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The Responsibility of Forms

  
 
Cat Chant
20:37 / 15.11.02
What responsibilities does a writer (artist, filmmaker) have when dealing with dodgy subjects? How do you define a dodgy subject? This is the only one I have a tentative definition for: at the moment my definition is twofold, one being "a subject which messes with a reader's traumas" (though this is a hard one, because after a certain point you can't really tell: some people have some really weird traumas. I still can't read some of the Little Grey Rabbit stories because they're too painful) and the other being "a subject which, in mainstream culture, is framed in ways that tend towards oppressing, harming or stereotyping any identifiable group".

Are there things that shouldn't be written? At all, not even if you then burn the only copy and eat the ashes? Things that should not be published? What difference does a writer's own experience make? What about pieces that are written as "therapy" or to sort out the author's own feelings about a dodgy experience they went through - should they not be published? How published is "published", anyway?

I'm not talking about censorship here, but about the writer's own responsibility in taking the decision to write or not to write, to publish or not to publish.

Examples welcome.

PS: Yes, I'm still obsessing over Harry/Snape. Why do you ask?
 
 
Jack Fear
21:01 / 15.11.02
The minute the artist starts worrying about a hypothetical audience, the art suffers.

(And—to go slightly off-topic—not always because the self-censoring artist neuters the work, either. It cuts the other way, too—sometimes the artist is so determined to shock or shake up the audience, so dead-set on disturbing their sensibilities, that s/he puts all hir energy into the message and neglects to make the artwork compelling as an artwork. If you have a message, go down to Speakers' Corner: you should only make art if your primary aim is to make art. Function follows form, in this this case.)

You must do the thing that scares you: sometimes, it's the only thing worth doing.

Stephen King (who, whatever you might think of his style, puts a lot of thought into the craft) says you should write with the door closed, and re-write with the door open. Let nothing interfere with your saying what you need to say: but once you've said it, get the opinions of some people you trust.
 
 
Cat Chant
21:54 / 15.11.02
Ooh, I knew I liked Stephen King, and now I know I do - thanks for that. But I think that insisting that

you should only make art if your primary aim is to make art

is coming on a little strong for my purposes: what if making art is the best way for someone to sort hir head out? Is it still the case that ze should not do it, or only that ze shouldn't share it, or only share it with people that ze know won't react adversely? (And is it enough to publish it with a warning page?)
 
 
Jack Fear
22:04 / 15.11.02
See, you should only worry about that after the art is made. And let me re-emphasize: it kills art to think about the audience--to think about sending a message to them. If you're doing it as a conversation with yourself... well, that's pretty much what art is.

Let me say outright, though: Nothing can be so horrible that you cannot say it to yourself. This is why it was so abhorrent when, as part of Mike Diana's guilty plea, he was monitored in his home to see that he was not drawing anything "obscene" even for his own use, with no intenet to distribute. That's Thought Police stuff. That draws the line on what you're free to think.

You're free to think anything, even if only to yourself. Once you've said it to yourself--once you've made the art to begin with--then and only then should you worry about how it will be received by others. It's not just better" to apologize later than to ask permission first: when it's something as life-n-death as wrestling with yr own artistic impulses, it's the only way.

The internet, though, makes it possible to bypass any kind of filtering, makes it possible to, in a sense, publish in a vacuum--as an unintended byproduct of placing the means of (re)production into the hands of the creator. Interesting conundrum... let me think about it...
 
 
Cat Chant
07:23 / 16.11.02
Thinking about this, I think I'm maybe more interested in the "rewriting with the door open" stage. For example, someone should really have mentioned to JK Rowling that it was incredibly dodgy to write a book about a race of happy slaves who speak Jar-Jar-Binks style pidgin English and are fitted by nature for slavery to the extent that when freed they can't look after themselves and just sit about fretting over massa and getting drunk. Maybe she needed to write that to sort out her own implication in cultural structures of biologized racism and the legacies of slavery; but I think I'm justified in finding it offensive (and, if you like, poor "art" in that it seems not to know it's repeating a kind of discourse about slavery that sounds like Gone with the Wind, which is shoddy workmanship if you ask me).

And as someone who doesn't want to add to the mass of writing out there that reinforces and legitimates - on however small a scale - oppressive or damaging memes, but who does want to challenge the current paucity of available approved narratives and positions on various dodgy subjects, what sorts of responsibilities do I have once I've opened my door and my readers have started pointing stuff out?

I don't know if that's any clearer. Never mind.
 
 
Linus Dunce
11:05 / 16.11.02
who does want to challenge the current paucity of available approved narratives and positions on various dodgy subjects

Well, there's your justification for doing it right there. Your reluctance to tackle this seems to me to be rooted in your belief that thought is a product of language, and that by not talking about something, it will go away.

Your responsibilities are that you don't tell lies and, mainly to others who may find themselves in your situation, that you demand a fair trial.
 
 
Sax
12:15 / 16.11.02
One example that always comes to mind when I think about this is Irvine Welsh and Marabou Stork Nightmares. Now, I don't really have extremely strong views on Welsh either way; I like his writing but think his plotting stinks, I appreciate his characters but at the same time find them two-dimensional. The thing about Welsh is that he's built a reputation on not shying away from the horrid, on turning a spotlight over the nasty nooks and crannies of human behaviour and therefore life as it's lived.

However, Marabou Stork Nightmares is a good example of whether this should have been one time when he switched off the flashlight.

For anyone who's not read the book, and remember, I think Welsh's plotting stinks so I don't consider this a spoiler, the central character is narrating the story from the position of a coma. Sometimes he's deep under, and invents a fantasy reality about living in Africa that's all mingled in with abuse at the hands of a relative, and sometimes he's a bit closer to the surface, and telling the story of what led up to him being incapacitated so.

The central action of the story is a particularly nasty rape (I know, are there any that are not? Perhaps I should say a particularly nastily recounted rape). Welsh's painstaking account of this prolonged assault sickened me to my stomach.

Was it necessary? Was it too much? Did Welsh have to go into such detail to prove to us that his character is a grade-A shit (albeit a grade-A shit with a traumatic youth...) or was it simply too much information, information bordering on titillation?
 
 
Linus Dunce
13:53 / 16.11.02
I'm no Welsh fan either, and I haven't read this book, but it could be, through his explicit description, an effective evocation of the emotional violence of all rapes. How else could one do this?

What about Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho?
 
 
w1rebaby
15:07 / 16.11.02
Actually, I think the rape in Stork is one of the more effective bits of the book. You're familiar with all the characters and the victim as well, none of them are faceless, which is one of the reasons it's shocking. It's demythologised - it doesn't try to gloss over details to lessen the impact, or romanticise it. The whole dynamic of why it happens, before, during and after, is gone into. The fact that it's lengthy means that you can understand the trauma more than if a veil was drawn over it. Basically it is a real, and horrible, event. It's certainly not comfortable reading, but it shouldn't be.
 
 
Cat Chant
19:25 / 16.11.02
My ideas on this are still kind of confused, but I couldn't resist posting because I can say, with absolute truth, that I asked Helene Cixous* about this today and she told this wicked anecdote about a time she'd been writing a play and one of her characters had suddenly upped and murdered another - and she'd hated the scene and thrown it in the bin. Then she went downstairs and told her daughter about it, and her daughter had said:

What?! Are you in the play? Is it your business?

and made her go and rewrite the scene.

*She was on Gauda Prime giving a seminar.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
18:28 / 17.11.02
This comes up a lot in the horror genre, presumably because dodgy subjects are usually blatantly dodgy.

My first published story nearly finished me. I've discussed this on Barbelith before, I think, but it was reviewed in Interzone magazine and I was both patronised and described as a Myra Hindley character. It was pretty devastating at the time, but to be fair I had used the death of a child as shock tactics. It was more naive than anything else, and I wouldn't do the same thing again. About two years ago an ex of someone I used to know was found murdered, with bin liners wrapped around her throat and stuffed into her mouth. When I heard about it, I freaked out big time, and as a consequence nearly stopped writing horror. I had to assess what I was doing and why. There are reasons for everything I write, I decided, so I carried on.

My personal 'dodgy' subjects - mental illness, death, misery, abuse are never gratuitous, as far as I am aware. I never portray madness, for instance, as noble or romantic. Because it isn't. It's something than can touch us all and needs to be explored and understood.

To finally try and answer the abstract, I think to simply make money out of other people's misery (however you want to define that) is irresponsible and wrong. It's all about context - why are you writing about such and such? If you have genuine reasons, then fine. If not, don't do it.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:30 / 18.11.02
If you have genuine reasons, then fine. If not, don't do it.

But surely this just throws up a whole new question - what are "genuine" reasons? I'm uncomfortable with this idea not just because it seems to open to subjective interpretation, but also because it seems to raise the spectre of 'authenticity' in art as some kind of lofty, morally admirable quality. Where does this 'authenticity', which seems to confer on an artist the authority to work with a problematic subject matter, come from? Personal experience? That sounds vaguely sensible in theory, but when put into practice it falls down - for example, there have been rappers who've defended misogynistic lyrics by claiming that they're merely working from the basis of their personal experiences with women - I'm assuming, sfd, that you wouldn't recognise the authority granted by this alleged experience. So how do we judge who has 'genuine' reasons and who doesn't, given that there are going to be cases much more debatable than that example (a starter for ten: Tracey Emin)?
 
 
Shortfatdyke
14:43 / 18.11.02
Actually, Flyboy, a rapper who genuinely hates women should in fact sing about it, IMHO. I believe in honesty. I didn't mean someone had to have 'noble' reasons or good intentions - which of course, are different for everyone anyway. Of course the abstract puts a moral line on this straight away - if someone is a misogynist, then they won't think their views are dodgy anyway.

I see writing as an art and I respect people who are genuine. I may not agree with what they say, but I would hope not to be arrogant enough to think there is only one way of being genuine, and that is to agree with me.
 
 
Cat Chant
18:50 / 18.11.02
a rapper who genuinely hates women should in fact sing about it, IMHO.

Another thing Helene Cixous said on Saturday was that "veiling is the only obscenity" (and of course "obscene" is from the Latin for "offstage"). Since she is clever enough not to go around saying "I fucking hate those bitches, as do all real men, & it's only the PC brigade that stops us saying what we're all thinking", I got thinking about the implications of it, and I think part of the point is that racist/sexist/homophobic narratives and ideas that are just picked up from cultural biases & stereotypes are themselves a kind of veiling, a shorthand.

ANd I suspect if you are writing about something outside your own experience, or not using elements of your own subjectivity in imagining what you are writing about, you are more likely to go for accepted & current, culturally sanctioned, available versions of that experience: which can bring its own problems. So if a rapper sings about "genuinely" hating women, that "genuineness" might be marked by its resistance to standard misogynist narratives/notions, and hence allow for some sort of progress.

I haven't had my tea yet, though, so I don't know if I'm making any sense. (I'm going to have to read Marabou Stork Nightmares now, though)
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
21:08 / 18.11.02
Flyboy: surely there's a certain amount of audience control over consumption of dubious content? I'm thinking in terms of white-sup Oi stuff, for example; it's out there, but to a great extent is ignored. How does this side of things come into the conversation, if at all?

I guess it gets to the point of the koan; if a rapper disses in the woods, and nobody sees hir and nobody hears hir, does ze really dis? How does audience (or lack thereof) govern responsibility? Assuming, that is, that one's creative process isn't tainted by the concept of creating to spec, for audience, as Jack has mentioned.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:00 / 19.11.02
sfd: I think you misunderstand me slightly - firstly, in the examples I'm thinking of, these artists wouldn't say "this song is misogynistic, but that's valid because I genuinely hate women". They'd say (and have said, I don't have an example to hand but there's plenty of them, although maybe we should widen the context to cover misogynistic popular music in general, cuz it's not limited to hip-hop by any means) something more along the lines of "this song isn't misogynistic and I don't hate women, I'm just reporting genuine experiences I have had with real, individual women". Now, I wouldn't grant a morally/politicall troubling artist or piece of work some kind of validity based on such a clain, and in general I don't think many of us do: we apply our critical faculties not only to a work of art's qualities but also to any such claim of truth, authenticity etc, and to the question of to what extent such claims validate what goes on in the art.

Or to put it another way, responding to this:

I believe in honesty. I didn't mean someone had to have 'noble' reasons or good intentions - which of course, are different for everyone anyway.

I didn't think you were suggesting that the honest reason had to be noble or good - it's the idea of ascribing some kind of moral weight to honesty in art that I find a little bit dubious. The most obvious stumbling block being in how one ascertains the veracity of this honesty: do we risk turning every consideration of troublesome art into a detective game, much like some strands of the study English Literature have become, where say we piece together the evidence that Dickens' childhood experiences lead directly to the antisemitism in his depiction of Fagin?

And then, let's say we prove the genuine nature of this experience: what does that change about the art itself? I have in mind a thread from a while ago in which a poster claimed that because he'd been a victim of crime himself, he was authorised to use the term 'criminal underclass' - or more specifically that anyone who opposed the use of the term and had never been mugged or burgled did not have a leg to stand on. Now, obviously there's a difference between art and argument. But I think the problem still stands - "it's true to my experience" seems too pat an answer, too much of a catch-all as a defense... I think we have to look elsewhere...
 
  
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