by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

The validity of the lives we lead

Edit Post

“I don’t really think that it makes sense for a work of art to take on a social purpose. Just because there are so many constraints that you’re working under already — what material is available to you, what your capabilities are with the abilities you have, what will the market bear, what’s the nature of your audience — these are the constraints you have to satisfy. If you have a purpose of social reform, I don’t think it’d be art.”

Caleb Crain, who wrote Necessary Errors, said these words, which were reported recently by Daniel D’Addario in Salon. Reading them, I begin to think of the “social purpose” in novels I have read and of the “social purpose” in three of the novels I have written. In the third sentence above, Crain defines “social purpose” as “social reform,” meaning, I think, that when Macbeth argues against regicide Shakespeare’s social purpose is to support the Tudor myths, and that is impermissible in a work of art. But he couldn’t mean that. I guess that a study of literature could argue that half the works of literary are about the causes or the effects of murder of one kind or another.

The sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill, is a kind of tennis net that functions in the literary work for the character to deal with. It exists in thousands of novels, causing difficulties, suffering, illumination, more suffering, and in the end, sometimes, release. A social purpose is a subject like anything else, and it exists to be written about and to be dealt with by the character.

An elaboration of the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill gay people, exists the same way. We have hundreds of plays and novels about killing the king, but almost none about killing the gay kid next door. Listening to Caleb Crain, it would seem that the former are art and the latter not. He thinks we should not write about the moment when the gay kid next door is murdered or about its consequences, because this would give the novel social purpose. This murder is intrinsically important. It is interesting. It has moral significance. In fact, killing the gay kid next door satisfies every one of Aristotle’s requirements for tragedy, including, as we have seen in our own lives, the disruption of all society when the victim is found tied to a fence on the prairie outside of Laramie. Or, to choose an illustration closer to home, the murder of Bernie Mallett in Ceremonies, the first novel of the Stonewall Triptych, which then disrupts everything in Cardiff, Maine, and destroys the accommodation straight Mainers had made with the gay people in their midst. And nothing is ever the same again.

It’s not the social purpose that makes bad novels out of gay political events or movements. I doubt that every work of art is, as Craig would have it, its own thing. I think of Guernica. Of September 1, 1939. Of Intruder in the Dust. Of Mrs. Dalloway. A novelist, dealing with all the constraints that Crain lists in the first paragraph above, can surely find space in his novel to make the point that Murdering a gay kid violates the same codes that murdering a king or a queen or a president or four little girls in a Birmingham church. Now, to be clear, not all novels are about murder. Some are about men falling in love with one another, and, given the realities of literature, it is true that not even most novels have to be about heavy subjects. But it is legitimate—and appropriate—when an author chooses to write about the murder of a gay person, to believe that that event is not a merely private event, and is worth of the effort of both writer and reader.

I don’t think gay literature has been dumbed down by writers who have a social purpose. We live among social purposes all the time, all day, every day. A novel about my going to the Boston Common at seven o’clock six days ago to join a demonstration against any action against Syria can be as compelling as anything being published today—it might be a very long novel, with a cast of thousands, and a very complicated plot, and, of course, a profound and subtle treatment of its subject. What is dumbing down our literature is the publisher saying, Don’t write about it. It will offend somebody, including straight people, and the readers saying, Don’t disturb me. The result is that we can’t find books about ourselves. Even though most of us—or many of us—live lives which are deeply political, and even though many of us are deeply anguished by the politics and the violence of our lives. We are already disturbed. 

We can’t continue to allow publishers and writers to ignore the lives we lead. 
0 comments
Sunday, September 8, 2013

We don't tell the truth about ourselves

Edit Post

What should be the subject of a gay writer?    

I ask this question seriously. I have read a recent article in Salon by Daniel D’Addario which seems to explain what is happening now in publishing.

The headline over D’Addario’s article is, Where’s the buzzed-about gay novel?  D’Addario knows something isn’t working. There are just not enough gay characters in current literature getting the same intense examination that heterosexual characters routinely get. He also says, even the LGBT characters who do make it into books in the bookstores are from a narrow range of experience. D’Addario says, “Publishing is not a charitable endeavor devoted to equal reception for all: it’s a business catering to the interests of an audience comfortable with gay people but not necessarily comfortable with stories that don’t cohere with a mold recognizable from, say, the most recent Michael Cunningham novel.”

There seem to be two causes for this present situation. D’Addario quotes Matthew Gallaway, the gay author of The Metropolis Case, “The publishers want to sell as many copies as possible,” so they want to stay away from anything that might be controversial. Readers, too, bear some responsibility. Sarah Schulman, lesbian activist and novelist, says readers “have gotten used to a certain kind of white gay [writer] who does not have very overt sexual content in his work, who fits paradigms they’re comfortable with.” The result of this is that “the gay character must not experience homophobia from middle-class white people, he can experience it from rednecks, but not from people like the reader. He’s not allowed to be angry about his life.”

Concluding, D’Addario discusses something he calls “minority lit,” in which the minority writer will write, in the words of Alexander Chee, “about the difficulties one faces as X minority in the US—and so this becomes the expectation.” Chee concludes, “even before you pick up the novel, it can feel like you’re about to read a long-form complaint.” D’Addario seems to feel that the possibility that a novel is a “long-form complaint” is a terrible thing, driving away publishers and readers. 

But something else is happening here too. Twenty or thirty years ago, academic historians started assigning novels to their history students as a way of teaching them about some historical phenomenon. Intruder in the Dust, Absalom, Absalom! Native Son, Giovanni’s Room, and Portrait of a Lady. If D’Addario is right in his assessment of current publishing, where will future historians go, among current gay novels, to find the truth about the lives of gay men and women in the first decade of the twentieth century? If publishers don’t want anything controversial, and if readers don’t want anything outside their comfort zone, who will tell the truth? 

When I was seventeen, in high school, I came to understand that a writer—we were discussing Herman Melville—was a truth-teller.  It was not until twenty-five years later that I was handed, as on a silver-platter, the subject about which I was to tell the truth—what happened to a group of gay people in a small town in Maine when one of them was murdered by bigots. 

Later, I wanted to write about the life of a gay man who had gotten married in 1964, then read about Stonewall in 1969, then divorced and moved into the gay community in 1984. There was nothing about this man in literature. In fact, whole important swaths of the American population have been ignored by writers who create America’s literature, and fiction treated them as if they didn’t exist. But they did exist, and we need to know about them. 

What was the effect on individuals of DOMA and DADT and the various obscenities of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association during the forties, and fifties and sixties, and of the constant assault on the persons of gay people from Christian churches? Where has been the writer who could tell us that the most savage abuse that a gay person experienced during those decades usually came from his own family? 

No wonder the buzzed-about gay novel does not yet exist. We have people like D’Addario explaining to us why gay writers need not tell the truth about gay lives. The reason we have the literature we have is that intellectually lazy agents and editors and commentators and critics say over and over to readers and writers that it’s OK—even necessary—not to tell the truth about our lives. 
0 comments

Designed by Edward Wharton.