Liquid Ink

The official website of Gint Aras, Finalist 2016 CWA Book Award

Monthly Archives: January 2020


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Readers ask: Shouldn’t writing make readers comfortable?

This is a great question. Let me roll up my sleeves.

Asking this is similar to criticism I often hear of teachers. People would learn a lot more if teachers made learning interesting and fun. Without getting into the tedium of contemporary schooling, let’s agree that whoever says this probably assumes learning isn’t interesting or fun all on its own.

In the same way, a person demanding comfort from artists must not be feeling it while making their morning coffee. Maybe it’s worse…maybe they’re looking for distraction from whatever they feel or think. They might be seeking reassurance. They can relax because plenty of writers, artists (and teachers) will oblige them.

It’s clearly stupid to make learning boring. But people get this whole thing backwards. If memorizing a list of eventful dates alongside names of dead politicians is boring, maybe it’s because we don’t learn all that much by doing it.

Yet notice what crazy and complicated shit people memorize when self-motivated or linked to community. My son and his friends can tell you meticulous details about the myriad Pokémon characters. When I was a kid, I could recreate AD&D saving throw grids and combat matrices from memory.

Could I recite the names of all 12 apostles?

At a certain point in our development as adults, we end up weighing the difference between tasks that cause immediate discomfort while offering potential for wisdom, community or skill. This is how we learn to play music. It’s how we train to take penalty shots, win street fights, manage large groups of people or sew up wounds. It’s not comfortable for a trauma surgeon to treat a person who fell out of a rolling truck.

Ah…you say…but the surgeon is well compensated!

Sure. But I won’t agree that comfort is commercially viable while discomfort is a liability. Sex, drugs, gambling and arms have proven their commercial demand for millennia. Does porn offer comfort? Does heroin? The roulette table? Is American military might a cause of widespread paranoia or a result? Does it pacify our fear of the world or trigger it?

My favorite books were always the ones that turned me inside out. Some of my favorite writers sent me reeling. Others satirized while entertaining. What does it say, after all, for the answer to life, the universe and everything to be 42?  We laugh because, in the face of absolute ignorance, the alternative is to get fussy.

I could make a fuss. I’ve always been stunned by readers who think their comfort is universal. In other words, if they curl up by a fire to read Agatha Christie, they guess it’s masochism to read Wittgenstein while seated on a rock. Maybe it is. Of course, some people really like to get hooked. It turns them on.

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Photo of Napoleon’s bed from Wikipedia.

 

 

 


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Readers ask: Why do you think fiction is more demanding than memoir-writing?

This reader is responding to an answer I gave to Rob McClennan as part of his 12 or 20 Questions series. You can read the entire interview at the link. However, here’s an excerpt to the bit that provoked a question:

Fiction…is the more demanding art form, at least for me. It’s rooted in deeper traditions, and the risks you take leave more at stake than just personal embarrassment, or someone taking issue with an idea you have. When you’re writing fiction, you’re sitting in the room with all the ancestors, the lineage going all the way back to Homer, to the Old Testament, Christ’s parables, the myths and legends that form the foundations behind the fundamental assumptions we use to create a reality for ourselves. So, you’re adding a patch to that quilt, as you stretch and bend it. It’s a really demanding moment.

Several people have found this answer surprising. My memoir, Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen, handles heavy themes, not least of which is the Holocaust. The belief is that themes, not mediums, determine difficulty.

There’s truth to that assumption, though my novels also handle themes like sexual assault, domestic violence, collapsing identity, wartime trauma, family dysfunction, religion, artistic process, etc.

I’m sure there are writers who find memoir-writing impossible. Writing my memoir was frightening; however, I could do it, whereas I can’t write poetry without it sounding like a nursery rhyme, bad rap song or random grocery list. I don’t bother with it. It’s too demanding.

Demanding how? I think it’s important to separate emotional demands from technical ones. They’re related, sure, but I find it much easier to say “this hurts” or “here’s where I messed up” or “here are my flaws” than implementing the scalpel, rib shears, protractor and carpenter square necessary to write even a short story of a few hundred words.

Of course, the demands are largely determined by me.

I’m aware and respectful of traditions, use a fair amount of allusion in my fiction, and when I draw water from the well that is the English language, I let the pail sink for a while before drawing it up. I’m bored otherwise.

At the same time, I think there’s an important note in English that colors my awareness of the past, as the words we use to categorize prose are fiction and non-fiction. That implies the default form is fiction, while the other form is its negation.

Imagine if, instead of saying vegetable, we used non-fruit or something. Fruit would clearly be the primary reference point.

To me, fiction is the primary reference point. The great lessons in Western civilization come in stories. Myths, fables, parables and allegories make up the reference points that both progress and define our culture, and we engage in much more soul searching and theoretical “what if” in our fiction than we do in our laws, news reports or histories. American philosophy—Emerson or Thoreau—is blithe stuff compared to Moby Dick or Huck Finn. Homer and Sophocles get me going much more than do Aristotle or Kant.

It’s true that a great historiographer must use her imagination to connect one dot to the next while arguing for some cause. Historiography is demanding, but I’m not an historiographer. I don’t have that kind of mind. I’m an artist, and when I want to put myself to the test, I try writing fiction. It’s sad that more people don’t read it, and that economic and social obstacles have prevented me from writing more than I have, but that doesn’t change what I find engaging.

I think the best example of what I mean should come from  writers I admire. If we compare Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory to Lolita, I think we’ll find he’s working much harder in Lolita. Dostoevsky hardly breaks a sweat in The House of the Dead, even when he’s describing gruesome scenes. But in his great novels, he’s carrying massive stones up the hill.

Some writers who find memoirs more demanding than novels might come up with examples of novelists who have it easy compared to their memoirs. I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Ultimately, art is a kind of perversion in which the artist creates some problem and tries to deal with it, usually alone. Notice that dealing with it is different from solving. Beware artists who think they’ve got something figured out.

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Photo of Memory by Olin Levi Warner (1896) from Wikipedia.

 

 

 


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Readers ask: Why do you think good writing is resistance?

This question comes from a reader responding to something I wrote in an essay, Find the Bigotry, published in Re-Imagining late last year. That essay offers my take on “woke” culture. The reader is responding to my claim that books surviving over the centuries commonly critique the powerful in their own time periods.

Before I get into a detailed answer, I need to stress that all writing resists something, if even a reader’s basic unawareness. However, that doesn’t make it good or bad. Manuals for things like leaf blowers resist those who don’t know how leaf blowers work.

These days, we think of resistance as a political and sociological force standing in opposition to disinformation, the harvesting of fear and bigotry for political and economic gain, and the dismantling of civility and culture. I feel, as I tried to communicate in Find the Bigotry, that we should work to oppose all propaganda, and all efforts to destabilize communication. Fascist propaganda is not the only type of discourse guilty of destabilization, though it’s particularly dangerous. As I argue in Relief by Execution, my memoir, the most dangerous kind of disinformation denies atrocity or responsibility.

Obviously, in order to have propaganda or disinformation, you need writers (or “content providers”) to compose it. If our definition of good writing is writing that seduces the audience to belief or action, then propaganda is good writing. It’s certainly more effective, and more seductive, judging by its appeal, than is writing that provokes introspection.

Frankly, I’ve lost interest in whether or not writing is good. I’m interested in whether or not the writing is trying to aid our survival. I don’t think writing does this by pointing fingers at “the bad people” as it tries to elevate itself somehow. We are destroying ourselves by shopping and sitting in traffic.

Most important: artists aren’t noble by default. Take the photos of musicians I’m including below. I know plenty of people who’d elevate classical music over American folk, though in this case I’ll take Woody Guthrie over the Vienna Philharmonic.

Vienna Phil

 

Woody

Of course, Guthrie’s machine did not kill fascists. In his hands, it offered a counter-narrative. In someone else’s, it could incite loathing. In order for it to do one thing or another, it requires a listener to draw conclusions or take actions.

As far as writing goes, if there’s good resistance, it rests with the reader. Without a reader, writing doesn’t exist.

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Photos from Wikipedia and Deutsche Welle.