Re: the literary life
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Fri, 02 Oct 1998 13:07:01 +1000
> actually it does bother me what the lives of my favourite authors are
> like. if i was to find out that a loved writer of mine had done
> something exceedingly amoral then i wouldn't be a part of a list like
> this for them.
This is a problem my film class debated at length when we studied DW
Griffith's Birth of A Nation. On one hand it's the first modern film, way
ahead of its time, innovative and brilliant, etc. The only problem is, it's
also a blatant piece of racist propaganda. At what point do you have to
disregard one to appreciate the full impact of the other? It's impossible
for one thing to really discredit the other, but it's very very difficult
to appreciate a piece of art that has morals you violently disagree with.
I think that there is a tendency in this, the age of the death of the
author, to assume that the author is a colourless, scentless liquid oozing
between the lines of his or her text. I don't think that's so, and nor can
it ever be so because humans being what they are have (no matter what JDS
says) big hulking egos to take care of. A human is a human is a human as
Gertrude Stein might have said, and there's no way any of us can avoid it.
However, in my perception, the death of the author is a positive thing, not
because it renounces the personality of the author (if this were so,
theoretically we shouldn't be able to tell one writer from another) but
because it admits that the author is part of a larger process of
communication and interpretation. I guess that things like the Maynard
affair - which does have concurrencies in such things as our `is Seymour a
pedophile' debate, as well as Time Magazine's search for the `real' Sybil,
and so on - just form part of the larger Salinger text.
Camille
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