Monday, December 7, 2009
Is it the message, or the messenger?
Things could have worked out differently for Pete if he had simply not revealed his literary insincerity. In some way, he is like a magician who reveals his secrets, a cardinal sin in that business. Do we think his primary error was admitting his motives, or did he commit a graver sin against Literature, with a capital L? Consider his statement at the bar with the MFA students: “I’d profaned the evening. These people treated stories like sacraments.” Should they be in general, or is it commentary on the literary bubble within these programs?
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It's interesting that telling as he saw it and creating controversy sold him more books. How famous is that magician who had that tv special who went around solving the other magicians secrets. He made way more money doing that than he would have just being a dude who toured around college campuses.
ReplyDeleteThe MFA students reminded me of the summer I spent participating in the National Writing Project, and those people most definitely saw writing as a sacred thing. I remember there were days when I absolutely wasn't in the mood to write or share anything, but since I really had no choice, I "pulled a Tarslaw" and wrote something I knew was crap and tried to pass it off as something I actually cared about.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between my experience and Pete's is that everyone in the NWP was too nice to tell me that my crappy writing was crap, and instead they bent over backwards to find something nice to say. In fact, criticism was very much frowned upon, like we writers were these delicate creatures who'd shrivel up and die if someone dared tell us that our writing wasn't really that great. (Book critics operate under a different set of rules, of course, since scathing reviews can be entertaining to read.) I guess the act of writing was seen as sacred there, and whether or not we wrote good stuff didn't matter as much as the fact that we were trying to "live a writerly life." (Yes, that's the phrase they used.)
However, I didn't do what Pete did. I never tried to write crap and pass it off as art in the hopes of exposing my NWP peers as frauds. Had I done that and then revealed what I had done, I'm sure I would have been shown the door. It wasn't so much that I, on occasion, wrote crap as it was that everyone thought my crap was part of a process of growth and that I was being sincere. Pete wasn't being sincere, and that was a sin that was far greater than the sin of producing bad writing.
What's interesting, Mags, is your distinction between knowingly passing off "crap" as something a writer actually cares about due to an x-factor (time contstraints, mood, whatever) rather than the reverse: producing artificial "crap" for the expressed purpose of getting a one-up on some other purpose or group. (And I know... I did indeed partake in a creative writing program.) I think, in the end, that gets to the jist of what Hely was really trying to accomplish here. It's apt that Kev points out those page number similarities and I think such a detail makes me dig HIBAFN even more. It is so fricking self-aware. Can you think of a book that was such an *easy* read and also made the reader think so much about anything (in this case the nature of the publishing industry) ALSO in such a hilariously entertaining way? Because that seems to be what Hely was really trying to do. You could write the novel off as simplistic, sure. But, in the end, I think that would just make Hely laugh his ass off. I love that.
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