Shoot the Wounded
Is it acceptable to write material that is praised for its artistic achievement when obtaining that requires using techniques that go "over the head" of people who don't see reading as consumption of art, but as enjoyment?
Do we shoot the wounded so they won't be slowing us down?
If Art's purpose is to efficiently communicate ideas and abstract concepts that can't be communicated with the same fidelity and efficiency in any other form, and an artist creates work that doesn't effectively communicate, but (intentionally or unintentionally) obfuscates, is it really Art?
Does making a distinction between Art and Entertainment have any real, practical meaning?
Isn't the creation and consumption of Art one of the most Democratic and timeless of all human activities?
No matter the socio-political situation of the consumers of Art, democracy reigns when it comes to the consumption of Art. Even when Art's form and function was mandated by the Church, there was still an element of democracy in the consumers of Art deciding who gets to keep doing it and who doesn't.
There is no Arts Dictator who can force us to consume a kind of Art we don't like. Especially if that Art and our entertainment overlap. Neither can we put in place a non-democratic form of arts consumerism that supplants an individual's right to accept our Arts offering or to reject it.
We can't make people like and accept our work, or ourselves (for artists, the two are interminably intertwined), even if they should like it because—and of course we would know—it's better for them than that other drivel.
The painful part of this whole process is that the best we can do is do the best we can do. Then we put our work out in the marketplace and watch it succeed or fail on its own merits.
Sometimes our work isn't accepted. Sometimes we are not accepted.
So we try again.
I'm not much at HTML styling, if you'd like to clean up my comment please feel free.
You pose the following questions, using some pretty strong imagery:
Is it acceptable to write material that is praised for its artistic achievement when obtaining that requires using techniques that go "over the head" of people who don't see reading as consumption of art, but as enjoyment?
Do we shoot the wounded so they won't be slowing us down?
By way of an answer, at least one that is meaningful to me, I thought that I would paste in 3 different poems by 3 different American poets of the 20th century. Its not clear to me that they actually do use techniques that 'go "over the head" of people who don't see reading as consumption of art, but as enjoyment?', but depending on the reader they might. I'd like to ask you if you feel that an artist has the right to create a work of art that asks its readers to "expend some effort to access the work, if at first look the reader finds the work difficult?"
Gary Snyder - Axe Handles
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's We Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature" - in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
T.S. Eliot - Preludes
THE winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Ezra Pound - In A Station Of The Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
I expect people to work a little harder for stories that matter.
I think it's inevitable that some people just won't "get it" and you shouldn't necessarily write at a fourth grade level simply because it'll be more easily understood by more people than writing at a tenth-grade or twelfth-grade level.
But sometimes writers write for other writers, rather than their readers. They purposely obfuscate their stories the way the medical community did in the early days of medicine by using Latinate names for everything. They write in code that can be picked up on by other readers in the club.
I think good stories that matter can have some stuff in them that goes over the head of the non-thinking reader. In my own work, I don't mind requiring careful, thoughtful reading of the material. But in the end, the stories we write aren't for us. They're for everyone else. We just need to keep that in mind.