Writers, Writing, Writs, and the Wright Brothers

This is in response to an entry in another diary.  It’s not meant as inspiration, encouragment, or insult.  Just because this is what I thought of while reading.  My hero, as in favorite writer, is William Faulkner, a man who a majority of the world seem to dislike intensely.  Almost everywhere I turn I hear people talking about how over-rated he is, or how they don’t get his work, or they’re not really into it.  Most are just readers, not English majors, not people who’ve had the pleasure (or punishment for many) of the rigors of rules and opinions about good literature and bad literature and how one determines what.

Firstly, let me say before I begin my argument, that everyone has the right, ability, and privilege to choose literature they believe to be good and bad.  Whatever their measurement methods, they have that right and it is an inalienable right, it is the right to be right without being wrong.  Now I often say people are wrong about what is good literature and what is bad, simply because I am arrogant, prideful, and believe that while everyone else has this right, it’s the right of an ignorant mass unknowing of the great standards, the great standards being MY standards.  That was all a joke.  Scarily, I read it over and wondered if anyone would laugh.  OHHHH well.  I guess technically we also have the inalienable right to disagree to the point of hurling insult and disassociating from those who will not take our opinion…:)  God Bless America. 

That being said, here is what I believe are the great standards.  Choose to believe them or not.  They’re pretty open-minded, so I think most people won’t be too unhappy with them.  Firstly, I believe there are two sets of standards when reading a book…I will call these the "good book" standards and the "good literature" standards.  This is a simplifying of the real differences, but I’ll explain them and you can apply your own terms, copyright them, and market them as your own personal philosophy.  The difference between a good book and good literature, is that a good book is simply a book that entertains or that one enjoys.  For whatever reason.  Good literature is an actually measured and determined thing, analyzed on many levels and balanced out, like a figure skating or gymastics scoring thing. 

Take Jane Austen.  In my opinion, not generally very good books.  I don’t enjoy reading them because they are soap operatic, melodramatic, long-winded, and gossipy.  Despite this, it is good literature for numerous reasons.  She is an early feminist author, an early woman author, she is one of the pioneers of a new style of literature whose characters are not flawless and whose world is less than heroic, a style which was radically different from literature before her time, and filled with many ideas that revolutionized social strata as well as the world of writing.  It’s true of many early female authors of the Romantic Period, men, too.  Reading half of those books makes me want to just burn them, because often they are dull.  As English majors we are privileged enough to be trained to find the good in the stilted classics and thus are driven to read through respect, if not actual enjoyment. 

Take John Barth.  I love him.  Most people don’t.  They find his literature confusing and insane, and it often times is.  Characters actually draw diagrams to explain things in some of his novels, and the plots are so convaluted it’s hard to know what the hell is going on some of the times.  I think he writes good books.  You don’t have to.  As for the literature aspect, I believe it is good literature because he once again (like most GREAT authors) challenged the conventions of literature, broke down the walls completely, and found a place that had not yet been explored.

Today, I find very little literature that is actually worthy of being made into a classic.  We have broken through to so many new areas, so much has been explored, we’ve come to the point where we’re writing literature about reading literature and even writing literature about writing literature.  Some books are even about writing literature about writing literature.  We have very few places, I think, left to explore except perhaps socially.  That’s why science fiction writers like Michael Crichton are so popular, because what’s seemingly left is exploring new ideas about what to write about.  Jane Austen in a million years would never have written about nanomachines buzzing about the country in a collective swarm intending to shut down computers (namely because she didn’t know a few of the words or what they meant in that former sentence.)

So does that mean we’re reduced to writing good books?  For a large majority, that’s all that’s needed.  Film has become so popular that writers around the globe are copying its style, format, and mentality to the point where you can actually feel the movie you’re watching as you’re reading it.  It has even gone to the point where often times, a person can compare the book to the movie and snag the moments where the movie skipped the book — and ironically, very rarely do people disagree with the envisioning of something in the film — generally because the author had already thought this WHOLE thing out.   I believe there is still good literature out there and I’m generally desperate when I write, because I feel like everything I do has been done before and, if not, will probably be done before I finish and get mine published.  Yet I’m trying.

This is a long entry, but over due I think.  William Faulkner has been quoted as saying: "Read everything.  Good, bad, read anything and everything."  There’s more to it, but I forgot the rest, suffice to say that the bulk of the quote was what was up above and while I disagree with it, I guess he’s right in a lot of ways, because you have to read the bad to understand what the good is.  And you have to read the really good to understand the difference between it and the bad.  That’s the unfortunate part about most non-English majors, because the legacy of literature is not passed down through the entire world, but only through English majors and their professors.  Think about it.  Everyone can see the legacy of technology, of theatre if they keep up with the Tonys and Broadway, of most sciences through magazine articles, of history of course, and on and on and on.  But literature that was revolutionary, that inspired others, that continues to be reviewed and interpreted, the general public could name maybe a significant number of the biggest authors, but they probably couldn’t tell you why their literature was important, where it was placed in time, who it inspired, or even which novels were better than others.  It’s a huge gap in the knowledge base of the world and one that is the ultimate paradox, because literature used to be an art, and has become another central part of millionaire capitalism.  Movie rights, Best selling lists, book chains selling to the masses anything and everything…it’s transformed the world of literature which used to be prestigious because it was about the art and

not about the money.  And it was also about the commitment to style and form, and not about believing that any old fucking idea could be written about.  Today, everyone thinks they’re a writer and too many of them are only lucky.  They don’t have skill, they simply write something relatively interesting without structural cohesiveness, without an overall thought, without considering the myriad of intentions that most major writers did actually think about. 

I am often amazed at how much the great writers considered when writing their literature…about the rules to adhere to and how to best represent things.  They placed everything in the story for a reason that was not only profound and important, but because it connected things together.  Most writers today do not.  They find one prevailing theme and they pivot an entire novel around that theme so it becomes like "The Great Gatsby."  I don’t mean to insult that book, because I think it is very good, but I use it in a different context.  A large number of people like "The Great Gatsby" because of the story and because of the all too apparent color symbolism that is prevalent.  It makes people feel smart when analyzing it.  But there are deeper currents in that novel that most readers cannot appreciate and don’t even consider.  They do not consider that Fitzgerald was exploring the possibilities of a narrator the reader cannot trust completely…that Fitzgerald at crucial moments places commentary that should make us wonder about how well we can believe Nick’s impartiality. 

I believe Faulkner to be remarkable.  Hemingway, Anderson, Barth, Wolfe, Dickens, Cunningham…etc.  I believe most writers do remarkable things, especially within their place in time.  I love literature.  I love it more than books.  I can entertain myself with a video game anytime, I like to stimulate my mind a bit more, I like to read a book not to know how it ends, but to see how the end defines the rest of the book, how the beginning defines the end, how the characters changes come about, how they’re structured, etc. 

So how can we judge what is good and bad?  There are standards as with anything in my opinion.  With poetry, it’s actually easier because their are less words.  Poets, for the most part, strive to write things as succinctly as possible.  They only use certain words to create a sound, a flow, a color, or an image…those are the reasons to excuse a digression.  Constistancy of metaphor, parallels, flow, sound, rhythm…all these things are important to analyze.  What is ultimately said is important, too.

There’s another significant thing about literature (poetry and all) that must be said, too.  It is why I hate a large (almost all) portion of my poetry on this site.  Why I hate almost all poetry on this site.  It is the reason for the large defilement of literature over the last ten years, it is the reason for viscious creative writing professors, it is the reason that "Crash" is a good movie (as in "Crash" fights against this thought.)  Selfishness.  Writers, the great writers, the really great names never wrote to be famous.  The most famous writer (and successful) was Fitzgerald, who was paid more for his work than anyone — he considered himself an ultimate failure because he failed to write much that was profound and benefitted the human spirit.  Now I do not mean to say that those who say "write about what you know" are wrong.  They are right.  Most great writers wrote about what they knew.  But they did not write about themselves.  They were not so arrogant as to believe that they were the ultimate embodiment of a relatable human condition — in fact most thought they were outcasts who didn’t know what the hell was going on and wrote to try and understand it.  That’s why great writers weren’t successful in their time, because they weren’t marketting themselves to the public, they were marketting the world they saw, confusing, bizarre, divided, hostile, and ever-changing. 

Faulkner also said that every writer wishes he was a poet.  They start off writing poetry, and when that fails, they try to write short stories, and when that fails, they write novels.  I believe there is a magnificent truth in this, and the ultimate truth of it lies in the fact that novels is where most people should start.  But no one has the patience.  The reason?  Because the novel gives you the most time to try and meld everything to an idea, a theme, a motif, a destination.  It gives you hundreds of pages to make a point.  Then you have to try and do the same justice in a short story and then in a two page poem.  And it is easier to write a poem after a novel…because when you finish that first novel and you read it over, you see the great points, the pillars that hold the work together.  If you’re really good, you can start taking all the pieces that are less than strong and supporting them further…bolstering them until your novel is a single, unified, might pillar.

Not everyone is cut out to be a writer, certainly.  Not all those that become them are great.  The majority are awful.  The majority taught in specialized classes are terrible, too…since we’ve had English professors around long enough that the classics generation is dying out completely, and a very specialized breed of snobs has grown into judging literature based on their own standards — which is their right, which I have the right to hate and want wiped from the face of the Earth as long as I don’t actually do something about it other than say it.  In my opinion, there are clear cut rules and I can measure any novel up to them and judge.

This is long.  It is repetitive.  It is redundant.  It’s Faulknerian…;)  Not really.  It’s nowhere near as good.  I’d love to be reincarnated as an English professor, but this life I think is for other things.  Good night for now.