dls@hocse.UUCP (05/30/84)
This is forwarded from a friend of mine off-net. Dear Jeff, Before replying to your missive, I ought to state a few of my prejudices. 1) I received a B.A. in English & history from a college of which I am probably inordinately fond & which didn't have watered down science courses for humanities majors 2) I am a feminist 3) I get along well enough with scientists that I'm marrying one & we talk about his work a lot more than we talk about art or literature. As for your memories of existential literature, I can empathize. My professor had recently given up smoking, so he sucked on a piece of chalk all of the time, & it was in the middle of a Minnesota winter so even though the class got out at 5, it was dark & cold & frightening in the world beyond the classroom & instead of asking us about suicide exactly, our professor used to take a tremendous drag on his chalk & query "What is there to do in life, but fornicate & rot?" One look outside & you almost agreed. But at my college, we didn't just read modern literature, we read older stuff, too, so I don't associate all "mainstream" literature with suicidal inquiry. But I also never got the impression that art &/or literature claimed to have all of the answers. Rather, I thought it was supposed to pose some questions. And if you think that modern "mainstream" literature has gotten mightily stuck on the question of to blow my brains out or not to blow my brains out, could that be because you're basically reading works by white male authors? Most scholars treat female authors as if they didn't exist or if they must acknowledge a woman's existence, they pick the books that most reflect the themes commonly found in literature written by men. Edith Wharton is known in the academic community for ETHAN FROME which is your basic why bother living book, but it's also unrepresentative of her life's work. If you look for books written by women or written by blacks or written by anyone who for whatever reason feels that s/he has been oppressed, you find a tremendous will to live, to experience that which has historically been denied to one--in short, a completely un-Camus-like approach to life & art. You might also be interested in works written by Asians & Africans who are concerned with questions of how to maintain their cultural identities while incorporating (or coping) with the benefits/problems of Western influence. Sf may tell you what's going to happen tomorrow, but some of us retain an interest in today and yesterday and how yesterday & today come together so sf alone won't do for us. I guess I start counting the silver when anyone starts offering panaceas & claiming that he looks to one thing to provide wholeness. It brings back too many painful memories of Sundays wasted in my grandmother's Baptist church & sermons on Jesus being THE way & THE truth. My good sir, don't you agree that there are too many people in the world with too many needs, too many questions for any one way to be THE way? What's wrong with tolerance & glorying in diversity? And what exactly is it that you expect from your literature? Who's supposed to provide the wholeness--you, the reader or the author? Who's supposed to do the striving, the thinking, the wrestling with the issues, the integration of the issues raised in the book into some more complete, personal Weltanshauung? Only the author? We're not talking TV here--doesn't the very involvement that reading requires imply an active mental contribution on the part of the reader with the material presented? And isn't the fact that some works of fiction have enough ideas in them to think about (for more than 5 minutes) exactly what makes them *literature* as opposed to whatever you call the kind of outpourings produced by Harold Robbins? Unlike you, I guess, I enjoyed earning my BA & even my MA in English, but that may be because I expected that education to provide me with something other than what you've suggested you expected. First, I was looking for an excuse (that adults like my parents & future employers would buy) to read a bunch of good books. For whatever obscure reasons, going to schools & getting degrees (even in English) is considered a much more praiseworthy endeavor than sitting around & reading for the same length of time. Such is life. Second, I obtained a sense of what made the books I read not only interesting, but compelling--the mechanics of the artistry within them. And I learned how to use that understanding to cull all (well, one TRIES) of the layers of meaning from the works I read. That's no small legacy, & I think it was even worth the tuition (although my more practical father, who actually paid for the BA portion is a tad more skeptical). What did you want? What did you expect? What do you expect now? What if when science meets literature in that great sf ballroom in the sky, you still don't get wholeness & you still don't get answers? Shouldn't you prepare for that eventuality so that your only resort at that point won't be the proverbial .44? Sincerely, C. E. Jackson (whatever you see above plus)hocse!lznv!cja Dear Jeff, Wherever did you get the idea that "*Art* and *literature*... for thousands of years were accurate reflections of human culture?" Literature (its production & appreciation) is limited primarily to the literate. No country even ATTEMPTED universal literacy until about 200 years ago & it is still a goal unattained. This is not to say that illiterate people are bereft of culture, but the only aspects of their cultures that we know about today are those aspects which some literate people bothered to record for us. And what those literate people chose to record is probably more a reflection of those elitists' tastes than of the cultures themselves. I don't take a thoroughly Marxist view of the world, but I would suggest that power & money have a lot to do with what has come down to us as the cultures of the past. Because I am a feminist, I am more aware of how women's voices have been thoroughly excluded from our perception of older cultures, but I am sure that other oppressed groups have also somehow had their voices "lost." For instance, how much of the oral tradition of American slaves has been recorded for posterity? What do you know about Native American culture? How much access do you have to books about THEIR attitudes in the 17th, 18th, 19th &/or even the 20th century that have not been distorted by the prejudices of the white people doing the writing? Also, your definition of "mainstream" literature seems shockingly narrow. Existentialism may well fall on its navel & I, for one, would barely miss it, but that's not exactly mainstream literature, any more than dadaism was. It was simply a relatively small part of a much larger whole. Sincerely, C.E. Jackson (whatever is above)hocse!lznv!cja