The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (35 page)

I don’t know why this curious skewing and segregation of society by age should induce writers to use a youthful viewpoint as if it were the only one; but a great many of them do. The unquestioned assumption is that all readers are young, or identify with the young. The young are Us. Older people are Them, outsiders.

And to be sure, every adult was a child, was an adolescent. We’ve been there. We shared the experience.

But we aren’t there now. Most readers of adult fiction are adults.

A great many book readers are also parents or accept parental responsibility in one way or another. This means that though they may identify with the young, their identification isn’t simple. It’s extremely complex. It’s not a belonging. Nor is it mere recollection. Adults who accept their social or personal responsibility towards children and young people, and who don’t need to deny that they were themselves young, have a double or multiple point of view, not a single one.

To write from the child’s or adolescent’s point of view is of course natural in books written for children or young adults. In books written for adults it is a valid and often powerful literary device. It may simply fulfill nostalgic yearnings to be young again; but the innocent viewpoint is inherently ironic, and in a wise writer’s hands may imply the double vision of the adult with particular subtlety. In much recent fiction written for adults, however, the child’s vision is not used ironically or to increase complexity, but is, implicitly or openly, valued over the depth of vision of the adult. This is nostalgia with a vengeance.

In such books an absolute division between adult and child is made and a judgment is based on it. Adults are perceived as less fully human than children or young people, and the reader is expected to accept this perception. Parents and authority figures of any kind are presented without compassion or comprehension as automatic enemies, all-powerful wielders of arbitrary power. There may be a few saintly, all-comprehending exceptions proving the rule—powerless old folks, grandparent figures rich in the Primitive Wisdom of Another (note the word) Race. Sentimentality fawns on oversimplification.

As a dead white man of the ruling class remarked, power corrupts. To the extent that adults have more power than kids, adults are inarguably corrupt, while kids are at least relatively innocent. But
innocence is not what defines people as human. It’s what we share with the animals.

An adult indeed may have absolute power over a child and may abuse it. But even truthful, valid descriptions of abuse are weakened when the writer’s point of view is childish or infantile. To accept the infantile view of adulthood as omnipotent, readers must abandon their hard-earned knowledge that most adults in fact have very little power of any kind.

I will use the same two books as examples as I did in the previous essay, on fictional characters:
David Copperfield
and
Huckleberry Finn
.

We are caught in and share young David’s perception of his stepfather’s cruelty. But Dickens’s novel is not about a child abused by jealous and hateful adults: it is about a child growing up, becoming a man, a complete human being. All David’s mistakes, in fact, are the same mistake repeated—a childish misperception of false authority as real, which prevents him from valuing the real help that is always at hand for him. By the end of the book he has outgrown the infantile myths that held him helpless.

Dickens as a child was, in many respects, David, but Dickens the novelist does not confuse himself with that child. He keeps the complex, hard-earned vision. And so
David Copperfield
, fearfully acute in its understanding of how children suffer, is a book for adults.

Contrast J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye.
The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds.

The childish point of view and the child’s point of view aren’t necessarily the same thing. A good deal of
Tom Sawyer
is a rather uneasy mixture of the two, but
Huckleberry Finn
, though narrated in a boy’s voice, has nothing childish in it. Behind Huck’s limited vocabulary, perceptions, and speculations, his ignorances, misconceptions, and prejudices, is the steadfast, lucid, ironic intelligence of
the author, and it is through that intelligence that we understand and feel Huck’s moral dilemma, which he has such difficulty understanding himself.

When I read the book as a kid Huck’s age, I understood that, as well as anybody under eighteen understands irony. So I could read with understanding even when shocked by some of the language and events—until I came to the episode where the boys, at Tom’s insistence, imprison and torment Jim. There I saw the black man I had come to love powerless in the hands of the white children, his fear and grief and patience ignored and devalued, and I thought Twain himself had joined in the wicked game. I thought he approved of it. I didn’t understand that he was satirising the cruel mockeries of Reconstruction. I needed that historical knowledge to understand what Twain was doing: that he was honoring me by including me in the same humanity with Jim.

Throughout
Huckleberry Finn
, the boy’s unquestioned assumptions (which are those of his society) and the author’s convictions and perceptions (which are frequently counter to those of his society) contradict each other deliberately and shockingly. It is a profoundly complex, dangerous book. Those who want literature to be safe will never forgive it for being dangerous.

Each Unquestioned Assumption has a possible opposite, a reverse, which if written into fiction would give us stories in which men occur only as sexual objects for women, where homosexuality is the social norm, where white skin has to be mentioned whenever it appears, where only godless anarchists act morally, or where adults rebel vainly against the bullying authority of children. Such books are, in my experience, rare. One might meet them in science fiction.

Realistic fiction that merely questions or ignores the assumptions, however, is not unusual. We do have novels that assume that women represent humanity as well as men do; that gays, or people of color, or
non-Christians, represent humanity as well as heterosexuals, whites, or Christians do; or that the adult or parental point of view is as valuable as the childish one.

The stigma of “political correctness,” invoked by those who see all refusal of bigotry as a liberal conspiracy, may be slapped on such books. They are often ghettoised by publishers and reviewers, segregated from fiction “of general interest.” If a novel is centered on the doings of men, or its major characters are male, white, straight, and/or young, nothing is said about them as members of a group, and the story is assumed to be “of general interest.” If the major characters are women, or black, or gay, or old, reviewers are likely to say that the book is “about” that group, and it is assumed, even by sympathetic reviewers, to be of interest chiefly or only to that group. Thus both the critical establishment and the publishers’ publicity and distribution tactics lend immense authority to prejudice.

A writer may not want to defy both the reactionary critical establishment and the pusillanimous marketplace. “I just want to write this novel about the kind of people I know!” “I just want to sell my book!” Fair enough. But how much collusion with prejudice, disguised as unquestioned assumptions about what is normal, does it take to buy safety?

The risk is real. Look again at Mark Twain.
Huckleberry Finn
is still getting bad-mouthed, banned, and censored, because its characters use the word
nigger
and for other reasons, all having to do with race. Those who allow it to be thus abused in the name of equality include people who think teenagers are incapable of understanding historical context, people who believe education for good involves suppressing knowledge of evil, people who refuse to understand a complex moral purpose, and people who distrust or fear secular literature as a tool of moral and social education. A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to—by gender, sex, race, religion, age—is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

PRIDES

A
N
E
SSAY ON
W
RITING
W
ORKSHOPS

This piece was a contribution to a volume edited by Paul M. Wrigley and Debbie Cross as a benefit for the Susan Petrey Fund and Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1989. This version is different here and there, updated, but the illustrations are the same.

Sometimes I worry about workshops. I’ve taught quite a few—Clarion West four times; in Australia; at Haystack on the Oregon coast and at the Malheur Field Station in the Oregon desert; at the Indiana and Bennington Writers Conferences, at the Writing Centers in D.C., and at Portland State University; and many times at the beloved and muchmissed Flight of the Mind. And I still teach workshops sometimes, though sometimes I think I should stop. Not only because I am getting old and lazy, but because I’m two-minded about workshops, not single-minded. I worry, are they a good thing—yes? no?

I always come down on the Yes side—lightly, but with both feet.

A workshop can certainly do harm as well as good.

The most harmless harm it can do is waste time. This happens when people come to it expecting to teach or be taught how to write. If you think you can teach people how to write you’re wasting their time and if they think you can teach them how to write they’re wasting yours, and vice (as it were) versa.

People attending workshops are not learning how to write.
¹
What they are learning or doing (as I understand it) will come up later on.

A more harmful harm that can infect the workshop is the ego trip. Classes in literary writing and writers’ conferences, years ago, were mostly ego trips—the Great author and his disciples. A good deal of that still goes on at “prestigious” universities and creative writing programs featuring pickled big names. It was the system of mutual group criticism, the Clarion system, now used almost everywhere writing is taught, that freed the pedagogy of writing from hierarchical authority and authorial hierarchy.

But even in a mutual-criticism workshop the instructor can go on an ego trip. I have known an instructor who ran an amateur Esalen, playing mind games and deliberately disintegrating participants’ personalities without the faintest idea of how to put them back together. I have known an instructor who ran a little Devil’s Island, punishing the participants for writing by trashing their work, except for a favorite trusty or two who got smarmed over. I have known an instructor—oh, many, too many—who ran a little Paris Island, where a week of systematic misogyny was supposed to result in a “few good men.” I have known instructors who seemed to be running for a popularity prize, and instructors who just ran away, leaving their students to flounder, not showing up from Monday until Friday, when they came to collect their check.

Such self-indulgence can do real and permanent damage, particularly when the instructor is famous and respected, and the participant is—and they all are more or less—insecure and vulnerable. To offer one’s work for criticism is an act of trust requiring real courage. It must be respected as such. I know several people who after a brutal dismissal by a writer they admired stopped writing for years, one of them
forever. Certainly a writing instructor has a responsibility to defend the art, and the right to set very high standards, but nobody has the right to stop a person from trying to learn. The defense of excellence has nothing whatever to do with bullying.

Ego-tripping by participants can also be destructive to the work of other individuals or of the whole group, unless the instructor is savvy enough to refuse to play games with the troublemaker, who is usually either a manipulative bully or a passive bully, a psychopathically demanding person. I was slow to learn that as the instructor I must refuse to collude with these people. I am still not good at handling them, but have found that if I ask other participants to help me they do so, often with a skill, kindness, and psychological sensitivity that never cease to amaze me.

Perhaps all workshops should have a sign on the door: Do Not Feed the Ego! But then on the other side of the door should be a sign: Do Not Feed the Altruist! Because the practice of any art is impeded by both egoism and altruism. What’s needed is concentration on the work.