Garth Greenwell on Philip Roth

[mirafrida]

This is from March, so sorry if it's old news to you.

https://yalereview.org/article/garth-greenwell-philip-roth

I found it an interesting meditation; and perhaps not without relevance to issues that authors here think about...

 

[SyleusSnow]

Thanks for the link. My goodness, that essay is some tweed-encrusted prose. Guess that's par for these "renowned journals of literature".

I've had Roth on my "must read" shelf for a while, especially since he writes so much about sex. Sabbath’s Theater sounds like quite a romp.

 

[12oclocktales]

Reading the article was uncanny for me, because on Monday of this week I had published on Lit the first part of a two-part story (“Writing What You Know”) that deals with the same concept how filth binds people together, and can almost be like a religious experience (“. . . it really made me have a pact with you. It was like we were forever united,” says Drenka in Roth’s novel after she and Sabbath pissed on each other). In my story a young female with exceptional writing potential enrolls in a fiction writing class in order to improve the quality of her taboo fetish stories, which for her are beautiful and exquisite, but appalling to her instructor, who tries to get her to reject writing porn stories for more “mainstream” fare. The student refuses emphatically, and in Part 02 that should appear next week, cites Roth’s novel as an example of a vile act (pissing on each other) not only appearing in a “mainstream” novel, but being valuable as art. This being Lit it’s the instructor who changes her views, or has them changed for her through her lesbian lover, and the vile act they are dealing with is even more extreme than pissing. It’s a shame that art today has to be filtered through a litany of predetermined checkpoints before passing muster, and, as Greenwell says, “make(s) it impossible for art to do the moral work proper to it.”

 

[SimonDoom]

Thanks for that link. I read the article. It's worth reading. I've read and enjoyed a number of Roth's works (though not without some misgivings, many of which Greenwell discusses), but not the particular novel discussed.

Topics raised in Greenwell's article have come up in this forum before, and I agree with Greenwell's article about the role of art. Here's a quote that resonates with me:

Our current obsession with purity, our sense that we cannot associate with others who do not share our political and social values, our intolerance of disagreement are not just corrosive of civil society and democratic discourse. They are also impoverishing of ourselves. I feel the appeal of that intolerance. Sabbath’s Theater helps me to resist it.

The ability of art to do this moral work, the work I think it is uniquely equipped to do, depends on our acknowledging the power of a frame as a kind of magic circle separating the world of art from the actual world. I don’t mean to suggest that art is cut off from politics or history, or that this separation is absolute. I mean that representation has a fundamentally different moral and existential status from that of reality. This is a point that needs defending. The moral and political demands currently placed on art, the charge that art has responsibilities and consequences as grave as actions in the world beyond the frame, the conflation of art and activism, don’t just mistake the nature of art and art making. They make it impossible for art to do the moral work proper to it.

I see the trend Greenwell complains about in society at large, among Literotica readers in their comments sometimes, and even in this forum. When people complain, for example, that the characters in a Literotica BDSM story aren't abiding by the so-called "rules" of BDSM play among experienced BDSM practitioners, I roll my eyes and wonder, "Do you have no understanding of fiction? Are you really that blind?" This kind of simple moralism, to me, conflicts with the more complex and nuanced moralism that art (including erotica) is better suited for.