I've got a story fragment about two researchers in the future going through a landfill for old hard drives, trying to find a writer's lost correspondence. If I ever come up with a decent plot....
Yeah...executors will no doubt be turning over to scholars and journalists old hard drives in the same way they used to turn over the old cedar-chest full of ribbon-wrapped packets of letters and grubby leather-bound diaries.
That's a good one, thanks. Reminds me of one of my profs back in college, who was lamenting how scholarship went downhill after famous figures began typing. He maintained that handwriting was revealing, and typeface hid the subject. I privately thought that so did a court hand, or letters dictated to yawning (unpaid) daughters, examples Trollope and Hugo, or recopied several times before being sent.
I first discovered (being a clueless late-bloomer in all ways but idiocy) in college that biographers were not in fact as neutral as they claimed when I read a psycholanalytical bio of Martin Luther. Oh lord, what was that guy's name? Anyway, our prof, who had a jones against religion, presented it as stunning 'new' biography and full of truth and I read it and was appalled--the conclusions the guy came to made the writer, not Luther, seem a total whack-job, especially when he based a bunch of Freudian conclusions on English translations of German terms, without getting the German right! Or being the slightest bit aware of historical context
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Yes, regarding dirt, or that although the writer may have written something culturally great flaws in the writer cause it to be meaningless or inauthentic at its core. I think there can be truth to that but people jump to that conclusion far too easily. In my head (this is not really fit for public consumption but
Regarding dirt: Yes, and the conclusion often is that great works are inauthentic at their core due to the writer's personal flaws. There is sometimes truth to this, perhaps, but the conclusion comes far too easily. In general in academia inane criticism, energetically uttered, is so often the filler to cover up lack of real insight.
As for the idea of writers owing posterity personal information... I don't think there's any absolute position possible on that question. Many writers attempt to tell us about themselves and otherwise brilliant people become horrible bores. However, I do feel that a wrong has been committed--even if one had the right to commit it--when for example crucial papers are burned, etc.
Intentionally or not, most writers inevitably create a persona that the reader feels they know. In general, when we read, we experience the force of the intelligence or personality behind the text, and that personality -- whether it's near or far to that of the real person -- becomes a character in the larger narratives we construct about our own experience. It's natural, then, that people want to flesh out and understand that persona. Finding evidence in a writer's life that expands our understanding of that persona is interesting, but, just as in fiction, conflict is more interesting -- and so when we find evidence in a person's life of choices or events that contradict the persona we encounter in the fiction, it creates a tension between our two experiences of the author (within and without the text), and that makes for more compelling narrative.
Oh, I agree. And in my own footnote at the bottom of the catchall chapter of Millstones of Mediocrity: Forgotten Authors of the Late 20th Century no doubt some desperate grad student
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No, of course, writers don't owe readers the facts of their lives.
But the desire to know them means that the more facts that are concealed, the more interesting it is, and the more compelling a narrative it makes. Writers don't, and can't, control the publicly-constructed narratives of their lives by witholding facts, even if that's the impulse that drives it.
Lying is still lying, even if it's not done for profit. Keeping privacy is one thing, but to put out false information in the place of real is quite another, even if it really doesn't make any difference what is true.
I don't believe the desire to know personal information about an author is simple prurience. Fiction is a highly subjective art that creates a sense of intimacy, feigning deep personal acquaintance through its insights into fictional characters. The question of what this says about the author's character (for it surely comes from deep within the author's character, even if the fictional persons are nothing like the author) begs for an answer.
A lonely young SF reader of the 1950s later said that he considered his favorite authors to be his best friends. "How could I not consider them my friends?" he said. "They were letting me into their heads."
I find that a very striking view. The young reader later became a respected SF writer himself: he is David Gerrold.
I like that quote. But I still don't buy a wrongness in constructing a persona...so Patrick O'Brian wanted to be Irish, and let journalists believe he was. I just don't have a problem with that.
If the authors of my favorite works are my friends (hey, Jane Austen and I are like that) why should I not allow them their little vanities and illusions. I've got a friend who honestly believes that her yellow sweater is the most flattering garment she owns. Why should I insist that she face the truth?
I don't feel that an author owes anyone anything but good work. I think it's disingenuous of an author to get upset if people start inquiring about their lives, but I don't think the author has to tell the truth, or all the truth, or anything at all. I don't mind that journalists intrigued by O'Brian wanted to get at the truth--that is, theoretically, what they do--but I do mind the excoriation. I could see a little unseemly triumph at having unearthed hidden data, but acting as though the author had deliberately suppressed information to distress them is stupid. Not having read either Tolstoy's book or King's, I don't know all the reasons why O'Brian created such an elaborate backstory for himself, why he was so eager to escape from his real past. But I'll bet it wasn't to thwart biographers and journalists
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He doesn't seem to have gone as far as some imply--but he did definitely not correct journalists who said things like "So you were born in Ireland."
The reasons seem to be obscure, and not easily attributable to any one thing--except perhaps to a profoundly dysfunctional and unhappy childhood. That and an extreme embarrassment over the fact that he only had four years of school, and that a school that sounds less than stellar in quality.
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Regarding dirt: Yes, and the conclusion often is that great works are inauthentic at their core due to the writer's personal flaws. There is sometimes truth to this, perhaps, but the conclusion comes far too easily. In general in academia inane criticism, energetically uttered, is so often the filler to cover up lack of real insight.
As for the idea of writers owing posterity personal information... I don't think there's any absolute position possible on that question. Many writers attempt to tell us about themselves and otherwise brilliant people become horrible bores. However, I do feel that a wrong has been committed--even if one had the right to commit it--when for example crucial papers are burned, etc.
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Oh, I agree. And in my own footnote at the bottom of the catchall chapter of Millstones of Mediocrity: Forgotten Authors of the Late 20th Century no doubt some desperate grad student ( ... )
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But the desire to know them means that the more facts that are concealed, the more interesting it is, and the more compelling a narrative it makes. Writers don't, and can't, control the publicly-constructed narratives of their lives by witholding facts, even if that's the impulse that drives it.
Reply
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I don't believe the desire to know personal information about an author is simple prurience. Fiction is a highly subjective art that creates a sense of intimacy, feigning deep personal acquaintance through its insights into fictional characters. The question of what this says about the author's character (for it surely comes from deep within the author's character, even if the fictional persons are nothing like the author) begs for an answer.
A lonely young SF reader of the 1950s later said that he considered his favorite authors to be his best friends. "How could I not consider them my friends?" he said. "They were letting me into their heads."
I find that a very striking view. The young reader later became a respected SF writer himself: he is David Gerrold.
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The reasons seem to be obscure, and not easily attributable to any one thing--except perhaps to a profoundly dysfunctional and unhappy childhood. That and an extreme embarrassment over the fact that he only had four years of school, and that a school that sounds less than stellar in quality.
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