tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post1113095175495802798..comments2024-03-12T22:31:46.500-04:00Comments on What Would Phoebe Do?: Is fiction better?Phoebe Maltz Bovyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-8911104534753933662014-02-06T16:40:47.747-05:002014-02-06T16:40:47.747-05:00Oh. I missed that point--I totally agree.
My poi...Oh. I missed that point--I totally agree. <br /><br />My point was more that having something you wrote be used as evidence of having done something you're accused of works with no actual general theoretical approach to art; it sort of announces itself as an unserious claim.Nicholashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05693481720368030657noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-47934078240527451092014-02-06T16:37:05.389-05:002014-02-06T16:37:05.389-05:00I see your point. But let's say - separate fro...I see your point. But let's say - separate from whatever Zola was accused of by anti-Dreyfusards after J'Accuse - that Zola had had a furious ex-partner, or someone else with a grudge, legitimate or otherwise. Accusing him of something that he'd represented would maybe have worked? I suppose what I'm getting at is, it's not that writing X means being accused of X. It means that *if* you end up accused of X, you're that much more likely to be presumed guilty.Phoebe Maltz Bovyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-65501683588566016722014-02-06T16:26:48.481-05:002014-02-06T16:26:48.481-05:00But I think there has to be more than even this to...But I think there has to be more than even this to make the WA case work, because it seems there are instances we'd be disinclined to think that repeating unpleasant situations in someone's work imply anything about the person themselves. To choose an example we might also both know enough about to discuss: Zola's novels tend to have a lot of murder, suicide, and discussions/depictions of how sex is like violence. He's pretty obviously fixated on these for psychological and storytelling reasons (I was reading <i>The Earth</i> over the holidays and, when no major character had died 3/4 of the way through, assumed the end would be a bloodbath, which it more or less was), and this might perhaps tell us he had a mental predisposition to those things, but it's still a long way from there to acting on any of them.Nicholashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05693481720368030657noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-33582199451035257532014-02-06T11:46:24.745-05:002014-02-06T11:46:24.745-05:00Hmm. There's definitely the straightforward is...Hmm. There's definitely the straightforward issue of protagonist/persona/person conflation (which happens even to actors just playing a character written by someone else), but what I'm talking about is something a bit broader. As in, not that we're assuming WA is Alvy Singer, but rather that if whichever situation appears repeatedly in the work of WA, whether involving a WA-like character or not, whether the character is played by WA or not, it clearly came from his brain, and speaks to what he's fixated on. This is a much tougher art vs artist question than whether a protagonist *is* the artist. Phoebe Maltz Bovyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-72494549609183797332014-02-06T11:30:24.853-05:002014-02-06T11:30:24.853-05:00Perhaps it's just me, but I begin with the ass...Perhaps it's just me, but I begin with the assumption that people who create fictions are not the people in the fictions themselves, and, weirdly, everyone seems to recognize this except when they forget it. I would imagine there's overlap between people who think the 'Woody Allen' character in a movie is Woody Allen and the people who insist (correctly) that Hannah Horvath is not Lena Dunham. (To choose an example: the narrator of "The Whore of Mensa" has the most Allen-like voice imaginable, but is obviously not Allen himself.) Roberto Bolaño had an alter ego in his books that borrowed from his life but was not him; Javier Cercas has a whole backstory of Bolaño in the (fictional) <i>Soldiers of Salamis</i> whose entire purpose is to sound as credible as possible while being fake. Or <i>My Dinner With Andre</i>, etc etc.<br /><br />I have a strong reaction to this in part because in my evangelical church attending formative years, there was a lot of emphasis on collapsing this distinction in order to discredit lots of things: if a musician sings about something untoward, it must be him singing about his life and views. It also came up in college in one of my art history courses: we see a painting that is powerful and touches something real, emotionally, and so want to assume there is something in the biography of the artist to explain it. But any explanation along the lines of "Caravaggio was sad about this and so made this beautiful religiously-themed painting" is reductive and speculative. <br /><br />Which is to say: there's certainly some kind of link between who a person is and what they create (there was certainly a link between who I was and the dissertation I wrote, for example), but all the crucial parts of the transition happen in someone's head, so apart from them specifying, we'll never know. I suspect, in Allen's case, this has less to do with a specific application of a general theory about art, and more to do with trying to clear someone out of respectable discourse.Nicholashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05693481720368030657noreply@blogger.com