Sans Fig Leaf
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"Oppression or…?"
19 July, 2007
Imagine you're at a restaurant. You order vegetable soup. The waiter brings you a bowl full of gravel. You protest, saying that you ordered the vegetable soup. The chef storms out of the kitchen and yells at you: "How dare you try to tell me what to put in my soup! It is my restaurant! It is my menu! It is my soup! You cannot oppress my creativity!"
You infer from this that the chef is a lunatic and leave, declining to attend the restaurant again.
Now imagine that you write a review of the restaurant. You point out that the scientific consensus is that gravel is not a vegetable. You also point out that a survey of all available recipe books failed to yield a single recipe for vegetable soup which contained only the ingredient gravel. You mention that you don't find gravel appetizing.
Now imagine that the chef sues you. Imagine that many of your friends and neighbors express the opinion that, because it is his restaurant, you have no right to criticize the food he serves.
Sound insane?
Substitute "book" (or "song" or "painting" or "movie") for "vegetable soup", and make other appropriate substitutions, and you have the situation I have witnessed many times in meetings, forums, and panel discussions of writers and aspiring writers. Point out that an author failed to deliver an ending consistent with the rest of the story, and you will be told you can't impose conventions on the author. Say that you found the dialogue awkward, and you will be told that it's not your place to decide how his/her characters should express themselves. If you say that the characterization is uneven and unconvincing, you will be informed that only the author has the right to decide how the characters behave.
The funny thing is that each of those arguments is stating a truth, but they don't actually contradict the criticisms raised. The theoretical critic never said that the author didn't have a right to make those choices, just expressed the opinion that the choices were poorly made.
Some might argue that the soup analogy isn't fair, because when we go to a restaurant we're paying for something we will ingest. It isn't just a matter of taste--it's also a matter of health. Again, that is true, but it doesn't invalidate the analogy.
Even when we aren't being asked to pay for a book or other artistic work, the creator is asking us to invest some of our time and attention to the work. An author is asking us to care about the story he or she is telling and to welcome the characters into our hearts. Just as the restaurant is obligated to take resonable precautions not to offer us spoiled or contaminated food, an author is obligated to try not to deliver a bad tale.
When we invest in something, we become a co-owner. In the case of something like a book, not in a legal or financial sense, of course. But the point of a work of art is that part of it--an idea, essence, feeling--is shared between the artist and the audience. A writer without readers is just a crazed scribbler. The audiences make him or her an author.
It's not a simple two way arrangement, either, because audience members share the experience, ideas, and feelings with each other. It becomes a complicated metaphorical web of unspoken agreements.
You could say that the story belongs to the author while the meaning and significance of the story belong to the readers--not just to the majority of the readers, but to each and every one equally. So, of course, just as I have the right to criticize an author for failing with a particular story, every other reader has just as much right to agree, or disagree, or partially agree.
It isn't a competition. It isn't a matter of being correct or incorrect. The point of any creative endeavor--for both the creator and the audience--is to reach for something beyond the ordinary. Both criticism and praise can be your signposts to the extraordinary, but they can't do their job if you shut either of them out.
--Ansel Adams
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