High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [102]
I am writing to thank you. I picked up Animal Dreams because I was eager to read any book dedicated to Ben Linder and daring to hold up a mirror to the horrible devastation our country has visited upon Nicaragua….All through the eighties, Reagan’s policy was driving me nuts….Then in early 1990 it hit home. It was then we got word that two of our sisters were ambushed on a lonely road in Nicaragua. Killed by U.S.-supplied armaments. One was a North American, a Milwaukee native, and the other was a Miskito Indian woman who had been in vows less than a year….I want to thank you for your novel, which says something hopeful about death and the life that can come from death.
The sentiments in the second letter don’t change the significance of the first. I can’t in good conscience ignore either one. I don’t know whether my convictions about art—and particularly, art that contains violence—will ever be allowed to settle into a comfortable position. They have been revising themselves for a long, long time, roaming restlessly over the options, continually exhorted by the ghosts that bless and curse.
As an adolescent girl, I had a secret yellow notebook I filled with stories. They were written in a crabbed cursive, set mostly in places I had never been, like Mexico and the Andes, and the protagonists of these stories were always boys. What’s more, they were almost always maimed in some way. One of my heroes, I remember, had been blinded, and yet he still managed to canoe across a lake and climb a mountain. Another one had a clubfoot, and he won a scholarship to leave his small folkloric village and study art. When I was eleven, I’m sure I didn’t know what a clubfoot was; I think I had some vague idea that if someone clubbed you on the foot, then you would have a clubfoot.
I was very much like that girl who has written The Princess Bride and The Dark Crystal and thirty-five other novels and is now wondering how the plot possibilities will open up if she knocks off her parents. When I was her age, I wasn’t remotely conscious of what it took to make good writing. I was just looking for drama and impact, and the only way I could see to get that onto a page was to write about events that, if they happened to you in real life, would tend to make a big impact.
I didn’t realize that it’s emotion, not event, that creates a dynamic response in the mind of a reader. The artist’s job is to sink a taproot in the reader’s brain that will grow downward and find a path into the reader’s soul and experience, so that some new emotional inflorescence will grow out of it.
Of course, the writer has to do this for many readers at a time, without ever having met any of them, knowing nothing about them except that they’re human and have mostly all lived on the same earth. So it’s a challenge. Lacking the skills to pull that off, it’s common for beginning writers to fall back on the put-out-his-eyes-and-make-him-climb-a-mountain tract. Some years ago as a judge in a fiction contest, I read the unscreened entries of a few hundred aspiring writers and, I swear, three out of four contained unfortunate wretches trapped in wheelchairs in burning buildings. That job was a curse.
In time, with practice, you learn that violence isn’t a necessary component of exciting art. You can substitute metaphor and imagery for the clubfoot. And then comes the question: If you don’t have to, why would you want to create violence in art? Are there any good reasons? Maybe yes. Maybe no.
To some extent I agree with my correspondent who wrote that inventing violence, even for the noblest of motives, might necessarily be promoting violence as entertainment. The equation of fun-for-pay with the infliction of pain makes me very uneasy. Very often it’s done with a cast of morality thrown over the whole thing, as though that might redeem it—for example, in the genre I call Slice