Bad People, Good Art

 A perennial topic, one that I suppose applies to me, a felon.

I find Amanda Perry's I Changed My Mind about Reading Problematic Male Authors more equivocal than its title.

I was happy to give Walcott a pass too, and I was not alone in reaching this conclusion: my alma mater brought him back as a distinguished scholar in residence, right after the Oxford controversy, to work with undergraduates. But why was I so nonplussed by such stories? I was no puritan, and I knew desire could be unruly and relationships messy. Perhaps I thought that artists, like their works, enjoyed a certain moral leeway if they were impressive enough. Above all, though, I suspect I found it more comfortable to identify with powerful men than to imagine myself as a potential target.

Many of today’s students have different instincts. In 2019, I taught my first course on Caribbean literature as an adjunct professor at Concordia University. I opened with Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History,” which seemed to go over well, but made the error of following up with the American writer David Foster Wallace, best known for Infinite Jest. I’d assigned his essay “Shipping Out,” which satirizes the luxury cruise, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, a polemical takedown of tourism as an extension of colonialism. The pairing was meant to set Wallace up for a fall based on content; Kincaid, an Antigua-born writer who now teaches at Harvard, delivers a far more historicized vision of the region. Instead, the first student I called on delivered a scathing account of Wallace stalking fellow writer Mary Karr. Another student called out Walcott shortly after.

I stumbled through that class and spent the next week ranting to friends about the dogmatism of activist youth. Did they expect me to curate a new literary history based on moral virtue instead of talent? Wait till I told them that Kincaid supported Israel, and feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir had seduced her underage female students. Besides, Walcott and Wallace were both dead by then. What happened to separating the art from the artist? Of course, my defensiveness was a mask for panic. I felt I was one misstep away from a social media scandal and one bad set of course evaluations away from unemployment.

In the end, that course went fine. The “activists” proved perfectly capable of nuanced thinking, and my evaluations came out strong. Retrospectively, I also respected the daring of the students who tore into the writers I’d chosen for them. I might have felt relieved instead of threatened: this cohort appeared far less likely to tolerate behaviour that, at their age, I had rationalized under the banner of human fallibility. Maybe they were also better defended against predation. But I was still stuck with the question of how to teach problematic writers, and I was startled to realize it was my call to make. Despite the precarity of my job, and the persistence of my own flawed humanity, I was on the side of power now.

I have read Infinite Jest without any joy. I think it is due to my obtuseness, but I do not find Wallace's treatment of his addict characters uplifting. I had known too many people like his characters. Yes, Wallace can write far, far better than I ever shall, but I prefer Nelson Algren.

Ms. Perry leans heavy on Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I also came to late in life. One thing I had learned by 50 was open relationships do not work. Nothing in Kundera's characters did I see anything to emulate except in one – one just has to live through one's mistakes. Let us all worry about the damage we can do to one another without the slightest intention of doing harm.

The novel was far more political than I remembered, with plot points revolving around the 1968 crushing of the Prague Spring and communist censorship. But I was pleased to find that the touchstone of my youth remained, in a basic way, good. Kundera’s aesthetic approach to existence had retained its potency, as he insists that we compose our lives like music, turning random happenings into personal motifs and following “the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Yes, I thought, this is why I embraced literature with a quasi-religious fervour at an age when I was losing faith in a more literal god. The notion of crafting my life like a novel was a way of holding onto meaning and coherence, if of a more provisional sort.

I suspect that I would enjoy reading more of Ms. Perry's work. I know I have had enough of Wallace. I will read Kundera as I can get tot him.

 sch 10/29