The Situation in [insert country/designation] Writing
Found these series of interviews from Maud Newton, and apart from showing my favorite answers so far—I’m interested to hear about what people in my “circle” think about these set of questions asked by Full Stop as inspired by The Partisan Review. (don’t you just love that name?)
Here’s the basic description:
In 1939, The Partisan Review sent out a questionnaire to a number of prominent writers, asking them about literature, politics and their identities. While the questionnaire hasn’t been completely forgotten, we felt that these specifically political questions were rarely being asked of our writers. Considering that 2011 was a year of global unrest, we felt that it would be particularly relevant to update The Partisan Review’s questions.
And here are my favorite answers (emphasis mine):
from Geoff Dyer:
2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval?
I don’t think so. Responsibility is an important civic and personal quality — obviously — but literature is free to be as irresponsible as it wants. Having said that, many of the writers I care most passionately about would argue — and have demonstrated — exactly the opposite.
And from Aimee Bender
2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval?
Absolutely. But there are many ways to respond. There are the writers with journalistic skills who are able to tell about the situation via fact and story; there are the people directly involved who will tell their own personal stories, and there are others impacted who will tell the stories in more metaphorical ways that are less easy to track but still deeply influenced by these upheavals. There’s a clunky writing exercise I give in a class about building scene, where the book (that holds the exercise) asks each writer to follow very specific instructions: write a sentence describing a character’s hands, write a sentence about the weather. One of the instructions is: write a sentence including a current event. It’s kind of hilarious. Usually it fails miserably—“He leaned on the bookshelf, thinking of Hurricane Katrina”. You can’t just cut and paste current events — they have to be felt and moved through to work. But, on occasion, a student will weave one in beautifully. I feel similarly about a writer’s job — yes, we are here to respond to the world, but sometimes it takes awhile to process events and let them happen naturally on the page.
(I think i just like that writing exercise, too.) Anyway, here are the questions with the option to alter them to what you feel is your context (hahahahaha!). If you feel like responding to the the questions or to just one or to even protest the questions, leave a comment here or better yet, a link to your response on your blog. 1. 2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval? 2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American [ insert relevant description here] writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years? 3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? For the past decade we’ve seen a series of cuts to predominant literary magazines and literary supplements, and in response, criticism has moved online. Do you think this move to the non-professional realm has made literary criticism more or less of an isolated cult? 4. Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession? 5. Do you find in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual? 6. How would you describe the political tendency of Philippine [insert description here ] writing, as a whole, since 1986/2001/[insert significant year] ? How do you feel about it yourself?
7. Over the past ten years, America has been in a state of constant war with a nebulous enemy [do feel free to edit to your ideas of what the Philippines has been doing the past decade.] This war has extended to fronts throughout the world. Have you considered the question of your opinion on an unending war on terrorism[or religion, or population control, or religious supremacy, or poverty, or shallowness, etc ,etc]? What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are, in the midst, of unending war?
Yes, I’ll be answering this too. You know how much I love answering interviews like I’m of some import.
