torture and critics and the critics who torture

In one of my very first graduate-level poetry workshops, my professor "reminded" us that to be an artist is to be marginalized. We were to forget whatever privilege from which we came and recall that the road we chose or accidentally fell into or had some innate proclivity towards was inherently problematized and put us at odds with the rest of the world, she said. There we were, all of us working so hard to tug our affected mantles of artistic humility up around our ears, and there she was, telling us that whatever talents got us into one of the top Creative Writing MFA programs (a questionable distinction, perhaps?) in the country did, indeed, make us special-- and made our path perhaps a little stonier than it might have been if we'd been naturally predisposed to becoming, say, CPAs.

It was, at once, a difficult, painful thing to hear and a wondrous thing to hear. I know I've always been a little uneasy with the notion that because I'm reasonably (though, clearly, not spectacularly) intelligent, because I happen to have some facility for stringing words together to make meaning, because I have crazy, curly hair, because I have the heart of the haute pervert, that there was some "specialness" about me. And whatever artistic aspirations I might have or once have had couldn't possibly make me any more different. I mean, everyone fancies themselves a poet now and again, right? But then, hearing Jane tell us that merely because the path of the artist cuts against the grain, it is all the more important, was still so incredibly validating. Truly, by that point in our lives-- most of us well into our 20s, several of us one or two decades beyond-- I think most of us had lost a lot of the romance with being an artist. We worried about rent and beer money. We thought we were idiots for delaying getting real jobs for as long as we had because other people our age no longer had to freak out about whether they'd have enough money left over at the end of the month to feed their dogs. The writing became work. We became stuck. Sometimes we had a hard time remembering when writing was fun. We worried about the Business of Publishing and about how piss-poor self-marketers we all were. What the fuck is romantic about any of that?

Or maybe that was all just me.

Regardless, being called "marginalized" simply by virtue of my being a somewhat creative soul was a thing that pushed me forward on so many long, bored afternoons of sitting with my laptop between my thighs, staring at what I was sure was the most boring poem ever composed in the whole miserable history of poetic endeavors. But if I was marginalized, suddenly nothing I wrote could be all that mundane, could it? Never mind my blasted happy childhood. Never mind my never having had to struggle for money (up until grad school, that is). Never mind the lilies in my skin, my mother's Lexus, the two fulls sets of silver awaiting me in my Hopeless Chest. Because I was an Arteest(!), my going to the trouble of committing my "unique" perspective to paper was, in fact, a worthy venture. Or so I had to remind myself time and time again.

Today, Sean put up this post on his blog in which he (posts smokin' hot photo of one Ms. Anne Sextonm but also...) asks this question:

Question: If artists are inherently not normal, but the goal of analysis is more or less to overcome abnormalities, is treatment of psychological problems likely to inhibit the subjects’ creativity?

Answer: I don’t know.

He also says this:

Have we, at long last, finally debunked the romanticized notion of the disenchanted individual (see: tortured artist) churning out masterworks in spite of, or because of, their affliction? This has been an especially egregious construction of lit-crit vampires and prurient pundits, most of whom have no actual insight regarding the association between creativity and mental illness. Hence, we get academic treatises depicting the requisite “abnormal” consciousness that compels creation.

And then, a little later, he goes on to say this:

Nevertheless, many artists are inspired to create because of a fundamental dissatisfaction with reality and how it is defined, and/or perceived by the masses (is there a better way to say this? The average folks? The normal folks? The consumers? The quietly desperate?).

I think he's onto something.

I must say, I too find the notion of the "afflicted artist" to be a cumbersome one. On several levels, many of them deeply personal. As I said, sometimes the only thing that keeps me seated in my desk chair is that notion that I'm not normal... and that not normal is inherently more interesting than normal. And, well, I mean, sure, I go through my annual funks. Right now, even, I am in the throes. Do they engender writing? Hell, no. Quite the opposite. Check my archives. Last year, I wrote nearly every day once the sun came out in March, April, May. And yet my postings dwindled to 3 or 5 a month as the days shortened. But perhaps that's a poor example. It's not like I'm actively destroying my life, and blaming the SAD, in the way so many notable creative sorts have. My issues are so mickey-mouse.

But I think Sean's best point is this: it is that artists, purely by virtue of the way their brains work, are necessarily dissatisfied with some aspect of the world around them. Now, that dissatisfaction can manifest in ways both healthy and unhealthy, or either, or neither. And true enough, that dissatisfaction might open a window of susceptibility to mental health and/or addictive problems, but I continue to believe that assuming a causal correlation between the drive to create and the drive to destroy the self is a false and faulty approach. Sean blames critics and the academy for perpetuating this queer line of thinking. I agree that such folks shoulder their fair share of the responsibility here. But I also tend to think an artist or two, over the years, just might have been a little complicit in tacking a frill or five onto our culture's insistence that the tortured artist is the only kind of artist for whom it has any patience.

You know the ones. The ones who swear they can't write when they're sober. Or on Xanax. Or regularly speaking with their spiritual and/or mental advisor of choice. The ones who get so fucking sick of themselves when they aren't stirring up their own drama. For their art, they say.

These are the ones that kill me. Now, please don't think I mean to minimize the pain of real, live, hurting people. I don't. It's just that I so easily recognize my own need to play the oddball as part of my own creative process. And so I wonder that it isn't that so many of us need to play up our freakishness-- even to desperately problematic heights-- just to keep ourselves interested in our own work? And so maybe we forget that history prefers the E! True Hollywood Story to our body of work. And then what gets remembered is Lord Byron's clubbed foot and his collection of envelopes full of his lovers' post-coitally snipped pubes. And Shelley's tuberculosis. And Whitman's boy-lovin'. And Caravaggio's. And Wilde's. And Plath's head in her oven. And Sexton's tail-pipe sucking.

But then again, Sean is right. The critics and the biographers certainly aren't helping matters, as they are the ones who think they can understand the work just by learning a hell of a lot about the people who make it. Folks, that's just not the way. It can't ever be.

Twice in the past couple weeks, I've caught a fair-to-middling little film called Starting Out in the Evening on some deeply advanced cable channel. Really, it's just an okay sort of movie-- one that looks very much like a hundred other mentor/student indie dramas NetFlix has to offer. It notable, however, for Lauren Ambrose's slick curtain of orange hair, her spaniel eyes, and her newly sinewy, svelte, pencil-skirted little body. She is nice to watch. Even more compelling, however, is the eroticizing of Frank Langella's lumbering, Frankenstein's-monster-esque, old-man body. For that alone, I watched it a second time-- a thing I rarely, rarely do.

The story, though-- it's about an aging novelist and a young graduate student writing her thesis about his oeuvre. And how they get confused in their relationship to each other. They, neither of them, know whether they are in love with his books, or with the man who made the books. It is the usual conundrum of the critic/artist relationship.

There is, however, a moment in the film that I think illustrates all of Sean's points perfectly. Up until this moment, Heather (the Ambrose character) has been struggling with her analysis of Leonard's (the Langella character) second two books. For years, she has loved his first books. She finds passion and a spiritual quest for personal freedom in them. But the last two, the ones he claims are writ on a broader social palate, leave her cold. She is loathe to admit it, but she really hates them. She goes to Leonard's posh, book-filled apartment and bursts in on him. A friend has just informed her that, in the break between the first books and the last two, Leonard's wife had had an affair another man and then died within the year. Heather watches her analysis of the last two books crystallize before her eyes. No wonder those books suck! He was heartbroken.

But Leonard yells at her. How dare she reduce his art to simple psychoanalysis? How does such an interpretation not completely undermine the work and accomplishment of creation, his creation? He tells her that she insults him. He repeats it. It is a complex moment for him. To this point, Heather's presence in his life has done nothing but massage his flagging ego. Not only does this lovely 25-year-old female thing adore his work (though he hasn't published anything in over ten years and he doubts whether he ever will again), but she kisses him. She unbuttons her blouse for him. She charges his life with sex in a way he cannot resist (though he is an old man, much given to assuming he would never fuck again). And then his disappointment when she tries to explain away the shift in his writing style that he believes represents his own artistic growth by way of pedestrian biography? It is here that we come to understand this tango that writers and critics have always done. How they hate each other and need each other. How it's personal. How much the writer yearns to be understood, despite all his different-ness. All things considered, it's a pretty smartly constructed scene.

I suppose it comes down to this (and I wonder if Sean will agree with me): you can never really understand an artist's life without understanding, or at least appreciating, his or her work. You can, however, given enough attention and time, come to understand an artist's work without understanding his or her life. And that is why the job of the artist will always be, and must always be, privileged above the job of the critic. And perhaps that is why our romance with the creative life, tortured or otherwise, perpetuates itself. Perhaps.