My professor in a stage combat class told us often that no matter the type of combat scene--sweeping, emotional, comedic, whatever--the creators of the scene have a moral responsibility to depict pain. Violence hurts. And to suggest anything contrary to this fact is dangerous.
I think about what my professor said more often than one might expect. I no longer choreograph or act in combative scenes. I do not write violence. But that question of the moral responsibility of artists has stayed with me.
There is a line one can cross between "you cannot depict violence without pain" and "you cannot depict sex outside of marriage." I am fervently anti-censorship, and yet the question of a writer's responsibility lingers with me.
Back around the same time that I took the stage combat class, I wrote a sex advice column for a fairly large and famous men's magazine. I wrote under a pseudonym, which was a good thing, because I received death threats in open letters in our school newspaper. I was accused of being a part of a culture that plays into men's fantasies and causes women to be raped. I did not take any of this lightly.
When I wrote the advice column, I had a rule with myself: while I might tailor my voice to the publication, I would never lie. I would never write something because it was what I thought men wanted to hear. It was always what I felt was true and all of the anecdotes shared were my own or those of close friends. I have never questioned the morality of my participation in a men's magazine. But there are those who might suggest that I am an enabler of "rape culture."
Today's post was inspired by Roxane Gay's "The Careless Language of Sexual Violence." Read it. It is important.
And now I ask you: do we, as writers, have a moral obligation in the language we use? The circumstances we depict? The violence we portray as painless? I think we do and, though I can't pinpoint exactly where this sits on the censorship scale, I think that it is dangerous and childish for artists to believe that we have no responsibility for the words we use.
Stephen King said, "We understand that fiction is a lie to begin with. To ignore the truth inside the lie is to sin against the craft, in general, and one’s own work in particular." Good fiction often tells the truth better than nonfiction. Writers can create whatever situations they need to tell the story, the lie, but how their characters react to that situation, that's where the truth is, or at least should be. At the very least, if a character doesn't respond in a truthful way, it should be clear that that character is an aberration, and that aberrant behavior should be the source from which the truth comes (e.g., A Clockwork Orange, A Confederacy of Dunces).
ReplyDeleteRecognizing the truth behind the lie of fiction is the only reason we read fiction, isn't it?