@LoveYourSmile
LoveYourSmile said:Sorry for the serious tone, I simply don't get how this art x artist "coupling" works. If I worried about Stephen King's political views, I would end up reading zero of his novels. That's just the wrong way to approach art imo.
It depends? I certainly do not think you can separate Hemingway himself from A Farewell to Arms. I mean, he did serve in the war, and eventually committed suicide.
It is dishonest and superficial to reduce a work outside of an artist, however external an entity it is. Hemingway's war experience were fundamental to the creation of several of his works. You fundamentally understand works like A Farewell To Arms better in the context of the lives (and times) of their creators. Art is an expression of the self, and when you have deeply intimate work like this, it would be completely dishonest to pretend Hemingway or the life he lived did not factor into the how or why of Farewell to Arms
Putting aside any morality of enjoying a work of creators by bad or less than ideal person, I do not agree with this "approach", being any sort of defense, because it is just willful ignorance. For example, Dickens was socially conscious and hence why his books (David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectation) dealt with the most pressing issues of his time concerning the poor and downtrodden, especially children. He was famous for being a social reformer and crusader of children's rights. His books were intended to spread his very political beliefs for his time.
If you read his book in complete ignorance of the time it was written then yes, I do think you get less out of it; those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it and all that.
Burroughs was literally a fucking drug addict, much like in Naked Lunch or Junkie. Since art is a fundamental expression of the artist, it cannot be completely impersonal, at least for the artists here I am familiar with. I rather just acknowledge artists as terrible, and then have that conversation of "how do we approach their terribleness in the context of their work" then pretending the artist magically does not exist. Ahistoricity is no virtue.
LoveYourSmile said:PS: Thinking about my beloved King, I just remembered some oddly specific scene from his Dedication. Oh, boy, how come his "liberal" friends didn't cancel him for that yet?
To be honest, King is a blue-state liberal raised in a red state, in his own words, which he has admitted in his essay Guns. We are not talking Tom Wolfe here, who would actually be considered a conservative, but someone who is at least a centrist.
Even putting that aside, most agree that his best works were written during the most troubled period of his life. The Shining was about an alcoholic and dysfunctional father, whereas Pet Semetary opened with an introduction where King's daughter wandered a bit too close to a road for his liking, and how this influenced Pet Semetary. The stereotypical Stephen King is set in a small-town in Maine for a reason.
Not trying to be too much of a dick here, but I do think the artist and who they are is important to works like these. There are authors out there who do put works out there that don't want their lives to overshadow the works, but that is pretty telling in its own right. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, who was notoriously private, but you understand Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian's themes on violence better if you read his earlier and later works too (Or watched, as is the case of No Country for Old Men) |
