Katy writes:

Thanks for your site — I read it daily through my Google RSS feed with much enjoyment. Like you, I think the correlation between the decline of domesticity and the decline of thought is no coincidence. Both children and ideas need time and nurture to grow to maturity. One of the side-effects of modernity seems to be that we push both out the door and into the world a bit too fast, or perhaps just in the wrong ways, before they are ready.

To get to our topic, though — without having read Bellatin, I must point out that there is a long and fine tradition of “literature of the wound,” better known as the grotesque, in the West. One of its exemplars would of course be Flannery O’Connor, in stories such as “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” and “Good Country People.” The fault in contemporary authors in general seems to be not that they fixate on the deformed, disfigured, or diseased. All reflection on human nature must, to be complete, explore our inescapable flaws, either directly or through some metaphor. Rather, the fault is that contemporary writers of woundedness increasingly seem to indulge a tendency to exploit the macabre and prurient for its own sake — seeing it as attractive in itself rather than in what it can reveal about us. They show increasingly less of the gentleness and good humor O’Connor showed even as she left Hulga abandoned in the hayloft, and their characters show increasingly less of the peaceful yet profoundly disturbing self-acceptance of the sideshow hermaphrodite in “Temple” as it lifted its dress and said: “God made me this away, I don’t dispute hit.”

Certainly, part of this shift in tone could be because a culture fixated on diversity has thrown all kinds of difference into painful relief and made us all, “normal” or otherwise, paradoxically less able to accept difference without struggle. But I think the likelier explanation is a prejudice in some strands of contemporary literature to suppose that the real coincides only with the dark and difficult, the complex and subtle, and that a writer’s true mettle is proved in the crucible of describing suffering without cliche. No doubt this is to some degree true. But I think it ignores the flip side of the coin, that another great test — perhaps a much greater test — is that of describing joy without cliche. As Tolkien observed, the uncomfortable and grotesque generally make for a good tale, and take a deal of telling about anyway, but “things that are good to have and days that are good to spend” are soon past and soon told of. There’s less complexity, less subtlety, in such days and such things. Less complexity translates to fewer problems, which again translates to less appeal when you’re trying to interest a reader in what happens next. It takes one hell of a writer to make quotidian goodness interesting in narrative. This is the challenge that currently is, perhaps, being ignored — or perhaps not thought of? Who knows. I’m not privy to the interior lives of contemporary writers. (No famous ones, anyhow.)

Again, I’ve no idea where Bellatin falls on this spectrum — it sounds as if he treats his characters with respect, and I can respect that, whether or not I am eager to read it. But if I did read it, I would be willing to accept an uncomfortable reading experience, if I thought the trade-off in enrichment would truly be worth it. The greater trouble with any contemporary book is that, not having been tested by time and thus by many readers with many temporal perspectives, it may or may not reward you as you hope.

Laura writes:

Thank you for this excellent and thoughtful response to what may seem a blithe dismissal of contemporary literature and of the worthy theme of freakishness. I may be wrong that Bellatin is wallowing in grotesquery as a cheap bid for his own moral superiority, but looking at the photograph that accompanies the Times interview I cannot help but leap to this conclusion. In any event, the critics quoted take obvious delight in his physical abnormality, as if his arm-lessness was a literary badge, and in the theme of “sexual fluidity,” one of the most over-worked fields of exploration today. Bellatin is from Mexico and a writer from any undeveloped nation is by definition more authentic. He is also apparently homosexual and this further raises him in the esteem of the Times. These prejudices do not prove Bellatin is not worth reading. The Times may stumble on good things despite itself. 

My fear is Bellatin writes about freakishness to freak us out, to make us feel guilty for our normality, and that’s all. O’Connor wrote about the weird to grasp the larger human condition. Bellatin’s comment that “to me literature is a game, a search for ways to break through borders,” raises alarms and makes me doubt he possesses the humility to explore his chosen subject. It’s a conceit of modern writers that literature is only a form of play. They don’t mean it for a second and nobody believes them when they say this. As Lawrence Auster put it yesterday in pursuit of this insincerity, which is nihilism in fashionable clothes:

All the higher things of our civilization are either illusions, or, at best, cultural commodities that we pick up and caress for a while to give ourselves a fleeting sense of “value” and ‘meaning’ before it all ends.

You’ve got to be kidding if you expect any grown-up citizen of Western civilization to take [this] seriously.

Katy says, “It takes one hell of a writer to make quotidian goodness interesting in narrative.”

That’s well-said. It also takes one hell of a reader, one who doesn’t need to be shocked back to life. Contemporary literature, as Katy so well puts it, is far too filled with every variety of woundedness. There is so little heroism in its pages. It’s not enough to be told life is filled with suffering. We can find that in the news.

Melissa writes:

I had read a few years ago, in First Things, about the psychological state of those willing to self mutilate. The article discussed sex changes and “erotic amputations.” Here we see it played out in quasi-culture. Literature is a cultural indicator of the time and place and this author is no exception. The death of literature is the direct result of the death of culture.

Laura writes:

Erotic amputations are news to me.

“The death of literature is the direct result of the death of culture.” Fortunately, we have a vast literary heritage to tide us over. Literature that’s only a game is a bore and never lasts.

Rose writes:

“Erotic amputations are news to me.”

This is an enlightening article.

Laura writes:

Thank you. I should have thought of checking the Atlantic’s archives.

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