… your fictional daughter killed you and thought of putting your body in the freezer but couldn’t manage it and NYTBR reviewer Lee Siegel (among others) allegedly misunderstood a plot point in your book and now he’s supposed to feel bad?
I think not.
Let me take readers back four and a half decades to see how unbearably priggish and tragically humor-challenged and literal-minded—not to mention morally correct—Americans have become [e.a.]:
Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad while he was studying European theater [in 1961] on a postgraduate travel scholarship earned at Harvard. … As its subtitle indicated, he wrote the play as a parody— ‘‘a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition‘‘—in the new, avant garde French theater of Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. It was this subgenre of the theater that, in 1961, Martin Esslin labeled the Theatre of the Absurd. …
The offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan— caused some critics to complain about a lack of serious purpose in the play as well as its derivative elements, but the farcical and fanciful treatment of an overly-protective, domineering mother and her neurotic son gave New York and European audiences little pause. Most commentators could not argue with success and found the play [an] engaging spoof of everything from Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo to Freudian psychology.
I haven’t read Sebold’s novel, but judging from the words of her Little, Brown publicist, Heather Fain, Siegel hit Sebold’s Achilles’ heel.
Fain (quoted in GalleyCat):
The main concern that Fain voiced when we spoke about the review yesterday was that the “mom’s in the freezer” spin might be “making light of the macabre nature of the subject matter, …”
Siegel:
Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. … Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.
Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.
Surely the moral conundrum is the murder itself and not what the fictional daughter does with her fictional mother’s body after the murder. But publicist Fain is doing what she’s supposed to do: she deflects criticism away from her trying-to-have-it-both-ways author and tries to place blame on the shoulders of that author’s righteous critics.
However, Siegel is calling bullshit precisely on Sebold’s attempt to be both deliciously transgressive and morally serious:
Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you’re almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales.
Moral seriousness is not about your subject matter. It’s about how you handle your subject matter.
I wasn’t going to post about this, because I didn’t really have anything to add, but the incident involving alleged cheaters among students at Columbia’s journalism school apparently has legs—and it’s drawing quotes that confirm what I would have said about this matter if I’d posted about it after I read the Times’s coverage last week.
Namely: that Nicholas Lemann—an excellent writer, whose work I have enjoyed for years—is uniquely unqualified to teach young people enrolled at one of the nation’s premier institutions of learning in the 21st century. Here’s what he told the Times:
Mr. Lemann said that he was surprised that students might have been concerned about how they scored on the pass-fail exam, and that exams and grades at the school were rare.
“We are not a very grade-intensive institution,” he said. “Our school is run on a pass-fail basis.”
“Our students are strivers,” he added. “But they are striving to get good clips. It is not like law school, where fine differences in points make all the difference in the world.”
He is surprised that Columbia J School students care about their grades?
Did he just crawl out from under a rock? Anyone who spends five minutes talking to the kind of overachiever who attends the J school knows that that these are kids who have been programmed, if not hard-wired, to succeed. No matter what.
Want proof? Even now, after the brouhaha—which was about ethics—the students are still concerned only about themselves and how this will affect their future.
“It’s going to affect us for years to come,” said Jack Gillum, 23. “Columbia’s going to have this badge of dishonor.”
“If people did cheat, it makes me really angry,” he added, noting that he pays much of his $43,422 yearly tuition and fees by himself and does not want his degree to be devalued.
“There’s kind of a palpable fear: What’s going to happen when you go for a job interview?” said Caroline Preston, 26.
(via memeorandum)
Well, if she tries out for a job the AP, for example, perhaps she can help them examine the ethics involved in their reporting from Iraq, which is under intense scrutiny—much to the displeasure of the AP, as the NYT reports:
Over the course of last week, an Associated Press article — one subsequently challenged by the military — in which six Sunni worshipers were reportedly doused in kerosene and burned alive by Shiite attackers, became the worst kind of totem.
For bloggers who believe that the media has been drawing false pictures of mayhem in Iraq, the insistence of the American military and Iraqi officials that the burning incident appeared to be a mere rumor was proof that their suspicions were correct.
…
The international editor of the A.P., John Daniszewski, said in a statement Tuesday that the military’s questioning of the original sourcing on the article was “frankly ludicrous and hints at a certain level of desperation to dispute or suppress the facts of the incident in question.”
Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, is hanging tough too. She
explained that the agency had already done all it could to respond to the uncertainties by vigorously re-reporting the article, and suggested that to engage these questions — to continue to write about them — merely fueled a mad blog rabble that would never be satisfied.
Lots of lessons in ethics—and a lot more—here…for journalists and aspiring journalists. And all the rest of us too, as the NYT’s David Carr notes:
It is important to find out if this really happened in order to separate the hyperbole from the merely horrible in Iraq, so that the horrible will still have meaning. Otherwise it will all become din.
No kidding.
