An Unholy Trinity
Writing, literature,
“literature.” Everyone who has print
literacy skills can produce writing. The
more creative try their hands at crafting literature. The most ambitious and creative agonize to
create “literature,” a prime candidate for disdain or praise. At any given
time, these acts of representing may diverge, intersect, or overlap.
Many of us are conditioned to worship “literature,” to sneer
at literature, to treat writing as a tool beneath the dignity of careful
attention. The conditioning is necessary
for us to have civilization, a relatively successful repression of the choices
and free will we would have to endure in a state of amoral nature. The citizens in the United States who truly worship
“literature” are few in number, because worship is a dreadful luxury
indivisible from aesthetic constipation, and we tend to be a practical,
pragmatic, and anti-intellectual people. The majority of us opt for a more
democratic use of writing. Writing serves the ends of “progressive” science and
technology and commerce. It gets things
done. It produces less stress than either “literature” or literature. It
demands less use of cognition and critical thought. As manufacturers of
propaganda know only too well, writing or its oral equivalent is a most
powerful tool for achieving motives of all kinds. Few of us have the courage to
acknowledge that writing, literature, and “literature” have hastened our
transforming ourselves into post-whatever critters in the fist of an absent
god. Seldom is what you read what you
get.
American literature serves as a buffer zone between the
strident operations of “literature” and writing. Literature is not innocent, because it
possesses a full range of motives that can be as transparent, muddled, or
hidden as those of “literature” and writing.
It should be obvious that I am not addressing American literature as a
body of work that gets canonized and studied with lip-service within academic
institutions. I am speaking of an ever
expanding body of work that is actually used in our society ---advertising, throwaway
fictions and enthralling non-fictions, mass media, scribbling in social
networks, schemes to fleece the unthinking and weak-minded of hard-earned
money, discourses that satisfy prurient desires and assure us that hope and
faith, however invisible, do spring eternal. I should amuse us that the
cultural mobility involved in American literature’s becoming American “literature”
is fickle. Why are Stephen King’s passionate explorations in the bloody heartland
of the America mind not works of “literature?”
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
February 15, 2014
