mythago

Interesting discussion over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog about V.S. Naipaul, and how an artist being a colossal asshat impacts on how, and whether, one reads their work.

One argument that has popped up, and which I’ve seen elsewhere, is the claim that the value of the work should be divorced from the artist; that you don’t judge the value of a book on whether the person who wrote it is a nitwit in real life. Ursula LeGuin once wrote that one should never meet the artist, because you’ll find out that the author of the great work of fiction that you cried and read to tatters is actually a bad-smelling weirdo in a tinfoil hat.

And to a point, this is true. Whether a book speaks to you doesn’t have anything to do with the subjective views of the author on, say, the merit of price controls for tungsten.

But this viewpoint is somewhat blind to the degree to which an author’s beliefs and views affect the work. At the obvious end of the spectrum you get Atlas Shrugged or Ecotopia – polemics where the characters and plot are ideological sockpuppets, political Mary Sues. But less obviously, there are plenty of books where the author’s personality and politics actually diminish the book. Not because the author doesn’t cater to one’s own political prejudices, but because they actually warp the course of the story. The plot becomes a lecture. A scene or a character appears and the reader thinks “aha, this is just like that guy in the author’s previous novel”. And it takes us out of the story, reminding us that we’re actually just reading something made up, and worse, made up by a writer who has a particular tic they can’t keep out of their writing. I don’t want to think “okay, this is the Sexy Nordic Blonde who shows up in all of his novels,” instead of seeing her as a real, three-dimensional character; I don’t want to have a story broken by the villain being a conservative strawman who’s an obvious stand-in for the author’s political enemies. It stops being a good work by a writer who happens to be a jerk in real life, and starts being an intrusion of the jerk into the writing, which isn’t so good anymore. The only thing worse than breaking the fourth wall is having it knocked down by a creep.

Then there’s the separate issue of supporting the artist. Assume that the only problem with a book is that the person who wrote it is an ass: do I really want my money going to keep him in hookers and blow? If the author is long dead, that’s hardly an issue – you can cheerfully buy as much T.S. Elliott as you like without worrying that your money goes to anti-Semitic causes – but when an author is very much living, how do you balance the fairness of paying an artist for his work versus the distate for giving money to someone loathsome? Stealing their work is clearly wrong, and checking it out of a library or buying it used is certainly quite legitimate, but at some point it’s still some variety of “I want to enjoy this work but I don’t want the author to get any money for that”. And I’m still mulling over to what degree that is fair, even if it’s legal.