I’ve been reading Hemingway’s short stories and started to wonder: is it ok to write about everything? For sure, there is a story in every situation, but some of them must be off limits. Occasionally Hemingway will write a story with enough sexual detail to force this question to the discerning reader’s mind. He never seems to write the story or the scene just to be explicit or dirty, so he is still well inside the parameters of good old fiction. But there is still a problem with writing about someone having sex. Just because it is consistent with the rest of the story, or just because the author is still telling us something about someone in the story does not justify it.
So what can we write about? What can’t we write about? The writer’s wisdom: “write about what you know” only gets you as far as the writer, and so you have Hemingway writing about things he knew very well. On the other hand, if you read the Old Testament in Hebrew, you will definitely find no examples of avoiding a subject just because it is explicit. In fact, Moses, Solomon, and the prophets were far more explicit than any Hemingway story I’ve read.
I can immediately see one difference between the Old Testament and Hemingway. That is Hemingway tells us about a specific set of characters doing the explicit stuff. The Old Testament tells us about Israel through general comparisons. She was like a prostitute, etc. But then there is Song of Solomon, which is impossible to relegate completely to allegorical-lesson-land. And there is also Moses, who if put in our pulpit today would probably make everyone of us (myself included) uncomfortable.
Maybe it has to do with the intent of the writer? Maybe it is one of those things where the content of the story is only good in proportion to the character of the writer? I don’t know. Help me out here.
You should read O’Connor’s collection of essays Mystery and Manners (some of which we read in Mr Jones’s class)—she tackles this question head-on in several places.
It’s been a while since I read it, but I think the gist of her argument is that the Christian writer is a prophet of sorts and as such may write things that are not edifying to all readers. And being the good Catholic that she was, she placed the responsibility of discernment on church leaders: if they felt that a book or a story would be detrimental to their flocks, they had every right to censor it. (Which gives you some insight into O’Connor’s intended audience, come to think of it.)
Hemingway’s sexual content has never bothered me; it’s not particularly titillating (and more often than not, he’s content merely to imply). Others (like Charles Baxter) do make me uncomfortable with what and how they write. Perhaps discernment ought to be approached as a multi-component task: part personal (don’t engage things that will stumble you), and part authorial intent (why is sex included here and not there?).
Authorial intent is also helpful in discerning how good a writer is. If anatomical information is scattered throughout needlessly (a certain “n” word comes to mind), it would seem that the writer is not being as concise as he/she ought to be: such sentences are more likely to push the reader than the plot or characters.
@G – I guess the level of detail is an important distinction here, but while reading your post several characters came to mind: Onan, Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba. Particularly in the case of Onan, the OT is pretty earthy, and it doesn’t fall into your category of “general comparisons.”
That being said, it’s a worthwhile question, and one for which I haven’t yet found a comprehensive answer. It seems to me that, in any case, putting sin in a narrative should be fundamentally instructive, and the depth of that narrative should be appropriate for the maturity of the audience.