Half Past Noon

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.

Joseph Buttom at First Things suggests that children’s literature has never been better, and offers some terrific observations along the way:

Rowling had literary reasons for her triumph—these were pretty good books—but she had social reasons, as well. Europe and America still have a hunger for the shared topic of conversation that is the main benefit of a middlebrow literary culture. The trashy bestsellerdom of the lowbrow may be shared, but it gives us nothing to talk about. The glossy unbestsellerdom of the highbrow may give us something to talk about, but it isn’t shared. Once a middlebrow book reaches a certain number of readers, however, it begins to feed on its success to gain even higher success. Add in the even greater hunger of middlebrow parents for their children to have shared literary references, and you have an appetite ravening for something like Harry Potter to feed it.

Ever take a real look at all the historical winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Even if you are fairly well-read, chances are you can count the ones you know on your philistine fingers. Erik Axel Karfeldt? Gabriela Mistral? Kenzaburo Oe? If you know them, I salute you.

Now, thankfully, Ted Gioia provides us with the “Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe.” Some examples:

HT: The Slate Cultural Gabfest