Writing and Responsibility

Carl Tighe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134282272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

In a world where literary scandals often end up in court, the issue of responsibility in writing has never been more important. In this groundbreaking study, Carl Tighe asks the questions every writer needs to consider:

*What is it that writers do? Are they responsible for all the uses to which their writing might be put? Or no more responsible than their readers?
*How are a writer's responsibilities compromised or defined by commercial or political pressures, or by notions of tradition or originality?
*How does a writer's audience affect their responsibilities? Are these the same for writers in all parts of the world, under all political and social systems?

The first part of this book defines responsibility and looks at its relation to ideas such as power, accuracy, kitsch and political correctness. The second part examines how particular writers have dealt with these issues through a series of often-controversial case studies, including American Psycho, Crash and The Tin Drum.

Writing and Responsibility encourages its readers to interrogate the choices they make as writers. A fascinating look at the public consequences of the private act of writing, Carl Tighe's book is a must-read for everyone who writes or studies writing.

1 Introduction

This first chapter is about writing as a private act with public consequences. It looks at the history of writing, and the global, personal and ethical dilemmas writers deal with, questioning the role of the writer in contemporary society.

This chapter sees writing as ‘rendering an account’. It asks what writers are responsible for, and to whom they are responsible. It also highlights some of the issues writers ask themselves about their work and explores the broad social and political concerns writers take into consideration when making artistic decisions.

You’re pleasing yourself when you’re writing. You’re not pleasing a bunch of other people. You’re not constructing a little candy house, or a little gingerbread house that everyone can take a piece of and feel sweet and nice and that makes them feel good about themselves… Writing a book is actually a very selfish and very aggressive thing. You’re writing this book and putting it out there and it says: Read me! Read me! Read me!

(Bret Easton Ellis (Clarke 1996/98))

Rendering accounts

In the three-million-year history of the human species, writing is a relatively recent development. We can trace its origins to Stone Age tally sticks and clay tokens dating from about 8000 BC, and to cave painting, but writing proper seems to have developed only about 3500-2600 BC (Schmandt- Besserat 1992). Although many of the earliest surviving examples have yet to be deciphered, it is clear that writing is connected to palace culture, rule and order, keeping accounts, tracking stores, enabling survival. Without writing, how could we map our territories or record good hunting areas? How could we order armies to move, make laws and regulations or keep track of kinship? If making marks of some sort was originally a form of keeping accounts, and later grew into what we now call writing, and if the responsible management of stores, palaces and cities developed into what we now call civilization, why should we imagine that a connection of writing with responsibility that is so important to the species as a whole should be anything less at a personal level?

Philosophers and responsibility

Philosophers have long pondered ideas of responsibility and writing. Aristotle’s Ethics (367-347 BC) offers a useful example of such reflections. He points out that without writing there is no government, without government there is no civilization, without civilization there is no writing. Writing is inextricably intertwined not only with individual consciousness but also with society and thus with responsibility. For Aristotle, we are all responsible for the actions in which we have a choice and awareness of the consequences of an action is the mark of a citizen. While all humans deliberate the right course of action, Aristotle argued that:

The arts call for more deliberation than the sciences, because we feel less certain about them. Thus the field of deliberation is that which happens for the most part, where the result is obscure and the right course not clearly defined.

(Aristotle 2003: 119)

Such deliberation, we might argue, is built into narrative: the selection of which ‘beginning’, which ‘middle’ and which ‘ending’ is as much a moral or political as an artistic decision.

If we have a moral responsibility to make the ‘right’ decisions, in action or in narrative, we immediately come up against the issue of authority. As long as ‘the word’ was the word of God there was no real crisis of authority. During the medieval period, writing had been primarily religious in purpose. For example, as indicated by titles such as Everyman (1508-34) or Mankind (c. 1475), plays dealt in human averages and archetypes, rather than in individual personalities, and were used to teach moral lessons. However, the authority of the Church in England was seriously weakened by the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. After this, its role as the sole arbiter of moral matters and the repository of all that was known and thought started to dwindle.

The universities set up to train young men for government began to grow and prosper, at first in the shadow of the Church and then less so. With that change it became possible to think things that the Church would have disapproved of, and as a result many of the restraints upon the development of writing and theatre as art forms, entertainment and commentary on life simply disappeared. Theatre in particular moved away from its solely religious function to become entertainment and began to look at relations, changes and pressures within society in ways that had previously been impossible.

With the decay of feudalism, there grew a fantastic interest in the individual minds, capacities and abilities of men and, to a lesser extent, in those of women. The work of the new writers, some of whom were university educated, revelled in the beauty of human beings and their seemingly boundless capacity for inquiry and knowledge. Renaissance literature named individual people rather than general humanity as its theme: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1588) or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth or Coriolanus (c. 1600-6) are but a few of the period’s studies of the restless, inquisitive, acquisitive personal and intellectual life that was opening up for the individual. Hamlet’s soliloquy about humanity, ‘What a piece of work is man’ (Hamlet, II ii 303-10), would have been unthinkable in a medieval mystery or morality play.

As writers and readers we are the inheritors of the freedoms the Renaissance won. The social changes initiated in the period removed moral authority from the Church and allowed us to become responsible for our own lives and our own choices. These social changes also gave rise to a literary culture that did not necessarily accept the narrative structures of the Bible as its only models: instead narrative began to display a moral structure that was not predetermined but deeply ambiguous and ambivalent. This might be seen as the beginning of today’s uncertain, marketorientated literary culture.

Morality and writing

What then are the moral, professional, practical and artistic dilemmas facing those who now commit words to writing? Oscar Wilde, who elsewhere stated that all art is immoral, said in the preface to his 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde 2003: 3) that there was no such thing as a moral or an immoral book – only badly written books. Wilde’s book did offend, however, and was taken as an endorsement of a certain lifestyle, even if later critics have argued that it was at its core curiously moral in purpose. The question of immorality has more recently revealed itself in a series of highly publicized claims against films. It has been said, for example, that the films A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers were both responsible for copycat attacks or killings, while Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies have been blamed for a rise in vigilantism in the USA. Rock music lyrics have also been blamed for violent acts. In 1996 the lyrics of the rock band Slayer were cited in a California court by parents of a girl who had been killed by three boys following necrophiliac ‘instructions’ in a song called ‘Kill Again’. The lyrics of Ozzy Osborne have also been cited in several cases of teenage suicide.

In the USA grieving parents have attempted to make musicians and song-writers responsible in law for ‘causing or encouraging’ death with their lyrics, only to find that artists are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. In the UK the impact of the European Charter on Human Rights, folded into English law as the Human Rights Act (1998), brings the right to free expression into conflict with the right to privacy and with current laws on libel and defamation in a very similar way (Boundy 2003: 10).

Fiction writers demonstrate an ongoing concern with the issue of moral responsibility, or the ‘morality’ of writing. It is a steady theme in the works of Angela Carter, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiongo and many others who write about, for example, rape or murder, poverty or racism. It is there in a whole list of scandalous literary events, from the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial to the furore surrounding Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the fatwah pronounced against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or Science Fiction’s warnings about plague and genetic engineering. A concern with moral responsibility affects the choice and use of language in post-colonial and migrant writing and informs much women’s, gay and lesbian writing and, after the successes of J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, it is clear that the issue is a part of writing for children (Pullman 2002: 4; Fine 2003: 12; Wallace 2003: 18).

Defining responsibility

Most of us have some idea about professional responsibility only in relation to medical ethics. We can point to the Hippocratic Oath, which is a convenient fiction rather than a legally binding document, since doctors do not physically take an oath, but which is nevertheless an effective statement of professional intent. If we hear of a doctor murdering elderly patients for their money we have a very clear notion that this contradicts our expectations of the medical profession. However, if we hear of a teacher having sex with a pupil or a car dealer welding together two halves of different vehicles, our reaction is rather different. Circumstances alter cases, we might argue. How old was the pupil? What did they pay for the car? Our notion of responsibility or of what is allowable within the practice of these professions is less clearly defined.

So what notion of responsibility might we possess in relation to the profession of writing? Most of us have some idea of what we mean by ‘writing’, but it is not a word we normally find linked with responsibility. English probably gets the word responsibility, via French, from the Latin word respondere, an obligation (literally, re-spondere, to promise in return). This is also the source for the English words spouse and sponsor, both of which indicate a reciprocal arrangement between two parties. The Oxford English Dictionary’s long list of meanings for the word touches upon such concepts as obligation, trust, duty, accountability, reliability, rational conduct, reputation and respectability. Being responsible, it seems, means being part of society, whether we want it or not, so the responsibility of the writer depends on their role in society. The theorist and writer Edward Said has elaborated the idea that writing is part of a spectrum of interconnected human activities that cannot be divorced from other aspects of our lives, and that no country is exempt from the debate about what is to be read, taught or written (Said 1993).

The South African novelist Nadine Gordimer learned that it was an act of responsibility to write:

In my case, being born in a country like South Africa, white, automatically privileged, living, brought up in the colonial life, as I was, if I was going to be a writer there would have to be a time when I would see what was in that society, when I would see how it had shaped me and my thinking and that I would bear, automatically, a certain responsibility for it as a human being. And since a writer is an articulate human being, there would be a special responsibility to respond to it in a certain way.

(Bourne et al. 1987: 25)

Ian Curteis, President of the Writers Guild of Great Britain, has said that, in particular, writers involved in broadcasting have a huge responsibility since their work ‘has more direct influence on society, people’s assumed values and the way they conduct their lives, and what they believe than any other force’ (Curteis 2000: 7). However, while most writers accept that they are in some way responsible for what they write, some are surprised that anyone should think them responsible, in any way, for anything they might have said, written, thought or caused to happen. Even when writers acknowledge a responsibility forced upon them, their thoughts on the subject can be vague and unfocused. Some writers say they write to please themselves and take no heed of what anyone else might think, even in terms of pure entertainment. They might feel very little obligation to entertain, or might even consider their responsibility as writers to lie in opposing the very idea of entertainment or, for that matter, in opposing the notion of responsibility.

Those writers who acknowledge responsibilities of course differ in the specifics of how they perceive them. Some speak of social, personal, familial, professional or philosophical responsibilities; others feel responsible towards a craft or genre. They may see their responsibilities in connection with literary traditions, literary forms, markets for work, professional obligations, particular political parties, in opposition to political power, in relation to our supposed rights within the law, our freedom of speech and notions of what is correct or socially acceptable, or even in relation to the ‘politically correct’ or socially acceptable. W. B. Yeats, for example, wondered whether his poetry had sent men out to die fighting the English in the Easter Rising of 1916. Writers might also argue that responsibilities connected to particular literary forms might be substantially different, or that they write in conditions where responsibilities are seen and defined differently, and where the definition of a writer’s responsibilities is constantly shifting. Others have split responsibilities: some writers in the former easern-bloc countries were required to be servants of the state, but also felt allegiance and therefore a responsibility to oppositionist movements.

Global and personal responsibility

Looking back over the last few years we can see from the life and work of such writers as Soviet Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Australian Thomas Keneally, Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Anglo-Indian Salman Rushdie and the Czech writer-President Václav Havel that within the underlying problems of responsibility to one’s people, ethnic group, language or nationality there is a growing sense of general political responsibility that goes far beyond the local and the immediate. Global issues and questions hang in the air for all writers, whatever their origins or loyalties.

We can define responsibilities in terms of how writers think, but we might also define responsibilities in terms of who or what (we think) the writers are: in terms of, for example, ethnic or national origin, religion or gender, sexual preference or social class, to name but a few possibilities. This means that writers, particularly when creating out of their own experience, are often very aware of the difficulties of disentangling truth and fiction, between creating a lie, no matter how grounded in autobiographical ‘fact’, and creating a story. Writer Jeanette Winterson has said that lies are just lies, intended to deceive others by passing as the truth, whereas what art tries to do is ‘cut through all that and come up with something that really is objective’ (Brooks 2000: 10).

Writers cannot help drawing upon personal experience, but if writing has the power to help us understand ourselves and our world, it also has the power to fix events, to present one side of the case, to pretend to offer ‘the truth’. To take this idea further, does the idea of artistic licence allow writers to reveal secrets or details of ‘real’ events that might damage others? John Bayley’s memoir of his wife Iris Murdoch, Iris: A Memoir (1998) enjoyed strong sales, but Bayley was taken to task for writing so openly about the details of his marriage to the novelist Iris Murdoch and the changes in her personality brought about by the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Critic and academic Germaine Greer has been accused of unnecessarily exposing her father’s past in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989). This single issue of creating from experience gives rise to a wide range of views around writing and responsibility, but as we shall see, there are many more questions to be asked.

The private/public act

Over the last ten years globalization – another name for the apparently irresistible rise of US commercial, political and military power – has made massive inroads into our lives and has increased our awareness of the many possible applications of the slogan ‘the personal is the political’. We are much more aware of the interconnectedness of things. We worry, among many other things, that clothing retailers operating in countries like Thailand and Cambodia are breaking international labour agreements by exploiting underage, low-paid workers, toiling in sweatshop conditions to produce clothes and shoes which are sold at a massive profit in western stores.

A new awareness of the fragile state of the ecology of our planet furthers our understanding of the interconnectedness of the public and the private. That even the most apparently inconsequential act has hidden aspects is now taken for granted by many of us, even if some have resolved to respond by doing nothing and to accept the status quo. The collapse of communism, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, difficulties in post-colonial Africa, slow political reforms in China, changes facing the Catholic Church, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the USA and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism have all forced revisions in our understanding of the nature of moral, political and religious leadership. But while the fatwah pronounced against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses appears with hindsight to be a precursor to the events of 11 September 2001 and the escalation of conflict in the Middle East, those events have not made the issues of responsibility any clearer. What they have done is to make it clear only that responsibility is a global issue. Writing and writers are part of this world. Writers and their works operate ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Issues
• Part 2: Case studies
• Bibliography
• Creative Writing and the New Humanities
• Creativity: History, Theory and Practice
• The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook