Rick Moody's recent statement to the New York Times (covered previously here) that literature should appeal only to 3,000 refined people was not said by accident. It represents a philosophical outlook, the basis of the strategy he and his friends follow: "The Moody Doctrine."
The ULA is on the front lines of a fight for control of literature-- a war to determine lit's future; what it will look like and to what audience it will appeal.
Literature, to Moody and other well-connected Overdogs, is not meant to attract and stir the human world. It's reserved for a select elite with the breeding, training, and wisdom to understand its postmodern gobbledygook importance-- a contemporary version of the Elusinian Mysteries, which I'm sure one-time doctrinal student Hiram Moody III has read. For this crowd, the rest of us may as well be illiterate. (As we've seen, they pretend we are!) This is the Moody Doctrine.
THE QUESTION is whether literature will be understandable and relevant to all, or if it will instead be reserved-- specially-priced seat-license tickets only-- for those who dwell in expensive museums, safe palaces, or secluded Fisher Island caves.
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9 comments:
King,
I couldn't agree with you more about the importance of this issue, but I don't think you've hit on the scariest piece of this here. I wish I knew what ULA'ers thought of B.R. Myers "Readers' Manifesto" but I would guess it was given pretty loud applause, right?
Anyway, it's one of the essays of my life. Perhaps the most remarkable point he made in that essay was, to me, his thing about the priests who started preaching in the native tongue of the community he was preaching for. Priests were astonished to discover the speaking understandably lowered the esteem with which their congregations saw them. Being comprehensible is uninteresting to a lot of people. They enjoy being seen reading dense, incomprehensible garbage... even if it doesn't make any senese to them.
I think this Rick Moody fellow has hit onto a great marketing scheme. If 3,000 opinion shapers like something, then thousands and thousands of other insecure yutzes that want to be like the thesis crowd will buy the crap as well.
Harrumph.
This is slightly off subject but the TV show the L Word seems to be taking a few jabs at
the writing program/demi-puppet mentality. Last week there was a very funny jab at Moody when the pretentious writing class student
who is fucking the "famed" writing instructor compares the heroine's work to "Moody." This guy looks a lot like Eggers. Then he gets up in front of the class to read his piece, says he's added a drag queen to his story "for local color" (very demi-puppet attitude toward gay characters) and the heroine reads him his rights,and tells him in what sounds like a rather Eggers directed criticism, that he "can't write women." Perhaps I read too much into the show, but it seems to be a very honest portrayal of the writing workshop scene as described on this site.
L.G.
I think our new Nazi pal is an authentic crank, convinced every forum is proper for his "ideas," and can only be ignored as much as possible. If he's an MFAer's strawman, he's an unbelievably lazy, desperate one - the creation of an idiot blessed with epic free time. Of course, the Amazon mokeyshines already convinced me I'd given Karl's ideological foes too much credit.
I think we're entering the last stages of demi-puppet desperation, that's all. They're trying to discredit the ULA any way they can. I hope they keep in mind that, as with the Amazon fiasco, anonymous posters on the Internet are sometimes accidentally revealed. (The poster strikes me as a caricature of a crank.)
in the future all books published in america will be written in an obscure russian dialect with a modified alphabet you can only learn at NYU or Columbia. they'll have to do it to make sure that 1) no one else will be able to write a book. 2) no one but their ivy league buddies will be able to decipher their illustrious words.
i find it sickening that they've moved on, balls out, to the next level of classism. not only are the masses unworthy of producing literature, they are also unworthy of reading it. i can only imagine how pissed the shop owners must have been, way back in 18-what-not when they started teaching the factory workers to read the instructions on the machines, and a few days later, the haughty bastards showed up with books. turns out people actually wanted to read. i'm sure if any of those slave-driving moguls could see the ULA, they would cry and wish they'd thought of sign language and never taught the workers how to read at all.
bernice mullins
Hey, don't dis the Eleusinian Mysteries -- they were pretty fucking rad.
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