painted by the wonderful 
So begins a blog post by Peter B. Hyland over at Plowshares blog.emerson.edu/ploughshares/… which goes a little somthing like this:
When I was a teaching fellow in graduate school, one morning a colleague and I debated the virtues of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita over coffee in our campus office. I had added the novel to the booklist for my fall classes, and her initial vague disapproval now solidified into the contemplative frown and raised eyebrow that lets a man know his character is up for judgment. While checking her e-mail, she asked how my classes were coping with the text after fifty pages. I said "great," and it was true. Although I felt a few minor tremors erupting here and there during my first lecture, the students began asking intelligent, probing questions once they actually started reading, and one went as far to say, "I really like this, but I hate Humbert. Is that all right?" My friend clicked her mouse a few times, turned away from the monitor, and asked, "But what do you want them to get from it?" I answered back with something about the nature of desire and the purpose of art and the astounding conflicts a psyche inevitably endures. She sipped her coffee. "Hmm...what else?"
Her point, as far as I could tell, was that my undergraduate students weren't ready to handle a novel about a pedophile. It unnerved me a little. Once I put aside her tired reservations about literary taboo and propriety, her question prompted me to explore more vital considerations about my role as a writer, the impact of my work, and where I exist in an ethical community.
When discussing literature and ethics, we're mostly concerned with the cultural function of a novel or poem. We less often consider what impact the activity of art-making has on our immediate community, mainly because our understanding of community tends to be macroscopic. In the second section of his brief poem "The Literary World," Philip Larkin approaches the responsibility of a writer this way:
Mrs Alfred Tennyson
Answered
begging letters
admiring letters
insulting letters
enquiring letters
business letters
and publishers' letters.
She also
looked after his clothes
saw to his food and drink
entertained visitors
protected him from gossip and criticism
And finally
(apart from running the household)
Brought up and educated the children.
While all this was going on
Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby
Doing his poetic business.
I've not yet found a poem that disputes the old Romantic notion of genius quite like Larkin's does. He strips Tennyson of all his literary majesty and points to something inherently pathetic and disappointing in the way writers sometimes conceptualize their purpose. One of the reasons the poem works so well, from its humor to its cataloging of the domestic, is that culturally we still endorse the idea that genius privileges its owner, placing him or her at least partially outside the shared ethical community. It's perfectly fine and justifiable if Mr. Tennyson burdens his wife with domestic affairs because, after all, he's writing poetry; moreover, excellent poetry. This mentality really only works with certain professions. We aren't so apt to forgive the garbage man for neglecting his wife and children, no matter how much genius and dexterity he exhibits collecting the trash down Main Street.
The idea that a writer should, without question, sacrifice his friends, family, and himself for art is a compelling stupidity, though it is equally silly to think he must sacrifice nothing at all. We are so given over to the privilege of genius that we can blindly forgive most anything it produces. Writers will invade the lives of those nearest to them. As a poet, I know this is unavoidable; I cannot imagine art unfolding in any other way. But I find it too simple to say that my activity as a writer conquers all other obligations, and I think the manner in which I conduct myself as a poet has larger social significance. Whenever we make allowances for a writer's abuses, whether they are big or small, our reason for doing so is nearly always connected to the quality of their work. Larkin's poem forces the question: If Tennyson produced some of the best English verse ever written, why should we care about Mrs. Tennyson and her domestic burdens?
Tough question that; many answers come to mind.
While you ponder all that check out the multimedia offerin's over at Plowshares (if you'd like): blog.emerson.edu/ploughshares/…
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