Article written by Rory Hawkins.
Authors, like a great many other people, do interviews. And interviews, despite smiles, jokes and general good vibes, are business. They’ve got a purpose, a reason to be sitting down, talking to this person they’ve never met before. That’s to promote whatever recent release: business. But I still think the pretence feels off.
As a reader, it can sometimes be disappointing to finally meet a favourite author and not have your mind completely blown. Maybe because, foremost, they’re a writer? As in written word? You’d at least hope it’s one of their stronger points. Personality off the page is just an added bonus.
That doesn’t make it any less weird to see and hear someone you might only have ever read. A person’s prose is like dialogue between your head and theirs – maybe even hearts, here and there. But it’s words on a page, and that’s nowhere near the same as talking to someone face to face.
So what’s written shouldn’t be taken as everything the author is. Though writing fiction can be very personal, we shouldn’t fully equate it everything the writer is – for good or bad. But that makes it possible that someone lacking moral character can still make good art.
Take Charles Dickens, for example. Author of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and a great many other novels and series, he’s celebrated by many as the greatest author of the Victorian era. But Dickens was neither a good husband nor father, quite the opposite. Despite having ten children and an ailing wife, the characters in his writing seemed to be more important than real people. Well, having a young mistress too speaks a little differently.
Rather than go through the divorce process, he wrote elaborate smear campaigns against his wife, publishing them in his newspaper before sending her away. His philanthropy with the working class publicly helped make him look the victim. It wasn’t until after Dickens’ death that his eldest daughter published her own autobiography, shedding light on the reality of her family’s miserable home life.
Dickens is by no means the only or worst offender, and I don’t want to start listing off every writer who’s ever been morally lacking. But the point stands: bad people can still make good art. I don’t think that something well-written or made should be completely discredited because of who created it.
Personal politics and accountability in the arts is becoming an increasingly more prominent topic. But if a piece of work can stand on its own without leaning towards slurring or propagating anyone, shouldn’t we hold it a degree apart from a clearly less than perfect person?
In regards to anything well written, I think without any explicit biases in a narrative (with the exception of good over evil, of course) the piece shouldn’t be held to the author’s moral capacity. Does reading or watching a screen or stage adaption of Oliver Twist leave a bad taste in your mouth? The story came from Dickens’ imagination, but it isn’t a complete reflection of him.
As many writers agree, I think when you’re writing a narrative, it should take on a life of its own – be propelled by what makes sense for how characters react, move the plot to some kind of logical conclusion. Unless a character was specifically written to be a caricature, then they shouldn’t directly reflect their writer’s personal politics.
Fiction narrative just wouldn’t work so well as a medium. Whilst an exact iteration of a story couldn’t have been born without you, the story itself doesn’t necessarily rely on one person telling it. That’s one of the reasons why books can have such an impact no matter the reader – reading is this weird transformative relationship between how you perceive the words on the page as they could be in real life.
I don’t think being accomplished in any art excuses you from being a bad person. But I also don’t think anything once heralded as good work should be thrown on the garbage pile when found its creator wasn’t always morally upstanding.
It lends too much to group mentality, popularity rather than talent. If so, any current opinion couldn’t weigh more than a feather. Whatever comes to light is best accepted and seen for what it is. Events in a person’s life can add context to how they express themselves – but the work didn’t do anything wrong.
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