I once had a conversation with a British professor of art. I was about 35 at the time and wondered at all the time and energy that some modern artists put into creating things that really didn’t turn me on. I voted for paintings and statues of women, since that did turn me on. What good was the focus on the ugly, the cruel, the dirty, the smelly, the chaotic?
I knew then that art is about all of life, not just what nature has wired us for. Food, warmth, pleasantness, love, sex, good memories – all have a place in art, to be celebrated and appreciated, to be analyzed, criticized and eulogized. But hunger, despair, terror, pain, rejection, nausea and cold are also part of everyday life. I can certainly see they have a place in our lives and in our thoughts. I am deeply convinced that noticing, experiencing, remembering, reflecting on our lives and experiences and those of all people of the past, present and future enriches us, broadens us, improves us.
But, what is with the gore? Recently, we read a “mystery” to which the answer to a mild but vexing problem was new shoes. Providing new shoes was the solution. Now we are reading a celebrated mystery that seeks an answer to Who was the murderer? The story takes us on a review of grisly murders perpetrated on nubile women. What a surprise!
There is a place in the writings of C.S.Lewis where he explains his tiredness with sexually provocative art. He suggests a switch to a tease that is not a strip but rather an uncovering. He depicts a table filled with very tempting and beautiful foods, like our typical Thanksgiving dinner. He suggests slowly and teasingly removing gauze coverings from the table until it is totally bare, at which time the lights go out.
I enjoy occasional good writing about sex or love or violence. But I truly wish more writers could find the imagination to get us interested in other problems than ax murderers and similar gore. I am confident that if my livelihood depended on book sales and I found that the gory books, with lots of details on just what the hammer did to the eye sockets, sold better, why then I’d write more of that. I fear that our basic instincts are such that picturing a nasty doing really naughty things will keep us more riveted and buying more rivets than questions of who took the daisies from the back garden.
I remain on the lookout for good stories that raise interest in us by other means than repeated blows of the blunt instrument of blood, pain and agonizing death.
