The Fiction of Our Times
I heard the other
day someone is going to
rewrite Gone With The Wind. It seems the book has offended this
persons sensabilities and 
she
feels she should be able to produce a politically correct verison
of the book. Well the estate of Margaret Mitchell is upset and
are going to fight this infringement of their copyright. What
the hell is going on? Since when did political correctness apply
to novels? Fiction. Art. It is made up. This is not reperations
for the slaves or reperatiions for the imprisoned
Japanese or apologies to the Indians. No. This is a novel. This
is a work of fantasy. Not only do we want to rewrite history
to fit our very important idea of how it should behave for those
of us walking the planet in the twenty first century but our
literature should fit our specific paradyme as well. What a bunch
of crap.
We are the most self important group to come down the pike
for a long time. We have decided already we don't care much for
history and that we can address the wrongs of all human beings
with reperations or apologies or just saying yes it didn't happen.
Now we want to pluck out thine eye because it offends thee. Sure,
Margaret Mitchell's novel is from the viewpoint of the
Southern aristocracy. This is who she was. That novel was her
dream. She did not say, "this is the way it happened."
She said as all novelists do, here is a story for your entertainment,
read it or not. This is a very strange business we are getting
into now. We want to reinvent the world for our channel surfing
mentality. A channel for every ethic group or every race and
if we find something offensive then we just switch or we rewrite
a novel.
Where does it end? Should we also rewrite Harper Lee's To
Kill A Mockingbird? Certainly
Huckleberry Finn could use a good solid rewrite where Huck can
become politcally correct and quit using the colloquialisms of
the time and switch to the proper politically correct refernces
to his cohort Jim the slave. My God we are smug. You cannot go
back and discount all the people who lived before because they
don't fit our MTV/ Romper room view of the world. Because, guess
what, then the novels we write of our times will all be suspect
and open to rewrites fifty years down the line. Who wants that?
I don't write a novel so someone can spit on my grave and say,
ah, sorry, we don't agree with your sensabilites, they offend
us, so we're just going to do a little tweaking. That is not
how art works. If art has any integrity at all it
will offend, amuse, give us pleasure and give us pain. The question
is who died and left the person boss who proposes to rewrite
Margret Mitchell's interpretaton of antebellum South?
If a book offends you don't read it. If a painting offends
you don't look at it. But don't presume to know more than the
author. We cannot create novels for the twenty second century.
We can only write in our time. We can only create the fiction
of our times. If someone deems the work offensive one hundred
years from now then so be it. But don't assume fiction
is truth and should be held to the same standards. The fiction
of our times unfortunately is what we are living more and more
every day.
