comments

1. Daryl Scroggins on October 31st, 2006 at 11:54 am

   Cringe. It always gets to me to hear fine works belittled–even when I take into account the utterly empty minds behind the comments. Sometimes, if I am teaching a story I deeply admire, I warn students ahead of time that they should do themselves a favor and keep silent if they feel the urge to offer advice concerning ways the work might have been improved. Once, concerning Hamlet, a student offered this: “Why didn’t he have the guy just go in and kill the guy, like a guy would, and then, you know, make the story all about getting away with it and shit.”

2. Andrew Simone on October 31st, 2006 at 2:02 pm

   Not that I think the student knew what he was talking about, Daryl, but did you read T.S. Eliot’s critique on Hamlet?
   Frankly, I am not sure I am with Eliot on this one…and that is rare.

3. Mary Jeys on October 31st, 2006 at 2:11 pm

   Commenter LucyKemintzer writes:
   I think a fair number of these comments could have come from students like mine (at-risk adolescents). These are people who never quite get the hang of fiction. I think that because fictional narrative has a voice that is clearly coming from a particular person, they think that everything that happens in the book is endorsed by the writer. They can watch a movie with the same events and get into it. Or not, but they don’t hold the movie maker responsible, and they can distinguish it from fact more easily. This may be because they are more conversant with the story-telling language of film, or it may be because they are more visually-oriented in the first place.

   Can this be true? or possible? Has the written word now come to hold more water than the image?

4. Daryl Scroggins on October 31st, 2006 at 2:31 pm

   Yes Andrew, I first read the Eliot piece on Hamlet about 35 years ago, and I haven’t substantially changed my view of it: it is Eliot making Hamlet fit Eliot. He is, after all, a person who once described sexual intercourse as (and I am paraphrasing from memory) “a great fuss about nothing more than a momentary spasm.” I guess it is easy to avoid having “an emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” when you are so willing to trim down the compelling nature of emotion and facts before you begin.