Here's the thing. The essay is about dead baby jokes. More specifically, it reflects upon a session at this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in which Lucy Corin read a string of dead baby jokes from a work in progress. Here's how Suzanne tells it:
"In the scene read by Corin, a father tells the dead baby jokes to his daughter. The girl has attempted suicide and floats in and out of a coma. The father sits by her bed and tells the jokes as a kind of 'magic spell' to ward off imminent death, for, as Corin observed in her opening comments, magic 'shores up against pain via rhythm.' The wisecracks started out fairly innocuously, but grew progressively more disturbing. At first, audience members, including me, laughed. Then we fell silent. The gags grew more sinister and graphic, and still Corin continued. Her voice shook. The jokes were awful—bloody and baroque and vicious."
A few days after the conference, Suzanne was still processing her experience in the session, and she happened to talk to me about it. Audience members had become uncomfortable, she said. The room was overcrowded and stifling hot, and, what with the material and all, people were feeling woozy, sick, bludgeoned. One woman yelled, "What are you doing? Why are you traumatizing your audience like this? What does this have to do with magic or the intellect?" Others joined in what Suzanne describes as heckling, and Corin's defenders spoke up, too, told the hecklers to leave, encouraged Corin to continue. "Corin," writes Suzanne, "stood silently, head bowed."
Suzanne was silent, too, taking in the scene and instinctively siding with Corin.
I should also side with Corin. I teach literature, so it goes almost without saying that I do not endorse censorship. I have recently opined against the idea of issuing trigger warnings about literary texts in any widespread or codified way. (Note: I do think that they are warranted in certain situations and cases. If you're not familiar with the issue see this NY Times piece.) As a rule, I value literature and the experience of reading or being read to, whatever that experience may include. Even so--or should I say, of course, because I am often forced to interrogate my closely held beliefs--I found myself telling Suzanne that Corin should never have read that excerpt from her work. A part of me even wondered if she had the right to write it.
"Andy! What the FUCK?"
In her essay "On Dead Baby Jokes and Art," Suzanne identifies me as "a novelist friend, Bea." (Finally! An alter-ego I can embrace.) She recounts our conversation:
"I described this panel to a novelist friend, Bea, whose own child survived a near-fatal congenital illness as an infant. 'I would have walked out, too,' she said. 'You have to get this stuff right, or it’s immoral.' She laughed sheepishly. 'I guess you could say I believe in taboo.' Bea’s uneasy assertion reflects the mixed feelings of many readers and writers; we champion our right to free expression, yet, in the name of sensitivity and taste, we want limits placed on that speech. Indeed, the ethical stakes are real: When artists seize on any one of a number of private and public traumas, from dead babies to the Holocaust, they risk exploiting the real pain of real people. For Bea and many others, some subject matter should not be freely available to the artist merely because it strikes her as 'interesting.'”
Suzanne goes on to identify what is "thorny" about my reaction, and she's absolutely right: my objection makes sense in the abstract, but in practice it raises the question, "Who gets to decide which fictions lie outside the bounds of good taste?"
I have no interest in claiming Jesse Helms as my homeboy.
(Artist unknown, accdg to politicalgraphics.org)
I readily see and accept this argument. Yet even after talking with Suzanne and reading her thoughtful and nuanced essay--and I encourage you to read it, too--I still suspect that, had I been in Corin's audience, I would have left the room early into her recitation of the fictional father's jokes. I would have done so not because Corin violated standards of sensitivity or taste but because she seems to have gotten it wrong. No parent would do what that father does. It's inauthentic.
According to Suzanne, Corin said at the start of her reading that magic "shores up against pain via rhythm." About that she's right. When I sat beside my daughter's hospital bed, I uttered incantations to restore her: Please save my baby; please let her live. I did not use humor; I did not use irony; I did not tempt the fates by conjuring the deaths of babies. Who risks a misreading at a time like that?
Besides that, who tries to manage his own pain before having saved his child from hers? And why did that daughter, that fictional daughter, try to kill herself, anyway?
I remember now that my own father visited my daughter's hospital bed. Notwithstanding the evidence of a single photo of him gazing at her compassionately, I know that had I left him alone with her there's no telling what he would have said. Flash back to my own childhood, to my father's Helen Keller jokes, Jesus Christ jokes, Hitler jokes, adoption jokes, disease jokes, boob jokes, penis jokes, death jokes. Jokes, jokes, none of them funny, all of them crude, many of them cruel. What rhythm was he making to shore himself up against pain? And why did his poetry, his prose, his humor inflict so much pain upon others?
So Corin got it right, yes, she probably did. People heckled her for it, and that means that they don't tolerate a father like that, or that they don't believe he exists, or that they don't want to be reminded that he does. They want to protect the babies, the dead ones, the live ones, and the ones hanging in between. Probably Corin does, too, and so she wrote this man who, Suzanne argues, "For a while...could speak out of the monster's mouth and assume its destructive power as his own. But all the time, he said the jokes in a frightened voice. Within the clammy costume, he was still human, still small."
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