The Importance of Literary Trash :: Personal Narrative Essays

The Importance of Literary Trash   Ive heard it said that the goal of stark writings is to illuminate the human condition. If that is the case, the error of serious literature is that it is far too simple-minded and attempts to illuminate the human condition by portraying it directly. The great posture of myth, legend and their modern-day successor trashy genre fiction is that they dont just show us the human condition, but interpret, highlight and contrast it by presentation us the larger than support symbols. The courage and romance that allows us to survive and to savor daily life are the core of myth and genre. There they are made larger than life and inspire us to aspire to a greatness that goes beyond simple daily experience.   The other failing of modern serious literature is the failing of all modern art art for arts sake. Modern art far too frequently is nothing more than the artist covering off the techniques they would use if they were ever to create a tru e work of art. And so we see the sense of color that they would use if they ever a render and so on. Technique becomes all important and content is eschewed as distracting from the true art, meaning the simple skills and techniques.   An irony of this great art for art mistake is that matchless of its first and most eloquent spokesmen, Theophile Gautier, put forth his position in the introduction of his romantic novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, whose title character whose adventurous life would make a rip-roaring and thoroughly trashy adventure novel, if only the author had wished to actually tell a story. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, in her introduction to Amazons II, gives us a two-page summary of the life, loves, and adventures of the historical La Maupin, actress, duelist and lover that is both exciting and tantalizing, and which has at least as much plot in its 2 pages as Gautiers novel.     Stephen Donalson claimed at the second World Fantasy Convention (or was it th e third?) that he never read any non-fiction because all of the great insights that people told him they got from non-fiction deeds he had found long before in fictional tales. From context, it was clear that much of that fiction was fantasy and science fiction. While I wont go as far as Donalson, his point is similar to my own.