My main writing project for the month of March has been a short story, Gutter Punk. This story is loosely based on a social construct of Punk Society that has existed more than fifty years. It started as a counter culture movement but has devolved to a groups of traveling teenagers that don't really fit into our current social normative world. They are gypsies, vagabonds travelers all and none of these things.
With this culture as my base. I'm left to wonder is profanity necessary to create a realistic character. I decided that linguistic tone of these characters would require a lot of rule breaking, slang and yes profanity. While I was writing it did not even enter my mind that people would find this offensive or obscene. Yet one of my first critiques said exactly that.
I set the piece aside to think about the comment. I was curious what made the use of b!tch profane. Was it the fact that one female character was calling another one, a cray-cray b!tch, is it the fact that it was a female voice using this term, or is the word itself offensive. As I pondered this thought, I was pursing facebook.
When a post popped up in my feed asking what people thought of this app, Clean Reader. I responded briefly never heard of it. I was shocked, dismayed and interested at the same time when she told me this app scrubs profanity from books.
Curiosity led me to the Clean Reader website: which touts read clean books not profanity. "Clean Reader prevents swear words in books from being displayed on your screen. You decide how clean your books should appear and Clean Reader does the rest." Digging deeper into the site, I discovered that not only does this filter (as the call it) take out profanity, but also hurtful racial terms.
Okay so my mind is spinning for a minute. Who decided what is profane, what is a hurtful racial term and what happens to literature if artists are not allowed to explore all manners of nature, culture, counter-culture. Humanity at its worst and best and everything in between.
Are we left with a vanilla world, were the past atrocity are glazed over or in the case lined through. Will we live in a world redacted of everything that offends, and if so you is the arbitrator of distressing language. Or worse will we forget the language of the past and the hard lessons it has taught and continues to teach us.
Or will art die on the vine or creativity if the idea that things that make one sad should be avoided. The creator of Clean Reader states that they designed the app because their child was sad after reading a book, would it not be better to discuss and deal with the emotional reaction than to avoid them. What happens in a world were one does everything to avoid emotional reaction, and what happens to art, as it is for the purpose of evoking emotion. See the definition of music an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.
I for one write to evoke an emotional response, from myself, and my reader. If I could paint this would also be my goal. I want people to pick up my books, and feel, sad, happy, angry. I want them to rage against the inequities I show, or love when a character achieves that which she was told was impossible, but in the world that clean readers want to create my art will lose its meaning and context as many of my worlds are formed by the enclaves of my young adult experiences. They are trying to create a world I rally against. So on that note, Fuck all to Hell, I will write as my characters and my art dictate.
No comments:
Post a Comment