Sometimes Getting To The Truth Calls For More Artistry Than Stenography
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(OPINION) Recently, I was scrolling through my usual itinerary of news sites: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Lexington Herald-Leader, The Associated Press, the Free Press, a couple of religion news outlets and so on.
I keep vowing to cut back on news consumption to preserve my sanity. Then I keep backsliding.
Somewhere in that blitz of stories and opinion pieces, I happened across an article that, among other things, mentioned the stultifying level of profane language now permeating all forms of entertainment — TV shows, movies, plays, music. What used to be called f-bombs function almost as punctuation.
I think the television series “The Bear” may have been called out specifically here.
Anyway, I waded into the readers’ comments, which is always a prickly place to go. That observation about naughty words seemed to have gotten readers’ dander way up, even though I don’t think it was the article’s main point. The commenters divided into two camps.
The first camp was of the opinion that, yes, the level of obscenity is shameful and lazy to boot and annoying beyond bearing.
The second camp proudly waved another banner: Oh, join the 21st century, you pearl-clutching puritans, because this is how people really talk.
I scrolled on to the next story and the next outrage of the day, whatever it was, and on to the next news platform and the next.
I’d almost forgotten this particular dustup over profanity, but then it popped into my head again. Of course, the original article seemed to have vanished into the ether.
Search for it online however I might, I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t remember who wrote it or what publication it appeared in or what its main subject had actually been besides the profanity.
No matter, really. I mainly found myself thinking about a discussion of profanity in art I had with a creative writing professor more than 40 years ago. It’s one I’ve remembered often.
As an undergraduate, I began my writing journey with no penny ante ambitions such as, say, learning to construct a coherent paragraph. Nope, not this kid. I began by undertaking to write the much-ballyhooed Great American Novel, which I — dumb as a cow — assumed I was capable of producing. I was in fact a living stereotype, but too callow to recognize it.
My teacher, however, was endlessly patient. My Great American Novel was to be a semi-autobiographical head-spinner about a boy (guess who!) coming of age in an isolated hamlet in a rural Kentucky county, drinking copious quantities of beer and falling in and out of love and fist-fighting with bullies and racing hot rods.
When I turned in my first installment of this GAN, the teacher dutifully read it, God help him. We met to discuss it. The first advice he gave me was, “Cut the profanity by three-fourths.”
Cut the cussing? I was horrified! Outraged! How dare he — a mere academician — tell me how real rednecks talked! I’d lived it, buddy-roe! Redneck was my native tongue!
“That dialogue is dead on,” I protested. “I lifted it word-for-word from actual conversations.”
“It’s not your job to be a stenographer,” he said kindly. “Your job is to be an artist.”
He explained that “art” was short for “artifice.” Art was an interpretation, a cleverly designed facsimile crafted to produce a particular insight or reaction. It evoked the essence of a real thing, but it was in fact not the thing.
He went on to say that some words — profanities or, say, racial slurs — carried outsized weight. If you weren’t judicious, they’d drown out all the other words. Readers wouldn’t hear anything else. You had to keep your audience in mind.
In actual life, a person such as the character I was writing about might use four obscenities every time he opened his mouth. Fine, but on the printed page, the teacher said, you only sprinkled in a profanity here and there to reflect the character’s voice. The reader’s mind would do the rest of the work.
Ultimately, I switched from arty writing to journalism, a change for which I imagine the genuine literati are still grateful.
But even now when I watch a movie and the characters spew endless streams of epithets, I think, “This is not smart. This writer is wasting words.” It’s not a moral judgment. Characters should be portrayed believably, f-words and all. Still, it’s usually poor writing.
I even think of this lesson sometimes when I’m reading the Bible. There aren’t any blue words there, at least not in our cleaned-up English translations.
Yet there’s plenty of artifice. That doesn’t mean the stories aren’t true — only that they’re clearly being shaped with a particular intention or audience in mind.
There’s the Genesis account of creation. I can’t imagine the world was created in six 24-hour days. But the author isn’t acting as a historian or a physicist. The author is telling us a story he hopes will lead us to insights about God and ourselves.
To put a stopwatch on it is to miss the point. The story is true — it is, indeed, True — but it’s not necessarily factual in all details.
In the four New Testament Gospels, each book tells Jesus’ biography a bit differently. The writers have different ends in mind and tailor their narratives accordingly. John says he’s left out reams of information. If he’d recorded everything, he says, the world couldn’t hold the volumes. He shaped his story.
Frequently, artists get closer to the truth than do mere stenographers.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.