Following is a wonderful piece by David Foster Wallace. Just change fiction to therapy and he captures my position in narrative practice. Often I have found myself in conversation with socio-politically aware folks wondering, where's the possibility here? How do I take that into the room with me? These conversations tend to be heavy on the dark worldview, light on the hope or possibility. Foster Wallace captures it beautifully when he says; ..do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? ...the definition of good art (therapy?) would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness... Call me a sucker, I still believe in the magical. Rest of the quote follows..
If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.— is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
— David Foster Wallace
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