strong opinions

One of my writer friends -- and i very much respect this person's work, let me say that upfront and right away -- has this habit of making pronouncements about literature and writing and craft in a way that makes personal artistic preferences sound like infallible Gospel Truth. It's always made me uncomfortable -- and i never quite got round to putting my finger on why, until we had a convo just yesterday about writing, and i asked about the criteria upon which these pronouncements of artistic judgement were being made. That's when i realised that what was happening was just a declaration of individual taste -- a declaration that was being made in a tone more suited to, oh i dunno, objective, undeniable fact. The unavoidable subjectivity was elided, in a way that allowed the individual to impose -- and in the act of elision and imposition, other people's subjective preferences are reduced to wrongness, to mistakes, framed as lesser things not worthy of consideration or respect. 

i guess it's only human, to want to see one's preferences as universal. "I am the world." i do it myself when i express strong opinions about things -- and i have a lot of strong opinions, as any reader of this blog will know. Most of the time, my excuse is that i've thought for a very long time about the things that i have strong opinions about -- it all happens beneath the surface for years and years and years, so that by the time it emerges in my conversations and writing, i've already turned things over in my head and read up a lot and talked to a lot of people and asked myself all kinds of inconvenient questions, many many times. What i need to do better is to let people in on that process. Maybe the same is true of my writer friend.

i hope, too, to be always aware of this tendency in myself, to catch myself when i slip into that way of talking. Because it is a kind of rhetorical style. i hope to always have friends who will challenge me, who will disagree with me and express their own strong opinions in ways that make room for dialogue and exchange. i hope to always be aware of the provisionality of most things, and to learn to point towards that in the way i speak and write, even when expressing long-thought-through strong opinions. 

And -- oh, look! 

Strong Opinions: J.M. Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction

i wrote a paper on this topic more than 12 years ago. Sigh. i know now that a career in literary academia would have been a mistake for me. But every so often i'll google something Coetzee-related and i'd find that my ideas about Coetzee's work -- ideas that were utterly intuitive and uninformed-by-scholarly-opinion at the time, because the scholarly opinions had not yet been published -- were not that very far off from what scholars were doing; that i was, not exactly ahead of the curve, but moving in sync with it -- on the curve. i still don't know how i'm supposed to feel about that.

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