The Importance of Literary Trash :: Personal Narrative Essays

The Importance of Literary Trash   Ive heard it give tongue to that the goal of dangerous literature is to illuminate the merciful setting. If that is the case, the error of overserious literature is that it is far too simple-minded and attempts to illuminate the human condition by portraying it directly. The great strength of myth, legend and their modern-day substitution trashy genre fiction is that they dont just show us the human condition, but interpret, highlight and contrast it by showing us the large than life symbols. The courage and romance that allows us to survive and to savor day-by-day life are the core of myth and genre. There they are make larger than life and inspire us to aspire to a wideness that goes beyond simple daily experience.   The other failing of modern serious literature is the failing of all modern wile art for arts sake. new-fangled art far too frequently is nothing more than the operative showing off the techniques they would use if they were eer to create a straightforward work of art. And so we see the sense of color that they would use if they ever a picture and so on. Technique becomes all important and contentedness 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 one of its first and most eloquent spokesmen, Theophile Gautier, set up forth his position in the introduction of his romantic novel silver perch 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 distinguish a story. Jessica Amanda Salmonson, in her introduction to Amazons II, gives us a two-page heavyset 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 the third?) that he never read any non-fiction because all of the great insights that people told him they got from non-fiction whole shebang he had found long before in fictional tales. From context, it was name 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.