the guilty (and unreliable?) narrator

Yes, I sometimes call you/them stupid, but only indirectly, and at least I feel guilty about it.

This semester, I made my students read Joey Goebel’s Torture the Artist. And yes, this was selfish of me. And yes, this was rather fundamentalist of me, hoping that I could force my love of subversion-via-rock-n-roll on them.

In the novel, a very lovable narrator, Harlan Eiffler, is recruited by the evil magnate of a global media corporation. The figurehead is attempting to redeem himself by creating a division of his company called New Renaissance, which will attempt to permeate popular culture with “real art” (“whatever that is,” I hear you saying, recognizing the age-old conundrum) to replace the trashy entertainment that has become a signifier for a shallow dumb-ass culture. (Gee, sound familiar, VH1?) Harlan’s job is to torture the most promising student of the arts, Vincent. The best art, after all, comes from the tortured, does it not?

I won’t give away more of the novel here, but I’m perplexed that my summary focuses solely on the crux of the viable argument-paradox—the issue which allows this novel to be considered “appropriate” for study—when really I meant to reveal my true purposes: to say, Oh how bitchin’. The subculture lives. We, the elitist rock-n-roller hipsters who love our Ginsberg as much as we hate our Bush are “right.” We have access to what is True. We are the only Poets, whether we write lines or not. Pretentious as it is, we have been, as James Dickey writes, “the masters of the superior secret, not they.”

And this need to assert ourselves “above” frat boys and office drones is false. For some, this is an attempt to turn the hierarchy on its head and say ‘art rules, commerce drools’ much in the way that some feminists mistakenly think it is women’s role to say, ‘no WE are better.’

But to truly be an Other in America, do we have to be non-white, gay, lesbian, Middle Eastern, etc.? To be culturally Othered within our own culture, if such a thing exists, can it be a choice to be bohemian, to be scenester/hipsters with subscriptions to ReadyMade magazine? Is this Emerson’s new patrician class? It would be rash to generalize about the multitude of subcultures, but there is a (perhaps mistaken) commonality that used to be closely related to economic class in addition to artistic tendencies, whether chosen or imposed. But when I see kaffiyehs at Urban Outfitters and hoards of Jackie O wannabes sprawling around the bars at indie shows, I’m not so sure…

I feel guilty for it all. Wanting to be sub, not being cool, criticizing, not criticizing.

So just how subtle am I, introducing this text to my students with the intention of converting them into living, breathing, thinking beings with passions for what I think is inherently "good"--rock n roll, literature, etc.? Go read Torture the Artist.

P.S. I love ReadyMade, Urban, and Jackie O—I am a polyphonic text.