Jason and Madam Crommelynck discuss a wide variety of subjects: love, death, beauty, homosexuality, and all of them force Jason to really consider who he is at heart, but the section that really stuck with me was that about the idea that any good poem should be entirely truthful and candid with respect to the author. One of the revelations which Jason has while talking about his poetry is that his writing is the only place where he can say whatever he wishes to. Madam Crommelynck, however, points out that his poems lack in truthfulness simply because Jason refuses to own up to them. She certainly does speak a sparkling of wisdom--it's hard to imagine that a poet who refuses to identify with his poems actually believes in them--and Jason is forced to admit that he is in fact ashamed of his poems, and horribly frightened by the idea that others might be able to read his innermost thoughts, which he puts down in his poetry.
Honestly I've gotta say I can certainly understand where Jason is coming from here--having your creative writing scrutinized by others is something that the self conscious writer would find terrifying. I speak from a certain amount of self-experience, meaning I've always avoided the act of creative writing for the very reason that I'm not comfortable with the idea that something I created might not hold up against the criticism of its readers (myself included). The idea that a truly good piece of creative writing has a certain inherent candidness in it--or that it would contain a piece of yourself, so to speak--is something that I agree with, and precisely for that reason I would say that creative writing is the most personally challenging of all the writing forms. To allow a piece of art, which stemmed entirely from your own imagination, to be criticized by others is to allow that fiber of your personality to be put on display and criticized as well. Jason puts it very well when he says "If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, 'When you're ready'" (145). Allowing others to view--and thus criticize--your own written work is to not only to allow them to criticize the intellect behind your writing skill, but also the personality and following beliefs which formulated the piece. To me, as a writer who isn't especially comfortable with his creative writing, it seems a courageous act to provide your own material for others to read and critique. I think the day when I can comfortably permit others to read my writings I will pat myself on the back, but until then I have every bit of sympathy for Jason and his reluctance to claim his poetry. That being said I still totally agree with the ideas that Ms. Crommelynk has about what good poetry is and how it should be intimately connected with who you are as a person.
This is a great articulation of why these meetings w/ Mme. Crommelynck function as a rite of passage for Jason: he doesn't so much "allow" her to criticize his work as succumb to what appears to be inevitable (try stopping her!), but he is also eager to hear what she has to say, and flattered even that she takes it seriously as "work," worthy of critical analysis.
ReplyDeleteBy publishing his work at all, Jason seems to make himself open to such critical scrutiny, but here's where the issue of the pseudonym comes in (and Mme. fixates on this, too)--Eliot Bolivar is open to critical scrutiny, but not Jason Taylor. As you say, criticism of his work is inseparable from criticism of his person, and she fixates on the pen name as a way of Jason avoiding reality in his work. He "dresses up" his poems in "pretty" imagery, and he's given himself an exotic name as "author"--she wants him to set aside both tendencies and make his work more real. This is a scary thing for a 13-yr-old in his position to do, but she's not taking no for an answer.