an axiological survey

Question:

Could you read, and love, a literary work by someone whom you personally know to be a crappy human being?

I'm just wondering how the numbers will break down, so please answer, however briefly.

Two potentially biasing facts:
- I get an impression from most people I know that their answer, with very few caveats, is no;
- I'm not sure what my own answer is.

One more twist:
- he was an antisemite and owned slaves and beat his wife and made enemies everywhere, but these passages are immortal,
vs.
- he treats his MFA students like shit -- you should ask X about it sometime -- so every time people praise him I shudder.

So?


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pseudopodium
"I get an impression from most people I know that their answer, with very few caveats, is no"

Huh. I guess puritanism really is back. "And this time it's personal." If anything, I've usually felt odd in having so much of an overlap between work I like and creators I like and respect. The overlap's still far from 100%, though, so my answer has to be yes.

By the way, I see a pretty big difference between the two declaratives of your twist. They could be brought closer together if the first one went "he's an antisemite and owns slaves and beats his wife and makes enemies everywhere, so every time my sister praises him I shudder." The shuddering comes from the possibility that praise is going to make the world worse, right? With living assholes, it often does. With dead assholes, praise can encourage emulation, but that seems more the fault of the living emulators than the dead author.

simultan
No, it's the double standard in the two declaratives that fascinates me. Those are things I've (more or less) actually heard or read, and they do differ...

But on the rest of it, I understand.
Metameat
My answer has to be "yes" too; I think it's harder to enjoy work by living assholes not only because admiration for living assholes can do more harm, but also because 21st-century America is such that living assholes who teach at MFA programs tend to write work that's very heavy on the self-presentation, and it gets harder to screen out unflattering things you know about that self.
mooxyjoo
i've never had the opportunity to read a literary work by someone i knew personally to be a blot on the record of humanity, so i'm not sure i can say. i think if their character were immaterial to the content, then i could swing it.

but once i'm convinced that what they say flows from their deepest attitudes and beliefs, which i think are unaccountably wrong, i can't stand to read anything; this often happens to me with criticism.

so i guess with famous bad people not personally known to me, i just never feel as if i am reading something that must flow from their character. tsk-tsking about brecht seems to me silly. but rilke, one time out of ten, i entertain the idea that yes, this IS related to his being miserable to others.
D. Fennel
I think, for me, an author's personal contemptibility is less of an obstacle to loving a book I've read than it is to reading the book in the first place. The reading process keeps getting interrupted by the sense that I have something better to do.
calisto
Good question. I don't know. I still read Tolstoy--although I've wanted to stop a number of times :)
And generally I tend to treat sceptically students' complaints about their professors. As much as I don't listen to professors complaining about their students. Isn't complaining just a part of the game?
waggish
I could. My standards are high enough already without adding this one to it. Of course, I have yet to encounter this scenario with literature....
jc
I would. But in the case of the antisemite slave-owner I imagine I'd be battling with the work the entire time. Or more likely, psychologizing it. Still, I'd bet that fewer people would be willing to set their ethical qualms aside and read the book if the author were a rapist and murderer, or if he liked to torture babies.

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