Wendy Lesser

from Chapter Four, "Authority":

...The point of all this is that literature can never be *just* a trick. We need to feel that something more is at stake, that something is truly being created where nothing was before...It would be inaccurate to say that authoritarian works command while works with authority persuade, for even the word "persuasion" is too blinkered, too end-achieving, too personally manipulative to cover the methods employed by the most powerful literature. (But the words "method," "employ," and "power" are also suspect here. They are blunt instruments standing in for something that is far more delicate and in fact nearly indiscernible.) The author who possesses authority has no palpable designs on us: we barely exist for him, just as he barely exists for us...And yet at some point in the process of reading, if the work has authority enough, the self yields.
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this passage (in full, anyhow...go read the whole thing!) and this chapter explained a lot for me. I avoided reading _The Color Purple_ for, like, 20 years because of all the snarky (at best) criticism of Alice Walker's place in the new canon. I didn't feel like reading anything super-manipulative and/or just not that good, and I reallyreallyreally didn't want a reading experience that would make me side with the Bad Guys. so when I finally read the novel ( because one should), I was doubly resistant...and yet, it happened: Walker's writing established an aesthetic authority to which my stupid, scared self yielded entirely.

at the same time, Lesser's notion of authority seems to explain why Eugenides leaves me cold. when I read him, I can *feel* his end-achieving designs in a way that embarrasses me. like a "miss u" text from someone you just met: dude, is your nose running? like seeing somebody wearing a Nirvana t-shirt: do you even Pixies? thx for making *me* feel like a dick, you dick.

it isn't that I dislike perceiving an author's designs on me; I am definitely not so cool that I'm not flattered by the attention. but when the author who barely exists to my barely-existing reader is, say, a more artful McSweeney's type, then that discernible design-- however overt or even heavy-handed--is more like seeing somebody wearing Velvet Underground knee socks. like, ok, i'm looking at you, so good job, but now tell me more.… (meer)