SEARCHING FOR PRIVATE RYAN…
I’M often asked in author interviews what I think makes today’s literature “contemporary.” Has it changed over the decades I’ve been authoring? The simple answer is, “Yes, it’s changed and especially so these last couple years.” There is, however, one thing that hasn’t changed: the need to appropriately address and express violence and sex, two intrinsically human issues, if not obsessions. There is so much trauma, or put in a more general way, violation, or, if you prefer, thwarting of our individual needs, wants and desires, that literature has and will, I think, continue to play a singularly important role in it’s sublimation. I would say resolution or recovery, but medical science today suggests that traumatic learning “crystalizes” into a complex of eidetic but repressed executive, procedural, emotional and body memories that we carry with us throughout our lifetimes. I have often wondered if this isn’t what “fate” is all about: the lifelong attempts to resolve violation, the two greatest being birth and death, over which we had and will have little if any control.
Sex is a bit different, as it can be, and often is, a combination of volution and violation, its singular position in human lives making it something we all face, most experience and few ever really understand. Humans seem to me to be intolerably lonely, solitary creatures for whom sex is a surprisingly risky but definite drive. We’re mostly safe when alone, and highly vulnerable when not. Either way, writing about violence and sex are two of the charges every author must face and conquer. To be clear, I’m not taking about gratuitous violence and sex, sometimes offered in books more like a “fix” to an addict, in the end, adding to any burdens we carry surrounding them. No, I mean writing “about” violence and sex in a manner that non-traumatically helps readers to gain “clarity in meaning” over time about these two singular events.
I haven’t forgotten the first question: how literature has changed and what makes today’s stories contemporary. You might anticipate me saying that today, literature seems to need to have social “relevancy” or at least have a social “edge.” But, no. What I think makes today’s literature unique is, first, what I call “Post World War” in reflection, and second, a science or technology base. WWII is over, and, while actual survivors are disappearing fast, the issues of inequality, xenophobia and glorification of obedience in war continue to haunt this and, I assume, future generations. As far as being science or technology based, these two issues more than anything else, I believe, define our times. Poised to leave behind a dying Earth, we surely must be some of the vilest creatures that have ever existed. Dealing with our abdication from our stewardship responsibilities of Gaia can’t and won’t be easy.
In the Amazon Genre Bestseller, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor, currently available in printed, digital and audio formats, and purchased by K. Simmons Productions for manga, animation and/or cinematic treatments, I address each of these issues: volition, violation, violence, sex, inequality, xenophobia, glorification of obedience all within a wholly plausible and not unlikely future science and technology scenario.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999693859
Sex is a bit different, as it can be, and often is, a combination of volution and violation, its singular position in human lives making it something we all face, most experience and few ever really understand. Humans seem to me to be intolerably lonely, solitary creatures for whom sex is a surprisingly risky but definite drive. We’re mostly safe when alone, and highly vulnerable when not. Either way, writing about violence and sex are two of the charges every author must face and conquer. To be clear, I’m not taking about gratuitous violence and sex, sometimes offered in books more like a “fix” to an addict, in the end, adding to any burdens we carry surrounding them. No, I mean writing “about” violence and sex in a manner that non-traumatically helps readers to gain “clarity in meaning” over time about these two singular events.
I haven’t forgotten the first question: how literature has changed and what makes today’s stories contemporary. You might anticipate me saying that today, literature seems to need to have social “relevancy” or at least have a social “edge.” But, no. What I think makes today’s literature unique is, first, what I call “Post World War” in reflection, and second, a science or technology base. WWII is over, and, while actual survivors are disappearing fast, the issues of inequality, xenophobia and glorification of obedience in war continue to haunt this and, I assume, future generations. As far as being science or technology based, these two issues more than anything else, I believe, define our times. Poised to leave behind a dying Earth, we surely must be some of the vilest creatures that have ever existed. Dealing with our abdication from our stewardship responsibilities of Gaia can’t and won’t be easy.
In the Amazon Genre Bestseller, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor, currently available in printed, digital and audio formats, and purchased by K. Simmons Productions for manga, animation and/or cinematic treatments, I address each of these issues: volition, violation, violence, sex, inequality, xenophobia, glorification of obedience all within a wholly plausible and not unlikely future science and technology scenario.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999693859
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