The Monster Under the Bed

Elle's Essay #5

For a long time, I only concerned myself with the monster that lived under my bed.

The ones that dwell in darkness, waiting for their prey to overheat and wiggle their left foot until it falls slightly outside the protective duvet barrier. That’s when the monster strikes with a hairy taloned claw, or cold wispy shadow hands.

I shudder just thinking about it.

Unfortunately, monsters are not confined to the small space under the bed. Some monsters sit in the Director’s chair of your favourite movie. Some pen your favourite novel. The monster under your bed is a late-night enemy. The one in the director’s chair has given you the gift of great art.

Do you see where I’m going with this elaborate metaphor?

Let me put it another way.

During a visit to London two weeks ago, I found myself (by pure happenstance) in a cute little bookshop in Hampstead talking to the women behind the counter. I asked what they were currently reading and the younger of the two gave an impassioned monologue about the newly released Julia by Sandra Newman, a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 from a different perspective. I love listening to people talk joyfully and emphatically about things that have influenced them and George Orwell obviously had a big influence on our Hampstead bookshop friend. As she reached the tail end of her 1984 speech, she sighed ruefully and said ’great book, bad guy.’  

And there it was. The caveat. The footnote. Her way of telling me that she knew her passion was slightly unethical while begging me to understand her moral dilemma. And I do understand because I’ve been there many times. Most recently with J.K Rowling and her adamant issue with the trans-gender community on which I profoundly disagree.

We know that art and artist are inextricably linked. The chicken and the egg; one cannot exist without the other. But when the artist is a bad person, or discovered to be a bad person posthumously, does that corrupt the art?

My answer is, maybe… yes? And so, the question becomes, as Claire Dederer puts it in her recent book Monsters, what do we do with great art by bad people? I’m going to take you through a few of my thoughts on this topic. Fair warning… the thoughts are muddled, a little confused and not at all certain.

Onwards!

The most logical thing to do is try and separate art and artist into different entities, i.e, love the art outside of the artist. But this is difficult for multiple ethical reasons. The artist reaps the benefits of your consumerism, for one. They continue to be praised for their genius despite their badness, for another. The list of cons continues for a while until I arrive at a dead end.  

Let’s begin again.

Does it become less about the ethicality of it and more about the justification? ‘I was reading Harry Potter way before J.K Rowling revealed herself to be transphobic,’ which is another way of saying ‘my love for her art pre-dates her badness.’ But how far does the stain of badness spread?

Back it up and begin again.

Forget justification, is simple recognition enough? Like our friend in the Hampstead bookshop, is it enough to say, ‘great book, bad guy’?

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I have delved so deep into this problem that all my thoughts have merged to form one huge, convoluted maze full of nasty tricks and dead ends. I sit cross-legged in the maze’s centre, surrounded by my Harry Potter books with a look of forlorn resignation on my face.

My one piece of advice would be this; love the art, know the artist. Then we can all sit together in one of these ethical dilemmas I so often find myself wrapped up in. Hopefully we make it out of the maze one day. I’m sorry to leave you here, alone in the dark with beloved art, a moral quandary, and a monster under the bed.