The Moral Aspect of a Sledgehammer

This evening I went to see the world premiere of Lydia, a new play that was commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. It was extremely well-executed and powerful, but it also left me asking Why? The actors turned in excellent performances working with very difficult material, but I struggle to see what the playwright and the director were trying to accomplish. It was a brilliant sledgehammer of a play, but aside from the emotional spectacle of watching a family tear itself apart, I couldn't see that it accomplished anything.

That raises the question of whether art needs to have a "purpose" or if it should just be allowed to exist completely detached from moral considerations in a bubble of "art for art's sake". My feeling is that while art need not have a moral agenda, the artist must still take into consideration that it does exist in a moral world. Sometimes audiences need a play to be a sledgehammer that smashes ideas or expectations, but there's a reason we speak disparagingly of "shock value", and it is a shame that a play full of such beautifully crafted scenes ultimately did nothing more than revel in a spectacle of rage, guilt, and destruction.

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A recent article in Slate has prompted a lot of thought on my part. I've actually never read anything by Nabokov, but I feel deeply conflicted about the question of whether his grandson should carry out his wishes and destroy his unfinished final novel. As a reader and scholar of literature, I have a knee-jerk reaction in favor of defying his wishes and releasing it to the public, but that thought sickens me when I consider that he clearly felt that it was incomplete.

At what point do the desires of the reading public override those the authors who provide the literature we crave? Does a writer's control over his work diminish in proportion to his greatness? I have no answers that can diminish my visceral feeling that the manuscript shouldn't be destroyed, and I feel like my inability to make up my mind on this issue is a failing on my part.