Some Literary (Self-)Criticism

So I'm not thrilled about my last post. I think, mostly on account of it being sort of journalistic, an artificial structure that I am not familiar with and cannot really handle well. But reading over it has gotten me thinking about a few things.

I won't remove it, first of all, because I feel that part of the appeal of blog-writing is its spontaneity, its extemporaneous quality. Things enter the mind and are published almost as quickly. This is both wonderful and atrocious - my prose here is more energetic and varied than in any other context, at the serious expense of editing and revision. Everything is a trade off.

So I will keep it as sort of an awkward testament to the Spirit of Blog. But in another sense I find it quite interesting. I attempted, especially towards the end of it, to play around with language, to effect a kind of stylistic simulacrum of decay. I think I failed abominably, but that's beside the point.

Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps the point that has me riled up, even minutely, is the sort of hack-neyed, ad hoc quality of the latter section. Using ellipsis to simulate ellision, broken spacing, omission of entire phrases to represent sections torn out or illegible. I mean, it has a very heavy-handed quality to it. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a damn about the piece, but what troubles me is the spirit behind it.

There's an amateurish approach to writing that seeks to elicit a particular response, be it comedic or emotional, without the use of subtletly or guile. The amateurish writer sits down and hammers out text with entire sections in bold face capitals, multiple exclamation marks, and abrupt caesuras. I shall attempt to demonstrate:

Judith SWERVED the car quickly away from the precipice!!! She was TOO LATE - the wheels spun out over the gorge and half the chassis began to GRIND into the - YAWNING PIT OF DEATH!!

Okay I'm obviously exaggerating here for effect. But imagine something along these lines, only toned down a bit in respect of its more superficial excesses. In all other respects, particularly in terms of grandiloquence, prolixity, verbosity, or whatever you want to call it, amateurish writing tries to grind and squeeze every drop of sentiment from the reader. There is no concern for style or grace, or the careful manipulation of context and language to produce a particular result.

Such writing is often called "masturbatory", a term I take quite seriously in that it has more than once been used to describe my own writing. What does it signify, aside from the obvious self-gratification? It is above all symptomatic of an author's profound and persistent disinterest in the reader - in his or her potential reactions or desires upon encountering your work. Naturally, it is patently impossible to tailor a written work to every possible taste; that is not my point, in the least. We must always write from our guts, from a point of interior strength and energy; we must always attempt to harness that fleeting, vaguely intuitive sensation of flow, beauty, artistry, and moment.

But there are times when we write exclusively for the pleasure that our own prose brings us. I have experienced the following phenomenon many, many times: I begin by writing something that I am convinced, just as the words grace the page, is pure gold. Don't be mistaken, I'm not confused by delusions of grandeur, but as I write I become nevertheless enthralled by my own use of language. However, as time progresses, and as the psychic distance between me and my own creation grows, deepens, widens, I become cold to it. Turns of phrase that I had previously considered brilliant become, well, increasingly mediocre. Average, tepid, stale, or worst of all - ineffectual.

The first moments of writing are the most self-serving and egoistic. The truly humble writer is one who can brave his (or her) own feeling of disgust at the garbage his fingers created, and return to the page again, and again, and again. Revision is the negation of ego. To create and then discard your work, heedless of quality, is little more than arrogance.

Yet, the whole situation is a bit more complex. That initial moment of ego, the narcissistic first-contact with the page, has in the past enabled me to overcome the horrible fear of failure that cripples all creative output. There is a huge danger associated with writing, and above all publishing. It is not at all surprising that so many writers become infuriated when their work is described as autobiographical. It is precisely this that I, as a writer, struggle to move away from. Writing is annihilation. What kind of power can someone have if they, in their creation, are always bounded to some essentialist, authorial self? The act of manipulating thought and language emerges from the ego, from whatever fractured and discursive "unity" of thought the mind can perceive itself as having. But for it to be of any merit, this art, it must separate itself severely from that point of origin, and delve so deeply into something foreign, even alien, that the point of contact between author and work is explosive and profoundly mystifying. The exposure of unity to difference is defined, in my mind, by mystery and wonder - and the best writing is precisely that which embraces the dissolution of stagnant forms.

In the end I need to find a productive harmony between my own persistent and inescapable ego. My vanity is absolute - there is no way to excise this self-serving element from an act of creation so intimately entangled with my own mind. What I can do, however, is struggle against the amateurish impulse to "just create", to hammer onto the page some brazen and childish thing - not in content, but in form, since I will always cherish the most immature of sentiments (laughter, absurdity, and irreverence). The best I can do, for now, is perhaps to take my own vain self-awareness - and all the ridiculous intensity of thought invested in the recognition of how wonderful I am, qua writer - and transform it into a meticulous self-awareness of the work of art. In simple terms: the less I think about myself, the more I can think about what I create.

And maybe, just maybe, in time I can find that precious space of wonder that is about neither the self, nor the art, but something more and deeper.