Theses on the Written World
- N. A. Dawn
- Aug 17, 2020
- 7 min read
The first thing you learn when studying literature is that you’re not in it for the pleasure. Not directly anyway.
It doesn’t matter if you enjoy the novel, the poem, the play, the essay. That’s not relevant to your literary education. No, not at all. If you find the prose of Things Fall Apart repetitive and superficial, if The Complete Works of William Shakespeare bores you to tears, and if Derrida makes you want to rip out your eyes – tough.
You’re here to learn literature, not to love it.
And don’t be fooled: that’s not to say you’ll understand it once you finish your degree. You may understand it, but you just as easily may not; you may totally miss the whole force of every piece you read; its arguments, its insights, its mechanisms. And even funnier: you may not even understand why you do not understand.
But even that doesn’t matter. Don’t understand? No biggie. It’s not about what you think, but how. Why does Achebe’s style read so alien to the Western audience? Why does Shakespeare’s preoccupation with radiant language confound us so? Why do Derrida’s views frustrate us? What are the patterns of socialisation that have produced in us these preferences, hostilities and attractions to various texts? Why do we expect immediate pleasure in literature – or any of the arts, for that matter?
Learning to read literature is the first step in learning to read the world; the almost sorcerous art of peeking behind the quotidian curtain and beholding the hidden forces that shape consciousness therein. Exercising these interpretive faculties starts off in the ilk of:
Identify as many literary devices in the passage as possible, and comment both on their specific use and whether you consider this effective, providing reasons for your answers.
But quickly, they migrate to: What does Swift seem to suggest by describing aboriginal peoples in this particular way? And eventually: Consider the City. What do you notice? Why?
It’s show-and-tell for adults, except you’re always showing the world, and the story you’re telling is always yours. (Or is it?) The literature student is a reader, and therefore: an author.
Discovering you’re becoming a writer is a strange realisation. You don’t so much as erupt elatedly into song as sigh with relief: ‘Oh, praise the Lord… I get to be myself.’
There’s something primordial about writing, something innate. Which is not to say it’s at all natural; it’s about as pretentious as it gets. But somehow that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? You can create whatever it is that you feel you have to. And that raw creative impulse, that silent fury welling inside you, forcing you into these hypnotic sways of invention and introspection – that’s what’s sincere. That’s the genuine part. So genuine, it feels like everything else is fake. R5 Store fake; Van Gogh original masterpiece fake; lip-synching popstars fake; political manifesto fake. Fiction is the realest thing there is, and it’s the writer’s duty to prove it.
The world is an exhausting place for writers. For one thing, although writing is the most rewarding aspect of their lives, and certainly a key ingredient to their psychological stability, everything else always seems easier, more immediate and more pleasant. Scrolling through feeds, trawling videos, streaming series, taking care of friends, attending to housework, going out to dance, drink and talk smack – not a thing in the world is as counter-intuitive as shutting oneself away from everyone else, all entertainment and social interactions, all responsibilities and attractions, and scribbling on a page, or typing on a screen.
It takes extraordinary discipline to voluntarily put oneself through draft after draft of complex interrelated ideas, which no one may ever read, and which may be a total catastrophe in the end anyway. And moreover, the patience: only after months – sometimes years – does a project really take meaningful form and develop into something coherent, moving and authentic.
Yet we do it anyway, for better or for worse.
Pensiveness predominates the literary mode, a contemplative approach to all experiences, such that the world stores itself into your mind. You become aware: what people say to each other and how they say it; the emotional fluctuations that accompany peculiar encounters with strangers and lovers; the texture of buildings and the movements of light; the clash of worldviews alive in the news, on TV shows and radio commercials, in music and social media, over the dinner table and between the pages of glitzy rags.
The world is communicating with you, and you learn to speak its language: Moments, feelings and ideas file away into your cerebral archives. The connections between our perceptions, expectations, our desires and assumptions crystallise before us into a dynamic web of stories, possible narratives, a prismatic complex of lenses through which we can review our reality. Or rather, our subjectivity: we haul from the wells of memory vast amalgams of lives – the tributaries through which we live, and the life-shards we collect from others – hoping we have something useful to say.
Much of being a writer is spent nursing yourself. Tending to the wounds acquired while trudging through a world in which no one (including yourself) can adequately understand you. You think too much, feel too much. Think and feel too much about thinking and feeling too much.
Your head is filled with a million and one ideas, observations and sentiments – some enchanting, others disturbing. Forced to cork it all up while you attend to everything else you have to do, which never ever seems worthwhile, before securing just a morsel of time each day which you may – and must – use to finally pour it all out. And when you don’t have that time, that little cosmic allowance, you gradually, sometimes rapidly, sink into a vicious miasma of moods too morbid to mention.
I guess depression’s a fitting term: frenzied, sullen, hollow. It’s a purely biological inevitability. Writers, fundamentally, are writers; they write. If they don’t, the cease to be writers – which is to say, they cease to be who they fundamentally are. Which is to say, they die.
Sure, technical writing handbooks, guides and advice columns help a great deal. They provide a lexicon, and with that an understanding, of the various elements that together contrive the mechanisms of the craft: fiction and nonfiction forms, the structures of scenes and plots, the facets of characters, settings and argumentation, the nuances of theme, the respective merits and drawbacks of summary, analysis and dialogue/action, the necessary agonies of multiple drafts, the format and niceties of submitting manuscripts, the horrors and hilarities of rejection, and so on.
But mastering all of that does not guarantee a successful experience as a writer. Successful writers relish the living language of their art, not merely the nuts and bolts of the skill; a dual, antithetical sense of both personal intimacy with one’s work and the self-annihilating bliss of disappearing into the words, as if somehow, all this time, you never actually existed, and all you ever were, and ever will be, is simply a bundle of potential stories. Yet unwritten, but soon to be.
Sure, artistically satisfying writing experiences don’t always pay the bills. They certainly don’t necessarily lead to commercial viability with a loyal (and moneyed) readership. But then again, most writers don’t start writing because they want to earn a living from it. Most writers are part-timers: they’re in every area of literate society, working all sorts of jobs, tending to their families, jostling through supermarket queues so they can take home their groceries, fry up some chow, and sit down with their tea at the keyboard, when they can finally crunch out some words before they return to the world again the next day.
Writing manuals thus constitute a bare fraction of the writing life: reading them will provide you with a foundational technical knowledge to avoid common pitfalls and create whatever it is you want with greater consciousness and professionalism. If nothing else, they’re extremely motivating – and when you’re a writer, every bit of encouragement counts. Writing manuals are there to say, “We know it’s hard, but you can do it, and if you ever get stuck, here’s some creative and professional advice.”
But writing manuals are not an author’s primary engine of learning. The most compelling source of growth as a writer is, for wont of a better description, the dynamic rhythm of continuously losing and rediscovering yourself in writing. You must surrender yourself to the tacit, buried realms of your mind – suppressed memories, idiosyncrasies, strangeness, dissonances, and the reeling sensation that you’re floundering, thrashing around in your own psyche.
You need to get lost. Lost in yourself. So lost that the world begins to change shape: buildings and streets become the checkerboard of a societal game so complex you can hardly point out the players or tally the score. Your life’s a surging drama of interwoven subplots and volcanic twists of fate. The people all around you become blurs of motives, flaws and eccentricities, redeeming beauties and endearing quirks.
And just when you feel that you can barely cope in such a state of inner disorientation, such exhausting turmoil, you dredge from those depths an artifact: a distinctly personal creation, so genuine and so rich in sensibility that the greatest description of it is itself. At once it speaks to both that timeless child-storyteller within you, the pure creation that has spun such stories your entire life; and too your more sophisticated (and perhaps more complicated) present self: an evolved form, the matrix of moments and memories that make you who you have become, and will make you who you are always becoming.
A novelist.
None of which is to say that to write anything worthwhile requires you first to descend into tragic mental illness. But the capacity to access the parts of yourself that are unstable – the questions, the contradictions, the longings, the enigmas which only language can wrangle out of you and into the world – invites you to master not ‘writing’ (in the abstract, general or commercial senses of the word) but to master yourself, ‘the writer’.
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