In Part 2, we looked at what literature means to readers, and the ways we interact both with books, and the text within them. So really, all things being equal, we should now turn the spotlight onto those who write literature and ask two similar questions: 1) what does literature mean to them, and 2) how do they imagine what they’ve written communicates with those who read it? Put another way, we need to find out what writers think they’re up to, and how they go about delivering the literary ambition(s) they’ve set themselves. [1]

We’re going to try and do this as open-mindedly as possible, without placing too much reliance on the traditional ways literature has been filleted and classified by the Lit Critters. Because it’s actually a lot simpler than they make it out to be. And here’s the carrot: if you stick with this section, you’ll have literature completely sussed, and you’ll never have to read another word of Lit Crit ever again. So it’ll be worthwhile for that reason alone.

And if you’re not convinced, here’s a reminder of what you could be ploughing through. Be afraid. Be very afraid:

This article explores the ways in which the trope of appropriation is expressed in Antony and Cleopatra, and how it has a complex effect on the ways in which subjectivity, cultural organisation, and epistemological enquiries are formulated in Shakespeare's play. After gaining some initial insights into Early Modern perceptions of the insecure spatial and chronolocial [sic] ordering of the world, discussion focuses upon the manner in which this very concept of insecurity is articulated in this play as a dominant stimulation for human creativity. Particular reference is made to developments in New Historicist and Post-colonial theorising of Renaissance litarature [sic], in addition to Early Modern textual voices (Bacon, Purchas, Browne etc.), in order to give greater clarity to the analyses of the different ways in which appropriation may be conceived: in terms of geographical mapping; gender expectation; cultural spectacle; mythic referencing; textual revision; versions of nationhood etc. Finally, the reader is invited to consider the variety of ways in which this play may be found to unpick the familiar opposition of imperializer and imperialized.

And there was me thinking it was a love story.

As I say, there’s no reason whatever to get involved with this guff, since there’s no shortage of information that’s actually been written by writers themselves - so we’ll be getting most of our data directly from the horses’ mouths, as it were, and not from third parties. We’re effectively cutting out the intellectual middle man.

You can find these authorial observations both in the canon of literature itself and in writerly criticism (what’s called ‘primary material’),  and those reviews, magazine articles, autobiographies and interviews where writers break cover and discuss their craft directly (‘secondary material’). They’re writers and their job is writing, so what’s to stop them writing about writing? Particularly if they’re being so poorly served by academia?

If this material is cast as non-fiction (as in the case of great writer/critics like TS Eliot and Matthew Arnold), the writer is stepping out of his role as creator, and donning the garb of a cultural commentator or analyst; if it’s enclosed within a fictional narrative, he’s now labelled a Postmodern Writer. Or as we used to call it, one who washes his dirty underwear in public.

So, in the tradition established by ‘Tristram Shandy’, we now have books about writing novels (an excellent newcomer to the genre is ‘Elizabeth Costello’ by JM Coetzee; a pretty dire one is ‘Coming Soon!!!’ by John Barth, which is so postmodern it refers to itself as “supersophomoric dreck”, a self-conscious irony that is ironically true); novels about what it’s like to be a novelist (anything written by Philip Roth from 1979’s ‘The Ghost Writer’ to 1990’s ‘Deception’); poems about being a poet (I suppose the best known is Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’, but try Pablo Neruda’s ‘Poetry’ for something more up-to-date) and plays about writing plays (of which the most obvious is perhaps Luigi Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters In Search of an Author’). And of course there’s any number of books which riff on the theme of constructing narrative (which is why modern detective fiction is so beloved of contemporary critics as the detective/gumshoe weaves together the discovered threads of the plot into a story - just like a writer does!). It’s a sign of how self-obsessed (and self-regarding) literature can get. Or as the French poet Paul Valery puts it, “If you’ve run out of things to say, take your clothes off.”

But all this writerly navel-gazing’s going to help us steer our arguments round the Lit Critters, so for our purposes it’s actually rather useful.

And of course, some authors are dreadful drama queens.

Oh, that utterly terrifying blank sheet of paper (or empty screen) mocking you first thing in the morning as you sit down to write! Take William Styron’s anguished assertion that “ . . . writing is hell,” and his description of the “pain” he has to go through to get started. But the creator of ‘Sophie’s Choice’ then adds, without breaking step, “I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing . . . it’s the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well.” And the condition of not-writing is, of course, even worse than writing: like that other paradoxical cliche, the unhappy clown, the writer can often be a (self-proclaimed) reluctant showoff. Having writer’s block stops him communicating his meaning to others, and without that lifeline to the outside world, he’s not able to perform for anyone but himself. Creativity can be a cruel mistress.

 So with this wealth of self-referential material to choose from,  let’s address two Year Zero issues:

Þ       why do writers write?

and

Þ      how do they write what they write?

These key questions will determine how they conceive of literary meaning, and the ways they go about organizing it within their texts. Because meaning, as it reveals itself to the reader,  is all about ORGANIZATION. There, I’ve said it. It’s Big Theme #11, and the subject that’ll concern us for the rest of this section.

b) Why Writers Write

“There are eight million stories in the naked city”, ran the tag line from one of the most celebrated American TV shows of the 1950’s. And that just referred to the hard, fast, gritty, brash, noir-ish city of New York; in every apartment block, behind every door lived a human being with a story to tell, even if it was simply his own biography.

But there’s other places on the planet, particularly those with a rich oral culture, where the air itself seems to be saturated with stories. Travel south from the Big Apple down below the Mason-Dixon line, as Chris and I did, and you’ll find;

The country is one of extravagant colours, of proliferating foliage and bloom, of flooding yellow sunlight, and above all, perhaps, of haze. Pale blue fogs hang above the valleys in the morning, the atmosphere smokes faintly at midday, and through the long slow afternoon, cloud stacks tower from the horizon and the earth-heat quivers upward . . . the influence of the Southern physical world is itself a sort of cosmic conspiracy against reality in favour of romance.

Social historian WJ Cash’s masterful description of a landscape supremely adapted to storytelling is absolutely spot on. Compared to the West of America, where light is bright to the point of harshness, lending clear, sharply-defined outlines to everything it touches, and where the air is either crisply cold or dryly hot, the South is miasmic, imprecise, soporific, damp and fecund. The physical atmosphere has clearly shaped the vision, the outlook even the genre most Southern writers choose to tell their stories. [2]

So the general currency of the South tends not to be social realism or hard-boiled detective fiction - it’s more likely to be the shaggy-dog story, the Gothic, the Baroque - forms which accentuate unreality and exaggeration over the tyranny (as Southerners see it) of Northern city fact. [3] And it’s not delivered in the machine-gun quack of a Brooklyn dweller or the tortured vowels of a native Bostonian - but in the unhurried elongated drawl of someone who not only relishes what he’s saying, but how he’s saying it. Try these for size:

When Chris and I first arrived in Mississippi, we toured Melrose plantation in Natchez whose centrepiece is an outstanding antebellum mansion. Within moments the guide began telling the story of how the original owner’s younger brother disappeared into the nearby woods at the close of the Civil War, where he survived on a diet of nuts and berries for over 40 years. Given up for dead, he made a dramatic re-appearance, louse-ridden and stinking, at a society garden party being held in the grounds, and hurled lewd and insulting remarks at the petrified female guests before vanishing never to be seen again.

Then in Lynchburg, Tennesee, home of the Jack Daniel’s whisky distillery, we learned that the original Mr Daniel, a short man, died prematurely aged 61 in 1911, after kicking his iron safe in a fit of rage. The resulting broken toe turned gangrenous, and being a pig-headed individual he refused all offers of medical assistance - so goodbye, Jack (the killer safe is still there, incidentally, brooding darkly in the corner of its erstwhile owner’s office).

In the Sun Studios museum in Memphis, you find out how the guitar sound that played such a distinctive part in the impact of early rock’n’roll was “invented”. An amplifier fell off the back of a truck carrying Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm to a recording session, so a prompt repair had to be effected by stuffing the perforated cardboard speaker cone with newspaper, and - hey presto - the fuzz-tone guitar was born.

And lastly . . . at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville,  you discover how at the funeral of Faron Young, an over-eager relative emptied the packet of the singer’s ashes upwind of the mourners, and that for several months afterwards Johnny Cash was picking powdery mementoes of his late friend out of various items of the clothing he wore that day.

It’s almost as if stories like these condense out of the air down South, which is one possible explanation why the area’s spawned such a vital literary heritage - and great tour guides. Much of the material comes under the general heading, ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’, an accusation of unbridled fantasy often levelled at Southern novelists by critics who’ve never bothered to venture into Dixie. But it’s all there - and most of the stories owe at least a partial debt to reality. So if you’re in one of those areas of the world like, say, Ireland, Central America or India where storytelling is a habitual, even revered element of the culture, no-one’s going to raise an eyebrow if you choose writing as your main source of income. Which makes the decision to set pen to paper that much easier.

But the ready availability of potential material isn’t necessarily the main reason why writers write; one of my favourite pieces on the subject is by the American novelist Joan Didion, probably because it’s so unassuming. Efficiently entitled ‘Why I Write’, she points out the following:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating, but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

I can find no more honest or succinct appraisal of how writers understand literary meaning.

Footnotes:

1. Most of them aren’t in it for the money: in the UK more than 60% of writers earn less than £10K a year. Either the pay’s crap or they’re being less than honest with the taxman.

2. More of which in a few pages’ time.