No matter how you cloak your ambitions in ideas of objectivity, meaning is an extension of the self, which is, of course, necessarily partial. As a writer, you’re in love with communicating, but communicating on your terms. Even the most objective author has this personal agenda behind what they write, no matter how much they try and hide their authorial interventions. Or they wouldn’t be writing. No one writes for the void, or, as Didion has it, to impact on nobody. And, as we noted in Big Theme #10, Meaning Is Personal, which is why Didion thinks writers are bullies - the direct link that meaning creates from person to person is a de facto invasion of the reader’s “most private space,” - if they can reach it. They’re exploiting this privileged access to our hearts and minds. And we, of course, let them, because we enjoy letting them in. Literary orgasms all round.

And, of course, the circumstantial meaning of the book as a printed artifact is just as significant for its creator as for those reading it, maybe even more so. As JM Coetzee’s fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello notes, there’s something “undeniable” about it; in short, it both proves she exists and vindicates her choice of profession. Having a book on the shelves of a copyright library like the Bodleian in Oxford or the British Library in London means that;

 . .  . there is at least one copy that will not only be read but be taken care of, given a home, given a place on the shelves that will be its own in perpetuity . . . if I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations.

She acknowledges this need for security is on one level “pathetic”, but that she couldn’t ignore it, and wouldn’t rest until she was sure her first published book had been deposited in the library, safe amid the pantheon of all those other writers that had preceded her. The need to belong, to assume one’s place within a historical continuum is a neurosis most writers would recognize, and is all part of the package of existential anxieties Joan Didion describes.

 Didion admits that she nicked the title for her essay from George Orwell, who performed a similar act of self-appraisal in 1947, in which he says much the same thing, only at greater length. He writes out of:

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all -- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but . . . above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations. [itals mine]

Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political purpose. Using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It’s an honest, although not terribly flattering portrait of the artist that owes a lot to existential theory - the writer writes to impact his personality, views - whatever - on others. It’s also an odd mixture of the ideal, the real and the downright grubby. The need for revenge sits hand in hand with a desire to share the world’s beauty with others; vanity and selfishness proceed in partnership with a desire to make a better world.

But the most important point Orwell makes is his assertion that in terms of meaning, there is no such thing as pure objectivity, which might sound odd coming from a writer whose reputation rests as much on his non-fiction as his ‘made-up’ novels. Everything, he says, bar a railway timetable, has an ‘aesthetic’ element, and that aesthetic element is the way the writer interprets the world and recreates it on paper. [1] In doing so, he’s not so much reflecting the world, but the world as he sees it, the world as filtered through his aesthetic consciousness.

So, for example, Orwell could never agree with George Eliot’s idea that the writer owes a debt to verisimilitude: in her novel ‘Adam Bede’, she proposes that the novel must be as faithful to life as possible, possessing the “rare, precious truthfulness” of “many Dutch paintings”.

In Orwell’s opinion, however, this ambition is delusional: you can never reproduce reality completely accurately because your senses get in the way. And your senses are personal to you. So what he’s effectively saying is that literature can never travel to the furthest left of our Meaning Line. It will always contain a measure, however small, of ambiguity. Because there’s a human consciousness somewhere in the equation. So he’s shaved the extreme left off it. And in any case, there’s a point beyond which literature can’t travel without becoming a string of facts, and reading, say, the phone book in pursuit of meaning isn’t, let’s face it, time well spent. So if we take that on board, here’s what the Meaning Line looks like now:

Fact------------Meaning-----------------------------------------Significance

                        Literature-------------------------------------------------Literature

I don’t think we need bother too much about defining what we mean by ‘fact’, or we’ll be here all day. But there is an interesting concept we can borrow from the language of computing which may help get our thoughts straight.

To a computer programmer, a fact is either “unbound” or “bound”, which basically means it either arrives with or without additional baggage (or what they call “subgoals” or even “logic variables” - what can be interpreted from a fact or what can be built out of a fact respectively). So a fact either stands alone (bound), or has something that props it up (unbound). It either has implications (unbound) or it doesn’t (bound).

What Orwell’s saying is that there’s no such thing as a bound fact in literature, because everything it contains is either there for a reason (because the writer wants it to be there) or carries the potential to be interpreted. So all facts, however much they aspire to being a definitive parcel of unequivocal meaning, are “unbound” by the writer’s aesthetic.

Simply by its inclusion within a literary text, the fact is begging to be assessed, probed or analysed; it already has a number of potential meanings. And when placed together with a second fact, all kinds of perspectives are possible, as any journalist or spin doctor worth his salt will testify. So even Orwell’s own “historical impulse” is suspect - there can be no such thing as what he calls “true facts” to build history from. You can’t deny the authority of fact and then, as Orwell does, immediately re-establish that authority in your very next sentence. As a creator of literature, you can’t have your cake and eat it. Which is why I’m going to let the ‘bound’ fact bookend our Meaning Line, effectively banishing it from our model for the time being, because I don’t believe it exists either.

So what we’re going to be doing for most of this section is look at a number of representative authorial aesthetics (or writing styles) and see how far they reflect/distort/re-cast the facts in their own image, and the means by which the writer achieves this transformation. In doing so, we’ll also begin the process of filling in the Meaning Line, so it becomes more than simply a pairing of opposites. But first, given that we know all meaning is more or less partial, we have to look at three hopelessly involved themes that lie at the heart of the writer’s partiality.

Footnotes: