How the writer sees the world: three little words; ‘above’, ‘within’ and ‘onto’

To a greater or lesser degree, every writer is building his or her own world from the moment they commit words to paper or screen. In fact, as Joan Didion goes on to argue in her article, without the ability to express herself in words, she couldn’t make sense of her imaginative life: [1]

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron [a redundant particle accelerator housed in a huge building near Didion’s childhood home] burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

Didion wants to know why her editorial eye gives significance, and possibly meaning, to certain things and not to others. Why has her imagination lighted on these images - and ugly ones at that - for transfiguration? Why did she unconsciously choose to endow the bevatron with significance over, say a bunch of flowers? She wasn’t looking for significance - seems like it came to get her. So was it the result of:

Þ      the intervention of an outside agency (inspiration?) that made her see it

Þ      some quality inherent in the bevatron itself that chimed with her

Þ      some pre-existing inclination in herself that chimed with the bevatron

In short: Where Does Meaning Live in the writer’s world, and just who’s in charge of it? Is it ‘out there’ waiting to be drawn down? Is it ‘in there’, contained within the physical world, waiting to be teased out?

Or is it within the writer, waiting for an appropriate vehicle to be projected onto? It’s not often remarked on, but the use of these spatial metaphors to ferret out where meaning lives plays a crucial role in the way we understand it.

Of course the study of meaning contains a strong philosophical bias, but that philosophy has ultimately to be expressed in words, and because meaning isn’t something you can see or touch, we’re forced to describe its origin and location metaphorically. And each of these spatial referents comes complete with its own set of intellectual baggage which colours out vision of what the writer actually does, and therefore what literature is.

Let’s examine the proposition that meaning is a function of ‘inspiration’, and I’ll show you what I mean.

Q: Where is it often said inspiration comes from ?

A: Above.

Q: What exists ‘above’ us?

A: The Divine.

Q: If meaning emanates from a divine realm, what’s it going to be like?

A: Transcendent. Mystical. Inspirational.

Q: How do you commune with the Divine?

A: It tends to get in touch when it wants to, although prayer can help.

Q: In what form will it communicate with you?

A: Revelations. Epiphanies. And, of course, Inspiration.

Q: So what does that make the artist?

A: A messenger. A medium. A priest. A spiritual leader.

Q: Whose job is . . ?

A: To lead his audience up to meaning. Or to draw meaning down so his readers can share it.

When “inspiration” enters the discussion, a set of associations tends to crowd into the mind based on how we define the word “above”, because that’s where inspiration is commonly thought to come from, and has done since antiquity. As we saw in Part 1, this was the model for meaning among the philosophers of Ancient Greece; meaning was a gift from the Gods, and consequently the role of the artist carried weighty social and religious responsibilities. And while this meant that there was a dominant moral component to meaning, it also meant that literature had its own inbuilt divine authority, which of course gave your writing added credibility. Not a bad trade-off. So in this example, we can see how it’s not just meaning that’s influenced by the spatial metaphor, but the writer as well. He’s beloved of the Gods, and would be responsible for passing on the meaning of the bevatron, which had was already pre-ordained by the powers that be on Mount Olympus (and Zeus naturally knew everything about nuclear physics, because, as King of the Gods, he invented it). So the writer sits between the Gods and us mortals, explaining their divine purpose to those who are not as tuned into it as he is. But he’s pretty much in the dark as to why he’s writing about a particle accelerator. And so would you be. But he doesn’t need to know why he’s writing about it, because he’s being instructed to by his Muse, whose loyal servant he is.

So how about meaning that’s within the physical world, and needs bringing out? For a start, this implies a more ‘active’ intervention on the part of the artist - but the nature and degree of that intervention is will also colour our ideas of what the writer brings away from the encounter:

If the meaning of something actively ‘announces’ itself to the writer, his role is to notice and to record it in his art. So while there may not be a great deal of authorial intervention in the relationship, it differs from our ‘inspirational’ model in that the perceived world already possesses a physical independence, an autonomy that doesn’t rely on an outside agency like the Gods for its meaning. The bevatron is first and foremost a bloody great ugly piece of technology. Of course, the writer may wish to ponder on the significance of this bloody great ugly piece of technology and work outwards from there, but whatever meaning the writer chooses to draw from it, the bevatron will have selected itself simply by being there,  rather than the writer selecting the bevatron to embody a meaning he’s using to make a point.

Which is essentially out third category of spatiality, projecting meaning ‘onto’ something. And that this is something we looked at in Big Theme #4, when we discussed ‘organic’ meaning vs ‘manufactured’ meaning. So when Joan Didion noticed the bevatron for the first time, she didn’t know why she’d noticed it. But she is, of course, at perfect liberty to use it as, say, a vehicle for discussing green issues. And, as such, it would be an excellent metaphor. But she could just as easily have felt the urge to discuss green issues, then seen the bevatron, and then decided it would be a good starting point for a story about the rape of the countryside. In that case, the bevatron would have lost its autonomy; it would be a cipher onto which Didion is projecting her own preoccupations. And, of course, our picture of the writer’s role will change too; he’s not a conduit; he’s not a recorder or interpreter - he’s essentially God, because the world exists to be moulded to suit his purposes. So he’s naturally more important because of that.

Three little words - above, within and onto - three different conceptions of meaning, each entirely different from one another, yet, as I say, hopelessly intertwined. And in much literary criticism they’re used as metaphors almost interchangeably, which means that Mr Critic is assuming too much if he a) doesn’t acknowledge these distinctions exist; or b) takes it for granted that as readers, we know where he’s coming from on this issue.

So what we can draw from this little canter in speculative philosophy is that as an artist, you may feel any or all of the following:

Þ      the world, or ‘reality’ dictates how you write about it;

Þ      the world and your art are equal partners in forming your literary world;

Þ      your art is the world.

And precisely Where Meaning Lives (and it might share all these three different addresses) is our Big Theme #12, and will pretty much eat up the rest of this section.

So when writers write about writing, they repeatedly ask themselves how much they ‘own’ the world within their art - how much they’re passively  reflecting what’s already ‘out there’, or how much they’re involving themselves with what’s already out there, or how much they’re actively forming it from what’s inside them. [2]

Meaning Line again:

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

                   Ownership                    Partnership                                Inspiration        

                   Forming                                          Involving                                    Reflecting

       As with most oppositional schemes like this, the majority of writers will fall towards the centre, occasionally being drawn left or right, depending on the artistic ambitions they set for themselves and their meaning. So you could write a simple equation to define the middle column along the lines of Writer + World = Meaning, just as we did in the previous section when stating that Reader + Text = Meaning. And this  tendency to hover around the centre is elegantly summed up by the American poet Robert Lowell, who once wrote that;

 . . . the author is an opportunist, throwing whatever comes to hand into his feeling for start, continuity, contrast, climax and  completion. It is imbecile [sic] for him not to know his intentions and unsophisticated for him to know too explicitly and fully.

So that puts him smack dab in the middle of our Meaning Line. What Lowell’s saying is that it’s possible for the writer to know too much or too little about his craft, and, by implication, how his meaning will be interpreted. He will either be too much in control, strangling its resonance (which he considers “unsophisticated”), or else he’ll allow his meaning to be too pregnant with possibility for the text to yield any kind of sense (which is “imbecile”). Lowell continues;

Nor is it [the author’s] purpose to provide a peg for a prose essay. Meaning varies in importance from poem to poem, and from style to style, but always it is only a strand and an element in the brute flow of composition. Other elements are pictures that please for themselves, phrases that ring for their music or carry some buried suggestion.

So Lowell’s ideal would be;

a)  to incorporate elements of meaning that are directly comprehensible, together with other effects from which the reader may derive other, less rational forms of pleasure, and

b) for the author to be in a state of informed ignorance or unconscious knowledge of what he’s up to. He has to be aware, yet somehow unaware of his aesthetic - both at the same time.

It’s a wonderfully contingent and, as we’ll see later, utterly impractical compromise of the kind we looked at in the case of the Washington monuments at the close of Part 2. It’s all to do with creating ‘room’ for meaning to exist within the text: create no room and you’re crowding the reader with your own authorial presence; create too much and you’ll lose both him and yourself. So to avoid either of these possibilities you have to juggle both of them. Without looking.

Footnotes:

1. And she wasn’t alone: EM Forster once famously asked, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”