It keeps happening. I keep finding parallels in visual art with the way poets and writers talk about their process. While most art makers have their own “narrative” of what is going on and how their work comes into being that could be questioned as a kind of handy fiction all its own, I still find sparks of recognition when I read or hear those “behind the curtain” confessions.
Here are two cases in point just from today’s reading. First, a 3 minute video of Sharon Olds discussing the fact that she is often referred to as an autobiographical poet. Here is a quick discussion of similes, metaphors and her claim that she does not have an imagination, but an “image-ination”:
Second is from an article about David Foster Wallace in the latest issue of The New Yorker. While I am not particularly drawn to DFW’s work (his prose feels like walking into a pub that’s too noisy to carry on a conversation and one guy with a booming voice has completely taken over) but D. T. Max highlights some memorable comments made by Wallace about his work:
The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”
So Wallace’s project required him to invent a language and a stance of his own. “I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff,” he wrote to his editor Michael Pietsch while he was working on his second novel, “Infinite Jest,” which Little, Brown published in 1996. He knew that such proclamations made him seem a holy fool. In the interview with McCaffery, he said, “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies . . . in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.” He also said, “All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.”
“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.”
Yes. Yes.
Some of the best things I’ve ever heard from DFW. Glad you connected too.
I read that article, having the same non-relationship with DFW’s fiction as others who didn’t read him much, and rarely liked what they found when they did read. It seems to me he had transferred to the shoulders of fiction many of the tasks of living life. Oh, more than most writers do, I mean. If you demand of your own fiction that it be about what it is to be a human being, that is cracking the whip over something that must happen anyway, whoever you are as a writer. It’s true, when you write or read a good sentence, you do feel less alone — you have participated in something very deep. But to live with the condition of doing that rarely is to understand art, and press on anyway. As Rilke wrote, of the devastating failure of art, “In happiness art is a jewel; in sorrow an iron door.”
“But to live with the condition of doing that rarely is to understand art, and press on anyway.”
Hmmm. Maybe. I think we tell ourselves this all the time, comfort ourselves with the idea that very little of art or writing arrives at something great. We know that most plods along in its own mediocrity, failing to ever say or render the feeling intended. And giving oneself permission to fail is so often a necessary condition of continuing the writing or the artistic life.
But as a writer, I don’t go around actually believing this. I can’t. I wouldn’t work this hard, reading like a lunatic, drafting like a lunatic, pushing myself into the brink of all that scares me, if I truly thought I’d never carve out some essential part of what it means to be human. I have to believe–each and every time I go at it–that this is the piece that will push into greatness. That I’m capable of it at any time.
I know this sounds arrogant, but I’ve never known a really good artist or writer who wasn’t. Perhaps Rilke got it backwards; I must confess that I’ve thought he was a piss-poor poet.
VV, This really moved me:
I wouldn’t work this hard, reading like a lunatic, drafting like a lunatic, pushing myself into the brink of all that scares me, if I truly thought I’d never carve out some essential part of what it means to be human. I have to believe–each and every time I go at it–that this is the piece that will push into greatness. That I’m capable of it at any time.
I don’t know how else to describe that relentlessness that I feel every single day of my life whether I’m in the studio or not. I wish that were the only qualification for being a really good artist since that alone is just not enough. But it does feels instinctual, like it belongs to me and has been in me from the start. Maybe something along the lines of what Denis Dutton has proposed in The Art Instinct.
VV, I’m so sorry you don’t like Rilke, and hope that loss will be made up to you in some way, especially if you ever come to feel it as a loss. I must say I have NO idea how my remark got construed to mean asking little of yourself as an artist while giving yourself plenty of fail-room. That would be enervating indeed. There is something to be working for beyond one’s own greatness, however — that is, beyond one’s own sense of one’s greatness, since so many artists have worked without that sense, and yet achieved greatness. Cezanne died saying, “I have not realized…” — meaning, I have not made it concrete. Virginia Woolf wrote about the job of a novelist — to get herself “expressed.” I have noticed how few great artists have gone on record with the ambition to be great — maybe it’s just too much of a given to be topical.
Elatia, I have a funny feeling that we’re mostly in agreement here but slipped into one of those holes where we end up talking past one another. I think you’re absolutely right that most great artists wouldn’t dare go on record flaunting ambitions for greatness. And I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t worry all the time that everything they’ve ever done is utter shit. I just think that the thorny underside of all this is that most of the great ones bemoan their failures while quietly and simultaneously reaching for a greatness they nonetheless believe possible for them. After all, what is any act of creation if not an extraordinary leap of faith? I take this to be what Deborah means by “relentlessness,” and of course it alone is not enough, and perhaps that is a blessing as well as a curse.
What a coincidence. Although I rarely read the New Yorker, I too read the wonderful sketch of DWallace. Travelled to it by way of several web links. I also found this link to a commencement address he gave four years ago: http://goaheadsueme.blogspot.com/2005/05/david-foster-wallace-at-kenyon-college.html. He gives another clue to why his writing is exactly as you describe it. I love his explanation of why studying the liberal arts is important and I am going to use it when students grumble to me about the humanities requirement here at the UofU.
Janet, Thank you so much for this link. It’s so good I have had to write another posting on DFW.