Masturbatory Writing? Informational Writing? Beautiful Writing?

Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoyevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate with words, loving them as I do?" She never answered these questions. If readers' response over the last 75 years means anything, however, then it has answered for her: yes, she writes from deep feeling, and yes, she fabricates with words. She revels in words, and why shouldn't she? Doesn't everybody who loves literature revel in words--their sounds, the way they align, crystalline, to form a sentence, how they look in their clean black stacks on a page? Woolf's writing has the quality of beauty at the level of construction: the poetic prose, recurring images that thicken her writing with significance. Her writing is a pleasure to read aloud, just for the sound, the way her words dance like thousands of butterflies skipping on their spindly legs over every crevasse and slope of her subject. It is through the beauty of her writing that her subject is illuminated to us; her words are not just the vehicle to the subject, but the light by which we may see it.

But by "fabricate with words," Woolf meant that she worried that the immense pleasure words give her causes her to write purely for that pleasure, rather than to write for the purpose of conveying meaning. She worried, in other words, that writing was for her merely an abstract form of masturbation--a "soul masturbation." Her prose might glitter (and then her readers would derive a voyeuristic satisfaction from being witness to her masturbatory pleasures), she thought, but that might be all it does. My question is: which writing is more ideal, the kind that, like Woolf's writing, both revels in its own pleasurable-ness and is richly textured with meaning, or the kind that perpetually effaces itself in order to direct the reader's attention solely to the subject?

Just as we must eat food in order to procure nutrients, we must somehow imbibe text to procure certain kinds of knowledge. This analogy is valid only to a point, but I think it is useful for exploring this question, for now. Let's line up Melville and Eliot, and Woolf and Hemingway, and compare what kind of textual 'meals' each author serves. Melville--in a very different way than Woolf, of course--seems to have lost himself in his words, meaning, he gave himself to the pleasure of his words and his story; he utterly indulged himself (but in masterful fashion; he knew what he was doing). George Eliot: same thing. (Melville and Eliot, however, delighted most in details, in giving the details their due on the page; Woolf revelled more in beauty and roundness in the prose itself--the details were subservient to that aim.) I think of Eliot's and Melville's novels as like sumptuous dinners--a giant ham or roast in the middle of the table, and all kinds of puddings and breads and pies and creamed this or that, one after another and all at once and you have to take a nap afterward, you're so stuffed. Woolf's novels read like fine cuisine--a bisque or souffle or crisp arrangement of greens; everything just so, flavored just so, the portions just enough for satiation, arranged just so on the bone china plates. Hemingway is the classic example of self-effacing prose. Or, really it's not self-effacing, it reads as though each word knows what it is, what it can do, why it's there, and tries to be no more or no less than that. "Hello, nice to see you," his prose addresses the reader, shaking hands briefly, and then it turns its attention back to whatever it was doing before you came along, but compellingly, invitingly, without ego or drive, so you feel you can join it in its activity without imposing or without being cajolled into a level of involvement that doesn't suit you. Eliot and Melville wag and lick and caper like big country dogs. Woolf stands before you, arches an eyebrow, points at society and laughs at it with crisp, subtle, earnest wit. After eating/watching Woolf (and it's both) you want to think, to cut to the chase, get to the bottom of things, all in wry good humor. Hemingway...his writing is like a dinner I used to order at an Irish pub in Boston: it was called the "Irish supper," or something like that, and consisted of about a quarter of boiled cabbage; two peeled, boiled carrots, not cut; a few thick slices of corned beef; and two or three small potatoes, also peeled and boiled. And that was that. Simple, good, filling--an evening meal. Sated, I could move on to other things: conversation, study, walking along the river, bed.

So, after admittedly masturbating with words and analogies here myself, returning to my question: are any one of these kinds of writing more ideal, more "meaningful," than the other, or are they, like different foods and cuisines, equally "nourishing"?

Unfortunately I'm going to have to cop out again, and leave off not having answered my question. It's because I'm going to need to theorize, and that takes a lot of time and thought that I do not have right now. I am going to ask a lot of questions here, I think, and then gradually, they will be answered as I write. My hope, of course, is that eventually folks will stumble onto this site, and start offering up their own ideas, some of which I'll reformat as a posting all its own, all of which I will respond to. I must admit I relish throwing out questions, watching and listening to other people thrash around with them, and only then jumping in there myself and thrashing around alongside everyone else. I like to watch a question grow into a kind of communion among people: who knows what shape the communion will take? That shape is as much an answer as any one person's contribution--probably more. I love seeing what happens. Here I am, after all, in this wonderful virtual sandbox. I can see others playing in other sandboxes and I don't know how to call out to them to come play with me. One last question: is the internet the appropriate medium for this? Or something, someplace else? These are the questions driving this blog: you'll see what I mean (I hope) in the next few postings.

The Anti-Paragraph Coalition

There appears to be some kind of Anti-Paragraph Coalition at work here on blogspot.com. My postings all begin their existence with paragraph breaks and even block quotes, but when I release them to the stacks of Academy of Readers, they become one long, long block of words--"elongated," one person very kindly said, "like a Modigliani." The difference, of course, is that Modiglianis are lovely to look at, whereas my unbroken posts are visually overwhelming. Until I learn the art of the blog paragraph break, I can only apologize for my postings' appearance. And until I learn the art of conciseness in all my writing (and speaking!), I can only say, Bear with me: I'm working on it.

Passion, Living Literature, and Acts of Imaginative Courage

Where, exactly, does passion fit in with the reading of literature? The simplest answer to this question is that you don't just read literature, you live it--and insofar as passion implies fierce commitment, focus, desire and a heightening of the senses, passion is necessary for reading richly, just as it is necessary for living richly. Although the first posting is atypical in comparison to the "welcome letters" or "Editor's Notes" found in many periodicals, it is close (I hope) to the kind of introduction Academy of Readers requires. It is, no doubt, imperfect as a piece of writing; nevertheless it enacts the difficulty (as I feel it) of living literature to a T: feeling so much, being overwhelmed by wave upon wave of visions and sensations and impressions and a constant panoply of external stimuli, and then needing somehow to account for those waves by releasing them--in art, perhaps, or sharing them in other ways. My own experience of this emotive abundance is like this: I feel I need to present myself to the center of the world, as in the middle of a vast park full of people milling about, napping, playing sports, and give over my entire heart like releasing a dove, or like handing out flowers from an ever-renewing bouquet--and doing this not because I want to impose myself or my point of view on people but because it seems right that this enormous energy and overabundance of whatever-it-is (joie de vivre? Love?) be disseminated, because it feels so wonderful and is harmless, like a kiss, unasked for, unexpected, from an unknown, unseen source that asks for nothing in return. Annie Dillard said it better than I have. This is from her memoir, An American Childhood: “What can we make,” she begins, “of the inexpressible joy of children?” Dillard continues:
"It is a kind of gratitude, I think--the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being--whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.
"Any way you cut it, colors and shadows flickered from multiple surfaces. Just enough work had already been done on everything--moths, say, or meteorites--to get you started and interested, but not so much there was nothing left to do. Often I wondered: was it being born just now, in this century, in this country? And I thought: no, any time could have been like this, if you had the time and weren’t sick; you could, especially if you were a boy, learn and do. There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn." (in Three by Annie Dillard, pp. 382-83, about a third of the way into the memoir)
She goes on to recount how at age ten she tried to fly in plain view of everyone in her neighborhood. “I knew well,” she says, “that people could not fly--as well as anyone knows it--but I also knew the kicker: that, as the books put it, with faith all things are possible.” She knew she wasn’t actually going to fly, but she understood that liberation lay not in accepting the limit or doggedly striving to break it, but rather in running along that limit, that edge dividing the possible from the impossible, that edge from which all creative activity derives. Her anecdote concludes:
"I crossed Homewood and ran up the block. The joy multiplied as I ran--I ran never actually quite leaving the ground--and multiplied still as I felt my stride begin to fumble and my knees begin to quiver and stall. The joy multiplied even as I slowed bumping to a walk. I was all but splitting, all but shooting sparks. Blood coursed free inside my lungs and bones, a light-shot stream like air. I couldn’t feel the pavement at all.
"I was too aware to do this, and had done it anyway. What could touch me now? For what were the people on Penn Avenue to me, or what was I to myself, really, but a witness to any boldness I could muster, or any cowardice if it came to that, any giving up on heaven for the sake of dignity on earth? I had not seen a great deal accomplished in the name of dignity, ever."
“I couldn’t feel the pavement at all.” So she did fly, after all: by desiring something beyond what was possible, all while knowing that it was beyond the possible, she opened up a space inside herself and her world that could incorporate a desire or vision of limitless magnitude, limitless strength. Typically this space goes by the name of “faith,” but to me that word fails to capture the intensity that the space requires. When someone urges you to “have faith,” he or she is urging you to trust that what seems impossible will become possible, or that despite something remaining impossible, everything will turn out fine. But often there’s greater creative, spiritual strength to be gained when one must mourn and accept impossibility while simultaneously trusting that if something can be desired or imagined, it must already exist in some form; it must already be possible. Young Annie Dillard, for example, desired flight, imagined it, accepted the impossibility of it, and then discovered the flight of the spirit, an uplifting of the self on the wings of courage. It’s like reaching through the boards of an endlessly high fence enclosing a magic barnyard, and filching a single golden egg. You don’t have the golden goose, but having the golden egg on your side of the fence--the side of “reality,” of “practicality,” of “empiricism” and “possibility”--presents the possibility of the existence and acquisition of the goose that laid the golden egg, even while it is impossible to actually have that goose (just like it was impossible for Annie Dillard to actually fly). Creative liberation is gained, I think, when you can say like Annie Dillard said, “_____ is impossible. But I want _____ no less.” You are not giving up in saying this, but rather shifting focus away from the desired thing itself and towards what in yourself makes you desire that thing. You thus learn to tolerate a state of yearning in yourself, and to work creatively from that yearning place. That is what it means to run along the edge dividing the impossible from the possible. Only there does the edge reveal itself as artificial, and the impossible and possible bleed into one another. Rather than call this tolerance of yearning “faith,” I call it “imaginative courage”: you inhabit the world as it is, but you know that more is possible--and why do you know? Because you desire it to be more, and if you desire it, then already it’s no longer impossible. You’ve made a breach, you’ve crossed that edge, you look foolish, and knowing that, you continue forward with unshaken conviction. THAT is what it means to live literature.
Whoa, you say. Where does literature enter into this? Literature resides on that edge; you could say that literature enacts that edge between the possible and impossible. Its foundation is the world as it is, but its orientation is towards what’s not in that world that could be there, i.e, desire orients the story towards the thing that cannot be, and in so doing it elicits the possibility that it can be. So basically you could say that literature is the writing of our yearning, of our desire. To live literature, then, is to live by that desire, to consciously use our desire as a means to navigate our lives, and thus everything takes on the quality of a piece of literature, its beauty, its direct access to the human heart, its insight. When you have an ecstatic feeling about a particular moment--whether alone or with others--and you think, “I must somehow capture this moment; I want to have it forever!”, that’s you living literature. You become a reader of that moment, and of your desire to have that moment again. And if you have a turn for writing, you will record that moment, and build from it so that a reader can experience what you felt in that moment, but as his or her own feeling, his or her own desire. Thus everyone comes to inhabit that edge dividing the possible from the impossible; they inhabit it not through literature, but through and among themselves.
Let me pause for a moment to say I hope I’ve written clearly enough so that some sense is to be found in this. I worry with every sentence that my mind, rather than having been improved, has been ruined by all the theory--psychoanalytic, literary, cultural--I’ve been buried in over the past several years. Anybody have thoughts on the influence of theory on how you see, on your intuition? Does it train intuition, or clog it? But back to my subject: so you see there is a tremendous problem with discussing literature, because what are we discussing? Intellectual ideas depicted in books through a story? Ourselves? Psychology? And if so, whose psychology? The question is, how to get to the meat of the book, if its meat is that volcanic edge we inhabit with the book? In the past several years I’ve participated in some truly fabulous discussions about literature. These discussions were intellectually captivating, and more than that, they were inspiring, and opened my mind, freed my soul, because they taught me to see more deeply--not just to see a particular thing; they expanded my faculty of sight, so that I could gain more not just from that book, but from everything I did, from the study of literature to how I interact with my loved ones to the range of moods with which I greet each morning. Learning how to see more deeply is invaluable, but what was always lacking from these discussions was that we didn’t carry out our discussions from within that edge--we didn’t flap our arms and run full-speed down the streets in full view of strangers who might ridicule us; rather, we remained safely nestled on the side of the possible. Meaning: we didn’t share our passion with one another; we didn’t take that risk. You could say that we did share our passion, in that we all chose to be there and contributed in such a way as to produce an inspiring discussion--but I would counter that no, we spent the whole time immersed in the book, and never once turned toward one another in active engagement through our passion.
Is it because it’s too difficult, it requires too much and is too risky, that we don't interact through our passion more than we do? With that, I’m going to sign off, though I realize I am cutting off mid-idea. But, life calls. I’ll pick up where I left off when I return. Thanks for reading.

Welcome

Welcome to Academy of Readers! If you, like me, are intimidated by screens, keyboards, and conversations with strangers whose names we might never know or whose faces we might never see, then I invite you to imagine this blog into something more comfortable for you. It could be a friend’s party, and a handful of you meander out onto his balcony and wind up in an impassioned discussion of Shakespeare, forgetting the rest of the party, your brimming martinis, the chilly air, the moths beseechingly circling the halogen floodlights. The conversation does not have to be about Shakespeare, but whatever its subject, when you travel home at the end of the night, you feel rich, expanded, inspired--you look in front of you and see lights and swirls of color as hope plunges and soars, and satisfaction stretches, reclines, murmuring “yes yes yes” without stop. The impassioned discussion, you think, tickled, massaged, and invigorated every part of you, even rubbed clean those cobwebby parts in the shadows and corners that choke up your soul with ennui. But even as you fall onto your bed in perfect satiation, some ghost trace of you leaps up and rushes out into the night, crying, “More, more! I must feel this again! I must act on that long-ignored dream! I must tell so-and-so I love her/him! I must…I must create this feeling again for myself, every day, so that I don‘t waste a minute, so that on my dying day I can say I did not just do do do, I really lived, my eyes were open!” I want Academy of Readers to excite and touch you like any truly worthwhile experience will do.

Here I’ve gotten all carried away, like a nervous, over-eager host. My sole excuse is that literature is an outlet to me not only for rigorous analytical exercise, but also (and not separately) for every inarticulate yearning, sorrow, joy, and passion I have ever felt and will feel. I feel like I can thunder like a giant around books, be a bull and make impossible demands (love them to decrepitude like so many velveteen rabbits, elicit life in them, vivify my life), and the books are meant to, and must, withstand everything. And all that intensity elicited by and brought to books…I do not know how best to articulate it. I do not know how best to share it with others, and engage them in conversation about it. It often seems to me that the richest, most interesting way to discuss literature is through formal and rigorous study of it in an academic setting. But in that setting, literary discourse too easily becomes brittle and impotent, bold words full of promise that is never realized; it all degenerates into hubris the way a drowned body bloats like a sponge but is dead dead dead. I am not someone who feels hostility towards theory; theory excites me as an impressive aggregate of sophisticated lenses that enhance the naked eye of shared human experience. But without an acknowledgement of and conscious working within an experience of sensual reading, theory, along with its subject, crumbles into meaninglessness. I do not think the sensual reading experience—what elsewhere in this blog I call “passionate reading,” among other things—receives its due in the academic discourse surrounding literature. Disdain curls the lips of colleagues into scorpions’ tails if anyone dares ask, “But what does this passage in the text make you feel?” I dream of a literary discourse that holds “intellect” to be an exquisite marriage between analytical rigor and emotional receptivity, linear reasoning and intuitive logic, and thoughtful and scrupulous discipline and lightning-flash imagination. Such a discourse would never conceive of dispensing with close reading; reading would be elevated to an Art, an act of creation, not a laying of train tracks for the latest theoretical trend. Such a discourse would be its own institution, aptly named the Academy of Readers--as opposed to being dubbed the "English Department" or "Department of Comparative Literature." So I dream it, and this blog aims to initiate the invention of this discursive institution, one word at a time.

Though I may post only sporadically, the concept of an Academy of Readers is always at the forefront of my mind. I am admittedly uncomfortable with the blogging medium, being much more accustomed to private writing notebooks and writings shared only when they exhibit some semblance of cohesion. I do not promise cohesion in my postings; that will come as the language takes shape around the idea of an Academy of Readers. I invite any readers to post comments, suggestions, thoughts, dissentions and questions liberally; ideally I’d like this blog to develop into a community of passionate readers.

Again, welcome, and thank you for reading.