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.