Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: The Faustian pact with the devil is nothing but giving up originality, isn’t it? And vice versa, a painter, Wyatt, manipulated into selling his soul, giving up originality, is bound to be Faustian, besides being emblematic of the artist’s position in a corrupt, manipulative, counterfeit world. Is this a correct interpretation of Wyatt’s central function as a Faust figure?
William Gaddis: It is, yes, originality also being Satan’s “original sin” if you like. I think also, further, I tried to make clear that Wyatt was the very height of a talent but not a genius — quite a different thing. Which is why he shrinks from going ahead in, say, works of originality. He shrinks from this and takes refuge in what is already there, which he can handle, manipulate. He can do quite perfect forgeries, because the parameters of perfection are already there.
—“The Art of Fiction No. 101,” The Paris Review, Winter 1987
Writers, if you can call them that, are cowards. They are afraid of being too different from one another. Easily the most pernicious lie they tell themselves is that they have a calling — that they belong to a metaphysical caste with others like them in some ineffable way. This quality may not be something within their powers to describe, as they’d be the first to admit, but that won’t stop them, for they are writers. They will find the words. By an irritating logic, writers may be accidentally correct in this belief of a species-wide likeness, the likeness being that silly belief.
When there is no writing out there to speak for itself, the writer talks about writing. Maybe they write a story about it. Or an essay. Or they read a story/essay about writing, which is an elegant way of avoiding writing, because it provides a writerly fog that nearly simulates writing itself. It’s all very tiresome, because of course you can’t properly write about writing — you just drone on about “the process,” or your close attention to the texture of this world, or your drinking problem, or whether MFA programs destroyed the craft (as if there was anything to destroy). Leaving aside the obvious benefits of a good writing workshop — deadlines, clashing viewpoints, sex — it’s clear they feed the fantasy that writers can coexist at a single set of coordinates. They allow a frivolous, narrow habit to resemble a vocation.
This has already been written about, exhaustively, and writing about it further will only encourage more of that same writing. When a writer writes what we’ll call a book, that book is pitched and sold as a book in the model of other books that came before, and the writer is identified as a writer happily related to several successful writers. This is utilitarian shorthand after a fashion, but it also reinforces the fear of originality. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis blurbs its author as both “heir to the shredding wit and poignancy of Dorothy Parker and the shrewd surrealism of Donald Barthelme” (Donna Seaman, Booklist) and a writer whom there is “no one like” (Catherine Holmes, The Post and Courier). Well, which is it?
Admitting that language succeeds through contagion and mutability, it seems redundant to insist that no writer is truly original. But in despairing at that unattainable, likely unpublishable ideal, writers retreat too hastily into the traditional romans-á-clef, the same stunt journalism that a cycling of taste demands. The reasoning appears to be: if you can’t be a unique writer, have the markings of a generic. Glamorize your squalid room in the bohemian part of a bright metropolis. Peddle opinions on the books you read (if you read). Consort with other writers.
Except how friendly can two writers be? They are jealous of each other’s luck, scornful of each other’s methods. Slander flies thick behind backs. And because writers can focus on the business of books while overlooking books themselves, there is little need to have arguments about what has actually been written. Instead of Nabokov gleefully demolishing Dostoyevsky’s idea of the psyche, or David Markson noting mystic “bullshit” in the margins of DeLillo’s novels, it’s an unpacking of a critique of the hyperbole around Jonathan Franzen. This would be writing, not feeling.
What dark, original feelings writers have — and suppress in the interest of community — are purged as the calculated outbursts of token enfants terribles and bitter old cranks (the former smoothly becoming the latter, as Martin Amis can attest). To parse a book’s account of reality, consciousness, and time is to fly too close to the sun; the stakes are simply too high. Better to pigeonhole the prose style. To fetishize the small, lovely sentence. To address the writer’s eccentricities off the page, which he or she is transparently eager to name. Writers, assigned to write about other writing, skip over the gut reaction to nitpick, evading the biggest questions posed. Frightened of their problematic voices, they adopt synthetic tones, stripped of all that troublesome bias but saddled with its outcomes regardless. A century after William James, no one will confess to having a temperament.
You could have ignored the remarks above, and no harm would have befallen you. They are not especially provocative, in that there is nothing to provoke. It is unclear who should actually care what they mean. None of them are meant to suggest that things used to be different, or will soon change, because who knows how things used to or will be. Writing is just what some people do, whenever they stop writing about it. It is an art, as Gaddis had it, for which we can set the parameters of perfection. Why we should want to is, for the moment, beyond answering.
Image credit: design.mein/Flickr
Oh, I hear you. I've been a subscriber at different times in my life, and just subscribing is quite a burden. You know there's something great in each issue, but you've only got a week to get to it, or they start piling up.
And that's what they've always done for me. Pile up. That's more pressure from a magazine than I can handle, at least right now. Who wants to be hassled by a stack of unread magazines?
Agreed. I used to subscribe to The Believer (McSweeney's lit mag) and found that even at a monthly rate I couldn't manage to read everything.
Instead, I was lucky enough to work someplace with a guy that brought the New Yorker to work. He would leave them, and I would take them. They're stacked up in a pile on my bookshelf. Now, if I have any desire to read the magazine, I can go downstairs and grab an old one.
No obligation. No deadlines. Just great articles.
Let's say I am very into literature and politics and forget how much I am into music because I can get coverage for most of the latter online. Is the New Yorker the ONE magazine I should subscribe to? How does it stack up against Harper's (now THAT always piled up on me!)? And is it affordable? This is also the only literary blog I read and I love it. I've read some works based off of reading reviews or mentions on here and then Amazon has been pretty good with leading me through the maze of recommendations for me to find other great reads as well. But if there is a literary blog(s) that comes close enough to snuff as The Millions I would love recommendations too. Or I could quit being lazy and start clicking all them damn links over yonder there on the right. Cheers!
p.s. Does anyone else love Etgar Keret as much as me?
May the day of unsubscribing never come! I've felt that piling pressure in the past too, believe me, but because I write about it, lately I've been pushing myself to read everything in the issue every week. It's surprisingly gotten a little easier each time–there's room for other books and magazines, too. Josh, I'd say yes, it's the one magazine you should subscribe to, since all of Harper's is free online. And it doesn't have to be expensive; I know a few people who've found good deals on those discount-magazine sites.
I'm a fan of The American Scholar, too, though I know there was a lot of dissent about the change in editorship, etc.
Don't worry—there's still time for withdrawal to set in. ;)
I heart the New Yorker too. If only they sold lifetime subscriptions!