Sunday late afternoon, having read all the news I deemed fit to read, I was sitting at my desk minding my own business when I decided to check out Arts & Letters Daily.
According to Mary Gaitskill, writing is a
rational process. But great writing comes from a stranger place...more>>
Ooh, sounds cool. Click on more. Forty-five minutes later and having read, per the page progress bar at right of my 'puter, one-third or one-fourth of the essay, I had to stop because my head hurt.
I am a retired lawyer, not as retired as I would like to be, but getting there. To think like a lawyer means, in part, to read like a lawyer: closely, very closely, you can't speed-read the opinions in a seminal case, can't elide the chaff for the wheat as it were, the dicta for the holding. So did I read "The deracination of literature."
See, right at the beginning I was in over my head. I had never heard of Mary Gaitskill and I didn't know the meaning of deracination. We, the profoundly ignorant and talentless, make ourselves known to others by the pathognomone of thinking we know something when we don't. As example--You should know that I started this post that baneful Sunday afternoon, tried again yesterday, and now today.--having read the one quarter or one third of the essay I decided that I had grasped the nettle and could for the benefit of mankind improve upon it by removing certain words which I deemed superfluous. I was conscious that in doing so I was transmogrifying Gaitskill's essay into my own and had drafted a satisfying advisement to the reader; it was to own benefit after all.
Before completing "my" essay I read Gaitskill's a little further and realized I was getting to a depth so over my head that ascent with the easy comfort suggested by late Sunday afternoon setting would be impossible. In other words, I thought I knew something which I decidedly did not. I remember the point of epiphany: It was when Gaitskill read--aloud--there's a tape in the goddamned essay, a passage from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Light, which I had never heard of (Pale Light, OF COURSE I had heard of Nabokov). And, more wincing, the passage did precisely what Gaitskill said it did. She was not in over her head. That I was dunked on by a writer I had never heard of using a word in the title I had never heard of, calling upon the reader's auditory sense as well as his ocular (a matter of first impression for the undersigned; what's she going to do next, scratch and sniff?) and doing so so felicitously bummed me out profoundly
Ms. Gaitskill's essay...I should have written this earlier...is a miracle, Revelation--Behold!--it is of fathomless depth and leaves the reader (this reader anyway) gasping; it is dense, complex, there is meaning nested in meaning, it is spare as an algorithm, clear as a teacher's freshman class lecture notes (Ms. Gaitskill teaches writing (Temple was one of her stops*) in addition to being a novelist)), is free of pedantry, and as how-to on good writing, should be beside every aspiring writer's keyboard.
At least (most of) the first two-thirds. It is a little bit all over the place. The last third or so, with the paragraph beginning "It's true that very few people can write this way..." gets off the amazing writing tutorial. The tutorial portion is contradictory in some key places (see conclusion). When I broke from reading the essay I googled Ms. Gaitskill. She has been a little all over the place in her life, which is not justification and may not be explanation for the confused thought. It just is.
Thus far, unsure of my footing, I have consciously avoided summarizing Gaitskill's writerly guidance. It reminds me of The Garden of Eden, where similarly the unlettered reader first believes he understands and then realizes he doesn't and at the end so many pages are dog-eared and so many lines underlined that understanding comes from the feel you are left with rather than any logical, written summary you could write, which I believe to be fair summary, as far as it goes, of Gaitskill's essay:
...the plot or the theme functions almost like a conduit; an ineffable content which can be compared to a person’s unconscious or the guts of the body; you don’t see the unconscious but you feel it, you may misunderstand it but you feel it.
"Guts" immediately recalls Hemingway's dictum on writing, "You sit over the typewriter and bleed." The difficulty of summarization of Garden, Joyce I would say, Gaitskill's essay, a court opinion, or an algebraic equation is in removing the log that causes the whole Jenga tower to collapse. It reminds me of Professor Michael Sugrue's anecdote of the professor asked after class what War and Peace is about. "It's about Russia," the dumbstruck prof eventually summarized. (Tolstoy was asked a similar question, whether the book was fiction or history. "It is what I had to say in the way I said it," he replied.)
Gaitskill's argument is that there are some things (she argues most of life) in life that cannot be put into words, they are felt rather than processed rationally by our brains; yet, it is the writer's paradox to,
...give words to what is wordless and form to what is formless through creating pictures and images that...make a connection to the deeper body of the story — the viscera or unconscious. (This is one of the places in the essay that I was extremely tempted to alter: In whole context it would be much better by her to say "to make the reader feel" in place of "creating pictures and images." She is trying to get the reader away from the ocular.)
Scratch-n-sniff? Yes, actually. Good writing, Gaitskill argues, must involve more than our sense of sight inputted to our CPU:
Unless you are a surgeon or are the witness to a horrible accident, you aren’t going to see the guts of the body...
She means blood and "guts" literally. Which is bizarre. Hemingway meant "bleed" metaphorically, as pouring out one's soul.
...but if you touch the person you will feel them beating under your hand — on a hot day you might even smell them.
Nested meaning: Gaitskill's inclusion of her in her soundclip reading Nabokov was conscious "writing" that worked in understanding Nabokov's talent and Gaitskill. We hear the woman's voice.
Has anyone besides my daughter ever thought of writing a novel from just the sense of smell? Poe wrote Footfalls from a blind man's auditory sense only. How about smell? Have you ever read the descriptions of scented candles? Here are some: "Laundry Day"; "Lakeside Morning"; "Summer Boardwalk." Nothing more need be written! We all have olfactory "memories" of those. Bed, Bath & Beyond, with words, makes us smell. Or “This Smells Like My Vagina” by loopy, gloopy, gross Gwyneth Paltrow.
Ms. Gaitskill reads aloud another passage from Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People. The conclusion is foreshadowed by the recited portion,
Which you don’t remember by the end of the story and don’t need to. Because you’ve felt it…Another place that I snipped-and-cut initially is this, an old bookseller in Ann Arbor who gave the young student Mary Gaitskill a definition "that I have never forgotten":
He considered style to be the “inevitable by-product” of the writer feeling their way through the shape of their creation, through word choices and small decisions as well as big ones. I didn’t like the term “by-product” because it didn’t sound central enough — style mattered to me even then — and he said that he meant it in the way the appearance of a plant or flower is the by-product of its most essential inner workings, that there is simply no other way for the flower or plant to look according to its genetic structure.
I do not like "by-product" either; the completed thing, book or flower, is the product; I don't like "product," it's too industrial. What are the specs for this widget? "Creation" would be better, what I would have said in my essay, but this is Gaitskill's. Fundamentally, I don't like "style"! What style is this flower? "Art for art's sake": don't ask what a post-war painting is "about." A post-war painting just is. Like a tree. What's a tree about? It's not about anything, it's just a tree! Trees and flowers and post-war paintings make you feel, you don't understand (or misunderstand) them rationally. They are post-rational, this is the art of post-writing writing: "the most powerful writing uses words in a way that transcends language." Finally, I don't like the plant analogy. Too biological. Too "inevitable." There is nothing inevitable about the finished novel. If there were there wouldn't be drafts. There wouldn't be waste baskets, paper-shredders, erasers. The finished novel is a creation:
Writing is a rational process of connected thoughts and ideas, but great writing comes from a stranger place; an interface between the intensely intimate perception of an individual and the social and natural worlds. It is related to the rational mind but in a way that dreams are related to thought —poetically and irrationally. It is through poetic and irrational means that the unseen world of your story gets radically illuminated, like a burst of music can illuminate a scene in a movie...
Hand me my scissors. "interface," snip. Too Silicon Valley; "unseen", snip; "illuminated," illuminate", SNIP, SNIP. Cutting those out, that could have been my essay. She misses it: music. Music does not fucking "illuminate." What is she thinking? Music is the one art-form that bypasses the mind entirely and goes straight to the soul. We feel music. Music is a creation that makes us feel through our ears. That is consistent with the central thread of Gaitskill's essay and would have been far better analogy than her muse's plant. But, it's her essay.
*I went to Temple Law School. She also was married to a writing professor, then and current, at the University of Pittsburgh. I quit for the night last night after reading that.
