![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatWhile reading a few essays by Jonathan Franzen last night in his collection: How to Be Alone, I stumbled upon a few interesting passages and quotes, that I'd like to save and comment on.
"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with the work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follow it around?" -from William Gaddis's first novel The Recognitions (1955), as quoted by Jonathan Franzen in his essay "Why Bother?" which first appeared in Harpers in 1999, in a slightly different format. He's reworked it for this collection.
In other words the view that the work should speak for itself. We should not need to interview the people involved with it and ask their intent. We should not require a Q&A with the author. And to be honest, I've rarely enjoyed such things often finding the author to be uncomfortable discussing his or her work, uncertain of it, or unconscious of what the reader noted. The interaction between reader and words happens in the reader's mind not the author's. I was reminded of this again, recently, when I watched an old episode of a TV series on DVD, then watched a portion of the writer's commentary - the episode was deliberately written in a stream of consciousness manner to the extent that the writer admits he was not aware and still is not aware of what he meant by many of the images. Since he is commenting on the episode long after the fact, two years to be exact, and has no doubt forgotten much of the creative thought process - it is even harder to determine what, if anything was his original intent.
Franzen responds to the quote, stating that at first he felt the need to let his work speak for itself and refused to discuss it. Then realized that it was counterproductive and states:
"Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone somewhere, expects your voice to be loud. Silence in the 1990s seemed only to guarantee that I would be alone."
This I can identify with - since it is also my modius operandi, when I get upset, feel rejected, angry, uncertain of my world - my initial response is to pull back from it. I've won many arguments with my brother, by removing myself from the scene. Becoming silent. You don't want me? Fine. I deprive you of my voice, my words, myself. Gone. This however is only useful if people care and how can they care if you are silent? Also, it is the height of arrogance to think they would. Usually all it accomplishes is cutting me off from the world.
Franzen goes on to state that "Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."
He adds: "Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community with print, requires solitude, after all."
And he's right, I think, writing is a solitary practice and not something that you can really do in a group - unless of course you write collaboratively or are a journalist - which is a completely different type of writing. Novel writing in of itself is a solitary sport. Just as novel reading is. Movie watching, television, theater can all be group activities - seen en mass or as a social event. But to read a novel, you tend to retreat inside yourself. You and it are alone together.
But it's an odd relationship - because, as Franzen states, "Reader's and writers are united in their need for solitude , in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness."
What an interesting Catch-22, you are alone when you read, yet you aren't - since you are engaged with another's words, another's views. Franzen, wrongly, I might add, believes that the internet and the computer pulls people away from writing and reading. Yet as we all know, you can read and write a great deal on this medium and while it is populated by non-readers and non-writers, it is equally populated by those of us who are both. And we, like the novel reader, are united in our pursuit for a way out of loneliness, yet by the same token a need to be alone.
While depression can arise from "loneliness", people who are depressed do not write novels or even want to read them - at least according to Flanner O'Connor, in a quote that Franzen reproduces towards the end of his essay:
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to experience.
Having been depressed, I can attest to the truth of that statement. But as Franzen states the cure is not wanting to feel bad anymore, to shift from "depressive realism" to "tragic realism." Or to realize that point of the novel may not be to change the world, but to preserve a thought or experience. It may even be to provide the writer and reader with a sense of freedom. To break out of the solitude of their own thoughts. To see them out there, floating, inside another's mind.
Here's a portion of a quote taken from Don Dellilo, author of Underworld and White Noise who states:
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will not be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
Don Dellilo also states, earlier in the quote, that "writers lead not follow. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind not in the size of his audience." A statement that gives me hope since like Franzen, I too worry about the size of my audience, even if I have yet to get my writing published in a forum other than an online one.
Writing in of itself does not create social change. This is a theme in M. Night Shyalaman's film Lady in the Water, where the writer is told he won't change the world but a person who's read his words and been inspired by them, will. It is not about change. It is about preserving what has happened or what is inside us at the time we write it. Art cannot change the world - but how someone reacts to art can.
In a later essay entitled The Reader in Exile, Franzen quotes another writer, Nicholas Negroponte from his book, Being Digital ( a collection of his Wired magazine columns),
"In explaining his decision to publish an actual book, offers a surprising reason for his choice: interactive multimedia leave too little to the imagination.By contrast, he says, the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader's imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you."
I remember talking to someone recently about novels being adapted to the screen. They stated that they did not want to see a particular favorite become a film, because they preferred how they saw the characters in their head to how the filmmakers may envision them. When we read - we interact with the words in a way that does not exist with other art forms. We create the pictures and interpret their meanings. Pictures can also have multiple translations and interpretations, but not in the same way as words. After all some words don't translate into another language. Coca Cola had to change their name - the beverage and pictures of the beverage stayed the same - but the name had to be changed when it was marketed in certain Asian countries.
Later, in the same essay, Franzen discusses quotes from the essayist, Sven Birkerts, who wrote an essay entitled "Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age". Birkerts, according to Franzen, sees "Books as catalysts of self-realization and books as sanctuary: the notions are paired because Birkerts believes that 'inwardness, the more reflective component of self', requires a 'space' where a person can reflect on the meaning of things. Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best tracing the subleties of this state."
Direct quotes:
1. Regarding the reading of a novel or start of one: "I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide."
2. "The domination by the author' has been, at least until now, the point of reading and writing. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another."
Oh, and Franzen concludes his essay with this line: "The first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone." Which in of itself, may be why I bought the book.
I think these quotes gripped me last night, fairly late, depending on your internal clock, because they meshed with many of my own feelings regarding writing and reading and the odd need to explain them.
For me, writing and to an extent reading provides me with a certain degree of control. Not a lot mind you. Our control over our own lives and environments even who we associate with and love is extreemly limited. We really only control how we choose to reacte to circumstances presented to us, and even that is often based on factors beyond our control - ie. how we feel, our physical condition, our knowledge, amount of information we have at our disposal, and whatever it is we are reacting to. We do not control how others perceive us, intrepret what we say, and react to it. I've spent an entire year struggling with how others percieve my actions, which half the time have been so far off kilter, the perception, I've wanted to scream in frustration. Until finally I've come to the conclusion that I can't be responsible for how they perceive me. All I can do is try to make my point clear. And hope things work out in the end.
Novel writing is somewhat freeing. More so than writing on this forum or by letter or email, because there is no interaction. When you write it, it is just you and words initially. No one else. Then, when you do release the work to a small group of people initially - it still has limited interaction and yes, the blood pressure goes up just a tad in anticipation of the reaction. When you sell it, unless you have a blog or invite reactions/responses from your readers - you really don't know how they related to it. You and the reader never really meet - except through the words and it is a one-sided communication. Both have control and neither has to worry too much about hurting the other. The writer controls what is on the page, and the reader controls the extent to which he or she reads and digests it.
When I want to feel safe, I read. But I can't always write to feel safe. Although I'll admit I often use novel writing as a means to find that safe place. Where I am in control. I will lash out at the things that plague me in life upon the page of my work, disguising them. Knowing that whomever reads them, most likely won't know what prompted the story or work. I've been in creative writing workshops and seen how others interpret my work and others - more often than not they come up with ideas and images I never intended. Projecting themselves on to it.
I told a friend last week that explaining the drive to write to a non-writer is a bit like explaining eating a rich flourless chocolat cake to someone who does not have a sweet tooth and does not like chocolat. They don't get it. And you might as well be speaking a foreign language with words that cannot translate.
Yet, through novel writing you can find a way to explain. It is a way of communicating beyond just a few words and phrases. And there are numerous novels and essays written about the writing process.
Reynolds Price - "Learning a Trade"
Stephen King - "On Writing" and his short story "Omny's Last Case
Jonathan Franzen - "How to Be Alone"
Margret Atwood -"The Blind Assassin" - a book within a book
AS Byatt - "Possession" about two poets and two scholars
Lousia May Alcott - "Little Women" - about a woman who adores writing and struggles to become a novelist
Ian McEwan - "Atonement"
For me, writing is about control, freedom, escape, release....the release of emotion bottled up inside. I am an emotional writer, because I do not believe in suppressing emotion - when I do, it bottles up inside me and makes me ill. So I release it in words. Yet I also control what I write, edit when I wish, cut, delete. And through my writing I escape my problems, my fears, my anxieties.
When I write I feel sometimes as if I am flying. There are no boundaries but the ones I choose to set and when I feel truly free, I don't care if anyone is reading or if they are how they are responding. That doesn't happen all the time though. Lately, the past four days at least, I did not feel free, felt self-conscious, trodding lightly. But today, I do.
How the reader responds is up to the reader. I think. If they read at all.
"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with the work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follow it around?" -from William Gaddis's first novel The Recognitions (1955), as quoted by Jonathan Franzen in his essay "Why Bother?" which first appeared in Harpers in 1999, in a slightly different format. He's reworked it for this collection.
In other words the view that the work should speak for itself. We should not need to interview the people involved with it and ask their intent. We should not require a Q&A with the author. And to be honest, I've rarely enjoyed such things often finding the author to be uncomfortable discussing his or her work, uncertain of it, or unconscious of what the reader noted. The interaction between reader and words happens in the reader's mind not the author's. I was reminded of this again, recently, when I watched an old episode of a TV series on DVD, then watched a portion of the writer's commentary - the episode was deliberately written in a stream of consciousness manner to the extent that the writer admits he was not aware and still is not aware of what he meant by many of the images. Since he is commenting on the episode long after the fact, two years to be exact, and has no doubt forgotten much of the creative thought process - it is even harder to determine what, if anything was his original intent.
Franzen responds to the quote, stating that at first he felt the need to let his work speak for itself and refused to discuss it. Then realized that it was counterproductive and states:
"Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone somewhere, expects your voice to be loud. Silence in the 1990s seemed only to guarantee that I would be alone."
This I can identify with - since it is also my modius operandi, when I get upset, feel rejected, angry, uncertain of my world - my initial response is to pull back from it. I've won many arguments with my brother, by removing myself from the scene. Becoming silent. You don't want me? Fine. I deprive you of my voice, my words, myself. Gone. This however is only useful if people care and how can they care if you are silent? Also, it is the height of arrogance to think they would. Usually all it accomplishes is cutting me off from the world.
Franzen goes on to state that "Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it."
He adds: "Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community with print, requires solitude, after all."
And he's right, I think, writing is a solitary practice and not something that you can really do in a group - unless of course you write collaboratively or are a journalist - which is a completely different type of writing. Novel writing in of itself is a solitary sport. Just as novel reading is. Movie watching, television, theater can all be group activities - seen en mass or as a social event. But to read a novel, you tend to retreat inside yourself. You and it are alone together.
But it's an odd relationship - because, as Franzen states, "Reader's and writers are united in their need for solitude , in their pursuit of substance in a time of ever-increasing evanescence: in their reach inward, via print, for a way out of loneliness."
What an interesting Catch-22, you are alone when you read, yet you aren't - since you are engaged with another's words, another's views. Franzen, wrongly, I might add, believes that the internet and the computer pulls people away from writing and reading. Yet as we all know, you can read and write a great deal on this medium and while it is populated by non-readers and non-writers, it is equally populated by those of us who are both. And we, like the novel reader, are united in our pursuit for a way out of loneliness, yet by the same token a need to be alone.
While depression can arise from "loneliness", people who are depressed do not write novels or even want to read them - at least according to Flanner O'Connor, in a quote that Franzen reproduces towards the end of his essay:
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to experience.
Having been depressed, I can attest to the truth of that statement. But as Franzen states the cure is not wanting to feel bad anymore, to shift from "depressive realism" to "tragic realism." Or to realize that point of the novel may not be to change the world, but to preserve a thought or experience. It may even be to provide the writer and reader with a sense of freedom. To break out of the solitude of their own thoughts. To see them out there, floating, inside another's mind.
Here's a portion of a quote taken from Don Dellilo, author of Underworld and White Noise who states:
Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will not be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.
Don Dellilo also states, earlier in the quote, that "writers lead not follow. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind not in the size of his audience." A statement that gives me hope since like Franzen, I too worry about the size of my audience, even if I have yet to get my writing published in a forum other than an online one.
Writing in of itself does not create social change. This is a theme in M. Night Shyalaman's film Lady in the Water, where the writer is told he won't change the world but a person who's read his words and been inspired by them, will. It is not about change. It is about preserving what has happened or what is inside us at the time we write it. Art cannot change the world - but how someone reacts to art can.
In a later essay entitled The Reader in Exile, Franzen quotes another writer, Nicholas Negroponte from his book, Being Digital ( a collection of his Wired magazine columns),
"In explaining his decision to publish an actual book, offers a surprising reason for his choice: interactive multimedia leave too little to the imagination.By contrast, he says, the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader's imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you."
I remember talking to someone recently about novels being adapted to the screen. They stated that they did not want to see a particular favorite become a film, because they preferred how they saw the characters in their head to how the filmmakers may envision them. When we read - we interact with the words in a way that does not exist with other art forms. We create the pictures and interpret their meanings. Pictures can also have multiple translations and interpretations, but not in the same way as words. After all some words don't translate into another language. Coca Cola had to change their name - the beverage and pictures of the beverage stayed the same - but the name had to be changed when it was marketed in certain Asian countries.
Later, in the same essay, Franzen discusses quotes from the essayist, Sven Birkerts, who wrote an essay entitled "Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age". Birkerts, according to Franzen, sees "Books as catalysts of self-realization and books as sanctuary: the notions are paired because Birkerts believes that 'inwardness, the more reflective component of self', requires a 'space' where a person can reflect on the meaning of things. Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best tracing the subleties of this state."
Direct quotes:
1. Regarding the reading of a novel or start of one: "I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide."
2. "The domination by the author' has been, at least until now, the point of reading and writing. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another."
Oh, and Franzen concludes his essay with this line: "The first lesson reading teaches us is how to be alone." Which in of itself, may be why I bought the book.
I think these quotes gripped me last night, fairly late, depending on your internal clock, because they meshed with many of my own feelings regarding writing and reading and the odd need to explain them.
For me, writing and to an extent reading provides me with a certain degree of control. Not a lot mind you. Our control over our own lives and environments even who we associate with and love is extreemly limited. We really only control how we choose to reacte to circumstances presented to us, and even that is often based on factors beyond our control - ie. how we feel, our physical condition, our knowledge, amount of information we have at our disposal, and whatever it is we are reacting to. We do not control how others perceive us, intrepret what we say, and react to it. I've spent an entire year struggling with how others percieve my actions, which half the time have been so far off kilter, the perception, I've wanted to scream in frustration. Until finally I've come to the conclusion that I can't be responsible for how they perceive me. All I can do is try to make my point clear. And hope things work out in the end.
Novel writing is somewhat freeing. More so than writing on this forum or by letter or email, because there is no interaction. When you write it, it is just you and words initially. No one else. Then, when you do release the work to a small group of people initially - it still has limited interaction and yes, the blood pressure goes up just a tad in anticipation of the reaction. When you sell it, unless you have a blog or invite reactions/responses from your readers - you really don't know how they related to it. You and the reader never really meet - except through the words and it is a one-sided communication. Both have control and neither has to worry too much about hurting the other. The writer controls what is on the page, and the reader controls the extent to which he or she reads and digests it.
When I want to feel safe, I read. But I can't always write to feel safe. Although I'll admit I often use novel writing as a means to find that safe place. Where I am in control. I will lash out at the things that plague me in life upon the page of my work, disguising them. Knowing that whomever reads them, most likely won't know what prompted the story or work. I've been in creative writing workshops and seen how others interpret my work and others - more often than not they come up with ideas and images I never intended. Projecting themselves on to it.
I told a friend last week that explaining the drive to write to a non-writer is a bit like explaining eating a rich flourless chocolat cake to someone who does not have a sweet tooth and does not like chocolat. They don't get it. And you might as well be speaking a foreign language with words that cannot translate.
Yet, through novel writing you can find a way to explain. It is a way of communicating beyond just a few words and phrases. And there are numerous novels and essays written about the writing process.
Reynolds Price - "Learning a Trade"
Stephen King - "On Writing" and his short story "Omny's Last Case
Jonathan Franzen - "How to Be Alone"
Margret Atwood -"The Blind Assassin" - a book within a book
AS Byatt - "Possession" about two poets and two scholars
Lousia May Alcott - "Little Women" - about a woman who adores writing and struggles to become a novelist
Ian McEwan - "Atonement"
For me, writing is about control, freedom, escape, release....the release of emotion bottled up inside. I am an emotional writer, because I do not believe in suppressing emotion - when I do, it bottles up inside me and makes me ill. So I release it in words. Yet I also control what I write, edit when I wish, cut, delete. And through my writing I escape my problems, my fears, my anxieties.
When I write I feel sometimes as if I am flying. There are no boundaries but the ones I choose to set and when I feel truly free, I don't care if anyone is reading or if they are how they are responding. That doesn't happen all the time though. Lately, the past four days at least, I did not feel free, felt self-conscious, trodding lightly. But today, I do.
How the reader responds is up to the reader. I think. If they read at all.
