A FRIENDLY DISAGREEMENT
A FRIENDLY DISAGREEMENT
I have been a fan J. Robert Lennon’s writing for a while now and was happy to see he had resumed blogging on his author website. In August he wrote:
 ‘I had a very small hissy-fit on facebook this morning when my friend Ryan posted a quote from playwright Jose Rivera. I hated this quote immediately and intensely. I said so on facebook. It made me very mad and I was kind of a prick about it.
The quote comes from Rivera’s quite well known (but not, until now, to me) “36 Assumptions About Playwriting”, and I was surprised to find that I quite like the other 35, even applied to forms of writing other than plays. Among them are “Be prepared to risk your entire reputation every time you write, otherwise it’s not worth your audience’s time.” And, “Strive to be mysterious, not confusing.” And, “Think of writing as a constant battle against the natural inertia of language.” These are all very good ideas, and I might well provide this list to students, albeit with number 15 struck out.
15 is the one I hate. It goes: “Write from your organs. Write from your eyes, your heart, your liver, your ass–write from your brain last of all.”
Oh, boy.’
John goes on to mock the idea that an author’s characters can get away from her, that there are sources other than the self, the brain and, primarily, the intellect, for a book. A book is the work of the brain, the intellect and every other assertion is sentimental. John has always reacted to the idea of inspiration with vituperation. In the post he acknowledges that there may be spontaneous, non-intellectual writing, but that it will only be any good if the intellect addresses it, corrects it. Inspired writing is only good by chance. I will agree with him to an extent. A book is a big project, like building a house or planting a large garden. It doesn’t happen haphazardly, and intention, design, and hard work are the only way it will be any good. But I think he leaves concepts like the ‘intellect’ and ‘the brain’ as he finds them. There is a long and deep history of debate in philosophy, psychology and aesthetics about the role of the unconscious and irrationality in creativity. And there are multiple possibilities here: some writers may have a different process, or some writers may experience and describe the same process in different terms. But there have always been writers who believe that their source of inspiration lies outside of the ego or self, and that their words come from elsewhere. They hear and transcribe what they hear, perhaps imperfectly. And they write from the gut. Jung, while visiting the Navaho, writes that when he asked a Navaho man where his mind was, the man pointed to his solar plexus. Neurology tells us that the brain is actually an organ than includes the entire nervous system. And physics implies that the mind could be penumbral, that the skull is not the actual limit to thinking. All that aside, I would like to argue that perhaps the words brain and intellect aren’t the right ones, but rather the imagination is what does the writing, even if the intellect is the project manager. The imagination is the creative faculty of the mind. It doesn’t exclude intention, rationality, or intellect. But it does include inspiration. If I accept that a story has a beginning, middle and an end, it does not mean that I think of it say as a magnet, with one pole being the beginning and the other the end. The story then would be like steel shavings aligned by the magnetic field. If this were the case a novel would be a simple act of transcription, with the arc of the narrative being inevitable. But a narrative isn’t like this. It’s not necessarily even like an arch, which requires a superstructure to be built until the keystone is in place and the arch becomes self-supporting. An author must imagine so many details along the way that are not inevitable and yet support the overall design. And much can intervene to go wrong. Maybe the right analogy would be organic: the beginning is a seed which contains all of the genetic information necessary to form a perfect plant (the end). But every gardener knows you can’t just plant the seed. This is where intellect comes in: you have to plant it at the right time, in the right soil, and then you have to tend the garden and hope there are no hail storms. That is the hard work of the intellect plus experience, because all novelists have planted gardens and forgotten to weed them, or planted too close or too far etc. But where does the seed come from? And why the hell does the gardener plant a garden when he can go to the supermarket?
Novels, and novelists, have characteristic designs and obsessions that are supra-rational. It is important not to know too much about these things. Moreover, insight into character comes from where? It might be the intellect demanding that characters be real (which in itself is an aesthetic position, a demand of culture and history, separate from the individual writer), but it is the imagination, and physical emotion, the liver, the asshole, that give insight into how a character will feel in the diabolical situations the novelists subjects it to. I am, in a first person narrative, always in character when I’m writing. I am in control. But I am also experiencing a point of view, a world, and reacting  emotionally  to it. The intellect instructs, describes, measures, dictates. But it cannot feel what it is like to lose your mother or cut your finger, even if you have not experienced these things. To portray the full range of human experience, which is what the novel does so well, means working with the physical body in the same way an actor does. And the art of the novel demands constraint. My intellect wants to say things the character cannot. And my intellect forces me to observe the integrity of my character. But my choice of that character is not the product of intellect. The intellect creates and enforces procedures for realizing a story that has wellsprings that are deeper.
On another level, the design of a novel, the metastructure governing the details, is not necessarily a concept of the intellect. It might be that I will decide to use descriptions normally applied to dogs for all of my characters. I will tirelessly, intellectually, force this on every scene. But why am I obsessed with animal nature? What in my make-up requires human animal fusions in my narratives? Why do I always write about drugs? Why are my characters neurotic, with body obsessions? I can’t really answer this. These are questions for grad students. As an author, I work with a whole preset of irrational obsessions. Some of these will be personal and some aesthetic. I like avant-garde art, but I don’t write it. I love the realist social novel of the 19th century, but I don’t write like that. I don’t choose my books the way I choose to eat whole grain foods. They spring from who I am, and who I am is bigger than my ego.
 I can’t dismiss entirely another author’s experience of writing. And I can attest to both the phenomenon of characters moving away from my intention and of a flow of language coming from sources outside of myself. I honor this experience because it is the only way I’ve ever gotten started. Robert Graves distinguished between the Apollonian and Dionysian poet. The Apollonian poet works intentionally from a design whereas the Dionysian poet is inspired by the muse. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy analyzes Greek drama in the same way. Sophokles emerges as the greatest of the Greek dramatists because he is midway between Aeschylus’s Dionysian and Euripides’ Apollonian work. You can trace this back to Schopenhauer’s World as Will (infinite, immortal, unformed) and Representation (delineated, rational and mortal). Longinus’s in his theory of the sublime notes that as a writer approaches sublimity there are distortions of grammar and syntax (much as there are distortions of time and space as you approach light speed), and that he preferred the failed works of sublime authors to the perfect works of quotidian authors. For Blake, the Imagination is a higher, integrative faculty. The Four Zoas is a wild and fascinating ride through the mind, a division that anticipates 19th and 20th century philosophy and psychology. Urizen, Reason, on his own becomes a tyrant, enslaving the instincts (Tharmas), Emotions (Orc), and the Imagination (Los). In Blake’s cosmology, the Imagination is the limit of human perception. In Blake’s cosmology, the Divine and the Human are only separated by acts of intellect that inaugurate a series of downward divisions that result in a world of time and space that can be conveniently measured, in which all matter is dead. His is a theory of alienation. But Blake was a very intentional designer of myths. He created a myth to understand what he perceived through inspiration. Inspiration for Blake is true creativity whereas memory can only reproduce an already existing subject, the difference between giving birth and taking a photograph.
I don’t disagree with John entirely, as I have exhaustively said! Certainly you cannot teach people to write novels with their body parts. A novel is a complex entity that requires experience of life, hard work at craft and discipline. But I don’t think there is a rational explanation for why I sit in a chair for an hour or two a night after work, after making dinner, after washing dishes, in a state of emotional and physical exhaustion exercising not only my intellect but my imagination and empathetic self for nothing other than the satisfaction of having done so, and the weird belief that I will get better at this if I keep working at it. I would not do that for an idea that doesn’t inspire me, a story that doesn’t haunt me constantly, that has pieces I never knew about that fall into place out of nowhere. They may require rearrangement or polish, but the pieces are not always of my conscious invention.
As for teaching, I do wish that sometimes people would teach Emerson’s The Poet to poets. Young people should know that putting a novel together isn’t just building a box with Legos. The greatest art we know invokes the whole person. The Phenomenology of art is magical thinking, alchemical process, the laws of identity and opposition. Aesthetic experience is itself primitive. The most potent aspect of human consciousness, its great vivifying paradox, is the phenomenon of the symbol, of an abstraction, that conjures reality. Five words on a page can make you laugh or cry. And you will remember them at the end of your life. Rosebud.
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