The internet has transformed modes of social discourse. There's a truism if ever there was one, surely. Blogging, twitter, social networks and forums are so integrated into everyone's consciousness that it seems inconceivable that they have been around for less than a generation. And repeatedly we hear how they have utterly transformed the ways humans interact, ushering in a new, interconnected age.
Well yes, but I am firmly of the view expressed in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. The ways human beings interact, established over millennia, can't have changed over such a short period of time, can they?
Part of the issue is that we seem poorly equipped actually to get a clear understanding of the scale on which the internet operates. It has been suggested that humans struggle to establish a meaningful concept of a number even as big as 100, so an internet with a total number of users in the billions is simply too big for us to come close to conceptualising. The same is true of distance. We have evolved to have pretty good understanding of distances up to maybe 15 miles- the distance we can see, or can easily walk in a day- but beyond that we struggle. Aeroplanes and high-speed trains don't help of course and even cars compress distances to the extent that it is hard to remember just how far it is between places. We repeat frequently that it is a small world, but no it isn't. Try walking round it.
However what the internet does allow us to do is to tune out these problematic issues of scale. The process of engaging with computers provides an illusory but comforting sense of privacy and intimacy- of things happening on a human scale. Occasionally it is disrupted of course, such as when someone with whom one is conversing on an internet forum says that it is too late to address an issue right now when in fact it is 8am and you are just wondering what to have for breakfast. The same uncomfortable jolt comes when someone shares a link on FaceBook and as you click on it you see that 37,942 others 'like' this.
Fundamentally though, the internet allows us to pretend that we are in communication with others at an entirely human scale- it is what makes it so seductive. And what happens as a result, I believe, is that we simply replicate ancient structures of social interaction through the medium of high-speed broadband. The clues are in the words we use to describe the process, many of which point us in some surprising directions.
Take the word 'blog' for instance. It covers a multitude of sins but its etymological origins, from the log a sea captain used to keep, points to one of the purposes of weblogs. They provide a record of a journey. At the time of writing it is of course impossible for a sea captain to tell what may or may not be important to record, but he (pretty much exclusively 'he' in those days) has to record it anyway. So logs can be repetitive and mundane, leavened with the occasional touch of humour and seasoned with plenty of shipboard gossip, or they can chronicle momentous, turbulent and life-changing events.
Not all blogs are like that of course. Celebrities, authors, actors and the like blog to enhance their 'platform.' Again it is interesting that a word has been chosen from another era, because the means and the motivation are actually very similar to Charles Dickens' when he took to the platform in theatres around the country to recite from his books and impress his audiences with his wit, erudition and presence. So today those who wish to be heard take to a platform of their own creation. It is much easier than in Dicken's day because you don't need to book a theatre or print show-bills. On the other hand there are so many platforms around that it becomes like Hyde Park corner on a busy bank holiday with about as much chance of establishing an audience that actually sticks around.
Another form of internet-based discourse is what used to be called chatrooms. Of course that word barely exists any more and I think it is interesting to ponder on why that it is. The reason I think is simple: the concept of chatrooms has no real world equivalent. Who builds a special room simply for people to chat in? And if they did, who would go to it? So the word chatroom has largely been replaced by the word 'forum,' and that of course has a much more august and ancient pedigree.
I have been to the forum in Pompeii and was struck by how big, but also how open, unadorned and lacking in any focal point the Roman forum was. However it was not until I started participating in internet forums that I began to get a clear sense of what Roman forums must have been like. Initially baffling, they are in fact a demonstration of the functioning of a chaotic and noisy form of democracy. There are generally many threads of conversations going on and participants can stick with one for a while then wander off and participate in others. Some will rant and declaim and get excitable but other participants in their conversations will generally drift away, or perhaps call the harassed moderators to eject the excitable ones from the forum. Not everyone has equal status of course, and some stalk the forums sporting their imperial togas of five-figure post counts. Occasionally one of these makes an announcement, though it is rare for this to have any significant effect on the myriad conversations that proceed all around them.
Nevertheless, despite the apparent chaos, forums do generally reach vague sorts of consensus, at least over the key issues they discuss. I lived in rural India for two years and participated in a couple of village forums, called to address some issue of concern. It was utterly unlike any sort of European concept of what such meetings are like- there was no chairman, no agenda, little effort to keep the discussion to one issue and no vote at the end. I was baffled to the extent that I never even knew at the end what decision (s) had been taken, but in retrospect what those meetings were very like was internet forums.
The most interesting of all though, in terms of replicating social structures, is Twitter. For years I refused to engage in Twitter, scoffing at it as the verbal effluence of self-indulgent wankers with too much time on their hands. It won't last, I repeated sagely. It's a flash in the pan. I was wrong of course. Even kids are starting to use Twitter and that means it probably will last. But why?
Again, the clue for me is in the name. Because actually Twitter replicates social structures that pre-date the development of humanity itself. Birds such as starlings or sparrows (like many other social animals) twitter incessantly when they come together. A host of the latter or a murmuration of the former raises a din that it is hard to ignore. At first listening it comes across as a cacophony, with each participant simply making incessant noise to the extent that one wonders how any of them can bear it. Yet the twittering has a purpose of course. Some of it is self-promotion, with each participant vying to show how loud and tuneful (substitute hip and witty) they are. Some is for reassurance, so each can hear a constant stream of tweets from those around them, making them feel secure and wanted. Some, no doubt, is the transmission of gossip (if only we knew enough bird-language to follow it) with great strings of participants retweeting particularly loud or tuneful tweets they have heard. These trends can ripple through the flock so that briefly every way you turn you hear them, but generally they die away quickly into the background hubbub.
All this of course provides a backdrop that seems to instil each participant with a sense of belonging in a wide variety of different fluid and overlapping networks, all part of a vaguely glimpsed whole that is of itself too big for any participant to develop a meaningful concept of it. Some participants are particularly loud and forceful of course, and many other participants always have half an ear cocked for their particular tweets in the (to an outsider) incomprehensible cacophony of noise. Those alpha participants with a particularly strident (or tuneful) voice can have their every tweet amplified across the flock, but that does of course make them a target too, because the flock does not accept a leader.
And just occasionally the alarm is raised. When danger is at hand it only takes one participant to spot it and tweet about it and with the speed of thought suddenly the whole tone of discourse of the flock can change. Some will continue their mundane twittering as if nothing had happened but the more alert participants retweet and amplify until soon the flock is tweeting with something very like a single voice. And that can be a very impressive thing to witness.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Applying literary theory to sporting contests
Why do people watch sport? Not a question you would think was in any way relevant to this blog, unless you believed that great sporting contests share many of the features of great literature.
So to return to the question. For some, of course, the reasons are self-explanatory and nothing to do with literature. There are the active sports(wo)men who study contests to improve their own game or to relate more closely to their role models. Then there are those who define themselves so strongly in terms of their fandom that they would never miss a match in which their team is involved. But what about the rest? What about the millions who routinely tune in to watch sporting contests simply as an alternative to another rerun of The Great Escape on a Saturday afternoon? What do they see in sporting contests that keeps them watching?
It was my sister who first put me onto the notion that sporting contests have much of the same structure and inherent narrative drive as great literature. Not necessarily the same sort of literature for each sport of course. Premier League football matches for me are like soap operas- episodes are scheduled regularly and, though each episode stands more or less alone there is a clear sense too of a narrative with longer timespans. Matches are peopled with a large cast whose key members are instantly familiar and whose onscreen and private lives it is sometimes difficult to untangle. The most exciting episodes end with a cliffhanger but there are frequently long periods which superficially resemble ordinary life (i.e. Sunday kickabouts) but are actually too carefully scripted for that.
Cricket matches are a different sort of literature altogether. More like rambling Victorian novels they seem initially immensely dry and tedious but then draw you in to their intricate web of tension and uncertainty. They are conveniently divided into four volumes, all involving the same characters and each leading into the next, though it is possible to engage with a single volume on its own. Sometimes the narrative is almost unbearably claustrophobic as line and length bowlers seek to pin the batsmen back and the poised, judgemental slip cordon looks on with ill-disguised glee. Occasionally a batsman seeks to break free, challenging the constricting bounds of social acceptability with a four or even a six, but we know that in the end conformity will win through and (s)he will be out. They will allow their defences to be broken down by the relentless accuracy of the jibes directed at them or they may be caught in the very act of social transgression itself and made to slump dejectedly to the poorhouse or debtors' prison that awaits beyond the boundary.
The Tour de France is perhaps closer to a Tarkovsky film, impenetrable to the uninitiated but redolent of pain, desperation and fear. Days follow a relentless, repetitive cycle whereby a small group launch themselves off the front of the peloton, ride themselves into exhaustion through the pitiless beauty of the alpine roads, temporarily burying their differences and working together in desperate, and nearly always doomed, attempt to stay away. In the peloton itself riders take turn at the front, burying themselves (it is a cycling term) to drag the hordes behind them. We see into their faces and can read nothing. Why do they do this? How do they keep going in the face of the pain that is destroying them? We do not know. We cannot know. Yet the road stretches on, relentlessly.
Yet it is tennis that is perhaps the purest example of sporting contest as work of literature. There is a protagonist and an antagonist held together in a fundamental conflict. Action progresses through a series of small conflict-resolution cycles, all set in the framework of the central conflict and building towards a final resolution. The best matches even follow the classic Shakespearean five-act dramatic structure (it's why women's tennis really should be in five sets too).
Of course the question of who is the protagonist and who the antagonist is often a moot one, but focusing on it makes very clear just how similar a tennis match is to a Shakespearean tragedy. You see I don't think it depends on who you support, but rather on what you believe the stakes to be.
Take the recent Murray/Federer match for instance (not a proper five-acter I know, but you can't have everything). Clearly you could see Murray as the protagonist. A tragic story of a nation pinning their collective hopes on a flawed but brilliant hero. Can the truculent Scot conquer his demons and lift the pall of humiliation and despair that has blighted the nation for 76 years? Er, no.
On the other hand you could see Federer as the protagonist. This is the old chief, beaten almost into submission by the young, fit but ultimately soulless pretenders who have sought for so long to topple him from his rightful throne. For long and long he was down. Defeated and destroyed. Made to look old and out of touch and beyond redemption. Yet he has arisen again. Can he drive the barbarians from the gate one last time? Can his guile and his artistry, honed over the long bitter years of his reign, banish the energy drinks and the motivational coaches from his kingdom? Hell yes.
So there you go. I was hooked anyway. Or I would have been if I hadn't been trying to finish my novel at the time.
So to return to the question. For some, of course, the reasons are self-explanatory and nothing to do with literature. There are the active sports(wo)men who study contests to improve their own game or to relate more closely to their role models. Then there are those who define themselves so strongly in terms of their fandom that they would never miss a match in which their team is involved. But what about the rest? What about the millions who routinely tune in to watch sporting contests simply as an alternative to another rerun of The Great Escape on a Saturday afternoon? What do they see in sporting contests that keeps them watching?
It was my sister who first put me onto the notion that sporting contests have much of the same structure and inherent narrative drive as great literature. Not necessarily the same sort of literature for each sport of course. Premier League football matches for me are like soap operas- episodes are scheduled regularly and, though each episode stands more or less alone there is a clear sense too of a narrative with longer timespans. Matches are peopled with a large cast whose key members are instantly familiar and whose onscreen and private lives it is sometimes difficult to untangle. The most exciting episodes end with a cliffhanger but there are frequently long periods which superficially resemble ordinary life (i.e. Sunday kickabouts) but are actually too carefully scripted for that.
Cricket matches are a different sort of literature altogether. More like rambling Victorian novels they seem initially immensely dry and tedious but then draw you in to their intricate web of tension and uncertainty. They are conveniently divided into four volumes, all involving the same characters and each leading into the next, though it is possible to engage with a single volume on its own. Sometimes the narrative is almost unbearably claustrophobic as line and length bowlers seek to pin the batsmen back and the poised, judgemental slip cordon looks on with ill-disguised glee. Occasionally a batsman seeks to break free, challenging the constricting bounds of social acceptability with a four or even a six, but we know that in the end conformity will win through and (s)he will be out. They will allow their defences to be broken down by the relentless accuracy of the jibes directed at them or they may be caught in the very act of social transgression itself and made to slump dejectedly to the poorhouse or debtors' prison that awaits beyond the boundary.
The Tour de France is perhaps closer to a Tarkovsky film, impenetrable to the uninitiated but redolent of pain, desperation and fear. Days follow a relentless, repetitive cycle whereby a small group launch themselves off the front of the peloton, ride themselves into exhaustion through the pitiless beauty of the alpine roads, temporarily burying their differences and working together in desperate, and nearly always doomed, attempt to stay away. In the peloton itself riders take turn at the front, burying themselves (it is a cycling term) to drag the hordes behind them. We see into their faces and can read nothing. Why do they do this? How do they keep going in the face of the pain that is destroying them? We do not know. We cannot know. Yet the road stretches on, relentlessly.
Yet it is tennis that is perhaps the purest example of sporting contest as work of literature. There is a protagonist and an antagonist held together in a fundamental conflict. Action progresses through a series of small conflict-resolution cycles, all set in the framework of the central conflict and building towards a final resolution. The best matches even follow the classic Shakespearean five-act dramatic structure (it's why women's tennis really should be in five sets too).
Of course the question of who is the protagonist and who the antagonist is often a moot one, but focusing on it makes very clear just how similar a tennis match is to a Shakespearean tragedy. You see I don't think it depends on who you support, but rather on what you believe the stakes to be.
Take the recent Murray/Federer match for instance (not a proper five-acter I know, but you can't have everything). Clearly you could see Murray as the protagonist. A tragic story of a nation pinning their collective hopes on a flawed but brilliant hero. Can the truculent Scot conquer his demons and lift the pall of humiliation and despair that has blighted the nation for 76 years? Er, no.
On the other hand you could see Federer as the protagonist. This is the old chief, beaten almost into submission by the young, fit but ultimately soulless pretenders who have sought for so long to topple him from his rightful throne. For long and long he was down. Defeated and destroyed. Made to look old and out of touch and beyond redemption. Yet he has arisen again. Can he drive the barbarians from the gate one last time? Can his guile and his artistry, honed over the long bitter years of his reign, banish the energy drinks and the motivational coaches from his kingdom? Hell yes.
So there you go. I was hooked anyway. Or I would have been if I hadn't been trying to finish my novel at the time.
Monday, 9 July 2012
Online writing forums and the development of the writer's 'voice'
Online writing forums are wonderful things. Really they are. I use Absolute Write a lot but I am sure there are tons more. Sure they eat up time and lots of the writing is mediocre and some of the opinions and advice unhelpful. But these problems are massively outweighed by the tremendous benefits of putting writers in touch with each other, letting creativity and talent magnify and grow and feed off each other.
Well sort of. Because inherent in these forums (fora? I'll settle for forums) are a series of contradictions for an aspirant writer to navigate. There's the tension between mutual congratulation and one-upmanship for instance. Almost by definition the people who contribute the most to these forums are those who have yet to achieve real success as writers. This provides for a sense of community certainly, and there is a lot of genuine emphasis on mutual support. On the other hand it is very hard not to seek weaknesses in everyone else's work, simply because it makes you feel better, and as the phenomenon of internet trolling has shown, the distance that the internet provides does allow for a higher degree of cruelty than would be possible in a face-to-face encounter. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes that sort of directness is the only thing to make you realise that what you have submitted is actually pretty shit.
Another tension is around the reasons people spend their time on these forums. On the one hand they are an invaluable tool in the service of a writer wishing to improve their style, both by having their work critted and by critting that of others. On the other it is perfectly clear that being on the forum is a guilty pleasure for most- something they do when they should be working. They become big online societies like any other, with their humour, their letting off steam, their politics and their feuds. All fascinating to absorb yourself in and a great way to put off writing.
But for me the biggest contradiction is around the issue of 'voice.' For those not in the writing and/or reading world (though why on earth you would read this if you weren't...) voice is the indefinable but essential quality of an author's writing that sets them apart and makes them unique. Without a distinctive and powerful voice, one is told on these forums, no agent will consider your work.
And yet these online communities have also worked to instil a conformity in writing style that I am sure is orders of magnitude greater than any that existed before. At the moment the received wisdom is that sparseness and leanness is what you want. Cut down the adverbs and adjectives. Pleonasms are beyond the pale (and if you had to look up 'pleonasms' then don't worry, so did I. It means a formulation involving redundant words, like 'burning fire.')
It goes beyond this though. Wherever you look on these forums you will get the same sort of (excellent) advice: don't have your character 'walk quickly' out of the room if they can 'stride' or 'storm' or even 'hurry' out. Each of these contains the sense of 'walk quickly' but does so in a single word, and conveys something more too. And while you're at it, don't bother to have them 'stride purposefully' because the idea of purposefulness is inherent in the verb stride. You can't stride hesitantly. The same people will go over whole passages for you and point out entire sentences that are redundant or could be subsumed in a single phrase, or even word. Pretty soon you end up being able to do it yourself.
Now I have nothing against this sort of advice at all. It is excellent and the internet permits it to spread with the speed and efficacy of an air-born virus. The thing is, how is the ubiquity of a similar set of pieces of advice consistent with the development of a unique 'voice'?
Well to return to a theme I have explored in a number of posts (imagery for instance, or symbols) I think the key is in the image we use to describe what we mean here: the image of a human voice, telling a story. I think our species is hard-wired to respond to the sound of a voice telling a story. For millenia before literacy was widespread it was how we engaged with fiction and I think it has become a process akin to telepathy. I know that sounds far-fetched, but it is instructive for instance actually to listen to children telling each other stories. The spoken words transcribed are often close to meaningless yet everyone present gets the story completely. In the same way, when I used to read a book to a class (up to A level, even) I would begin to see students round the room dropping their texts and simply listening. And for the first time the story would really make sense to them.
Because if you listen to a piece of writing being read to you by someone who really gets it then, unbeknownst to you, all sorts of things beyond the words themselves somehow get communicated too, bypassing your conscious mind perhaps, but no less powerful for all that. The challenge for a writer of course is to imbue the words themselves with that same magic, so that the reader's internal voice can give them the same cues that you no doubt would if you were reading the text aloud to them.
And that is where the real value of these online forums lies. You see when you read your own writing then the voice you hear it read in is your own, and you get it (or hopefully you do. If you don't then stick it in the bin NOW). And if your friends or family read your work then they will hear it in your voice too, and will unconsciously imbue it with the meaning they know you see in it. But if another contributor to an online forum reads it, then they have no extraneous 'voice' of yours to read it in, so the words have to stand absolutely by themselves. And if they don't, then those same contributors will not hesitate to tell you.
And it can be a salutary lesson to learn. Except of course I should cut out the 'to learn' bit, because that's redundant, isn't it?
Well sort of. Because inherent in these forums (fora? I'll settle for forums) are a series of contradictions for an aspirant writer to navigate. There's the tension between mutual congratulation and one-upmanship for instance. Almost by definition the people who contribute the most to these forums are those who have yet to achieve real success as writers. This provides for a sense of community certainly, and there is a lot of genuine emphasis on mutual support. On the other hand it is very hard not to seek weaknesses in everyone else's work, simply because it makes you feel better, and as the phenomenon of internet trolling has shown, the distance that the internet provides does allow for a higher degree of cruelty than would be possible in a face-to-face encounter. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes that sort of directness is the only thing to make you realise that what you have submitted is actually pretty shit.
Another tension is around the reasons people spend their time on these forums. On the one hand they are an invaluable tool in the service of a writer wishing to improve their style, both by having their work critted and by critting that of others. On the other it is perfectly clear that being on the forum is a guilty pleasure for most- something they do when they should be working. They become big online societies like any other, with their humour, their letting off steam, their politics and their feuds. All fascinating to absorb yourself in and a great way to put off writing.
But for me the biggest contradiction is around the issue of 'voice.' For those not in the writing and/or reading world (though why on earth you would read this if you weren't...) voice is the indefinable but essential quality of an author's writing that sets them apart and makes them unique. Without a distinctive and powerful voice, one is told on these forums, no agent will consider your work.
And yet these online communities have also worked to instil a conformity in writing style that I am sure is orders of magnitude greater than any that existed before. At the moment the received wisdom is that sparseness and leanness is what you want. Cut down the adverbs and adjectives. Pleonasms are beyond the pale (and if you had to look up 'pleonasms' then don't worry, so did I. It means a formulation involving redundant words, like 'burning fire.')
It goes beyond this though. Wherever you look on these forums you will get the same sort of (excellent) advice: don't have your character 'walk quickly' out of the room if they can 'stride' or 'storm' or even 'hurry' out. Each of these contains the sense of 'walk quickly' but does so in a single word, and conveys something more too. And while you're at it, don't bother to have them 'stride purposefully' because the idea of purposefulness is inherent in the verb stride. You can't stride hesitantly. The same people will go over whole passages for you and point out entire sentences that are redundant or could be subsumed in a single phrase, or even word. Pretty soon you end up being able to do it yourself.
Now I have nothing against this sort of advice at all. It is excellent and the internet permits it to spread with the speed and efficacy of an air-born virus. The thing is, how is the ubiquity of a similar set of pieces of advice consistent with the development of a unique 'voice'?
Well to return to a theme I have explored in a number of posts (imagery for instance, or symbols) I think the key is in the image we use to describe what we mean here: the image of a human voice, telling a story. I think our species is hard-wired to respond to the sound of a voice telling a story. For millenia before literacy was widespread it was how we engaged with fiction and I think it has become a process akin to telepathy. I know that sounds far-fetched, but it is instructive for instance actually to listen to children telling each other stories. The spoken words transcribed are often close to meaningless yet everyone present gets the story completely. In the same way, when I used to read a book to a class (up to A level, even) I would begin to see students round the room dropping their texts and simply listening. And for the first time the story would really make sense to them.
Because if you listen to a piece of writing being read to you by someone who really gets it then, unbeknownst to you, all sorts of things beyond the words themselves somehow get communicated too, bypassing your conscious mind perhaps, but no less powerful for all that. The challenge for a writer of course is to imbue the words themselves with that same magic, so that the reader's internal voice can give them the same cues that you no doubt would if you were reading the text aloud to them.
And that is where the real value of these online forums lies. You see when you read your own writing then the voice you hear it read in is your own, and you get it (or hopefully you do. If you don't then stick it in the bin NOW). And if your friends or family read your work then they will hear it in your voice too, and will unconsciously imbue it with the meaning they know you see in it. But if another contributor to an online forum reads it, then they have no extraneous 'voice' of yours to read it in, so the words have to stand absolutely by themselves. And if they don't, then those same contributors will not hesitate to tell you.
And it can be a salutary lesson to learn. Except of course I should cut out the 'to learn' bit, because that's redundant, isn't it?
Friday, 15 June 2012
Whatever happened to satire?
I am far from the first to pose this question of course, but I would like to put it in a slightly longer historical and literary context than is usual. When I was at University I studied an optional unit on 18th Century verse satire. I was the only one to opt for the unit and even at the time I wondered why. Satire may not have been quite as in vogue in the seventies as it had been in the sixties, or would be again in the eighties and nineties, but I was surprised that no one else was interested in learning about its roots (particularly given the alternatives. The Prelude and Lyrical Ballads, anyone?)
Maybe partly this can be explained by how little people generally know about English 18th Century satire. By its nature (dependent as it is on contemporary cultural references) satire dates badly. Most people's exposure to 18th Century satire will have come in one of two forms: either a children's edition of Gulliver's Travels, with all traces of satire surgically removed; or an A level study edition of Rape of the Lock, Pope's prissiest and most genteel offering, where again it is possible to carry out the most detailed dissection without discovering the faintest trace of that jubilant iconoclasm that is satire's greatest joy.
Yet 18th Century satire in English is far from being bland or uninteresting. There is wit, humour and in-jokes that would not be out of place in a Footlights Review but there is also anger- Swift's A Modest Proposal goes further than Frankie Boyle would dare, and much of Gullivers Travels, particularly the voyage to the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos is equally bitter. There are also enormous amounts of downright crudeness, particularly in the works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. It is to him that I owe the understanding that virtually all the swear words I guiltily treasured as a boy, thinking my generation to have invented them, were in common currency in the 18th Century and probably had been for centuries before that. Mind you, the word "dildo" appears to have been something of a neologism, according to his poem Signor Dildo (not one of his best).
So why did the 18th Century see the first and greatest flowering of satire in the sense we now understand it? That was not a question I particularly asked myself at the time, though I could see that it did, and that all satire since (up to and including its last great flowering towards the end of the 20th Century) can in a sense be traced back to that time.
I am no historian, but it is clear that it is the historical and social context that was influential in producing the work, and it was a historical and social context that has resonance today. The country's old certainties had recently been torn apart with the Reformation, then the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Then the new certainties (of Puritanism) that had replaced the old were torn apart by the Restoration of the monarchy. And in this context, so similar to our current context of post-War, post-Thatcher, post-Blair Britain a new breed of rulers emerged. Charles II had always believed himself the rightful King of England, but had for years been cast into the political obscurity of exile. Totally out of touch with the reality both of government and of life in Britain he was, as Ed Milliband should have said, born to rule but not fit to govern. And so he presided over a court with no firm beliefs or commitments to anything but pleasure and networking. It was the first flowering of celebrity culture and thank God Twitter had not yet been invented.
A telling, if probably completely fictitious scene sums it up for me. John Milton, now blind and slaving over Paradise Lost, would get up at 4am to have the Bible read to him by his manservant in Greek. Unfortunately for him this was the time when the Restoration rakes were returning from the brothels and the private parties, and more than once Milton's windows were smashed by drunken proto-Bullingdon boys.
And it turns out this was a perfect breeding ground for satire. Rochester wrote a pretty ribald Satyr on Charles II and a pithier little verse that goes
"God bless our good and gracious King
Whose promise none relies on
Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one."
Satire seemed a natural response to their newfound freedom from church and state, their relish in the coarser joys of life and their sudden understanding that those who led them were just as stupid, selfish and lost as they were themselves.
So if the 18th Century was the perfect breeding ground for satire then why in 2012 are we not awash in it? Well it turns out for a start that satire is not and never has been a particularly effective way of achieving change, because satire is fundamentally an insider's art-form. Most of the twentieth century's best satirists (in the UK at least) came from about as Establishment a background as it is possible to conceive. And the idea of taking the piss (and being prepared to have the piss taken right back) is pretty fundamental to British society, dating right back to Court Jesters and the Lord of Misrule. And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that most of the Tory cabinet allegedly loved Spitting Image. Mind you it still has one of my favourite exchanges ever. Thatcher is at a restaurant, her cabinet sitting around her. She is ordering:
Waitress: And what will you have?
Thatcher: The steak please.
Waitress: And how would you like it?
Thatcher: Raw please.
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?
Thatcher: They'll have the steak too.
See. You smiled. Laughed maybe. You were presented with a visual image of a carnivorous, bloodsucking Margaret Thatcher, treating her entire cabinet like the vegetables they were, and you found it funny. Very British, but hardly revolutionary.
So by 2012 we have progressed to the point where, far from undermining the status quo, satire becomes a means to sustain it. Have I Got News for You, about the closest we have to satire these days, can be used by Boris Johnson to make the people of London elect him as mayor of the fifth largest city in the world. Not because he was clever or politically astute or because they agreed with his policies, but because he didn't mind having the piss taken out of him. So what on earth is the point of satire?
In the end Rochester came to the same conclusion. Much of his greatest work in the end is turned against himself, not the court or King Charles. In some ways my favourite is To the Post Boy if for nothing else then because of the simplicity of the concluding line. Rochester starts by berating the post boy, saying "Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell/A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?" He then outlines the destructive decadence of his own life (made even more poignant if you know the events he is alluding to) and awaits the post boy's response. It is simple and direct. "The readiest way my Lord's by Rochester."
So the conclusion that Rochester reached, I believe, is that the only real value of satire is when the satire is turned on the reader rather than on another. And the trouble is, that doesn't make us laugh, does it. So we aren't interested in it.
Maybe partly this can be explained by how little people generally know about English 18th Century satire. By its nature (dependent as it is on contemporary cultural references) satire dates badly. Most people's exposure to 18th Century satire will have come in one of two forms: either a children's edition of Gulliver's Travels, with all traces of satire surgically removed; or an A level study edition of Rape of the Lock, Pope's prissiest and most genteel offering, where again it is possible to carry out the most detailed dissection without discovering the faintest trace of that jubilant iconoclasm that is satire's greatest joy.
Yet 18th Century satire in English is far from being bland or uninteresting. There is wit, humour and in-jokes that would not be out of place in a Footlights Review but there is also anger- Swift's A Modest Proposal goes further than Frankie Boyle would dare, and much of Gullivers Travels, particularly the voyage to the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos is equally bitter. There are also enormous amounts of downright crudeness, particularly in the works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. It is to him that I owe the understanding that virtually all the swear words I guiltily treasured as a boy, thinking my generation to have invented them, were in common currency in the 18th Century and probably had been for centuries before that. Mind you, the word "dildo" appears to have been something of a neologism, according to his poem Signor Dildo (not one of his best).
So why did the 18th Century see the first and greatest flowering of satire in the sense we now understand it? That was not a question I particularly asked myself at the time, though I could see that it did, and that all satire since (up to and including its last great flowering towards the end of the 20th Century) can in a sense be traced back to that time.
I am no historian, but it is clear that it is the historical and social context that was influential in producing the work, and it was a historical and social context that has resonance today. The country's old certainties had recently been torn apart with the Reformation, then the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Then the new certainties (of Puritanism) that had replaced the old were torn apart by the Restoration of the monarchy. And in this context, so similar to our current context of post-War, post-Thatcher, post-Blair Britain a new breed of rulers emerged. Charles II had always believed himself the rightful King of England, but had for years been cast into the political obscurity of exile. Totally out of touch with the reality both of government and of life in Britain he was, as Ed Milliband should have said, born to rule but not fit to govern. And so he presided over a court with no firm beliefs or commitments to anything but pleasure and networking. It was the first flowering of celebrity culture and thank God Twitter had not yet been invented.
A telling, if probably completely fictitious scene sums it up for me. John Milton, now blind and slaving over Paradise Lost, would get up at 4am to have the Bible read to him by his manservant in Greek. Unfortunately for him this was the time when the Restoration rakes were returning from the brothels and the private parties, and more than once Milton's windows were smashed by drunken proto-Bullingdon boys.
And it turns out this was a perfect breeding ground for satire. Rochester wrote a pretty ribald Satyr on Charles II and a pithier little verse that goes
"God bless our good and gracious King
Whose promise none relies on
Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one."
Satire seemed a natural response to their newfound freedom from church and state, their relish in the coarser joys of life and their sudden understanding that those who led them were just as stupid, selfish and lost as they were themselves.
So if the 18th Century was the perfect breeding ground for satire then why in 2012 are we not awash in it? Well it turns out for a start that satire is not and never has been a particularly effective way of achieving change, because satire is fundamentally an insider's art-form. Most of the twentieth century's best satirists (in the UK at least) came from about as Establishment a background as it is possible to conceive. And the idea of taking the piss (and being prepared to have the piss taken right back) is pretty fundamental to British society, dating right back to Court Jesters and the Lord of Misrule. And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that most of the Tory cabinet allegedly loved Spitting Image. Mind you it still has one of my favourite exchanges ever. Thatcher is at a restaurant, her cabinet sitting around her. She is ordering:
Waitress: And what will you have?
Thatcher: The steak please.
Waitress: And how would you like it?
Thatcher: Raw please.
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?
Thatcher: They'll have the steak too.
See. You smiled. Laughed maybe. You were presented with a visual image of a carnivorous, bloodsucking Margaret Thatcher, treating her entire cabinet like the vegetables they were, and you found it funny. Very British, but hardly revolutionary.
So by 2012 we have progressed to the point where, far from undermining the status quo, satire becomes a means to sustain it. Have I Got News for You, about the closest we have to satire these days, can be used by Boris Johnson to make the people of London elect him as mayor of the fifth largest city in the world. Not because he was clever or politically astute or because they agreed with his policies, but because he didn't mind having the piss taken out of him. So what on earth is the point of satire?
In the end Rochester came to the same conclusion. Much of his greatest work in the end is turned against himself, not the court or King Charles. In some ways my favourite is To the Post Boy if for nothing else then because of the simplicity of the concluding line. Rochester starts by berating the post boy, saying "Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell/A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?" He then outlines the destructive decadence of his own life (made even more poignant if you know the events he is alluding to) and awaits the post boy's response. It is simple and direct. "The readiest way my Lord's by Rochester."
So the conclusion that Rochester reached, I believe, is that the only real value of satire is when the satire is turned on the reader rather than on another. And the trouble is, that doesn't make us laugh, does it. So we aren't interested in it.
Monday, 30 April 2012
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
As someone who has spent a considerable portion of my life writing and teaching about literature and the creative process it was with some trepidation that I launched on my attempt to become an active participant myself- to become a writer. I enjoy the process of writing, but it is for me virtually impossible to apply the same analytical and evaluative approach to my own writing that I apply so freely to others'.
The thing is that the creative and analytical thought processes are clearly different and engage entirely different parts of the mind. Truly effective creative writing, I firmly believe, arises largely from the unconscious process of the brain over which we exercise conscious control at our peril. As a writer you know what it is when those unconscious processes take over. Time seems to disappear and you simply vanish into the world of your creation, emerging after some unspecified period with repetitive strain injury, an urgent need to relieve yourself and no clear sense of what you have just written. That doesn't happen often of course (that bloody man of Porlock with his constant Facebook status updates), but it is when the best work is produced.
The quandary then is that when you reread later with an analytical frame of mind it can be easy to spot that a passage (or an entire novel!) is not as good as you had hoped, but impossible to rewrite it in a way that retains its original fluency. So, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea I generally just tinker- frightened to change too much and lose too much, yet frightened too that what I have written actually needs far more radical surgery.
And then there are all those small but irritating issues about research and the need for accuracy. Here again the devil is on one side, the deep blue sea on the other. I personally cannot stand those books where the author has clearly spent many hours in the British Library and is DAMN WELL going to shoehorn in the results of their research at every possible opportunity. On the other hand it can be equally irritating to read in a novel something that you KNOW is wrong. Like the description of a scene you are familiar with in real life, when you know for a fact that the character could not possibly have seen that building from there (or whatever).
One such small (but for me irritating) dilemma emerged around the title of my novel and the quotation from which it comes. The title is An Absence of War and it comes from (what I thought to be) a Spinoza quotation:
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
Lovely, I thought, and so appositely summing up the central themes of my book. Only Spinoza didn't actually write that. It is an incredibly loose translation that has somehow gained common currency and been attributed to him. What he actually wrote (in Latin) was something closer to:
"For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done."
Not quite so snappy. Or as lovely. Actually quite profoundly different. Still, I didn't want to lose the title. So I added a prologue, and tried to weasel in the meaning of the 'quote' as I had originally felt it, without misquoting a great philosopher. Here is that prologue. I will leave you to judge whether it works.
Prologue
It happened again last night. I woke in the cold grey of the dawn, struggling for breath, my mind a confused jumble of tortured images, of shattered fragments of suffocating dreams. In the empty hours while others sleep I relive those days, those weeks, those months. No matter how far I go, they always pull me back.
TV and the internet parade their endless images of death and destruction, of devastated towns and their traumatised inhabitants. I watch streams of refugees wheeling their pitiful collections of household treasures in ramshackle carts past the burnt out wrecks of armoured vehicles. I see reporters in flak jackets, picking their way through the shattered wreckage of a family home; hear politicians intone their platitudes about the need for reconstruction, for a political solution.
Yet as I lie awake it is Germany I see, in the autumn and winter of 1945. I see a hand, its fingernails blackened, its skin grey with dust. I see a throat, slashed across in vivid red. I see a man slumping down to the floor in front of me; see his body shaken by the motion of the truck; see a girl clutching a package tightly between thin hands.
And words from those days still speak to me across the years. Words spoken by a man I once called my friend— kümmern uns um die Nummer eins: look after number one. Words forged in heavy black steel on the gateway to hell— Jedem das Seine: to everyone that which they deserve.
And more than anything I hear a voice. The voice of a young boy, his whoop of joy echoing through the empty ward of an abandoned hospital, tearing my heart with its belief in a better world.
-----
Unable to sleep I lay listening to the World Service, so often my companion in those dead hours before daylight brings me fully back to the present day. A reporter had returned to some benighted region of our war-torn planet to see how the people there were dealing with the aftermath of conflict. He spoke of recrimination and reprisals, of hardship and deprivation. The cameras of the world have moved on, he said, but for the people the ending of hostilities has brought little respite.
It was the Jewish philosopher Spinoza who first said that peace is not simply an absence of war. It is many years now since the ending of the war that ripped my childhood world apart. Yet still I wonder when peace will truly come.
The thing is that the creative and analytical thought processes are clearly different and engage entirely different parts of the mind. Truly effective creative writing, I firmly believe, arises largely from the unconscious process of the brain over which we exercise conscious control at our peril. As a writer you know what it is when those unconscious processes take over. Time seems to disappear and you simply vanish into the world of your creation, emerging after some unspecified period with repetitive strain injury, an urgent need to relieve yourself and no clear sense of what you have just written. That doesn't happen often of course (that bloody man of Porlock with his constant Facebook status updates), but it is when the best work is produced.
The quandary then is that when you reread later with an analytical frame of mind it can be easy to spot that a passage (or an entire novel!) is not as good as you had hoped, but impossible to rewrite it in a way that retains its original fluency. So, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea I generally just tinker- frightened to change too much and lose too much, yet frightened too that what I have written actually needs far more radical surgery.
And then there are all those small but irritating issues about research and the need for accuracy. Here again the devil is on one side, the deep blue sea on the other. I personally cannot stand those books where the author has clearly spent many hours in the British Library and is DAMN WELL going to shoehorn in the results of their research at every possible opportunity. On the other hand it can be equally irritating to read in a novel something that you KNOW is wrong. Like the description of a scene you are familiar with in real life, when you know for a fact that the character could not possibly have seen that building from there (or whatever).
One such small (but for me irritating) dilemma emerged around the title of my novel and the quotation from which it comes. The title is An Absence of War and it comes from (what I thought to be) a Spinoza quotation:
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
Lovely, I thought, and so appositely summing up the central themes of my book. Only Spinoza didn't actually write that. It is an incredibly loose translation that has somehow gained common currency and been attributed to him. What he actually wrote (in Latin) was something closer to:
"For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done."
Not quite so snappy. Or as lovely. Actually quite profoundly different. Still, I didn't want to lose the title. So I added a prologue, and tried to weasel in the meaning of the 'quote' as I had originally felt it, without misquoting a great philosopher. Here is that prologue. I will leave you to judge whether it works.
#####
Prologue
It happened again last night. I woke in the cold grey of the dawn, struggling for breath, my mind a confused jumble of tortured images, of shattered fragments of suffocating dreams. In the empty hours while others sleep I relive those days, those weeks, those months. No matter how far I go, they always pull me back.
TV and the internet parade their endless images of death and destruction, of devastated towns and their traumatised inhabitants. I watch streams of refugees wheeling their pitiful collections of household treasures in ramshackle carts past the burnt out wrecks of armoured vehicles. I see reporters in flak jackets, picking their way through the shattered wreckage of a family home; hear politicians intone their platitudes about the need for reconstruction, for a political solution.
Yet as I lie awake it is Germany I see, in the autumn and winter of 1945. I see a hand, its fingernails blackened, its skin grey with dust. I see a throat, slashed across in vivid red. I see a man slumping down to the floor in front of me; see his body shaken by the motion of the truck; see a girl clutching a package tightly between thin hands.
And words from those days still speak to me across the years. Words spoken by a man I once called my friend— kümmern uns um die Nummer eins: look after number one. Words forged in heavy black steel on the gateway to hell— Jedem das Seine: to everyone that which they deserve.
And more than anything I hear a voice. The voice of a young boy, his whoop of joy echoing through the empty ward of an abandoned hospital, tearing my heart with its belief in a better world.
-----
Unable to sleep I lay listening to the World Service, so often my companion in those dead hours before daylight brings me fully back to the present day. A reporter had returned to some benighted region of our war-torn planet to see how the people there were dealing with the aftermath of conflict. He spoke of recrimination and reprisals, of hardship and deprivation. The cameras of the world have moved on, he said, but for the people the ending of hostilities has brought little respite.
It was the Jewish philosopher Spinoza who first said that peace is not simply an absence of war. It is many years now since the ending of the war that ripped my childhood world apart. Yet still I wonder when peace will truly come.
Monday, 19 March 2012
The process of writing- characters
There is a notion often expressed by novelists (and would-be novelists) these days that what they do with characters is to create them and then 'watch what they do.' Ray Bradbury puts it like this: "First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!" There are writers who have suggested even that while they were writing their novel they wanted to write a particular scene but 'the characters wouldn't let me.'
When I came across this notion my first reaction was to dismiss it as something between New Age twaddle and the desperate attempts of writers to convince themselves they are artists (darling!) rather than craftsmen/women. Since a novel's characters have no existence outside the writer's mind (until the novel is read of course, when they acquire an existence in any reader's mind), how can they behave or react in any way except how the author decides they should behave or react? How can they 'lead' the author? Most of all, how can they take independent, autonomous decisions about their actions?
Of course this notion of characters having a life independent of their creator is a long-established one. There is an element of it even I believe in that most level-headed of novelists, Jane Austen. In her famous quotation about Emma:
"I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like"
what is interesting is her choice of the verb "take." It is as if Austen feels that Emma already exists and she is going to choose to put her in her novel. Novelists such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne often write about their creations as if they have an independent life and exist outside their imaginations and surely neither Fielding nor Sterne nor Austen could be declared guilty of New Age twaddle. Also none takes themselves so seriously as to create such a notion for their own aggrandizement.
It is therefore an idea that is worthy of serious consideration. What is interesting about it is of course the notion that the novelist is not entirely in control of what they write. Gustave Flaubert expresses this idea beautifully in the quote:
"C'est comme un homme qui a l'oreille juste et qui joue faux du violon; ses doigts se refusent a reproduire juste le son dont il a conscience"
("It is like a violinist whose ear is true but who plays badly; his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.")
I find an echo in this of L P Hartley's advice that "it's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about". Both to me suggest that in their writing a novelist should tap into ideas and areas of consciousness over which they do not have complete conscious control, and that frustration arises when they cannot successfully do so.
Of course this reminds me of an idea I have explored in a previous post, that the successful writer can use the incredible power of the unconscious mind in their writing. As I said in that post, Incognito- the Secret Life of the Brain has opened my eyes to the range and power of the abilities of the unconscious brain. We like to think that the higher order mental functions are entirely under the control of our conscious minds, or to put it another way that writers know what they are doing when they write. However it seems clear that the conscious mind is often 'the last to know' when the unconscious parts of the mind have been working away at some complex and subtle problem for a considerable time and have come up with a brilliant and creative answer.
So perhaps this idea of characters who 'tell the author what to write' is simply another way of describing the functioning of the unconscious mind. As I have said in many previous posts human beings seem strongly predisposed to think in symbols. What better symbol is there for an author of the complex functioning of their own unconscious mind than a character they themselves have created. So when their characters 'speak to them' perhaps it is simply their own unconscious mind they are listening to.
When I came across this notion my first reaction was to dismiss it as something between New Age twaddle and the desperate attempts of writers to convince themselves they are artists (darling!) rather than craftsmen/women. Since a novel's characters have no existence outside the writer's mind (until the novel is read of course, when they acquire an existence in any reader's mind), how can they behave or react in any way except how the author decides they should behave or react? How can they 'lead' the author? Most of all, how can they take independent, autonomous decisions about their actions?
Of course this notion of characters having a life independent of their creator is a long-established one. There is an element of it even I believe in that most level-headed of novelists, Jane Austen. In her famous quotation about Emma:
"I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like"
what is interesting is her choice of the verb "take." It is as if Austen feels that Emma already exists and she is going to choose to put her in her novel. Novelists such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne often write about their creations as if they have an independent life and exist outside their imaginations and surely neither Fielding nor Sterne nor Austen could be declared guilty of New Age twaddle. Also none takes themselves so seriously as to create such a notion for their own aggrandizement.
It is therefore an idea that is worthy of serious consideration. What is interesting about it is of course the notion that the novelist is not entirely in control of what they write. Gustave Flaubert expresses this idea beautifully in the quote:
"C'est comme un homme qui a l'oreille juste et qui joue faux du violon; ses doigts se refusent a reproduire juste le son dont il a conscience"
("It is like a violinist whose ear is true but who plays badly; his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.")
I find an echo in this of L P Hartley's advice that "it's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about". Both to me suggest that in their writing a novelist should tap into ideas and areas of consciousness over which they do not have complete conscious control, and that frustration arises when they cannot successfully do so.
Of course this reminds me of an idea I have explored in a previous post, that the successful writer can use the incredible power of the unconscious mind in their writing. As I said in that post, Incognito- the Secret Life of the Brain has opened my eyes to the range and power of the abilities of the unconscious brain. We like to think that the higher order mental functions are entirely under the control of our conscious minds, or to put it another way that writers know what they are doing when they write. However it seems clear that the conscious mind is often 'the last to know' when the unconscious parts of the mind have been working away at some complex and subtle problem for a considerable time and have come up with a brilliant and creative answer.
So perhaps this idea of characters who 'tell the author what to write' is simply another way of describing the functioning of the unconscious mind. As I have said in many previous posts human beings seem strongly predisposed to think in symbols. What better symbol is there for an author of the complex functioning of their own unconscious mind than a character they themselves have created. So when their characters 'speak to them' perhaps it is simply their own unconscious mind they are listening to.
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
The process of writing
At a creative writing masterclass recently I was told that a great novel is not written but edited. Get you first draft down quickly, we were told, but then accept that by the time you have finished editing it probably less than 25% of the original will be left. Someone asked if that was always the case and the workshop leader, a very successful novelist, said perhaps if the first draft had been written extremely slowly and carefully then more of it would survive the editing process.
That got me thinking about the process of writing, and whether speed and fluency or meticulous care is more likely to produce works of genius. The problem is that there are examples on both sides, to the extent that I can see no clear conclusion. In poetry, Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth is a shining example of the value of redrafting and editing. I liked to show students images of Owen's various drafts of this poem, complete with Sassoon's suggestions (the 'Doomed' of the title was one). One such draft is below:
That got me thinking about the process of writing, and whether speed and fluency or meticulous care is more likely to produce works of genius. The problem is that there are examples on both sides, to the extent that I can see no clear conclusion. In poetry, Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth is a shining example of the value of redrafting and editing. I liked to show students images of Owen's various drafts of this poem, complete with Sassoon's suggestions (the 'Doomed' of the title was one). One such draft is below:
and it demonstrates wonderfully the creative mind at work. On the other hand John Keats' On the Grasshopper and the Cricket was reputedly written in a pub on Green Lanes in a competition with Leigh Hunt to write a sonnet against the clock.
The world of novels presents similar extremes. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake took seventeen years to write; Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol six weeks. Perhaps neither is the greatest novel ever written, and there is unquestionably a difference in length, but each has been hailed at one time or another as a work of genius.
As to my favourite author, although evidence on the subject is scant I am inclined to think that Shakespeare tended more towards the speedy and fluent than the meticulous and painstaking. He was clearly a very busy man and play-scripts would have to have been produced to a strict schedule with first nights looming. There are also fairly frequent internal inconsistencies, plot holes and loose ends that a more careful editing process would surely have eliminated. I am therefore inclined to think that Shakespeare, like Dickens or Keats, wrote fast.
So how can two such radically different approaches each lead to works of genius? Perhaps the answer lies in ideas explored in Incognito-The Secret Lives of the Brain and elsewhere. It seems that our unconscious mind is capable of greater complexity and creativity of thought than we may sometimes suspect. The advice we were given, that it is editing not writing that creates great literature, is predicated on the idea that it is the conscious mind- the dominant partner in the editing process- that is the key to greatness. Certainly the idea has some merit. In writing Anthem for Doomed Youth Owen, I believe, wrote from the heart (or under the direction of his unconscious mind, which means the same) but then harnessed his conscious mind, and Sassoon's, to look critically at what he had written and to improve it beyond measure. Keats had no time for that, and it was through harnessing the immense creativity of his unconscious mind that he wrote his sonnet.
Dickens, I am sure, cannot have had complete control from his conscious mind as he wrote. Many of his great novels were written as weekly serials and I am sure that a lot of the time he was flying by the seat of his pants (to use an anachronistic metaphor) in writing them. Kate Perugini said of him that "He had no doubt a strong natural instinct for art" and for me that is simply a description of someone harnessing their unconscious mind to create great literature.
Of course the picture gets muddle when you factor in notions of 'the Great Artist.' On the one hand the idea must be preserved of the creative genius who suffers for his art, so a Stephen King or a Terry Pratchett, who can churn out novels with the efficiency of a production line is derided in comparison with a Vikram Seth, who confirmed in 2009 that his sequel to A Suitable Boy would be published in 2013. On the other hand, some seem to feel, the truly great artist should be above the whole tedious business of editing, so that every stoned-out rambling should be preserved unedited and unspoilt for all eternity.
For me, as so often, it is Shakespeare who provides the model of true genius. A craftsman rather than an 'artist' he worked against the clock, writing quickly to pay the bills. And to do so he called upon the immense wealth and creativity of his unconscious mind. I see him staring blankly out of the window and then bending over the page and scribbling "To be or not to be, that is the question..." the beauty of the words forming naturally and instinctively in his mind and in his hand as he writes.
OK it's a cliché, but it's one I like to think might represent the truth.
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