Two recent articles in the New Yorker have profiled female writers who insert themselves unabashedly into their fiction. The first is Chris Kraus, and the second is Helen Garner (whom I mentioned in my last post).
Kraus told an audience at a book talk in no uncertain terms that she is a writer because she is a person with a life:
"It all happened. There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”
A friend of mine objects to this kind of personal writing, which tends to be self-involved and doesn't tend to say much of significance about the state of the world, only the state of one's heart and mind. Those are good topics too, but can't they be incorporated into books that have something grander to say?
Flannery O'Connor, who had much grander things to say, about black and white identity in the South in the 60's, believed she should not be present in her stories. She wrote:
To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.
I think I agree with her. My experience is that I can be much more honest about what I find in myself when I read it in other people's fiction, not when I try to put it into mine. I don't have good enough vision of self to portray with any accuracy my own character, and I always end up feeling shallow and as though I'm trying to be "clever" by getting into my own head and subjecting myself to my own cynicism.
How do we know that Flannery O'Connor felt this way? Because she wrote a letter to a friend, from which is pulled the above quote. What are we going to do without letters? How will we know how the great writers and thinkers were thinking? I believe that we cannot trust their blogs.
In a recent paper I wrote for my MAT I quoted from journal articles about writing in the English classroom. One teacher wrote about the role of audience in writing:
"It is precisely the acts of responding, analysing and reflecting that are required in the process of writing but, with no ‘real’ audience, these seem impossible for many boys."
(This entire, excellent article is available here.)
I wonder about the difference between the audience of a blog, and the audience of a friend. I am certainly more discerning and stylistic in what I write in my letters to individual friends than what I write here. Email has never inspired the same thoughtfulness as writing on paper. I flinch actually, to mention it in the same paragraph with real letter-writing, not because I object to writing emails, but because it is such a different endeavor from writing a letter.
Some of the best articles I've read about figures and writers I like include parts of their letters. This is an excellent one containing correspondence between Nabokov and his wife.
I think I shall start scanning and saving all the letters I receive from my few correspondents. I have some in boxes, but certainly not all survive, and I must be the change I wish to see in the world!
Kraus told an audience at a book talk in no uncertain terms that she is a writer because she is a person with a life:
"It all happened. There would be no book if it hadn’t happened.”
A friend of mine objects to this kind of personal writing, which tends to be self-involved and doesn't tend to say much of significance about the state of the world, only the state of one's heart and mind. Those are good topics too, but can't they be incorporated into books that have something grander to say?
Flannery O'Connor, who had much grander things to say, about black and white identity in the South in the 60's, believed she should not be present in her stories. She wrote:
To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen. . . . Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.
I think I agree with her. My experience is that I can be much more honest about what I find in myself when I read it in other people's fiction, not when I try to put it into mine. I don't have good enough vision of self to portray with any accuracy my own character, and I always end up feeling shallow and as though I'm trying to be "clever" by getting into my own head and subjecting myself to my own cynicism.
How do we know that Flannery O'Connor felt this way? Because she wrote a letter to a friend, from which is pulled the above quote. What are we going to do without letters? How will we know how the great writers and thinkers were thinking? I believe that we cannot trust their blogs.
In a recent paper I wrote for my MAT I quoted from journal articles about writing in the English classroom. One teacher wrote about the role of audience in writing:
"It is precisely the acts of responding, analysing and reflecting that are required in the process of writing but, with no ‘real’ audience, these seem impossible for many boys."
(This entire, excellent article is available here.)
I wonder about the difference between the audience of a blog, and the audience of a friend. I am certainly more discerning and stylistic in what I write in my letters to individual friends than what I write here. Email has never inspired the same thoughtfulness as writing on paper. I flinch actually, to mention it in the same paragraph with real letter-writing, not because I object to writing emails, but because it is such a different endeavor from writing a letter.
Some of the best articles I've read about figures and writers I like include parts of their letters. This is an excellent one containing correspondence between Nabokov and his wife.
I think I shall start scanning and saving all the letters I receive from my few correspondents. I have some in boxes, but certainly not all survive, and I must be the change I wish to see in the world!
No comments:
Post a Comment