TheWorldJournal.com

Future in the Present of Writing: A Personal Note
to a Young 5000-Word Novelist
By Manuel Yang, TheWorldJournal.com

To write like someone else, to write as only you can, what does this mean?

When I was sixteen, I attempted to assume the boisterously obscene, vivaciously freewheeling diction of H. Miller's _Tropic of Cancer_ for a creative writing class. A resounding failure. In trying to fake my voice this way, I quickly sensed the note of falsity, the forced posturing of apocalyptic self-declaration, that crept into my prose, when the most nerve-wracking concern in my life was not how to obtain the next meal or philosophize on a Parisian whore's vagina but how to endure the boredom of the classroom or where to go when I cut school. That was also the pathetic season of aimlessly drunken boats when, comparing myself with Rimbaud at my age, I drank all night to suppress the severe bouts of depression that came with the discovery that I was no genius (ha, ha, ha!).

Later I realized that cessation from comparison was the first, primary step in finding your own voice. Of course, this search for one's voice--tantamount to establishing a distinctive, even peculiarly idiosyncratic style that even the most superficial reader could decipher as your own--was something of a futile quest for the holy grail. In thinking and writing so much about the means to attain the elusively ideal style, you never got around to writing what you originally intended to write with that style.

Fetishism of style operates on the same logic as the fetishism of money; it is a religiously illusory aspiration through and through, turning the world of the written word upside down to make it appear as if it is styles that are the creative subjects talking across the centuries to each other, not the labor of specifically suffering and desiring consciousness in a cramped historical context. It is no coincidence then that the classics are referred to as part of the canon, a term that derives from Latin for "rule" and Greek for "measuring rod" and associated traditionally with ecclesiastical law established by a church council, portion of the Mass, and the Catholic calendar of saints. To be obsessed with style is to betray one's secret ambition to be a saint, willingly accepting the fate of being turned into an iconic object of literary veneration that will function as a "measuring rod" to discipline the imagination of contemporaries and posterity alike.

Disabused of this literary phantasm, you start to write more intuitively, that is, without the overbearing internal censor that passes judgment with microscopic vigilance on each and every syllable you put down on paper. Considerable freedom stems from this. Even if it's awkward and uncertain in places, like an austere dance of an enraged slave or a delirious monologue of a shell-shocked survivor walking away from the scene of an accident, your language no longer turns inward to incessantly consume itself in neurotic harangue about its own structure but starts to crack and break at the seams, as if the event or feeling you irrepressibly want to convey is cutting through and bleeding between the lines, scorching an elemental word like "revelation" into a condensed insignia of experience that melts the most elegant metaphors and elaborate descriptions into lackluster ashes.

As you face the typer or notebook, you often forget the reason why you started to write in the first place, allowing yourself the arrogant complacency embodied in that repulsive, ungrammatical phrase, "been there, done that." No different from sex or eating, the act of writing recovers its original form and intensity when you undertake it as a means of rediscovering that first taste of forbidden grace that succulently dripped onto your greedily quivering tongue from the fruit of the tree of carnal and gastronomical knowledge as you squeezed and bit into it lustily and hungrily. It is undoubtedly true that you can't go home again in the actuality of experience but you _can_ in the desire of remembering, out of which both literature and history emerge, to prophetically, angrily, doggedly, and hopefully write and rewrite the second coming of never-returning revolution of your senses.

Recently a friend confessed to me her difficulty in jumpstarting her novel. She is a lifelong diarist, and the shift from that familiarly prosaic genre of unconstrained, spontaneously off-the-cuff entries--wherein no narrative continuity is required save that of the author's own voice--to that of the novel has found her somewhat disoriented, effecting in her after 5000 words or so an invariable pall of boredom. I know this boredom well. It is the boredom of having to speak in an artificial voice other than your own. After the initial novelty wears off--just as if you were to continue faking an accent long after the brisk breeze of slight amusement it has momentarily induced has grown stale--the meaningless drudgery of beating the proverbial dead, decomposing horse gets on your nerves; it feels then like stagnant labor that produces neither exchange nor use value but only a literary equivalent of interminably waiting for a bus that never arrives.

A bus that never comes is like an indefinitely delayed orgasm, which, past the tensely glowing buildup of feverishly uncontainable anticipation, turns into pain and eventually into irritable boredom. Because writing a novel is a fairly long stretch of an affair, with all the attendant commitments, complications, detours, and fluctuations of mood, to say nothing of unplanned offspring and intrusive kin relations, that a singularly fierce, chronologically compressed one night stand can blissfully ignore, how to ignite a spark of an idea into a flame of flesh-and-blood characters and to fan this flame into a sustained wildfire of organically interlacing stories that rapidly and comprehensively engulfs the crisply dry forest of your imagination becomes paramount.

Indeed to write at such a sustained pitch into the smoking ruins of viciously blazing words, gnarled trunks of smoldering pages, shedding continuously unbroken layers of singed skin weaving themselves into a book, necessitates the dangerous urgency of criminality and illegality that only a lucidly determined arsonist possesses in full. Without this tension of committing unmentionable crimes, writing dims to involuntary yawns and scratches, a secondary activity to kill one's time, a safe substitute for cowardly suicide. As you stroll stealthily into the night life of dangerous writing, you find momentous trials and fatal errors raised to the impossible scale wherein your life and death are suddenly defined as a matter of an existentially rigged choice.

It is unfashionable these days to put the matter this way. Not only are existential formulations terribly passé--approximately fifty years behind the times--but fakery of a fake has come to be valued over authenticity. To be sure, I, too, believe in the destruction of authenticity, in concocting forgeries of style, diction, and form to devalue the religious aura of art, culture, money, what you will. But such destruction is nothing more than a gestural flourish of a poseur if the destructor is not animated by other versions of authenticity and values of new life, if destruction is not premised on the really existing conditions of the world in which we live; a counterfeiter becomes just another money-changer when he or she forgets the longer view of disrupting and causing havoc in the sphere of monetary circulation.

A nihilist of Stravroginian dimension may no longer pose a spiritually potent threat to the consciousness of our times because he or she appears to us merely as the banality of _fait accompli_, a dissolutely exhausted zeitgeist whose implosion has expelled all spirits from the republic of ever-circumscribed creativity. But spirit, etymologically, means breath, a breath that you infuse jadedly or resolutely into each tug and pull of the written word. As long as you remember that this breath issues from within yourself and that what the literary fetishists had gotten it wrong was to canonize it as an external object of worship, a graven image of dead, fossilized idols, you'll naturally realize that the purpose of iconoclasm is to destroy for the sake of recovery, albeit in a new register, in the reinvented language and force of New Jerusalem or Taiping, a new breath that hums the song of creation before the world and its antithesis were forged by the labor of multitudes, to strike at that root of revelation--which is what "apocalypse" means after all--that will unveil the essence of language to be communal intercourse of kisses, vows, prayers, and the long, endless march into the night of unspoken dreams, intimate promises, and conspiracy against those who dare impose the dictum of "meum et teum" on language, to say nothing of life. To write is to believe ourselves to be the sorcerer's apprentice who raises the dead to remind the living of its trespasses and potentiality, and the sorcerer is a vector of the historical holy ghost we know by the name of hope, love, and faith that are painfully and joyously actuated in our concrete struggles for experience and desire.

© February 3, 2004

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