They might — they probably will — deny it and affect a faux modesty, and insist that they are just regular chaps like you and I, but don’t fall for that schtick: they think they are right and — as with my apostasy on Ernest Hemingway, ‘greatest American author of the 20th century of this parish’ — others are wrong or mad.
I’ll just throw this in for good measure: I metaphorically run a mile if and when I hear someone declare him or herself ‘passionate about literature’. Really? Fuck off.
Moving on a little, my ‘conclusion’ will not just highlight how — I shall contend — your, my and everyone else’s judgment on this or that writer, poem, painter and composer is essentially and wholly subjective, but that there is also the not-so-slight problem of ‘relativism’ to cloud the issue.
I must confess that what I ‘know’ about ‘relativism’ in the philosophically academic sense is tiny. But I am a firm believer that all ‘philosophical problems’ are at the core simple. The one I always quote is, in moral philosophy, the ‘is / ought’ gap.
Seen from another angle, that ‘is / ought gap’ is the essential difference between ‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’ rules, i.e. at what point and on whose authority does the observation that ‘we have been doing it this way for some time’ become the instruction ‘this is how we should be doing it (because we have been doing it this way for some time)’?
Very many eminent philosopher have broken their hears and souls trying to crack that one and none has succeeded. More to the point none will succeed. (It was all a little easier when many still believed in and acknowledged the ultimate authority of ‘God’, but then he died about 300 years ago and it all went tits up. The most recent attempt to bridge the ‘is / ought’ gap is when we insist on the immutable existence of ‘fundamental human rights’.
Nice try, but no cigar, although I should swiftly point out that I am slandering the philosophical attempts to make those rights immutable, not the acceptance by many, not least me, that every man jack and jill on Earth has the right to be treated with dignity.
In the early 20th century a gang of ‘thinkers’ who were regarded as (or called themselves, I don’t know which)
‘logical positivists’ and were known as the Vienna Circle (great gang of lads, right) and who were rather keen on mathematics, did suggest that ‘reality’ might be reduced to and understood better as — well, whatever it was they were reducing it to and understanding it better as.
Because as far as I’m concerned ‘philosophy’ is firmly in the woolly, fluffy arts camp and has no place among the hard-nosed toughs of science, in that sense it was another attempt to equate ‘the arts’ with the science, to insist that there was a mechanistic dimension to ‘art’, one which might allow ‘objectivity’ and ‘objective’ judgments.
That is partly what I want to suggest in my ‘conclusion’, though at not too great a length as I have already written an essay on it.
I then want to follow that up with the suggestion that each story, novel, poem, painting and piece of music should be — that bloody word ‘should’ again, damn! — evaluated and judgment hermetically. In practical terms that might be difficult, but I do think each work should be judged in and of itself.
Further to the question of subjectivity is the — in one way more obvious question — of what we actually ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. With the best will in the world that, too, might have a bearing on our judgment of a piece of prose or poetry.
For example, I have a preference for what I am tempted to call ‘well-written prose’, but that immediately begs the question ‘so what is and is not well-written?’ And now you have just opened another can of worms.
One analogy that occurred to me when reading some Hemingway story or other was that it was like stumbling through a newly-ploughed field. It wasn’t easy to read.
That is, and cannot be, a fundamental objection, of course, because a writer is doing — one assumes — 1,001 other things when she or he writes. And who says writing should be ‘easy’?
Joyce’s Ulysses is said to be a ‘great work of art’, but is it ‘easy to read’. Well, I — who can admit to having read quite literally every word of the book, but further admit it was just the once and that I probably never shall again — can confirm Ulysses is not ‘easy to read’.
(And by the by, there has even been the serious suggestion from people more qualified to make such suggestions than I that ‘Joyce could certainly have done with an editor’). I’ve also attempted Faulkner and did not like it enough to persevere, although that was some years ago and I might have matured enough intellectually to try a second attempt. But the ease or difficulty with which one can read an author can’t, I think, be the main yardstick by which a work is judged.
One such measure would, though, be: how well has this author managed to achieve what she or he set out to achieve. But then we are again opening a can of worms, our second or third can of worms (I’ve lost count).
If, as I suggest, a work should be judged hermetically and we do not resort to external ‘evidence’, the question is then ‘can know what an author intended to do?’ If, once have persuaded ourselves we do know, we might be able to judge whether the intention was realised.
On the other hand how can we be sure we know ‘what the writer intended’? For example Hemingway wrote his long short story Big Two-Hearted River in 1925/6, but it wasn’t until several decades later, it seems, that he declared he intended it to portray the mental healing of a young man who had returned from war.
That has now become the standard exegesis, but I suggest you wouldn’t pick up on that (as I didn’t) simply by reading the story.
Here, perhaps, an example from the real world might help. I have before written about the website
Deadline For Writers (which I have found very helpful in getting me off my arse and actually writing fiction).
In the past three years I have submitted 51 short stories and 42 pieces of verse and every now and then others who are members comment on a story or poem. And what they ‘see’ in the piece, what they think I am trying to convey and what a piece ‘means’ to them are quite often something different to what I thought my story ‘was about’.
So here’s the question: I would assume it is axiomatic that when we create art (and I hold that ‘art’ is a ‘process’, an ‘undertaking’, an ‘activity’, not some vague metaphysical property that some pieces have and others do not have), we are doing so consciously.
The ‘art’ — in whatever medium — consists of ‘conceiving’ (perhaps in the process even and often re-conceiving and altering the original conception), then ‘realising’ that conception, giving it ‘form’ (in the case of sound and music that meant metaphorically).
When we come to judge the ‘worth’ of that piece, we might depend on how successful think the author of it (or artist or composer) has been in ‘realising’ a conception. Even Hemingway might be thought to agree with that suggestions.
Although he was responding in the 1930s to pressure from the Left to make his writing more ‘engaged’ and ‘socially relevant’ he said: ‘
There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.’ (Oscar Wilde took a similar view on ‘good art’ and ‘bad art’, but I can’t offhand come up with any ready quote from the man.)
None of what I write here is or intended to be ‘hard and fast’. There are far too many bods — not least sodding ‘Papa’ himself (and, Lord, is that nickname absurd) — laying down the law on this, that and t’other. As far as I am concerned what works, works and what doesn’t doesn’t (and laws were made to be broken, although having said that, this old codger has finally learned the wisdom of learning to walk before trying to run).
Furthermore, something, some way of ‘creating’ might work for some but not for others, so what is the point of becoming dogmatic and didactic?
Hemingway was dogmatic and didactic, though and sincerely thought he was one of the world’s best writers. Something he said, which I have only recently come across, gives — me at — least a little more insight into his thinking. It was in a letter he sent to his editor at Scribner’s Max Perkins:
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
Well, no, Ernie, dear heart, that’s nonsense bordering on total bollocks. If nothing else, trying your hand at ‘creating’, call it what you will, is the last free place in the world. It is a very wild west and there are no laws. You might not find anyone in the least bit interested by what you have ‘created’, but that’s not the point: do what you want to do.
Obviously, it also depends on what your goal is: if ‘earning a living and making money’ is your goal, there certainly are ‘law of prose writing’ but they are dependent on the industry to which you intend to sell our soul.
If you want to serve the crime-writing readers and become a big noise in the crime-writing fraternity, go for it, but remember to do it their way. If you want to woo slushy romance readers, mug up on An Idiot’s Guide To Writing Slushy Romans.
If ‘examining the human condition’ and ‘creating serious art’ is your bag (and you don’t mind making no money but will settle for drinking acidic, lukewarm white wine with folk who are ‘passionate about literature’) mug up on An Idiot’s Guide To Writing Serious Literature.
There seem to be as many different kinds of writing as there are writers, as many different reasons for writing as there are writers and there are no ‘law of prose’ writing.
If one were talking about writing as ‘communication’ — which, though, we are not — there could be might be law, more of a rule: make yourself bloody understood! If you fail to make yourself understood, you haven’t communicated, have you.
In fact, in a broader sense that is true even if you are trying to convey — as in communicate — something a little more complex than the time of the next train to London. If you do manage to ‘communicate’ what you were trying to communicate, then you are succeeding. But if you don’t . . . (and don’t fool yourself).
At this point I am obliged to draw attention to what I wrote about those who read a story or poem of mine and who ‘saw’ something different (and which I had no idea was there): that’s another good reason for why it’s best for writers never to discuss their work.
A writer not discussing ‘their work’ might piss off their publisher (if they are lucky enough to have one), but that is a small price to pay for preserving readers’ illusions. And what is ‘art’ after all but one huge illusion?
I mean if you have read this blog entry so far and have come to the conclusion that I am ‘a great writer in the making’, I would be a moron to persuade you you’re wrong. If that’s your illusion . . .
