Authors on Writing: Metaphors and Intellectual Labor

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Authors on Writing

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Authors on Writing Barbara Tomlinson University of California, San Diego

10.1057/9780230595668 - Authors on Writing, Barbara Tomlinson

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Metaphors and Intellectual Labor

© Barbara Tomlinson 2005

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4895–3 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4895–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tomlinson, Barbara, 1946– Authors on writing: metaphors and intellectual labor/ Barbara Tomlinson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4895–X 1. Authorship. I. Title. PN145.T65 2005 808’.02–dc22

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Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Part I

Introduction

1

Metaphor and Cultures of Composing

Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Part II

vi

Composing and Metaphoricity Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models Metaphorics of Embodied Labor Metaphorics of Discursive Sociality

9 32 51 72

The Apparatus of Authorship

Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Authorship and Intellectual Labor Authorship in an Economy of Promotion Writing in Earthquake Country

97 113 125

Appendix: Sources, Selection, Classification of Metaphors

132

Notes

135

Critical References

169

Interview References

179

Index

221

v

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Contents

Thanks to colleagues and students at the University of California, San Diego who have offered useful comments and criticisms including Evan Adelson, Linda Brodkey, Betty Cain, Lori Chamberlain, Aaron Cicourel, Stephen Cox, Charles R. Cooper, Edwin Fussell, Brent Gowan, Eugene Holland, David Keevil, Hugh B. Mehan, Bill McKnight, Ken Mendoza, Louis A. Montrose, Peter Mortensen, Brooke Neilsen, Richard Terdiman, Don E. Wayne. I have also learned a great deal from colleagues in the profession on other campuses including Nancy Armstrong, Rise Axelrod, Steve Axelrod, Carol Berkenkotter, Peter Elbow, Linda Flower, Ann Matsuhashi Feldman, Sheryl I. Fontaine, Sarah Freedman, Paul Gordon, Robert Hanneman, John R. Hayes, Shirley Brice Heath, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Bruno Latour, Donald McQuade, Donald M. Murray, Jan Radway, Helen Rivera, Mike Rose, Rusty Russell, Jane Tompkins. Thanks to the composition group at the University of Minnesota that made me welcome as a visitor and as the first Fellow of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Writing; it was a quarter when I got an amazing amount of work done: Chris Anson, Robert L. Brown, Jr. Geoffrey Sirc, Donald Ross, and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. A special thanks for inviting me in and giving careful readings and comments to my Friday Morning Reading/Writing Group: Sara Evans, Amy Kaminsky, Elaine Tyler May, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Cheri Register; and also to Hildy Miller. Particular thanks for the late stage contributions of Jennifer Diamond of UCSD and an exceptional reader for Palgrave. The people whose hard work has helped make the Muir College Writing Program succeed include Maria Arande, Michele Bigos, Caron Coke, Cynthia Dupray, Barbara Eyer, Patrick Gleason, Nancy Hesketh, Liza Kamps, Pat Ledden, Barbara Mauro, Douglas McCannel, Lorie Newman, Eliza Segura, and Linda Vo and Carrie Wastal. Thanks for sharing the years of intellectual labor to George Lipsitz, Kerry Tomlinson, Matthew Tomlinson, Lisa Choy Tomlinson, and now Rebecca Leigh, Emily Rae, and Kevin James Tomlinson. I would like to thank Masha Zakheim for permission to use Bernard Zakheim’s Coit Tower mural Library (1934) for the cover. I would also like to express my appreciation to New England Publishers Association for permission to quote from Packard, William, ed. The Craft of Poetry: vi

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Acknowledgments

Interviews from the New York Quarterly. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. I would also like to thank those who provided permission to reprint essays of my own that I have revised to incorporate into the book. To Tom Waldrep for permission to use “On Earthquakes, Lost Wax, and Woody Allen: Composing Composing,” Writers on Writing. Vol. II. Ed. T. Waldrep. New York: Random House, 1987. 205–211. To Sage Publishers for permission to use “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision,” Written Communication 5.1 (1988): 58–81, and “Characters are Co-Authors: Segmenting the Self, Integrating the Composing Process,” Written Communication 4.3 (1986): 421–448. To Erlbaum for permission to use “Cooking, Mining, Gardening, Hunting: Metaphorical Stories Writers Tell About Their Composing Processes,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 1.1 (1986): 57–79.

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Acknowledgments vii

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1

In this book I provide new ways of exploring a very old topic—the activities of writing and what authors say about them. Drawing on published interviews with writers, I explore the discursive and cultural practices that shape writing as both an individual activity and a collective practice. As narrative acts performed in public, interviews with published authors constitute critical evidence about the cultures of writing that shape us and that we help shape. In the pages that follow, I argue that serious and sustained analysis of figurative language about composing by authors in literary interviews enables us to understand writing as work, as a shared social practice, as an activity with both critical and creative dimensions. Analysis and interpretation of authors’ interviews shifts focus from the idealized humanist subject often enshrined in discourses about creation and criticism since the Enlightenment to the struggles of actual human individuals attempting to forge new subjectivities, subject positions, social identities, and social relations. Interviews allow us to see that something new happens through conversation, that interviews help writers and readers recognize and realize the trans-individual dimensions of activities conducted in solitude. In Part I, Metaphor and the Cultures of Composing, I argue that critical engagement with the metaphors that writers draw on in discussing their writing acts can help us locate our critical, creative, and interpretive practices in the historical matrices that give them meaning. By reading author interviews diagnostically and symptomatically, we discover the trans-individual and inter-textual dimensions of writing—the ways in which the words we write always echo, answer, amplify, and occlude words written by others, how a collective metanarrative about composition and authorship influences our efforts whether we know it 1

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Introduction

or not. Perhaps most important, employing metaphor-reading as a critical method teaches us that words are more than tools and that writing is more than a technology. My investigation highlights the importance of metaphor in composing as well as the connections that link the teaching of writing to collective, historically specific, and socially shared narratives and metanarratives about originality and creativity. In Part II, The Apparatus of Authorship, I explore how mechanisms of publicity and promotion produce the genre of author interviews and permeate its constructions of authorship. Interest in authorial subjectivity and even celebrity has been a long-standing aspect of cultural life as well as an occasional aspect of scholarly inquiry. It is related to larger cultural interest in representations of imagination and invention by all kinds of creative people, including artists, musicians, and scientists. My inquiry examines how conversations between interviewers and authors reveal socially shared understandings of what writing is and how it gets done. When writers converse about their composing practices, they recover and reconsider aspects of their artistry that may have eluded conscious recognition. Author interviews thus restore a temporal dimension and teleology to the seemingly timeless quality of literature as authors return to previous projects in order to plan new ones. The ways that authors discuss their composing, particularly their metaphors, help authors, readers, and critics recuperate what Gertrude Stein called “the time of the composition and the time in the composition” (1962, p. 516). They remind us that the finished work of art has a history, and that the unfinished draft has a future. A dominant cultural metanarrative that I have called the Buried Life of the Mind tends to govern discussions of composing in Western culture. This metanarrative implies that writing emerges from deep within a heroic self. Such a metanarrative of writing encourages us to focus attention on the special selfhood of the heroic author and its teeming buried life, rather than the embodied labor and the social nature of composing. Whatever their utility for moral education and inspiration, images of heroic authors severely limit our understanding of how writing actually takes place. These stories focus our attention on cultural products worthy of admiration, rather than on the complex cultural processes that produce them. They segregate literary authorship from other kinds of textual production. As Raymond Williams argues, relegating writing exclusively to the sphere of art “is to lose contact with the substantive creative process and then to idealize it; to put it above or below the social, when it is in fact the social in one of its most distinctive, durable, and total forms” (Williams, 1977, p. 212, emphasis added).

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2 Authors on Writing

Roland Barthes argued popular “profiles” of authors in newspapers and magazines serve exactly to hide intellectual labor: “Thus the function of the man of letters is to human labor rather as ambrosia is to bread: a miraculous, eternal substance, which condescends to social form so that its prestigious difference is better grasped” (1972, p. 30). I argue that there is much evidence from authors’ metaphorical stories about writing to alter the cultural view that Barthes challenges, to see the intellectual labor of authorship differently. Part I, “Metaphors and Cultures of Composing,” includes four chapters introducing and analyzing a range of writers’ figurative language about the events and acts of their writing, figures drawn from published literary interviews. In Chapter 2, “Composing and Metaphoricity,” I argue that metaphorical stories about writing acts and events are part of apparatuses of social production of both authorship and of composing. I introduce Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life of the Mind” as a touchstone to develop my argument that the buried life functions as a metanarrative for composing and to discuss the problems presented by overemphasis on it and related metaphors of inspiration and illumination that make composing a site of inspiration, mystery, interiority, and alterity. The argument of Chapter 2 provides tools to reposition metaphors that might otherwise be seen as emblematic of interiority and alterity. In Chapter 3, “Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models,” I consider the kinds of multiple “truths” that emerge from examining how writers’ figurative language about their writing processes can “model” composing. I also discuss these metaphorical models in the light of several other ways of looking at writing. I argue that sustained study of writers’ metaphors about writing processes reveals the existence of a meta-narrative community among writers and in the general culture. Interpreting its role in literary interviews might enable us to supplement, revive, or even replace the epistemological tools lost to writers, readers, and teachers because of society’s celebration and mystification of authorship. We need to learn how to read other writers on writing, to bring the critical and the creative in dialogue with one another, to restore the centrality of the social to studies of cognition and communication, and to promote metaphorical analysis as a critical method. In Chapter 3 I also introduce a conversational, contingent, and comparative approach to metaphor-reading adapted from the arguments of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and of Donald Schon In Chapters 4 and 5 I focus on two strands of significant alternative narratives, the metaphorics of embodied labor and discursive sociality.

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Introduction 3

Chapter 4, “Metaphorics of Embodied Labor,” situates writing as an embodied activity. I then analyze Writing is Mining, a story of labor that appear to have close ties to the buried life metanarrative, yet demonstrates significant differences. I go on to examine a variety of metaphors that connect intellectual labor with other kinds of labor, particularly metaphors of revision. Chapter 5, “Metaphorics of Discursive Sociality,” analyzes major metaphors that dramatically emphasize the role of social voices in intellectual labor. These stories describe texts and fictional characters as living beings whose concerns must be negotiated to complete one’s writing tasks. Chapters 4 and 5 draw on typologies that organize metaphors by their shared characteristics, grouping together metaphors that liken writing to traversing time and space, that depict composing as similar to craft labor, that imagine both texts and fictional characters coming to life as if they were co-authors. My intent, however, goes beyond mere description. Once we have grouped these metaphors into categories, we can turn to examining how they may shape notions of writing. The importance of analyzing the full range of author’s metaphorical stories about composing is to modify, if not overturn, the dominant metanarrative of the buried life. The metaphors of Chapters 4 and 5 reveal that many different kinds of labor, cognition, and communication go into writing. They direct our attention to micro-social practices and processes that help us understand that successful writing entails many minor but arduous tasks. Precisely because writing and revising require actions too small to support heroic narratives—revising sentences, re-arranging paragraphs, changing punctuation, looking up the meaning of words, adjusting the rhythm of phrases and the pace of paragraphs, lengthening or shortening chapters that previously seemed to be completed—they generally remain hidden from view, therefore mystifying the processes of writing and allowing both advanced and beginning writers to believe that no one else has to struggle with writing in quite the way we do. Part II, “The Apparatus of Authorship,” presents two chapters on the literary interview as part of an apparatus of publication that creates rather than merely reflects “authorship.” In Chapter 6, “Authorship and Intellectual Labor,” I discuss conceptions of authorship that influence literary interviews, as well as the literary interview as a genre and discursive site for the production of images of intellectual labor. In Chapter 7, “Authorship in an Economy of Promotion,” I discuss how the interview functions within a promotional context of capitalism.

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4 Authors on Writing

The subject of The Buried Life of the Mind, then, is neither metaphor nor composing per se, but the discourse and discursive context of cultural conceptions of composing. The book brings together critical and creative discourses to examine how authors present their writing as intellectual labor during literary interviews and how these interviews function as part of the apparatus of contemporary authorship. It argues that when properly interpreted, the things authors say about composing processes can tell us a great deal—about them and about us, about the cultures of commerce and creativity in our society, about the assumptions, understandings, and aspirations that make writing a shared social practice as well as an individual art.

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Introduction 5

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Metaphor and Cultures of Composing

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Part I

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2

Figurative descriptions or “metaphorical stories” of composing are ubiquitous in interviews with professional writers. Writers explain themselves as building, battling, or giving birth; their texts as flowing, growing, or coming alive; their minds as razors, reservoirs, or compost heaps. They position their writing as cooking, painting, rock-climbing. They present themselves as vehicles, listeners, actors, manipulators, manufacturers, masters. Their characters and their texts become active, even recalcitrant, co-authors. Figurative themes and metaphorical stories about composing acts bring writing down to earth, not only reflecting, but also constituting extant concepts of composing as authors’ interviews repeatedly reference actual life activities. These figurative commentaries about writing activities are by no means isolated or unique, but are part of a wide network of representations that are also connected to discussions of creativity in science, painting, and other fields. Borrowing from one another and from widely shared social tropes, authors’ metaphorical stories contribute to the sense that there is some set of activities, ways of thinking, and ways of being that Western culture has come to term a “creative process.” Although they may be attempting to capture their experiences as writers, interview respondents unconsciously re-create or instantiate a notion of the writing process based on shared social language about authorship and composing. Precisely because we have been taught for so long to think about writing as little more than an inspired presentation of an already coherent inner self, writers have difficulty representing the labor that goes into writing, the many tasks that it entails, or the identities it asks us to assume. Writing is a social institution created over time. The cumulative discourses about it shape our understanding of what we are 9

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Composing and Metaphoricity

supposed to do when we write, and how we see ourselves as writers. Our “interior selves” are not so much displayed in our writing as they are constituted by it. We are not fully intact and formed subjects who write to make our inner selves visible: rather the discourses surrounding writing help construct our inner and outer selves by “hailing” us and inviting us to take on identities as writers. Yet most of the ways we are constituted by writing remain invisible to us because cultural emphases on interiority and inspiration occlude the practical social labor that we do, as well as the ideological consequences of that labor. Although the writing process is shaped by shared social understandings, dominate cultural metanarratives tell us to think of and even to experience our processes as purely personal and individual. By performing the discourse of a writer as imaged in our culture, we become what we think a writer is, we internalize a series of expectations, norms, and behaviors that we have learned from others. Yet we imagine that the writers we become were inside us all along. We cannot see our identities as writers as the product of a shared social process precisely because that social process is so powerful and pervasive we come to believe that it originated inside ourselves. The things that are closest to home can be the things hardest to see. When New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther reviewed the opening of Howard Hawks’ 1947 western film Red River, he hailed the motion picture as a breakthrough, as a western film that was just plain fun and that had no adult “message” or ideology to communicate. Yet ideology permeates Red River, a cinematic ode to private property, patriarchal power, and imperial expansion intended as an allegory to justify the Cold War from the U.S. perspective. Because the film’s ideology corresponded completely to Crowder’s ideology, he thought it had no ideology at all. This is the problem we face when we try to understand the social labor, social identities, and social ideologies sedimented within metaphors describing writing processes. They are so powerful and pervasive that they do not appear to be there at all. They are what is taken for granted, what goes without saying. * In their retrospective accounts of their writing practices, published writers say what goes without saying. Reading their richly textured and intricately detailed metaphors critically enables us to think about the way that metaphorical stories about writing hide from sight or obscure social practice. Louis Althusser (1971) offers a generative argument

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10 Authors on Writing

about the importance of studying this kind of practical activity in order to produce what he describes as “descriptive theory.” From his perspective, concrete individuals become constituted as “subjects” through ideology, but the most powerful ideological influences do not come to us in the form of ideological pronouncements. That would make them visible, controversial, and refutable. Instead, Althusser argues that the most powerful ideologies exist in “apparatuses,” in practices, and that these practices are always material. Althusser’s interest is in apparatuses of the state; he uses the metaphors “infrastructure” and “superstructure” to stand in for the state, so we can see how and what the state does. My interest here is in the trope of the author embedded in the apparatuses of cultural production. Descriptive (ideographic) metaphors about the events and acts of writing can lead us to theoretical (nomothetic) generalizations by revealing the “how” and the “what” of writing. Writing processes are social practices, and their materiality becomes visible most usefully through the descriptive theory of writing that we can create through critical examination of writers’ metaphors about their composing activities. Yet in order to explain what writing is, we need to examine how it has been explained traditionally. Probing the dynamics and origins of composition has long been related to efforts to discern core truths about human creativity, selfhood and subjectivity. A passion to understand how and from where thought arises and a corresponding fascination with the origins of writing have been central to many kinds of philosophical, empirical, and literary studies. These inquiries encourage us to seek one hidden “truth” about writing, rather than to analyze available but competing truths. The enormous value that the Western tradition assigns to elite authors, texts, and processes positions them in exaggerated terms: either as comprehensive and universal, or as mysterious and particular. In either case, what one expects to find “buried” in authors is truth of mind and method. But inquiries focused on defining such truths categorize writing subjects in ways that are antithetical to understanding actual practices of writing. I argue in Part I of this book that interviewed writers reveal multiple truths about composing processes, but that we cannot always hear them because we shape our comprehension to a singular conception: the buried life of the mind. In this chapter I sketch out a schematic version of the argument in Part I. I first examine Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life of the Mind” as a representative of this metanarrative of desire for deep and hidden knowledges of the human mind. I then argue that the demands for pre-existent singularity and

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Composing and Metaphoricity 11

interiority that infuse the metanarrative of the buried life serve to limit our conceptions of writing processes. I go on to argue that the metanarrative is supported by an equally misleading emphasis on “creativemoment” metaphors of inspiration and illumination, but that we can overcome the limitations of this overemphasis if we examine cultural discourses about writing. Examining metaphorical stories about composing can help us refigure conceptions of writing processes to encompass authors’ rich multiplicity and references to labor and sociality in the face of the occlusions of the metanarrative. I also contend that the tensions created by our competing desires for generality and idiosyncrasy lead us to emphasize stories of the buried life and inspiration in the face of repeated emphasis by writers on plurality of practices as central to their writing processes. Because we look for metanarratives, we overlook micronarratives: we cannot hear authors’ claims for other more “multiple” ways of creating writing. * In the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold used a metaphorical notion about the “buried life of the mind” to describe the origins of thinking and being. This metaphor appears frequently in the cultural lore surrounding creativity. The trope, which occludes as much as it reveals, has become our metanarrative about writing. While historically specific to his time, Arnold’s vision resonates with older traditions of thought about the “truth” of human intellect. According to Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life,” the powerful desire to understand the origins of the mind’s energies remains an inaccessible, fugitive ideal: But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us–to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines,

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Composing and Metaphoricity 13

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Arnold contrasts the buried life with the bustling public life of the modernizing city, a beleaguered conflicted political life. The buried life emerges in everyday life as an object of pure desire to know the “truth” of one’s nature, one’s genesis, one’s being in the world. Presented as inner, under, and within, this buried life always remains that thing which one can look for, long for, even lust for, but which can never be obtained or comprehended. The search may create eloquent articulations, but the truth of hidden feelings and understandings can never be known. It remains tantalizingly just beyond one’s grasp.1 Arnold’s “buried life” metaphor positions the mind in ways similar to ancient Greek tropes of truth as absent and inaccessible. Page duBois (1991) discusses the tendency in ancient Greek thought to situate truth in places seen as hidden, or “other.” Greek torture of slaves aimed, in part, to extract truth from the interiority of the slave’s body. Tropes that position truth in this way render ultimate knowledge unreachable and ungraspable. From this perspective, the “truth” rests precisely in that which is not known and not knowable. When applied to writing, this belief obscures the socially shared assumptions and practices that establish writing as a collective, cultural, and trans-individual activity. When contemporary scholars attend to metaphorical language about writing activities, they often focus on metaphors congruent with the buried life of the mind. They utilize what duBois describes as an “aristocratic” model of truth, available only to the few who can find it, comprehensible only through their grace. These metaphors invoke ideologies of the self as the fountain of individuality and creativity, though such ideologies have been contested in recent years in productive ways, especially by poststructuralist theories. They obscure competing models, like those duBois finds in fragments of the writings of Herakleitos where truth emerges from the play of difference, from struggle, change, and movement. The truth Herakleitos

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‘And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves – Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on forever unexpressed. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well–but ’tis not true! (1979, pp. 289–290)

suggests brackets the issues of underlying unity in order to emphasize particularity in the universe (1991, pp. 97–98). Extending duBois’s argument, social investments in thinking about truth as an unknowable, mysterious, unitary process may rest exactly on its elusive status, its ability to exceed grasp and comprehension. Similarly, metaphors that present writing as received from external and even divine sources position truth and creativity as mystical and unknowable. Well-known metaphors about muses and lightening bolts that deliver truth from “somewhere else” discourage us from looking at the practical work, social networks, and communicative acts that inform and enable our writing. Such metaphors obscure their dependence on a dichotomy between mystery and labor that denigrates labor in order to valorize mystery. Yet the resort to mystery is no mystery. Helen Sword (1995) points out that historically specific reasons lead contemporary individuals to cloak themselves in pre-modern practices and beliefs. Important strains within the culture of modernism, leading from Arnold through Eliot to Frye and Bloom, aestheticize disenchantment, establishing art as a compensatory realm that soothes the wounds of spiritual and social alienation. The fact that modernist thinkers steep their work in irony about muses, deities, and other-worldly forces reflects their longing to escape the everyday by attaching themselves to the transcendent or the deep—to the true, the good, the beautiful, and the universal. Yet such grandiose hopes and escapist fantasies only serve to exacerbate disenchantment with the quotidian, the social, and the experiential. The words we share bear a direct relationship to the worlds we share. duBois notes what is at stake in the selection of one metaphor rather than another. In her discussion of Herakleitos she argues that his attentiveness to time, change, and process prefigured the values of democracy. Rather than canonizing truth as eternal and unknowable, she finds Herakleitos to celebrate mutuality, interdependence, observation, and experience (duBois, 1991, p. 98). The mutability and mutuality that duBois recognizes in Herakleitos remain relevant to democratic hopes and aspirations today, no less than they did in antiquity. Appeals to the hidden depths of the buried life of the mind, however, function to depict qualities as already within individuals rather than developed in social arenas. When the interiority of the writing subject holds center stage, accounts about writing processes hinge on their potential authenticity as representations of unique subjectivities. Although putatively eternal and universal, this interiority rests on widespread notions of the self

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14 Authors on Writing

that are themselves historically specific and ultimately metaphorical. The positing of a “pure” interiority has been facilitated since the Enlightenment by structures of self-surveillance encouraging the experience of the self as a “closed system,” characterized by “inner” and “outer” dimensions (Elias, 1991). According to Norbert Elias, “The social division between the individual and others is replicated internally as an immediately felt relation between an “interior,” nonmaterial individuality and its own body” (Ferguson, 2000, pp. 48–9). Elias objects to pervasive ways of positioning selves that frame the “inner” self as prior to social relations, as though nothing that is individual has been shaped by social life.2 Because we posit the individual mind of the writer within an encapsulated interior, we overlook the socially sedimented nature of discourse; we attribute to the author discourses that can exist, in fact, only because they are created by, reflect, and are connected to the discursive world of others. Thus we can see that Arnold’s “buried life” metaphor, as rearticulated in cultural lore about composing, reinstalls the myth of the solitary genius while eliding the possibility of shared cultural work. Studies of interiority and the buried life of the mind draw upon metaphors of “depth” for certain kinds of significance. Yet depth is something brought by interpretation to the scene, not something that precedes interpretation.3 Thinking of ascriptions of “depth” as rhetorical rather than ontological allows us to examine how they are used, and with what consequences.4 In his brilliant discussion of the cult of interiority among jazz critics, Robert Walser (1997) argues that notions positing a “deep” subjectivity in jazz depend upon conflating aesthetic complexity with psychological depth. His comments reveal some of the limitations of excessive focus on authorial subjectivity: … deep jazz thinking bestows depth upon the self; … [in doing so] some people’s cultural values are validated by being universalized, through means that circumvent evidence and forestall challenge. Arguments that some music is “deeper” than other music are useful in the social negotiation of value precisely because they blur the social construction of both subjectivities and aesthetic values. They amount to claims of special privilege, and it is because they are rarely recognized as such that they warrant criticism. To locate value “inside” something—whether a person, a tradition, or a recording— is to attempt to evade what is “outside”: history, culture, politics, contingency, contestation. Yet to evoke interiority is inevitably to argue about society, and it is precisely because the stakes of personal

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Composing and Metaphoricity 15

16 Authors on Writing

Walser shows that discourses of interiority construct the self they purport to find, that our ideas about interiority are inevitably socially motivated and grounded. What is in question, then, is a method that presents the values of specific groups as universal, blurs the social construction of identities, imagines both the writing process and works of art as so disengaged that they would not be affected by even radical social change, elides the different meanings that literary texts may have for different people, and guarantees the worth of canonized literary texts by validating the integrity of the subjectivities of both the author and the critic while at the same time conflating them. The focus on authorial subjectivity reduces the complexity of the social and discursive world. It disguises the agency and social determination of authors, audiences, and critics, obscures cultural history, and, significantly for this inquiry, distracts us from the practices of intellectual labor by which texts are made. * The buried life of the mind is a dominant metanarrative about intellectual labor that mystifies it through a focus on interiority, but also, by its quest for the truth of an “other” life, by a focus on alterity. This focus on alterity is emphasized in related metaphors of what I call the “creative moment.” Creative-moment metaphors present sources of writing or writing events as mysterious, enigmatic, impenetrable, extraordinary, “other.” Inspiration stories depict writing as being possessed or otherwise surrendering control to unknown or outside forces; illumination stories present writing as prompted by sudden and unexpected insights. Though they do not share its spatial emphasis, these metaphors are deeply connected to the metanarrative of the buried life of the mind. They share its positioning of the author as a unique being who has that deep, extraordinary inner life, who undergoes special experiences that “release” glimpses of hidden truths. Inspiration and illumination metaphors are the most “iconic” stories of writing processes in both traditional and contemporary authorship.5 Popular conceptions of literary composing have focused on the author—particularly the poet—“inspired,” rushing to take down the “dictation” of the “muses.” But despite the popular references to inspiration, to “serving as vessels” and “receiving gifts” which dominate a

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identity, historical memory, and artistic experience are so high that interiority is so public. (1997, p. 291)

cultural “at large” conception of writing processes, writing is on-going work or intellectual labor, and the great body of authors’ metaphors reflect that. Contrary to the assumptions embedded in the tropes of interiority and alterity, inspiration and illumination stories are not the predominant representation of composing activities used by contemporary interviewed authors. The predominant metaphorical representations of composing by writers are those found in Chapters 4 and 5: embodied labor and discursive sociality. These stories are vivid, interesting, and ubiquitous. But their importance to conceptions of composing has often been obscured by the cultural interest in the “otherness” of the mind. I argue that inspiration and illumination stories are iconic exactly because, at least momentarily, they pull composing out of a world of effort and social interaction. Creative-moment stories privileging inspiration and illumination, however powerful in themselves, obscure the small steps and shared social labor at the heart of composing. Because creative moment metaphors emphasize altered states of consciousness and moments of exhilaration, ease, and fluency, readers may not know or may not acknowledge that inspired moments are atypical writing occasions, that creative moment metaphors loom larger in the discourse of composing than such creative moments actually occur during process of writing. Yet creative-moment metaphors can tell us a great deal about cultures of writing and their continuing fascination with the buried life of the mind. Their popularity in the culture—which so exceeds their use by writers—demonstrates the continuing interest in positioning intellectual labor as not labor, and, to some degree, not intellectual (nonrational). Discussing the nineteenth-century popularity of anecdotes about authorial inspiration and sudden illumination, Timothy Clark argues, “The fascination of these episodes lies in their seductive status as modern versions of miracle. Glimpses of the creative process remain like brief visions of the promised land” (1997, p. 5).6 Without challenging any author’s experiences of inspiration and illumination, I want to position the stories so as to demonstrate that they are not diametrically opposed to the claims of embodied labor and discursive sociality that permeate metaphorical stories of writing. * Some of the best known inspiration stories, those frequently taken as dramatically representative of literary writing, are not generalized

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18 Authors on Writing

Now I can say that about a half a dozen times in my life a poem has been given to me, rather than had I tried to invent it, or make it with the rational mind. It is as if it were a gift of the gods, and as if the personality of the poet were a [vane] upon which a wind, a spiritual wind blows, so that in a sense the whole being is used by the poem…. but I insist that in at least half a dozen cases in my life some of my best poems have been given to me. (1979 Cannito, p. 249) This passage by Eberhart contains several of the inspiration stories also used by other writers: claims of receiving a poem from a muse or other an unknown creator7 (sometimes it is from an unknown place8), claims of being merely a vessel for greater forces.9 Yet Eberhart clearly distinguishes this particular and rather dramatic method of writing from the ways in which he wrote the rest of his poems. The prominence of such metaphorical stories of “creative-moment” composing does not mean that they should be interpreted to be “the creative process” of poetry. The long history of invoking muses shapes how people receive these references in contemporary literary interviews. Invocations to divine sources historically constituted a part of the poem itself, a gesture of appreciation and desire. This religious background influenced invocations to the muses and deities in medieval and later poetry, as references to the “pagan” muses began to be dropped or replaced, particularly when Christian poets began to make such invocations.10 In contemporary interviews, the muses take their place among a variety of ways to discuss the emergence of literary texts. References are sometimes ironic; they are also full of qualifications and other rhetorical gestures. Further complications arise if one notes that most of those who make references to inspiration stories are poets. If one were to interpret these references as bearing specific religious content, one would have to presume that deities are particularly concerned with the production of poetry (good and bad) but less so with fiction and nonfiction writing, however beautiful, however significant, however religious. This seems unlikely. It is more likely that discursive

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stories of how all writing gets done, but of how once in a while some writing gets done. For example, prominent in interviews with poet Richard Eberhart are “creative-moment” metaphors: poems that are inspired, “god-given,” “beyond rationality,” the poet “a vehicle for the utterance of the poem.” Reports Eberhart,

conventions encourage poets to expect the presence of muses, or at least to perform that expectation for their readers. Many modernist poets invoke prophetic inspiration, although sometimes to treat it ironically or specify its absence. Helen Sword (1995) examines how three representative modernists call on visionary tropes to define and manipulate an inspiring spirit of “otherworldliness” through their writing. Rilke does so through an inner female self. Lawrence confronts a dynamic but ill-tempered demon. H. D. searches for an oracle. Sword argues that we need to contrast claims about the experience of inspiration with the use of poetic rhetorics that have a “prophetic” feel. Following Frederick Clarke Prescott, Sword uses the term “primary inspiration” to refer to experiences that the author considers “visionary.” “Secondary” inspiration characterizes poetry with a style or rhetoric displaying a visionary stance. According to Sword, Primary inspiration … refers to real visions and real divine voices (and I have chosen to accept at face value poets’ claims to such experiences), while secondary inspiration applies to verse that merely imitates prophetic tropes. (1995, p. 5) Sword argues that most poetry deemed “prophetic” results from secondary inspiration. Metaphors of primary inspiration are just that— metaphors. With some exceptions (Rilke was one), poets speak like prophets, not as prophets. They draw on their talents as writers to construct a dramatic and memorable metaphor, but only rarely confuse the metaphor with the experience it purports to represent. Perhaps most important, Sword reminds us that the purpose of prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures was not to predict the future or to flaunt special communication with God, but rather to interpret the present by standing outside it, to offer “an exegesis of existence” (1995, p. 5). Following Sword, we can bracket any “actual” experiences of visionary states to examine instead how writers strategically draw on metaphorical stories about inspiration in their writing practices. Claiming divine inspiration endows an author with authority. In interviews, authors may posit privileged access to wisdom by minimizing their own agency and maximizing the agency of otherworldly sources. This concept of poetic inspiration follows an oxymoronic logic. The poet achieves power through powerlessness, maintaining an authoritative posture only through abjection. The apparent paradox rests on the assumption that writing can result from a pure, fully autonomous activity, independent of social sources. Yet the poet receiving dictation

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Composing and Metaphoricity 19

from nature, deities, or muses is busy listening to and transcribing the dictation. This is activity. Even a claim to become “empty” or “passive” immediately prior to the moment of inspiration requires preparation. Part of what makes inspiration stories “iconic” is that they seem, like the buried life of the mind, to position the contemporary writer in a historical lineage of extraordinary human beings and experiences outside of changes in society. But, as Cherryl Armstrong argues, claims of poetic inspiration are not isolated from other social concerns, especially about how authors are positioned in society. She suggests that differences in how poets from different eras describe their composing may not reflect substantial differences in “actual” writing behavior so much as different attitudes toward writing poetry exhibited in different eras. Poets are most likely to speak publicly and probably even to think privately about that part of writing that is of greatest interest to their age. The Romantics were interested in nature as both a subject for writing and a source of inspiration, and the part of their experience to which they seem to have given most significance was inspired composing. This certainly does not mean that they did not labor over their drafts. Contemporary poets seem to see labored revision as the most significant aspect of writing, while, as we have seen, they experience inspired composing as well. (1985, p. 26) As Armstrong notes, the fact that poetic interviews involve questions about writing processes at all is “to assume that there is considerably more to poetic creation than inspiration” (p. 26). Armstrong also indicates that what is “received” during inspiration varies, and so cannot be seen as the same experience. She finds “inspiration” applied to the impulse to write, the subject for a poem, the first or germinal words of text, and the spontaneous composing of lines or verses (1985, p. 28). Moreover, claims of reception from “deities” may be strategic appeals. Poems from the gods imply a status superior to those attributed to unspecified or openly social sources. Like inspiration stories, illumination stories are often positioned as mysterious and thrilling because the experience they describe is exciting and seems to produce the results of effort without the actual expenditure of effort. Marguerite Yourcenar remarks that she was thrust back into her Memoirs of Hadrian when she came upon an early draft in a trunk: “a bolt out of the blue!” (1984, p. 113) This

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20 Authors on Writing

metaphor expresses energy, unexpectedness, suddenness. But it does not necessarily imply instanteousness, as some readers might assume, nor does it imply an outside source. The metaphor of a bolt of lightning is worth considering in some detail to remind us that even literal lightning is the result of effort—a process with beginnings, middles, and ends. Bolts of lightning appear during a storm, when already established conditions make them possible. Lightning bolts develop temporally and in relation to one another. An electrical charge builds up through small collisions of low intensity. High-speed photography reveals several strokes in what appears to be one flash. Some strokes work their way downward from cloud to cloud, rather than immediately connecting source to ground. The brilliant flash that lightning bolts seem to contain is actually an upward discharge from the target to the source. A bolt of lightening stems from a charge of electricity that is not formed as a “trait” of the carrying cloud, but rather as a relationship “between cloud and ground below, or between cloud and cloud (i.e., a difference in electrical potential)” (see Gruber and Davis, 1988, p. 243). In other words, what makes the lightning bolt carry a charge and flash brilliantly is caused by its enabling processes. Without them it cannot exist. In writing, lightning bolts are formed similarly, by the relationships between ideas and language within the stormy connections of discourse. The conditions necessary for the brilliance of a bolt of lightning are remarkably similar to the network of relationships that are necessary for the moment of insight to take place during writing. Expectations of interviews demand explanations that are incomplete or not fully delineated, and that focus on the dramatic. Insights of various types are a regularly occurring feature of writing activity. They are not singular, and not always dramatic. Emphasis on sudden and dramatic insight does not reflect adequately the network of relationships established in on-going writing and thinking activities. Thus, authors’ perceptions of sudden insight are not an adequate representation of the entire writing process. The primary effect of the cultural emphasis on inspiration and illumination stories as “iconic” of the buried life of the mind is to render the intellectual labor that actually produces the writing invisible. Inspiration and illumination stories appear to be stories of intellectual labor without consciousness or labor. Creative moment metaphors are popular partly because they hide the intellectual labor that makes up the mundane activities of those who create. Their popularity suggests

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Composing and Metaphoricity 21

22 Authors on Writing

that what is most popular about the process of writing is imagining that writing can be produced without one.

If we shift the focus from the alterity of creative moments and the interiority of the buried life of the mind, from writers’ subjectivity to how discourse shapes conceptions of composing, a different set of questions arise. Rather than concerns about interiority and authenticity, uniqueness and universality, alterity and excitement, attention now turns to how language constitutes writing processes, how discourses influence concepts of authorship, how instances of discourse contribute to understanding writing as a social institution. The relationship of shared language to concepts of intellectual labor becomes a focus of interest. Shifting our point of view from “interiority” and “alterity” to look at the discourse of composing in a strategically “exterior” way allows the inquiry to “problematize” the notion of “writing process” by considering how writing is formed in social discourses, rather than reflecting a “reality,” an isolated technology, a set of skills, or an essential characteristic of human “creativity.” To question people’s sense of creativity as central to the human subject, welling up from a spring of interiority, is not to deny their feelings or the sense of their experiences. It is to argue that such a sense of interiority is an effect of discourse, not its source. This is a circular process. The discourses of writing and creativity encourage both writers and readers to view interiority as producing “creative” writing. Positing that pre-existing interiority, they look to these same discourses for evidence of the workings of the interior life. From such a point of view, these “utterances” or instances of language I examine here do not demonstrate how authors “capture” into language their experiences of creativity and writing, but how they construct those experiences for themselves and for others, as part of a cultural apparatus of writing. This inquiry is an effort to identify the shared social language that orders conceptions of writing processes—a language all about work, action, and the mundane. In that light, these shared social languages about intellectual labor are not to be denigrated because they are “commonplace.” These languages are simply the way people—even people deemed “creative”—in fact especially people deemed “creative”—talk about their everyday writing activities. These texts form a discursive “field” to be inflected by individuals, a field that helps to organize our knowledge of writing practices. These shared social tropes, then, are the “hidden sources” of our writing lives.

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*

Writers’ metaphorical stories about their composing, while fascinating and individually inflected, draw on discursive resources—on pervasive and systematic ways of positioning writing activities that underlie the diversity of personal accounts. They do so not because they reflect some underlying trans-historical and trans-social “reality” of thinking activities, but because they are part of shared discursive practices for discussing composing. To understand writing requires understanding how these discursive practices frame authoring activities. In a climate emphasizing authorial subjectivity and interiority, arguments for the importance of shared language are often seen as thereby, of necessity, arguments against the significance of the exceptional subjectivity of authors. In a climate emphasizing the subject as constituting, transcendental, and essentialist, arguments for a subject constituted through shared discursive practices are often seen as thereby, of necessity, arguments against the subject as a source of knowledge, certainty, and creativity. Susan Hekman argues that such dichotomies position the constituted subject as a “social dupe” precisely because the dichotomy is “parasitic” on the modernist definition of the subject (1995). The constituted subject is constructed as simply the opposite of the modernist subject. Since the modernist subject is defined as the source of all agency and plenitude, the opposite of transcendental agency becomes no agency. Yet the kind of “discursive subject” that becomes useful in considering writers’ discourse about writing practices is neither social dupe nor transcendent. The writing of such a subject does not spring forth from an interior life free from social influence, nor is it ineluctably determined by its social world. According to Hekman, For the discursive subject, however, agency and construction are not antithetical. Rather, agency is a product of discourse, a capacity that flows from discursive formations. The discursive subject redefines agency in a way that explodes the boundaries imposed by the constituting/constituted dichotomy. It does not entail reference to a prediscursive “I” but, instead, entails that subjects find agency within the discursive spaces open to them in their particular historical period. The perspective offered by the discursive subject suggests that it is not the case that Descartes discovered the “truth” about human subjectivity and its agentic potential, but, rather, that the agency that is the hallmark of the Cartesian subject is created by the discourse of that subject, that is, that it enables those who employ it to speak as agents. (1995, p. 202)

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Composing and Metaphoricity 23

I argue that our understanding of writing processes is not well served by conceptions of a transcendent, emancipatory, heroic, solitary subject. I do not argue that discursive subjects cannot act in the spheres available to them to change their own and others’ lives. On the contrary, they can. They can do so in specific, local, and contingent ways—in fact, the very ways that are open to most people in their lives: the very ways that people might seek to influence through writing. This shift to valuing authors as “discursive subjects” encourages us to emphasize not their singularity but their imbrication in the social world. It changes not who the authors are, but our own approach to them, and, I would argue, our ability to hear the fluid, perspectival, multiple, partial truths about composing that they declare. Because of the multifaceted and complex nature of writing events and activities, it is not useful to talk about writing processes “as they are,” or “literally.” We can best understand composing in “as-if” terms, by means of metaphor. Any “reality” of composing, then, involves culturally shared notions of the relation of individual author to text, the traceable moves of writing acts, the social settings in which writing processes emerge, and their influences on subject, task, purpose, and audience. The “reality” of composing is not a “literal” reality, but a socially constructed one—a reality that includes what people believe to be real about what they do, and how they come to find it real. * The popularity of the metaphors of interiority and alterity, of the buried life of the mind as a “master narrative” or metanarrative subsuming literary creation, has turned attention from the multiplicity of ways that the metaphor narrative can be inflected as well as the wide range of “competing” metaphorical narratives that we will see in Chapters 4 and 5. For no single, defining metaphor controls our views of writing processes. Rather, as I argue in Chapter 3, these views are structured according to multiple metaphors, multiple models of the composing mind. Diverse metaphors reveal and create a range of perspectives on composing, focusing attention on different aspects of and attitudes toward writer, reader, text, process. Writers thinking before writing may say they are “gestating,” “lurking,” “jelling,” “simmering,” “ripening,” “blocking,” “filling the reservoir,” or “drying up.” These stories are not the same and do not describe the same writing processes. Authors frequently use multiple and contradictory metaphors to describe their writing acts. In fact, one of the strengths of

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24 Authors on Writing

Composing and Metaphoricity 25

[I]magination is a form of knowledge…. it’s probably naive to think that there is always a clear distinction between fact and fiction. We all compose the world we live in every moment of our lives. (1984, p. 202) Descriptions of composing processes in writing reflect tensions created by two opposing tendencies: one toward generalization, the other toward particularity. These polarities exhibit a desire for unity and synthesis on the one hand, and an emphasis on idiosyncrasy on the other. Literary scholars who examine composing by means of manuscripts, notebooks, and letters tend to look to the practices of individual authors. Interviewers and scholars in composition and rhetoric tend to seek similarities in composing strategies, to generalize across groups of writers. Scholars concerned with creativity often represent the composing of literary authors as one or another version of a single, “convergent” process, often seen as similar across all kinds of creativity, including that of science and art. Perhaps because of a recurrent belief in an elusive “key” to creativity, interviewers and analysts commonly talk about “the creative process” (“What starts the creative process for you?”) or “the writing process” (“Tell us about your writing process.”)—as if all poets and novelists merely vary in idiosyncratic ways from a standard pattern or procedure, or, even more commonly, as if individual writers have one habitual strategy for writing, whatever the subject and rhetorical problem. Yet literary writers describe their writing frequently not merely as “eccentricity” (minor variations from a norm), but as difference. For instance, the authors in my corpus of interviews do not hesitate to talk about using different processes of writing for different purposes, in different genres, and for different topics. Many of these comments relate to the metaphorics of embodied labor that I examine in Chapter 4. For example, Marguerite Yourcenar indicates that each book is born with its own quite special form, rather like a tree. An experience transplanted into a book carries with it moss and wild flowers mixed in with the clump of earth adhering to its roots. Each thought that gives birth to a book conveys a whole set of

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literature is exactly its opportunity for revealing multiple truths. The same should be said for the project of analyzing writers’ metaphors for composing. This is the impetus for comments such as that of E. L. Doctorow:

26 Authors on Writing

Yourcenar here uses a metaphor of embodied labor, Writing is Gardening, to emphasize that subjects and texts bring methods with them, that her method of composition is related to their nature, purpose, and conditions of emergence. Thus each new text to some degree represents a new task. An interaction between method and developing text gives a different “feel” to different writing projects, marking each with a unique origin and history. Yourcenar develops this sense of differing textures in another comment: In The Abyss it seemed to me … that I worked in granite, and in Archives de Nord I felt as though I was kneading a very thick dough. Yet that density is not a defect, in my view, but a characteristic of the society I was writing about. I know about dough, mind you: remember that I make my own bread…. You have to vary things according to your mood, you have to adapt the recipe to the materials at hand. Bread is never made twice in the same way. (1984, p. 185) Writers often turn to metaphorics of embodied labor like this in arguing that the “feel” of their material differs, conveying a sense of the differing shapes, textures, toughness, and malleability of their topics and texts. One result of variation in practices is that many writers, even those who are very experienced, claim that they are not always prepared for new rhetorical problems. Clarence Major points out, The things that I learned writing All-Night Visitors really didn’t carry over to NO. And I wasn’t able to use anything that I learned from writing NO in the process of writing Reflex and Bone Structure… . I’m not able to say I have now enough experience to go forward and write my books … Because I don’t. I can’t really use the experience. It’s not like an automobile mechanic who works on Volkswagens and he knows Volkswagens, so he’s able to really use that knowledge and it carries over from car to car… . [Instead it] involves discovering a new approach with each time, with each step. (1985, pp. 54–5)

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circumstances, a complex of emotions and ideas that will never appear in quite the same way in any other book. And each time the method is different. (1984, pp. 59–60)

Composing and Metaphoricity 27

Writers like Major and Yourcenar are not seeking to establish the nature of a general writing process, even their own. They emphasize the difference from one task to another, one problem to another.11

Once we recognize that we read writer’s stories of inspiration and illumination through the lens of the metanarrative of the buried life of the mind and its attendant creative-moment metaphors, and once we see that writers emphasize particularity and difference in their writing practices, it may be possible to overcome some of the cultural emphasis on interiority and alterity. Rather than seeing inspiration and illumination as standing for the whole of writing processes, we can see them as punctuating moments in the continuing engagement with discourse that makes up composing. We can then see inspiration and illumination stories as they are instantiated in the interviews: as stories of rare moments, or as stories embedded in other stories that emphasize composing as embodied labor and discursive sociality. For example, Geoffrey Hill uses an inspiration story that situates itself as also a story of labor. Hill reports, I do believe most profoundly in inspiration, but it has nothing to do with the vulgar notion of inspiration which supposes that Chopin sat at his piano listening to rain pattering on the roof and was immediately inspired to write the so-called ‘Raindrop’ Prelude. I believe that there must be such a thing as inspiration because I’ve experienced it. This inspiration comes at the end of a work, when maybe only a word or a phrase or a few sentences are wanting, and they will not come, and you struggle for hours, … and suddenly the word or phrase is there with that marvelous click like a closing box that Yeats talks about. (1981, p. 83)12 Even stories of “effortlessness” such as claims that writing just “flowed”—much admired in our culture—may turn out to be embedded as part of stories of on-going composing work. Doris Lessing indicates, Actually, I think I write much better if I am flowing. You start something off, and at first it’s a bit jagged, awkward, but then there’s a point where there’s a click and you suddenly become quite fluent. That’s when I think I am writing well. (1988, p. 94)

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*

Writers often use the story of a “click” as Lessing does, to describe an interrupting idea or sense of sudden ease that makes the writing task “fall into place.” These are metaphorical stories that situate moments of illumination within the context of a writing life. In such a life, writers are seldom sealed off from the possibility of writing. Rather their lightning bolts and clicks and pops and flashes take place within a context of a world of on-going text production, much as the metaphors of embodied labor that I discuss in Chapter 4. * The metanarrative of the buried life and attendant creative moment metaphors suppress not only references to embodied labor but also writers’ constant references to the social life of discourses. The influence of the metanarrative’s mystical attribution obscures the dialogue with the self and others, the situating oneself in language and discourse that encapsulate some of the most prevalent ways that writers talk about their composing. Claims in interviews that writing comes from “elsewhere”—a staple of classical, Romantic, and post-Romantic discourse—are almost always taken to refer to mysterious other-worldly sources. When an author says, “It just came to me,” it is generally not interpreted as “It just came to me from a cultural repository of discursive structures that include genres and other textual forms that shape what I write,” or as “It just came to me from the parts of my experience and understanding that represent a social world constructed through discourse.” Rather, it is interpreted as evidence of the “mystery” of the writing process, a practice that can never be fully understood and should, therefore, be merely admired. This removing of thinkers from their social scene might be understandable (though unfortunate) in the case of artists and scientists, whose creative processes might be seen as less connected to discourses. It is less explicable in the case of writers. Perhaps the dominance of the buried life of the mind contributes to our conceiving the creativity and activities of writers—whose raison d’être is language, whose métier is language—as somehow divorced from discourse. The embodied labors writers discuss in Chapter 4, the social interaction they describe in Chapter 5, both reveal that they work in a world saturated with discourse. For example, Charles Johnson, describing his composing, argues for a measure of agency in language itself: As Heidegger says, it’s language that covers over our perception. And it’s language in the hands of an artist that uncovers our perception.

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28 Authors on Writing

It’s the same phenomenon that conceals and reveals. This is why I think fiction is exciting. When I’m writing, things happen and I don’t quite know where they came from. I’d like to attribute them to the language itself, to its unpredictable possibilities. It’s like a trap door, the language drops you down to this whole other level of seeing. (1987, p. 259) Johnson’s metaphors position language at the center of the writing scene, concealing and revealing, opening possibility. It is language, he argues, that creates the door to insight. The personal and private so privileged in the buried life metanarrative and its attendant creative-moment metaphors can be repositioned also or otherwise as references to the quintessentially social. An example is found in stories that figure writing as dictation or listening to voices. Henry Miller indicates that he has, upon occasion, ceded control of his text to a dictator: it happens only at rare intervals, this dictation. Someone takes over and you just copy out what is being said…. I was grappling with ideas … I was saturated with it … the dictation took over most strongly with that book. (1977, p. 171) Taking dictation, transcribing, and recording imply energy and ease of arrival, writing without “thinking.”13 Yet the aura attached to writing that is characterized by special origins and special ease obscures other more valuable aspects of such metaphorical stories. Miller’s account is “saturated”: with language, style, and ideas. What he receives is discourse. What he “passes on” as he takes down the “dictation” is discourse. Taking dictation and writing “coming in voices”—both iconic of the writer’s alterity—are often shaped by writers in ways that counter the stories’ cultural role. Rather than declaring connection to outside forces, they often affirm social connections and histories in discourse. Wilson Harris discusses the “voices” of his and others’ novels speaking to him. Harris says, … the novels you write as well as the novels that other people write, have their own life. They speak to you. Now when that kind of speech is so haunting, that constitutes a development in the novel [being worked on] because the novels of the past are addressing you, are pushed on by some things you see, you are astonished at seeing

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Composing and Metaphoricity 29

them. In some degree, they’re already residing in what has gone before… . it’s as if there is a chorus. This is one way of putting it, and certain voices are more to the fore, though the other voices are there. Then in another novel, the other voices come to the fore. You have to be attentive not only to what you’re doing but in some degree to what is coming back. (1981, p. 61) Without mentioning Mikhail Bakhtin, Wilson Harris positions himself as writing in a world of “Bakhtinian” dialogism. I argue in Chapter 5 that writers use prominent and pervasive families of metaphors to position themselves as writing in such a thoroughly social and discursive scene. * Most writing problems require effort rather than inspiration (a backbone rather than a wishbone). They might also benefit from interpretation of the metaphors used by published writers during interviews about their composing practices. Investigation of students’ composing processes often goes astray by seeking to establish the nature of “normal” or alternatively “novice” writing processes. Such categories appear to bring organization to the chaos of individual writing experiences, but not without consequences. These category labels themselves consist largely of metaphors for composing, each framing composition according to its own structure. For example, studying composing through speaking-aloud protocols is often criticized as interfering with writers’ normal writing processes that are assumed to be silent and unobservable. Yet we perpetrate a mild fraud in positing the existence of a “normal” writing process, rather than searching for ways of mapping, analyzing, and understanding the many different processes that take place when people write. In Chapter 3 I discuss how different ways of conceptualizing composing contribute to models that are richer, more fluid, more multiple, and more adequate. The prevalence of the search for a unitary composing process suggests some of the limitations inherent in generalizations about writers. Rather than seeking to expand analytic categories for composing, encompassing ever more writing acts, or to delimit these categories ever more accurately, we might well profit from doing just the opposite: by fragmenting the analysis of composing, making it “a-categorical,” or using categories as heuristic probes, seeing categories as temporary contrivances that represent shifting brief alliances enabling us to break

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30 Authors on Writing

through a boundary, to broach a new area, to illuminate a moment. Gesturing thereby toward a holistic view of composing, moving back and forth between analysis and synthesis, playing off metaphorical stories against one another, we can then remain aware that our categories are not natural or organic, but social constructions. Understanding the multiple truths of metaphorical stories about composing processes requires us to suspend our desire for general laws or unified writing processes, for veridical reports on the “reality” of writing activities, for quintessential expressions of individual subjectivities, even for enjoying “uniquely personal” performances. Instead we use these metaphors as an entry point to cultural critique, to examining widespread discursive constructs that enable historically and socially specific ways of understanding writing. We do not seek to discern the hidden truths of the buried life of the mind, but rather to understand the shared social labor that we undertake together as writers and readers.

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Composing and Metaphoricity 31

Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models

I have argued in Chapter 2 that overemphasis on the interiority and alterity of the buried-life metanarrative occludes the richness and range of authors’ stories of their writing processes. Before moving to Chapters 4 and 5, where I analyze metaphors of labor and sociality, I establish in this chapter a framework for understanding why authors might use metaphorical stories of composing, what kinds of “knowledge” and “truth” can be found in such stories, what method we might use to read them, and what contributions these metaphorical stories make to understanding conceptions of composing. In thinking about why authors might use metaphorical stories about their writing processes, I argue that the metanarrative’s tendency to make labor invisible stems not just from the specific problems of intellectual labor, but from the difficulties of representing the persistent, cyclical, continuous nature of work itself. Using Elaine Scarry’s meditation on representing work in Resisting Representation (1994), I discuss problems of representing the on-going nature of work activities. To clarify what kinds of “knowledge” can be found in these metaphors, I pinpoint some of the specific problems of representing intellectual labor when such representations rely, as authors’ interviews do, on fallible methods of monitoring, recollecting, and reconstructing intricate and ephemeral activities. I compare the kinds of “truth” available from metaphors to that found in several other types of analysis. I then describe a conversational, contingent, comparative method of metaphor-reading that enables me to connect metaphors of individual authors to broader discourses that establish socially shared conceptions of writing processes. Finally, I discuss the particular contributions metaphorical stories or “models” of composing can 32

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 33

make to understanding writing processes and the discourses that surround them.

Why do authors use metaphorical stories for their writing processes? Part of the reason authors may resort to figurative language about composing is because of the difficulty of representing work itself, not just intellectual work. In a meditation on work and the body in Thomas Hardy and other nineteenth-century novelists, Elaine Scarry (1994) points to many of the problems that make labor “resist representation.” These problems of representing work in factories, in agriculture, in the workshop, bear directly on the problems of representing intellectual labor.1 First, the nature of work is continuous action rather than a discrete action. It is “perpetual, repetitive, habitual” (p. 65). Each move in work is modest, yet it is out of the rhythm and repetition of modest moves that workers create significance. Scarry argues that it is deeply difficult to describe work in its fullness, immediacy, rhythm, modesty, sensuousness. But the alternatives also present difficulties. One method used to describe work is to divide it. But dividing work temporally in order to describe an arbitrary segment of it (a “typical” sequence, for example) misrepresents work exactly because such a segment is removed from the repetition that is the nature of labor. Dividing work into specific tasks requires attention to the intricacy and complexity of the tasks, to the choices and elisions of their unfolding in the sequence of representation. Another method that Scarry describes is “to take the massive fact of work precisely at the moment when there is a tear or lapse in the activity that must be repaired, replaced, or rescued” (p. 66). Such a moment can represent the overall process of work, Scarry argues, because it is the whole of the process that is put at risk, the whole of the process that must be salvaged. She notes that Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Emile Zola provide unusually detailed moments of rescue in their novels’ description of work, while other writers tend to provide more generalized acts of rescue that gesture toward “labor in general” or “the structure of work.” “Rescue and repair become effective models of work precisely because ‘survival,’ which is always at stake in ordinary work, becomes for the first time visibly at stake” (p. 67). Scarry’s categories of kinds of difficulty in representing work—and consequent “falsification” in representation—can function here as a

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*

kind of scheme that helps us see why authors may use figurative language to describe their working practices. Authors’ interviews offer no opportunity for a full delineation of an author’s writing processes. Sometimes an author will present a brief summary of a day’s activities, but only in the most general terms. But authors do sometimes use metaphors to demonstrate the “perpetual, repetitive, habitual” nature of their work. In Chapter 2, we saw Marguerite Yourcenar contrast the “feel” of different texts—of working in granite or kneading dough. She uses the metaphor of kneading dough to present a picture of on-going, rhythmic, sensuous action. I quote further: There are stages in bread-making quite similar to the stages of writing. You begin with something shapeless, which sticks to our fingers, a kind of paste. Gradually that paste becomes more and more firm. Then there comes a point when it turns rubbery. Finally, you sense that the yeast has begun to do its work: the dough is alive. Then all you have to do is let it rest. But in the case of a book the work may take ten years. (1984, pp. 185–6) Yourcenar’s metaphor situates her working with supple interconnected stages, modest repetitive movements. A rhythm of work and rest, work and rest, work and rest. Those authors who describe their writing by evoking sequences of alternative work processes, as Yourcenar does here, are more likely to illuminate the repetitive scope of their writing processes. Much more common are writers dividing work into temporal moments and opening out one or another of the tasks that are part of their work as writers. Many metaphorical stories of writing, including stories of labor and sociality that I examine in Chapters 4 and 5, focus on one task or another in writing. Metaphors of collecting and accretion, for example, represent writing in early stages, before the author might claim to be “writing,” but are also persistent, cyclical, rhythmic. Vladimir Nabokov uses a collecting image in describing his early writing activities: All I know is that at a very early stage in the novel’s development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat pebbles .… inspiration … having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure. (1980, p. 69) Many writers describe themselves as engaged in small tasks: creating collages and mosaics,2 pulling together elements, bits, pieces, frag-

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34 Authors on Writing

ments, assembling things, putting, bringing, piecing, tying, melding them together.3 Stories of accretion and amalgam also demonstrate the writing life as accumulation of small tasks.4 Task-oriented stories are probably the most common kind of metaphorical stories of the intellectual work of writing. Stories in the category of “ruptures” in the work process—a category Scarry deems “tears” and “repair”—are of deep significance here. Creative-moment metaphors, metaphors of labor, metaphors of sociality, all offer opportunity for authors to describe interruption, punctuation, a sudden change in work process. Often the moment is situated in a scene of “normal” activity, interrupted by the sudden need for or onset of intense activity. The intensity connects that writing moment to the impetus, salvage, and repair of entire projects of writing. Scarry has reminded us that the scene of work is an on-going site of engagement and interaction, not discrete action. In writing lives, then, writing is not a discrete event, but a pattern, a background, of repetitive moves, ways of thinking, ways of living. This is the perpetual background, yet metaphors of writing often focus on sudden events, intense moves, shifts in work practice, incursion of new work methods. Many of the most dramatic metaphorical stories of composing focus on that moment when the work is “torn,” where the pattern is shattered, where the work practice must shift to accommodate sudden change. Scarry’s meditation on work’s resistance to representation also focuses attention on the problems of representing the world and the person in interaction. She demonstrates how Hardy represents human consciousness in embodied interaction with the world, so that “all states of being—not just overt, physical activity but even what appear to be forms of physical inactivity like reading or perceiving or feeling— inevitably entail reciprocal jostling with the world” (p. 51). Contemporary authors engaged in intellectual labor are embodied beings “jostling” with the world, and they tell us about it repeatedly. Sometimes the metaphor focuses on what is at once both a moment of the “rupture” and an assertion of the world on the author. For example, John Graves is jerked into a specific kind of writing by a “break” in the pattern of the world around him. I have never developed an orderly approach to the business of studying out something to write. It’s like a nail sticking out of the wall: you walk past it for six months without seeing it, and all of a sudden it tears your shirt as you go by. Every once in a while something will slap me in the face; thank God it does. (1980, p. 68)

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 35

Graves’s metaphor is similar to Yourcenar’s “bolt from the blue,” quoted in Chapter 2. Both metaphors punctuate scenes of “normal activity.” Graves terms the world and the impetus it provides a “nail” that “tears your shirt” and “something” that “slaps [your] face.” Both describe punctuation created in an encounter with the world. But our difficulty imagining intellectual labor produced by bodies in the world (rather than disembodied minds) promotes our reading metaphors like Yourcenar’s—metaphors that demonstrate punctuation in connection with the world—as the opposite: as buried life, inspiration, illumination. Yet most metaphorical stories of composing are not stories of disembodied minds: quite the contrary. They represent authors as embodied persons (bodies and minds together) jostling, rubbing, connecting, interacting with the world. Embodiment reminds us that there are “insides” and “outsides” of various kinds that go into processes of writing: the author, the “self,” the “mind,” the world, the text, the character, the discourse situation. Metaphorical stories are replete with spatial relations of various kinds based on embodiment. The kinds of “insides” and “underneath” and “within,” the up/down and in/out binaries that structure metaphorical stories about writing are not claims about interiority as the fount of creativity, but claims about embodiment and work. Stanley Kunitz, for example, draws on metaphors of labor and sociality to connect himself and the world. He says, I’m leafing through my notebooks, something I jotted down months or years ago often catches my eye. It’s been there all the time, sleeping, and at the same time it’s been simmering in my own mind. And I look at it and suddenly I can see what else it’s hooked to, what other buried phenomena. And at that point, when it signals its attachment to the layers of the life, I can use it. (1974 Ryan, p. 85) Kunitz in this passage is figuring work as both continuity and discontinuity, as appeals from discourses and texts, as slippage between his own agency and that of his texts, as connection between the tangible and the intangible, between the working author and the world. Spaces, spatial relations, and connection are significant: things are jotted “down,” things are “in” his mind, things “catch” the eye and are “hooked” to other things that are “buried,” and life is “layered.” Subtle, modest work is figured as things “simmer.” Dynamic discursivity is figured as things “catch” and “sleep” and “signal.” Metaphorical stories do not present work as one thing, but as a complex of things:

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 37

* Scarry’s discussion of the difficulties of representing work is primarily focused on novelists’ representations of the work of artisans, agricultural and industrial laborers, and so forth, and touches only briefly on intellectual work. Intellectual work is also difficult to represent because it consists of on-going cognitive and emotional processes that are intangible and unrecorded. In the case of interviews, the thinker is also the one who provides the representation, a further difficulty. Processes such as composing that are complex and not closely monitored are difficult to grasp, describe, and explain veridically. Published writers certainly know that the nature of the writing process—intricate, interconnected, inchoate—subverts any attempt at precision. Discussing his writing, poet Edward Dorn says, But in any case, we’re speaking of large, general habits which hang like curtains way behind the work. Even by talking of it this way I’m giving it a twist I can already hear is not accurate. It was a kind of brooding preoccupation. I fuss a lot over work when I’m not actually doing it, and then do it in very quick moments. (1980 Fredman, p. 75) The “unrecoverable” nature of writing processes—their resistance to recollection and representation—is not a problem of untrustworthiness or naiveté on the part of authors (though they may, of course, indulge in rhetorical display). Rather, it is part of the difficulty of knowing and representing one’s own cognitive processes retrospectively. With or without figurative language, writers’ descriptions of their own composing are constructions, not recollections. The only kind of knowledge available for these descriptions of writing activities is “metacognitive” knowledge: knowledge about one’s own thinking activities. The passage from Dorn that I quote above demonstrates his metacognitive knowledge as well as his awareness of its inadequacy. He characterizes thinking and working habits—practices of dwelling on work and swift inscription. He cites his ways

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as connection, intersection, interaction, dynamism, embodiment. All are central to authors’ figurative stories about their writing processes. Scarry’s categories enable us to see why people may use metaphorical stories of their work as writers. We need to turn to what kind of knowledge or “truth” such stories represent.

of being in the world, his habits which “hang like curtains behind the work,” as influencing but not determining his processes. Dorn’s metacognitive knowledge, like that of all writers, cannot emerge simply from reflection. Rather, it is constructed from referring to general procedures, generalizing from salient episodes, reconstructing from task analysis, and referring to a priori theories. These a priori theories function as “schemas” to shape general views of how writing is done. If authors— like all thinkers—cannot accurately monitor and recollect what they have done, where do these stories of writing processes come from? While composing, writers have moments when they become aware of themselves as thinkers and writers, moments when they pause to observe themselves in the act of writing, to monitor their choice of strategies, or to reflect on what they are doing. These are “metacomposing” experiences when writers are “thinking about their thinking.”5 In effect, writers attempting to understand and describe their writing processes are engaged in comprehending or interpreting a particularly difficult kind of “text” or “text-analogue.” Like other objects calling for interpretation, this text-analogue is in some sense “confused, incomplete, cloudy, seemingly contradictory—in one way or another unclear” (Taylor, 1987, p. 33). Cognitive processes such as writing are complex and rarely closely monitored. They are difficult to grasp, describe, and explain veridically. Writers are unable to attend to certain aspects of their processes, unlikely to heed others, and apt to misjudge the effects or importance of what they do notice. The more they monitor, the more the processes may be altered as a result. As time passes, they tend to forget details that they originally grasped. Asked to generalize and make inferences when describing their writing activities to themselves or to others, they must go beyond reporting the uncertain information obtained from metacomposing experiences to interpret it, to construct a narrative or representation. John Barth talks about the shift in his stance from the moment of writing where he is focused on one task, and the moment of retrospection, focused on another. There is an interesting balance … between theorizing about what you’re doing and doing it. As you compose, particularly if you have a theoretical turn of mind, you’re likely to be interested in working out any theoretical notions that you might be afflicted with about the medium you’re working in. But you also know … that you work to a large degree by hunch and intuition, and inspiration, as they say. Then, retrospectively, you may understand a great deal more in

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 39

Most writers are perfectly aware that they cannot capture adequately the micro-movements of writing, though they may try in a variety of ways. These problems of definition, memory, and representation underlie all attempts to remember experiences, not just those of thinking and writing. Because people are fallible and limited as they observe and remember their own writing activities, they must draw upon other sources such as formal or informal descriptions of writing that are socially transmitted, in order to construct apparently coherent accounts of their composing. The way authors both experience and characterize their writing is partly determined by these a priori explanations of what the writing process entails. All literate people understand their own and others’ writing processes partly according to what they think such experiences should be like. Popular metaphors reflect and shape writers’ metacomposing experiences and seem to encapsulate significant and salient aspects of composing experiences. Understanding writers’ narratives and tropes of composition is, therefore, central to the study of writing processes, for in writing, as in most activities, stories and images help guide people’s actions. Socially derived and approved knowledge consists of sets of instructions (Schutz, 1962)—in this case, instructions for going about writing, but also for thinking and talking about one’s writing. Instructions establish what people should expect to experience as they write, helping them interpret their metacomposing experiences coherently and memorably. Instructions provide writers with explanatory frames of reference for understanding and remembering their writing activities. Writers may turn to social constructs learned (directly or indirectly) from textbooks, teachers, and commentaries by published authors to explain their writing processes.7 By means of these frames of reference writers can perceive and evaluate information from their writing experiences, integrate new understandings with previous knowledge, and communicate their conceptions of the writing process. Metaphorical stories are “prototypical” social constructs framing or modeling writing activities to bring them into a kind of “coherence.” The social language used to discuss the writing process binds all

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the theoretical way about what it was that you in fact did, than you understood at the time. When we talk about it, we’re talking retrospectively, so I think sometimes we give the impression that we’re all terribly theoretical when we sit down at the desk, which of course we aren’t. (John Barth, 1974, pp. 134–5)6

individuals talking about writing. Everyone is constrained by the social dialogue. When writers (or writing scholars) tap into social narratives, particularly figurative stories about composing, they are reconnecting, consciously or unconsciously, with this dialogue. The frames of reference that writers develop, revise, and use, many of which are encapsulated in metaphorical stories about writing processes, can be considered mental models of composing.8 A mental model functions as a kind of informal, private, unarticulated theory, an internal model of the situation to help people explain and make predictions about the world. Although writers’ internal models and private theories may be incomplete, unstable, uncertain, ephemeral, partial, contradictory, and unscientific, they nonetheless serve more or less successfully as guides to thought and action. Writers’ internal models are not always private, however. Models can be articulated and shared. They can be revealed by language and behavior. Some cognitive models are intersubjectively shared among members of social groups, in which case they serve as cultural models or folk models (D’Andrade, 1987; Holland and Quinn, 1987). More specialized than folk models, experienced writers’ figurative models or metaphorical models not only concretize cultural models of composing, but contribute importantly to the sense that writing processes are knowable and can be intersubjectively shared. * Given the difficulty representing work, and the further difficulty representing intellectual labor, what kinds of “truth” do metaphorical models convey, and how do they contrast to other ways of conceptualizing and studying writing processes? The complexity of authors’ metaphorical stories with their fluid, perspectival, multiple, partial truths about composing should counter our desire for metanarrative binaries of one kind or another—rational/nonrational, control/no control, agency/no agency, active/passive, effort/ effortlessness. The “as-if” terms of metaphorical stories about composing work at a level that is neither global nor local, neither general nor particular, but both/and. They encapsulate complex moves of writing processes in ways that are concrete but not literal. They are both “true” and “not true.” Studies of cognition can help us recognize that different levels of analysis produce different and contrasting “truths,” including truths that are inconsistent—in effect, multiple truths. George Lakoff and

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40 Authors on Writing

Mark Johnson note that “[I]n much of the Western philosophical tradition, truth is taken to be absolute and scientific truth claims take priority over nonscientific truth claims” (1999, p. 105). Lakoff and Johnson argue that multiple “truths” about color in cognitive theory challenge this method of evaluating truth claims. Lakoff and Johnson distinguish three levels of “embodiment” necessary for a full understanding of the mind—neural, phenomenological, and cognitive unconscious. The “correspondence theory of truth” of traditional philosophy, they claim, does not distinguish among these levels of analysis. Studies of the neurophysiology of color vision indicate that it is the body—the color cones of the eyes and the neural circuitry—in interaction with local light conditions and the wavelength reflectances of objects that create the sense that color is found “in” objects: colors do not inhere in objects themselves. Lakoff and Johnson point out that this “truth” of color vision as revealed by neurophysiology does not reflect the “truth” of color found in everyday perceptions. … . [Yet at] the phenomenological level of conscious experience, we perceive colors as being “in” the objects that “are” colored. At this level, there are common truths: Grass is green, the sky is blue, blood is red. Green, blue, and red are one-place predicates holding of grass, the sky, and blood. (1999, p. 105) Without taking account of the contradiction of these different “truths” of color, Lakoff and Johnson argue, it is impossible to describe color theory properly. What is “correct” at the neural level is not at the phenomenological level. What is “correct” at the phenomenological level is not accurate at the neural level. “Here is the dilemma: A scientific truth claim based on knowledge about the neural level is contradicting a truth claim at the phenomenological level” (1999, p. 105). For Lakoff and Johnson, the “dilemma” of the truth of color encapsulates the problem of requiring that only one level, one metaphor, one story represent truth. All methods of inquiry require decisions about what is to be examined and the ways it may be examined in order to develop truths useful for disciplinary arguments. Disciplinary advocates, even in the sciences and social sciences, are often aware that their perspectives are partial, even though they might not phrase their arguments in that way. For example, social scientists conducting empirical studies are very aware of the competing claims for “reliability” versus “validity” versus “generalizability”: assessment must produce repeatable results, results that adequately represent what is being assessed, and results that can be generalized to larger

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 41

populations. Better satisfying the demands of one criterion may at the same time make another more elusive.9 A “laboratory” study of composing must be done with only a few particular writers, particular texts, and particular methods of collecting and analyzing information. The results cannot be generalized to all writers in all situations, but they can provide partial perspectives. Schematic models of generalized processes offer broad suggestive understanding. They do not attempt to describe the moves of all writers under all circumstances. Cognitive inquiry attempts to open the “black box” of individual cognition. However flawed some find its assumptions, we should not deny ourselves the benefits of the knowledge it produces. It is far preferable to see cognitive inquiries as approximations than summarily to reject them for their failure to reflect adequately other important perspectives such as the social. Rather than mystifying stories, predominant metaphors are summarizing stories, summarizing a myriad of small textual developments and dramatic textual consequences. They represent composing as processes of engagement and entanglement, as a welter of decisions that all impinge on both texts and authors, who, after all, live together. They put “the social” at the center of the writing scene. It is important to recognize that most literate people use figurative stories to understand and describe writing processes. Those studying and teaching composition use them, as when Peter Elbow (1973, 1981), describes “cooking,” James Britton (1982) describes spontaneous inventiveness as “shaping at the point of utterance,” Ann E. Berthoff describes the paragraph as a “gathering hand” (1978, 1981), or Barrett Mandel (1980) declares that “the writer writing is not at home.” Students use them incessantly, particularly the ubiquitous statement: “It just flowed.” Figurative stories offer antecedent guiding structures, ready-made frames or “schemas,” for understanding otherwise confused and confusing composing experiences. Figurative language can summarize an inchoate experience such as composing, viewing it by means of another domain of experience which is understood more clearly, and thus establishing an explanatory frame of reference through the source domain. Composing-process metaphors, like other metaphors, explain and ground the unknown by linking it to the known, the abstract by linking it to the concrete. In so doing, they encapsulate in the figurative story part of a complex structure of knowledge about composing. As narratives, they impose temporal order and logical cause and effect relationships on processes that might otherwise disappear into the infinitely diverse and plural events, ideas, and symbols people negotiate every day.

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42 Authors on Writing

Yet it also appears that part of the function of metaphors for writing is exactly to resist the imposition of rationality and coherence. Using metaphors becomes a way of remaining “truthful” to one’s sense of the chaotic and not fully known aspects of composing. In fact, it appears that using metaphors for composing can subvert the ideal of precise structure desired by both interviewer and writer by pretending to satisfy it, without, in fact, quite doing so. Though the metaphors do supply explanatory power and coherence, they do so only by extending the structure of another domain to composing. Powerful as it is, the structure providing explanatory strength is that of the source domain. People accept as coherent even stories that make no attempt to be, as when Frederick Manfred says that an “‘Old Goat,’ is really boss of everything” (1974, p. 114), or Samuel Beckett remarks that he “works constantly in the dark,” so that talking about how he writes is “like an insect leaving his cocoon” (1968, p. 51) or Anne Sexton claims, “it’s all a mystery to me, it all just happens” (1974, p. 19). “Out of my control, don’t know, too mysterious, can’t talk about it,” is an acceptable story about imaginative composing for authors in this culture, particularly if they go on to indicate the pitfalls, with regard to their creativity, of such rational talk. People use and understand figurative stories because they are an extraordinarily efficient and accessible method of providing information about composing. The stories are vivid, yet carry a great deal of information in a few words. Most are rich with implication. Though writers seldom provide details, writer and audience do not need extensive knowledge of the metaphor’s source domain to interpret the figurative story. James Dickey compares his revising to mining ore. When he does so, he indicates that he has only a vague idea of what is involved in refining (he gestures toward it by saying “and whatever you have to do to refine low-grade ore”). Members of his audience may have knowledge of mining or refining no more specific than his. But each interprets the figurative story according to his or her knowledge of its implications. Despite the general lack of expertise in mining, each knows, as Dickey does, enough characteristics of mining to draw upon when considering mining as a model of the writing process. * Analyzing authors’ metaphorical stories requires a conversational, contingent, and comparative approach to metaphor-reading, one that is

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 43

informed by the tradition of Lakoff and Johnson (for example, 1980 Metaphor, 1980 “Conceptual,” 1999), as well as the work of Donald A. Schon (1993), who connects metaphors to stories of social life.10 While it cannot examine all aspects of the use of language in passages illustrated, this method of metaphor-reading assumes the central significance of seven points. First, figurative language plays a central role in making sense of experience. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate the degree to which people draw on their understanding of concrete concepts to think about abstractions (1980 Metaphor, 1980 “Conceptual,” 1999), although the profound effects metaphor has on how people think often remain unacknowledged. Metaphors can achieve this cognitive effect by encouraging “seeing-as.” Frames or perspectives from one domain of experience are “carried over” to another. When writing and thinking are represented as emanating from places deep and buried, text creation takes place within a network of “ready-made” suggestions about writers’ tasks, so far-reaching as to eventually imply specific theories of agency, subjectivity, interiority, and cognition. Whether authors primarily use metaphors of interiority and alterity or metaphors of labor and sociality, then, and how they use such metaphors, allows us to understand authors’ experiences in writing as well as their discourses about it. Second, this method of selecting and examining metaphorical stories emphasizes their implicit narrativity. The figurative language appears in descriptive tales of how authors go about their activities as writers, how they get their writing done. The background scene always is that of the author in the act of writing, engaged in the events of writing, completing the tasks of writing. My selection of metaphors emphasizes this implicit narrativity, for I identify instances of figurative language that situate the acts and processes of writing as movements, actions, and activities, as a series of steps and flux. The metaphors selected for analysis reflect this sense of writing as either process or as discrete events ultimately connected in sequences as part of the experiences of a writing life.11 While, as Scarry argues, the activities of work do not have discrete beginnings, middles, and endings, the stories authors construct about the activities of their writing tend to shape themselves as narratives. Third, the themes of authors’ metaphorical stories create a network of implications. Writers’ metaphorical stories about the labor of composing emphasize and suppress different elements of the composing process. Each figurative story highlights and hides different aspects in the writing process—waiting for, searching for, creating, nurturing,

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44 Authors on Writing

transforming, combining, refining, or revising. Metaphors identify different locations for ideas (inside or outside the writer), different characteristics of the ideas to be obtained (more or less independent of the writer, elusive), different roles for the writer (as recipient, vehicle), different responsibilities for writing problems (in the writer, in the environment). These networks of meanings and relationships, taken together, constitute conceptions of composing. Fourth, an author’s particular inflections of a metaphorical story can emphasize some of these implications but also play against them. For example, the theme of a story of labor may be used to play with the notion of agency, to hide and reveal it. Stories can emphasize moments of passivity in an active labor process. They can figure the author as controlling agent in what might appear to be a passive stage of labor. They can emphasize moments of discovery that will be followed by back-breaking labor. Authors can leave unstated the specifics of labor, as Marguerite Yourcenar does with her reference to gardening that I quote in Chapter 2 (“An experience transplanted into a book carries with it moss and wild flowers …” [1984, pp. 59].) Yourcenar does not delineate implications of writing is gardening, but they inhere to her metaphor. Authors can deny a particular metaphor to emphasize an alternative, as Clarence Major does (“It’s not like an automobile mechanic who works on Volkswagens …” [1985, pp. 54–5, emphasis added].) Fifth, authors treat metaphorical stories as tools not commitments. Authors move from one metaphor to another even within a sentence. Authors can draw from two contrasting metaphorical stories with conflicting implications to characterize two different writing experiences (Yourcenar’s “granite” and “bread”), but they can also use contradictory and disparate metaphors to talk about different moments in the “same” experience. In other words, writers manipulate their metaphorical stories of writing just as they do other language, so as not to be totally bound by the implications of the metaphorical stories they use. Sixth, a particular metaphorical story positions itself as an element in a larger argument, an element that plays with and against the interview’s overall presentation of writing activities. For instance, a particular metaphor may appear within the author’s larger discussion specifically to dramatize the difference between one kind of composing and another. An example appeared in Chapter 2, in a statement by Richard Eberhart: I insist that in at least half a dozen cases in my life some of my best poems have been given to me. (1979 Cannito, p. 249)

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 45

This appears as a story of poetic passivity congruent with the buried life of the mind. But the discursive context positions it as a story of exception—quite different from Eberhart’s “typical” writing processes. In this example the passage quoted itself contains a caution that such “given” poems are rare; more often such modifiers are part of the larger discursive context of the interview and thus not evident in the metaphorical passage quoted. Authors cite, deny, inflect, position, use metaphorical stories as part of larger narratives of writing lives. Seventh, the method of metaphor-reading I use is focused on examining the ways that composing is constructed in larger cultural discourses about authorship. The ways that literary theorists and scholars, composition theorists and scholars, teachers of writing and literature, readers, and writers themselves talk about writing processes are all partial. I am trying to enrich a conversation among these parties. Our efforts to create a coherent story of “the writing process” impose false coherence on diverse, plural, and often contradictory practices and perceptions. Writing is much more varied than our own discourse about it. Yet this discourse becomes a social fact and a powerful social force because it influences how people learn to write. It is the primary widely available and socially sanctioned way to discuss writing. The method of metaphor-reading I use seeks to enrich our understanding of these widely shared discourses about composing. * Unlike other explanations of composing, figurative stories are not specific, but suggestive; as a result, they can be easily grasped and remembered. In return for emphasizing some aspects of composing and suppressing others, the story supplies a context for interpreting behaviors and attitudes, a context that explains much about the process, its goals, the writer’s attitudes, and the activities of writing. This context allows both writer and audience to overcome the effects of vagueness, inconsistencies, or lacunae in a story’s description. Both writers and audience can draw upon the contextual coherence of figurative stories in order to transform the fragmented information absorbed from social sources and writing experiences into a more fully integrated understanding of the processes of writing. Yet these stories are also a performance, one often found pleasurable and entertaining whether or not it informs or enlightens. Figurative stories about composing contribute to a writers’ ethos and persona. They also can contribute to the sense of a shared community

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46 Authors on Writing

of writers and, at the same time, to a sense of one’s intense individuality as a writer. Considering their own and others’ figurative stories can help working writers, whether students or professionals, to monitor and manage their writing processes. They can contribute to understanding one’s attitudes and emotions about writing, and even become practical guides for writing behavior. Figurative stories can make social what during writing seems so individual: pains and frustrations, uncertainties, strategic moves, the exhilaration of success. People can be reinvigorated by the knowledge that others too must search for every nugget or must refine drafts that are low-grade. Others too find that writing takes “damn much labor.” People can use figurative stories to learn about their attitudes and emotions while writing, gaining therapeutic value from them. The result may be greater control over writing behaviors. Writers can make metaphors about their own composing, then consider what these metaphors may reveal about problematic attitudes, emotions, fears. Probing may reveal the kinds of underlying concerns that can inhibit the most skilled of writers: ways they avoid writing, ways they overlook important sources of ideas, ways that they put their attention to unproductive tasks, ways that they carry dysfunctional emotions and attitudes from other settings into the writing task. Such analyses need not be elaborate. Writers engaged in difficult and frustrating writing tasks can pause to determine an appropriate figurative label for what they are doing. Some labels provide suggestions for effective strategies; other labels reveal self-knowledge and a refreshing sense of control over a writing process that can seem overwhelming. Scholars in rhetoric and composition argue about the benefits of certain ways of modeling the composing process. In the 1980s and early 1990s, many composition specialists accorded privileged position to models of composing which draw on research methods of the cognitive sciences,12 assuming that such formalized models might help develop understanding of cognitive strategies. Others deplored the language and point of view of such models and promoted more holistic and much less specific ways of discussing writing processes. Yet all research on writing assumes and implies models of composing. Just as writers’ views of the writing process are mediated by socially shared language, so are the views of those who conduct research on writing. There is no such thing as a unified, discrete, atomized, and homogenous “idealized” writing process not grounded in shared language and shared experience. One studies writing processes

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 47

by using language to think and talk and write about them. This language is not a transparent neutral vehicle for conveying the researcher’s revelations of “reality-as-it-is.” Exploring the implications of their own language about writing processes, becoming critical of it, cognizant of other choices, contemplative about the ramifications of what they do and do not say, scholars will be better able to analyze the models of composing underlying their discussions and understand the significance of various ways of modeling writing processes. These metaphorical themes can be considered as informal “theoretical models,” as descriptive theory. Models bear a metaphorical relationship to that which they model. The model is not considered to be the thing, only something which represents the thing, stands for the thing, functions to some degree as the thing does. The relationship between an individual event or object and an abstract conception of it also may be “metaphorical.” In making generalizations and classifications in models of composing, people “agree” to overlook the individuality of the specific event in order to be able to understand such events in the abstract, to see a shared pattern of events, to find coherence in chaos. It is only because people have agreed to allow leaps from individual events to shared patterns that there can even be such a thing as a concept of the composing process.13 It is helpful to recognize that cognitive research models and metaphorical models of the writing process are based on two different types of “knowing.” Research models focus on the process of writing from an observer’s point of view, while metaphorical models proceed from the writer’s point of view. Research models look to explain and account for specific moves in writing, while metaphorical models stress the writer’s experience of those moves. Both models are social constructs, interpretations of evidence about the writing process. Research models attempt to be systematic, analytic, and inclusive, while metaphorical models are intuitive, integrative, and suggestive. The virtues of one kind of model can be used to criticize the other, for the virtues of each tend to point up the weaknesses of the other model. The virtues of one kind of model, however, cannot be used to deny the other; they simply are not doing the same kind of thing. How do these similarities and differences between types of models affect their ability to tell true and important things about writing processes? More “objective” models of composing share the basically metaphorical status of the informal models; the differences are more of degree than of kind.14 Both kinds of models can make similar claims about their “veridicality,” “accuracy,” and “truth.” On the surface, one

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48 Authors on Writing

can see that the metaphor describes “falsely” what people have agreed is the “true” writing event. Yet in fact, metaphorical models illustrate their own kind of truth, the truth of writers’ subjective experiences of the writing event, their conceptions of it. While it would appear that a rigorous “test” of many metaphorical models might prove impossible,15 their “lack of objectivity” has advantages. One is more likely to know metaphorical models are metaphorical, be more easily reminded that such models are related to writing acts metaphorically, more alert to their assumptions and fictional elements. In addition, the variety of metaphorical models directs attention to the dynamics of contrasting views of composing. Metaphorical models are more likely to “keep us honest” about the complexity of writing processes.16 Most important, metaphorical models may reveal distinctions between writing acts which look the same to an outside observer.17 The same “objective” moves during the writing process can be perceived and reconstructed quite differently. An outside observer might see no difference in writing behavior when a writer says “that came to me unbidden, a gift,” and in another where he or she wipes metaphorical sweat from the brow and says, “I really had to dredge that one up,” or “I had to fight the text all the way here.” Yet these acts are not quite “the same.” So metaphorical models can disclose when different emotional as well as intellectual events take place during writing, and thus distinguish between composing events that other types of models find identical. This is important indeed for theories of composing. Metaphorical models provide exactly what many other models of composing deny us, the thinking and feeling that writers experience. Rather than attending to a myriad of specific decisions and moves, metaphorical models frankly summarize these acts to grasp and express the writers’ “felt sense” of the writing experience (see Perl and Egendorf, 1979). Describing composing “synthetically” rather than “analytically,” writers incorporate into their descriptions salient cognitive activities, perceptions of the emerging text, attitudes held and emotions experienced during the process. By doing so, they accentuate the emotions and attitudes that underlie, influence, and even transform the cognitive processes being revealed by research into composing. Metaphorical models can be used to probe writers’ narratives, assumptions and explanations, and to help people re-conceptualize their writing processes. Rather than operating as competitors to cognitive models of composing, metaphorical models establish an arena of concern of their own, and contain a kind of truth of their own. To

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Multiple Truths and Metaphorical Models 49

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affirm that truth is to assume a broad, rich view of the writing process itself, and hence of people’s ability to experience, comprehend, and represent their own writing processes.

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4

Writers’ “metaphorics of embodied labor” evokes a writing process with little resemblance to the inspiration and incubation stories of the buried life of the mind. Bodies, time, spaces, and the processes of work, growth, and change assume center stage when writers describe their work as embodied labor. Writing is figured by means of metaphors of effort, temporality, rhythm, liminality, and tangibility, by varied acts and mutable texts. The rhythms of activity and pause, of movement and return, fill stories of spatiality, directions, and movement. Some metaphors emphasize large physical tasks such as in mining; others stress small moves and nurturance, as in gardening. Some metaphors focus on physiological labors such as gestating or giving birth. Temporal analogies and allegories reference the inevitable slippages that occur because texts have histories and futures, they are written, re-written, published, and read at many different moments. All these metaphors testify to the emotional content of a shared social understanding of the embodied labor that goes into writing. The method of metaphor-reading I proposed in Chapter 3 suggests several different analytic lines to bring together metaphors for scrutiny: (1) examining how different authors engage with a particular metaphorical story, (2) examining the ways in which metaphorical stories draw on the network of implications that characterize them, (3) examining what metaphors authors use in discussing particular writing activities, stages, or events. In this chapter I will do each in turn. First I examine the story of Writing is Mining and related stories. I then demonstrate ways in which Writing is Mining is in “conversation” with other metaphorical stories of labor that might at first appear to be quite different. Finally I examine 51

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52 Authors on Writing

metaphors for revision, the great majority of which emphasize labor.

The embodied labor of authors is not entirely absent from our social imaginary, but it is often represented in very limited ways. Linda Brodkey, in her superb essay “Modernism and the Scene(s) of Writing” (1987), discusses the pervasive image of the “scene of writing”: “a solitary writer alone in a cold garret working into the small hours of the morning by the thin light of a candle” (p. 396). Brodkey calls this image of the scene of writing a “representative anecdote” in the terms of Kenneth Burke (1945),1 a story that selects and shapes our attention to privilege only the moment of transcription, as if it were a synecdoche of writing. She argues against the limitations imposed by its iconicity: “To the extent that the scene of writing encourages the reification of one moment in writing as writing, by excluding all other moments, the image itself is hegemonic, for its authority prevents us from entering or leaving the scene itself” (p. 400). Brodkey demonstrates that the “romantic” image of this scene of writing relates crucially to modernist impulses and anxieties that influence both authors and critics. The scene of writing, like the buried life of the mind and creative-moment metaphors, presents a restricted view of cognitive labor. Brodkey also argues that the scene of writing serves to occlude temporality or duration from writing practice: “The scene of writing is just that, a scene or tableau that represents an event (transcription) as the experience (writing) by removing writer and writing from the influence of both durative and historic time” (404). With its emphasis on inscription, Brodkey argues, the scene of writing “dehumanizes” the writer, who is portrayed as a “writing machine.” Foregrounding metaphorical stories of embodied labor can help us broaden the limited picture of the scene of writing that Brodkey criticizes. With her evocation of the writer as “writing machine” Brodkey signals concern with what counts as human, what counts as “production” and “human labor,” and what connections there may be between “bodies and machines,” including writers and their tools and technologies of production. For writing is partially a technology. And, as Brodkey notes, part of what it means to be a writer is to generate text. Part of what a writer is, then, is a “writing machine”—not the “dehumanized” writer of the scene of writing that Brodkey criticizes, but

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*

the fully embodied human writer who uses not just the quill, but other tools, machines, and the body to think, to generate text, to revise.2 Our tendency to reduce the “scene of writing” to iconicity is encouraged by the sedimented history of our ambivalent cultural attitudes about work, and especially to intellectual work. This ambivalence is a significant problem in considering authors’ metaphorics of embodied labor, for it is then that authors make explicit connections to other kinds of physical activities including various kinds of work. Elaine Scarry notes that some seek to protect imaginative labor from being diminished by connecting it to other kinds of labor; others seek to protect the “real” problems of other kinds of labor from being diminished by comparing them to a “safe” world of imagination. She argues that while “both ‘protective’ impulses have legitimacy and generosity in them, both work in the end against the very thing that is being cared for” (1994, p. 87, n. 23). Such protective impulses make it more difficult to see how intellectual labor shares features with other kinds of work, even though it clearly differs in other respects.3 The problem of the relationship of intellectual labor to other kinds of labor is of long-standing but changing nature. Different historical periods have imagined both intellectual work and other kinds of work in different ways, often related to historical anxieties about each and about their relationships to one another. (See, for example, Borus, 1989; Bromell, 1993; Seltzer, 1992; Siskin, 1998; Weinstein, 1995.) Stories about embodied labor reflect authors’ sense of writing as part of their experiences as embodied beings. Scholarly work in cognitive linguistics offers considerable insight into how embodiment may structure experiences and communications about composing (see, for example, Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1986; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). According to an important line of argument, people figuratively comprehend the world by means of “image-schemas”—structured gestalts based on bodily experience. These “image-schemas” serve to organize our actions, perceptions, and conceptions according to recurring patterns or regularities. Metaphorical stories about writing as embodied labor draw on several image-schemas that are commonly used to describe many other ways of thinking and acting in addition to writing. These include imaging oneself as a container and putting things in and out of that container, as well as seeing containers as part of the material of the world, into which things can be inserted and from which they can be removed. These image-schemas also include seeing oneself as moving oneself or things along trajectories and transforming things.

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Metaphorics of Embodied Labor 53

Many of the metaphorical stories about embodied labor that are used by authors are also used by other people as part of our shared ways of talking about thinking and negotiating the world. “Pushing,” “pulling,” “grappling with,” “groping for” ideas are all metaphors that are taken-for-granted in everyday discussions of thinking, yet reflect pervasive connections between embodied experiences that are tangible and activities that do not always result in tangible products. Metaphorical stories of embodied labor draw on these pervasive connections to bodily experience, but they also elaborate, augment, and extend them. * As they answer interviewers, writers often transpose dramas that take place at their writing desks to social sites like mines and refineries, where labor makes things change form, or makes things move up and down. Referring to his sense of discovery during writing, John Gardner told an interviewer for the Chicago Review: Sometimes what happens is that you poke your pick into a piece of respectable earth and silver shows up in an iron-ore vein and God knows where you’re heading. You follow it and you have to revise everything in the light of the silver. (1978, p. 83) While the “buried value” aspect of this mining metaphor appears congruent with the buried life of the mind, the metaphor presents rather different implications. What is buried in Gardner’s metaphor is not teeming life and truth, but raw material, material that is extractable from its matrix of possibilities (“respectable earth”). The writer writing is positioned as deep in prosaic labors, working with his pick in an “iron-ore vein.” Only as a result of excavating of material of modest value is he in the position to find the silver. The unexpected glint of silver is the focal point of Gardner’s story, but it is not the totality or even the most significant moment of the process of writing he is describing. It is simply positioned as the most exciting moment for him and, therefore, for us. The discovery of the silver is not the conclusion of the process; it is simply the trigger for yet more labor, a move to a different kind of process where the writer “follows the vein,” and revises past labors. For Gardner, writing is mining represents a story of long labor and occasional sudden excitement.

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Metaphorics of Embodied Labor 55

I work … on the principle of refining low-grade ore. I assume that the first fifty ways that I try it are going to be wrong. I do it by a process of elimination. No matter how backbreaking the shoveling is and running it through the sluices and whatever you have to do to refine low-grade ore. You have the dubious consolation that what you get out of it is just as much real gold as it would be if you were just going around picking up nuggets off the ground. It’s just that it takes so damn much labor to get it. (1974, p. 33) This is a metaphor of grueling toil for value, one that ruefully comments on its own foregrounding of authorial effort. Like the stories of many writers, Dickey’s assumes that valuable elements hide in the mass of his early drafts, that these will eventually be revealed if he tries hard enough to get at them. Revelation is not enough, however. Dickey must transform his “ore” through an onerous process before its value will be recognized. Labor, transformation, and refinement for value are central entailments of writing is mining. Writing is mining is a frequent metaphor,4 enhanced by the many writers who declare that they must scratch, dig, or dredge to bring up the materials for their work.5 Writing is mining invites us to see the process of writing according to the entailments of the process of mining. According to the metaphorical story, writing and mining both involve searching in an external world for something of great value, something which is hidden in a mass. One can look for a long time without finding anything of value, or find the value unexpectedly. Writers and miners must explore their discoveries, only later refining the product. Writing and mining are exhausting, backbreaking work with a recalcitrant substance; the substance must be transformed in order to yield valuable, even invaluable results. One works until the value is exhausted. The activities are not pleasant, but the results are worthwhile. Writers speaking of themselves as prospectors with mining claims remind one that written things of value are also commodities, to be owned and traded for profit. Authors have “rights” that may need protection from “claimjumpers.” This metaphorical story thus reflects not only the activities of writing, but also the structure of the system by which this society rewards, or fails to reward, various achievements in writing.

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Also using a mining metaphor—but in this case one focused in more detail on the labor of revision—is James Dickey, who told an interviewer for the New York Quarterly:

Writing is mining and many related stories are congruent with some of the basic assumptions of the “conduit metaphor,” a widespread metaphor that frames human communication as achieved by “the physical transfer of thoughts and feelings” (Reddy 1993, p. 167).6 The conduit metaphor makes intelligible the notion that communication is achieved by a sender “packaging” something physical—ideas—in a container and transferring it to a receiver, who unpacks the container. The implication is that communication does not change ideas but simply shifts their location. There is a strong spatial dimension to the conduit metaphor, but the general implication is of horizontal transfer (from person to person) rather than the “up/down” binary of writing is mining. The conduit metaphor does capture the implication that the material of a text can be an external entity. Writing is mining and its related metaphors emphasize that the entity—the product or text—is transformable. Writing is mining thus assumes the extractability of material, its inherent value as a commodity or the ability to transform it into value, and, ultimately, its transferability as part of a system of exchange. None of this is true of the buried life of the mind. Writing is mining and related metaphors frequently refer to up/down dimensions without implying that the matrix is within the writer; it may be in the world, in the text, or unspecified. The “core” of the process is not truth or mystery but value. Sometimes the locus of the mining is within the writer, but often it is not specified and may be presented as external. Importantly, identification of the “agent” may be fluid: while Gardner and Dickey represent themselves as miners, sometimes stories represent the “agent” as the text or the earth or leave it ambiguous and unspecified. Thus, while writing is mining shares some of the same entailments as the buried life of the mind, its emphasis is on labor. Writing is mining is only one manifestation of an interconnected pattern of figurative stories about the writing process that rely on the “up/down” binary. Spatial metaphors depict ideas as underground,7 subterranean,8 or buried.9 Writers may claim that there is a “very subterranean feeling” about their materials (Hortense Calisher, 1977), or that they come to “realize a poem is buried there” (Anne Sexton, 1977). They may assert that “first drafts … form way down inside” (Shelby Hearon, 1980), or that they “work from some deep down place” (Henry Miller, 1977). In coming up, ideas move from the subconscious to the conscious, from chaos to coherence (Eugene Ionesco, 1971). Metaphorics of labor such as writing as mining combine this spatiality, externality, and process with temporal elements. They regis-

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I think something quite accidental disturbs something else. It’s like digging in the sand and hitting a remaining land-mine or something …. almost any unexpected little thing may disturb something inside one … what I had seen and heard did arouse or precipitate something. (1966, p. 35) This is the first of a series of metaphors that use “explode” to evoke the creation of energy. Blunden moves from one kind of labor to another, but his emphasis is not on the final value of the goal (Gardner’s “silver”), but on the nature of the change in labor practices: the energy. This energized labor process is a central theme of stories related to writing is mining and its emphasis on spatiality, externality, and process. Wilson Harris, for example, describes a similar process of the creation of energized labor. Harris indicates that he wrote The Secret Ladder after hearing about a friend being shot. That set off a charge…. It’s as if that kind of charge is there, written into the soil, and it goes on deepening itself and deepening itself. This is not an intellectual process. At a sudden point it seems to come out, as if the resources have suddenly arrived. Like Marsden, Black Marsden, he’s arrived, he’s charged! He’s charged with some kind of strange wisdom … The novel then runs as far as it can go with that kind of intensity and density … (1981, p. 55). Harris, like Blunden, draws upon themes of depth, strength, and intensity to convey the impact of energy.10 The stress on labor is also revealed by metaphors contrasting two kinds of labor in related up/down metaphors about ideas surging forth under pressure, such as eruptions. Pressure sets the stage for ideas to “burst forth,” as they do for Erica Jong. It erupts like a volcano … in a subterranean way. And when it comes time for you to write a poem, the whole thing explodes. (1974, p. 24)

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ter labor by reference to activities over time and to work as the creation of energy, privileging different kinds of intellectual labor. This is evident in a comment by Edmund Blunden. Like Gardner, Blunden’s mundane laboring is transformed, but directly into energized labor:

Many stories of energized writing, like Jong’s, indicate a contrast or shift in labor practices from slow building up of ideas and texts to energized composing. Some, like Jong, mention “eruption,”11 others texts that “explode,”12 “burst” or “surge” forth.13 Some writers simply refer to mounting “pressure” seeking release.14 “Pressures” and “explosions” are not stories of effortlessness, but stories about labor—not only the labor of the moment of bursting forth (the volcano is not “passive” in its eruption), but also the massive slow labor of the material forces building up within the earth. Metaphorical stories of explosions and eruptions are significantly connected to people’s experience of themselves according to the “image-schema” of a container. In The Body in the Mind (1987), Mark Johnson contends that that “containment” and “boundedness” are pervasive features of our bodily experience. We experience ourselves as three-dimensional beings, but also as three-dimensional containers: We put things into ourselves, and things emerge. We envelope things and are enveloped in things. We also experience ourselves as manipulating things (sometimes containers) in a world of other containers: We put things down and pick them up. We get things and move them. We put things in and out of containers. Johnson argues that this container schema influences our understanding of reasoning. The “up/down” and “in/out” binaries that often structure metaphorical stories about writing—and particularly metaphorical stories of embodied labor—are not claims about interiority as the fount of creativity or about alterity as its experience, but claims about embodiment and work. Failure to make this distinction—to assume that all metaphors referring to these boundaries are claims about the buried life or claims about creative moments—may be one reason for the strength of the metanarrative at the expense of the multiple micronarratives about writing practices. Related metaphors direct attention to the slow process of prewriting that is also labor. Charles Simic discusses a poem he did not “begin,” but rather registered its presence in a slow development or potential: The poem didn’t “start.” The experience was with me as far back as I can remember—or more precisely, the nagging image of just such an interior. Periodically, it would surface, and I would catch a glimpse of it and receive a jolt, a vague sense of dread, of premonition … (1977, p. 279)

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The beginnings can be something without words, in the mind. Even before it is ready to change into language a poem may begin to assert its buried life in the mind with wordless surges of rhythm and counter-rhythm. (1974 Fortunato, p. 31) Kunitz claims that his poems may originate without language, without words, but with emotion, feeling, pressure (1974 Fortunato, 1983). His metaphorical story of spatiality and temporality makes explicit reference to a “buried life of the mind”—the most explicit connection in my corpus of interviews—but it is also a story of labor. (Chapter 5, on discursive sociality, will discuss the image of the poem as alive.) * It is perhaps because of our investment in the metanarrative of the buried life of the mind that we fail to notice the counter-narratives of a multitude of metaphorical stories about authoring as labor that are not congruent with it. For example, spatial dimensions are significant in many stories of authorial labor, but only a few of them are congruent with the buried life. Writing is Journeying. The metaphor of the journey is always a story of labor, and common among descriptions of authorial activity. Duration is emphasized. Transformation is implied (both author and text changing in the journey), though not as dramatically suggestive as found with writing is mining. The thing of value may be the journey itself, the resulting transformations. Movement into unknown locations, movement past impediments and obstacles, and sudden moments of excitement are possible. Spatiality is central to writing as journeying, but not the up/down binary of the buried life or writing is mining; rather, authors evoke distance. Most journey or travel metaphors are used to emphasize one of four main points: (1) starting without knowing what one is going to write (where one is going to go) or being “lost” as part of the journey;15 (2) knowing what the final passage or “goal” of the writing is, without knowing the journey itself;16 (3) describing problems created during the work as obstacles, impediments, or gaps that interfere with movement;17 (4) describing solutions to writing problems as unexpected discoveries.18

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Stanley Kunitz uses the same central themes in describing slow “surges” by which his poems register their creation, with specific reference to “the buried life” of the poem:

Writing is Cooking. Cooking images typically involve putting things together, using heat to transform things, and waiting for things to be finished. The metaphor of cooking is used to emphasize the transformation of material over time, usually through temperature change, and often without the author’s full attention. Almost all cooking metaphors serve this purpose.19 Writing is Reproduction. The metaphor of reproduction is a story of labor not always visible to the observer. Authors frequently convey a sense of processes of labor through metaphors of reproduction, conception, gestation, and birth. They compare writing to mating, engendering, fertilization, breeding, and spawning, sometimes specifying biological specifics such as semen and sperm to signal conception or germination.20,21 They talk about periods of development by reference of incubation, gestation, pregnancy, and brooding.22 They refer to their “growing” text as an embryo or fetus.23 They claim that writing is like giving birth.24 They may say it is like laying or hatching eggs.25 They refer to textual problems as miscarriages, abortions, and stillbirths.26 Duration and transformation are emphasized by authors’ reproduction metaphors, as well as spatiality in respect to inside/outside. About half of reproduction metaphors are used to represent duration and development. The gestation metaphors in particular present the author as agent—not as passive—yet the process of development is not under conscious control. About half of the reproduction metaphors evoke a dramatic transition from “inside” to “outside” with reference to “birth.”27 Some of these metaphors are also relevant to the discussion in the next chapter about metaphorics of discursive sociality, since they define the text as a living, animate being, though I am putting off discussion of that aspect of the metaphorical story until that chapter. Writing is Gardening. Authors frequently use metaphors of gardening or metaphors in which ideas or texts are plants, with an emphasis on preparation and nurturance.28,29 Marguerite Yourcenar likens herself to the planting bed, providing a nurturing environment for growing ideas which she compares to sprouting plants. The writer must soak up the subject completely, as a plant soaks up water, until the ideas are ready to sprout. (1984, p. 114) Most of the metaphors portraying texts as growing like plants represent particularly the beginning stages of writing—preparing the ground,

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I think the end is implicit in the beginning. It must be. If that isn’t there in the beginning, you don’t know what you’re working toward. You should have a sense of a story’s shape and form and its destination, all of which is like a flower inside a seed. (1985 Haller, p. 345) Katherine Anne Porter finds her stories to be stimulated first by her experiences or observations, as if seeds are planted at that time, but take a long time to germinate. She reports that the inception of “Flowering Judas” was an expression on a girl’s face, seen long before. It doesn’t matter, it just takes a little—a tiny seed. Then it takes root, and it grows. It’s an organic thing. That story had been on my mind for years, growing out of this one little thing that happened in Mexico. It was forming and forming in my mind, until one night I was quite desperate…. I knew the time had come to write the story. (1977, p. 153) Like plants, texts emphasize gradual maturation, starting small and developing gradually, and eventually—with proper nourishment— growing, blossoming, and thriving. Networks of intertextual references shape comparisons between composing and gardening. Writers are also readers, and frequently they mention having heard similar metaphors from other authors. Griselda Gambaro, in commenting on her own composing, reports that Uruguayan author Felisberto Hernandez said …. that at a certain moment he would feel a tiny plant take root within him, but he did not know how the plant would grow, or if it would be hardy. He knew only that he had to care for it. Those are not his exact words but that is how it feels to me, also. I know something has been born. (1985, p. 62) Metaphors about seeds, sprouts, and delicacy in growth reference collaborative forces of nature and nurture in producing the text. * Metaphors of revision tend to be specifically focused on labor. Rather than portraying themselves receiving gifts or listening to

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planting seeds, germination, and the first emerging shoots. Eudora Welty indicates that the “seed” contains the potential of the text.

the heavens, writers often compare and contrast themselves as revisers to other kinds of workers, especially artistic and craft workers. Earlier in this chapter, in the section on writing is mining, I provided examples of John Gardner depicting revision as the outcome of following the glint of silver and James Dickey presenting a process of revision-as-reformulating low-grade ore into value. But many metaphors focused on activities of revision refer to less industrial labors, work with small moves: artistry, surgery, gardening, or sewing and tailoring. Variations on the theme of molding, casting, and sculpting demonstrate different ways of depicting revision and reformulation. Many writers put revision at the center of their regular writing processes, describing their media as malleable, pliable, something to push and pull, form and reform.30 Laura Chester finds the process sensuous. I type draft after draft almost obsessively until that first soft clay shapes itself into the poem it has to become…. I love to feel the poem as a malleable substance that I can push and reshape on the page. (1977, p. 75) Others “(re)shape” and “(re)mold” the text.31 These procedures seem less mediated than casting, less bound than chiseling. They emphasize remolding the same material into a new shape, often one which has little resemblance to the original form, rather than adding or deleting material. Revising here is reformulation.32 The possibility of major reformulation during revising also appears through analogies to the process of casting material. Ivan Doig’s text is a “hot, molten mass” (1987). Jessamyn West only wants to reread a text that is “molten,” with the possibility of revision (1976). James Dickey (1979) likes his text “fluid,” and Frank O’Connor complains that after only 10 or 12 lines his story has “ceased to be fluid … you can’t model it” (1977, p. 168). But John Fowles considers his text only “solid” with the final casting—publication. I love it when a story is still … changeable, still fluid, and you can take it anywhere, do anything with it. Once it’s printed, it’s set and frozen, like a bronze cast of a sculptor. You can’t shape it any more… (1977, p. 50) Notice that Fowles’s metaphor, like several in the section of writing is mining, alerts us to the nature of change in labor practices, in this case

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62 Authors on Writing

caused by change in the nature of the material being manipulated: from fluidity to solidity. At revision the material is external and its major transformations are complete. If there are problems in the text, those comparing writing to casting suggest that the casting can be done again.33 These metaphors accentuate the possibility of “reheating” material to return to a generative state. John Ashbery uses the casting metaphor to draw attention to the power of early drafts on final products. Discussing his poetic processes, Ashbery indicates that his impelling initial lines … often don’t fit into the texture of the poem; it’s almost like some lost wax or other process where the initial armature or whatever gets scrapped in the end. (1974, p. 14) The “lost wax process” to which Ashbery refers is a procedure for making castings: a metal mold is built up over a shaped core of wax; when the mold is heated, the wax melts and drains away, leaving the mold ready to shape other materials like jewelry or the “bronze cast” of Fowles’s sculpture. The wax is essential to the process, unnecessary to the product. The image of the lost wax process legitimates the compelling force on a text material that is gone. Casting represents dramatic change in labor practice at different stages, with possibilities for later-stage reformulation. Sculpting appears to offer few such options. William Goyen describes himself styling a statue. I generally just write just straight ahead … If I [look back] I get caught back there revising … It must be like chiseling a sculpture; if the sculptor does too fine a work too soon on what’s big, heavy, gross work, then it’s out of balance somewhere. I should imagine that he has to do all different phases of gross work, and then finer and finer and finer detail … (1980, p. 229) Goyen also signals change in his labor practice according to the material and the stage of working it. Since early in the process the larger shape of the text is blocked out irrevocably, his decisions then are not open to significant revision. Goyen thus suggests the existence of a real yet unrealized text as a whole, a text which could be irredeemably damaged by the indelible strokes of premature detail. Goyen represents his revising method as cyclical, working through of the text with first large moves, then small. Others also carve, chisel, or chip at their texts.34

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64 Authors on Writing

I write first drafts with great speed but the older I get (a familiar observation, I know) I rewrite more and more … I’m more an oil painter now. More deliberate. A good deal less certain. (1971, p. 338) Alberto Moravia speaks about his writing process as a kind of painting which builds up layer by layer. Each book is worked over several times. I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding, as it were, from layer to layer. The first draft is quite crude, far from being perfect, by no means finished; although even then, even at that point, it has its final structure, the form is visible. After that I rewrite it as many times— apply as many “layers”—as I feel to be necessary. (1977, p. 220) Harry Mark Petrakis indicates similarly that with his constant revisions, “each layer added is a layer which will change the shape and totality of the whole” (1977, p. 99). Lawrence Durrell’s successive layers of paint provide two or more “levels” of reading, one superficial, the other more enigmatic. He wishes to cover earlier layers of paint, but not too thoroughly, so as not to obscure interesting depths in the text. Paint is added, then, partly removed to reveal part of what is underneath: Just like a house-painter; he puts on three, four coats. And then it starts to rain, and you see the second coat coming through. A sort of palimpsest. (1973, p. 66) These writers, and others who describe revising as re-painting35 or retouching,36 also signal changes in working practices according to stage. The essence of the text is not necessarily hidden or buried in the draft, waiting to be discovered and brought to light. It is realized in the text, though perhaps “crudely.” Thinking of writing as “layering” allows an open-ended series of changes and reformulations. The final product may change drastically at any stage, and thus greatly enhance the richness and texture of the initial sketch. Writers may change either the “essence” or the “effect” of the work at many stages of the composing process, as long as they are not using water colors.37

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Some writers compare revising to painting, with layering rather than manipulating. Gore Vidal claims that he has altered his rewriting process over the years, like a painter changing materials.

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Finally, when I got within twenty pages of the end, I realized I still hadn’t delivered this revolution. I had a lot of threads, and I’d overlooked this one. So then I had to go back and lay in the preparation for the revolution. Putting in that revolution was like setting in a sleeve. Do you know what I mean? Do you sew? I mean I had to work that revolution in on the bias, had to ease out the wrinkles with my fingers. (1978, p. 155) Didion’s analogy draws attention to the divisibility of her text, in contrast to the more integrated or unitary forms suggested by revising as painting, casting, or sculpting. When texts consist of segments, overlooking the ends of an important “thread” results merely in an awkward but manageable construction problem. Major new sections can still be inserted, even as the text nears completion. Didion’s sewing solution implies a need for craft, for skill, but not necessarily for the artistry of a painter or sculptor. Lawrence Durrell also uses an analogy to sewing when he describes his revising. At one point he says: “the construction gave me some trouble, and I let in a hemstitch here, a gusset there… .” (1977, p. 267). A hemstitch is an ornamental stitch which involves pulling out a number of parallel threads, then stitching groups of the cross-threads together. A “gusset” implies a more direct way to solve a “construction” problem, since it consists of a small, triangular piece of material which is inserted in an item of clothing to reinforce it or make a better fit. It may be necessary to insert a gusset if a garment is to look good, be strong, and fit well, but undoubtedly it requires difficult and close work on detail, work that is tedious and demanding.38 Durrell might describe such revision as “tailoring,” since in the same interview he uses the term “retailor” to indicate a kind of revising that he finds himself unable to do. He says, “I know it’s a wrong attitude, because some people can, with patience, resurrect and retailor things. But I can’t …” (1977, p. 271). These and similar metaphors connect the experiences of Didion, Durrell, and other writers with the activities of tailors and seamstresses and other craftspersons who stick with slow boring tasks so that something will eventually function well.

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Revising also can be positioned as craft work to fix problems, as suggested by metaphors of sewing and tailoring. For example, Joan Didion had to insert a substantial new section into the manuscript of A Book of Common Prayer:

When Didion says she overlooked one “thread” of many, she suggests that numerous places in the text need small changes, apparently rather limited and undemanding. This view focuses on “tying off” and “clipping” bits that are loose and unattractive. But failure is of potentially larger consequence, leaving seams torn, sleeves falling off, texts unraveling. The importance of this kind of revising is reinforced by Nelson Algren’s related image of final revision as tying up knots: While I’m finishing a book it’s a little bit like tying a lot of knots that keep slipping and you’re just impatient to get it done. And then you have to go all the way back in, in order to tie it up, and you find you just can’t tie it up at the end. You have to go all the way back and tie it up. (1964, p. 324) Like Didion, Algren implies that problems of revising are primarily technical difficulties, that one must keep finding loose ends, tying off knots, returning when knots have “slipped.”40 Since the strings or ropes or threads that Algren is trying to knot go deep into the texture of the text, their tying is important—inadequate tying could lead to disintegration. Small, apparently pedestrian activities may have big consequences. The kinds of problems to be fixed can also imply mechanical or construction problems. Mechanics’ solutions make things work or run. Fred Chappell says revising is like finding needed parts and repairing an old car. [Y]ou work at it long enough, and it becomes so impersonal and so much an object that you’re working on … it’s like a car you’ve been trying to get to run, an old Hupmobile, that you’ve been looking for all the parts for, for the past thirty years, and, one of these days, you know that you’re going to take it out on the highway. (1973, p. 43) Robert Creeley compares some poets’ revision to a kind of mechanical aesthetics: A poet say like Louis Zukovsky has endless revisions upon his initial writing. It’s like tuning up a motor. He really isn’t satisfied until all the elements of the statement are for him utterly working in congruence. (1974, p. 208) Mechanic’s solutions suggest the need for attention to small problems, attention to precision and intermeshing of parts. This kind of meta-

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66 Authors on Writing

phor is frequent in revision discourse. Marguerite Yourcenar (1984) and Maxine Kumin (1983) both speak of tightening and loosening. “It wasn’t a matter of rewriting but simply of tightening up all the bolts, so to speak … tightening and loosening are jobs for a mechanic,” says Yourcenar (p. 184).41 Ann Beattie complains that she has “never been able to overhaul a story” (1987), while Andrew Suknaski (1988) mentions “fine tuning.” Conrad Aiken (1977) speaks of retooling and tinkering. For others, revising is “fixing” the text–patching (Christopher Isherwood, 1977 Scobie), shoring it up (Toni Morrison, 1984), or repairing it (John A. Williams, 1973). Sometimes it is making the text “match, and latch, and connect” (Alan Sillitoe, 1981).42 Philip Whalen says that he has “got to bang on it somehow to straighten it out” (1978, p. 37).43,44 Many different metaphors represent “cutting” text. John Brunner likens his writing process to gardening, his revising to pruning an ornamental plant. Organizing [a plot] is akin to training and pruning an espalier. Given a suitable plant—a promising idea—one must display it on the available trellis: the printed page. If it tends to wander randomly, it must be disciplined back to the desired shape … (1978, p. 319) David Jones (1966) speaks of having crawled “out on limbs,” and pruning them. William Goyen says that he will “cut back, and take what is still living there” (1980, p. 231).45 “Cut” assumes dramatic meaning when Henry Miller says that he goes “to work on [his text] with an axe” (1977), or when Hugh Leonard remarks that he finds cutting difficult when he “cannot get a wedge in because each line fits into the next” (1973, p. 196). Alex Haley states that he “act[s] like a surgeon” when he is writing, focusing on the careful delicate work, even constantly taking showers and washing his hands. “I like to do first drafts at night, when I’m tired, and then do the surgical work in the morning when I’m sharp …” (1977, p. 451). Christopher Isherwood describes his revising as amputation (1977 Scobie). Donald Hall explains that “the process of peeling away sharpens what’s there. It doesn’t clarify it, it sharpens it” (1973, p. 13).46 Authors pare,47 chop,48 hack, slash, and strip (down) their texts. James Tate (1977) “brandishes” his “razor,” while Herbert Gold (1973) goes over his first draft to cut out “the loose hairs and revise.” These stories portray texts

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as organic and stress the need to separate useless material to shape and enhance the significant.

Pulitzer Prize winner and composition theorist Donald Murray (1978) identifies two different ways of seeing revision, which emphasize two aspects of labor. “Internal revision” concerns writers’ own developing understanding of what they are trying to say. “External revision” refers to conveying that meaning to others. This distinction is, of course, provisional since acts to clarify meaning for writers may also clarify it for their audiences, and acts designed to convey meaning to others may also reveal and refine it for the writer. Nonetheless, Murray’s terminology focuses deserved attention on the meaning or significance for the author of any particular writing act and may shed light on an interesting feature of many authors’ metaphorical stories for late-stage and surface-level revision: their tendency to deprecate it. Some instances may even imply that writers are disrespectful of the value of such revising when they speak of banging or tinkering. Other terms reflect ambivalence, such as when writers mention having to chew, diddling away, jiggling, niggling, picking, worrying, whacking, fiddling, fooling around, fussing, messing, monkeying, mucking, playing, toying, and knocking (into shape and on the head).49 Some writers illustrate their self-deprecation through the image of a somewhat bedraggled writer-as-dog: [With a poem] … one sort of throws it away and goes and digs it up and tosses it into the air and finishes it off or doesn’t finish it off. (Stevie Smith, 1966, p. 225) It makes you feel like an ineffective bulldog, you keep worrying it and worrying it … (Jim Harrison, 1988, p. 74) Much … will have begun … earlier … and [been] worried and slowly chewed on and left for dead many times in the interim. (William Gass, 1983 LeClair, p. 158) Such rhetorical expressions reflect a tendency to discredit minor, surface, or late-stage revising activities, an attitude which is seldom expressed in reformulation stories. These different stories do not describe “the same” process in different ways, but instead delineate different aspects of revising and different

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*

“takes” on the same revising moments. Transforming ore, casting, painting, and sculpting suggest that writers go back into the text to rework its inorganic substance, to reformulate it. Dickey, transforming ore for gold, break apart his drafts into their constituent elements in order to find and transform the most valuable. Ashbery and others who cast and recast return their drafts to the amorphous, liquid state of beginnings and generativity. Moravia and other painters may alter dramatically the texture and form of their texts. Chester and others who work with clay-like materials may continue to remold their texts many times. Goyen reshapes his text cyclically as he chisels. Thus, a significant proportion of metaphorical stories for revising indicate that writers see themselves making substantial, laborious changes during revising. It also appears that these metaphorical stories about reformulation may form a harmonious group: they all imply a unitary text, rather than one composed of discrete parts which can be handled separately. The intention seems to be primarily to produce an aesthetic commodity, beautiful, useful, and valuable. Writers use a related set of congruent stories about reformulation to suggest they value it as a way to discover, construct, shape, and develop what they have to say. In contrast, stories of restructuring, reducing, and refining evoke revising as a process of small scale and later stage changes. They offer interpretations of the nature of revising which differ from those suggested by reformulation stories, yet seem in harmony with one another. Compared to reformulation stories, these stories do not appear to place as much aesthetic or commodity value on either the writing process or the written text. The tasks described are more those of craft and rule, rather than those of heavy labor or art. They make fewer demands on physical strength and artistic talent. The products are not so valuable. These stories stress the surface of the text; they tend to be stylistic rather than formal, local rather than structural. They often reflect Gore Vidal’s ambivalent attitude: “Rewriting … is a slow grinding business” (Gore Vidal, 1974, p. 157). This sort of revision seems analogous to the work performed by members of craft unions rather than industrial unions. One might suspect that these stories support now discredited “stage” theories of creativity and writing, but the situation is more complex than that. Taken as a whole, metaphorical stories about revising as labor do imply a set of relations linking the nature of the material, the “stage” of revision, and preferred methods of revision. The material to be revised may be at one time molten, malleable, and flexible. It is possible to reshape it and change it totally. Rewriting of material in

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Metaphorics of Embodied Labor 69

such a state tends to be represented by metaphorical stories about hard labor and artistic processes. At another time when the material is still somewhat flexible, alterations can still be made. The writer’s attention, however, is directed to the fit and functioning among parts, not to the totality of the text. Revising material in such a state tends to be represented by stories about craft and mechanical work like sewing, tailoring, tying, or fixing. When the text seems to be relatively “solid,” writers “cut,” focusing either on the material to be saved or that to be eliminated. When the “surface” of the text seems to have “hardened,” at least temporarily, writers engage in craft work again, as they “polish” or “touch up.”50 It would be wrong, however, to put these together as indications of a “superstory” that would valorize a stage theory of revising in which all writers move from work on larger issues to finer detail. The authors talk about the entire range of these activities as “revision.” Individual writers do not claim to engage first in reformulation and restructuring activities, then in surface work. In fact, taken as a whole, the stories reveal what close observational studies also suggest—that writing is a cyclical, recursive process. The states authors describe in their stories may occur and reoccur as writers complete their texts, though in general the movement of texts is from malleability to solidification, from working on substance and shape to working on surface. The movement is partly an artifact of time and constraint, of the exigencies of desire and situation that lead writers to abandon their texts. The powerful interruptions of both editing and earthquakes (see Chapter 8) can push writers into reformulation or surface work; but even more powerful forces of situation lead writers to sense the need for completion of text. The prominence of these images of externality is to some degree problematic. Reddy has described how reliance on the conduit metaphor and related images of ideas as physical objects can restrict people’s understanding of communication situations. Moreover, the implied distinction between form and content is an artificial one, since the two are seldom as independent, separable, or extricable as many statements about them imply. Despite such limitations, writers constantly use images of externalized, material texts, suggesting that they may be useful or even necessary for writers to understand and carry out acts of revision. Perhaps to manipulate language in revision, one must be able to envision ideas as “separate” in some way from the words used to express them. If not, one may not be able to change the words or relationship

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70 Authors on Writing

of words in order to better express or even get at the ideas. It is possible that such “inaccurate,” “inadequate” metaphors are what enable writers to succeed by means of “as-if” thinking. People write and revise as if externalized metaphors can reflect composing experiences, as, of course, they do. Problematic as such images may seem, metaphors indicating some type of externality may, in fact, be central to conceptions of writing.

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Metaphorics of Embodied Labor 71

5

Metaphors of discursive sociality offer an image of writing processes dramatically different from that of the buried life of the mind. Metaphors of discursive sociality situate the author and text in continuing engagement with an interactive and social field of discourse that extends over time and space. They position authors’ texts as alive or their characters as co-authors—rather than focusing back on hidden origins of thought. Pervasive and powerful, metaphors of discursive sociality reveal the primacy of discourse as the source and field of activity in composing. Were it not for the degree to which our investment in the metanarrative of the buried life focuses our attention on interiority and alterity, the centrality of their claims would not need to be stressed. Overcoming our fascination with the metanarrative of the buried life can allow us to hear other narratives that emphasize embodied labor and discursive sociality. I argue in Chapter 2 that metaphorical stories suggestive of alterity may be re-read as instead placing discourse at the center of the writing scene. In one such story, Charles Johnson attributes agency to language itself when he says, “It’s like a trap door, the language drops you down to this whole other level of seeing” (1987, p. 259). I read this metaphor to suggest that it is while manipulating language that Johnson comes to new ways of knowing. In another story, Henry Miller describes moments when his composing was “dictated”: “Someone takes over and you just copy out what is being said” (1977, p. 171). But the rest of the passage situates Miller in full engagement with language (“I was grappling with ideas … I was saturated with it” (1977, p. 171). The buried life metanarrative encourages us to see this as a moment of alterity; I read it to demonstrate dynamic discursivity. In the third metaphor, Wilson Harris talks about the “voices” that 72

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Metaphorics of Discursive Sociality

surround him as he writes. His metaphor positions him as embedded in a field of discourse, not a scene of interiority and alterity. So foregrounding the dynamic discursivity we know to be central to writing can allow us to read more fully even metaphors that might seem congruent with the metanarrative of the buried life of the mind. I frame the argument of this chapter with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism. Thinking about the scene of composing as dialogic and interactive focuses attention on the multiple voices and implicit dialogism of metaphors of discursive sociality. I first examine metaphors in which authors describe their composing as negotiating with their texts as living beings, having voices, arguing, wanting things. Second, I examine closely the metaphor I call Characters as Co-Authors, in which authors describe themselves as negotiating with characters that make demands and live “autonomously.” * Authors using metaphors of discursive sociality in effect align themselves with what might be seen as a “Bakhtinian” view of composing texts. Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 1986) argues for the constant interconnection and appropriation of discourse by those who participate in using it. Individuals do not produce meaning in a monologue. Composing is not the ability to access the buried life of the mind. Rather than meaning being produced by an isolated individual, it must be created in dialogue. Human agency is situated in a system of structures and conventions already in place—in genres, in styles, in ways of using language. There is always choice within those constraints; by inflecting those, and in that sense, people can speak as individuals (see White 1987/88). Bakhtin argues that all speakers are positioned in a network of language because they are always responding to already existing discourses. He states, … any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances—his own and others’—with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes they are already known to the listener). Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances. (1986, p. 69)

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Metaphorics of Discursive Sociality 73

Bakhtin’s theorizing of dialogism is often used to consider how people use texts to make meaning and, in particular, to see operations of intertextuality. I am arguing that it is particularly useful in situating composing and its metaphors of discursive sociality because it emphasizes the writer within a world of discourse, responding to as well as contributing to these discourses. Bakhtin reminds us that the writing of texts—as well as the socially shared discourses talking about that intellectual labor—is part of a history of discursivity: all prose discourses respond to, engage with, inflect previous utterances. Inflecting genres, narratives, arguments with individual utterances is an activity both creative and constrained. He argues, Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not selfsufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their character. Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related … Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. (1986, p. 91) Bakhtin’s description of an utterance that “is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances,” that “refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others,” theorizes the writing situation that metaphors of discursive sociality describe. Rather than positioning an essence of human expression in interiority and alterity, dialogism situates it in interaction. Bakhtin argues, Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that is in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of contact between voice-consciousnesses the idea is born and lives. (1984, p. 88) Metaphors of discursive sociality talk about social interaction at the moment of writing, when writers talk to themselves, to their texts, to their characters, and they find that all of these sources and an entire history of texts talk back to them. Metaphors of discursive sociality demonstrate writers writing through a dialogic process, inserting themselves in and responding to a preexisting field of discourse sedimented

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Metaphorics of Discursive Sociality 75

with history, responding to social exigencies, pushing at language through their own and others’ voices.

The passage by Wilson Harris quoted in Chapter 2 is a particularly apt introduction to a “Bakhtinian” notion of conceptions of composing. It emphasizes both the living textuality that characterizes metaphors of discursive sociality, yet, by its use of the metaphor of “voices,” it demonstrates also the kind of discursive interactivity found in such metaphors. I quote it again here. Harris says, … the novels you write as well as the novels that other people write, have their own life. They speak to you. Now when that kind of speech is so haunting, that constitutes a development in the novel [being worked on] because the novels of the past are addressing you, are pushed on by some things you see, you are astonished at seeing them. In some degree, they’re already residing in what has gone before…. it’s as if there is a chorus. This is one way of putting it, and certain voices are more to the fore, though the other voices are there. Then in another novel, the other voices come to the fore. You have to be attentive not only to what you’re doing but in some degree to what is coming back. (1981, p. 61) Harris’s metaphor situates his own and other people’s novels as speaking to one another, speaking in a “chorus,” and in this speaking, influencing the development of the new work. While the new writing is connected to (“haunting”) sedimented histories, those histories in their interaction with the writer produce new things (“you are astonished at seeing them”). Central to metaphors of discursive sociality are claims that the novels “have their own life,” and “speak to you.” Metaphors of discursive sociality find significance at the point of productive utterance, at the level of discursive interaction and development. Metaphors of discursive sociality show how writers see themselves living in a world of discourse, on the alert for discursive occasions, often listening for them. Bernard Spencer when asked what prompts a poem, replies: I suddenly detect myself in a situation, out of which comes a so-far-unformulated excitement, and I suppose all poets must feel or

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Negotiating with texts

learn to know this. It is sort of like a signal flashing on, or some particular kind of bell going. They know that there is a poem there, if they look attentively…. I rather like what a Greek poet said (it was Seferis) that you meet poems like people and certain kinds of poems in different places. A certain kind you may run into in a railway station, you can expect them there, and other kinds in, shall we say, the bathroom…. poems are almost hanging about. (1966, p. 237) Spencer suggests a ghostly world of potential poems. The poet, walking through that world, encounters potential poems everywhere, “meets them like people,” lets them “hang about.” But they importune, also. This metaphor of discursive sociality describes a writing life, where authors and texts wait to interact with one another. Metaphors of discursive sociality are often framed in terms of authors living with their texts, in a world of their texts, with metaphors of “saturation” or “immersion,” flagging the author’s emphasis on duration as well as dynamic discursivity. According to William Goyen, he is “saturated” by the “whole world” of which he writes. It is not merely his text that is alive, but the entire discursive scene. I plan quite a bit. But I’m not too aware of it. That is, I’ve not got it all down, but I’ve got a good deal of it thought through or felt through, before I begin writing. So that the whole world of it is very much alive and urgent for me. I’m surrounded by it—almost like a saturating scent. I feel it like a heat. The world that I’m going to write has already been created, somehow, in physical sensation before I go about writing it, shaping it, organizing it. My writing begins physically, in flesh ways. The writing process, for me, is the business of taking it from the flesh state into the spiritual, the letter, the Word. (1976, p. 99, emphasis in original) Goyen’s story captures the urgency of his writing process in the kind of interactive way I am trying to emphasize. He implies moving back and forth with physical, sensual moves to transform the novel from one way of being to another. His metaphors emphasize its claims on him as well as his control of it. I argue that this dynamism, this interaction, this sense of discourse as a place of fecundity and animation, is what emerges from metaphors of discursive sociality. Authors describe their texts as alive, or coming alive in interaction with them.1 (According to many authors, things that come alive can also die.2) For these authors, their texts not only

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76 Authors on Writing

speak for themselves, they move and change for themselves. A novelist may begin to write, only to find, like Harry Mark Petrakis, that “the life which the work itself presents takes on a movement and direction of its own” (1977, p. 98). Texts often seem to present themselves, articulate ideas, make suggestions, make rules, dictate, insist, and make demands on their authors.3 The texts themselves function as co-authors—as metaphors of discursive sociality. A significant number of authors suggest that their texts go even further than that: they write themselves.4 Speaking about his novel Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow claims that the novel made its own rules, its own demands, and by the last third of it had developed complete inevitability (1977, p. 39). Ann Petry describes one of her stories as a work that “almost wrote itself … The form finds itself” (1973, pp. 156, 159). Ruth Stone describes a poem that “knew itself already. I didn’t know it” (1975, p. 56). Authors often talk about their texts, words, and ideas as entities that want things, that seek to realize themselves.5 Alan Dugan reports: … I work in and out of notebooks … taking a poem out of a notebook and retranscribing it in order to see what the poem wants to be. (1973, p. 96) William Styron uses a related metaphor with somewhat different and dangerous meaning when he says “novels strangle with murderous hands” (1978, p. 277). Styron’s metaphorical story resonates with another of his evaluations of writing: “Let’s face it, writing is hell” (1977, p. 271). The life that a text assumes may therefore be a violent or inimical force—less an alter ego than an antagonist. Texts can become independent, taking over, going their own way, getting out of the author’s control.6 Worse, texts can choose their own authors, force themselves upon them, even take control of the authors.7 This set of stories about vigorous and animated texts cannot be interpreted as simply a displacement of subjectivity. Rather, foregrounding process, place, time, and alternative voices and perspectives, metaphors of sociality emphasize continuing engagement at the scene of utterance. They negotiate patterns of tension and constraint, freedom and convention, that inflect everyday experiences of composing. They portray composing as an interrelational rather than a solitary act. This interconnected body of metaphorical stories emphasizes that writers see their composing as engaging with a materiality of

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78 Authors on Writing

You start it and it wants to go another way; you resist, and very often it goes its own way in spite of you. But it had better not go entirely its own way, because then you’re out of control. (Wallace Stegner, 1985, p. 125) Metaphors of discursive sociality present composing as a process of negotiation with languages that will not cooperate, that frustrate, that enable. Some of the most interesting metaphors of texts as animated beings occur when writers use images of their texts as living creatures. The texts may appear metaphorically as animals, birds, fish, or human beings. Hearing the arrival of the bird/poem “rustle in the bushes,” for example, Denise Levertov readies herself accordingly (1974). Donald Hall finds most poems to “begin with the sudden gift of words, just winging into the head” (1974, p. 76). Patricia Highsmith observes, “An idea just sort of zooms in like a bird out of the sky” (1977, p. 33).8 To consider texts as creatures to be sought after, enticed, and perhaps trapped, emphasizes the vitality and otherness of the texts. The prey is alive and skittish, perhaps dangerous, and usually elusive, but it certainly mitigates the autonomous wholeness of the authorial self. Mignon Eberhart “lurks” while waiting to begin her text: “When an idea appears, I leap on it with all fours and hold it down till I’ve mastered it” (1977, p. 194). Flannery O’Connor wants to “feel it out like a hound dog” and “follow the scent. Quite frequently,” she says, “it’s the wrong scent” (1966). With regard to early stages of writing, authors mention setting out to hunt a rabbit (E. B. White, 1969), capturing textual butterflies (Taner Baybars, 1966), sensing the aura of bear, squirrel, or snake (Denise Levertov, 1974), beating the bush to flush a bird (Laurens Van Der Post, 1964), and capturing an elusive wild deer or a lizard (Lawrence Durrell, 1977).9,10,11 Those who do not hunt animals may instead “coax” them in, preferring to be “host” rather than a “big-game hunter” (Seamus Heaney, 1981, p. 72). Sandra Cisneros distinguishes the pleasures of writing poetry by rendering poems as cats on leashes: I simply write and in the act of writing discover what it is I knew…. That is why I enjoy writing poetry over the writing of prose. It is that flowering, that following that is so exciting, exhilarating. You

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language and a multiplicity of discourses, an interchange that resists as well as permits:

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Christopher Isherwood connects the independence of the text to writing experiences but also to the nature of the texts produced. I mean, you get people with tremendous vitality and total recall like Thomas Wolfe, for example. That’s where the horse ran away, obviously. Some people prefer to ride alongside and see where the horse goes, while others would say it’s much better to use the curb and restrain the horse. (1977 Bailey, p. 90) Madeline L’Engle uses the same metaphor to describe being impelled through the writing process: I can tell you some things by hindsight or from what people have told me. But basically, when I’m writing a story it’s like riding a rather wild horse, letting it go where it wants to go. The only thing I’m in control of is seeing that parts I can simplify … (1974, p. 255) Ursula Le Guin uses the same metaphor to emphasize the “feel” of engaging in the writing process, of interacting with the text: Fantasy starts in a very irrational place deep inside you. It’s got to start, probably, from feelings you don’t understand, so that there is something that is out of your control, and you’re constantly trying to control it as you write… . It’s like riding a horse. You want the horse to have his own will, because you’re doing something together. If the horse is too docile you won’t go far. (1987, p. 27) Talking about texts as animals suggests their independence, the need to try to control or otherwise engage with recalcitrant, fearful, or headstrong creatures who have minds of their own. The metaphor also connects to the desire to see the finished text as a living organic being. This is the basis of Frederick Manfred’s comment about his text as a beautiful pheasant: Because I do a lot of thinking and plotting before I begin a book. I know where the skeleton is and where the flesh is to be attached and the feathers are to go on. When I get done with a book, I like to

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cannot teach a poem which way to go. It is like a cat on a leash. Won’t move. But follow it, and oh, so many possibilities! (1985, p. 69)

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In this case, Manfred’s process of writing is not struggling with an independent text, but mapping the anatomy of the text he intends to endow with life. Authors describing their texts through metaphors of discursive sociality are declaring an independence of the texts so as to reveal an interdependence of their writing processes. The activities of manipulating language focus most of authors’ attention not on large “events” of “getting ideas,” but on small textual moves that fulfill “ideas.” Metaphors of discursive sociality can also register how the gradual accumulation of small textual moves can restrict future moves. Any move to establish a voice or shape a text is, at the same time, to reject dozens of other voices and shapes that might at one time have been possible. This is part of Martin Amis’s point when he describes the “demands” that a novel imposes, using a metaphor that mixes a demanding text, tunneling, and taking prisoners: Writing a novel always feels to me like starting off in a very wide tunnel—in fact, it doesn’t look like a tunnel at all, since it’s marvelously airy and free at the beginning, when you are assigning life to various propositions—but finishing off by crawling down a really cramped tunnel, because the novel itself has set up so many demands on you. There is so little room for manoeuvre by the end that you are actually a complete prisoner of the book, and it is formal demands that cause all these constrictions: the shape gets very tight by the end, and there are no choices any more. (1985, p. 17) Perhaps most important, these metaphors emphasize the duration of time, the intensity of concentration, and the quarrel with others that are required by writing processes. *

Characters as co-authors Perhaps the best-known example of the figurative theme of an author confronting independent characters comes from Luigi Pirandello’s

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have it like a pheasant in flight. It works. It’s beautiful. But I know before it flies where every bone and every gut and every feather and every drop of blood and bile and the whole business…. (1974, pp. 28–9, ellipsis in original)

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[They] went on living on their own, choosing certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the solitude of my study and coming—now one, now the other, now two together—to tempt me, to propose that I present or describe this scene or that, to explain the effects that could be secured with them, the new interest which a certain situation could provide, and so forth…. [It] became gradually harder and harder for me to go back and free myself from them… They are detached from me; live on their own; have acquired voice and movement; have by themselves—in this struggle for existence that they have had to wage with me—become dramatic characters, characters that move and talk on their own initiative; already see themselves as such; have learned to defend themselves against me… (1960, pp. 206–7) Pirandello’s fascinating account of his writing processes directs attention to the complications of text-level interactions, to moves designed to shape the direction of texts while facing the exigencies that emerge within it.13 It illuminates certain core characteristics endemic to stories about characters as co-authors. In these accounts, characters come to writers, are found, or create themselves.14 They become alive, autonomous, and independent during the process of writing.15 Characters may initiate the narrative by their arrival.16 They do things their authors do not expect,17 suggest or choose what they will do or say, and tell their own stories often with a kind of inevitability.18 Characters talk to writers and make demands on them about what and how and when to write,19 they try or manage to take over the course of the narrative, the writing process, and even the writer.20 Characters can respond critically to what authors write, as evaluators and as explicators.21 Fiction writers often describe their characters as real people who come alive and even become co-authors seeking to take charge of part of the narrative. Timothy Findley explains how he “meets” his collaborators: The first thing I see is the person, and the person will come and you’ll hear this in your mind (knocking sound); and you go to the door and you open the door and standing there is Hooker Winslow with a cat in his arms. And he says: I’m in trouble, babble, babble,

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play Six Characters in Search of an Author.12 In his preface to the play, Pirandello describes his encounters:

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Findley describes his characters shoving their way into his life and refusing to leave until he begins a new text. Such powerful characters are presumed to have had a life before the writer begins to write about them. Meeting them can be difficult, confrontational, and pressured. Findley even tries to protect himself from them by starting his writing with a central event which he describes as a brick wall: I’m now learning that it’s very important to build what I call a brick wall first. Then everybody [all the characters] has to get in the cars and drive towards the brick wall. They’re all driving towards that brick wall, and you have to have in the structure of your writing the brick wall: they must all either pass through or crash against the brick wall … (1973 Gibson, pp. 136–7) Rather than working with inert material, trying to make it “come alive,” authors such as Findley move with or struggle against a powerful, demanding text and even take steps to protect themselves from the willfulness of co-authors. Findlay continues: All authors are whispered to by their characters. The characters want life, and you have to give it to them. It’s a little like rape, with no recourse to abortion. They take your body and you have to give birth…. The characters want life, and you have to give it to them…. They arrive on your doorstep, and they say, I am coming into your life and I am not going to leave until I am down on the paper and that’s the end of it. (1973 Cameron, pp. 52–3) When writers ascribe independence to their characters they reveal the importance of points of tension during writing—the ways in which writing processes themselves stretch and shape authors’ original intentions. Writing requires authors to establish both short term and long range plans, to adjust previous plans according to new insights and the nature of the emerging text, and to evaluate their progress according to criteria related to genre, audience, and purpose. To alleviate the “cognitive strain” of managing so many complex tasks, experienced and fluent writers engage in systematic task management strategies and

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babble, and a scene evolves, but it’s all around the arrival of this person. It’s the arrival of a person that comes first, then the milieu; where do you belong, who are your people? Then the story comes. So it all comes in that order. (1973 Gibson, p. 136)

even complete some tasks “automatically.” Writers may then express their perceptions of changing task demands by using fictional stories which “assign” spheres of responsibility to their characters. Metaphorical descriptions of characters as co-authors attribute to mundane characters what quintessential creative-moment metaphors of illumination and inspiration tend to ascribe to deities. Positioning a writing problem as the consequence of actions by a social “other” augments our understanding of the writer’s task. One refers with awe to a mysterious spiritual superior, but not to a recalcitrant collaborator. Characters’ contributions are not always welcome, and resisting them allegorizes the dialogue between textual desires and textual effects. Joyce Carol Oates in interviews frequently uses the metaphor of characters as co-authors. For example, she says that her stories originate when characters gradually “appear” and their relations become evident to her: … I often fall into a kind of waking sleep, a day-dreaming about the people, the strangers, who are to be the “characters” in a story or novel I will be writing. I can’t do much about this habit. At times my head seems crowded; there is a kind of pressure inside it, almost a frightening physical sense of confusion, fullness, dizziness. Strange people appear in my thoughts and define themselves slowly to me: first their faces, then their personalities and quirks and personal histories, then their relationships with other people, who very slowly appear, and a kind of “plot” then becomes clear to me as I figure out how all these people came together and what they are doing. (1974, p. 21)22 Oates implies that her characters have existed prior to the time that they appear in her mind. She seems to find their arrival compelling but also disturbing. She does not describe herself as setting a stage for thinking about writing or creating these characters; in fact she implies that she is reluctant to experience this daydreaming—“I can’t do much about this habit.” Her description of how her characters gradually reveal themselves suggests that her ideas develop over a long, absorbing period of prewriting. Oates indicates that she has little control over the behavior of her characters. My “characters” really dictate themselves to me. I am not free of them, really, and I can’t force them into situations they haven’t

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Oates’ claim that she “can’t force [her characters] into situations they haven’t themselves willed” may represent a conflict between her original intentions and the emerging text. She also implies that purposes of various kinds may not be in agreement, so that potential text generated in response to one problem may conflict with another potential version of the text. For Oates to liken her experiences to dreams de-emphasizes the “reality” of her characters’ autonomy. She suggests that her view of characters as co-authors both is and is not metaphorical. The story is “real” in the same way dreams are real. Seen in the context of other writers’ comments, Oates’ statements are something of a concession to the fictive qualities of the fictional story, perhaps suggesting the gap between her style of fiction and “realism.” To have dream characters intrude upon one, to observe the events of a dream, to transcribe a dream, these seem less compelling than the intrusions and demands of real persons usually implied by talking about characters as coauthors.23 But like realists such as John Dos Passos (1973) and William Sansom (1974), Oates relates that characters who are willful and compelling during composing will be strong and well-developed in the finished narrative, that characters who are vivacious and believable to the reader must have been headstrong during composing. When characters are lively, writers may struggle with them during the process of composition, and not always successfully. Oates struggled with her character, Hugh Petrie, and claims she was only partly victorious. Her own desire, she says, was for a much shorter first section. She concludes that Petrie’s influence is unfortunate, but that the problems actually result from the character’s influence, his independence and insistence, not from any choices of her own.24 Oates attributes problems in the text to her inability to control her characters, to prevent them from saying what they want to say. Characters can carry both credit and blame. Kaye Gibbons sees her characters as making decisions about the proper management of their affairs because they know the proper way to do things. She positions herself in authorial control, but granting responsibility to the characters, much like the delegating manager of a large corporation. In one novel, it was important that a character, Starletta, show up at the house of the character Ellen Foster. It was

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themselves willed. They have the autonomy of characters in a dream…. In fact, … it occurs to me that I am really transcribing dreams. (1974, p. 30)

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Ellen made sure she did…. And I don’t feel like I handled it. I feel like Starletta handled it, and Starletta handled it just right. I watched what she did and got my cue from her and wrote it down. So it couldn’t help but be right. Starletta was going to do what came naturally to her. Learning that as a writer requires a great leap of faith, and it’s like delegating responsibility, and I had to learn to delegate responsibility for my story to my characters and not feel this urge to be in control all the time. It’s like the president of a large corporation who’s always going to the warehouse to make sure the right widgets are in a box. He has to trust that the people on the line put the right number of widgets in there, and I had to trust Starletta. (1993, p. 79) Gibbons indicates that this particular delegation of responsibility worked successfully. Authors may use these stories as a shorthand way of diagnosing problems in their writing, feeling that characters recognize problems, gaps, or faulty plans that the author does not yet understand. Cynthia Macdonald indicates that her character Blaschka was reluctant to speak because he knew more than she did about his actual situation: My first attempt was to have Blaschka talking to his wife. That didn’t work. He refused to say much to her either, no matter how I tried to force him to. No wonder: he knew about his secret, his relationship with Lilianne, even though I still did not. (1977, pp. 210–11) While Macdonald focuses on Blaschka’s resistance, she implies that at some point there was a moment of resolution. When she “found out” about Lilianne, she must have been able to persuade him to speak. When she altered her scope to include their relations, she was able to proceed. What the metaphorical story pinpoints is not ease of writing, nor cooperation, but privileged knowledge available first to the character, and only later understood by the writer. Writers may also attribute changes in goals, writing processes, and the structure of texts to the knowledge or influence of the characters. Rudolfo Anaya describes the point in the development of his first

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Starletta’s own knowledge, Gibbons claims, that enabled her to do this.

86 Authors on Writing

I began to tell the story of a family and Antonio, a young boy, and worked at it for years. It never really took shape, in terms of inspiration, until the night that Ultima came to me and appeared as a fullfledged character. She stood beside me and pointed out the things I had to do with the novel if it was going to work. She suggested that she would be an excellent character, and worked herself into the novel. From there on it clicked. (1980, p. 187) Anaya presents Ultima as an older, wiser co-author who provides a critique of his rough drafts, suggests methods for improvement, and demonstrates how the major method of improvement—including her as a character—would solve most of the problems revealed by the critique. Her intervention is the crux of the creation of the novel, as Anaya chooses to solve his writing problems by accepting her advice. Anaya describes here a moment in composing when he establishes a new focal point around which he could successfully shape the novel. Both Macdonald and Anaya had been struggling unsuccessfully. Revising their plans according to information available to the characters or garnered by taking advice from them, enabled the writing to proceed successfully. The dialogic encounter of two different voices allowed the novel to take shape. Similar stories can contain very different inflections. Oates indicates that the reluctance of Hugh Petrie to die made her writing process conflicted and may have marred her final text. In contrast, Leslie Marmon Silko emphasizes the creative contributions made by vivid characters. When her interviewer comments about “some pretty awful characters” in Almanac of the Dead, Silko replies, Even though there are parts of them I didn’t like, I have to say I liked all my characters quite a bit. I had planned on killing a bunch more than I did, but the characters knew in a way that I didn’t know. It was almost as if some other part of me was trying to save them. A lot of the characters developed—they became more than what I thought they were or could be—and they saved their own lives. (1993, p. 329) Silko delineates a positive tension, where her plans for creating the text changed in response to what emerged during the writing process. The

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novel, Bless Me, Ultima, when long-standing problems in the narrative were solved by the appearance of the character Ultima.

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When you create a character like that Miss Liz, you suddenly find out she never does anything she doesn’t want to. You, as a writer, have no control over her once she is established. And suddenly no man could come into that novel, because of Miss Liz’s presence…. (1973, p. 210) In these cases, conflict occurs because uncooperative and unruly characters resist their authors’ desires. Conflict is controlled or circumvented when one of the parties (sometimes the author) decides to cooperate with the other. Yet tension and conflict remain central to the writing process, whether it is the authors who resist their characters’ desires or when characters resist their authors’ desires. This metaphorical conflict reproduces tensions within the writer as well as those between writer and reader, writer and the larger social world. It acknowledges and performs the limits imposed on the writers’ narcissism—the degree to which the writer is not and cannot be a solitary, self-encapsulated genius. Writers frequently cite characters as co-authors to indicate resolutions between their original plans and their revised texts. Anthony Powell reports that the overall structure “inevitably” must be adjusted: “You set out in advance with a certain number of characters, but as they do different things, inevitably you have to trim your sails to what they have done …” (1978, p. 64). Novelist Martin Myers describes how the overwhelming force of the emerging text leads him to adjust his original plan: “Once I got the character started, it just absolutely took over. Then I had to make everything fit into the characterization, and that had a lot to do with the way the book worked out” (1973, p. 91). The co-author metaphor also enables writers to emphasize the way that a well-internalized structure or over-all plan can function as a matrix for developing a text, allowing the writer to by-pass some planning and make many decisions automatically. Cynthia Macdonald again refers to her character Blaschka, this time indicating that he could be cooperative. Macdonald, noting that she is accustomed to the form of the dramatic monologue, reveals that when she came to write The Stained Glass Man, she found the form “so natural to [her] that Rudolf Blaschka’s voice, giving the guided tour, came unbidden”

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sociality she ascribes to her characters metaphorically reproduces the dialogical quality of fiction itself, suggesting that the form is social and collaborative down to its very genesis. Similarly, Sylvia Wilkinson indicates

(1977, p. 210). By indicating that Blaschka’s voice comes easily, and by attributing that ease to her experience with the genre, Macdonald is using the fictional story to emphasize that form has generative benefits. By drawing on her schema for a dramatic monologue, Macdonald does not have to make so many decisions, does not have to choose from so many alternative sub-goals as she moves from larger plan to specific text. She condenses and figures the many voices inhabiting fictive tradition as the voice of a guiding character coming to her unbidden. Even without such a schema, decisions made during planning may function as a framework for the generation of a specific text. When discussing his writing of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, Ernest J. Gaines says “You must invent some incidents along the way, and when Miss Jane gets into the incident, she’ll develop it for you” (1976, p. 92). Gaines indicates that his broad plans are developed further once he gets into an event. He learns what he will want to write by focusing on the incident, developing and following through on appropriate goals. The intimate interaction of goals and emerging text, active planning and passive listening, produces new understanding, new ideas, new and unanticipated textual features. While Macdonald’s and Gaines’ characters again represent emerging meaning, in these cases the characters are cooperative: their actions, ideas, and dialogue fit easily into the authors’ larger plans. Their independence does not reflect increased tension in the writing process, but a diminishing of tension, generating texts appropriate to higher level objectives. This is part of what authors may imply when they speak of characters “rising up and taking charge” toward the end of the book. In addition to figuring the dialogism and discursive sociality of the composing process, tussles with characters represent the authors’ myriad struggles with the writing task. Author interviews indicate a seemingly endless succession of such struggles as characters insist, demand, reject, speak, say useless things, refuse to speak, lie to their authors, ignore suggestions, negotiate changes, resent what has been written about them, leave without telling, push other characters aside, confront, and even assault, push, pull, shove, and grapple with their authors. Yet in contrast to the behavior of all these recalcitrant characters, many interviews celebrate moments when characters take charge of the narrative and act on their own, in effect concluding the writer’s struggle in a positive way, guiding the writer to a successful completion of a difficult task. Here cooperation trumps conflict. In a famous example,

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88 Authors on Writing

William Faulkner says, “There is always a point in the book where the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job— say somewhere about page 275” (1958, p. 129). Faulkner’s comment implies a major change in his creative processes. Before the characters take charge (before page 275), Faulkner has to write on his own. After that point, however, his characters are his co-authors. The metaphor of shared labor, of social cooperation, stills the pervasive anxiety of creativity. Some widely quoted stories about characters as co-authors emphasize effortless and impelled writing when authors relinquish authorial responsibility to their characters. This emphasis is misleading, however, since the metaphor appears in the first place to indicate problems with one’s characters. In fact, instances describing difficulties with one’s characters may be, in effect, ironic commentary on the vision of ease suggested by stories of inspiration, punctuation, or compliant co-authors. The nettling nature of co-author characters can make some authors reject the metaphor altogether. Vladimir Nabokov vigorously repudiates the notion: INTERVIEWER: One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action. Has this been your experience? NABOKOV: I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane. (1972, p. 41) Yet if Nabokov were to survey literary interviews, he would have to classify as “very minor or insane” such writers as Saul Bellow (1972 Kulshrestha, 1972 Enck), Isak Dinesen (1977), John Dos Passos (1973), Ralph Ellison (1974), William Faulkner (1966, 1977), E. M. Forster (1977), John Fowles (1976), John Gardner (1979, 1981), William Inge (1971), Doris Lessing (1974), Bernard Malamud (1975), Larry McMurtry (1980), Joyce Carol Oates (1974, 1978), Harold Pinter (1977), Katherine Anne Porter (1977), and Jessamyn West (1976). Nabokov may at first appear to be saying that characters are not real, but to the contrary, his venom is actually directed at the suggestion that the characters could lead or control the author. In the same interview, he indicates that he has no intention of sharing his authorial responsibilities and privileges with them: “[E]very character follows the

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90 Authors on Writing

INTERVIEWER: E. M. Forster25 speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command? NABOKOV: … it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy … although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves. (1977, p. 96) Nabokov here represses his knowledge of the textual and social discourse that inevitably helps construct his own. Denying such permeations and penetrations, he takes recourse to the notion of the autonomous author, ironizing his position through metaphors of dictator and slaveholder. In effect, he acknowledges that his desire for absolute power is aberrant and abhorrent, yet he refuses to give it up. An author who has been called the last modernist insists, however ironically, on his privileges. Whether authors affirm or deny agency on the part of their characters, tensions remain between planning and altering plans, between shaping and being shaped. These take tangible form in metaphorical stories about co-authors. When asked by his interviewer about the extent to which his characters take charge, John Barth claims: You know, I suspect that’s a lot of baloney. You hear respectable writers, sensible people like Katherine Anne Porter, say the characters just take over.26 I’m not going to let those scoundrels take over. I am in charge. I like novels like Unamuno’s in which the characters challenge the author and begin to argue with him, but in my book they don’t take over. No, sir, my characters are going to do what I tell them. Really, I don’t think you ought to pay very much attention—it wasn’t Katherine Anne Porter, it was some silly woman who was being interviewed on the Today Show a few weeks ago; she had just finished a book and said that she hadn’t wanted it to go the way it did, but the characters had just taken over. You shouldn’t pay much attention to anything writers say. (1972, p. 24) Apparently rejecting the metaphor of characters as co-authors, Nabokov and Barth nonetheless personify their characters and quite

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course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world” (1972, p. 41). And on another occasion:

emphatically—as galley slaves and scoundrels. They do not claim that their characters are not alive, but emphasize instead that one should not give in to their importuning. Not to give in, to constrain such characters, involves the tension of trying to gain and maintain control over incipient conflict and rebellion. The question appears to be: who is in charge—author or character? The jocular denials of both Nabokov and Barth suggest, through a process akin to Freudian “negation,” that they are all too aware of the multiple voices embedded in and shaping their own. In an interview published a decade later, Barth again makes reference to the metaphor, but in this case as “simply a metaphor for the way things actually are.” That old convention of earlier modernism—of the dialogue between the author and his characters, the assumption of an independent life by those characters, even the mutiny of the characters against the author—that’s simply a metaphor for the way things actually are. I’m not very romantic about writing, and it always makes me uncomfortable when I hear an old-fashioned writer talk about the way his or her characters assume a life of their own: “I wanted this character to be such and such. But, no, she insisted on …” This is the kind of hogwash you hear from a certain kind of writer who talks in a romantic way about art. But on the level of simple fact, I think it’s undeniable that the work we do changes us; the dreams we dream change us. (1982, p. 32) A few pages later, Barth comments further, I don’t know myself, … whether the theme of re-enactment grew out of my interest in those famous re-enactments or whether it was the other way around. No more than I can, in some respects, say whether the author is shaping the characters or the characters are shaping the author. (1982, p. 34) The apparent change in Barth’s position may stem from his acknowledgment in the second interview of not only the complications of representing what writers do (“You shouldn’t pay much attention to anything writers say”), but also the complications of knowing what happens in writing lives. Though metaphors are never “the way things actually are,” they are also, at the same time, in fact “the way things actually are.” That is the contradictory nature of metaphor, and

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certainly the nature of trying to say anything meaningful about such a complicated topic as one’s writing life. Barth’s statements in both interviews attempt to contest what appears to him a rampant “romanticism” in discussions about writing. Evidence of that “romanticism” may lie in the ways in which interviewers rather than authors usually introduce the idea of characters as co-authors to these discussions. The interviewers’ interest often mimics inspiration metaphors, generally in connection with wondering whether authors write in “altered states of consciousness,” at the mercy of characters. John Cheever objects that The legend that characters run away from their authors—taking up drugs, having sex operations and becoming President—implies that the writer is a fool with no knowledge or mastery of his craft. This is absurd. Of course, any estimable exercise of the imagination draws upon such a complex richness of memory that it truly enjoys the expansiveness—the surprising turns, the response to light and darkness—of any living thing. But the idea of authors running around helplessly behind their cretinous inventions is contemptible. (1975, p. 43) Cheever presents one possible interpretation. I argue for another, however. Making reference to the legend that characters run away from their authors may well demonstrate that writers have a great deal of knowledge indeed—knowledge about the tensions of planning, writing, and revision, knowledge of how to stretch their conceptions in the process of writing and alter their texts to reflect an enriched vision, knowledge of the many voices that contribute to their own. The recurrent legend of the independent character, that is, bears upon creativity as both intellectual labor and social act. Some writers reject the metaphor of characters as co-authors precisely to home in on the difficult processes of writing and the complex negotiations between conscious and unconscious activity that they entail, without reference to negotiations with others. In an especially insightful version of this position, Edward Albee says I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well-formed that they just take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that the

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References to conscious and unconscious minds are no less “metaphorical” than metaphors about characters as co-authors. Like most metaphors for composing, they summarize an enormous number of discrete textual tasks into a generalized story. Albee draws on metaphors drawn from psychology and other fields. Though widely used outside literary discourses, such terms as “the unconscious mind” are alternative metaphors, not “non-metaphorical.”27 The concerns voiced by Barth and Albee about the implicit romanticism of treating characters as co-authors may evidence legitimate resistance to wide-spread mystifications of writing processes, as well as the widespread use of this particular metaphor. Positioning particular metaphorical stories as generalizable to large numbers of authors, as interviewers’ use of characters as co-authors does so relentlessly, truncates the enormous variation in processes of writing. Writers are hard at work inflecting the story to demonstrate through it the constant tension and negotiation with themselves and others at the center of the process of writing. They also use it to draw attention to the fact of their own individuality as writers. James Leigh comments ruefully, I’ve always been impressed—too impressed, probably—with Faulkner saying that if you do your work right, the characters will stand up and walk, along about page 275, and then all you have to do is take notes on what they do. Now, every year that passes, more of my head says “Bullshit!” It may have worked that way for him, but I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that I’m not Faulkner. Oh my, have I! (1976, p. 135)

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play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But there is work to be done—and discovery to be made. (1977, p. 343)

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Part II

The Apparatus of Authorship

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6

As we have seen, the testimonies that writers present in published interviews do not produce unmediated truths about composition; quite the contrary. Interviews provide metaphorical accounts of writing that take their place within a long tradition of discourse about compositional origins. Moreover, self-reported recollections of past writing activities are often imprecise, incomplete, and inaccurate. They have little to offer as evidence about actual writing practices. Authors perform identities and supply stories about writing in interviews to explain themselves, in order to seem interesting, to exercise their creativity, to engage and expand their readership, or to advance their professional and commercial reputations. They also respond to prompting, prodding, and provocation by interviewers eager to have their own notions and concepts approved by recognized authority figures. Interviews retrospectively construct (and necessarily constrict) long and complicated writing processes into short memorable anecdotes and images. My inquiry goes against the grain of a widespread and deeply imbedded cultural desire to view authors and creative artists of all kinds as solitary geniuses inspired by muses exclusively their own, as decisive originators of prose we have come to admire, learn from, and even love. Literary historians and critics have often been complicit, even evangelical, about portraying authors as “heroes” worthy of admiration. They often suggest that valorizing authors provides people with powerful resources that may help ground them in the world. Heroic authors can be seen as rising above the limitations of readers’ daily lives. Careful scrutiny of how authors do their work, however, runs the risk of disillusioning and disappointing people looking for heroes. 97

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98 Authors on Writing

Faulkner made the point that nobody really wants to know how visceral writers really are, how intuitive, how they perceive at such a low degree of intellection in their everyday work. Critics certainly don’t like to hear that their heroes have minds like compost heaps. [Laughs.] (1984, p. 205) Doctorow is certainly correct that revealing oneself as picking through rot, stink, muck, waste, and filth does not invite us to idolize the author. He describes a real problem facing readers who seek a behindthe-scenes look at the writing processes of authors they admire.1 The social prestige that authors enjoy, and the intellectual pleasures their works produce, stimulate desires to come closer to them, desires that account for the enduring popularity of literary interviews, and thus provide the archive of metaphorical stories about composing that I analyze in this book. Despite or because of their generic features, interviews can focus our attention on writing processes as well as on literary products and personalities. The conversation format reminds us of the collaborative nature of cultural production, the play of differences that emerges from dialogue, the creative consequences of communion and conflict among different kinds of consciousness. When writers report divine inspiration from the gods, poetic empowerment from the muses or from nature, or psychological assistance from the Freudian unconscious, they describe different ways of standing outside their common sense selves, of interpreting the present by expanding the perspective through which it may be viewed. By bracketing whatever literal meanings these metaphors may have for authors and instead treating them as metaphors, we can see that authors reveal that both writing and speaking about writing are ways of generating new ideas, not just reporting on ideas already mastered. Close analysis of interviews with published authors can provide us, nonetheless, with a unique optic on the socially shared, collectively inherited, and richly dialogical understanding of composition that prevails at the present time, helping us see what writing now is, how it is done, why it is important. Metaphors about the writing process enable us to see different kinds of writing as part of the same socially defined practice. This is not to say that published authors and beginning

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Echoing William Faulkner, novelist E. L. Doctorow comments wryly on the precarious position of the interviewed author in the face of general desires to glorify authorship:

writers compose in the same fashion, or that all written works have equal value, or that individual writers are simply soulless automatons through whom currents of discourse flow. The writing of accomplished authors differs markedly from papers written by apprentice students in a composition classroom. Reading interviews with fiction writers and poets is no substitute for meaningful engagement with their artistic creations. Yet interview evidence provides a valuable source of knowledge about writing precisely because it attends to practice and process, demystifying literary works by revealing the work, worry, transmitted information, and will that goes into their creation. Comments in interviews about authorship and composing transform the times and spaces of writing. Authors and audiences return to previous experiences and anticipate others to come. Readers of interviews “travel” to the discursive and physical spaces that authors inhabit, while writers reach across time and space to attract new readers. The speaking that takes place in interviews functions as a node in a network of communications that shapes how, what, and why authors write. The writing process is never a pure monologue. Authors enter a dialogue already in progress, “answering” other writers, and producing messages that provoke answers of their own. For Bakhtin (1986), every written or spoken utterance contains an element of response and functions as a link in a complexly organized chain. To see subjects situated in language in this way does not dis-empower authors and speakers, but rather sees them as fully social participants in dynamic currents of thought, speech, and action. Once we move beyond the search for author heroes, it becomes possible to explore the many other kinds of social subjects and subjectivities that writing includes. We can examine the genres of author interviews critically to discern how they expose previously occluded aspects of composing, how they illuminate important issues about the teaching of writing, and how they enable us to recognize that the changing contours of intellectual labor are producing new social subjects and subjectivities through writing activities. Many discourses come into play in literary interviews, including interpretation, criticism, history, publicity, and the relation of any text to other texts. Yet similarities in interviews with authors who produce very different types of texts reflect the role of the literary interview itself as a “speech genre” contributing to the formation of contemporary cultures of writing.2 The socially shared discourse about writing that interviews reflect and shape may seem to make them banal, to render interviews far less important sources of information about

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writing than self-conscious statements and manifestos on composition by published authors. Yet like all written and oral communication, interviews respond to, engage with, and inflect previous utterances. Interviews differ from manifestos in that their openly dialogic qualities reveal the collective assumptions, shared stories, and borrowed ideas that essays and manifestos often conceal. The intertextuality we find in the words of interviewed authors does not stem from any failure of originality, but rather reflects the presence and power of a shared social discourse. Bakhtin explains Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not selfsufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their character. Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related … Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. (1986, p. 91) This discursive condition, hidden in other genres, comes to the fore in the interview. As a genre of discourse, interviews revolve around social expectations that speakers can play with, violate, fulfill or frustrate. Their intelligibility nonetheless depends upon shared social expectations. Consequently, authors tend to tap a delimited stream of tropes when discussing their writing processes. Yet they still “inflect” their commentaries according to personal projects and personal styles. Interview evidence can enable us to discern what Raymond Williams describes as “the truly social in the individual and the truly individual in the social” (Williams, 1977, p. 197). All writers and readers participate, more or less distantly, in “cultures of writing.” Contemporary cultures of writing include an understanding that one may turn to authors to inquire about their writing activities. Most readers of fiction and poetry know about authorial interviews, whether or not they read them regularly. Many writers comment on things they have read in interviews of other authors, revealing that authors are both producers and consumers of interviews about writing. Yet writers do not just participate in socially shared discourses; they are also constituted by them. Louis Althusser deploys a metaphor useful in explaining this idea. He describes how social discourses identify, recruit, and “hail” us by likening them to the way the words ‘Hey,

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you there” from a police officer will cause us to stop, turn around, and respond to the call that interpellates us (Althusser, 1971, pp. 162–3). The texts people read, like the policeman calling out to them, ask us to become different kinds of subjects in different kinds of situations. Textbooks “hail” chemistry students. Baby Books call fond parents into being. The Merck Manual interpellates its readers as medical practitioners. Literary interviews position audiences as writers and readers. People can accept, reject, or negotiate the various subject positions that hail them. All people, however, necessarily find their identities through the contradictory calls of a “shower of hailing,” a “deluge of discourse.” Interviews form a prominent method of interpellating readers as potential writers, lovers of writing, appreciators of literature, and aficionados of specific genres. Interviews aim their messages at imagined, maximally competent and appreciative readers. Readers might identify with the interviewers or the interviewed, might imagine themselves as positioned in life with status, knowledge, and expertise worth hearing about, not merely “ordinary.” The interviewer purports to provoke a “behind the scenes” intimate picture, a personal revelation. An author’s ostensibly face-to-face interaction with the interviewer stands in for a one-to-one discussion with the reader. People learn from discourses and discursive practices how the world should be constructed, what authors are, what reading is, and what composing is, without being aware of the explicit implications of their doing so, and without necessarily seeing how their subjectivities are shaped by such discourses (Weedon, 1987, p. 31). The typical printed form of the published interview deliberately presents itself as an interchange between at least two people, usually with the implication that the interaction is face-to-face, implying a certain intimacy between interviewer and subject. But things are not always as they seem. Interviewers frequently conduct interviews “by mail,” sending authors a set of questions for them to answer (Turner 1977). The original Playboy interview with Vladimir Nabokov appeared as a “transparent” interchange. When later anthologized, however, an appended note indicated that Nabokov had requested that the questions be written out in advance on note cards, and that during the “interview proper” he stood at his lectern writing out his replies to the questions while the interviewer browsed through the bookshelves of Nabokov’s study (Golson, 1981). Most interviews consist of “co-authored” literary pieces jointly produced by the writer interviewed, the interviewer, and an editor.

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Contemporary methods of interviewing result in a kind of discourse that is not “oral,” not “written,” but a combination. Tape recordings and transcriptions face subsequent editing by the interviewer, and sometimes by the author, and even others. Questions shape interviews, both for better and for worse.3 Some interview topics may have been regrouped to facilitate comparison and understanding.4 When interviewed together, co-authors may have their answers commingled, so that the replies seem to come from one author. This is especially true when one “author” actually represents the work of two or more collaborators as in the case of the pseudonymous authors Ellery Queen (1977) and Emma Lathen (1983). Many writers have been interviewed so often that they can anticipate potential questions and have developed set anecdotes and responses that demonstrate intertextuality between interviews as well as between interview discourse and other kinds of texts that the authors have produced.5 The genre entails many shared conventions beyond the obvious reliance on sequential questions and answers.6 Though an infinite variety of authorial commentaries might seem available for interviews, what emerges are not infinite, but generic “types.” The New York Quarterly (1971) identified four kinds of interviews with published authors: the “professorial,” the “opinionated,” the “gossipy,” and the “craft” interview.7 The journal emphasizes what it calls the “craft” interview, focusing on the “circumstances of an author’s work.” Yet evaluative and pedagogical undercurrents run through many interviews. Authors are frequently asked to comment on the work of other writers, requested to adopt the role of literary critics. Some interviewed authors are also literary critics, of course, but many are not. While often interesting, these exchanges reveal a powerful desire to make evaluative distinctions among literary texts, rather than an interest in finding out how authors’ work situates them as writers. Direct questions about the nature of intellectual labor, relations between texts and contexts, or the role of business practices in authorship rarely appear directly in questions, even though interviews almost always provide a rich repository of direct and indirect testimony on these topics. Pedagogy also provides a recurrent purpose for the literary interview. Many questions veer away from probing the writer’s own procedures to ask about practices recommended for others. The frequency of such questions indicates that potential or aspiring writers are assumed to be important readers of these exchanges.8 Interviews proclaim authorial “uniqueness,” yet at the same time evidence the desire to have indi-

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vidual authors represent the “universal.”9 This kind of interview implies that there is a secret one can have about writing, a secret that will open the door to recognition and reward for the reader. I do not want to scorn or belittle this undercurrent of pedagogy in literary interviews. I would argue, in fact, that it is one important method by which cultures of writing are produced. Literary interviews foster cultures of writing partly by their pedagogy of desire, by revealing and universalizing the author’s “interiority” and establishing that the author is a person whose “subjectivity” is “deep” beyond the norm, worthy of intimate probing to demonstrate its richness. The author is presented as a person to admire or emulate. Yet much more than this emerges from writers’ retrospective accounts of their writing processes. Metaphorical models about the composing process direct our attention away from the special qualities of elite individuals and to the shared social discourse that constitutes writing processes. Yet what brings interviews into existence in the first place is the very celebrity status of the author that detailed analysis helps us deconstruct. Richard D. Altick clarifies the origins and long history of the celebration of authors as special people. He shows how the emergence of British (and ultimately, American) literary biography depended in no small measure on the affective pleasures produced by the conception of author as hero (1965). By the 1760s, Altick explains, sentimental attachments to books and their authors permeated popular interest in literature (1965, p. 44). The rise of literary biography entailed positioning authors in roles pioneered by historical narratives focused on the contributions of heroic men. Early images of literary authors as heroes emerged less from actual heroic deeds than from the pleasures provided by narrative, as if authors could be seen as characters. This veneration of writers as representative heroes gained momentum at the beginning of the nineteenth century and participated in the rise of romanticism. Author heroes have not been extolled in exactly the same ways in all times and places. Yet for several centuries, European and American interest in authors has coalesced around a belief in the special subjectivity and interiority of writers. The concept of romantic genius, Altick explains, filled and “would continue to fill for the better part of a century, an urgent need in English emotional life” (1965, p. 82). Changes in the material conditions and social roles of writers facilitated this phenomenon—specifically, the transformation from a system of patronage to one of commodity production.

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The continuing popularity of literary interviews today demonstrates that the promise of engagement with exceptional subjectivities continues to interest readers. Even as journalists, genre writers, local writers, children’s writers, and others join the ranks of those profiled and interviewed, a search for the special subjectivity of creative artists continues to serve a significant focal point within literary culture (see Silver, 1999, and Moran, 2000). In the late 1960s and the 1970s, two French critical theorists challenged the centrality of the interiority of authors as the primary frame for understanding literary and philosophical texts. From somewhat different theoretical positions, Roland Barthes (1977) and Michel Foucault (1977) argued for shifting emphasis away from authorial subjectivity and toward the influences of language and discursive practices. Their arguments joined with others who situated authors’ intellectual labor within social life and social discourses such as Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1968). These ideas encouraged scholars to expand the study of authorship and writerly authority to include inquiries into a broad range of institutions, venues, and practices. The challenges these theorists present remain contested today precisely because of the central links between concepts of authorship and enduring ideologies of human achievement, hierarchy, and social life. The figure of the author is, always has been, and always will be a discursive construct, not a real person. People who write are, of course, material, concrete, and historical persons, but the way they and others think and talk about authorship is always discursive, always subject to received definitions. The nature and significance of these received notions differ over time and with circumstances. Because cultural capital and symbolic power accompany authorship (see Bourdieu, 1984), the arguments advanced by Barthes and Foucault challenge strongly felt investments and widely held assumptions about intellectual labor. In challenging concepts of the author as the singular and transcendent source of all meaning for a text, Barthes, Foucault, and others argue that such conceptions have lost their value, not because authors can no longer serve as objects of appreciation, but rather because such conceptions limit our epistemological tools and channel our thinking in ways that are not currently productive. Their arguments can be seen as strategic responses to a specific cultural context, as attempts to redirect attention from individual thinkers to discursive systems. They provoke us to think about how discourse shapes thinkers, rather than simply how thinkers shape discourse.

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When Roland Barthes discusses the death of the author, he is not announcing, recommending, or celebrating the disempowerment of “real” people who write texts, nor is he denigrating the achievements of canonized writers such as Balzac. To the contrary, Barthes allows us to see real people as authors according to different but still legitimate definitions. As Gayatri Spivak notes, countering some of the antagonistic responses to Barthes’ argument: Barthes is writing here not of the death of the writer … or of the subject, or yet of the agent, but of the Author. The author, who is not only taken to be the authority for the meaning of a text, but also, when possessed of authority, possessed by that fact of “moral or legal supremacy, the power to influence the conduct or action of others”; and, when authorizing, “giving legal force to, making legally valid” (OED). (Spivak, 1993, pp. 104–5, emphasis in original) In arguing that this Author should not be considered the central force of literary creation, Barthes emphasizes, instead, the activity of the reader. Although the dichotomy of author versus reader is a bit overstated—both concepts can function simultaneously as Barthes acknowledged more fully later—Barthes encourages us to think that writers are also readers. The writer is “in this robust sense, a reader at the performance of writing” (Spivak, 1993, p. 105). For Barthes, the reader assumes importance not as a singular individual with “authority” over the text, but as a fully social being, a cultural performer, engaging with the dialogic social exchange which is the text.10 For his part, Foucault argues that “authorship” should be seen as a legal, political, historical and discursive category, not a transcendental act of origin for the text. This argument is a specific instance of Foucault’s more general interest in how historically specific classification schemes come to be seen as universal and free from the matrix of discourses from which they emerge. Foucault explores the possibilities available when we focus our attention on discourse and discursive practices and how they shape thinking. He proposes the term “authorfunction” to differentiate between those texts that are signed and held to be part of an author’s corpus, and those texts that are not signed— for example, posters or scientific texts in certain periods. Foucault’s discussion of the “author-function” usefully emphasizes the degree to which authorship is not a “natural” condition, but a socially ascribed role. When the Author as original source of ideas is taken-for-granted (even if not without challenge), it assumes center

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stage in explanation. When the Author is moved to the side, other players—and potentially very powerful ones, like discursive practices— can be seen at work. Concerns with origins and where thoughts originate are of particular interest in this debate over authorship. A common way of thinking about texts is to assume that an individuated consciousness came up with ideas and translated them into words. Foucault sets this concept of authorship inside a historical frame. He argues that it has not always been the case that writing was assumed to originate in individual thought. At a specific time in world history, Europeans came to believe that the best way to know things, to master them, and bring them under one’s authority was by determining their origins. This assumed that meaning originated outside of and prior to language. Foucault argues, then, that at this particular moment in time, writing began to imply a source in individual thought and that understanding that source consequently became the means of mastering both objects and other people. Because they argue against foregrounding the subjectivity of the Author in favor of the importance of discursive constructs as influences on texts, Barthes and Foucault have often been read as if they deny the achievements of individuals of stature, and instead position them as fully formed by discourse without any personal subjectivity or agency. Some fear that to argue that people are socially constituted is to deny the abilities of individuals to act in the world. To point to subjectivity and agency as social, rather than stemming from a unique individuality, however, is only to deny specific kinds of atomizing humanist ideologies that permeate established ways of appreciating texts, not the ability of individuals to “intend” and “act.”11 Authors find intellectual, political, and discursive problems to solve, think about and inscribe in texts. They fulfill generic expectations and alter them. Writers must use the available tools in the arenas that are open to them to survive in—much less be significant to—their society. In their written work and their oral interviews, they select from a limited range of tropes and rhetorical strategies and deploy the ones that might best communicate their ideas and self-images. Authors can “replay” and “resignify” the theoretical positions that constitute them, but they cannot “preside over” them (see Butler, 1995 “Contingent”). Conceiving of writing without focusing on its origins in an individuating consciousness can be very difficult, because as Foucault would argue, contemporary discourses concentrate so much on that way of talking about texts. Nevertheless, many scholars and rhetoricians—

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including those who are not poststructuralists—have tried to account for the shaping force of discourse on subjects. Kenneth Burke deploys the metaphor popularly known as “Burke’s parlor,” emphasizing the pre-existing discourses of social life as the context for subjects to speak.12 The scene of “Burke’s parlor” situates authors and everyone else in a conversation about intellectual labor, about writing, about creative processes, that has been going on and will go on. The positions that people take in that conversation are, necessarily, determined by the nature of the conversation that they hear. If they start to talk about something else, others may not understand what they are trying to say. If they try to change that conversation, the means that they adopt for doing so can become part of the conversation. Burke argues that what people say is intelligible only within certain conversations, their choices of what to say dependent on available discursive positions. The conversation constrains them and enables them. People do not form the conversation in isolation; the conversation also “forms” them. A focus on the special subjectivity or complex interiority of individual authors has tended to obscure the shared social life and labor that creates our understanding of artistry and authorship. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (1992) present a productive alternative to this way of thinking in their attempt to “de-mythify” the authorship of Milton. Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue that Milton’s singular position in British literary history as “the first Author” depends more on myth than on fact because it elides important aspects of his career and extends backward in time practices that emerged from his writing, that were created by the writing and thus could not have been the cause of it. In an argument that draws on Foucault and Barthes, they illuminate the dangers of mystifying and mythifying either the author or writing itself: It is all well and good to argue, as poststructuralism has done, that writing produces its author rather than the other way around. It is just as important to understand that writing did not always imply such a source. For only by dispelling the universality of “the author” can one understand the significance of writing that called authors— countless varieties of them—into being. But there is still a trade-off involved in demystifying the author, as there is, no doubt, in any act of demystification. The magic simply gets relocated, and theory tends to mystify writing instead of authors. (Armstrong and Tennenhouse, 1992, p. 4)

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Repositioning or “de-mythifying” authorship, Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, is not to remove all sources of “mythification” in accounts of knowledge creation, for the “mythification” may become displaced on to discursive signs or intellectual labor. Armstrong and Tennenhouse ask us to move beyond idealized notions of authorship and writing to confront the complexities of actual intellectual labor: But concealing that [intellectual] labor has not at all curtailed its historical effects … Its disappearing act only mystifies the way intellectual labor works and the power it wields in modern cultures. Such labor disappears into writing, which in turn melts either into things or else into thin air, where it seems to refer to nothing at all. Indeed, if history is the story that scientific cultures tell about themselves, then the story apparently does its work by simultaneously empowering writing and rendering it transparent. The story of intellectual labor consequently remains to be told. (Armstrong and Tennenhouse, 1992, p. 7) Telling the story of intellectual labor requires new sources of evidence and new methods of analysis. Unlike cultural stewardship which seeks to identify the particular writers whose intellectual labor should be valorized and to establish methods for exegesis or interpretation, analysis of writing practices and writing cultures compels us to think clearly about writing as intellectual labor, as a shared social discourse shaped by many speakers, and as a social pedagogy with important consequences for our collective social life. Some worry that this approach deflects attention away from considerations of literary excellence. Yet when questions of literary quality form our exclusive focus, we may forget that the standards we use to evaluate particular classic works as transcendent have been produced socially and historically. For example, contemporary and historical celebrations of artistic texts as expressions of individual genius reflect and shape an elaborated biographical apparatus that purports to revere art by associating it with the efforts of an inaccessible elite. Yet this apparatus actually obscures how writing works within a system of social exchange that entails production, distribution, consumption, and evaluation. The cultural products that secure most attention do so less through continual reconsideration and reaffirmation than through practices that reflect and re-accentuate previous decisions about quality. As Gary Taylor (1993) argues, prior canonization works to separate authors of roughly similar quality according to what sociologist

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of science Robert Merton (1973) calls “the Matthew effect”: “Unto those who have, more shall be given.” Taylor argues that canonization functions as part of a cyclical structure that enforces a “mechanical process of reinforced iteration” (p. 132), rather than renewed inquiry into the basis of literary value.13 Michael Bristol’s studies of authorship in the theater in early modern England lead us in a more productive direction. Drawing on Bakhtin, Bristol argues for a necessary link between bourgeois conceptions of the “author” and “authority,” but with an emphasis on the diffuse authority of our shared social life and the democratic possibilities of writing and speech. Authors influence others, disseminate opinions, thoughts, and feelings. Consequently, all speakers and writers might enfranchise themselves through writing. Bristol notes … the word “authority” is derived from Latin auge¯re “to grow, increase, augment.” In this sense it refers directly to any power of creative utterance or action, and the gradual augmentation of persons through social experience. Authority is thus the quality or state of being an author, that is, an originator, creator, one who conceives and brings to completion even the humblest social initiative or artistic project. In this sense, authority is not a special talent or the exclusive privilege of a small minority of great statesmen and artists, but is, on the contrary, initially dispersed among all men and women with basic linguistic competence. (Bristol, 1985, p. 22) Yet the drama of individual genius still holds a central place in popular discussions of literary achievement, creativity, and writing processes. The search for special subjectivities in authors truncates one of the most important steps in coming to understand writing processes as social labor. It presupposes the singularity or exceptionality of the person and the processes by which texts deemed valuable are produced. To discover or analyze the writing behaviors and events that lead to the production of texts, however, one cannot presuppose that exceptional texts have been produced in exceptional ways. As Doctorow’s comment about compost heaps indicates, these distinctions are often simply presumed. Without comparative empirical study, we have no idea whether the procedures of renowned and pedestrian writers differ. The emphasis, particularly in literary criticism, on writing as an activity that constitutes identity, that offers fundamental truths about humankind and contains revolutionary or transformative possibilities,

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demarcates such texts from more everyday uses of writing. Yet this distinction stems from a confused premise. Texts now deemed superbly iconoclastic, potentially subversive, revolutionary, or transformative often began as part of the day-to-day writing of those who sought to use their intellectual labor for daily financial support. Under such circumstances, the division between transformative and everyday writing practices is inaccurate, reflecting decisions by scholars about the nature of specific texts, rather than about the general traits of either texts or processes. Further, by implying that the unique and original shaping of such texts was implicit at the time of written production, this division encourages us to overlook connections between the processes of canonized texts and those of everyday writing.14 Studies of writing as shared social labor necessarily must go beyond persons and products deemed extraordinary to encompass the quotidian and social nature of activities of written production, precisely to determine what it is people do when they write. The challenges raised by Barthes and Foucault can help us connect the specialized arguments of literary and philosophical theorists with the research and working decisions of a range of scholars concerned with intellectual labor and writing endeavors. To the degree that the “author-king” blocked from recognition the “author populis” (if you will), its proposed “death” encourages a new foregrounding of authorship as engagement in everyday writing activities. The Authors whom Barthes and Foucault appeared to have wanted to “de-throne” or “reposition” are not the “ordinary” (or exceptional) people who engage in writing activities as they are figured in this project, and certainly not the students who many literary and composition instructors must teach to write. The very gap between such ordinary authors and the transcendent ahistorical conception of Authors of the grand literary traditions reveals the complications of establishing conceptions of authorship on such ideals, then hinging conceptions of intellectual labor to the authorship of the exceptional. To examine processes of writing as if initiated only at the level of the sovereign individual self is to posit a truncated view of intellectual labor. Notions of authorship—and therefore notions of the “process of writing”—have been extended to a variety of kinds of writers and texts. Mental labor and activities of writing characterize many jobs in an information economy. Scientific papers are signed by increasing numbers of authors, occasionally as many as 200 or more. Rhetoricians of inquiry have studied the discursive and argumentative qualities of academic texts, resituating scholars in their role as authors. Com-

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position specialists, concerned with how literacy connects to everyday lives of readers and writers, have undertaken studies of the writing behavior of students, journalists, those in business, engineering, and the professions, observing their textual negotiations as writing processes. Graffiti writers have established themselves as an activist community of signed artists, claiming a kind of authorship. Some, such as Basquiat, have become famous. The genre of discourse this project studies—interviews with published authors—appears in print regularly, and authors of all types are interviewed for their comments about writing and its activities. Foucault himself ended his career by publishing largely in the dialogic genre of interviews. Those responsible for research on and the teaching of writing to students also concern themselves with the authorship of their students and how that relates to wider notions of authorship. Textual analysis can now be seen as relevant to texts far beyond the imaginative or canonical. Recent explorations in cultural studies see significance in explorations into general and even commercial discourses. To situate, respect, and enjoy this proliferation of authorship does not require hostility to what some call “high culture” and to the rewards of intellectually complex reading. Quite the contrary. It does require, however, that we examine the connections between those who write imaginative texts for publication and those who do everyday writing. To sever such kinds of thinking and textual production from each other suggests our limited knowledge of and interest in intellectual labor and how people go about it. This present study of writers’ interviews intends to open up the discussion of what it means to write in contemporary society, to think of oneself as a writer, to think of oneself as a person engaged in the work of composing texts. Many kinds of social subjects write, not just the transcendent humanist subject idealized in post-Enlightenment discourse. The subject that is now the site of so much argumentation in scholarly circles has seldom been seen solely in narrow and uncontested terms and has historically served many purposes. The “subject” of modernity is not a unitary one, though some have been tempted to conclude otherwise. There are, for example, important differences among the Kantian subject, the Cartesian cogito, and the subject of empiricism (Hekman, 1995, p. 194). To call into question the nature of the modernist subject, then, does not repudiate subjectivity or deny individuals agency or dignity; rather, it disrupts our taken-for-granted notions about the subject, in order to reposition it for examination.15 Asking about the genealogy, uses, and effects of the subject makes it more important, not less.

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The search for exceptional subjectivity and solitary author heroes pervades interview discourse, but it leads us in the wrong direction. A binary opposition between the local practices of exceptional individuals and abstract principles about universal writing does justice to neither the local nor the universal. Instead, we need to see how the dialectical and dialogic tension between accounts of individual experience and empathic responses to