. . . which I wrote in the days before e-mail. Two names have been changed.
Dear Billy,
Have you ever lost your voice? I have an infection of the throat that has caused me to cancel social engagements to avoid hurting my voice. No phone calls, no talking to the cat, no casual conversations on the street . . . But isn’t voicelessness a natural condition among educated people? In writing workshops students are taught to find and then cultivate an “authentic” voice. What could be less authentic than such a practice? Over the course of our education, we are taught to write five-paragraph themes, personal letters, fairy tales, detailed descriptions of events, things, and places, reminiscences of our summer vacations, lists of things to buy, persuasive arguments, book reviews, and class notes, each of which requires a different voice. And then they expect us to come up with an “authentic” voice after all this? There is no such thing. We are all voiceless.
I imagine you have some thoughts on all this, being a professional ventriloquist yourself. (I hope my metaphor for as-told-to autobiography doesn’t offend you.) Is it easier finding an authentic voice as an as-told-to oral historian than as a writer? Has it ever occurred to you to write someone’s autobiography in the order of the telling rather than in the order of his life? Ask somebody to start telling you stories and write them down; chronology will be thrown to the winds. On a blind date one normally talks about the recent past first, then gradually delves into the distant past. The events one relates first are the superficial ones; as acquaintance deepens, the more apocalyptic events surface. Why shouldn’t this be the way books are written too, rather than beginning with the event that changes one’s life, or worse, beginning with one’s birth, an event that one cannot remember?
As usual, my life reads like a very contrived first novel that will never be published. I read somewhere that there are about fourteen million aspiring novelists in the U.S. Maybe the internet is a good thing because it’ll suck up some of the energy that would otherwise go into writing bad novels. Do you think the fact that fewer people are reading books is a good or bad thing? It might be good: fewer people might then write books. Even better, writing workshops might shrivel up for lack of applicants. Maybe only the books that people really care about will start to sell, since only serious readers will be left. Because the readership will be less fickle, book prices will quadruple, thereby insuring that publishers will be more willing to take chances on unknown writers. Therefore I say to the electronic media, More power to you!
Your prompt reply will be most appreciated (said Yuval in an authentic voice).*
Dear Billy,
I received your affirmation of conventional views of writing with mingled joy and disappointment. The joy came from the receipt, and from your finely-crafted prose; the disappointment from my feeling that you simply affirm established “truths” about writing without questioning them.
You claim that each of us has an authentic writing voice, which can vary like a spoken voice. I think the proper comparison here is to handwriting, which is as physical as the vocal cords; each of us has an authentic handwriting, which can vary a great deal, but yet which can still be identified. But once one takes away the physical manifestation of our writing and encases it in type, all writing becomes anonymous. By imposing our “authentic voice” on this anonymous writing, we label it as ours, we claim possession of it, we become authors. Authorship is constructed, not intrinsic. Many writers—Keats comes to mind—have viewed authorship as a quasi-mystical channeling of a divine force; others—e.g. whoever writes the back of cereal boxes—view writing as a task motivated only by capital. In many pre-modern and non-Western societies, the quality of art and writing was judged by how faithfully it resembled certain models; originality was considered a fault, not a virtue. In fact, with enough study, almost anyone of intelligence could produce passable imitations of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, and Melville (provided one limited oneself to a specific work). Children are taught the five-paragraph theme form, and for many of them, that is the only writing they have ever done. Is this their authentic voice, then? Do they subsequently discover their authentic voice, or do they invent it? Is there really any difference? And once it is discovered/invented, what is to stop them from changing it radically? If one did not know that Melville was the author of Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, and Battle-Pieces, is there anything in the works themselves to conclusively point to one author for all four of them? Each is written in an entirely different voice. An author is defined by his voice; the voice is defined by the work; therefore the author is defined by the work. Without knowing biographical details, and without attribution, each of those Melville works would define substantially different authors, about whose lives conjectures would vary widely.
Your notes on finding George’s voice simply reaffirm these thoughts: you are constructing a voice particular to this book. Doubtless George’s previous autobiographical work, written with a different coauthor, is in a different voice; and doubtless were he to actually set pen to paper and compose a memoir himself, it would differ substantially from yours. Then consider the possibility that he might want to write fiction, rather than a memoir; or poetry; or pop song lyrics, or legal treatises. You define George’s voice in your joint text as consisting of words which he could have possibly said. But there is nothing that he could not have possibly said. Had he learned French and subsequently gone mad, he could have possibly said, “Je ne suis pas mort; je monterai un cheval blanc; et à la fin, vous me trouverez trés loin d’ici.” Aren’t you, in fact, constructing a written voice for George, one which cannot claim authenticity? Isn’t your construction entirely dependent on how you want George to sound to your readers? Why not admit that, instead of calling it “finding George’s voice”? Is he incapable of finding his own voice?
I’m sorry if this letter is too earnest, testy, and argumentative. You know me. My next letter will be nothing but bad jokes . . .*
Dear Billy,
I’ve come to the conclusion (if one can really come to a conclusion—it sounds so utterly final) that the only true written literature consists not in novels, not in poems, not in short stories, but in letters. Give me enough letters and I will have no need of anything more. All other literature suffers from a peculiar lack—that of an addressee. Have you ever read a book written specifically for you? Who are books written for? Are they letters to oneself? If so, they would read, “Dear Me, dear me”—and many of them do. Are they letters to the world? If we subtract books addressed to oneself and books addressed to the world, we are still left with the large majority of books, whose addressees are unknown—or perhaps consist of certain groups of amateurs, such as sci-fi buffs, Civil War buffs, mystery buffs, future professors of English. None of this is specific enough for me. I want my reading to address myself, impinge upon me on purpose rather than by accident. Reading a book that someone has published for anyone to pick up is like getting junk mail. Who does this author think he is, writing me in such a fashion? one thinks. How did literature arise? Does it make sense to write a book? Pre-literary communication, I assume, must have all been directed. Who came up with the idea of writing an unaddressed communiqué? I suppose first there were chronicles—the idea of saving some heroic remembrance for posterity must be ingrained in all humans—followed shortly by the words of gods. Such documentation strikes me as quite legitimate. But a novel? How did the documentation of oral history get transmuted into such a peculiar thing? Stories are social acts, and impart a peculiar kind of knowledge we have long ago lost sight of. This is narrative knowledge, and is not information; it cannot be boiled down to a short statement. This kind of knowledge is best imparted orally, to a small group sitting around a campfire, or in a friend’s living room, perhaps, around a fireplace. I leave that to the storytellers. The novel departs from all that—it is a non-social communication, a shot in the dark. I can’t read the damn things anymore. What has this country come to, Billy? I would estimate that 20% of the populace consider themselves writers. All this writing—where does it go? Perhaps it’s useful to compare novels to birdsongs—they establish a certain territory—they are fenceposts for the property of the mind. Thankfully, letters sail over those fenceposts indiscriminately. You and I both partake in this free-floating disease, this aspiration to write, which is really an aspiration to publish (even if that publication succeed our demise), and I’m certain that if either of us ever does publish anything, it will be of much more literary worth than the stuff that’s in our letters. So what? Those published pieces will be barren in comparison. All the emotion, all the urgency, will have been drained from them. Literature departs from us like a package placed at an anonymous doorstep. We think we know what that package contains—a bomb, perhaps, or a baby—but we have no idea when and whether it will be opened—and if it is opened, whether the bomb will explode, whether the baby will live. And if it explodes, will the bomb harm the right people? And if it lives, will the baby bring joy to idiots or savants, misers or paupers? Letters reach those who deserve them. You deserve mine, Billy. Take that as retribution or reward according to your estimation of your desserts—and of my letters.*
Dear Billy,
I’d rather not hear that your letters were “too ordinary to send.” First, that seems improbable, even from your point of view; second, letters are by nature quite extraordinary, especially the ones I receive, since they arrive so seldom. Reading a letter is never an ordinary event; the event imparts something out of the ordinary to the letter itself.
I must defend my position on correspondence. You wrote, “All flirtation imparts counsel.” How can a novel be flirtatious? Doesn’t flirtation imply a person with whom one flirts? One can’t very well flirt with a thousand people at once. That would be entertainment, not flirtation. Let’s put it another way. In telling a story, the teller can observe the reactions of the audience; the same is true for an actor on stage. Letters are always written with the expectation of reciprocation. But novels are written in a vacuum. One is advised when writing fiction to ignore any possible audience, to write for oneself alone. Indeed, John Stuart Mill once stated that true poetry is comparable to monologue. This has been an essential part of literary discourse since the late eighteenth century. I ask you, does it make any sense to publish something that is written for oneself alone? Is there any reason why a reader should be put in the position of an eavesdropper on an internal monologue? Perhaps, as you put it, “I’ve driven off the road into the bushes.” The road, in this case, is modernism (broadly defined to include the last two hundred years); the premodern bushes I now inhabit are quite accommodating.
You hesitate to follow me when I head somewhere strange. That’s OK—I hardly need followers. As Neil Young put it in an interview with Greil Marcus, “I know that the sacrifice of success breeds longevity. That’s an axiom. Being willing to give up success in the short run ensures a long run.” Some ideas of mine work, some don’t. Whether they work or not, I’d rather test out new ones than stick with the old. Right now I’m interested in how writing is directed, how it functions as writing. I’m trying to understand how fiction works, how it can exist, how it can be defended. I’ve come to the point at which I have a very hard time getting past page two or three of any fictional work I pick up (unless it’s an epistolary novel). Too many problems present themselves to me. For convenience, let’s use Moby Dick, frequently called the greatest novel in the English language, as an example. “Call me Ishmael.” This presents the problem up-front: I have been issued an imperative, one that the author knows I will never obey, not only because I have no reason to call the narrator of the novel “Ishmael,” but because the author’s name is not Ishmael. All right, let’s forget about the latter, and pretend that an actor is on stage, directing us to call him Ishmael. Does the audience then respond, “Hi, Ishmael!”? Or does it sit in silence, as we do when confronted with these words? What kind of language is this, where a clear imperative is utterly ignored, with the implicit consent of he who issued it? If I wrote you a letter that told you to “Call me Ishmael,” you would either respond, “Dear Ishmael,” or, Bartleby-like, “I’d prefer not to.” But here we somehow take it for granted. Now I realize that this imperative says more than that—it says, in essence, “My name may not be Ishmael, but for the purposes of this narrative, I’d prefer you to know me as Ishmael.” Melville cleverly begins his fiction with an admission by the narrator that he is not entirely trustworthy. The second sentence reads, “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” That “never mind how long precisely” again admits the untrustworthiness of the narrator. So we are facing a fiction within a fiction, a tall tale told by a narrator who does not exist. The key thing is that this distancing strategy is necessary if we are to swallow this whale of a tale whole. It is a variant of “This is a story my father told me, and it was told to him by his father.” The novel no longer claims to be representative of reality—it becomes simply a story.
But something peculiar happens halfway through (and not only there, but in the prefatory material as well): this story, which has been presented to us as pure fiction, begins to require reams of documentation. Melville gives us hundreds of pages of facts—interpreted facts, but still facts. Why? What has happened here? When a traditional storyteller tells his tales which he has heard from his father who has in turn heard it from his father, no facts are necessary, we have left behind the factual world and exist in the realm of pure story. But the novel, at least after Balzac, requires the influx of information, requires provability. What is the point of the profusion of detail in the novel? To enhance the illusion of reality. But what is the point of that illusion? Why should we be deceived? And how do we allow ourselves to be deceived by realistic descriptions when we have not allowed ourselves to be deceived by “Call me Ishmael”? In my last letter, I argued that the very existence of novels made no sense; now I support that argument by saying that the way novels are written and presented makes no sense. There is nothing more futile than the imitation of the real, as Plato pointed out in The Republic. Pure fiction (as in the folk tale), pure communication (as in letters), pure documentation—all these things I can understand. But the novel—this unholy mixture—baffles me.
I no longer write letters. I write novels.