I suppose that much of the purpose of this year-off is to help me figure out what kind of a writer I am. I suppose this blog is meant to facilitate that as well; here, I have the luxury of writing absolutely anything I want. Perhaps I already knew that I'm a critic. But perhaps part of me has been holding out hope that there's a brilliant, still nascent, storyteller within me: a George Eliot, a Philip Pullman, even a writer of novels-in-miniature like Alice Munro -- a writer who envisions soaring plot structures, who sculpts out of thin air nicely detailed, resonating characters to move about on her sturdy scaffolding. Or a writer with an uncanny percipience about our emotional lives, who reveals the inner life with such simplicity and ease it's like turning a sock inside out. But a revelation so thrilling, so devastating, it's also like turning our insides -- our lovely, bloody viscera -- out, with a single sweep of the knife.
Yet when I look over this little blog-in-progress, the best writing I've done so far was inspired by something I read or I watched. Part of this may be the habit of four years of graduate school. But I cannot escape the fact that I think, I process, as I read. It's almost as if I need another voice -- even if it's one on the page -- I need someone talking to me, in order to create. I think in dialogue, usually with the written word.
This doesn't seem so remarkable when I remember that much of my artistic and intellectual life has been shaped by the theater, a place where (certain playwrights withstanding) one almost always works collaboratively, taking what someone else has made and translating it, rethinking and revising. Remembering this makes me less unhappy that I can't quite create out of thin air. I say with pride that I am a lesser god. A critic.
George Steiner writes in Language and Silence: "The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T. S. Eliot propaganda. Is there anyone but Sainte-Beuve who belong to literature purely as a critic? It is not criticism that makes the language live."
I'll take that last sentence as a challenge. Can I write criticism that makes the language live? I suspect G.S. himself thinks he did just that.
In other news: I've been reading Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, slowly. Mostly at bedtime, as my days are filled with job searches and phenomenology. The slow read meshes well with the meandering pace of his prose; I am dipping in and out of his detailed world, letting myself be suffused with the kind of pleasure of identification Hélène Cixous describes in La Jeune Née: "One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When I say identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter. Inhabiting someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that person's initiatives and actions." Moving from one character to the next, entering and being entered. Peeking down at the street from behind the latticework with the women, roaming the city with the men, glancing up at shadows of forms on the balcony. Sometimes hovering above it all, surveying the scene, drinking its scent and noise.
In yet other news: I sent an email to my doctoral program today, replying to a question about whether I'd be returning in the fall...
