A Bit of Roughage

I resist my obsession with DWS, I think for good reason. Mainly because there is something worrisome about being obsessed with anyone, a childlike (childish?) need for that person to provide you with the ego that you yourself don’t have. But that idea itself is naive in its own way, specifically that we—in spite of being social creatures—ought to exist psychologically as fully individuated entities, without reference to, much less leaning upon anyone else to validate or define us. I have come to fear that part of myself which depends on others because until now I have been a fairly bad judge of character, or at least occasionally bad enough to have nearly gotten myself into some pretty bad situations.

All of that self-blocking hedging aside, DWS makes (repeadetly, and pretty monomaniacally) the very good point that “writer’s block” is created by the idea that writing ought to be an arduous and unpleasant process rife with neurosis and anxiety, a terror of making grammar mistakes, the fear of being deemed “unliterary.” But this is entirely a construct designed and implemented in order to establish and maintain an elite hierarchy which places “real” writers above “shit” writers.

There is actually some validity to the perception which creates this apparent stratification, namely that there are unquestionably writers who write more artfully than others. There are writers who seem to have an innate (misnomer: innate skills take years of practice to perfect) ability to write a compelling sentence. There are also writers whose sentences feel like a wall built of sharp, unmortared stone. If you are able to perceive the difference it is obvious, but not everyone has that ability.

DWS has a bugaboo about drafting (ie. that one should not bother), but in this he contradicts himself. He is an extremely competent sentence-mason, but he is not an architect. He is right that it is stupid to hold the architect higher than the mason, to value the one as an intrinsically better person than the other, but it is equally stupid of him to tell the architect that they ought not spend any amount of time perfecting the design and construction of their work. Not everyone wants to live in a perfectly manicured artificial living space, just as not everyone loves the idea of living in a mud hut.

Some mud huts are utterly charming and some architechtural masterpieces are utterly unlivable. And so we come back round to the perennial answer to all of these arguments about everything, do you like it? Good. Do that then.

DWS can write and publish first draft novels because he explicitly and very vocally doesn’t care about whether or not his work is art, and he thinks that writing is about entertainment, diversion, and escapism. Which is fine, but reading his work also feels like eating cotton candy for dinner. And I suppose the argumnet is better made via that metaphor than directly. A lot of writing reads like the equivalent of off-brand oreos, chalky, granular, and perhaps a close facsimily of what you want, but not really satisfying. And even if you manage to find the real thing, eating only Oreos your entire life gives you diabetes and mood problems and cognitive issues. The human digestive system is not designed to process pure glucose, it needs fibre, and protein, and fats, and the host of micronutrients that are absolutely absent in oreos.

Right? THat’s the point. Pure entertainment is oreos and if you’re eating oreos, you might as well just eat a pound of sugar a day straight out of the bag. What I mean by art are those works which toe the line between form and function, which are compelling and charming and entertaining, but which also tell a story that has a bit of fibre to it, a bit of roughage.