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Reading, Writing, and Other Fetishes


Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950.


Yesterday I asked my wife to read five pages of a story I am writing. The notes she gave were predictably insightful. They had to do with William Golding. She’s just finished re-reading The Lord of The Flies, and while she was reading it, we often talked about a certain feature of Golding’s prose. First, it's often stunning, as an aesthetic object is stunning. Take this from the end of chapter 3,


Simon dropped the screen of leaves back in place. The slope of the bars of honey-colored sunlight decreased; they slid up the bushes, passed over the green candle-like buds, moved up toward the canopy, and darkness thickened under the trees. With the fading of the light the riotous color died and the heat and the urgency cooled away. The candle-buds stirred. The green sepals drew back a little and the white tips of the flowers rose delicately to meet the open aid. (Golding 57)


Even as I transcribe this, it’s fun to write. I can only imagine how Golding felt. But for all its beauty, a nagging deficiency has, at least for the Porter household, dogged his work. This brings me to my wife’s comments on my story.


When she finished reading it, she laid it down and said, “you know how we don’t really care how Piggy dies at the end Lord of The Flies? That’s kind of how I feel about this.” And when I coughed and blamed allergies for the tears and took a walk—I agreed with her.


My story, in the cold light of day, is moody, dark, complex, and yet, in a very real way, inconsequential. I, and in a much greater way, Golding, have written well, but meaninglessly. How is it that writers come to do this?


An initial answer is for the love of reading. Necessarily, writers are readers first. Books, quite literally, are the reason we write in the first place. But when we take off our reading glasses and pick up the pen, we err to the degree we forget we are now on the other side of the trick. We write as readers and our text becomes homage, a zombie, an impersonation of what literature seems to be.


The same holds for visual art. Take Rothko’s No. 10, 1950—its depth, its beguiling emotional intensity—and compare it to the satanic host of corporate art he inspired which now, as we speak, rapes the walls of America’s orthodontists. There is a difference between the two, but the difference is hard to articulate. They share so much: a common genre, technique, color, pattern. Yet the corporate stuff only succeeds, in my opinion, to doodle in Rothko’s shit.


In the case of Rothko, there seems to be something to experience. This is not at the surface of his work—style, color, et cetera—but beyond it, something which could only have existed in him. In thinking about art we often neglect something crucial: that art only exists because someone made it. And they only could have made it for a reason. Art does not happen by accident and its meaning is all bound up in why it came together. The mind of Rothko, his intention, his emotion, his experience, is part and parcel of No. 10, 1950. Conversely, Rothkoesque corporate art only seeks to imitate the content of Rothko’s work, and in so doing, has a limited, and shallow meaning.


This observation suggests a principle for illuminating the problem of writing like a reader. When we read we are thinking in a very deep way about the nature of the text before us. It presents itself as a sort of effect. We know this because words don’t spontaneously emerge. They are, by nature, intentions. When we determine the meaning of the text, we are therefore reasoning from the effect—the surface of the page, the language, the syntax, the form—to the cause, or the mind which wrote it.


This is why weird, recursive, circular things happen when we try to write like readers. Here the writer gets the situation backwards. The cause of the text becomes a text. They write to make a text, not to fulfill their intention in making a text. Unavoidably, the project becomes an attempt to write in such-and-such a way. They write, not to communicate themselves to other humans, but to communicate with the page.


This can take many forms. When I do it I write toward mood, toward style, or most embarrassingly, toward imitation. In each case, I write to create a text which looks and feels a certain way. I do this, I think, to replicate the experience of reading, the sensation of first encountering a text, the rush and titillation of a new style. But, the result is disappointing in the same way lovers are disappointed when they try to recreate the feeling of first having met. It grasps at straws.


I am not (so) stupid as to accuse Golding of my kind of reader-writing. I think his aim is much less petty than mine. And yet, I can’t help noticing a family resemblance. I first noticed it while reading what can only be described as a grotesquely British interview of Kingsly Amis, and Brian Aldis, hosted by C.S. Lewis. Lewis said,


The only trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the details of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life if you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves. (Lewis 232)


Here, Lewis notices the same problems my wife did in Lord of the Flies. He fetishizes aesthetics. I use this word technically. It was Chris Abani who pointed this out to me in a lecture I attended at Pacific University. He noted that the word fetish has its roots in the history of African colonization. When Portuguese sailors first began trading with the people of West Africa, they soon found there was no mutual authority by which they could ratify their trade agreements. And so, the sailors got in the habit of asking the Africans to swear on the head of a statue of the virgin Mary. It was this statue which they called a fetish.


Objects, surfaces, features: these are that which aid in negotiating the space between reader and writer. But intent is everything, and language, like all symbol, only works if it communicates. In the case of the Africans, the fetish was meaningless, and only relevant to the devotion of the sailors. The sailors undoubtedly knew this, yet their investiture of meaning into the symbol of the statue, overrode the purpose of making a contract in the first place.


This is the role of all fetish, to operate as a proxy, an entity behind which we hide, thus separating ourselves from the other. It's not unlike a magician who has lost sight of the trick and becomes a wizard—at least in his own mind. When we write as readers, this is what happens. Instead of communicating through narrative, we manufacture a text, and ask the reader to swear upon its head.


We are at least getting high on our own supply. This is what I think is happening with Golding. As Lewis points out, that quivering, sun drenched leaf takes center stage and the beauty of the prose becomes its own reason to exist. But this begs another question: what accounts for the existence of powerful art, the real stuff? That’s what I am trying to find out with the story that my wife read. I think I understand its problems, the fetishes which led me to write it. But what can resurrect it?


As I’ve been thinking, I keep coming back to this notion of risk. The best fiction I can think of (which for my money is Denis Jonson, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, Flannery O’Connor, and Don DeLillo at his best) has a danger about it. I am not guaranteed to be the same person after reading it. I have actually avoided reading their books for this reason, the same way I would avoid a vicious looking dog by walking on the other side of the street.


This danger, this threat to my current self, seems to stem from the author’s particular vision, their way of seeing the world. In the case of Denis Jonson, for instance, there is a way his prose unfolds—the rhythm of his language, the clarity of his images, the pathos of his characters—that exposes me. I feel torn by him, and compelled to see, with his vision, a true part of myself. A part which is vulnerable, sad, hopeful, and poised to receive grace. Going back to our little formula of cause and effect, I can see and feel how Jonson felt that to; that he used the signs of language, not to hide, but reveal, to connect; fiction was a doorway into his heart.




Works Cited



1 comentário


Eric Cornell
Eric Cornell
23 de fev. de 2023

I appreciated the raw honesty of this reflection. Godbless Mrs. Porter! I've felt what she has about some of your pieces over the years, but surely there is a role for sincere imitation to play in the development of a writer heading in the direction of one of the greats. I think, between the lines here, you'd acknowledge that, given your tears an acceptance of your spouse/critic's remarks. Can't wait to read the great one you write.

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