On Writers and Writing

by Margaret Atwood

  This hand is among other things a writing hand that has become detached from any writer. There was a Shanahan cartoon in The New Yorker recently that played with this idea – the Author as severed part. It shows a large finger lying in a hotel-room bed, thinking, “Where the Hell am I?” The caption reads, “The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on to a three-week, twenty-city book tour.”16 In real life it is not of course the finger who has to go on the tour, it’s the luckless mortal body: that damn authorial finger, the actual perpetrator of the text, is off on its own somewhere, basking in the sun and evading the fallout.

  Jorge Luis Borges went even further. In a piece called “Borges and I” he doesn’t content himself with a mere hand or single digit. Instead he takes the Jekyll and Hyde theme and applies it specifically to authorship, and splits himself – Borges – in two. “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to,”17 begins the half that calls himself “I.” He goes on to tell us that Borges shares his own tastes, “but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me.” He admits that this Borges has turned out some decent enough pages, but he himself can’t take credit for them. “Besides,” he says, “I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things … I shall remain in Borges, not myself (if it is true that I am someone.)” The relationship may not be exactly hostile, yet it isn’t friendly: “Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.” The writer writes himself into his work – which contains an element of posturing and artificiality – and the more he does this, the more he loses what might be called his authentic self. Yet even in setting this down, Borges is writing. He is aware of the paradox: he ends his piece by saying, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

  This little piece sums up the self-doubts of the writer, as exemplified by the fable of the double. Can an “author” exist, apart from the work and the name attached to it? The authorial part – the part that is out there in the world, the only part that may survive death – is not flesh and blood, not a real human being. And who is the writing “I”? A hand must hold the pen or hit the keys, but who is in control of that hand at the moment of writing? Which half of the equation, if either, may be said to be authentic?

  Now I would like to discuss some characteristics of writing as a form that might be said to have contributed to this syndrome – the syndrome of the writer’s anxiety about his other self, as well as his suspicion that he has one. It’s pertinent to ask, for instance, how writing differs as a medium from the oral traditions that preceded it.

  It has become a habit for people to speak of novelists as “storytellers,” as in “one of our best storytellers,” which can be a way for reviewers to get themselves off the hook – you don’t have to say “one of our best novelists” – and can also be a way of saying that this writer is good at plots, but not much else. Or it may be a way of indicating that the writer has a certain archaic or folkloric or outlandish or magical quality, reminiscent of a German grandmother propped in a rocking-chair telling old wives’ tales, with a bunch of children and the Brothers Grimm gathered round, or of an old blind man or sharp-eyed gypsy woman sitting in the bazaar or the village square, and saying, as Robertson Davies was fond of saying, “Give me a copper coin and I will tell you a golden tale.”18 But there are significant differences between that sort of tale-teller beguiling his or her live audience, and the novelist in his nineteenth-century garret or study, inkwell on desk and pen in hand, or the twentieth-century one in the seedy hotel room so beloved by Cyril Connolly and Ernest Hemingway, hunched over his typewriter, or, by now, her word-processor.

  Talking is very old, writing is not. Most people learn to talk when they are infants, but many people never learn to read. Reading is decoding, and in order to do it you have to learn a purely arbitrary set of markings, an abstract formula.

  Not so long ago, those who could read were few. They had a rare skill, and what they did – staring at odd-shaped marks and reeling off a message written by someone far away – was regarded with awe. No wonder that, in the popular imagination, books and magic went together, and the kind of magic thought to be involved was frequently sinister. The Devil, like lawyers, was thought to go around with a contract – a big black book, which he was always pestering you to sign in blood. God, too, had his book, where the names of the saved were written, though not by themselves. Once enrolled in either book you’d be hard put to erase yourself, though it was always easier to get yourself scratched off God’s good books than off the Devil’s bad ones.19

  Writing had a hardness, a permanence, that speech did not. So as soon as tale-tellers took to writing – or as soon as other people took to writing down their tales, which is more like what actually happened – the writers-down became inscribers, and what they wrote took on a fixed and unchanging quality. God doesn’t content himself with speech or even with paper for the Ten Commandments: he chooses stone, thus emphasizing the solidity of what is written. Note however that in the New Testament, Jesus is a tale-teller. He teaches by parable, but he doesn’t write a word,20 because he himself is the Word, the Spirit that bloweth where it listeth; he is fluid and intangible, like the speaking voice. But among his enemies are the Scribes and Pharisees – those that hold to the letter of the law – the written-down letter. Ironic, considering that we learn about all of this out of a book. John Keats wanted as his epitaph, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” How discerning of him – that way he could get the name, the writing-down of it, and also the fluidity of the Spirit, all at once.

  No wonder St. Matthew looks so apprehensive in Caravaggio’s painting of him, clutching his pen while a rather thuggish angel dictates to him what he must write down: the act of writing comes weighted with a burden of anxieties. The written word is so much like evidence – like something that can be used against you later. It’s fitting that one of the first detective stories, that famous one by Edgar Allan Poe, featured a purloined letter.21

  But back to the tale-teller versus the writer. There’s a time-honored authorial ploy that consists of pretending to be an oral tale-teller, as Chaucer did in The Canterbury Tales – inventing, for good measure, a bunch of voluble folks to act as secondary tale-tellers within the tale he himself purports to be telling. And how many times have you read in some review or other that a writer has finally found his “voice”? Of course he has done no such thing. Instead, he has found a way of writing words down in a manner that creates the illusion of a voice.

  But deceive us how he may, a writer is not the same thing as a tale-teller. First of all, he or she is alone while composing, and the traditional tale-teller is not. The tale-teller, like the actor, must respond to an immediate audience. Her art is a performance: the instrument is the spoken voice, backed up by facial expression and gesture. This immediacy means that the tale-teller must keep within certain boundaries. Insult the audience – too much blasphemy, or more of it than the audience wants, or too much obscenity, or too many disparaging comments about the audience’s native town or popular leaders or ethnic group, and so forth – and a barrage of rotten fruit or the disarticulation of your skeletal frame is likely to follow. In this way the writer of books, like the graffiti artist, is freer than the tale-teller: he doesn’t stick around for feedback. Like Mary Ann Evans, the sensitive, shrinking other self of the brave and outspoken George Eliot, he can go on vacation at publication time and never even read the reviews. The reviews don�
�t really concern him anyway – they’re too late. By the time the book comes out, the text is set, the Rubicon is crossed, and the writer’s job is done. Informed criticism may be of some help for the next book, but the current one, poor thing, must take its chances in the wide and wicked world.

  The tale-teller in the midst of his tale can improvise, within limits – he can embroider or digress, he can add details – but he cannot revise the beginning, except between performances. Like a film seen in a theatre, his story runs one way only: you can’t turn back the page and make the whole thing different. The writer, on the other hand, can scratch his way through draft after draft, laboring, like Flaubert, over the shapes of sentences, striving for exactly the right word, and throwing characters’ names out the window – indeed, throwing whole characters out the window. Verbal texture and inner cohesiveness are thus arguably more important for the novelist than for the tale-teller. The best tale-tellers could improvise with language, but they often relied on standard phrases or tropes, pulled out of their word-hoard and stuck in as needed. Repetition – of words, of phrases – didn’t worry them a whole lot; it’s the writer, not the bard, who combs through the proofs looking for unintentional vocabulary duplications. It’s not that the writer is more studied and deliberate than the tale-teller; but she is studied and deliberate in different ways.

  Then there’s the nature of audience. For the tale-teller, the audience is right there in front of him, but the writer’s audience consists of individuals whom he may never see or know. Writer and audience are invisible to each other; the only visible thing is the book, and a reader may get hold of a book long after the writer is dead. An orally transmitted tale does not die with the teller: many such stories have been alive for thousands of years, traveling from place to place and from century to century. But the particular incarnation of the tale – that one persons way of telling it – does die. The tale thus changes from teller to teller. It is passed, not from hand to hand, but from mouth to ear to mouth. In this way it keeps moving.

  A book may outlive its author, and it moves too, and it too can be said to change – but not in the manner of the telling. It changes in the manner of the reading. As many commentators have remarked, works of literature are recreated by each generation of readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them. The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or “interpreted” by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes his own interpreter.

  Nevertheless, the actual, physical book gives the illusion of permanence. (I say the illusion, because books can be burned and texts lost for ever, and many have been.) A book also gives the impression of static form, of immutability – this and no other is the order of the words. In ages in which few could read and texts had an aura of magic, this counted for something: witness the passage at the end of the Book of Revelation,22 in which the author puts a curse on anyone who might dare to change a word of what he has set down. Under such conditions, the accuracy of a given text to some assumed and unique original becomes a matter of considerable importance.

  Once, texts were copied by hand; then came the age of printing, and books became infinitely replicable, thus creating the phenomenon of multiple copies with no single authentic original. Walter Benjamin has discussed this phenomenon and its repercussions in relation to visual art, in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”;23 but it is even more true of the book. A first manuscript version is only that – a first version. Editings, alterations, and revisions abound, and who is to say which version represents the writer’s genuine intent?

  That writer and audience may be unknown to each other because the act of creation is separated in time from the act of receiving it, and the infinite replicability of the book – these two factors contributed greatly to the modern writer’s equivocal view of himself. To be a writer came to be seen as running the risk of being the invisible half of a doubles act, and possibly also a copy for which no authentic original existed. The writer might be not only a forger, like the hand in “The Beast with Five Fingers,” but also a forgery. An impostor. A fake.

  The early-Romantic cult of the writer as a great man, a genius, the genuine article in a crowd of philistines and pinchbeck mediocrities24 – this cult ought to have played against the images I have been discussing; that is, the doubleness of the writer, his slippery evasiveness, and his potential lack of authenticity. With improved printing and distribution methods, as well as the rapid increase in literacy, it was suddenly possible for writers to become instantly popular on a scale never before imagined, to become enormously celebrated for their work: to become larger than life, and more apparently solid than life as well. But a book that appears everywhere at once acts like a megaphone. It magnifies the voice while obliterating the human individual who gives rise to it, and the writer is obscured by the image he himself has created. Byron awoke to find himself famous, and became identified with the Byronic figure of his own poetry; but once he’d put on all that weight, it was just as well he kept out of his public’s view: he could never have lived up to expectations. To be a Byronic hero is possible only in youth, even for Byron.

  The Romantic genius was supposed to be one of a kind, a great original. “Originality” in this sense (often carried to extremes, where it merged with the grotesque and the bizarre) became a touchstone, both for the public’s evaluation of a writer and for the writers evaluation of himself. Chaucer and Shakespeare thought nothing of using other people’s plots – in fact, to say that a story was not made up but came from an older authority, and/or had really happened, meant that it was not a frivolous lie and lent it validity. But the early Romantics held that what a man wrote was not just what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed, and not just the well-wrought embodiment of an older myth or tale or historical event. No, it was self-expression – the expression of the self, of a man’s whole being – and if a man wrote works of genius, then he had to be a genius himself, all the time. A genius while shaving, a genius while eating his lunch, a genius in poverty and in affluence, in sickness and in health – this is heavy luggage to cart around. No man is a hero to his own body, nor no woman neither. The Algonquin Indians,25 William Burroughs,26 and certain British cartoonists, such as Steve Bell, all have fables in which a persons rear orifice develops into an alter ego, complete with voice and personality – which is one variation on how the body subverts our more intellectual or spiritual pretensions. If you see yourself as just an honest craftsperson, you can wipe your nose on your sleeve and no one will find it out of place, but Romantic heroes and heroines, and geniuses, have – in this respect – less freedom.

  So if you’d bought the Romantic-genius package – or its later version, the high-art aesthete, for whom life itself had to be a beautiful composition – you might well have felt a pressing need for a double: someone to play the more exalted part while you were snoring with your mouth open. Or, vice versa, someone to do the snoring while you were writing the poem. “ ‘A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures,’ ” says Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, puncturing the early-Romantic great-poet idea by taking it to its logical conclusion – the logical conclusion being that if poetry is self-expression and a great poet puts the good stuff in himself into his work, there’s not much of him left over for his life. “ ‘Inferior poets are absolutely fascinating …’ ” says Lord Henry. “ ‘The mere fact of having published a second-rate book of sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.’ ”27

  Here is one last tale about doubles. It’s a science-fiction fantasy – I read it in youth, I’ve lost the author’s name, but I’m searching – and it goes like this. A man living in a rooming-house spies on another roomer – a dowdy young woman –
and learns that she is an alien, and that every evening when she comes home from work she takes off all her clothes, lies down on the floor, and attaches the top of her head to the head of a thin, flat, person-shaped skin. Then she empties herself into the skin, which fills up with her substance like a water balloon. The former empty skin is now the woman, and the newly emptied skin is rolled up and stored away. And so it goes, turn and turn about, until the voyeur can’t refrain from meddling. While the woman is out he takes away the skin, and watches to see what will happen. The woman comes back and sees that her second skin is missing. She can then do nothing but wait, in quiet despair. Shortly she bursts into flames and burns to a crisp. She too cannot live without her double.

  Thus the Author, capital A, and the person whose double he or she is. They alternate. They are attached head to head. Each empties his or her vital substance into the other. Neither can exist alone. To paraphrase Isak Dinesen, who said the same thing of life and death, man and woman, rich and poor, the Author and its attached human being are “two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.”28

  I would like to conclude this chapter by re-posing Borges’s dilemma: “I do not know which of us has written this page.” According to Borges, the completed text belongs to the “author” part of the equation – in other words, to the name without any body except a body of work – and the life out of which the text is supposedly made belongs to the mortal part of this dynamic duo. We suspect that they both have a hand in the writing of the page – but if so, when and where? What is the nature of the crucial moment – the moment in which the writing takes place? If we could ever catch them in the act, we might have a clearer answer. But we never can. Even if we are writers ourselves, it is very hard for us to watch ourselves in mid-write, as it were: our attention must be focused then on what we are doing, not on ourselves.