That Blank Page

 

I’m getting to the point in my research when I really ought to start writing, but it seems I can produce nothing other than ever more ingenious forms of procrastination. What is it about that blank page – or blank screen, I should say, that instils such terror into the authorial heart? I’m taking notes from a range of critical and theoretical texts, and it’s a chore that can be spun out indefinitely. There’s always something more to be read, some other reference to be chased up. I start to get fussy, and feel that I must have all the significant passages written out and at my disposal before I can settle down to the act of composition. I look inside my head, see nothing but whirling confusion, and hastily pick up another collected volume of conference papers, none of which will be actually pertinent, most of which will be yawningly tedious, but in which I have instantly invested the hope of the answer, the moment of insight that will illuminate and organise all my chaotic thoughts. As if!

 

I think what I need to do is remember what I’m writing this for. Although fiction writing is immensely difficult to do, it has a good clear purpose: the impassioned recounting of a story. Academic writing can seem ill-defined and directionless in contrast, and most people I talk to from outside the university context wonder what there is to say about a novel that can be of any interest. Well, if you’ll excuse me for a second while I drag my soap-box into position and climb up onto it, I have always written criticism in the fervent belief that it can be intensely, exhilaratingly enlightening on the world we live in. Dan Green over at The Reading Experience has a very interesting post on what good academic criticism should do. For the record, I think its purpose is twofold. On the one hand, a good critic should be able to open up a story to the reader like a series of Russian dolls, unpacking its layers of meaning in a way that makes the story richer and more vibrant. Anyone should be able to ‘get more out of the story’ from reading it, and want to return to their own initial thoughts and judgements in order to reconsider them. On the other hand, I think that criticism ought to take a broader overview and be able to say something more general about the implications for life, for society, for the history of the times in which the book was written. Stories are visceral objects, they are composed of the blood and flesh of their author, born from minds that are chained together by the networks of language that dictate to any society what they can think, imagine and predict. They often have very startling things to tell us about who we think we are, how we think it is possible to behave, what we consider to be precious, valuable and important.

 

On this note I want to say a few things about critical theory, which is in the grip of a weighty backlash at the moment. Most people won’t know what critical theory is, or if they’ve heard of it at all, will think it’s like the Minotaur of literary studies, some ghastly slumbering monster lurking within a labyrinth of tortuous thought. A couple of days ago I posted on Michel Foucault (Power/Knowledge) and if you read that you’ll see that theory isn’t scary at all. I’m always really intrigued by the violent emotions theory awakens in some people; they detest it with a bitterness and anguish that it really doesn’t warrant. It’s only a form of writing, like any other, only in this instance it’s a fantasy of coherence and mastery over the complex and alarming world in which we live. It’s a funny old thing, because it’s an often awkward mixture of mathematical rationale (‘the world in which we live looks random and arbitrary and chaotic, but underneath all that I can discern dependable patterns) and romantic flights of lyricism (for all that, I don’t want to explain the world as if it were a magician’s trick; I want to leave it with its intrinsic mystery and awe intact). And after all, like all genres of writing, there are good and bad examples of it; it’s not all to be condemned. Rather it should be considered a stencil off a certain, historically particular way of thinking.

 

Or let’s look at it another way. A lot of people get angry with theory because they feel intimidated by its complexity. When I get a student come to me, and from the start he charges off into some overly sophisticated explanation of a text that no one else can follow, I don’t feel intimidated by him. I think: oh poor boy, how nervous he must feel of us all to need to represent himself this way. The first job is to show him that intelligence resides primarily in what is lucid and clear, and that he can express himself simply without feeling insufficient before the task. I often feel that the men who do this (and it is mostly men, I’m afraid) must be the ones who feel they have to abandon all hope of masculinity when they step onto the dance floor. So, I tend to see the frustrating complexity of some theory writers as a response born of insecurity in the face of our convoluted, alarmingly unmanageable world. And that’s reasonable, isn’ t it? The mind-numbing complexity of some theoretical works is a mirroring response to the ideology of the times, which sees our world as a hopelessly mixed-up place, where nothing is simple and straightforward any more, where there are no answers on which we can rely, and in which we human beings are frighteningly enmeshed without hope of redemption.

 

Which leads me back to the research I’m doing at the moment. You know what I really notice about the stories I’ve been reading? All the really contemporary stories about haunting end with paralysis and stasis. It used to be the case that the appearance of ghosts made people leap into action, summoning priests, setting up midnight vigils, sorting out inheritance problems, reasserting the family line. Nowadays, protagonists end the story much as they began, petrified and intrigued in equal measure, but having moved nowhere, accomplished nothing, solved nothing. What does that tell you about the world in which we live?