Where are you in your stories? How do you situate yourself in your text? I am not talking about your narrator, but you, as an author. Do you cut yourself off from life and roam in your mind to create a fictional world on the page? If so, you are a zero cipher. Or, are you the code in your work; its secret cipher?
Poets declare that we can learn nothing about a poet from their poetry. They argue that a poem is a self-contained work of art, nothing autobiographical therein. While I won’t argue with that here, it is right to say that a poet’s work is intertextually linked and evaluated in the context of other works in the real world. It may become part of an aesthetic discourse that valorises and confers status. We cannot deny that humans orchestrate (authorise) truth value in public conversation about texts.
What interests me is the extent to which our orientation in and to the world affects how and what we write. How does reality enter fiction which, by definition, is imaginary? As writers, we are intelligent, social, emotional and physical beings inextricable from both the world we inhabit and our stories.
Imagination is the faculty of imagining. It allows us to form mental images of, and elaborate on, things that are not present to our senses. We know that, right? We make things up, interpret or infer, don’t we? My view is that if we lost touch with reality altogether in our work, madness might follow.
Had I started writing early in life, I may have believed myself to be creating stories out of thin air. I now write from the ground up like the anthropologist that I am. It is also possible that I gravitated to anthropology because I had a natural inclination to that way of thinking. We are all different. Words are afloat about how writers can or should orient readers to their texts (tricks of the trade). Few explore our position as a cipher in a world of the real, and the really made up as Michael Taussig portrays it in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge 1993)
Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. We act and have to act as if mischief were not afoot in the kingdom of the real.
When you write (or re-read) a sex scene, do you become aroused? Do you write from direct experience, extrapolate from memory or make it all up? My question may be provocative, but it makes a point. We are creatures with bodies informed and supported by the mind. By nature, we are also social beings, and that raises the postmodern question: where do we sit in the social scheme? I raise this to point out that any notion of absolute truth let alone a pure aesthetic is problematic. Reality emerges in a constant flux of power and position. Where we are in life determines what we find interesting enough to write about (or read), and what we may believe to be virtuous, meritorious, true or beautiful.
A poem may not be biographical in the simple sense as poets argue, but I recently recognised that I speak with my father’s voice when I write Australiana poems. The little poem below, ‘Christmas is a Bugger’ started with outsider observation — me looking in. Nevertheless, it flowed unbidden from a deep part of me that ventriloquised someone born in 1910. We can never escape our embeddedness in time and place (check out the reference dates below!).
This poem will never enter the discourse of poetry as art. It lacks the qualities required to circulate in that aesthetic stratosphere. Words gain power by social status and the taste of the status-setters. Nevertheless, it is timely though, as the Silly Season advances.
Christmas is a Bugger
Dad and his cronies
bob their heads over bibs
in tune to carols
at the War Veterans’ Home
as nurses dance round wheelchairs
serving food, pills and kisses
in red and white-bobbled Santa caps.
The larrikin lost in the war
rises through glazed eyes
as faint memory
flickers in cheeky grins
and faces brighten over ill-fitting
mothballed best clothes.
Military issue cigarettes
are nowadays banned and dad’s
being weaned off Mogadon
by a new matron who warns
it'll kill you.
Silly bloody woman, he'd say.
In all my writing, I start with the raw materials of life: stuff I know, things I remember as well as things I’ve seen, heard about or experienced. I take those things as far I can push them, elaborate a bit and write until I run out of puff. Dates and details come later; research in reverse. Then I craft!
Questions to consider in understanding yourself as a writer —
- Where do you start: with a memory, an idea, image, experience, image or a simple word? Are you a cipher zero or the secret code in your writing?
- Do you write to explore the human condition? Or, do you want your texts to circulate as part of high-level public discourse as defined by Michel Foucault?
- Do you feel your work is art? Or can we discern a little of your life in your writing? See Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, (1988)
- How much is your writing affected by your belief system, social position or worldview?
* cipher –
1. A zero, nought, nil. (an absence)
2. A secret or disguised way of writing: a code. (recent)