Surrender, Dorothy.
Wednesday March 6, 2002
The sad truth is, there’s very little that’s creative in creativity. The vast majority is submission—submission to the laws of grammar, to the possibilities of rhetoric, to the grammar of the narrative, to narrative’s various and possible structurings. And in a democratic society that privileges individuality, self-reliance, and mastery, submission is a frightening thing.
Trust an author to see art in terms of power when he deals so extensively with slaves and slavery. (Naturally, one could be drawn to slaves and slavery precisely because one sees the world in terms of power.) —What I’m thinking of right now: the idea of a word processor novel; the idea, that is, that the novel is taking on new shapes and structures made possible by the malleability of text within the computer. (Do I have a link? No, I do not have a link. I read the phrase somewhere, but Google is staggeringly unhelpful for once, so maybe I didn’t. But oosh once told the story of Jesus Lizt: deciding, you see, that she’d rename Chris to Liz, and doing a global find-and-replace—you see? And—oh, just keep reading.) —It’s not, mind you, that I think the novel is taking on strange new hothouse shapes out there. But I’m reminded of the one time I tried to read Robert Jordan: When I got to the chapter that opened with a scene fixating on a borrowed scarf for the second time (exact same wording; I checked), I gave up. If he couldn’t be bothered to keep track of where he’d used something, the book as a whole certainly wasn’t encouraging me to do it for him. (And no one can afford good copy-editors these days. Have you noticed?)
Now, this sort of error isn’t impossible without the word processor, the computer, the copying and cutting and pasting of great gobs of text at the click of a key. But the word processor makes it easier, to be sure. —Terribly easy to write at a flying speed, fingers clicking faster than the bit of the brain in charge of critical analysis can sometimes keep up.
I’m thinking about this because I had to use a typewriter today. Remember those? Big, bulky, and it has this massive foam pad under it so it doesn’t make too much noise when in use. (It’s louder than the computer under the desk, and it rattles, sometimes.) You don’t tap. You don’t brush the F12 key accidentally on your way to hitting backspace and then have to sit there as Dreamweaver calls up Explorer to preview the page you just tried to delete something from. You punch. Each keystroke is definite. You damn well mean it, because you aren’t going to get anything done if you don’t. It brought back a visceral, gut level memory (and writing is basically a physical activity—why do you think we’re always so particular about where and when and how we go about it? If it were just, you know, mental, we could just, you know, write it down, whenever) of sitting at the counter in the back room of that apartment, the IBM humming next to the fish tank, punching those keys, rolling the paper out and setting it on the slowly (too slowly) growing stack to the right, the feel of the paper, sitting back to read through what I’d written, carefully, the physical memory of having typed each word still lodged in my fingertips (well, an aggreggate, really; I exaggerate, but only slightly), picking up a pen and marking something, then and there—
Compared with now: skating over the slightly compressed feel of the iBook keyboard, the keys a little crunchy under my fingers, typing into a narrow window. Cutting and pasting, leaving a blotchy paragraph at the bottom and referring to it from time to time as I re-write it. A long piece, I’ll force myself to think more about it by physically re-typing it, word for word, even if the revision changes maybe only a paragraph in toto.
Obviously, I’m not saying the one is better than the other. (It was obvious. Right?) The question rather is this: What am I surrendering to, in either case? The typewriter, with its focus on physicality, the very act of writing, forcing the writer to always keep that in mind; the computer, with its ability to subsume all that and get it out of the way, so the writer isn’t distracted from—well, the act, I suppose, of writing—
Gack. The similarities, I think, greatly outweigh the vast differences. —I mean, I wrote most of that sermon longhand on a legal pad while on hold with various very busy people who didn’t want to answer my technical questions about wireless LAN applications. Every now and then, a dog would tumble into the office with a tennis bowl in its mouth, hey, throw it, I want to play fetch! (It was one of those dot-com ’90s hey-day holdovers. God bless ’em, every one.)
Maybe writing qua writing isn’t so much a physical activity. And yet—