Writers on Writing: Salman Rushdie warns against “Behalfism”

From “Notes on Writing and the Nation” in Step Across This Line, Modern Library (2003):

Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. This is the New Behalfism. Beware behalfies!

The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it substitutes political values for literary ones. It is the murderer of thought. Beware!

While I relate to his desire to assert an individual voice, independent of any group or nation, I don’t see how uplifting and ethically conscious literature becomes a problem. Is it because the authors of such literature are not resigned to nihilism, that their work seems to be “for” something as opposed to being “against” all? I do not know. I tend to think that tragedy need not leave us entirely decimated (I’ll point to Aeschylus’ Oresteia or perhaps Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac). Perhaps, in his aim for pithiness, clarity of thought became subordinate. In any case, I do sympathize with his universalist intention. In the same piece, he wrote a much less objectionable truth: “Good writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards.”

Writers on Writing: Ursula K LeGuin on conflict in plot

Romeo and Juliet is a story of conflict between two families, its plot involves the conflict of two individuals with those families. But, Ursula K. Le Guin asks, “Is that all it involves?” In this excerpt, LeGuin wonders if plot is all about conflict or if it is about something else.

From looking at manuals used in college writing courses, and from listening to participants in writing workshops, I gather that it is a generally received idea that a story is the relation of a conflict, that without conflict there is no plot, that narrative and conflict are inseparable. . . .

Existence as struggle, life as a battle, everything in terms of defeat and victory: Man versus Nature, Man versus Woman, Black versus White, Good versus Evil, God versus Devil—a sort of apartheid view of existence, and of literature. What a pitiful impoverishment of the complexity of both!

In E.M. Forster’s famous definition (in Aspects of the Novel), this is a story: The King died and then the Queen died. And this is a plot: The King died and then the Queen died of grief. In that charming and extremely useful example, where is the “conflict”? Who is pitted against what? Who wins?

People are cross-grained, aggressive, and full of trouble, the storytellers tell us; people fight themselves and one another, and their stories are full of their struggles. But to say that that is the story is to use one aspect of existence, conflict, to include and submerge other aspects which it does not include and does not comprehend.

Full text found in Dancing at the Edge of the World, Grove Press (1989)

Greene and Greene’s Gamble House

I was walking through Sheridan the other night with a friend. A couple blocks west of the library, we passed a couple of Craftsmans. Neither house was in particularly good condition and I was more than pleased that my friend could see through their dingy facades and recognize their potential. I know too many people who dismiss the simple charm of a 100-year-old Craftsman as too compact or too old-fashioned or too run-down—preferring instead the manufactured smell of a four- or five-level house ubiquitous to suburbia. I wish I could drag each and every one of these people through Greene and Greene’s Gamble House (one of the earliest and best authentic Craftsmans in America). Check it out:

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Writers on Writing: Ray Bradbury “Dancing, So As Not to Be Dead”

The art of story-telling is the key to Bradbury’s choreography to outwit death. “[Stories] have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00am.” As he explains below, just as Laurent dances, Bradbury writes, writes, writes, “so as not to be dead”:

My waiter friend, Laurent, working at the Brasserie Champs du Mars near the Eiffel Tower, one night while serving me Une Grande Beer, explained life.

“I work from ten to twelve hours, sometimes fourteen,” he says, “and then at midnight I go dancing, dancing, dancing until four or five in the morning and go to bed and sleep until ten and then up, up and to work by eleven and another ten or twelve or sometimes fifteen hours of work.”

“How can you do that?” I ask.

“Easily,” he says. “To be asleep is to be dead. It is like death. So we dance, we dance so as not to be dead. We do not want that.”

“How old are you?” I ask, at last.

“Twenty-three,” he says.

“Ah,” I say and take his elbow gently. “Ah. Twenty-three, is it”

“Twenty-three,” he says, smiling. “And you?”

“Seventy-six,” I say. “And I do not want to be dead, either. But I am not twenty-three. How can I answer? What do I do?”

“Yes,” says Laurent, still smiling and innocent, “what do you do at three in the morning?”

“Write,” I say, at last.

“Write!” Laurent says, astonished. “Write?”

“So as not to be dead,” I say. “Like you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, I say smiling now, myself. “At three in the morning, I write, I write, I write!”

“You are very lucky,” says Laurent. “You are very young.”

“So far,” I say, and finish my beer and go up to my typewriter to finish a story.

[“Dancing, So As Not to Be Dead” –  Introduction to The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, 1997]

Writers on Writing: Salman Rushdie on influence

In a lecture, delivered at the University of Torino and published in his book of collected non-fiction Step Across This Line, writer Salman Rushdie discusses influence. Here are some of my favorite excerpts:

“Influence.” The word itself suggests something fluid, something “flowing in.” This feels right, if only because I have always envisaged the world of the imagination not so much as a continent as an ocean. Afloat and terrifyingly free upon these boundless seas, the writer attempts, with his bare hands, the magical task of metamorphosis. Like the figure in the fairy tale who must spin straw into gold, the writer must find the trick of weaving the waters together until they become land: until, all of a sudden, there is solidity where once there was only flow, shape where there was formlessness; there is ground beneath his feet. . . .

The young writer, perhaps uncertain, perhaps ambitious, probably both at once, casts around for help; and sees, within the flow of the ocean, certain sinuous thicknesses, like ropes, the work of earlier weavers, of sorcerers who swam this way before him. Yes, he can use these “in-flowings,” he can grasp them and wind his own work around them. He knows, now, that he will survive. Eagerly, he begins. . . .

If influence is omnipresent in literature, it is also, one should emphasize, always secondary in any work of quality. When it is too crude, too obvious, the results can be risible. I was once sent, by an aspiring writer, a short story that began, “One morning Mrs. K. awoke to find herself metamorphosed into a front-loading washing machine.” One can only imagine how Kafka would have reacted to so inept – so detergent – an act of homage. . . .

[The full text can be found in Step Across This Line, Modern Library (2003).]