Massoni Reader Response #3

The Domain of the Word

Having not yet responded to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I was eager to dive into this chapter, dedicated to the specific creative experiences of novelists and poets. I often find interviews with writers on craft to be some of the more inspiring access points to a writer’s unique world. For how else can we get any closer?

I believe it was Orhan Pamuk who once said writing “is a commitment to being alone in a room.” We all experience this isolation, and we all attempt to release honest renderings of our imagination, experience, and the characters we create and emotions we invoke. Attempts to communicate these other worlds that often spring from solitude seem inherently challenged. We cannot sit by the side of the writer, perch on the edge of his/her desk, and simply observe. So, we read interviews, we read textbooks on creativity, and we engage in dialogue with other representatives of our field. Perhaps when we’re fortunate enough to publish, we communicate with members of our audience. All the while, there is the voice of our critic to contend with, who tells us when to cut, when to start over, and hopefully, finally, when to rest in completion.

I did take away helpful snippets from “The Domain of the Word,” and I’d like to begin forming this response with those. The first point seems obvious, when Csikszentmihalyi writes: “we all write to a certain extent, so the craft of professional writers is not abstruse” (237). This is true. We all need to communicate with one another, despite our professional pursuits, especially today, when so much business is conducted through email. Our verbal communication skills feel like they may only continue to atrophy when one can resort to an email/text rather than a phone call or face-to-face conversation. This digression is meant to reiterate that writing skills are perhaps MORE important than they have ever been before, as the written word continues to pervade the ordering of our professional and social worlds.

Csikszentmihalyi looks back at the evolution of written language. He assesses that “the oldest symbolic systems in the world are those organized around content and the rules of language,” and goes on to state: “the discovery of writing made it possible to preserve memory outside the fragile brain, the domain of the word became one of the most effective tools and greatest sources of pride for humankind” (238). And perhaps this is what writing is fundamentally about: preserving memory and experience outside of ourselves, truly releasing something from our brains through our fingers and out into the world; writing as giving birth if you will.

This exteriority is coupled with a complex interiority, for “the written word allows us to understand better what is happening within ourselves. In recording real or imaginary events, the writer arrests the evanescent stream of experience by naming its aspects and making them enduring in language. Then by reading and repeating a verse or passage of prose, we can savor the images and their meanings and thus understand more accurately how we feel and what we think” (238). This summation sounds lovely in theory, and certainly the process of expressing ourselves through writing often leads to a clarity of mind we might not have arrived at without the filter of translating thought into text. However, it sounds all too easy. Elmaz asked us an interesting question last class when it came to writing our syllabuses: Who needs to be served/satisfied here? The teacher or the student? I found this compelling as I’ve been wondering if it has to be one or the other? How do we ensure the progression of our students’ creativity and productivity and hold ourselves accountable as teachers and derive a sense of self-satisfaction from that? Are these mutually beneficial always? Exclusive on occasion?

Does the same theory hold for writing? Should we be concerned about serving/satisfying our audience? Or with achieving this personal understanding as Csikszentmihalyi suggests? Shouldn’t we focus more on living up to the authenticity of the creative piece at hand and serving THE WORK? I’m not sure that I’m motivated by understanding more accurately how I feel or what I think. At least not while I’m in process, which is what the portions of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention that we have read seem to be concerned with thus far.

This chapter seems specifically concerned with the intersection “between the intellect and the intuition” (239), which calls to my mind a rather formal and scientific visual rendering of creativity, and one that needs to be defined by the very material at hand: language. This week in my Craft of Fiction class with Professor Powell, we discussed Aureole by Carole Maso and themes of language and desire. Our conversation culminated in the idea that many of the books we’ve read this semester illustrate where language CANNOT go, and other failings of text. For these books often challenge even the way we conventionally read a book or can be read quite differently depending on the reader’s current emotional or mental state. What happens when language does fail us? Perhaps in terms of how we express the experience of reading a particular book or perhaps here with what Csikszentmihalyi is discussing: how we write?

Mark Strand mentions patience as one element that is required when language may be failing or not conforming to the images or emotions the writer wants to express. He says of his poetry that “the secret of saying something new is to be patient,” (240), that reacting too quickly might yield a superficial cliché rather than a deeper, original meaning. He suggests that the same patience is required of the reader: “Poetry is about slowing down…There’s no rush to find out what happens in a poem. It’s really about feeling one syllable rubbing against another, one word giving way to another, and sensing the justice of that relationship between one word, the next, the next, the next” (240).

When Strand specifically addresses language, however, he claims that “Writers are people who have greater receptivity to language, and I think that they will see something in a phrase, or even a word, that allows them to change it or improve what was there before” (241). While I adore Strand’s work and I want to believe this, and it certainly sounds true of writers, particularly during editing phases, it sounds rather conceited to assume the writer’s receptivity is greater than any other’s. Doesn’t the perceptivity of the words we place next to one another dependent upon the receptivity of our readers? Who’s to say one is any greater than the other?

For often isn’t it the experience that precedes language that may give us something to say in the first place? I appreciated the candor of Hilde Domin and the “chronic state of psychological dislocation” (244) that appears in her work, which she presents as a kind of salvation, saying that “flight into a world of symbols saves the writer from the unbearable reality where experience is raw and unmediated” (245). Again here though, the writer seems to be the one served, and readers an after thought in order to preserve the integrity required to package a difficult experience in language.

Domin also speaks directly to my previous point about the limitations of language. As she learned up to five different languages, she observed “the same word may have a certain set of connotations in one and a very different network of meanings in another. Or that one language could express some emotions or events more accurately than another” (245). While this is not a novel observation, it suggests the borders of any one language and its ability to be the best mode of expression for a certain experience. Despite her great knowledge of multiple languages, Domin ultimately gravitated back to her native tongue, German, and that is the language where she found her utmost refuge for “she could not live where that language was not spoken” (245). This further suggests something about how we absorb spoken language as well. Perhaps it’s never enough simply to push words in one direction, away from ourselves; so much also depends on the ways we take in those words (reading is relevant here, too).

I was flabbergasted to have it confirmed that Domin’s fair instinct to concentrate “on the merits of the writing instead of the personality or politics of the writer” when judging literary prizes so starkly contrasts with the way it is commonly done in her experience. How then do we take the field to task? How can it be fair that politics should count more than the writing itself? I truly don’t understand how “jealous and antagonistic critics” are permitted “to silence the artist’s voice” (246). I understand the dynamics of competition, but I don’t understand the places jealousy or antagonism have earned in the field. How does that serve anyone? Finally, I appreciate the time and practical advice Domin gives to aspiring writers she believes she can help, so I reiterate it here: “mainly to simplify, to cut out whatever is redundant, flabby, unnecessary” (247).

Madeleine L’Engle seems an example of a writer who could have been silenced altogether by a field that did not want to let her into the domain, rejecting her manuscript A Wrinkle in Time as many times as it did, saying it didn’t fit neatly into conventional notions of genre or either adult or YA prose. While success didn’t arrive until after 40, admirably, L’Engle “was never tempted to compromise her vision in order to play it safe” (257). While “the enjoyment of writing comes first” for L’Engle, it’s soon followed by “a sense of responsibility for what she writes” (255), which seems a conscious serving of both writer and audience, and is why her stories preserve “some kind of hope” (255).

As for Richard Stern, I don’t mean to belittle his literary accomplishments, but he sounds like one more Caucasian male who had the good fortune to study at Iowa (among other Caucasian males) and who began to publish prolifically in the mid-20th century. Yet, he too, it seems, must “overcome the pain of existence” (261) through writing. While his observations earned their place in the domain, I’m not sure how relevant his personal story is to aspiring writers, many of whom will undoubtedly be of different age, race, gender, or socio-economic bracket (I found it interesting that Mark Strand was the only writer to mention the financial constraints brought on by career choice).

So does Csikszentmihalyi fulfill this chapter’s hypothesis: to present “a number of cases from the same domain, in order to get a more detailed understanding of what is involved in producing a cultural change” (238). Alas, he wraps up his chapter by generalizing the similarities of these five writers, all of whom “keep notebooks handy for when the voice of the Muse calls…usually start a working day with a word, a phrase, or an image” and their “work evolves on its own rather than the author’s intentions” (263). What’s more, if one does not maintain the two processes of trying not to “miss the message whispered by the unconscious and at the same time force it into a suitable form” … “the flow or writing dries up.” Well, this is certainly a daunting threat, since, “after a few hours the tremendous concentration required for this balancing act becomes so exhausting that the writer has to change gears and focus on something else, something mundane” (264).

I still have to wonder what other methods are out there for cultural change? I admit that I do not write fiction everyday. In some ways, I will consider myself a failure until I do. I also try to acknowledge that I’m in a demanding program while I work a virtual full-time job. But I know Elmaz did this, too. And she confided that she writes all day some four times a week on her writing days. Oh, the dedication that can inspire! I seriously doubt that after a few hours, she finds she can do nothing else but turn to the mundane.