by Sven Birkerts

from AGNI, Issue 70

Ah, the old questions, the good questions, the Heideggerian questions that seem so very basic on the surface, but then you get caught in the implications and realize that they go on and on and that you'll only go crazy trying to answer them. Heidegger liked to ask, "What is thinking?" which ended up being question enough to support a whole philosophy. Me? I've been staying close to my own ground, asking merely, "What is writing?" I'm not looking to found a philosophy, though. In truth, I'm just responding to a short rumination I read online, I forget where, in which the writer went through his day, itemizing his actions, enumerating all the dodges and distractions, finally coming to the conclusion—surprise!—that he usually did very little actual writing. The scenario was distressingly familiar.

In fact, it got me thinking that if the actual production of words were what finally qualified one as a "writer," then my title to the vocation could be said to be a bit provisional lately. Where for long years I filled every free crevice of time with the action of words—with pages typed, later word-processed, xeroxed, posted, faxed, Fedexed—now, for reasons I have yet to fathom, longer and longer stretches go by without any of that pressurized exertion, but also, strangely, without my feeling that I need to be putting words to the page. I just came back from two weeks of travel, weeks which directly followed two weeks spent running a writing residency, and nothing—nothing—of value was produced. Or, rather, nothing of value made it to page or screen. One twelfth of the year has proved a complete blank, so far as generation goes. This would have been unthinkable in former days, or, if thinkable, then not to be endured without the worst mortifications of conscience. But I sit here now feeling only the slightest taint of the old guilt. I am uncontorted by the gut-twist of fraudulence. I would even say that I feel as much a writer as ever before and I feel it in a way that I did not, quite, in my fullest flow of productivity.

How to explain? If I say—to get Heideggerian again—"the singer sings" or "the dancer dances," who would venture to dispute me? The action defines the craft, embodies it. There is a distinct line that marks the limit—and the origin—of the activity. Not-singing bears little or no relation to singing; not-dancing bears little or no relation to dancing—or so I say as an outsider. But by contrast there are a great many modes, or states, of not-writing that are closely bound to—are indeed, as philosophers might say, partially constitutive of writing. And this has everything to do with the question "what is writing?" For one thing, it makes the question vexing. For if writing is not defined as the putting of words to a surface, then what is it?

I'm thinking now of the well-known opening sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." Irresistible prose—it perfectly launches this greatest of novels. We would all agree that during the writing—the committing to the page—of these words, Fitzgerald was the writer par excellence, an intelligence fully in the act of inspired, distilled production. A sentence like this almost never comes flying forth out of nowhere. It embodies a balance, a poise, a precision—a subdued pressure of wisdom—that signals the highly developed verbal sensibility. The person who wrote the sentence was a writer, and if it chanced that he was not one by professed vocation, then at very least he inhabited the true writing mind for the duration of that composition.

But even if the author was self-declared as writer, the odds are that the words did not flow effortlessly to the page, but actually got there as a result of some intense labor. Writing, we all know, is not just about end result, the final output; it is also about the process that leads to the result. All attempts at getting the words in their right, their inevitable-feeling order must likewise count as writing. In this regard, I often think of Frank Budgen's account of meeting James Joyce on the streets of Zurich and finding the Master quite pleased with himself. Budgen asked him if the work were going well, and Joyce answered that it was indeed: he had given the day to getting the words he had chosen for a particular sentence into the right sequence. He thought he had finally found it. So yes, the moving and adding and deleting of words, no matter how much ground is finally gained—or lost—must be counted as writing.

Here, though, we enter on the slippery slope. For now it is not a very big step to count all verbal manipulations, even aborted ones, as similarly defining the writing act. And if Fitzgerald had spent, say, weeks prior to getting that first sentence right in filling wastebaskets with rejected versions, could he still not be legitimately honored as carrying out the writer's task?

How much does our conception of the vocation require the physical imposition of marks on paper or screen? If our author had sat at his desk and merely thought his way toward that sentence (and, implicitly, the ones that would follow), testing sequences on his ear, rejecting one after another in search of the combination, never once picking up his pen, would his activity be any less writing? Is the act defined more by the physical commitment of words than by the processes that underlie it? I think not. Writing is the manipulation of words toward expressive sense, and a word is no less a word when held in the auditory imagination than when bodied forth in ink. Indeed, if focus is the determinant, it may be even more fully realized in thought than execution. I have, I know, placed many thousands—maybe millions—of words on paper with the barest awareness of their weight or meaning, and I have thought countless others with what felt like the purest clarity.

I'll take another step now and say that I don't think that a writer has to be sitting at his desk at all to be considered "in the act"—physical situation is a mere formality. The same verbal testing processes can be undergone while one is lying on one's back on the lawn or pacing slowly up and down in front of the corner delicatessen.

You can see what I'm getting at here. Writing shades into thinking about writing in ways that are hard to pinpoint, but this thinking has to be seen as an essential part of the process. Why? Because the process cannot take place without it. Writing is the fulfillment of an action, a dynamic, that begins in observation or thought; it is the emergence of the original stimulus into artistic self-consciousness—experience as packaged by the writer to be received by the sensibility of an eventual reader.

It is a complex and elusive business. This more purposeful, targeted thinking-toward-writing that I'm considering does not arise from nothing. How could it? The mental movement that directly feeds the production of literary work is rooted in the broader life of thought itself, and to write a sentence such as Fitzgerald or Welty or Baldwin or any other achieved writer might create requires a seedbed, a long-established practice of observation and reflection, and a particular kind of thinking about the ways of the world, about people, about everything that forms the "stuff" of the art, which is to say—for nothing is alien to writing—that it requires a good deal of thinking about anything at all. It is the particular nature of that thinking that counts.

This last distinction is crucial. For it cannot be that anyone thinking about anything qualifies as a writer. That would generalize the concept of writing into utter absurdity. I have in mind here only the thinking that might eventuate in writing—thinking carried out by those who filter their experience with that end in mind. But isn't this a circular situation? Am I not saying that only thinking by writers qualifies? We are back to the original question. Who is the writer? The writer is one who writes, of course. But the writer must also in a preliminary way be defined as one who processes his or her experience in order to write about it. The chicken, the egg; the chicken, the egg.

I wouldn't bring any of this gnarly business up at all if it were not for this question of self-validation—my looking for a way to establish in good conscience that I am a writer even if I am not writing. The conscience, I will emphasize, is mine alone. Though I grant that the aim of writing is to reach others, I don't in this one regard care much whether others think I am doing the work or not. I just want to be square with myself.

The idea of being a writer is what stamps my ticket; it is the one thing that I feel redeems my experiences from mere contingency. By this I mean that relating to one's life under the assumption that it is all potentially material to be shaped into artistic expression is completely unlike going through the identical experiences without that assumption. For me it is the difference between meaning and meaninglessness—and a greater difference cannot be imagined between any two terms.

I have long admired Jorge Luis Borges's little ficción "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," but these reflections have me thinking that I've only partially understood it. The story—familiar to many readers by now—recounts one Pierre Menard's attempt to recreate Cervantes's Don Quixote word for word without reference to the original. Menard sets out to assimilate so far as possible the same influences and experiences. He wants to re-invent the work afresh in identical form by, in effect, becoming the author. In this he both succeeds (partially) and—illuminatingly—fails. I always believed that Borges was writing a kind of parable about originality, about how an author quite literally "holds title" to a work of imagination, and how the meanings of all statements are contingent on context and the slippery business of intention. Certainly Borges's work suggests these ideas, but to take them as primary also misses a deeper wisdom in the tale, which I see now is an investigation of the core essence of authorship. "Pierre Menard" studies the very relation between self and the materials—experiences—that are subject to creative transformation. What, exactly, comprises narrative and on what terms?

The interesting—telling—aspect of Borges's patently absurd imagining (we accept it as a metaphysical ploy) is found in the distinction between Cervantes's and Menard's experiences. For Cervantes—this is primary—readings and life-encounters and thoughts sparked in him via unknowable alchemy the artistic aspiration, the will, and then—only then—became the material that would be transformed into story. Menard, on the other hand, is already artistically predisposed; he is besotted with the desire to produce a masterpiece. He looks to the readings and re-stages life-encounters to make himself into the author who would produce, exactly, the Quixote. Menard's approach is result-oriented, determined, deterministic, whereas Cervantes's had been open-ended, like that of any person living the unknown, unknowable life.

Borges's "Menard," then, is about willing the sensibility to fashion given materials into what would appear on the page as inevitable narrative expressions. The parable is less occupied with imaginative origination and more with the idea that a true writerly response to a set of givens will yield the desired work. It puts the burden of the writer's activity not on the actual production of words, but on the inward sifting and shaping of experience that eventually calls that work forth. The creative act of writing feels secondary to the achieving of the desired sensibility.

I pursue this whimsy because it supports my contention that writing is understood—defined—not by the obvious placing of words on the page, and not even by the specific thoughts and inner processes that lead directly to that; rather, it is a condition, a disposition that considers experience in a certain way, whether or not that consideration results in output. The writer is one who experiences the world in ways that could, under fortuitous circumstances, result in verbal expression. Being a writer is filtering all experience through a scrim of potential verbal significance. Potential. It is, in other words, living liminally, hovering at all times at the threshold of transformation, the place where language comes alive.

I remember how even when I was very young I felt the thrall, the seduction, of this state—not just the making things from words, but preliminary to that, and no less important, the transformative orientation toward experience. I could not say what it was—I still can't—but I was sure that I recognized it when I saw it. In certain readers I observed, for instance. Something of what I think of now as the writerly stance, the ongoing filtering of experience, was often perceptible in the reader's demeanor, manifesting itself in what was to me a deeply attractive quality of absence, of not being fully present to the moment, which I interpreted not as a failure so much as evidence of partial attendance at some infinitely more interesting event. This was for me the first glimmer of the writing life, and I have to say that while much has worn away from my fantasies of what that life might be like—certainly on the public, worldly front—my attraction to the feeling of that absence, my pull toward the conjectural, toward something just registered in intuition and open to meanings, remains undiminished. That ongoing awareness has gradually changed my attitude toward writing, which I now regard a bit less as the doing and more and more as the inhabiting of a state that might, but also might not, finally certify itself in a procession of words on a page.

About the Author
Sven Birkerts has been editor of AGNI since July 2002. He is the author of eight books: An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literature (William Morrow), The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (William Morrow), American Energies: Essays on Fiction (William Morrow), The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Faber & Faber), Readings (Graywolf), My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (Viking, 2002), Reading Life (Graywolf, 2007), and Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir (Graywolf, 2008).

AGNI
Boston University

Editor: Sven Birkerts
Founding Editor: Askold Melnyczuk
Senior Editor: William Pierce