Christopher Bernard

Deception and Seduction: Notes on Some of the Paradoxes of Writing

Beauty is truth, truth beauty~that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
―Keats
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
―Picasso
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss
man schweigen.
Of what we cannot speak we must remain silent.
―Wittgenstein

The art of writing is an art of seduction. Or, for those readers who prefer the term craft: the craft of writing is a craft of seduction. 

Purely as an art, that is all writing is: the inducing of a hypnotic trance by a line of words on paper, on a screen. The art is at its most potent when it not only rivets the reader’s attention, but when the writing~from individual phrases to particular scenes, characters, images, ideas, even the tone – haunts the reader’s mind long after he has tossed the text aside. The writer has the greatest success when he dominates the mind of the reader, for days, years, a lifetime. We all know writing that has had such an effect on us: the work of a Dostoyevsky, a Kafka, a Doris Lessing, a Faulkner, a Nietzsche. The Bible. Such is the magic of the written word~a magic many practice unsuccessfully, and a few master to a degree that exhilarates, enchants, inspires generations of readers; that is indeed terrifying, if one thinks closely about it. We are fascinated, we are convinced: we believe what we are reading almost more than our own lives. We would give our mind, our soul, to such writers. And the young writer would give his soul to be such a writer. 

. . . 

A writer is of course not just someone who happens to put down letters and words on a screen or paper~a writer is someone for whom words are a struggle, a sport, and a passion, for whom writing is a means, not so much of expression as of frustration and fulfillment, aporia and liberation; for whom words are both the reflection and the making of thought and action; for whom words are the object of a sometimes betraying faith. 

. . .

So, what is this craziness, this disease that makes those of us who have caught it write, no matter what or who stands in our way~the indifference of publishers, the contempt of editors, the bafflement of relatives, the condescension of friends? (Well, perhaps the bafflement of relatives is something of an inducement.) Why are we so willing to be poor and neglected for a lifetime, and if we are honest with ourselves, probably for all time, stealing time from actual paying work for the sake of a series of personally satisfying (if to no one else) phrases organized according to a logic only we may be cognizant of, but that satisfies some peculiar warp in our prefrontal lobes, and may actually provoke or offend other people? What keeps us going? And what makes us so certain of the value of what we’re doing? For, make no mistake, there is no such thing as a humble writer; the humble don’t stick their thoughts under other people’s noses unasked and expect them to be read and “appreciated.” So what makes us so stubborn and proud? So sure of ourselves?

. . .

Pace Samuel Johnson (of the famous putdown: “Only a blockhead writes for anything but money”~and who had contempt for the other motive he recognized driving writers: vanity; as if writers were not vain by nature and as if all publishing were not at heart vanity publishing): every writer worth his salt knows he doesn’t write for either money or fame, even to be published, even to communicate. Although even vanity can be a more laudable motive than pay: vanity at least presupposes some belief in our worth besides our price. 

. . .

One rational motive for writing even if you never communi-cate a word, make a sale, or have any hope for fame, present or posthumous: to tell yourself the truth, thereby cleansing yourself of the lies social life often requires. One motive for a diary, the most private form of writing. 

. . .

Another motive is revenge: the daily assassin you have at your beck and call, with dagger in hand hidden by day behind the cloak of politeness, to be buried in the back in the middle of the night. To write something down is almost to perform it~every writer has probably had this queasy feeling at one time or another, as if to write were to hallucinate an action. It has a similar psychological effect as an actual deed –, has a somatic effect, becomes for the mind a reality as strong as biology, economics, and politics.

Revenge may not be the noblest motive for writing, but surely it’s a common one; sometimes the diarist’s revenge may be the only justice in this life he can hope for.

. . .

Another motive: to create for ourselves, if only virtually, a life we can’t pursue “really.” The waitress at the truck stop can become a Vegas star, the homely, teetotalling proofreader a ranting punk, the lifetime secretary can play at being Nicole Kidman, the failed dramatist pretend he’s the love child of Shakespeare’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter and Noel Coward~all through the hallucinogenic of the written word, with its illusion we can know and speak the world just because we have access to a little vocabulary and a blank page.

. . .

Any writer has problems with the truth, but the writer of serious fiction (a strange phrase in itself) faces a peculiar dilemma. He writes fiction but often claims to be the sole purveyor of a certain kind of truth~emotional, human. Yet he works in deliberately contrived illusions whose sole purpose is to seduce a reader, any reader, to follow his words with held breath, skipping mealtimes, neglecting friends, reading till the garbage truck beeps in the predawn alley. 

If asked, many a writer will claim that his sole purpose is just to present the truth (he may call it “authenticity,” “sincerity,” “honesty”) as convincingly as he can. He may write in short declarative sentences because he thinks simplicity and directness a moral as much as an aesthetic virtue. He may under-write with the complacency of the over-writers of other eras, or he may over-write with the faith that the wider he casts his net, the more likely he’ll catch something that at least looks true~slippery fish!

However he writes – simply or elaborately, in gruff Anglo-Saxon or silken latinism~he uses style and syntax, vocabulary and grammar as tools, or weapons, to capture reality~of circumstance, of personality, the hidden thoughts and more deeply hidden feelings, the dark heart, in every person, the traumas and farces of human relationships. 

What is odd is that, for all his effective writing, he may be haunted by a fear (and the fear can deepen with the very power of the writing) that, no matter how careful he is, no matter how conscientious, at bottom he’s something of a fraud~that, far from capturing “truth,” he has simply created one more convincing deception. He wonders if he isn’t just a better liar than other people, or other writers. If he has a conscience he may feel guilty; may even go back over his writing like an especially unforgiving editor, and test it~not for literary effectiveness but by that tougher and exacting, that more perilous, standard: truthfulness.

More perilous, the reader may well wonder? Isn’t truthfulness what writing, in the end, is all about? How can making a piece of writing more truthful be “perilous”?

To which I will only suggest, like the serpent in the garden: “What if the point of literary writing never was truthfulness, but only its appearance~that sometimes disingenuous literary ‘value’ called plausibility, which we know that truth itself often suffers from the lack of?”

“The truth” is an explosive device waiting to go off in every writer’s computer. It threatens everyone around him, from his spouse to his agent, his parents to his publisher, his distant relatives to his increasingly less distant (thanks to the internet) readers. It can risk his career. It can endanger the writer’s relationship with himself. 

So: the writer has every incentive to appear truthful, and many reasons not to be. Yet, without truthfulness, what is a writer worth, or the writer’s work? On the other hand, what value does writing have when it fails to bury its talons in the reader’s mind: when it is not “effective”?

Visit www.caveat-lector.org to read the rest of this essay.

The dilemma seems to run deeper still. The literary mind is often averse to the demands of precise thinking and analysis. As Paul Valery wrote in his preface to “Monsieur Teste”: “I have always been suspicious of literature . . . The art of writing always requires a certain ‘sacrifice of the intellect.’ We are all aware, for example, that literary reading is incompatible with too much precision of language. The intellect demands of the language of daily use a perfection and purity that just isn’t in its power. But then, rare is the reader who finds pleasure in thinking strenuously. We win the attention of most readers by entertaining them, and that kind of attention is passive.” The literary mind is sometimes a little too sure there is a succinct and simple phrase for every thought, even if it’s just a clicheé; that everything significant can be said simply and clearly. This may come as a surprise to many mathematicians and physicists. And if writers can’t accommodate their truths, what use are they? 

The honest writer even has the reader to contend with. Writers and readers are not always natural allies; are often antagonistic, even natural enemies. The reader says please me, thrill me, comfort me, flatter me; the writer says (or might say if agent, editor, and publisher, or his own pusillanimity, would let him), wake up, get up: the ship’s going down, and we’re drowning. 

Of course, the writer may rationalize by saying he can both tell the truth and gratify the reader; that his aim is to “sweeten the pill,” to speak the truth persuasively, to win readers by wooing them. What he may not always be aware of is the danger the very rhetorical tools he uses~the sweetener on the pill or, more perversely, the caustic banalities of “authenticity,” one of the chief mannerisms of our time~may betray the very truth he is trying to say.

Of course, is it even possible, through language, and in particular through written language, to “tell the truth” about any object, person, event, however simple? This has been one of the most disputed questions in philosophy over the last hundred years~from Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists to Roman Jackobsen to Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Derrida, the philosophical premises of Beckett’s writing~even though the same suspicion was adumbrated more than two millennia ago by the bête-noire of many of these thinkers: Plato. 

The answer to that question – an answer no serious writer is likely to want to hear – very possibly is no: how can a word or any combination of words capture the smell of lilacs on a summer morning, or the taste of a fresh cut peach over vanilla ice cream, or the sound of a moth’s wings beating against a window shade, or the color of a woman’s cheek the moment before she blushes. To say nothing of anything more complicated or abstract. 

The related question – whether language can adequately express any truth whatever, however modest – for example, what time it is – is still left dangling, like a fish hook without a weight in cold and cloudy water. And the writer remains with his dilemma: should he aim for truthfulness or effectiveness, honesty or manipulation, integrity or seduction – and how much of each should he blend in his work, if it’s possible to combine them; and what should he do if he finds that each corrupts and nullifies the other? Choose between them and thereby lose either integrity or communication? Abandon the whole thing as a bad job and retreat into a Trappist silence, or do something useful and honest like plumbing? Or let the problem burn, even as you once again fail to solve it, buckle down and blemish one more page with the signs of your latest defeat.

A brief historical detour: Reading Paul Johnson’s illuminating if sometimes dyspeptic history of the twentieth century has led me conclude something I have often keenly felt: that much of the last century was indeed ruled by a kind of (to borrow one of Johnson’s favorite terms of opprobrium) murderous frivolousness. The tenor of much of that time was a moral insanity reinforced, not by the moral relativism Johnson repeatedly condemns, but by a belief in moral absolutes, in particular the absolutes of power, the supposed imperatives of history, survival, success, and a belief that any means are justified to attain them. The frivolousness appeared largely in the aesthetics of moral justification used to make palatable the horrors of the means: a cynical nod to virtue by a sometimes overwhelming evil. 

There seems to be no bottom to the evil human beings are capable of when in the grip of an idea that seems to justify it: an idea of a “higher good” – that is, a good higher than the protection of human beings from suffering and death. Johnson mentions the “heartlessness of ideas”: to this I would have to add the heartlessness of ideologues, both secular and religious, which absence of the organ of love I suspect has something to do with the excessive clarity, or apparent clarity, of language, particularly written language, and the ease with which language can be abused. It is very easy to translate such abuse into the abuse of human bodies when a particular text is treated as an authority for action (the Bible, the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, etc.). As Wittgenstein insisted, we can indeed be hypnotized by language – so much so that we can become blind to the world we live in, sleepwalkers following the injunctions of a dead or absent authority, simply on the basis of a powerfully persuasive thread of words. 

The written word can be a moral danger because its author – who might qualify or elaborate on a written text’s apparent certitudes – is usually not available for consultation. And his readers can be tempted to invest his words with an authority they may not deserve. The impulse can be to create a world as unambiguous as a book – or as our interpretation of that book. 

And so we need to be a little suspicious of the word, roping ourselves to the mast of our doubt against the sirens’ song of language. Literature is, paradoxically, one way of doing this: by immersing ourselves in the schoene schein – the beautiful illusion – of literature, we can, maybe, break the spell of language: we learn how easily and willingly we are duped and learn to suspect any language that tempts too comfortably our belief.

. . .

The literature of possibility: There is another, maybe more hopeful, approach for the conscientious writer to his ambiguous calling. Just as language can be understood as reflective of actual things, people, events, however tenuously, it can also be understood as projective, as subjunctive – under the sign, not of the real, but of the possible. What is usually called “literature” (poetry, fiction, etc.) is especially well-placed to pursue the subjunctive in the broadest sense: it can be an exploration, not only of the practically possible (the purview of “realism”), but more interestingly, I think, of the logically or linguistically possible such as can be found in the writings of Gertrude Stein, of the Russian novelist Andrei Biely, of Joyce, the surrealist novels of the 20s, the explorations of Borges, Garcia Marquez, and the Latin American poets and novelists, the nouveau roman of the 50s and 60s, the postmodern fictions of Gaddis and Pynchon, the Bay Area language poets and writers of the 70s, and so on.
 
There are those who, for whatever reason, reject these “literary experiments” or believe that the period for them is substantially over; that the approach of literary modernism has been tried and found wanting by most readers. But I think this is untrue: what is occurring now – a cultural reaction to the literary modernists and their followers (see, for example, the attacks on such works as “The Waste Land” and Ulysses by Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Franzen’s notorious attack in the New Yorker on William Gaddis, or B. R. Meyer’s provocative A Reader’s Manifesto) – is simply another instance of culture lag, more pronounced in literature than painting or architecture precisely because literature is a popular art, and popular art tends to be more resistant to change than arts with a more restricted, so-called elitist, or (at least in America) urban audience, such as painting or sculpture. 

I believe we’re in an interregnum during which the modernist and postmodernist discoveries are being digested. Afterwards there will be a period of new explorations of the outer limits of literary language, strategy, and form – this is already happening in the exploration of hypertext and gaming strategies by fiction writers online.

There is, I believe, still much to learn from the discovery that the basic unit of literature is not character or story, not situation or theme, image or trope, but the phrase: whatever can be put into a phrase and structured around it provides the strongest basis for literary writing in our time. 

Literature is, of course, above all a linguistic structure, not a political or sociological, historical or analytical one. It’s an art form and so provides primarily an aesthetic experience: all others of its effects hinge on that.

What differentiates literature from the other arts, aside from the universality of its medium (everyone depends on language as an essential tool for survival; this is why its specialized literary treatment can cause deep resistance: people still fight over the project of the French poet Mallarmé, more than a century after his death) is its overtly moral dimension, through stories―but even this dimension is primarily aesthetic. 

The ultimate morality of literary writing remains, nevertheless, the probity, and the freedom, with which it uses language: this is what makes writing one of the great adventures of the human mind and spirit. 

. . .

Imagine being abandoned on a desert island, far from the nearest air corridor or sea lane, unvisited by passing ships or crossing aircraft. Imagine the island is surrounded by a wide, shallow beach swept twice a day by the tide erasing all marks from its gray flat surface. Also imagine that on this island there are, freely scattered on the ground, twigs and branches and driftwood and bits of rock and shell, all of which you could easily use for writing or drawing on the sand if you so wished. And imagine you may have to spend the rest of your life on this island. So, there you have it: a huge, inviting page, lots of implements for drawing and writing, and all the time in the world.

My question is this: would you scribble words – stories, poems, essays, meditations, descriptions of your daily activities, hymns to the ocean, editorials to the clouds, whatever - day after day across that inviting space of beach, even though you knew there was little chance of your words ever being seen and the certainty they would be washed away every night by the advancing tide? 

What’s the point if you couldn’t communicate with anyone – wouldn’t it be a waste of time and energy that might be better spent doing almost anything else? And you’d probably be right: it would be pointless and foolish and silly. But would you have the lunacy, the infatuated romanticism, the love affair with futility and the endless possibilities of language, that it takes to be a writer?

. . .

Does all this abstract huffing and puffing mean we should distrust anything “too easy” - smoothly written or enticing or riveting or just plain fun to read, tasting to the full of the “aesthetic”~and we should only trust the difficult or the complicated or obscure? Is only the ugly true? Or do we have to abandon truth if we want the paradise, or theme park, of the text? Some of these notes run in that direction. I’m sometimes caught in this dilemma, and can’t make up my mind how to finish the simplest essay . . . .

But maybe the point is just this: never to entirely trust anything we read. Including this! Or anything we write.