English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

      I have been writing as an apprentice (i.e. in various educational contexts) and as a professional for about twenty years. The vast majority of the writings I have produced (easily 90% of them) have been works of fiction. In view of the predominance of fiction writing in my life as a writer, I have limited the following discussion primarily to concerns that have arisen out of the praxis of writing fiction, though I believe that these concerns are far from exclusive to that domain. To the extent that I am capable of recognizing what the Swedes call the "red thread" that runs through my fiction writing (i.e., the common motif--or even motive--that ties together the many distinct parts of the entire enterprise), I feel that I can say without risk of contradiction that subversion has always been its end, as well often enough as its means, though not invariably.

      Existing structures ‹social, ideological, and cultural (which includes the literary, but also much more) are there to be challenged and subverted. I find Noam Chomsky's concept of manufactured consent (in tandem with Marxist observations on the inequities created by the so-called free market) too convincing, not to mention corroborative from my own limited experience, to place much faith in the inherent goodness of dominant power structures, of which social norms, laws and institutions are but the perceptible manifestations and end products. This is not the same as saying that they are thoroughly corrupt. But as long as they are even a little corrupt there is plenty of work to be done. This necessarily places my creative writing efforts under a rubric of activism.

      As for my means and my ends, the subversive is always present in the latter, but only sometimes present in the former. The means and the ends are never mutually exchangeable as values. I may, for instance, employ time-honored conventions (e.g., dramatic, poetic or rhetorical conventions, among others) to achieve an unconventional or at the very least an unpopular effect, and collectively such effects may constitute the subtext of one of my stories or essays. The inverse is not true. While I may--and often do--attempt to break from conventional technique, I will not do so for the express purpose of reinforcing the privileged position in an unjust power relation, whether that relation takes the form of the state or a dynamic between two people, or even indeed if it takes the form of an ethical or moral conflict within a single person--i.e., myself.

      Yet I have discovered that both the means and the end can be subversive, often with interesting results. I suppose this is one of the reasons why Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America has held such sway over my developing awareness as a fiction writer. In this work we encounter experiments with the destabilization and displacement of poetic/narrative conventions and received norms not only on every page but almost in every paragraph. These techniques are not only an essential part of the fabric of the work; as I see it, they are also the work's raison d'ętre--at one and the same time small acts of technical subversion, examples or "emblems in practice" of the overriding subversive, even revolutionary, logic of the work itself: its message, if you will. For this reason Brautigan's major work, like Brecht's Threepenny Opera, holds for me a powerful allure. Both works, and a selection of others that do not represent the mainstream in literature, provide excellent examples of how ends and means can demonstrably reinforce one another and become a univocal expression of a work's activist purpose, regardless of whether that purpose is subversive or not.

      I am not so naive to imagine that I am somehow immune to conventional beliefs, or biases engendered in me by forces beyond my own control and knowledge. I am sure, for instance, that an enormous amount of "received wisdom" finds its way into my writing and into the positions I adopt and promulgate through it. What is most important is not that I focus all of my energies on purifying my writing of all such corrupt elements, for in the end this would be an impossible task and accordingly I would never write anything. What is not only important but essential, to modify a turn of phrase from Henry David Thoreau, is that I do not lend myself consciously to the evils I condemn.

      There in a nutshell is what I see as my mission and purpose as a writer.

     Beyond articulating this point, I feel obliged to admit that I have always resisted self-analysis when it comes to the most essential qualities of my own writing (i.e., beyond the merely mechanical or technical aspects of the writing product), as I find myself doing in large measure now. The truth of the matter is that I'm very superstitious about my work, particularly about the process(es) by which it is created, to a degree that I am not in just about every other facet of my life.

      I have always been willing to grant to my imagination an almost mystical quality, a certain intangible indecipherability, even to myself. Accordingly I am extremely loath to probe its workings too deeply, as if doing so would dispel a magic that can only work as long as I remain ignorantly faithful of its existence. What makes this all the more amazing is that I consider myself a sober pragmatist. I remember as a teenager consciously turning my back on the Catholic Church, whose doctrines and tactics of indoctrination had been the specters of my childhood, and ever since I made that choice I have lived my life according to an overriding principle of sobriety and self-candor.

      Why then is my conception of my own imaginative process seemingly immune to this overriding principle? How can the idea of its enigmatic inviolability continue to hold such sway over me, as if it were sacrosanct? Perhaps it is one of my necessary fictions. The cynic in me is certainly willing to grant this possibility, at the same time that the hopeful believer is unwilling to put it to the test. It may be far from a coincidence that the age which saw me turn my back abruptly on my religion also witnessed my first conscious attempts to express myself in writing for more than mere communication purposes, and at no one's bidding but my own.

      Was I acting (and do I still?) on a primal need to place unquestioning faith in something larger than myself, and merely transferring it from one system of belief to another? Quite possibly. But in truth, I do not know. Certainly my forays into the realm of the imaginative through my writing did not hold for me the same negative associations as the Catholic culture of my youth. In fact, if anything, quite the opposite--they were usually liberating and empowering. So I may have had less reason, or need, to question something that simply worked for me. But even if that were true then, it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I hold it to be incontrovertibly so now. In the years since I wrote my first stories and poems, I have come to understand that there are times when the imagination fails us. The result for me, at such times, has frequently been an unaccountable and nearly overwhelming sense of dread, powerlessness and lack of purpose.

      The rush of positive emotion that accompanies working on a story, poem or essay whose pieces fall into place almost effortlessly, as it were, has a terrible counterpart. Over the years my sense of personal well being has often been so tied to my imaginative vitality (as realized through my writing) that when the latter appeared to be absent I would slip into a despair that was unlike any I had ever experienced. I struggled for many years with this problem and in the end I found a few ways of coping with, if not overcoming it. One of these ways was to distance myself from both my writing and my writing self--in effect to give myself a vacation from the idea that I had to write.

      Doing this meant, of course. that I had to find new ways of envisioning myself, of defining myself, as well as new ways of enjoying life. I can't say that this has solved the problem, since for me it is an ongoing concern that may or may not resurface on a case-by-case basis with each new writing project I undertake. What I have managed to do, however, is to cultivate interests and relationships that alleviate the despair and give me a sense of purpose that isn't dependent on the writing life, and most of the time these are enough to see me through the dark periods. I'd like to think that they are more than stop-gap solutions, and I believe that the most important of these--my relationship with my wife, Jenny--truly is.

      Another very important approach I have taken to this problem may well figure prominently--indeed, it probably does--into the almost mystical deference I grant the imaginative process in writing. Namely, I have come to feel comfortable with the idea that the imagination and its workings are indeed enigmatic, or at least beyond my own rational grasp in any comprehensive sense. If I have learned anything from the thousands of hours I have spent working on my stories, it is that I cannot depend on the same thing working twice. At any give time I may sit down with what seems by any objective standard the same energy, emotional readiness and alertness of mind that attended my work on a story or article that fell into place on one occasion and achieve exactly the opposite results; or more tantalizing yet--I may achieve not the opposite, but still vastly different results. What this tells me about my own mind is that it is unpredictable to such a degree that any systematic attempt to find or impose order on its modus operandi might be frustrating and energy-wasting to the point of paralysis or despair.

      I cannot but wonder if even this is one of my necessary fictions. The thing about necessary fictions is that they are indeed necessary, and out of this necessity the fiction gives us what we need to keep going. A new necessity that arises from my growth as a person and as a writer may in time bring about a new fiction. If that fiction, like this one, gives me a lease on something essential--be it my sanity, my sense of purpose or well-being, or merely the task at hand--I will not fight it, and I will not dissect it like some Emersonian fossil poem. I will let it do its work and get on with the business of doing mine, which is my way, however imperfect, of being alive in this world.

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