Unconscious Deliberateness (part 2)

Writing anything at all is a sweeping oversimplification of our inner life and of the complexities of the world outside us, yet it is also the making of an object.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau described thinking in this way: “[Ideas] comes when they please, not when it suits me.  Either they do not come at all, or they come in a swarm, overwhelming me with their strength and their numbers.  Ten volumes a day [of my journals] would not have been enough.  How could I have time to write them?”   The pell-mell helter-skelter of thought can never be grasped adequately by the conscious mind, much less represented in written form, not even in the most freely associative stream-of-consciousness fiction, because writing must reveal itself in the dimensions of time and language, while thought achieves many simultaneities and a rapid succession of thoughts and feelings that are not even fully articulated, much less organized in such a way as to be communicated to anyone else.

“We’re too unconsciously productive to ever be able to fully grasp ourselves,” as the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas puts it (my italics).  How still are the plans and projects and categories and analysis of the intellect, compared to the pitching and running of the whole mind!  Consciousness is one rider on all the racing horses of the unconscious; when we must analyze words and events and defend ourselves against the manipulation of our feelings by others, it is consciousness that guides us; and when we must seek in our own being that which really matters to us, it is the unconscious that holds the lamp.  Yet consciousness is often insufficient to these tasks.  Hence our need to learn, from parents, and the best teachers, and all mentors official and unofficial, how to analyze, how to reason, how to sort out what is real and true and how to make decisions in the midst of our reactions to rushing circumstances, conflicting loyalties, deliberate lying and spinning, and all kinds of crisis.

So our experience of writing is twofold–the hope of expressing something that will satisfy our impulse to speak what is true to and of ourselves and true to our experience of the world, and the hope of making something that will gratify our pleasure in shape and proportion, rhythm and sound, movement and pace.  (And perhaps, in some writers, pleasures, whether questionable or merely artful, of manipulating readers.)  When we as writers can trust not only reason but also an intuition that somehow is honest, then we can manage to hear as much as possible of what intuition is saying, since it has already spoken in our drafts.  Bollas writes that “the sense of intuition” leads us “to consciously authorize certain forms of investigation in thought which are not consciously logical but which may be unconsciously productive” (1994, 90).  What is the complex way of thinking that is writing fiction or poetry, if not precisely that?

The novelist Cyrus Colter (1910-2002) once told me a down-to earth version of all this.  Colter–whose family might have been the only blacks in the whole white country where Colter grew up in southern Indiana–moved to Chicago after college, put himself through law school by working as the night clerk at a YMCA on the South Side, practiced–as he said–any kind of law he could, and eventually achieved great professional distinction as a long-time member of the Illinois Commerce Commission.  Having been a tremendous reader of fiction all his life, he began to write when he was fifty.  He published his first book, the superb collection of short stories, The Beach Umbrella, at the age of sixty, and went on to write several novels, among which The Hippodrome is the most shocking and astonishing and A Chocolate Soldier is his masterwork of narration of the hard truths of race in America.

I first met him in 1984, when he was seventy-four years old.  His wife had died earlier that year, and the sorrow of that loss never left him afterward.  When I asked him, perhaps five years later, what his wife–who was, to judge from his descriptions of her, a more conventional person than he–had said about his books, he replied that he had never shown a new work to her until he had completed it, and then only with some trepidation.  Colter was tall, imperious, a talker with considerable momentum, so I was surprised at the caution with which he had gone to the now departed Imogene for her response to his writing.  Given the inescapably autobiographical dimension of everything we write–precisely in this sense of the unconscious that I am trying to describe, in that everything we write shows at some level what our obsessions and preoccupations are–I had been wondering how Colter had handled the sometimes ticklish problem of personal diplomacy between the writer and the members of his family.  He said that Imogene, having read the typescript, would return it to him and, if he had done what he hoped, she would say the one thing–he told me–that he most needed to hear, most needed to know, and which at the same time removed from her the burden of commenting in detail: “Cyrus,” she would say, “it’s you.”

That is to say that the novel, no matter what it described, conveyed (as she recognized, looking with her whole being, conscious and unconscious) his whole being (not only the lawyerly competence, propriety and combativeness by which others knew him, his affability or imperiousness with others, his literary ambitions).  He had the gift of knowing himself more fully than he might have been thought to know himself, even by close friends.  Without this, even with his late-blooming literary craft and his preparatory wide lifelong reading, his accomplishment would have been minor.  He used all of what he had.

While the lattermath harvest of grass is scanty, the aftermath of experience and feeling can be rich.  It is only afterward that we have enough to work with.  Wordsworth’s well-known phrase “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is accurate enough, if by “emotion” we understand every sort of feeling and thought, even–perhaps especially–the body’s sense of what it experiences: what it knows, what it remembers, beyond consciousness, and every such fleeting feeling and thought whether or not we have a name for it; and if by “recollected” we mean simply having been preserved within us in such a way as to remain available to us, in some form or other, whether we try to remember it and do, or it comes to consciousness without our trying to remember it at all, or it reveals itself to us only through an arduous and even traumatic process of self-inquiry; and by “in tranquillity” we mean at least sometime after the activity of body and mind that is experience itself.

But I must end with a reminder of the deep pleasure of writing.  It may not be the kind of pleasure that makes one smile.  It may be a pleasure that seems to satisfy us most when we are least on guard against our worst tendencies as writers (which vary, naturally enough, from writer to writer).  Pleasure it is, though.   Pleasure–however desperate, at moments, for reasons personal, psychological, artistic, or political–of catching hold of, or creating out of imagination, the language and the image for what we sense, see, know, and feel.

Here is a link to my interview with Theodore Weiss, which was published in American Poetry Review in the May/June issue of 2001.  Weiss was born in 1916 and died in 2003.  Ted, along with his wife Renée, edited the Quarterly Review of Literature for more than 50 years, carrying it from the 1940s, when there were very few literary magazines, through the great flowering of lit mags in the 1960s and 1970s, and into our own moment.  After Ted’s death, Renée ceased publication of the magazine and began work–in which she is still active–at filling in library collections that are missing volumes of the magazine in their collections.  Since there is no other American literary magazine that comes close to representing the literary history of the nation between the 1940s and the millenium, the QRL is a uniquely valuable element in any library collection.  Many extraordinary poets, fiction writers and other writers, and many extraordinary works, published by QRL during its long active span, are not represented in current anthologies, which typically are the manifestation of publishers’ marketing research or at least hunches than of attempts to a sense of what really did happen in American literary history.  Hayden Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, a poetry anthology that in breaking this rule reveals how pervasive it is, still shows us how much we are missing in our everyday sense of where American poetry has been.

When I became the editor of TriQuarterly magazine in 1981, it was the example of Ted and Renée that was uppermost in my mind, and stayed very much in mind till I left the editorship in 1997.

My interview with Ted Weiss was less about the magazine, though, than about his own writing and his sense of poetry in general.  He was one of the greatest talkers about poetry I have even encountered, especially in the 1990s when he had the longest view of it, looking back at his own work and the work of his contemporaries.  Among his own poems (which can be found in his Selected Poems (Northwestern University Pres, 1995), I especially recommend:

“The Dance Called David” (and see the special issue of QRL from the 1980s on the figure at the center of this poem, the remarkable poet David Schubert, who burned himself out in one way or another and died young)

“The Last Day and the First”

“The Heir Apparent”

“The Last Letters”

“Things of the Past”

“The Polish Question”

“A Living Room”

“The Death of Fathers”

Here’s the link (you may have to cut and paste it in your browser):

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200105/ai_n8945900

Sandi Wisenberg is the faculty adviser for The OLLI Journal, which is the annual literary magazine of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern. She wrote this at the request of the new editor. You can find more information about the Journal and read the latest issue at http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/olli/journal. She is the co-director of the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program at NU. Her third book is The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa Press, 2009), nonfiction that Bookslut called “damned funny” and “far more selfless than most illness memoirs.”

What is good writing?

First, a caveat: There are a few works that everyone agrees are good—such as the plays of Shakespeare. But it’s easy to find disagreement about most other literary efforts. For example, the 1980 Atlantic Monthly reviewer of Raymond Carver’s (now classic) story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, wrote: “There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”

So, what criteria should The Journal editors use? I’ve come up with some attributes of good writing. They’re not exhaustive. And you may disagree with them. I’ve also provided examples and definitions you can find on line. Just click twice on the URLs.

Good writing has fresh language. The words are not trite or cliched. If there’s repetition, it’s deliberate and artful—to make a point, for emphasis, to please the reader’s “ear.” There’s a mix of rhythms in the sentences—OK, except for Hemingway. Great writing also helps you see the world in a new way, by the writer’s perceptions.

Most successful pieces inform the reader how to read the piece. For example, an essay with a light beginning “tells” or signals the reader that the rest of the piece will follow suit. If the tone changes dramatically, the reader will be confused. If a piece begins realistically, the reader will expect the rest of the piece to be realistic (unless the author manages to ease the reader into the unreal).

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

PROSE:

1. Realistic stories, memoirs and travel pieces

Novelist John Gardner said that readers “recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language…” Good writing should be smooth and consistent and detailed enough so that the reader isn’t jerked out of her “dream” while reading it. For example, if a writer gets the reader used to reading about people sitting in a kitchen for two pages, and then the writer suddenly shifts the venue without a transition, the reader will probably be jerked out of the “dream.” That said, some writing works by juxtaposition and association, and the reader is expected to pause between segments.

In a realistic short story or memoir, the reader knows where the characters are in time and space, is given enough information so that she can imagine the setting.

Dialogue should sound natural, and the characters should sound at least slightly different from one another. Dialogue should reveal character, move the story forward and show relationships. It shouldn’t be expository. (“Remember the time we went to the beach?” “Oh yes, I remember–we went with my husband Joe and your husband Moe and your three children. It was before Moe left to join the circus.”)

Main characters should be round—as contradictory as the people you know well. Beware of stereotypes, unless you’re writing fables..

Action should emanate from character. Beginning writers often force action or revelation. In a good short story, every action should feel inevitable.

Language should be consistent. If a piece begins conversationally, then it should be conversational all the way through—unless there’s a specific reason for it to change. Again, if the diction changes abruptly for no good reason, the reader will wonder what’s going on.

A classic short story with a very close third-person narrator is Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss.” You can search for it at http://www.short-stories.co.uk/. Find classic American stories at: www.americanliterature.com/ss/ssindx.html..

Then there’s flash fiction or short-shorts. You can read about them here and scroll down for a list of anthologies: http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/flash.shtml. I’m partial to Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces, edited by Mark Mills, for reasons that will become obvious if you examine the table of contents. Another site: http://www.quickfiction.org/

Memoir usually consists of a story, plus reflection on the meaning of the event, or on the way the writer’s view of the event has changed.

There should be some shift, however subtle, from beginning to end. The shift could be in mood, circumstances, opinion. It could be a shift from isolation to community.

The best travel pieces provide vivid descriptions of people and places, while telling a story of an interior journey or awakening or change of perception. Here’s a fairly short, straight-forward but quirky travel piece: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E1D61439F931A25752C1A963958260.

2. Non-realistic prose

In a recent review-essay in the New York Review of Books, novelist Zadie Smith wrote about the tiredness of “lyrical Realism.” Of a new realistic novel she says, “It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.”

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083>

As an alternative, Smith writes about metafiction, mentioning Donald Barthelme. (Choose from many of his pieces here: <www.jessamyn.com/barth/>.) There are also fables, fantasy, science fiction, as well as work that’s mythic, surreal, absurd. Here’s Stacey Richter’s recent “The Land of Pain,” which is unrealistic but to my lights, truthful: <www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/archives/richter.pdf>. The problem with some fantasy and science fiction is that the characters and plots are generic. That’s why literary magazine editors sometimes ban them; it’s easier to condemn them all than to go through many bad submissions. But then they might miss a story by someone like Borges: <www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_links.html>

Here’s a short fable by Kafka: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4855051/A-Little-Fable.

3. Essays

Consummate essayist Phillip Lopate says that an essay shows the mind at work. Writers are expected to use exposition in an essay. The best essays are explorations and are not polemical. The essay can digress, as long as the digressions are interesting.

What is interesting? There’s the rub.

Here is an essay by Lopate, which is about what many memoir writers fail to do:

<www.philliplopate.com/reflection.html>. The essay-review is another form of the essay, where the writer explores a topic, using books for fodder. Here’s Lopate again, writing about another great nonfiction writer, Edmund Wilson: http://www.philliplopate.com/wilson.html

Then there’s the lyric essay, a term coined by the editors of The Seneca Review: <http://web.hws.edu/academics/community/senecareview/lyricessay.asp>. And there’s an online magazine that publishes all kinds of nonfictions under 750 words: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity. You’ll also find reviews, interviews and craft essays on the site.

POETRY

What is poetry? According to about.com, “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary.”

Poetry is condensed, compressed language. Line breaks should be deliberate and should enhance the poem. Every word needs to be the exact word. As W. H. Auden said, “Poetry is memorable speech.” As Janet Burroway writes in Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, “Because poetry attempts to produce an emotional response through heightened evocation of the senses, imagery holds a central place among its techniques.” Also, poetry is the natural home for metaphor.

You can find a wealth of poems at www.poets.org, which is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. You can also search for literary movements from Acmeism to Slam to Victorian.

There is a hybrid, very similar to the lyric essay: the prose poem. Poets.org defines the prose poem thusly: “While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.” Read more about the prose poem here: <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5787>.

I hope that reading some of these examples will get you thinking about what you can accomplish in your own writing. Remember, too, that most good writing is re-writing. Many writers will tell you that their first drafts are rough, undeveloped and unpublishable.

On Friday evening, April 3, the Chilean poet Raúl ZURITA, with his translator Daniel Borzutzky, gave a reading in Chicago.

Zurita and Borzutzky, both in excellent voice in an auditorium that seemed perfect for the event and with a very good audience, read from the original and Borzutzky’s translation of Zurita’s Canto a su amor desparecido, alternating short passages in Spanish and English.  Both poet and translator read with an intensity, clarity and rhythm of exchange back and forth that created a remarkable third thing between them, a kind of dialogue of Spanish and English ways of saying, in addition to the dialogue between the precise words of Zurita’s Spanish original and the very good translation.

The poem itself is a surreal translation into both possible and also impossible imagery of unspeakable and nearly unsayable experiences of imprisonment, torture and murder, of powerlessness and sorrow and spiritual destruction, yet also of enduring and holding onto one’s humanity, during the brazen dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet was the army general who, with secret encouragement and backing from the CIA, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, had already been hounding the socialist president, Salvador Allende, and mounted a coup in 1973, attacking with tanks and troops the Presidential Palace, where Allende and his staff had small arms.  Allende committed suicide in the building.  Thousands of persons died and suffered in the days and months and years following, as Pinochet directed a campaign of extralegal imprisonment, torture and execution.

In this Song of the Disappeared Love Zurita finds a way to write a dirge about such overwhelming experiences of violence and injustice.  He mixes some words referring to such realities with others that make of the experience a surreal composite of the real and the unreal, the symbolic and the fantastic.

Poetry is a very insubstantial form of resistance to injustice.  It restores no independence of the judiciary; it is no defense against state thugs at the door and in the street; it can create no systems of defense of persons against a police state.  And poetry has no inherent value: or rather, it carries within itself inherently the potential for the subtlest values of the possibilities of language, and for speaking the truth of human experience in memorable ways.  But after all, the Confederate States of America had patriotic poets, as did Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain.  Yet as in samizdat circulation in Eastern Europe under Soviet domination, when poets write of humane values, when the very act of continuing to write and read poetry–as dictatorship enforces submission and generates hopelessness–is itself a preservation of something humane among darker human possibilities.  At such moments, poetry can serve as a deep restitution and preservation of honorable ideals and of language itself in the midst of the systematic destruction of these by dictatorship whether of the right or left.

I think that this kind of inspiring feat, from Zurita’s 1980s, is what moved the audience as Zurita, assisted by Borzutsky, gave voice to his poetry.

After the reading, Zurita answered questions from the audience, with Borzutzky serving as live translator back and forth for Zurita or the audience as questioners spoke in both Spanish and English.

Brief biographies of poet and translator had been provided on line by the sponsor of the event, The Guild Complex, a  literary center with small footprint and great perseverance (on whose board I have served since it was founded in 1989).  This event was part of an ongoing series of bilingual English/Spanish poetry readings in the Guild Complex series “Palabra Pura,” founded by Mike Puican.  And the welcome and introductions Friday night were given by Ellen Wadey, the Executive Director of the Guild Complex.  Here are the biographical notes:

Raul Zurita was born in Santiago, Chile in 1951. He started out studying mathematics before turning to poetry. His early work is a ferocious response to Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Like many other Chileans, Zurita was arrested and tortured. When he was released, he helped to form a radical artistic group CADA, and he became renowned for his provocative and intensely physical public performances. In the early 80’s, Zurita famously sky-wrote passages from his poem, “The New Life,” over Manhattan and later (still during the reign of Pinochet) he bulldozed the phrase “Ni Pena Ni Miedo” (”Without Pain Or Fear”) into the Atacama Desert, where it can still be seen because children in the neighboring town bring shovels into the desert and turn over the sand in the letters. For fifteen years, Zurita worked on a trilogy which is considered one of the signal poetic achievements in Latin American poetry: Purgatory appeared in 1979, Ante-paradise in 1982, and The New Life in 1993. Raul Zurita is one of the most renowned contemporary Latin American poets, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Poetry Prize of Chile. Translations of Purgatory and Anteparadise were published in the United States in the 80’s. Three new books, INRI, translated by William Rowe; Song of the Disappeared Love, translated by Daniel Borzutzky; and Purgatory, translated by Anna Deeny; are forthcoming from, respectively, Merick Press, Action Books, and The University of California Press.  Zurita’s books of poems include, among others: El Sermon de la Montana; Areas Verdes; Purgatorio; Anteparadiso; El Paraiso Esta Vacio – Canto a Su Amor, Desaparecido, El Amor de Chile, La Vida Nueva, In Memoriam

Daniel Borzutzky’s books include The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007), Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005), and the chapbooks One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull Press, 2007). Daniel’s family comes from Chile, and his translation work has focused on Chilean writers. He is the translator of, among other works, Song for his Disappeared Love by Raul Zurita (Forthcoming, Action Books); Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenún (Action Books, 2008); and One Year and other stories by Juan Emar, which was published as a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Daniel’s writings and translations have appeared in dozens of print and online journals. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the English Department at Wright College.

Unconscious Deliberateness (part 1)

When we work as writers in a state of openness of imagination, when we are responsive enough to allow what we see, both outside and within ourselves, to evoke feeling in us, and when we seek to discover within ourselves–beyond anxiety, trauma, enthusiasm, intense feelings of other kinds, and the sheer bafflement of writing, itself–what we had not known we knew or felt, then we are able to use more of the guiding power of our own unconscious to encounter both the world and ourselves.  We are able to discover more than we could using only our conscious minds.  And when we work that way we also are able to create poetry and fiction that is more deliberately woven together, making choices that are more artistically deliberate and meaningful rather than somewhat haphazard or by writers’ rules of thumb.  The pleasures of weaving that we feel when we work are then felt by the good reader.

Anyway, to think that we are working without the active participation of our unconscious is folly–no one is able with only conscious intent to produce great writing.  There is too much to manage, especially in longer works, and every power of intuition is necessary if we are to succeed. Not only that, but the conscious mind is unable to block out unconscious content, so it is going into what we write whether we know it or not.  So the question becomes, How do I use my own individual intuition, my range of responsiveness, my unconscious choices?  And what can I achieve if I try to do this?

Here is one illustration of supreme emotional depth and supreme craft united in a paragraph of prose.  The English title of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu is a Shakespearean phrase, Remembrance of Things Past (from sonnet XXX).  But properly translated into English the title would have been something as straightforward as “in search of lost times.”  Lost times exist only in our psyche, and this recherche, this search, by the way, is also our re-searching as writers–that is, our moving over the field after the harvest, searching once more, this time not for what was already harvested but for what has come back again and for what was left behind.

At the beginning of Proust’s first volume, called in English Swann’s Way, the first episode is a very prolonged account, astonishing in many ways, of an evening in the narrator’s childhood when his habitual emotional need for, his dependance on, a goodnight kiss every night from his young, beautiful mother, was thwarted by the presence of a dinner guest, M. Swann.  Events and characters are described with extraordinary richness of detail and symbol and psychological insight, and the plot advances only very slowly, as the narrator recalls his strategems for getting that kiss, on that evening both remembered and imagined, despite the intrusive presence of the guest, despite his mother’s reluctance to indulge him, and despite his father’s intolerance for the boy’s life of feeling and his neediness.  The parents finally come upstairs–mother first, whom the boy ambushes with his pleas, followed by father, holding a candle.  And the boy bursts into tears.

This is the crucial, initiating moment of the whole three thousand pages of Proust’s multi-volume novel.  Something is established in this experience of thwarted hope and desire, and then in the sudden and unexpected rewarding of this hope and desire, that sets the course of the whole work. Helene Cixous, the French writer and thinker, points out that in this scene the rewarding of desire leads not to triumph but to an unanticipated feeling of loss, because in finally being awarded, by the father, the presence of his mother, the boy gets her only against her will, and thus he defeats the one person whose love he needed to receive without asking for it.  In the reflective passage that follows this scene, this contradiction in feeling is drawn out by the narrator, and Cixous has also drawn our attention to the culminating poetic figure here–the moment in which child, father and mother are configured in a tableau which establishes the tears of the child not only in that moment but for the rest of his life.  Clearly these pages of Proust are richly woven with the most complicated feelings in the characters, at all levels of their psyches.  I want to point to a little technical effect in the same passage.

I translate Proust’s sentences pretty literally, and not very idiomatically in English, for a reason I’ll get to in a moment (and perhaps readers with even a little French, having first scanned this translation, will be able to follow Proust’s original text, which I will put afterwards):

It has been a good many years since all that.  The stairway wall, where I saw the reflection of his candle come rising, does not exist, since long ago.  In me also a good number of things have been destroyed that I believed ought to last forever, and new things are built which gave birth to new pain and joy which I would not have been able to foresee, before, just as much as the old ones became difficult for me to understand.  It has been a good long time also since my father stopped being able to say to mother, “Go along with the little one.”  The possibility of those hours will never be reborn, for me.  But after a while, I begin again to perceive, if I give a good ear to them, the sobs which I had the strength to contain before my father and which did not burst forth except when I found myself alone with mother.  In reality they never did stop; it’s only because life hushes now all around me that I hear them again, like those convent bells that the noises of the town cover so well during the day that one believed them stopped, but which sound out again in the silence of the night.

Il y a bien des années de cela.  La muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps.  En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours et de nouvelles se sont édifiées donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n’aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.  Il y a bien longtemps aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: «Va avec le petit.»  La possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi.  Mais depuis peu de temps, je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvai seul avec maman.  En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arrêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.  (Du côté de chez Swann: Combray)

We see the emotional trauma behind this narrative moment.  My sense of this passage is the following: the adult narrator is struck by what he sees within himself, by his in-sight–as he looks within; or is within and looks around him, there.  At this moment of perceiving what he has already described, of extending the consciousness of narration to the consciousness of aftermath, he understands that like the silence of convent (not church!) bells that is only apparent, not real, because they are drowned out by daytime noise, the long-ago sobbing of his childhood, which he had unspoken permission to release only in the presence of his mother, never did stop. but has only been drowned out by the noise of later, adult life, by his own later history both inner and social.  This already mown field, we enter by night.  And by night the movement, the insight, the discoveries, the knowledge, of the unconscious is as vivid as the watchfulness of the conscious mind by day.  By night, literally–in that in dreams and in the transition from sleep to waking and waking to sleep the unconscious speaks most clearly to the conscious mind–and by night, metaphorically, in that, at whatever hour we write, when we draw on the unconscious we make a kind of night of the day.

*

The reason for my wanting to provide a more or less word-for-word translation of the French is to create a reiteration in English of the adjective “good,” which is the best I can do, to match the French adverb “bien,” which because of the necessities of English-language syntax I am having to translate colloquially and awkwardly.  I want to do this so that we can perceive in English not only that the narrator’s sobs are like the nighttime ringing of the convent bells (and vice versa),  but also that he himself as writer rings these bells in his sentences by using the word “bien” five times.  In the passages before and after this one, the word appears only once or twice over a few hundred words–that is, at a more expected frequency.  And I would have liked in the last sentence of the translation to have echoed the narrator’s last use of “bien” with the English “good,” although it would have required me to distort the syntax into something like “the convent bells are good-and-covered by the noises of the town.”  But we’ll leave the problems translation as a topic for some other occasion!

My describing an aspect of craft so unmistakable, which yet seems too subtle to have been deliberately calculated, is for the purpose of giving an example of the working of unconscious deliberateness.  I don’t assume that Proust inserted those repetitions of “bien” consciously, but that he did so with unconscious deliberateness.  Proust’s passage exemplifies a synthesizing power which, at least in his case, directs every aspect of craft toward the one goal of the emotional and rhetorical richness of the portrayal of one moment of feeling.

(Someone will object: How do you know Proust didn’t set up that ringing bell of the word “bien” deliberately.  My answer: Yes, it is most certainly deliberate; there is no other way to account for its aptness and meaningfulness–yet conscious deliberateness alone can never create all the effects one finds in such a paragraph, much less in a whole page, a whole chapter, a whole novel.  There is simply too much to do.  One can’t do it with conscious deliberateness any more than a musician can play a difficult work in the key of B while having to consciously remember that the B scale includes D-sharp.  Nor does the musician need to remember that.  That knowledge, along with knowledge of phrasing, dynamics, and so on–and like Proust’s knowledge of syntax, image, and so on–has been absorbed into the highly trained musicianship that is required of a serious musician–like Proust’s highly trained…  what?  We don’t seem to have a word for what, in the writer, corresponds to “musicianship.”)

Since I am not gifted with Proust’s extraordinary powers of concentration and synthesis, then one of my tasks is to discover how as a writer I can at least bring certain aspects of this unconscious deliberateness to consciousness, so that I can discover on the field of my own experience the hints and clues of my unconsciousness feeling.  So I can glean those hints and clues from what my unconscious has left on the pages of my draft, and let them seize my conscious attention.  Just as the mouse, which anyone else might never have even noticed, or if noticing, might never have pondered, becomes for John Clare the object that, once acknowledged, releases his feeling.