Some of us know full well that all we know really how to do is write. I mean it just comes naturally to us; not at first maybe. Ralph Ellison thought all he really knew how to do was play the trumpet at first. Then it hit him: he found out really all he knew was how to write. When all you know how to do is write then all you should ever do is write whether you're successful or not. Writing comes first as tributes to great victories by great rulers--kings, generals, the supermen, as Nietzsche wrote tons of hard-to-read stuff on, so hung up in his own nihilistic religion he, too, became an antisuperman. Some writers began to write satirically about these royal legends and soon some writers began to stretch their imaginations from the heights of heavens to the very pits of the deepest hell (the core of the earth of course is fire)--and then women got into writing--the Brontes, George Sand, George Elliott, by Georges, even Shelley's wife became a successful writer with her novel of man's concept of himself as a monster--but I'm transcending my Ellison-level view of "art by its nature [being] social."
Ralph Ellison continuing: "Art by its nature is social. And while the artist can determine within a certain narrow scope the type of social effect he wishes his art to create, here his will is definitely limited. Once introduced into society, the work of art begins to pulsate with those meanings, emotions, ideas brought to it by its audience and over which the artist has but limited control. The irony of the 'lost generation' writers [Hemingway, etc.] is that while disavowing a social role it was the fate of their works to perform a social function which re-enforced those very social values which they most violently opposed. How could this be? Because in its genesis the work of art, like the stereotype, is personal; psychologically it represents the socialization of some profoundly personal problem involving guilt (often symbolic murder--parricide, fratricide--incest, homosexuality, all problems at the base of personality) from which by expressing them along with other elements (images, memories, emotions, ideas) he seeks transcendence." [Pages 38, 39, Shadow and Act, 1994.]
That's a powerful paragraph of good-ass writing. And I love that it all leads to a transcendence--aha, how wonderfully American this transcendence stuff is! Ellison interrupts me: "To be effective as personal fulfillment, if it is to be more than dream, the work of art must simultaneously evoke images of reality and give them formal organization. And it must, since the individual's emotions are formed in society, shape them into socially meaningful patterns (even Surrealism and Dadaism depended upon their initiates)." [Page 39, Shadow and Act.]
So Ellison says that Hemingway wrote novels in which his main characters fought hard against religion and war and death and cruelty and yet the power of his writing about these things made those things the "thing" to do in order to emulate that "fun" life Hemingway was really elevating while putting it down. Hemingway was trying to transcend the life he was addicted to--as he said, he was trying to knock out Mr. Shakespeare, but Mr. Shakespeare was a tough cookie to deck--in Hemingway's case, impossible to deck; therefore the solution to all of Hemingway's personal defeats as told in his best novels--The Sun Also Rises--a good-looking American writer who all the women throw themselves at except this poor soul's had his pecker shot off in WWI, on the battlefields of Italy--the battlefields on which Hemingway himself was injured--as told in A Farewell to Arms (whose lead paragraph is some of the best writing ever done), an American who is an Italian lieutenant who falls in love with a nurse while recuperating in the hospital--it all ends in her dying giving birth to his bastard child--or how about The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway's Moby Dick, where an old Cuban fisherman who's an American baseball fan goes out alone in his small boat to take on the largest marlin ever caught by man--a fish so big it would mean this old fisherman could live like a king for a year maybe--yet though he conquers the fish and lashes it to the side of his boat, by the time he gets back to shore the sharks have eaten most of the fish leaving only the skeleton--and to Hemingway, the only solution to that kind of heroism in the face of sure defeat is suicide. [That guy A. Alvarez, by the bye, wrote a great book on suicide called The Savage God--using the American prep-school girl poet, Sylvia Plath (she drank a glass of milk before putting her head in her oven), as his study. Alvarez says being very creative may also mean you may be extremely suicidal.]
Ellison says writers write in order to free themselves. That's good. I like that. Sure that's why writer's write. Writers aren't reporters; that's why great journalists don't necessarily make great writers; yes, Hemingway was a journalist but not by intention but for economic reasons. He became a journalist after he already knew he was a writer who had to write.
And one last quote from Ellison: "For man without myth is Othello with Desdemona gone: chaos descends, faith vanishes and superstitions prowl in the mind." [Page 41, Shadow and Act.] I know my old writing pal Philip Wylie would agree with that statement.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
Stay and Fight for Your American Rights [Impeach Bush's Whole Administration] or Would You Maybe Wanna Flee the Joint While the Gettin's Good?
You know how both times Bush stole an election, people said they would move to Canada? Apparently it wasn’t an idle threat.
The number of U.S. citizens who moved to Canada last year hit a 30-year high, with a 20 percent increase over the previous year and almost double the number who moved in 2000.
In 2006, 10,942 Americans went to Canada, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000…
Not only that, fewer Canadians want to be in America.
Last year, 23,913 Canadians moved to the United States, a significant decrease from 29,930 in 2005.
No doubt many of those making good on the threat we have all uttered are from places already Canada-ish, like Seattle and Fargo and Portland(s). Those of us further south have a little harder time with the whole concept of frozen things. Still, our country is losing some of its best and brightest.
“Those who are coming have the highest level of education — these aren’t people who can’t get a job in the states,” [Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies] says. “They’re coming because many of them don’t like the politics, the Iraq War and the security situation in the U.S. By comparison, Canada is a tension-free place. People feel safer.”
Would you have ever thought you’d understand — and agree — with that statement?
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