For a writer to reenter the world he has written about is no small feat. At the least, it is a peculiar exercise, even uncanny — like Kierkegaard going out into the street every hour during work and blinking at the shopkeepers. At the worst, it proves impossible, issuing in the familiar catastrophes to which writers fall prey.
Thought Experiment: A deductive-empirical exercise, something like Mendeleev’s project of deducing the periodic table of the elements, then looking around to see if there are actual elements which fit in the table.
This enjoyable exercise is the deduction of the various possible reentry modes of the artist-writer or reader-viewer from the semiotic options theoretically available to any person so abstracted from the world.
The experiment: Start with the world, that is, the same somewhat deranged place which everyone experiences in more or less the same degree. The world is the aggregate of your perceived environment encoded by signs: other people, family, house, marketplace, culture, myth, TV, past, future, and God as more or less real depending on whether you are an unbeliever or a believer, and even if the latter, then God as more or less problematical.
Next, there is the self, the individual conscious artist-writer reader-viewer self, the movable piece in the world, like a token in a Monopoly game.
The problem for the movable piece: How do you go about living in the world when you are not working at your art, yet still find yourself having to get through a Wednesday afternoon?
Note: This game can be played by artists and writers or by non-artists and non-writers, in fact by all true denizens of the age, that is, any person in the culture who feels himself orbiting the world, out of the here-and-now, out of life in a place and a time, and experiencing difficulty with reentry into such a life.
In order to understand the purpose of the exercise and be instructed by it, let us make the following assumptions which are probably more true than false but which at any rate I will not take the trouble to defend: that the present world is in some sense deranged, the center is not holding, that the plight of the self of the artist-writer is at least in part a historical phenomenon and not an essential property of being an artist-writer; that there may have been other times and other places, whether one wishes to call them an age of faith or an age of myth, in which men perceived a saving relationship to God, the Cosmos, the world, and each other. In such times the self did not feel displaced, or if it did, it understood its displacement. The artist-writer did not, presumably, feel the same compulsion to assert his individual genius-self as would the artist today. It did not, presumably, occur to the Chartres sculptor to sign his name on the toe of an apostle he had finished on the West Portal. (Or to the Lascaux Cave painter.) Though he was a sinful man like other men and subject to certain whims and antics, he would not, presumably, have understood the nineteenth-century English poet who utters a cry: “O world! O life! O time!” and sails out in the Bay of Naples to a suicide by drowning. Or the twentieth-century American novelist riding trains through the haunted towns of America and writing: “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”
Options of reentry into such a world are: (1) reentry uneventful and intact, (2) reentry accomplished through anesthesia, (3) reentry accomplished by travel (geographical), (4) reentry accomplished by travel (sexual), (5) reentry by return, (6) reentry by disguise, (7) reentry by Eastern window, (8) reentry refused, exitus into deep space (suicide), (9) reentry deferred, (10) reentry by sponsorship, (11) reentry by assault.
Object of experiment: to discover (1) which option you prefer and (2) which option is in fact open to you.
Explanation of Options:
(1) Successful and uneventful reentry, self intact. Theoretically, it is possible for the abstracted self to reenter the world as easily as a doctor leaving his office for Wednesday afternoon golf or the Chartres sculptor going home to sup with his family.
Was this not in fact the case with William Faulkner, doing a morning’s work, then strolling in the town square to talk to the farmers and have a Coke at Reed’s drugstore? Not quite. Though Faulkner went to lengths to pass himself off as a farmer among farmers, farmer he was not. A charade was being played.
Was it not the case with Sören Kierkegaard, who, every hour, would jump up from his desk, rush out into the streets of Copenhagen, and pass the time with shopkeepers? No, because, by his own admission, he was playing the game of being taken for an idler at the very time he was writing ten books a year.
Only one example comes to mind of a writer who, though performing at a very high level of twentieth-century art, nevertheless manages to live on one of the few remaining islands of a more or less intact culture, in the very house where she was born, to enter into an intercourse with the society around her as naturally as the Chartres sculptor, to appear as herself, her self, the same self, both to fellow writer and to fellow townsman: Eudora Welty. Perhaps also William Carlos Williams.
If you do not think this remarkable, imagine that you have lived your entire life in the house where you were born. For an American, an uncanny, even an unsettling fantasy. (2) Reentry accomplished through anesthesia. One can simply render the intolerable tolerable by a chemical assault on the cortex of the brain, generally by alcohol, and generally by writers. It has been observed that artists live longer and drink less than writers. Perhaps they are rescued from the ghostliness of self by the things and the doings of their art. The painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art, the writer is the Protestant. The former have the sacramentals, the concrete intermediaries between themselves and creation — the paint, the brushes, the fruit, the bowl, the table, the model, the mountain, the handling and muscling of clay. The writer is the Protestant. He works alone in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but a Scripto pencil, like God’s finger touching Adam. It is harder on the nerves.
Why Writers Drink
He is marooned in his cortex. Therefore it is his cortex he must assault. Worse, actually. He, his self, is marooned in his left cortex, locus of consciousness according to Eccles. Yet his work, if he is any good, comes from listening to his right brain, locus of the unconscious knowledge of the fit and form of things. So, unlike the artist who can fool and cajole his right brain and get it going by messing in paints and clay and stone, the natural playground of the dreaming child self, there sits the poor writer, rigid as a stick, pencil poised, with no choice but to wait in fear and trembling until the spark jumps the commissure. Hence his notorious penchant for superstition* and small obsessive and compulsive acts such as lining up paper exactly foursquare with desk. Then, failing in these frantic invocations and after the right brain falls as silent as the sphinx — what else can it do? — nothing remains, if the right won’t talk, but to assault the left with alcohol, which of course is a depressant and which does of course knock out that grim angel guarding the gate of Paradise and let the poor half-brained writer in and a good deal else besides. But by now the writer is drunk, his presiding left-brained craftsman-consciousness laid out flat, trampled by the rampant imagery from the right and a horde of reptilian demons from below.