Of Personae and Print

Prompt of the Day #15

Think about a writer. What does s/he do? How does s/he think? What does s/he struggle with? How do you stylise them? What relation do they bear to your own sense of writerly-ness? 

Write about a writer.

One of the curious things said of James Wood, was that he is, in many senses, a literary figure - a creation of his writing that would need another of him to fully analyse and comprehend. 

Roland Barthes said that 'falling in love involves telling ourselves a story about falling in love'. This much can seem true. Many of us will admit that 'the chase' is more exciting than the endgame. Is this not because we are treating ourselves as characters, imagining the twists and turns, the internalistic emotions and such? Is this not because we are more in love with the fictions than with the reality? We like to live in stories. 

I'm going to admit that I'm one of those old fashioned thinkers. I don't think there's a balance that can be struck between life and work for a writer because life is the work of a writer. That doesn't mean I'm another disciple of the House of Wood. I'm not advocating Realism and the be-and-end-all of good literature. I'm the kid that sits there reading Ulysses and thinks 'this is so true to life' and then reads The Redemption of Althalus and muses over the same thing. No, when it comes down to it, I believe that life is the ever present muse of the writer because anything that happens in real life can transform into fiction. In fact, it's a little like the epistemic dreaming argument - we can dream something lifelike but what we do in dreams may be impossible. Here, as writers, we can fictionalise life but we can't always live fiction. The trick is to make the reader believe that perhaps our novel, story or poem etc is somehow possible. Part of that is done by adopting a voice, a perspective, a form that encourages the reader to put faith in fiction. This is you as the writer. 

I will end by denying a view that I began with: the author is not dead, not entirely, no matter what Barthes said. You have power as a personae in print although your presence is not a determinant of interpretation.  Reading what you write, why not wonder where you find yourself. Hopefully, it's not as a Mary-Sue.

Je serai poète et toi poésie, 
SCRIBBLER