The Raven

Saturday, April 12, 2003

What Is a Writer?

This question has been gnawing at me for some time, particularly after I read the following words on Kat's Webpage about four months ago:

I'd be writing and posting this stuff even if you didn't read it; the fact that you do is just delicious gravy.

This is an extremely difficult statement to interpret once you look beneath its surface implications, and it calls into question a number of common assumptions about the relationship of readers and writers and the text that stands as an intermediary between them. It is when we examine some of those assumptions that an answer to the question "what is a writer" begins to emerge.

I wouldn't blame you at all, to begin with, if the first idea that presents itself to you is simply, "one who writes." This would allow us to say, for example, that a person who pens entries into a private journal could be considered "a writer," and no one would have a problem with this definition. But it doesn't really capture the special sense of the term meant when we think about a professional writer, someone who writes for a living.

Because if someone says, "I'm a writer," you generally imagine that the person has a particular talent with words, such that he or she exists in a relationship with editors and readers, and this is entirely different from the idea of someone who pens their thoughts into a notebook to which no one except the author has access. The former individual is a "writer" with a capital "W," and the latter is something more like a hobbyist or occasional dilettante. The Writer, then, has expectations and responsibilities attached to the act of writing, and the amateur exists in a realm of absolute freedom.

But this simply creates a false dichotomy and I'm inclined to reject the idea of there being two kinds of writers in this respect because of cases like those of Emily Dickenson and Sylvia Plath, writers whose principle bodies of work were published posthumously. Let's consider Dickenson in particular, and as a thought experiment, imagine her laboring over poem 89, which wasn't published until some 60 years after her death.

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Since no one except Dickenson was reading her work at this time, can we say that she was a poet? Or does she only become a poet when her poems are collected and read by others? Are titles like "writer," "author," and "poet" only conferrable by others? This inquiry leads in the direction of the ontological conundrum, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" The answer to that, of course, is that it doesn't matter. That is, writing to a non-existent audience, or only to one's self, negates the idea of "writer" at the source because there is no extant relationship between writer and reader to consider. Dickenson only becomes a poet when her poems are apprehended by a reader.

If you reject that idea, then consider a modern-day Dickenson or Plath, someone furiously penning unread poems in solitude. For this person, the statement, "I am a writer" is very much true, but only so in the sense that "I am a brain surgeon," and "I am a space-ship pilot" are also true. In private, with respect to one's self, any self-definition is both possible and unmeaningful. The same would apply to a self-titled "poet" who writes no poems at all but only considers himself to possess that capacity. Thus the secluded writer and the one whose body of work only exists as unrealized potential are essentially identical.

We can extend this argument into the case of Weblogs, per the leading quotation above, by noting that a Weblog does not exist until it has been read at least once. At this point, we have the formula writer—text—reader, suggesting that where there is a text and a reader, the writer is created as an element of a tripartite relationship.

According to J.T. O'Hara, owner of the O'Hara Literary Consulting Agency:

What is a "writer"? A writer is someone who can't stand not to write! Writers are lone wolves who mate for life with the act of writing.

In an existential sense, this is beyond dispute and similar in tone to this definition from the science fiction author Elisabeth Vonarburg:

A writer is someone who has a certain kind of relationship with words—and not the written word only, but all words. Someone who loves words, the very concept of words, who loves their forms, sounds, rhythms, history, mutable meanings. Someone for whom words are not merely tools but exist in their own right, as living beings.

Any writer reading these definitions would probably agree with them wholeheartedly, but as we can also infer, their solipsism omits consideration of both the text and the reader; and so we'll turn now to the idea of text and expression and ask ourselves "what is a text?" As a working definition, let's say that a text is any meaningful statement. For example, consider Heraclitus's famous dictum:

"You can never step into the same river twice."

While short, it satisfies our criteria: 1) It has an author—whose identity is immaterial, 2) it is a meaningful statement, as opposed to a random string of letters and/or numbers, and 3) it has at least one reader. More to the point, the author has attempted to convey an idea. Heraclitus is thus a writer.

Yet even so, his status as a writer exists only because he has a reader who, in turn, must make an attempt to grasp the author's meaning. What do you think Heraclitus was trying to say? The phrase seems to turn on some ambiguity involving the word "same," and in the act of determining his meaning here most readers at some point would probably try to picture or imagine the act of stepping into a river, or reflect on a memory of having done so.

It's arguable, then, that all readers will follow a unique train of logic in trying to interpret Heraclitus's meaning, even if each arrives at the same conclusion. More likely, though, different interpretations of the statement will arise, and this leads to the hotly contested question of whether or not there is a "correct" understanding (what a deconstructionist approach would term a "privileged reading") of the statement. Here's an argument from the postmodern critic Stanley Fish, who says that none of us really believes in an absolute standard of objective truth:

Rather, the actor, you or I or anyone, begins in some context of practice, with its received authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements, and generally accepted benchmarks, and from within the perspective of that context—thick, interpersonal, densely elaborated—judges something to be true or inaccurate, reasonable or irrational, and so on.

The key point here is that our perspective on a text reflects our own contextual experience of reality, which tends, as Fish puts it, to be "thick, interpersonal, densely elaborated," and thus unique to ourselves. For each text there are thus as many different "correct" interpretations as there are readers who interact with it.

To go just a bit further, even the language with which we communicate is seen to be a collective agreement about the meanings of individual words, but even those understandings are, to each of us as indivuals, deeply contextual and subject to continuous change and refinement. Whatever it is that an author tries to say in a given work, like Dickenson's poem 89, only exists in a purely objective sense between the author and the work in a dyadic relationship that excludes the reader.

In summary, while a writer attempts to imbue a work with a specific meaning, the work itself cannot be said to hold an absolute interpretation. The reader, engaging the work, does so from a private perspective that may or may not intersect precisely with the author's viewpoint—and from what we know about language and meaning it is rather unlikely that this intersection will ever be a perfect one.

Depending on how you address the question, "what is a writer," any two elements of the paradigm writer—text—reader will exist and the third is thus seen to be irrelevent from the angle of an objective meaning. We have the writer and the text, the reader and the text, and the writer and the reader. The final response is thus a reformation of the original question as, "what relationship exists between the writer and the reader?" In this way, the writer is created anew at every instance of a reader approaching the written word.

5:27:36 PM