The Writer’s Duty Pt. 2
All men are not created equal. I’ve been conscious of this fact since the day I could think. The variance in condition or environment one is birthed into is of least importance: One may be born rich or poor, sickly or vigorous, in a stable family or in chaos but these seem to be irrelevant in the long run. We all have to contend with the burden of our own problems and personal histories anyway.
The main difference is in the power and output of men’s brains. I remember my time in High School. It was, by far, the worst time of my life; much worse, in fact, than when my father kicked me out of the house for refusing to go to university. Even when I had to live on the streets, squat in garages in the houses of friends and relatives, sleep in borrowed cars and shower in the wash-rooms used by the watchmen at the local health clubs, my life was far better than when I was in Secondary School.
I came from a prestigious private primary school where I was often at the top of my class. But when I got into high school, I was suddenly and consistently at the bottom of the class. I entered high school arrogant and confident in my abilities but by the end of it, I was greatly humbled and keenly aware that my brain was small and its abilities decidedly finite and severely limited.
No matter how hard I studied, no matter how much I sacrificed, eschewing all sports and extra curricular activities, I simply could not even approach average performance in that class. My grades weren’t bad. But when normalised against the performance of my fellow students, along that infamous Bell-curve, I was suddenly on the tail end of the worst of the worst scholars. It was frustrating and it was painful and it convinced me that I should never again actively compare myself to others. I would simply focus on perfecting — or at least improving — myself, my craft and my art. Let comparisons attend to themselves. That was also what convinced me to skip college. There was no way I was going to let myself get humiliated in that way again.
In the intervening years, I’ve come to accept that I was never as smart as I thought I was, the comparisons were valid and now, all I can do is work on developing myself. Everything else is the road to frustration. More to the point, measures such as academic performance in school are significant and useful. They might not be perfect, but they are the best tool we have to ensure that our institutions are meritocracies rather than “arbitrocracies”.
To those who say that the performance measures we have are wholly inadequate, I can only say two things: One, that the school system has evolved into what it generally is now. Evolution is one of the most powerful means of improving any system. To abandon all that work and collective wisdom is both an act of hubris and ignorance. Second: Even if we assume that current academic measurement tools are completely useless, we would have to recognise the high likelihood that those who are “truly great” would just as easily succeed within the system as they would out of it. It’s hard to imagine a competent, self-taught scientist or artist not having the intellectual ability to pass tests and perform assignments. Such work would only require a subset of their abilities and the compliance of their will. That being the case, they would attain the highest honours in the system while still being able to succeed outside the system. Either way, the measures work and reveal useful information.
This has implications for what I believe an artists duty is. There is another measure, often derided, frequently ignored, that to my mind, is analogous to the typical school measurement system: Best-seller success. Many writers that I know hate everything on the Best-seller list as a matter of principle. I am one of those writers. No matter how much I try, I simply cannot stand the work peddled by these pop-culture scriveners. The revulsion I feel is so deep that when I picked up “The Lost Symbol”, I fell ill and threw up while reading it in the bus. This is no joke. My tastes aren’t as refined as some but bad writing does things to me that no poison could ever achieve. On the day an acquaintance insisted that I read the latest deathly hollow instalment of Harry Potter, I did so and for the rest of the day I was horribly ill with violent bouts of diarrhoea that convinced my doctor that I was suffering from severe food poisoning even though I had not eaten a full or solid meal in the preceding day.
On such occasions my health is, however, completely restored when I read a few pages of Roth, McCarthy, Dickinson, Joyce, James, Proust, Poe, Virgil or Homer. If I read Shakespeare, then I am reinvigorated to the point of perfect and, to my thinking, superhuman health.
Even though my body has its own irrational manner, my mind tells me that there is something decidedly bohemian and even elitist with the popular stand against most Best-sellers. Worse still, I worry that we may be completely wrong, not in viewing such writing as being irredeemably bad, but in associating causality with Best-seller status, that is, “if it is a Best-seller, then the writing must be bad.” I suspect that the market measure is similar to the school measure in more ways than one.
I used to assume that the reason Best-Sellers are such, is because of the pervasive stupidity of the reading public. But it is dangerous to make that assumption because if almost everyone is stupid then who is it that I will write for? After all, most writers like to flatter themselves by imagining that they write for highly intelligent people. In fact, that is one of the biggest albeit unadvertised points of pride for the artist. We quietly pat ourselves on the back and contemplate the high-minded, high-functioning, high-reasoning man or woman to whom our work will appeal. We imagine the highly stimulating conversations that we would have with such a person. We dream of that coming together of uniquely brilliant minds hitherto separated by their essential rarity. In short, as writers, we are all basically vain, a situation made worse because, unlike employed or contractual workers, we don’t have a well defined clientele. We cannot point to a single individual and tell our publisher that “She is the brilliant person that I am writing for. She has paid for my book in advance. I am writing for her and her friends, who have also paid in advance.” That we cannot say such a thing, makes our definition of a brilliant person flawed and dangerous in subtle ways guaranteeing that the majority of writers put nonsense to paper mistakenly imagining that they their work is brilliant and will be read by similarly brilliant people.
That vanity can, and in the best cases, is put to good uses. If we believe we are writing for the most brilliant subset of readers, then that demands that we do everything in our power to think deeply, logically and write as closely to perfectly as we can.
However, if we consider it true that Best-Sellers are only bought by ignorant readers then we miss out on something more significant: It might be the case, that the best writing, strikes at something deeply human. By doing so, such writing becomes a best-selling work of fiction.
What “deeply human” thing is this? I honestly wish I knew. I do know, however that we cannot assume that the one million buyers of a Dan Brown novel are uniformly mentally challenged. The writing of a Best-Seller might be dismal but it is not the juvenile writing and poor metaphor that people buy. I suspect that the writers of these novels stumble upon something magical that has the property of winning the hearts and minds of people. I also suspect that the writers don’t know what they’ve stumbled upon. Had they known, they would focus on reproducing that magical something so that all their prose would be peppered with it. Still, they manage to sprinkle a sufficient amount of that pixie dust over their prose so that when a reader picks it up, they immediately identify it and, because it is so hard to find this substance-without-a-name, they are forced to buy the book to sate their voracious, subconscious need for it.
Thankfully, I can take comfort in one thing: When I write such that I produce this substance, I will not have to compromise my highest ideals about writing. I will not have to dumb down my work or write from someone other than the brilliant man who I strive to engage with. Instead, this substance will improve whatever is best in my work while highlighting and allowing me to remove what is worst. Most importantly, even though this substance has no name and only a vague description, I will know it when I see it and so will everybody else.
