How can we understand the relationship between the writer’s ‘self’ and the writing process? T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1951), said that writing involved a ‘loss of personality’. He believed the writer needed to be an impersonal vehicle through which feelings and emotions could ‘enter into new combinations’. This wasn’t a matter of the writer expressing his or her personal feelings or emotions, but rather those appropriate for the work of art. Roland Barthes, in his equally famous essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), also characterised the writing process as ‘self-less’. For him the writer was not the maker of meaning in a piece of writing, but a ‘scriptor’, a detached and selfless organiser of ‘discourses’, who allowed words to ‘act’ or ‘perform’ through him. Writing required the death of the writer’s self.
By contrast poet Ted Hughes speaks passionately about the deeply personal nature of writing. Talking about Sylvia Plath’s poetry, he says: ‘It’s my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us’. And novelist Jenni Diski warns that ‘Writers who are not self-obsessed and wriggling through what they hope are their own labyrinthine psyches are very likely not writers at all’.
So we seem to have a contradiction: creative writing is deeply personal, deeply connected with the writer’s self, but it also involves moving away from the self and becoming impersonal. In fact, creative writing involves both of these things: being able to connect deeply with our own felt experience, so as to find our material for writing, as well as being able to distance ourselves from this experience, so as to give the imagination space to work our material into art. For this purpose, of course, we need to develop the craft of writing, so that this too becomes an inner resource we intuitively use whenever we write. Writing, then, is both a public and a private endeavour, requiring us to learn to operate on that precarious borderline between spontaneity and reflection, inner and outer, closeness and distance, freedom and control.
Celia Hunt is Lecturer in Continuing Education (Creative Writing) at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Writing: Self and Reflexivity. She was awarded a national teaching fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2004.
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