Fiction and poetry: capturing moments
...and at the end of the day, possibly not much more than that.
In commenting on a recent post of mine - concerning the difficulty in going back to try and resurrect an old unfinished work (‘The French Story’) - Roger, a wise friend of: mine, made the following comment (and I hope he won’t mind me quoting him!):
I recognise all you describe about half-finished work. I would suggest there are good but surreptitious reasons for ceasing to progress. You touch on one without recognising it, " all planned out". I would suggest that they are probably too planned out. You may not be giving the characters a chance to break free and you are demanding action from them that they would no longer do. When you plotted they were names on coat-hangers, they have become real now and you need to look sympathetically at the likelihoods of their actions. The plot may have changed. Perhaps the action is now another character's role.
Which is clearly an interesting notion; underlying it is the fact that across the intervening span of time between drafting the first words of ‘The French Story’ to now, I have changed too. Things have happened; I have learned things, forgotten things. Perhaps what I once believed in, I now doubt - or I believe in new things altogether. These are the outcomes of living: everything changes, nothing remains the same. Or - in the vernacular - “shit happens”.
If that is too simple a conclusion - a cliché, too trite to be taken seriously, a ‘get out of jail free card’ - from another angle, it’s suggestive of something more profound.
A few years ago I wrote a novel called The Opposite of Remembering and have often thought how, were I to write it again now - with the same characters and the same plot - it would inevitably be a different book. And why? Because I am a different person, and I would use different words.
If I asked you to write a poem today (to a specific form like a sonnet or a Haiku) about the atrocities in Ukraine or Gaza, and then asked you to do the same thing tomorrow or next week, you would inevitably create different poems. The sentiments are likely to be the same, but how you expressed those sentiments would surely not be.
We tend to think of great works of literature as capturing something profound and timeless, that the great characters and incidents depicted could only have been written in the way we have come to know them. Good literature is profound, yes, (and perhaps profundity is a quality that delineates the best from the average, the crass, or the blatantly commercial) but surely even ‘profound’ work - like all literature - is ‘time-bound’ rather than 'timeless’. If Conrad had started writing Heart of Darkness on a Friday rather than the previous Tuesday, say, he would have written his story in a subtly different way. And what if he’d staring writing it two years later?
What we write is always - and can only ever be - ‘of the moment’. Each and every word is the byproduct of an instant, that undefinable fragment of time when synapses and intent and idea and thought all coalesce and make us write ‘blue eyes’ rather than ‘brown eyes’…
None of this stops us lauding good writing for precisely what it is: moving, intelligent, challenging, humorous etc. But it must inescapably be ‘of its moment’. How can it not?
If that is the case, then is ‘going back’ to revisit something like ‘The French Story’ after far too long bound to end in failure?
For a selected edition of my poems I remember trying to edit pieces I wrote many years earlier. From a ‘craft’ perspective it was indeed possible to hone them, make the ‘better’ - but in doing so I found that they lost something vital. They lost that sense of moment. The emotion the original contained was diluted - or bled away altogether. And so in order to remain true to the emotional moments in which they were written, the poems resisted change. And quite rightly too, because the me who originally wrote them is not the same me trying to ‘improve’ them now.
And as a final thought, is it not therefore anti all those great things about literature - as well as being plainly ridiculous! - to want to ‘rewrite’ Conrad, Enid Blyton, Shakespeare et al and ‘correct’ the words of their creative moments in order to align with the sentiments of today? Logically, as cultural mores change, we would be interminably re-writing everything ever written; literature - and history - would be at the mercy of the Thought Police. Welcome to 1984.
Oh, and who has the right to judge which words should or shouldn’t be used anyway?
But that’s a whole new topic for another day…