The shock of the new leads us to confuse means and ends. We assume that a technology of communication actually determines the character of what is communicated. The medium is the message. Yet, before the digital revolution there was always more than met the eye—subliminal signals, nonverbal nuances, ambiguities, unspoken intentions. There was always a cloud of unknowing in the ether that surrounded us and obscured the space between us. There was always a gap between a speaker and his or her interlocutor. The monk hesitated over his manuscript as the student now panics at the sight of a blank page. Some small betrayal was implicated in every attempt to speak one’s mind, recount an event, or faithfully pass on a piece of news. Convinced that history is marked by radical discontinuities, one worldview giving ground to another, we fall into thinking that every new invention fundamentally alters our lives when, in fact, it may simply enable old goals to be met in new ways. Is a story written with a quill pen basically different from a story written on a typewriter or word processor? Is the life of a reader so very different from the life of someone listening to an oral tale? Did literacy bring about the atrophy of face-to-face social life? Does text messaging diminish the quality of a teenager’s life? In this book, I am interested in the rite in writing. My argument is that writing is like any other technology of self-expression and social communication, and that in exploring the lifeworlds of writing and writers we discover the same existential imperatives that have always preoccupied human beings, regardless of their cultural or historical circumstances—the need to belong to lifeworlds wider than their own, to feel that they can act on the world rather than merely suffer its actions upon them, and to express what seems peculiar and problematic about their own experiences in ways that resonate with the experiences of others.
ONE
The Other Shore1
WALTER BENJAMIN ONCE OBSERVED THAT our human gift for seeing resemblances “is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion . . . to become and behave like someone else.”2 But our capacity for recognizing what we have in common with others, let alone connecting with them, appears to be as limited as our capacity for putting experience into words. The blank page confronts the writer like the face of a stranger. Though we cling to the belief that we can read one another’s minds or mimic reality in art, the gaps between us, like the gaps between words and the world, can never be closed. “Always it is not what I say but something else.”3 “All is not as it seems.”4 Anyone who lectures for a living will recognize this experience. No matter how painstakingly one prepares a talk, it will draw comments that bear no relationship to what one thought one was saying and attract questions that preclude any response.
But lecture halls and classrooms aren’t the only places where we pass each other like ships in the night, and should an alien anthropologist visit earth he or she would undoubtedly be struck by our extraordinary capacity for talking past each other and not catching each other’s drift. At the same time, our imaginary anthropologist would surely be baffled by the different meanings that attach to the same gestures in different cultures—a nod signaling negation in Greece but affirmation in England, direct eye contact conveying sincerity of interest in America but antagonism in Polynesia and Africa, touching taken as an unwanted invasion of a person’s private space in some societies but in others communicating empathy. Not only would our alien anthropologist wonder at the mutual misunderstanding and downright misery that spring from the inherent ambiguity of everything human beings say and do in the presence of one another, he or she would also be astonished by the energy devoted to reducing this ambiguity and dealing with the fallout from never knowing exactly what others are feeling, thinking, or intending.
If our alien strayed into a university, he or she might be amazed at the industry generated by the passion for rational, systematic, unambiguous knowledge of others and of ourselves, and he or she might wonder how human beings have managed to succeed in the Darwinian struggle for survival, given their Babel of mutually incomprehensible languages, dialectics, and argots, not to mention their capacity for misreading one another’s gestures and minds. But our visiting ethnographer might ask a more fundamental question: Why would well-educated earthlings set such store by the idea of knowing the other, or knowing themselves, when social existence is manifestly not predicated upon theoretical understanding, any more than meaningful speech is predicated upon a formal knowledge of grammar. Indeed, theories, like prejudices, would seem to be one of the principal causes of misrecognition, since they tend to make the other an object whose only value is to confirm our suspicions or prove our point of view. As long as mutually congenial outcomes occur, our alien anthropologist might argue, it does not matter whether one begins, or ends, with a clear understanding of what one is doing, an empathic understanding of the other, or even knowledge of oneself.
Is writing also a matter of working in the dark? Of trying to cross the wide Sargasso Sea that separates us from what we call the wider world? One thing is sure: regardless of what we write, the very act of writing signifies a refusal to be bound by the conceptual categories, social norms, political orders, linguistic limits, historical divides, cultural bias, identity thinking, and conventional wisdom that circumscribe our everyday lives.5 In a Nigerian prison cell, Wole Soyinka scribbles fragments of plays, poems, and a memoir between the lines of books smuggled to him from the outside. “In spite of the most rigorous security measures ever taken against any prisoner in the history of Nigerian prisons, measures taken both to contain and destroy my mind in prison, contact was made.”6 In a novel decreed obscene when first published in 1856, Gustave Flaubert writes Emma Bovary into existence, famously declaring, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” For thirty-one years, Marcel Proust commutes in his imagination to Illiers-Combray, and the year he dies (1922) James Joyce publishes Ulysses, his epic return through lost time to the Dublin of his youth.
After many years of searching for the opening sentence of the book he wanted to write, Gabriel Garcia Márquez realizes “in a flash” while driving to Acapulco with his wife and children, that he would “tell the story the way [his] grandmother used to tell hers,”7 and so emerged the figure of José Arcadio Buendía, who dreams and then builds a luminous city of mirrors surrounded by water.8 Coincidentally, the story of Macondo, which is also the story of Columbia, recalls a story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a stranger disembarks one night from a bamboo canoe on an island in a river, wanting “to dream a man with minute integrity and insert him in reality.”9 This “magical project” exhausts his soul, and leaves him wondering whether reality is brought into existence by our dreams or we the dreamers are the dreamt.
In the act of writing, as in spirit possession, sexual ecstasy, or spiritual