Plain Talk
By
Mursi Saad El-Din
I will probably never venture to use a computer. Somehow I get a sense of satisfaction from using a pen to trust my thoughts to paper. No doubt there is a degree of intimacy between a writer and his pen -- or pencil for that matter. I used to know some writers who preferred pencil to pen, because it facilitated rewriting in a similar way to word processing. Typewriters and computers are cold metal structures that have none of the warmth a pen or pencil can give. Come to think of it, the greatest classical literature -- fiction, poetry, drama -- were produced long before the typewriter or the computer were known.
I might seem to be digressing. The thought that originally drove me to write is one that has obsessed me for some time now, in fact since I started writing regularly in both Arabic and English. I was worried that I might be turning into a writer by commission, like those court poets who produced poems for all occasions. This led to the question, "Why do I write in the first place?" Then, suddenly, I remembered an article by Eugene Ionesco, the author of, among other works, The Rhinoceros, which was published in the September 1964 issue of my then favourite magazine, Encounter. The article, "A Writer's Problem", put forth a possible answer to that question. The article opens the statement, "You ought to know," with which the answer replies to himself. "You ought to know, because you read your writings, and, if you read them... the explanation must be that you have found something valid in them, some form of nourishment, something that corresponds to your need."
Once alone, it seems, everyone, especially the writer, asks himself questions -- about the reasons behind what he does with his life. Questions follow each other in Ionesco's article: "Why do I write;" "What does the activity correspond to;" "Do I have more to say than other people;" "Am I trying to assert myself, that is, justify my existence;" "Is it because I am afraid of death and want to go on living in other people after my physical decease..." And so it continues, concluding with perhaps the most evocative question of all, "Or is it simply that creation is an instinctive, extra-conscious necessity -- imagining, inventing, discovering and creating being functions as natural as breathing?" Ionesco's answer is that the author himself is not fully aware of what he is doing. He is deceived. He will have a conscious intention, of course. For instance he may set out to prove something, and imagine that what he is trying to prove is the essential part of his work. Then he, or someone else, a critic, notices that what he has created is different or more important from what he took to be the essential thing.
Ionesco remarks that the writer himself is often astonished at the effects of his work on others -- something that drives him to write about criticism. A criticism is valid, he claims, in so far as it does not reflect the commonplaces of the current critical and intellectual systems. A criticism or an interpretation is a good one only in so far as the critic or interpreter approaches the work with a fresh eye, sincerely and objectively forging his own connection with it. The bad critic is "the arrogant one, who wants to foist himself upon the work, and who assumes a superior attitude towards it. Instead of adopting the schoolmasterish approach, the critic should be the pupil of the work", he writes.
To write, Ionesco believes, is to think in motion; to write is to explore. The critic must repeat the itinerary of the writer, who will have progressed in a kind of darkness or twilight. The critic, however, covers the same ground with a lamp in his hand and illuminates the path. It is his business to notice the drawbacks in the writing. A writer writes, forgetting about all the other works of literature he may happen to know. The critic, ideally, should remember everything in existence, if only to tell us whether or not the work is a repetition. I must admit that I continue to enjoy Ionesco's article immensely. In it he deals with a number of major issues relating to the writer, but the one thing he does not seem to have answered is, "Why do writers write?"
