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No. 7 Fall 2004


Ellen Smith
Reluctantly,

SUMMER, 2004: It's nearly midnight, and I've just finished my yoga practice for the night. In the bedroom next to mine, the light's still on. School's out; my daughter's 13 now and has slipped into the adolescent pattern of staying up late and sleeping until late in the morning. Still, it's midnight, so I think I should go in and declare "lights out." About 45 minutes ago, she begged me for more time to half-sit, half-lie on her bed, typing on her laptop, furthering the plot of her huge novel. I conceded, with the condition that lights would go out immediately after my yoga was finished. Now, when I go into her room, I see that - even with the lights on and the laptop humming - she's fallen asleep. Her glasses are still on, which means that she did not go down without a fight. And, on the screen, a whole new paragraph has been opened - evidence that she hoped to push past the wall of sleepiness and gain a second wind. But the only word in this dogged new paragraph is an introductory adverb followed by a comma: Reluctantly,

What a tip-over into possibility! What is supposed to follow this Reluctantly,? Is what was going to follow (had she managed to stay awake just a bit longer) lost forever? In the morning, when she's rested, breakfasted, and alert, will the main clause be qualitatively different from the one that stood up its introductory modifier, left it standing on the wide plaza of a new paragraph? Which character was going to do what reluctantly? Or did exhaustion blur the barrier between author-function and person-writing, so that a character was made to do something reluctantly as an analogue to the young writer's reluctance to call it a day, as in

Reluctantly, I let the sleep rise up like a tide within me and found myself floating on it, with it, in it. ?

***

SUMMER, 2004: I am re-reading Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language while working on a paper for a conference. In many ways, Kristeva is reading Jacques Lacan reading Freud. They seem like three people on the Métro, each one sitting behind another in a row, none of them ever seeing one another's faces - only the back of a head and the text that faceless head is reading. Kristeva proves only indirectly helpful in the paper that results. However, as I take my seat in this Métro of Theoretical Anomie, sitting behind Kristeva who is sitting behind Lacan, etc., other connections emerge that have everything to do with Reluctantly, . . . at least, with my own particular Reluctantly, about writing. It's a reluctantly I've heard expressed by so many writers, even one of my writing heroes - my friend Jane, a fiction writer whose most recent collection of short stories came out this year. We were talking one day and, in so many words, she asked why it is so hard to write, why sometimes we positively hate to write. You might say that this Reluctantly, is just another version of writer's block, but for the moment I want to hold to the shade of difference I'm seeing between the two: Writer's block is generally a problem of what to write about and how to write it; the Reluctantly, I'm thinking about is more existential, has more to do with the act of writing itself and what it entails.

Reluctantly, with Kristeva and the others on the Métro, I invoke the "death drive," Freud's concept that explains almost any impulse to lose oneself - be it in a case of Corona, a romantic interest, a big fat novel, or group meditation. In quotidian terms, it's easy to attribute to the death drive any of those dark, unhealthy, self-destructive impulses that we wish, of course, to disavow. But Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva all seem to agree that the death drive underwrites much more than bungee jumping, unprotected anonymous sex, and heroin use (Lacan: "It is in effect as a desire for death that [the subject] affirms himself for others."). In fact, once the poststructuralists and the semioticians go to work on Freud, one of activities most underwritten by the death drive seems to be creative writing, insofar as, unlike instrumental writing, it strives to say the unsayable (Lacan again: "So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has."). Building on Freud, Kristeva asserts that "in aesthetic productions [. . . .] the repeated death drive (negativity, destruction) withdraws from the unconscious and takes up a position as already positivized and erotized in a language that, through drive investment, is organized into prosody or rhythmic timbres." So, maybe this Reluctantly, as it concerns the ambivalence many writers have about the act of writing, has something to do with this what'sit (a snake? green slime? incessant Techno?) that "takes up a position" in our writing when we write. At the same time, does it have something to do with the shattering and potential loss of self that writing entails? When we write, do we undergo something akin to what happens, for Lacan, to the analyst in psychoanalysis, who, at key points, "intervenes concretely in the dialectic of analysis by pretending he is dead, by cadaverizing his position as the Chinese say"? Yikes.

***

SUMMER, 2004 (SMALL DINNER PARTY WITH FRIENDS): Oh, Ellen, that is so French! my friend Lynn says when I say that I'm trying to figure out the connections between writing and the death drive. The way she says it is neither a compliment nor an insult. Rather, it is said in a tone in which actual French people might say, Il ne faut pas exagérer (or: Don't be so dramatic about it ). Then, conversation ranges from Freud and his disestablishment in contemporary psychology to Romantic notions about writing that freight the act with unnecessary angst when one could simply, in the manner of Anthony Trollope, write for two hours each morning, then go to the office or even go hunting. Writing for a living as a way of circumventing existential qualms about writing with a capital W.

***

SUMMER, 2004 (ON A MORE PRACTICAL DAY): Well, since I am in debt, have some time on my hands, and have a lot of exposure (through my child) to an endless procession of young adult fiction, I decide to write a young adult novel. I figure that this will be a pot-boiling venture and so free of all the aesthetic angst that accompanies the writing, revising, and manuscriptizing of poems. It will be a Nike project: I will just do it. Kristeva says that we enter the symbolic order when we fully acquire language and become social subjects. The oozy drives are still with us, yammering away in the semiotic chora, but as long as we use language simply to communicate a single, untingly message, the death drive is repressed. Yippee. I will write ten pages a day and keep the death drive at bay.

My major source of inspiration for this project is the young girl in the room next to mine - the one who writes installments of her novel in the car en route to her grandmother's and during TV commercial breaks: She doesn't need to sage the house, stand on her head, and resolve life-long emotional conflicts before she sits down to write. Come to think of it, she doesn't even need to sit down in order to write. Reluctantly, she stops writing. Reluctantly, I start.

***

20 PAGES IN AS MANY DAYS LATER: Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva have filled pages articulating what that punk Rimbaud said in four words: Je est un autre ("I is somebody else"). The moment a statement is made, an "I" is posited, and - poof! - we are thereby absent to ourselves. And there's nothing really tragic about that, is there? We acquire language and egos, we buy groceries, we make friends, life goes on. As time goes on, some of us start to take this language thing further, into writing: we start thinking about writing as writing, words as words. We purposely set out to "cadaverize" ourselves on a large scale and for long intervals of time (maybe Trollope's two-hour daily limit was a hedge against this) in order to "listen to" what we write - that is, to write. If we've done time in writing workshops, we already know that our work is Other than ourselves. We sit our bodies down and attend to an object (writing) that, when it goes well, becomes the subject. In the process, we constantly risk losing control, almost as if our usual workaday selves have been anesthetized and writing is a surgery taking place while we're under. Even if, at some level, it is for a sense of control that we write (ie., I may not be able to change certain aspects of my life, but I can damn sure change this poem) - it is loss of control that the act of writing courts.

***

Still, il ne faut pas exagérer. The young novelist who lives with me does not like French cheeses. Taking pleasure in the taste of carefully controlled decay is an acquired habit. I count myself lucky to have her example of Reluctantly, under the same roof with my own Reluctantly,. It may not exactly keep me young, but it does make me want to want to write again so that, these days, when I step off the Theoretical Métro and rub my eyes, I can approach that Reluctantly, with more of a sense that it's a turnstyle that moves in both (of our) directions.


Copyright 2004, Ellen Smith

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.


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