Essay Online

As you may know, I’m a great fan of the works of the Canadian author, Robertson Davies. So, when I’m looking for inspiration and ideas, I turn to his articles on writing. I came across a speech he gave in 1990 for the Tanner Lectures in New Haven, Connecticut. One is entitled simply Writing, the other Reading.

What makes a novel good or even really great, so that it will be read one hundred years from now [or more]? What takes a novel out of its own time, so to speak, and become universal?

I have to quote Davies from his speech where he talks of an essential quality he calls

shamanstvo.

To weave the spell, the writer must have within him something comparable to the silk spinning and web-casting gift of a spider; he must not only have something to say, some story to tell, or some wisdom to impart, but he must have a characteristic way of doing it which entraps and holds still his prey, by which I mean his reader.

When reading this, I first think of shamans [i.e.: shamanstvo]&ndashsome sort of mystic, a healer, with powers not given to mere mortals. Perhaps a trickster or someone claiming to communicate with gods!

A tall order for us who toil before our computers, hoping for inspiration to just wrap up the plot or get a bit of dialogue right!

But it’s true! Remember the last time you picked up a novel and from the very first sentence, you were transfixed, inexorably drawn into the world the writer had created. I suppose that’s the “un-put-down-able” quality we all seek.

Somehow, I don’t think Davies meant the quality of a real “page turner.” He knew the value of lingering over a passage and the savouring of language. It’s got to be something else.

I really like this quote from Davies. The silk to make the web comes from within the spider and is produced naturally from it. The spider doesn’t know how it does this. It is just its inherent ability. And so, Davies must be talking about the grand sum of our whole self which produces this story&ndashor silk. It is a product of the writer’s being.

And it should have a story to tell or some wisdom to impart. But I think the real secret is contained in the last few phrases&ndash a characteristic way of doing it which entraps and holds still his prey, by which I mean his reader. Obviously, it has to be highly personal and individual to the writer. And it must be a story or a thought, which virtually impales the reader with its significance.

How can the writer hope to do such a thing? After all, my experience is personal to me, just as yours is to you. How, by drawing on my own personal experience, can I hope to ensnare you into my web? And better still, capture thousands of readers, all of whom have their own personal worlds? How can I ever hope to enchant a reader with my world?

Immediately, I think of the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung and the collective unconscious&ndashwhich we all share. If a writer can access that level of the unconscious, perhaps he can bring into his writing that which is common or universal to all humankind. Of course, the writer interprets that material and adapts it to his own personal experience of life. But still, he has drawn upon emotions, thoughts, archetypes, symbols and signs, even myths from that great library of human experience we all share&ndashthe collective unconscious.

Perhaps that is how we come full circle to the idea of shamanstvo. That charmer, enchanter quality. Shamans are indeed mystics. They have special access to inner worlds&ndashas I understand it&ndashby way of gift. But that does not mean we can’t try to enter those worlds where the creative materials of universal appeal are buried.

But Davies would not likely agree with me. To him, you either have shamanstvo or you don’t. Of course, he says that everyone has a personal unconscious, which is rooted in the collective unconscious.

But the difference is this. The kind of writer he means is one who has

the ability to invite it, to solicit its assistance, to hear what it has to say and impart it in a language that is particularly his own. He may not be&ndashvery probably is not&ndashfishing up messages from the unconscious which astonish and strike dumb his readers. It is more likely that he is telling them things that they recognize as soon as they hear them.

There you go! If its something they recognize immediately, then it must be drawn up [dredged up?] from the collective unconscious shared by all of us. Put in more mythological terms, it sounds just like the ability to court the muse.

So, next time we’re writing and get stuck, perhaps it’s best to just take a nap. Why? Because dreams, they say, are the gateway to the unconscious.

In Alain de Botton’s engaging book, The Art of Travel, he distinguishes between the anticipation and recollection of travel versus the reality of actually traveling.

When we anticipate, we study travel brochures and create in our imagination all sorts of exotic adventures, lying ahead of us. Once really there, we photograph the Eiffel Tower with our friends or family, their arms slung over one another’s shoulders and grinning into the camera. That forms the recollection, the moments we choose to remember.

Magically gone from memory are the delayed flight, the lousy food and the hotel room overlooking the alley, where the garbage collectors banged tins at 5am. But, if we otherwise enjoy ourselves, we select those ‘good moments’ and photograph them to construct a different reality from the real reality.

De Botton’s next idea is fascinating. He says that’s exactly what the artist does. Whether writing a novel, painting a picture or scoring a symphony, the artist imagines the outline of the work [anticipates the delights of the trip] then selects that which is felt to have artistic value [forgets the garbage men and includes friends at the Eiffel Tower]. Just as the traveler now has a fine and satisfying memory of the trip, the artist has a wonderful novel, painting or musical score. The artist has created art through imagination, selection, rejection and combination of artistic elements resulting in something new. The happy traveler has created a wonderful trip.

Then he tells of a man who had a very peculiar experience. After feasting his eyes upon paintings by Jan Steen and Rembrandt, this traveler anticipated beauty, joviality and simplicity in Holland. Many paintings of laughing, carousing cavaliers had fixed this image in his mind, along with quaint houses and canals. But on a trip to Amsterdam and Haarlem, he was strangely disappointed.

No, according to De Botton, the paintings had not lied. Certainly, there were a number of jovial people and pretty maids pouring milk, but the images of them were diluted in this traveler’s mind, by all the other ordinary, boring things he saw. Such commonplace items simply did not fit his mental picture. Thus, reality did not compare to an afternoon of viewing the works of Rembrandt in a gallery. And why not? Because Rembrandt and Steen had, by selecting and combining elements, captured the essence of the beauty of Holland, thereby intensifying it.

This is exactly what a writer or any artist tries to do and as a traveler, you may do much the same thing

When writing about a day in your protagonist’s life, you don’t start with what he had for breakfast or that his car wouldn’t start unless it’s germane to the plot or his character. You compress. You select and embellish. You toss out. All the details of your story must combine to intensify real life in order to create something interesting and of artistic merit. When I started writing the first novel in the Osgoode Trilogy, Conduct in Question, I had to learn it wasn’t necessary to build the whole city with lengthy descriptions of setting and character, before Harry Jenkins [the protagonist lawyer] could do anything. But many nineteenth century novelists did write numerous pages with glowing descriptions of the Scottish moors or a county hamlet. And that was necessary because, with the difficulty of travel, a reader might well need help in picturing the setting. But today, with the ease of travel, the surfeit of film, web and television images, no reader needs more than the briefest description. Just write walking down Fifth Avenue and the reader immediately gets the picture.

In a novel, usually only the most meaningful, coherent thoughts are included, unless you are James Joyce, the brilliant stream of consciousness writer. And so, you as the writer can order your protagonists thoughts so as to make complete and utter sense apparently the first time. In the Osgoode Trilogy, the protagonist, Harry Jenkins, does lots of thinking and analyzing [the novels are mysteries, after all]. But his coherence of thought is only produced after much editing and revising. Not much like real life, you say?

Same for dialogue. Interesting characters in books speak better and much more on point than people really do, partly because the writer is able to take back words. In real life, we often wish in retrospect, if only I had said this or that to set him straight. No problem for the writer. Hit the delete button and let him say something truly sharp and incisive.

And so, after comparing what the traveler and the writer do, what can we conclude? I quote De Botton in the Art of Travel.

The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.

And so therein lies the difference between Art and Life! And so, the similarity between the traveler and writer.