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A review by chrilaura
Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood
"There is one characteristic that sets writing apart from most of the other arts - its apparent democracy, by which I mean its availability to almost everyone as a medium of expression."
"Being a visual artist now approaches writing, as regards its apparent easiness - when you hear remarks like "My four-year-old could do better," you know that envy and contempt are setting in, of the kind that stem from the belief that the artist in question is not really talented, only lucky or a slick operator, and probably a fraud as well. This is likely to happen when people can no longer see what gift or unusual ability sets an artist apart."
"Little did we know that our superheroes were - among other things - projections cast by the setting sun of the Romantic movement."
"Those who have taken an interest in the Salem with trials in seventeenth-century New England will be familiar with the concept of "spectral evidence", which was accorded the same legal status as more tangible exhibits, such as wax effigies stuck full of pins. Witches were supposed to have the ability to send out their "spectre," or incorporeal likeness, to do their dirty work for them. Thus if someone saw you in the barnyard hexing the cows and you could demonstrate by witnesses that you were home in bed at that time, what was proven was not your innocence, but the fact that you had the ability to project your own double, and were therefore a witch."
"The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes his own interpreter."
"I can still hear the sneer of the Parisian intellectual who asked me, "Is it true you write the bestsellers?" "Not on purpose," I replied somewhat coyly. Also somewhat defensively, for I knew these equations as well as he did, and was thoroughly acquainted with both kinds of snobbery: that which ascribes value to a book because it makes lots of money, and that which ascribes value to a book because it doesn't."
"The contestants were those who wanted art to have some worthy agenda outside itself - to have a religious aim, or at least a moral purpose, or a socially redeeming agenda, or at the very least an uplifting intent, or at the very, very least, and optimistic and healthy-minded and cheerful effect - and in the other corner, those who proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art and its exemption from any need for social justification."
""The truth shall make you free," said Jesus. "Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty," said John Keats. By the rules of the syllogism, if truth is beauty and the truth shall make you free, then beauty shall make you free, and since we are in favour of freedom, or have been off and on since it was extolled in the Romantic age, we should devote ourselves to beauty-worship. And where is beauty - widely interpreted - more manifest than in Art? This train of thought pursued to its end leads to the conclusion that even the aesthetic turning away from the moral dimension had, itself, a moral dimension."
"The nineteenth-century battle over the proper function of art was fierce, but all attempts to bend art to some useful purpose, or to prove that it had such a purpose (...) came to grief in the end, because what they amounted to was censorship."
"(Flaubert) was put on trial for Madame Bovary, and found himself in the unpleasant position of having to play by his enemies' rules - that is, to demonstrate that his book had a healthy moral. He defended it by claiming that the moral was healthy because Madame Bovary died a gruesome death as the result of her adulteries. (Strictly considered, untrue - if she hadn't foolishly overspent, she would have gotten away with it.)"
(on being a woman writer and the expectation of sacrifice) "But you didn't have to be a nun of the imagination or nothing. The feminine of priest is not only nun but priestess, so you had a choice, and there was a difference: the Christian religion had no priestesses, so there was something pagan and possibly orgiastic implicit in the term. Nuns were cut off from men, priestesses weren't, though their relations with men were not usually what you would call domestic."
"popularity - too much of it - was still regarded as a crime if you aspired to being what used to be called a "highbrow" writer. (...) He then quotes Trollope: "Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life, then only in small doses.""
""You understand, says Primo Levi in a letter to his German translator, "it is the only book I have written and now... I feel like a father whose son has reached the age of consent and leaves, and one can no longer look after him.""
Brown Owl - "I gave these books to Brown Owl, and the fact that she liked them was certainly more important to me than the badges. This was my first real writer-reader relationship (...) That's my first answer: The writer writes for Brown Owl, or for whoever the equivalent of Brown Owl may be in his or her life at the time. A real person, then: singular, specific.
Here's my second answer: At the end of Isak Dinesen's "The Young Man With the Carnation," God's voice makes itself heard to the young writer Charlie, who has been so despairing about his work. "'Come,' said the Lord. 'I will make a covenant between Me and you. I, I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books... But you are to write the books. For it is I who wants them written. Not the public, not by any means the critics, but Me, Me!' (...)
So that is who the writer writes for: for the reader. For the reader who is not Them, but You. For the Dear Reader. For the ideal reader, who exists on a continuum somewhere between Brown Owl and God. And this ideal reader may prove to be anyone at all - any one at all - because the act of reading is just as singular as the act of writing."
"The end of Paradiso is a happy ending only if we squint very hard. And so it is with all happy endings of all books, when you come to think about it (...) A book is another country. You enter it, but then you must leave: like the Underworld, you can't live there."
"Where is the story? The story is in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going into a narrative - into the narrative process - is a dark road. You can't see your way ahead. Poets know this too; they too travel the dark roads. The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards."
"Being a visual artist now approaches writing, as regards its apparent easiness - when you hear remarks like "My four-year-old could do better," you know that envy and contempt are setting in, of the kind that stem from the belief that the artist in question is not really talented, only lucky or a slick operator, and probably a fraud as well. This is likely to happen when people can no longer see what gift or unusual ability sets an artist apart."
"Little did we know that our superheroes were - among other things - projections cast by the setting sun of the Romantic movement."
"Those who have taken an interest in the Salem with trials in seventeenth-century New England will be familiar with the concept of "spectral evidence", which was accorded the same legal status as more tangible exhibits, such as wax effigies stuck full of pins. Witches were supposed to have the ability to send out their "spectre," or incorporeal likeness, to do their dirty work for them. Thus if someone saw you in the barnyard hexing the cows and you could demonstrate by witnesses that you were home in bed at that time, what was proven was not your innocence, but the fact that you had the ability to project your own double, and were therefore a witch."
"The printed text of a book is thus like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or "interpreted" by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes his own interpreter."
"I can still hear the sneer of the Parisian intellectual who asked me, "Is it true you write the bestsellers?" "Not on purpose," I replied somewhat coyly. Also somewhat defensively, for I knew these equations as well as he did, and was thoroughly acquainted with both kinds of snobbery: that which ascribes value to a book because it makes lots of money, and that which ascribes value to a book because it doesn't."
"The contestants were those who wanted art to have some worthy agenda outside itself - to have a religious aim, or at least a moral purpose, or a socially redeeming agenda, or at the very least an uplifting intent, or at the very, very least, and optimistic and healthy-minded and cheerful effect - and in the other corner, those who proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art and its exemption from any need for social justification."
""The truth shall make you free," said Jesus. "Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty," said John Keats. By the rules of the syllogism, if truth is beauty and the truth shall make you free, then beauty shall make you free, and since we are in favour of freedom, or have been off and on since it was extolled in the Romantic age, we should devote ourselves to beauty-worship. And where is beauty - widely interpreted - more manifest than in Art? This train of thought pursued to its end leads to the conclusion that even the aesthetic turning away from the moral dimension had, itself, a moral dimension."
"The nineteenth-century battle over the proper function of art was fierce, but all attempts to bend art to some useful purpose, or to prove that it had such a purpose (...) came to grief in the end, because what they amounted to was censorship."
"(Flaubert) was put on trial for Madame Bovary, and found himself in the unpleasant position of having to play by his enemies' rules - that is, to demonstrate that his book had a healthy moral. He defended it by claiming that the moral was healthy because Madame Bovary died a gruesome death as the result of her adulteries. (Strictly considered, untrue - if she hadn't foolishly overspent, she would have gotten away with it.)"
(on being a woman writer and the expectation of sacrifice) "But you didn't have to be a nun of the imagination or nothing. The feminine of priest is not only nun but priestess, so you had a choice, and there was a difference: the Christian religion had no priestesses, so there was something pagan and possibly orgiastic implicit in the term. Nuns were cut off from men, priestesses weren't, though their relations with men were not usually what you would call domestic."
"popularity - too much of it - was still regarded as a crime if you aspired to being what used to be called a "highbrow" writer. (...) He then quotes Trollope: "Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life, then only in small doses.""
""You understand, says Primo Levi in a letter to his German translator, "it is the only book I have written and now... I feel like a father whose son has reached the age of consent and leaves, and one can no longer look after him.""
Brown Owl - "I gave these books to Brown Owl, and the fact that she liked them was certainly more important to me than the badges. This was my first real writer-reader relationship (...) That's my first answer: The writer writes for Brown Owl, or for whoever the equivalent of Brown Owl may be in his or her life at the time. A real person, then: singular, specific.
Here's my second answer: At the end of Isak Dinesen's "The Young Man With the Carnation," God's voice makes itself heard to the young writer Charlie, who has been so despairing about his work. "'Come,' said the Lord. 'I will make a covenant between Me and you. I, I will not measure you out any more distress than you need to write your books... But you are to write the books. For it is I who wants them written. Not the public, not by any means the critics, but Me, Me!' (...)
So that is who the writer writes for: for the reader. For the reader who is not Them, but You. For the Dear Reader. For the ideal reader, who exists on a continuum somewhere between Brown Owl and God. And this ideal reader may prove to be anyone at all - any one at all - because the act of reading is just as singular as the act of writing."
"The end of Paradiso is a happy ending only if we squint very hard. And so it is with all happy endings of all books, when you come to think about it (...) A book is another country. You enter it, but then you must leave: like the Underworld, you can't live there."
"Where is the story? The story is in the dark. That is why inspiration is thought of as coming in flashes. Going into a narrative - into the narrative process - is a dark road. You can't see your way ahead. Poets know this too; they too travel the dark roads. The well of inspiration is a hole that leads downwards."