On writing

W.E.B. DuBois spoke of double-consciousness as it relates to race. Specifically, he posited that black people are always aware of being of a bipartite soul (or at least, feeling as they are of a bipartite soul). He describes it, in The Souls of Black Folk, as the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

 

Emerson spoke of this phenomenon first, in 1843, but in a slightly different vein, and I find the DuBoisian concept a bit more apt for everyday life. But I digress. I'm going to borrow DuBois' term and apply it to writing. Authorship, really. I suppose one could consider it simply a gender-neutral version of Sandra Gilbert's concept of "anxiety of authorship" (which was itself borrowed from Harold Bloom (I'm beginning to wonder if there's any such thing as an original theory, here)), but it's more than that.

 

Bloom's anxiety of influence is the unpublished writer's desire to break free of his immediate literary forebears (think Cormac McCarthy "breaking free" of William Faulkner), finding his own voice and making his own path through the dense underbrush of the literary world. Gilbert's anxiety of authorship is mostly similar, though it deals with female authors. She said that women couldn't suffer from this particular anxiety (of influence), not having any female forebears against which to rail. So instead of struggling against their antecedents, they struggle against themselves, trying to find a voice of their own at all. Women are (were), according to Gilbert, stuck in the middle of the jungle and just trying to find a path -- any path -- to follow.

Now I've sort of digressed again (can you tell I'm enjoying my literary theory class?), but all of that actually has a point. In order to explain how my idea differs from those others that sound kind of similar, I needed to explain them. So now we can move on to the most important part of anything: me.

My idea is almost an amalgamation of double-consciousness and the anxiety of influence -- but not quite. See, a writer has a different sort of double-consciousness: following some 19th century critic whose name escape me's assertion that (and I'm paraphrasing here, obviously) every writer who aims to get published must be one of the most egotistical sons of bitches that's ever lived because he feels that, after careful review of all the great literature that has ever been published, he deserves to be put on the shelf along side them, so he has to have pride, and ego, and chutzpah. On the other hand, I can't believe that every author really feels that he is the be-all end-all of literature, so an author must, along with being egotistical, have a sense of humility, for he knows that there are some pieces of literature that can never be outdone -- at least, by him. 

The creature that emerges is both full of himself and humble. He knows he's a better writer than 99.5% of the people on the face of the planet, but he knows that he'll never measure up to the other .5%. Now, this may seem a bit lopsided, but when you consider the relative awfulness of Dean Koontz (what? He sucks. Seriously. I put him below even the unpublished masses, because he's that awful. Dan Brown lies at .00001%) at the bottom of the 99.5% and the greatness of Shakespeare at the top of the remaining .5%, the divide between where a given author feels his talents to lie on this scale compared to where he feels the greatest writer(s) of English lie is just as immense (if not more than) as the divide between the writer's own perceived talent and the bottom of the barrel. A visual aide:

Dean Koontz @0% <--(the masses)--> Author @ 99.501% <--(other authors)--> Shakespeare 100%

And so, with this dualistic egotism-humility in mind, the author sets forth to publish. But this bipartite nature of his soul forces him to be very anxious about the prospect, and to wonder if he should publish at all. If he gets rejected, he'll be relegated to the masses; published, and he is at the bottom of a new barrel. The worst part about it, though, is that he knows that he will never surpass most of the authors who have already been elevated to the canon.  It's like halving the distance between yourself and the door to your room. No matter how many times you halve the distance, you will always be infinitely far away from the door.

The anxiety my author feels is not the anxiety of Bloom or Gilbert, really. My author's anxiety stems, not from trying to break free of a seemingly oppressive/confining literary father (or mother (or lack thereof)), but from just trying to force his way into the same league as his literary forefathers. He hasn't even thought about breaking away from them yet; I guess this stage precedes Bloom's anxiety of influence in our literary psyche the same way that Lacan's Imaginary Order comes before the Real Order in our regular psyche. Without the influence of the forebears, the unpublished author has absolutely no chance of making it into the canon, so he can't think about breaking away until he's milked it for all its worth.