On Writers And Writing, by Margaret Atwood
What is a writer? Can anyone who puts marks on a page call themselves a writer - or is it something more than that? What is the writer's role? To delight, to instruct, to reflect, to foretell, to surprise? Or perhaps some combination of the above? These and more are the questions asked by this book. 'On Writers And Writing' is the book version of a lecture series given by Margaret Atwood at the University of Cambridge in 2000; it's a fascinating, insightful, often funny critical reflection on what it means to write.
The study of literature is unique because it has the same substance as subject: the only way we can analyse words is by expressing them in other words. Literary theory is writing about writing itself, and throughout this book Atwood is wonderfully self-aware of the meta nature of her task. Of course, by writing a review, I am adding yet another layer of self-reflection (I'm writing about writing about writing...) but therein lies the thrill of literary criticism. The whole art form hangs on finding new ways to express words, new metaphors in which to clothe them - and the Word Wolf finds this very tasty.
My favourite section of this book was the chapter entitled 'Communion: Nobody to Nobody'. It was all about the relationship between writer and reader - what kind of relationship it is, if one exists at all. Atwood imagined the writer-reader connection as shaped like an inverted V, with the book as the all-important third point that hovers between the two, joining them together. I liked how this figuration cast the book as go-between: the writer pours their soul into the book, and the book transposes it across time and space for the reader. Books are powerful messengers.
This was also interesting because the writer-reader connection cannot exist without the book - Atwood's model is a V, not a triangle. The separation of writer from reader is real (it's rare that the author is sitting beside you whilst you read!), but this distance raised some exciting questions about the nature of books. Does a book have its own identity, separate from its author? And might its message change with each new context in which the book is encountered? To whom does a book belong - can we say for certain who a text is 'for'? When a text 'speaks' to us, whose voice are we actually hearing? And conversely, when a writer releases their text into the wild, do they ever actually know who will read it? These questions can never be definitively answered, of course, but as a person who both reads and writes, I enjoyed thinking about them.
One theme that surfaced again and again in this book was the idea that writing is somehow a spiritual act. At first I wondered whether this might be a little sacrilegious: although the metaphor of writer as god has been around a long time, I'm not completely sold by it. But the more I read, the more I saw that there is something spiritual about writing. If we understand 'spirituality' to mean that which connects us to the transcendent, to the world around us, to other people and to our inner selves, then yes, writing is profoundly spiritual. It speaks into society, it affirms identity, it teaches empathy, it can even speak for the dead. Atwood's metaphors of the spiritual treated writing with reverence - which I think it deserves.
One critic describes Atwood's argument as having as many tentacles as a 'well-developed sea anemone', and this is a great way of putting it. The book pursues multiple trains of thought, which spark off one another into new ideas and then circle back to pick up where they left off. 'What is a writer' is not a straightforward question to address, and I appreciated the way Atwood meandered through the topic, working her way thoughtfully through the knotty bits, and then turning round to consider them from the other side.
All of this was rich with references to novels and poems, playwrights and theorists, and all of it was written with a fantastic wry humour. Atwood is lightly and ironically self-deprecating all the way through, despite her evident expertise, and this made the whole book an entertainingly down-to-earth read. To sum it up, the world of literary theory is one I happily inhabited during the years of my English degree, and 'On Writers And Writing' opened up this world for me again with humour, dexterity, and insight. I really enjoyed it.
