On Greater Suggestiveness

c/o Deborah Levy

Yesterday, with Virginia Woolf’s prompting, I opened the subject of suggestiveness.

Woolf said that some critics, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, write in a way that causes thought-births and idea-explosions in their readers’ heads, and some, like the unnamed Mr B, create only a fallen deadness.

This applies to fiction, too. Woolf names Kipling and Galsworthy as unsuggestive writers.

I’m obviously saying that this suggestiveness is something we should write towards, should write in search of.

A very basic question to ask of any book is, Do I want to reread it?

And this is based on another question, If I reread this, would I get anything more out of it?

There are some books, such as whodunnits, that we know we are unlikely to reread. Not unless we have forgotten we’ve read them. (The cycle of accidentally rereading Agatha Christie, and realising on page 55 that we know for certain who the murderer is.)

A suggestive book is beautifully rereadable.

I have reread Wuthering Heights perhaps ten times. Even typing this makes me want to go back to it again.

Also yesterday, I quoted Heidegger. He was writing about philosophy, but making a distinction between a kind of writing that labels bits of the world and a writing that energetically is what it does.

This saying is not statements made “about” be-ing, rather be-ing sways as this saying.

I gave Claire-Louse Bennett’s POND as an example of swaying a saying of be-ing.

Bennett’s writing is in a certain lineage. If you have read some James Joyce and some Samuel Beckett, and some Virginia Woolf, you’ll find it easier to take. If you haven’t, then you’re missing something key to her rhythms and word-availabilities. But even more so to her ambition — what she thinks writing can and should do.

This lineage is Modernist, but I think swaying as saying long predates that. It is writing that doesn’t merely describe, it enacts.

At its best, it isn’t a song that you — the reader — listen to, you are sung by it.

This kind of writing is closely related to poetry but it isn’t poetry. And it isn’t simply ‘poetic prose’ or a prose poem.

How do you get from one to the other — from non-suggestive to suggestive writing? Or do the two kinds of writing have completely different origins?

Well, here is Henry James. He’s talking about what goes in suggestive writing as a form of cooking, more precisely of stewing.

We can surely account for nothing in the novelist’s work that hasn’t passed through the crucible of his imagination, hasn’t, in that perpetually simmering cauldron his intellectual pot-au-feu, been reduced to savoury fusion. We here figure the morsel, of course, not as boiled to nothing, but as exposed, in return for the taste it gives out, to a new and richer saturation. In this state it is in due course picked out and served, and a meagre esteem will await, a poor importance attend it, if it doesn’t speak most of its late genial medium, the good, the wonderful company it has, as I hint, aesthetically kept. It has entered, in fine, into new relations, it emerges for new ones. Its final savour has been constituted, but its prime identity destroyed —which is what was to be demonstrated. Thus it has become a different and, thanks to a rare alchemy, a better thing. Therefore let us have here as little as possible about its “being” Mr. This or Mrs. That. If it adjusts itself with the least truth to its new life it can’t possibly be either. If it gracelessly refers itself to either, if it persists as the impression not artistically dealt with, it shames the honour it and can only be spoken to as having ceased to be a thing of fact and yet not become a thing of truth.

Henry James, The Art of the Novel, pg 230, Preface to ‘The Lesson of the Master’

James here ends by saying something very close to Werner Herzog, one of my few living artistic idols.

In his ‘Minnesota Declaration’, 1999, Herzog wrote about the difference between facts and what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’:

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

When I read Fact creates norms, and truth illumination, I think back to yesterday’s illustrations. Alex Katz’ portrait creates norms, Francis Bacon’s and Rembrandt’s create illumination. A norm is dead, an illumination is suggestive.

Herzog elsewhere said —

If we are paying attention about facts, we end up as accountants. If you find out that yes, here or there, a fact has been modified or has been imagined, it will be a triumph of the accountants to tell me so. But we are into illumination for the sake of a deeper truth, for an ecstasy of truth, for something we can experience once in a while in great literature and great cinema. I’m imagining and staging and using my fantasies. Only that will illuminate us. Otherwise, if you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.

‘Werner Herzog Is Still Breaking the Rules’, interview by Mekado Murphy, The New York Times, July 1, 2007.

To return to the question of how does writing become suggestive? I think the writer — at the moment they are writing, and perhaps for a long time afterwards — must not know exactly what they are saying, but they must feel it is in some way vital, significant, suggestive.

Writers must write out of the rich stew of themselves, which is comprised of the meat of others — what they have read by them, observed of them, and lived through with them.

I’ll finish today with a great quote from an interview with Deborah Levy. She was asked, ‘What one thing would you advise to all aspiring writers?’

Write something you don’t fully understand and then spend the next few years writing your way to a better understanding of your intentions and literary purpose. And here’s something unfashionable to keep in mind: what’s wrong with attempting to create a work of art of the highest order? If a nasty voice in your head tells you that you are getting above yourself, ask it how low it wants you to stoop to please it? And then stop pleasing it and start the work.

(Posted 26th September 2016, the Waterstones blog, by Sally Campbell.)

Deborah Levy, image credit Lauren Fleishman.