Aug 19, 2009
Tragedy and the Creative Impulse
Neil Gaiman is, as ever, sensible:
I don’t think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it’s raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn’t mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.
Exactly right. People say to me, sometimes—they do—“Oh, I had my heart broken, so I am going to write a poem about it,” or something along those lines, and I think, writing because you have been hurt is all well and good, but that the name of that writing is rarely, say, “a poem” and is, instead, “a journal entry.”
Which is fine; but you have to know the difference between them.
It is not only that immediate tragedy is too difficult to make art out of because it’s un-dealt-with, though Gaiman’s right that tragedy is one of those things that resists being packaged-up and art-ed. It is also that tragedy is essentially incommunicable: others, no matter how empathetic, can never really get there, so to speak. You add Fact A to Event B and wind up with Tragedy P, and everyone can understand the mechanics of that—but good luck with Affect Y, which attends, but only for you, Tragedy P.
Certain kinds of writing are not meant for the public eye. Just because a thing is incommunicable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write it down; simply putting a thing on paper is therapeutic for many people. But that’s precisely it: it’s therapy, not art. Art is, in its most basic definition, an act of communication. If you can find a way of making your tragedy (or whatever) communicable—a little less personal, a little more social—then no matter how much it partakes of you, it will have that je ne sais quoi of art in it that makes things interesting.
If not, it’s not art. Which is, again, fine. But no, I don’t want to read your poem about how your girlfriend dumped you.
Gaiman’s bit about indirection is exactly the thing. If one is a writer, and one experiences a tragedy, it is difficult to keep that tragedy out of one’s writing altogether. Writing is empathic; that is part of the point. And moments of emotional stress, rupture, fragmentation, et cetera, are frequently the spark that makes good writing go. But it is necessary to let things take their course. All poems about breakups, if they are only poems about breakups, are the same poem. So stare at something else for a while. You’re not going to be able to not think about it anyway, so there’s no need to fixate explicitly.
Writers have enough explicit fixation problems as it is.
it seems that you leave out entirely the category of elegy.
actually, i don’t mention poetic genre at all; nor do i think that what i’ve said precludes the possibility of elegiac writing. the point is that i think that there’s a substantial difference between, say, writing an elegy & simply “writing what you feel,” & i would argue that any elegy that only writes what its author feels is a very sorry elegy indeed. for the writer, tragic experience is not its own end; between tragic experience & what one makes of it is the moment of poetry.