Forget the Writer

“‘There is no such thing as THE WRITER.’ … The battle is this: the dethroning of the writer, the constant and all-consuming bloody coup every story or poem or essay—every genuine work of art—must accomplish over its author in order truly to live and to breathe and to have something to say to us that will matter.” — Brett Lott, Letters and Life, quoting Flannery O’Connor

When I read Lott’s words, they harmonize with others. Paul Celan says art makes for distance from the “I.” Quorra, in Tron: Legacy, removes herself from the equation. Cynthia Occelli says a seed only achieves its greatest expression in coming “completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out, and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would like complete destruction.”

All those people are talking about the process of dethroning. It’s the only way to get to the art that matters, the art that lives and breathes and has something to say. Without it, the artist sticks out like a sore thumb. The person or the message gets in the way of the art. What develops is not art; it’s something didactic, preachy, ostentatious. It has no staying power.

For true expression to occur, the seed–the writer–must die. It’s in dying to self that beauty arises. It’s in dying to self that everything changes. The world looks different because it is different. The artist has changed. She has become enthralled to a larger power.

That isn’t necessarily in a spiritual sense, although for the believing artist the stakes are always simultaneously sacred and secular. It’s in the sense that the artist gives preference to the art. She is merely an instrument, a vessel, through which the art comes. She submits to it first.

In return, it submits to her. The relationship between the artist and her work is, in some ways, akin to marriage. It demands mutual submission, making the daily choice to serve one another for the good of the art and for each other.

Image: Steve Corey (Creative Commons)