A Photo Essay
Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
August, 2005
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In Defense of the Blocked Writer
(Originally published in the Austin Writer, February, 1988, under the title In Defense of Silence)
The idea of the blocked writer calls up the dual images of amnesia and anesthesia, as if blocked writers had either forgotten what it was they wanted to say, or through some drug inducement or traumatic incident their minds were alert, but they could not feel their bodies and were thus cut off from the direct sources of their verbal imagery.
These medicalized perceptions of blocked writing as ill health, incapacity or dissolution are clearly metaphorical referents for what is perceived in broader sociological terms as frustration, failure, even laziness and fraud, and in psychological terms as self-deception, transference and denial.
But should these psycho-social perceptions be taken any more literally than the medicalized ones? Are they not themselves mere metaphors for deeper truths still unnamed and puzzling to those around the blocked writer, as well as to the writer to himself or herself?
There seems a clear consensus among modern writers as diverse as Marx, Freud, Sartre, Laing, Illich and Deridda, that writing itself is a metaphorical act, a ritual act used in a variety of ritual ways to unleash the explosive power of the mind and to increase, through the manipulation of words, one’s own power over other people. Writing is the most effective, indeed the most violent, of all forms of human activity. No wonder so many people are attracted to the career of writing. It has come to be understood as more noble, more romantic and more fiercely mercenary than the career of the bravest warrior. “How simply the fictive hero becomes the real,” writes Wallace Stevens, “How gladly with proper words the soldier dies.”
The Hammurabi code, the Bible, even the U.S. Constitution, are all means to make words more powerful than people and to legitimize the authority of one person over another. And if, as little boys want to be warriors, so many of us want to be writers, is it any wonder that we often balk at the deceit inherent in the task, at the unknowable consequences that our words might have on others, at the fundamental lack of necessity sometimes, to say anything at all. We are, at times, like disillusioned nuclear physicists shaking our heads in disbelief at the power of our own destructiveness
Picture the camps if you can: the Nazi concentration camps, the Gulag Archipelago, the football stadium in Chile, the work farms in Cambodia, the entire country of El Salvador. Words mean everything there. Words can get you in and words can get you out. The bubbly blabbering of contemporary American writing belies these terrifying images of past and present. But I suggest that that the camps are the best metaphor for the modern world; and writers with their “way with words,” are the strongest, the most promising and at the same time the most menacing members of this Kafkaesque incarceration.
We write, or fail to write, each of us, for some almost unspeakable personal reason, creating a fictional shadow reason to tell ourselves and the rest of the world. We continue to be the most dishonest people in history, constantly re-writing history in fact, rushing as we do to print, feeling as we do that it is a step toward immortality. We know that what is written is always taken more seriously than what is not written and that idea, stripped bare, is a commitment to half-truths and lies of Machiavellian dimension, “a stain upon the silence,” as Beckett calls his own work.
The blocked or reluctant writer, then, is always literature’s best hope. The hesitation that threatens obscurity also allows the ongoing possibility of truth. “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him, John Berryman writes. Perhaps Berryman and Hemingway and Plath and the others killed themselves, not because they couldn’t write, but because they couldn’t stand to live inside the walls of words with which they had surrounded themselves.
Listen to your silence then as much as to the sound of your voice. Watch carefully as your bold heart bolts the door against the promiscuity of words. Learn to stop lying to yourself. Perhaps you will find you have nothing more to say. Acknowledge once and for all the nobility of the blocked writer. Who, after all, speaks louder: life or death?
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