WRITER'S RESPONSIBILITY TO THE READER!

Writer's Responsibility to the Reader!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2006

"If the story is in you," William Faulkner once said, "it has got to come out." All writers, whether they are writing of a new scientific discovery, recording their musings, writing their memoirs, or publishing a novel are telling some kind of a story. That is what writing is all about.

Faulkner, incidentally, drifted a good deal before he finally settled down to writing, reinventing himself, attending college and then dropping out almost immediately, taking a sinecure position at the local post office in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, and then when the war came on (World War II), going to Canada, purchasing a Canadian flyer's outfit, returning to Oxford with a limp, as if he had been in the war, all inventions, all adding to his repertoire as a storyteller.

“The job of fiction,” writes Stephen King, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Read biographies of successful writers and you will see that lying is source material, and exaggeration a critical component of their tool kit.

Oscar Wilde once said that all storytellers are consummate liars, but added, there is more truth in their lies than in people who live on the surface of life and call it truth.

A writer, especially a writer of fiction, is basically telling the story of himself from as many possible angles as he can possibly conceive. Gore Vidal said that Henry James had several original stories in his repertoire, but most writers only have one or two, no matter how many books they write, with the possible exception of Shakespeare who had scores of original stories in his catalog.

Now, a writer can only make connection with a reader if the story he is telling resonates with the reader. Faulkner, who had very little formal education, but read widely, expected his readers to have a considerable vocabulary, and a healthy appreciation of fear and conflict in the human heart. This was the truth the reader had to bring to the story. Henry James said essentially the same thing when he said the purpose of a novel is to help the heart of man know itself.

Where does that put modern techno-thrillers and mystery novels of the macabre? One could say a safe distance from the wellspring of the immortal soul. These are not stories but essentially erector sets that fascinate in the complexity of their design. It hasn’t always been so.

Kurt Vonnegut said of Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1949), “His journals remind me of a time, not all that long ago, when there were still a few people passionately responsive to writing. They are now extinct.” He was talking about people who looked directly at their hidden demons and recorded the terror in their hearts without blinking.

Kerouac, if anything, obsessively embraced his fears, and left no room in the workshop of his heart for anything, but the old verities and truths, as Faulkner might put it.

Faulkner was dedicated to poetry and the human spirit, and spoke to this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Sweden in 1950:

“Until he (the writer) does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope, and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

Joseph Campbell put this in terms of the “seven circles of charkas,” suggesting the “third level” or “solar plexus,” where animal instincts reside is the contemporary level of our “gland” culture. This has led to the expression “waist high culture,” or popular culture.

We have a lot of gland or “waist high” writers today, writers that hide in the shock and awe of technology, keeping themselves separate from their material, who wow us with what they think without revealing how they think, who divorce us from our pain and fear and allow us to lull in some vicarious pyrotechnical thrill.

Stephen King says, “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affection.” The key words are “letting go.” He continues that the writer will find himself by recognizing that writing is found in what you really love to read.

He is also candid about why he sells a lot of books. It is because “book-buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.”

Page-turners are books the reader recognizes the people in the book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk. He continues, “When the reader hears strong echoes of his or her own life and beliefs, he or she is apt to become more invested in the story.” How much is determined by what the reader can remember of the book a day or two later.

Stephen King is not going to win a Nobel Laureate, as popular as he is, because writers such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, while still writing entertaining works, have taken their work to the next level. What level is that?

William Butler Yeats describes it in this way: “Now that my ladder is gone. I must lie down where all ladders start, in the fowl rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” In terms of Charkas, the heart is the fourth level. This is the center of transformation, and birth of the spiritual life. Joyce has Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1937) call this, “Jesus with his heart on his sleeve.”


There is no posturing at the heart level. Craving has been replaced by spiritual aspirations. Once the writer introduces us to this level, he must guide us through our doubt, as Faulkner has, and bring us through the mist into the clear, recognizing that as tough as things may get, “man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul.” In Charkas, the Yoga would say he has the radiance of God and the energy to look inward for fulfillment.

For the writer, he must decide if he wants to engage the reader in the code of the soul, or simply to entertain, and let it go at that. Dan Brown’s popular “The Da Vinci Code” approximates the latter with his journey into exploring the mystery of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This is a safe voyage, which uses the devices of mystery puzzle solving. Its staying quality can be measured on what is remembered from the story. That is not to say that entertaining writing, per se, is bad. On the contrary, most readers read simply for pleasure, which is fine.

The limits of the writer, whatever his genre, however, are governed by being true to his roots, and writing out of that experience and the education that accrued from it. If he is honest with himself, and gives the reader the key to his, “House of Intellect” as Jacques Barzun puts it, the reader can decide if it is worth the effort.

Emerson said, regarding serious readers, “One must be an inventor to read well.” He was speaking of “self-trust,” what Harold Bloom says in How to Read a Book (2000), “is not an endowment, but is the Second Birth of the mind, which cannot come without years of deep reading.” Deep reading comes from writers who have pondered their soul and have the will to share their insights. Thomas Clayton Wolfe of “Look Homeward, Angel” (1929) and “You Can’t Go Home Again” (1940) fame was such a writer.

Where Stephen King is correct, “writing is likely to be close to what you love to read.” This is the writer’s “House of Intellect,” which may have an ironic connection to his roots.

An appreciation of irony is a powerful tool of the serious reader. Bloom suggests that this is frequently and unknowingly in quest of a mind more original than one’s own. Irony, in any case, is a powerful concept with such writing. Take Hamlet in Shakespeare. He constantly says one thing while meaning another. It challenges the reader, and drives him to ponder and identify with the troubled soul.

But as Vonnegut, Bloom and others have suggested, you cannot teach irony. It is a complex derivative of a mind that works on several levels, often contradictory, and still can carry the reader to a safe landing. Because of the demands of this, Bloom laments, “The loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our nature.”

This missive was opened with the idea that all writers, whatever their genre, are storytellers. What is also true is that most novels are letters aimed at one person. Clearly, James Joyce’s classic novel, Finnegans Wake (1938) was written with his troubled daughter, Lucia, in mind. The novel is a powerful stream-of-conscious tale of a novelized version of her schizophrenic world with all its horrors, but treated with love, compassion, tenderness, and integrity.

In the end as in the beginning, the final assessment of the writer’s responsibility to the reader is to write as well as he can, as clearly as he can, and as honestly as he can. To do that, he must somehow master language well enough to record on the page what flies wildly and chaotically in his head.

The story the writer tells will still not be the story that is read. The reader will bring his own story to the book and connect the dots of his story with the story being read, thus creating a whole new story. Therefore, no two readers will have the same experience or derive the same benefit.

What brings about this peculiar marriage of writer and reader is that they both have live imaginations and an affinity for this invention called language in the printed word.

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Dr. Fisher is the peripatetic philosopher. His works are posted on his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com.