Motives for Writing

Y. S. R. CHANDRAN
Principal, Hindu College, Guntur

The spoken word has a spell of its own; its purpose is immediate; and its appeal instantaneous. When it comes from the mouths of earthly dignitaries, it acquires a power and might of great consequence. But the written word is seldom heeded by the contemporaries; it is addressed to posterity; rings across generations; survives and gathers a momentum.

Needs over-sway and words are of little value in the days of infancy; but with the weight of years and the growth of the mind, words take the field; the increasing sophistication makes us draw more and more on our artistic sense and the point of view is driven home with a cogency and palatability almost un-challengeable. After the satisfaction of the animal needs, man settles down and gives more of his thought towards chiselling and refining the form and the manner of his expression. A care, a concern and an attention which are rarely associated with speech, lurk behind writing; but the question that stares us in the face is, why should the great authors give their nights and days to writing: and why should they toil so much whether there is recognition or not?

The urge for writing seems mysterious when we consider the instance of Lady Mary Montague Wortley who after writing a history of her times, insisted on the whole lot being consigned to flames; there is the other equally staggering instance of a Casanova writing his memoirs, spending thirteen hours a day in the library and expressing a similar desire that they may be burnt; and certainly Peppys never meant that his diary should be pried into by any other than his own eye. The only motive here seems to be a type of Narcissism, a quest after self-perfection: it may be useful to remember how there have been a few who have given the clay of their lives an angel finish by such a determined pursuit; Marcus Aurealius, Benjamin Franklin and more recently Mahatma Gandhi may be quoted as shining illustrations.

There may be the motive of exhibitionism; writing may serve as a sort of window-dressing for mental ware; if a sportsman shows off his skill, why not a writer his prowess in turns of expression or the wealth of his scholarship; the writing may be a galley with an over-load; the peg may be too fragile to hold on the frame-work of learning and Milton cannot but suggest himself to us in this connection.

A hedonistic impulse may not be ruled out as one of the possible motives for writing; if people sing in the bath-room, why not we write for pleasure? don’t the birds sing for pleasure? and do they ever insist on their songs being broadcast or reviewed?

A Flaubertian quest for mot-jeste, may be another motive for writing; the mind may be wavy and turbulent; it may be a nest of thoughts which may be scattered away like birds at the slightest disturbance; a net has to be spread to capture them and one may write in the spirit of accepting a challenge to express the thoughts clamouring for expression in the exact words.

Sometimes writing may come in handy for taking away one’s blues; a mood of depression which finds tears an all too inadequate vent, may find in art a self-absorption, bodying forth the hankerings of the soul; but for Shakespeare’s being jilted by the Dark Lady, there would have been perhaps no sonnets and but for the disappointment caused by Beatrice, Dante would not have left to posterity the Divine Comedy.

Writing may after all be the diviner’s twig; if a water diviner is to be consulted to avoid wasteful labour and dig at the place located by him for a sure supply of water, so too the writer may take the quill to draw out the riches, the ore lying concealed and dormant in the sub-conscious; what a mine of wealth is there undiscovered, one does not know, unless one starts on the journey; the writer himself may be over-mastered and the course the direction and the culmination may all go contrary to his original intentions; the outline may be there, but the execution may be different; Shylock and Falstaff are so towering in the personality given them that they refuse to obey the wand of Shakespeare’s dismissal; so too Rebecca of Thackery.

The starved may satisfy their hunger in dream banquets; the actual may be too agonising and we may be driven to think of the ideal; an escape from this imperfect world into a fairy land of one’s own creation may be another motive for writing and thus we have day-dreaming, the rosy pictures of Utopias given to us not only by Sir Thomas Moor but by Plato and more recently by H. G. Wells.

Books may have the purpose of educating the public censuring the morals of the times or correcting the evil practices as Addison did with his Spectator or Charles Dickens with his novels; they may be written on purpose for giving a message; in fact books may be referred to as messages contained in a bottle; but just now the sea is stiff with too many bottles and the world requires a reduction by ninety percent of its population, leaving behind only the best part, before the individual regains his significance and not be the drop that he is today in the world ocean.

There may be the originality neurosis goading on a person to take to writing; something not said before, not thought of either or something out of the normal may be sought after by an author so that he may be marked out for a particularism; it may not be out of place to remember the shock-tactics of Bernard Shaw in debunking Shakespeare; the same strategy of discrediting the accepted values just for  inviting attention on their individuality, may be the motif for writing. It is however profitable to note that every individual is unique and different from others; praise be to God for his infinite diversity in creation; straining too much after uniqueness or originality may land one in queer-street; the writer’s job is to be good and if he has a personality, it is bound to come out in his works.

Money-making may be another motive for writing; there is the famous dictum of Johnson that none but bloc-heads, wrote anything except for money; but Johnson is not remembered by his Rasselas or his Dictionary but by his Talk and be did not make any money by his talk. There is no doubt a possibility of serving both God and Mammon when we remember the case of Shakespeare writing with an eye on the box-office returns and Scott studying the sales proceeds. Some may make writing a regular calling; in fact, since Dryden’s time writing has come to be established as a regular profession; but professionalism may spell danger for the writer and his writing; for one thing the author makes a precarious living; his writing has to be cut to size; it may not have survival value being too topical; and for the other it may offend the group that may come into power, landing the author in danger as in the case of Milton for his pamphlet on Regicide. When writing is embraced as a profession, it becomes soulless and mechanical; it is done as job-work and bas no immortality about it; it is because Aeschylus mentioned in his epitaph unimportant things such as where he was born and where he was born and where he died and how he fought the Persians and nothing about his dramas, that we delight in his dramas; it is because Chaucer could not finish his Canterbury Tales due to the stress of his official duties as Civil Servant, that we read with a sigh of disappointment that he has not finished; Milton in his prime is little remembered when compared with the Milton who lost his eyes in return for a real vision and higher that gave the epic. There is however the possibility of one writing too much and living too little; witness the case of Scott or Trollope drudging away the entire length of their lives; blacking pages and losing the savour of life; life is too precious to be thus thrown away on a single stake and that is why Marx in one of his relaxed moods and with a sense of humour said that we should strive for a day when the fragmentary man should be replaced by a completely developed man and when society could be so organised that a man could hunt, fish and write without being a professional.

Writing may be motivated by a desire to be lionised by the public, to be heard as an oracle and treated as such; the desire for publicity, renown, is perhaps greater than for money; but the public, to be worth anything, must at least be a century old like the oak; the contemporary pronouncements have no validity; reviewers are geese; friends and acquaintances are either too kind or jealous; time is the only court that can make an authoritative pronouncement and universality of appeal is the stamp, the seal of a good book. What is after all a public; Hitler had a public; the humourous programmes of the wireless have a public; Shakespeare regarded his public as being fantastic in their judgment, idiotic in their passions; even so he conceded that among the public there were lovable and admirable individuals; the same good-humoured amusement with which Shakespeare looked at the public and treated them, should be the attitude to be developed by the writer. Keeping company with such dead authors is healthy and leads to a productivity of the proper kind; the fear that keeping too much company with the dead may lead to their becoming antiquated or outmoded is entirely groundless; every age leaves its stamp on its generation; the Victorian because of intellectual companionship has not the slightest chance of being transformed into an Elizabethan and we may conclude by giving an instance in this connection of Demosthenes copying out Thucidides thrice for becoming an orator without ever being mistaken for Thucidides.