Constructive Language

One’s writing comes from some deep place which is non-negotiable. Certainly it comes from forces and influences you cannot name, but which can be traced to the place, culture and times into which you were born. Perhaps our conscious, educated mind guides us, refines and edits, but in the end our language reflects, embodies exactly who we are.

I have strong reactions to books because I feel their authors so intensely, particularly in the language they use, even in a very small piece. Novels which have become well-known in the last century, sometimes referred to as the “century of the self,” have dealt mostly with the inner lives of characters. As John Bayley says, “if the early novel saw the individual as part of the social whole, the post-Dostoevsky novel has come to represent his awareness of himself as a solitary being, who wishes to dream and to act ‘as he likes.’”

Writers ride the crest of a cultural wave. The wave throughout most of my life has raised up those who plumb the depths of their existence, who examine themselves and their struggles with the social world around them. A writer who found herself, somewhat to her surprise, surfing the wave of the Sixties is Edna O’Brien. Her characters wish to dream and act as they like!

The consequences for O’Brien’s characters are devastating. Set against an all-pervasive Irish Catholic church, which is more oppressive and dangerous than salutary, Edna O’Brien’s language is controlled, but underlaid with violence. The innocence of childhood foreshadows the scars of maturity, chronicling “unflinchingly the patterns of life for women, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair,” according to the cover material on The Country Girls Trilogy. “My novel,” O’Brien says of her first, “was completed in three weeks. It had written itself and I was merely the messenger . . . The words tumbled out, like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft.”

Out of sync with the cultural wave for most of my life, I first felt it when I wrote a letter to my college newspaper in April, 1966. The letter expressed my belief that people were spending their energy criticizing what went on around them and not appreciating what they had been given. “Must the opinions we voice be so negative generally?” I plaintively ask. (Thanks to an amazing archive program, the letter exists on-line today!) In that year, when the political left was intent on naming and reforming “the system,” this was not a popular sentiment!

Seeing the glass as mostly full, rather than mostly empty, the social whole as invoking the individual, are suspect in literature. The naked inner self and its authenticity still rules. I credit my remarkable parents with giving me the strength of mind, as well as their iconoclasm, to buck the prevailing winds. And of course, my own journey includes a great deal of soul-searching, as well as youthful exploration and rebellion. I do wish to lay claim to language as constructive, however; its ability to build as well as critique. (I'm aware that skirting the edges of platitudes can be dangerous!)

Cultural winds and waves change. I feel it in my bones. Violence and despair are not the only fruits of experience. Language which reflects hard-won inner peace may, at some point, be valued. It depends on where the story stops.