Rene Girard theorized that the inability of human beings to generate authentic desire caused them to imitate others. While I have not come upon a word I find suitable for the act of imitating an author’s voice or style besides mimetic or imitation, I will be the first, if not somewhere within the line of suspects, to admit that I am guilty of it.
Great artists steal, as they say, and it is quite fascinating really. To observe in my own writing and its evolution the small idiosyncrasies one “picks up” along the literary road. With these “borrowings” from others, one synthesizes their personal style. I mentioned this briefly in the short note On Reasons to Write:
If one imagines the empty spaces as the black fog upon the map of that inward world which the writer must wade through to come about truth, a disciplinary structuring of the process in a sense negates the excavation of the sought-after treasure. Writing is a non-linear activity and as such wholly frustrates the will, reason and organization. A further consequence: good writing, like beauty, feigns capture by the intellect in any sort of formal teaching. One must try on the various masks and personas to decide how and why one does not fit.
For me it is:
- From Nietzsche: the use of a forceful statement thrown out at the reader’s face after a colon.
- From Dostoevsky, a sidebar parenthesis providing comical commentary on part of the narrator.
- From Watts, an inexhaustible rambling in measure to the infinite patience of the reader, but also the habit of writing as one speaks.
I’m likely not alone in this and there are more examples I could consider, but the above are the primary I observe. This all being said, in the interest of experimentation I’ve decided in this note to share a short excerpt from a story I started writing in early 2022 after reading too many Russian novels that may demonstrate this.
// Trial of a Writer
// Chapter: The Beetle and The Widower
A man burst through the doors in a destructive flurry of chaos, disturbing the ambiance of the salon that evening.
“Oh but how will she forgive me? This poor soul and heart but in the darkest parts of the night!”
He stumbled forward to the table with a group of ladies and single gentlemen completely oblivious to the interruption of their conversation.
“You sir, please tell me: how could she forgive me? A poor drunken fool like me! That I’ve taken to drink, how can you blame me – what is a man to do when he is so consumed by grief! Ah but if only I could live this way all my life, while my heart beats. What was it that Pushkin said? Yes, Yes! I live to think and to suffer as I do so at your feet, Your Excellency!”
The man was well known throughout the town of Rovnoken, a certain Stepan Vokoreshnovich Ledyakin. He was a retired captain and widower who had in recent times taken to, or perhaps been taken completely by, consumption of drink.
It was apparent to all persons familiar with the matter that Mrs. Ledyakin, a fair lady with a calm complexion and a certain high French taste despite having little money for the affordances of fine things, had been progressively growing more ill in recent times. Despite the continual prayers on behalf of the former Mrs. Ledyakin from the fair ladies of our church to the Madonna, she eventually passed in a non-violent, quiet and dignified manner. It was Stepan who had, despite the obvious destination of her condition, remained in abrupt denial of the course of events to her final days, however. How it was, at least apparent to all who paid attention to this chronicle, that the captain had been convinced his dying wife was somehow “making an act of it”, is unclear. However, it was now common knowledge that the captain had taken upon himself the burden of grief in his failure to act sooner, so to speak, in preventing the passing of his wife. This had inevitably left him to wallow in the burrow of false perception that he had somehow been the primary cause of her death. And so, to reconcile the emotional weight, he had taken as many do to drink as a means to console himself.
The poor man who had, involuntarily, been involved in this inner turmoil and drama stared somewhat blankly at the captain unsure of how to reply. What is a man to say, after all, to another who is stricken with grief, sentimentality and the influence of drink? Drink: that sense of consciousness which liberates the inward mind from those thoughts which cower away from the light of civility and remain restrained behind the doors of inhibition screaming out all the while to be set free and for their sentimentalities to flow. Naturally, the man replied as any reasonable man would in this situation,
”I am sorry Sir, I do not understand a word you have said.”
Now if only it could have been captured in full view by a devilish artist at that precise moment. The total composure, what little remained at least, of the fair captain Ledyakin had been scoffed by this remark. He turned his nose in absolute protest towards his counterpart who had, it would seem to him, betrayed him so unfaithfully.
The adult writers in the room say you should write about what you know and heck they are probably right, but who knows what you could create if you let some of the “rules” go from time to time.