E. L. Doctorow: Creationists

I attend here mostly to compositions that take the form of stories.I write such compositions myself, and so am interested in those whowrite them.

A novel or a play has its origins in the peculiar excitements of thewriter's mind. These are powerfully felt, even inspired, responses towhat may be the faintest or most fleeting of stimuli— an image, thesound of a voice, a kind of light, a word or phrase, a bar of music. Orthere may be an idea for which the writer has a strong sense ofrecognition, so strong that it becomes his to deal with as his domain.

Of course, not all—in fact very few—of the writer's states ofarousal are resolved as finished works. Most are put aside for somemercurial reason: they are tried and found wanting in a page or so, orstashed away, or forgotten completely. But I imagine them as a kind ofgroundsong, these excitements, as constant and available as thesensation of life itself.

Wherever fiction begins, whether in the music of words or animpelling anger, in a historic event or the importunate hope of ajustly rendered composition of one's own life, the work itself is hardand slow and the writer's illumination becomes a taskmaster, a rulingdiscipline, jealously guarding the mind from all other and necessarilyerrant private excitements until the book is done, the script isfinished. You live enslaved in the piece's language, its diction, itsuniverse of imagery, and there is no way out except through the lastsentence.

Underlying everything—the evocative flashes, the dogged working oflanguage—is the writer's belief in the story as a system of knowledge.This belief is akin to the scientist's faith in the scientific methodas a way to truth.

Stories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, arerevelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with theinvisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something ofmoral consequence. They distribute the suffering so that it can beborne. To the skeptic who would not consider the story a reputablemeans of knowledge, the writer could point out that there was a timewhen there would have been nothing but stories, and no sharperdistinction between what was fact and what was invented than betweenwhat was spoken and what was sung. Religion, science, simple urgentcommunication, and poetry were fused in the intense perception of ametaphor. Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. Theywere as important to survival as a spear or a hoe. The storytellerpractices the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse thatantedates all the special vocabularies of modern intelligence.

There is a scientist in this book as well. Scientific formulas arerevelatory structures of facts. They too connect the visible with theinvisible. And, inevitably, they create realms of moral consequence. Iargue here that the experience of discovering a scientific truth is forthe scientist the same as the achievement of a realized work for thewriter. In neither case is there a lingering sense of personalpossession. The effort of one's mind seems, on completion, the work ofoutside forces. For all creationists, there is a strange displacement:the creative mind dissociates from what it has created. There is nomemory of the effort involved. The book, the formula, becomes somethingout there, as if it appeared of its own volition.

I assume the experience is the same for the composer of music, thepainter, the sculptor, the architect, the engineer. But the comedicmime, whose composition is in his physical deportment, whoserevelations are composed as gestures, lives, like the dancer, in hisexpressive musculature, his art molded from his being.

Human creativity would seem to be rampant. From infancy the mindascribes meaning to the unmeant; it lights what it sees and makes ahome of the world. The results are not always benign. Our inventivenessis boundless and can be at its most dazzling as it breaches the moralimperatives we have created for ourselves. Like the communalcomposition out of Los Alamos, it can have horrifying consequences.

In the history of literature, some of the most beautiful, mostprofound works have been composed by the most wretched of souls; thereis no necessary equivalence between the aesthetic and moral achievementof a novel and the confused, drunken, tormented, or immoral package ofhumanity who has produced it. Whatever sublimity inheres in the workdoes not necessarily exhibit itself in the author.

But the writers about whom I write do have a certain radiance in myeyes. I may not be uniformly positive in my judgments, but underlyingall my attentions is a collegial homage, a sympathy, even a love forthe aesthetic struggle as it shines with a kind of blessedness. Afterall, why compose fiction when you could be devoting your life to yourappetites? Why wrestle with a book when you could be amassing afortune? Why write when you could be shooting someone?

True storytellers ply their imaginations with a kind ofself-questioning arrogance. They would reassert the authority of thesingle mind to render the world. They may not realize when they committo the practice of fiction that they are ordained to contest theaggregate fictions of their societies. That, of course, is theirredeeming value, but also an indication of the risk they take. It canbe a dangerous profession, storytelling. If actuarial figures ofwriters' life spans worldwide were to be calculated, taking intoaccount the jailings, the deportations, the executions, thedisappearances, as well as the humdrum deaths from malnutrition andneglect, you would not want your son or daughter to become a writer.

Apart from such hazards, there is an entropic cost to the calling:writing is not merely a matter of setting down words. A novel iswritten at the expense of the novelist's being. Eventually, there isnot much more to him that hasn't been written away. It may be thepeculiar fate of the writer that after a lifetime of writing he becomesmysterious to himself, his identity having dissolved into his books.

Finally, the enterprise of writing gives no warrants. The fewmonumental works that change our thinking, our seeing, rise from thechatter of what is temporal, imitative, foolish, and easilyforgettable. The writer will never know if his work will flash forth alight from his own time and place across borders and through the ages.His own time and place clutching and pulling at his feet of clay everyday of his working life, he will know only how faint a light it is, andhow easily doused.

And so, all in all, a degree of courage is involved in the practiceeven if the writer, as he flourishes in the realization of his firstbook, may not be aware of it. He will be taught about courage in anycase. All creationists are mortal.