Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 1 Number 3, December 2000
_______________________________________________________________
Who’s Writing Whom?
The implications of a plural self for
the creative writing process
By
Abstract
This conceptual paper attempts to
open up a new perspective on the relationship between consciousness and
literature. It looks at the issue of identity in creative fiction, reviews a
number of approaches to writing (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996) and focuses on the
expressive process view for further consideration. It then reviews ideas from
psychology, namely Jung’s encounter with the unconscious, and recent work on
subpersonalities. These are then traced in some literary fiction examples. This
leads to the presentation of a model that offers a way of answering the
paper’s title question: ‘Who’s writing whom?’ The paper then considers
the implications of multiple sub-personalities for the creative writer and
suggests ways in which she may work with these inner ‘selves’. Finally, it
points to the work of Mike Leigh, the film director, as a model for a way of
working with the inner ‘actors’ in the creative-expressive writing process.
The Importance of Self in Writing
In his book The Art of the Novel
(1986), Milan Kundera, one of Europe’s leading writers of
literary fiction over the past 15 years, is quite clear about where he stands
vis-à-vis characters: the character is an
imaginary being created by the author. This is a fairly typical and
reassuring picture: the author as sole progenitor, in control of the figments of
his imagination, his ‘material’, writing from a conscious position, with
author-ity.
And yet, Kundera writes (p.23):
All novels of every age are concerned
with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a
character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the Self?
How can the Self be grasped?
That Kundera sees a close relationship
between himself, the author/narrator, and the characters is clear from another
passage in The Art of the Novel (p. 30):
You see, I don't show you what goes on
in Jaromil's [his character’s] head, rather I show what happens inside my own.
I observe Jaromil for a long while and I try, step by step, to get to the heart
of his attitude, in order to understand it, name it, grasp it.
So where is the boundary between Kundera
and Jaromil? If the character and the author are so closely interlinked, which
is which? Perhaps the relationship between author and character is not so clear,
after all? In other words, the ‘creation’ of a character raises questions
about identity and about the writer’s relationship to himself, his
self-identity.
Writing as Joinery
The traditional craft or ‘joinery’
view of the fiction process – the notion that a novel is something which can
be assembled or put together based on plot, character etc. – is very
tenacious. Examples of traditional ways of framing the writing process abound -
see Watts (1996), Disher (1983), Card (1990), Doubtfire (1981), and countless
other ‘how to’ books.
But ever since Robert Musil wrote his
novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, about a character without
characteristics, and since Edna O'Brien wrote "Fuck the plot!", in any
meaningful discussion about writing process one has to face the challenge as to
whether these constructs character and plot are (a) necessary
and/or (b) even harmful to a writer's process.
Perhaps the best that can be said is
that they are constructs retro-imposed by readers/critics on the finished product. When used as tools to help the practitioner in the
process of developing his or her
novel, they can be, in this writer’s experience at least, often extremely
unhelpful. In any case, how can one talk about product, if one cannot talk first
about in an understanding way about process?
On a more theoretical level, Grabe and Kaplan (1996) take an applied linguistics approach to
the subject of writing. According to them, the dominant approach to writing
studies is the process (rather than product) approach which ‘encourages:
self-discovery and authorial voice;
meaningful writing on topics of
importance (or at least of interest) to the writer;
the need to plan out writing as a
goal-oriented, contextualized activity;
invention and pre-writing tasks, and
multiple drafting with feedback between drafts;
a variety of feedback options from real
audiences, whether from peers, small groups, and/or the teacher, through
conferencing, or through other formative evaluation;
free writing and journal writing as
alternative means of generating writing and developing written expression,
overcoming writer’s block;
content information and personal
expression as more important than final product grammar and usage;
the idea that writing is multiply
recursive rather than linear as a process – tasks that are repeated
alternatively as often as necessary; and
students’ awareness of the writing
process and of notions such as audience, voice, plans, etc.’
Note that in the first item in the above
list self-discovery is linked with authorial ‘voice’, and note also that
‘voice’ is singular. The view expressed in this paper is that self-discovery
and writing are closely linked, but that authorial voice is plural rather than
singular.
The authors outline four different
approaches within this process approach (p. 107):
Expressive: writers should look for
their authentic voices and be able to express themselves freely. The goal of the
expressive approach is to produce writing that is fresh, spontaneous and has
integrity. Writers should say what they really think, be creative and take
chances; let their natural voices speak out.
Cognitive: writing involves the
following main elements: the composing processor, the task environment and the
writer’s long-term memory
Social: writing can only be understood
from the perspective of a social context and not as a product of a single
individual
Discourse community: ‘the notion of
discourse community includes writers readers texts, and social contexts in their
natural interaction, rather than artificially highlighted and separated
relations between writer and reader based on other considerations (Rafoth 1988).’
Of these four possibilities, the
expressive approach is the one of most interest in this paper. Although Grabe
and Kaplan state that it lacks theoretical underpinning, I am not so much
concerned with offering a theory, let alone a generically valid set of proofs.
This paper is more about opening up an entirely different perspective on the
writing process.
A Psychological Perspective
This perspective is psychological, because it draws on contemporary thinking in
psychology to focus on writing. It seems unwise to begin a discussion about
writing without taking cognisance of relatively recent thinking about how the
mind actually works … The opening up of the unconscious, by Freud, and, later,
Jung in particular, has only happened in the past hundred years or so. The
discovery that there is an extensive inner, psychic ‘landscape’ to be
explored, is still being processed by writers, still finding expression in the
novel.
Carl
Jung’s Work with Inner Figures, Images and Voices
In his autobiography, Memories,
Dreams and Reflections (pp. 203-205), Jung says:
It was during the Advent of the year
1913 - 12th December, to be exact - that I resolved upon the decisive step. I
was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself
drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave beneath my feet, and I
plunged down into dark depths ... After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the
gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight ... Near the steep slope of a rock
I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful
young girl. I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people
[emphasis mine], and listened attentively to what they told me. The old man
explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. But the girl staggered
me even more for she called herself Salome!
Over many years, Jung spoke and listened
to these inner figures and developed a strong connection with his inner world.
This work led to the formulation of the idea of the Self as consisting of
energies which he named ego, shadow, anima, and archetypes.
A question arises here for the
practising writer, namely are these figures any different from the figures which
writers encounter on their journey through the world of their imagination?
Robert Bly asserts, for example (Simpkinson and Simpkinson 1993):
We can contrast a psychological reading
and mythological reading of a sacred story in the following way.
Psychologically, each of the characters in the tale are read as energies, all of
which exist inside us.
Jung came to believe that not only do
these figures in the psyche have energy, they also have autonomy, a separate
identity and force or ‘will’ of their own, their own life. He says in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections (p.17):
We are a psychic process which we do not
control, or only partly direct. [1]
The autonomy of the unconscious mind is
an important idea in Jung’s work. I would argue that traditional theories of
writing as an expressive process do not take sufficient account of this
phenomenon.
Plurality of Identity
In the past decade there has been
considerable interest in the concept of a plural self, or subpersonalities. This
idea has a long history, going back to the nineteenth century, witness this
quote from Binet:
One
observes that in a large number of people, placed in the most diverse
conditions, the normal unity of consciousness is disintegrated. Several distinct
consciousnesses arise, each of which may have perceptions, a memory, and even a
moral character, of its own … (1892:243, quoted in Rowan
1990:16)
Rowan (1990) has demonstrated that there is increasing and
widespread agreement among the many strands of thinking in psychology that there
is not just one unitary self, but many ‘selves’. Certainly, the different
thinkers articulate their perceptions about this phenomenon with different
constructs, but Rowan’s assertion is that they are all talking about the same
thing. Here is a summary table of terms used by different psychologists for this
phenomenon:
|
PSYCHOLOGISTS |
TERMINOLOGY FOR MULTIPLE SELVES |
|
Freud |
Ego, id, superego |
|
Jung |
Ego, anima, shadow, complexes,
archetypes [2] |
|
Federn/Berne/Watkins |
Ego states |
|
Lewin |
Subregions of the personality |
|
Perls |
Topdog, underdog, retroflection |
|
Klein/Fairbairn/Guntrip |
Internal objects |
|
McAdams |
Imagoes |
|
Hilgard |
Hidden observer |
|
Balint |
The child in the patient |
|
Tart |
Identity states |
|
Denzin |
Emotionally divided self |
|
Winnicott/Lake/Janov/Lang |
False or unreal self vs. true self |
|
Gurdjieff |
Little I’s |
|
Goffman |
Multiple selfing |
|
Stone/Winkelman |
Energy patterns |
|
Mahrer |
Deeper potentials |
|
Mair |
Community of self |
|
Ornstein |
Community of self |
|
Gazzaniga/Minsky |
Agents within the mind |
|
Gergen/Martindale/O’Connor/Shapiro |
Subselves |
|
Strauss/Rossan |
Subidentities |
|
Markus |
Possible selves |
|
Kihlstrom/Kantor |
Self-schemas |
|
T B Rogers |
Prototypes |
|
Beahrs |
Alter-personalities |
|
Assaglioli/Redfearn/Rowan |
Subpersonalities |
From this table, summarised and adapted
slightly from Rowan (1990: 8), it can be seen that the
existence of multiple identities within the psyche is explicitly or implicitly
posited by many thinkers. Note that most of these authors construe the inner
identities anthropomorphically, i.e. as human figures. It is important for
writers to bear in mind that inner figures can be abstract as well as
representational, and that where they are representational, they an be
representing objects as well as beings.
Where do these sub-personalities come
from? The literature suggests a number of possible answers:
from a splitting of personality in
response to life experiences (Mollon, 1996); [3]
from introjection of other people’s
identities;
from pre-existing archetypes (i.e.
somehow genetically);
a combination of some or all of these.
Evidence for Authorial Subpersonalities
from Literary Fiction
A duality is commonly posited within the
writer’s mind that consists of the writer, on the one hand, and the internal
critic, or editor, on the other. This distinction is important, in so far as it
represents an attempt to liberate the creative process from the potential
harmful critical/review process by identifying the inner ‘enemy’ of
creativity.
One of the key propositions in Hermann
Hesse's Steppenwolf (written under a strong Jungian influence) was that
we are multiple selves. The goal of the central character in this novel was to
learn how to reconfigure his selves so that he could become a human being again.
The protagonist’s initials, H.H., standing for Harry Haller, bore a striking
similarity to Hesse’s own. This prompts the inference that the book is a
reflection of a stage in his life/artistic process.
A subtler, perhaps slightly unsettling,
example of the existence of other beings within the writer’s psyche is found
in Borges’ story Borges and I (1964):
The other one, the one called Borges, is
the one things happen to ... I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on
a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary ... It would be an
exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go
on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and his literature
justifies me.
However, with Alice
Walker, the relationship between author- and character-identity take a
different turn. She tells in In Our Mothers' Gardens (1984) of how she
made several significant life changes at the insistence of her 'characters' in The
Colour Purple before they would ‘come out and talk to her’.
New
York … was a place the people in The Colour Purple
refused even to visit … I flew … to San Francisco … where all the people
in the novel promptly fell silent … ‘us don’t want to be seeing none of
this,’ they said. ‘It make us can’t think’ … I started driving around
the state looking for a country home to rent. Luckily I had found … a fairly
inexpensive place in the city. This too had been a decision forced by my
characters. Eventually we found a place in northern California we could afford
and that my characters liked. And no wonder: it looked a lot like the town in
Georgia most of them were from. But there was still a problem … What to do?
Celie and Shug answered without hesitation: ‘Give up all this travel. Give up
all this talk. What is all this travel and talk shit anyway.’ So, I gave it up
for a year.
In this case, the author is not in
charge of her process, but needs to bend to the will of the characters and make
changes in her life if she is to write the book. In my view, this relates
directly to Jung’s idea of the autonomy of unconscious forces or figures.
Who is the real author in this instance?
There is a clear challenge here to the notion of the single author, in control
of her material. There is also a challenge to the idea that an author should
find her natural voice, because (a) there may be no such thing, and (b) she may
find instead the voices of significant inner others.
Who
is Writing Whom?
In Grabe and Kaplan
(p. 203) the basic question about writing is stated as:
Who writes what to whom, for what
purpose, why, when, where and how?
I suggest that this question is not
answerable fully from an applied linguistics perspective, in particular the
‘who’ and the ‘how’ of it.
There are in fact four different
processes going on within the creative-expressive writing process, namely:
I am Writing Me
It is Writing Me
I am Writing It
It is Writing It
The ‘It’ can mean the book, the
characters’ stories, etc..
This can be graphically represented as
follows:
This simple model illustrates a more
complex relationship between consciousness and literature than one commonly
finds in academic or practitioner books on the creative-expressive writing
process.
When considering this model, it may be
helpful if we bear the following broad equivalencies in mind:
Writer is to book, as
I is to other/it, as
Ego is to selves, as
Ego is to (anima+shadow+archetypes), as
Conscious is to unconscious, as
Writer is to characters.
The four dimensions of this model will
now be considered in turn.
I
Writing It
This is a view commonly encountered in
discussions of writing. ‘It’ is the text, the characters’ story, and
‘it’ gets written. Here, the writer is in control of her characters and
plot. If either gives any trouble, the writer simply wrestles with them till
they behave.
Sometimes, however, the characters will
not behave, the plot options are not convincing, writers become blocked.
Intellectual knowledge about technique is no help here.
I
Writing Me
There are various senses in which a
writer is doing this.
We can use this phrase in the sense in
which Flaubert used it: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" - the character was
essentially an aspect of the writer’s personality.
A writer also writes himself in the
sense that a story he writes can strongly influence who he becomes, through, for
example, commercial success, or fame.
Simply by being himself, being in
contact with his Self, being in the 'flow', a writer is writing his own life,
even when not writing, even in those long periods when she is drawing water,
chopping wood. The writer can ‘write’ his 'me' more deeply by engaging in
meditation, therapy, active imagination, dream interpretation and other ways of
interacting with inner figures, images and voices. Even through illness, a
writer can be writing her life more significantly. This is not just about
writing oneself, but also about ‘righting’ oneself - writing can be a
healing process.
It
Writing Me
The example from Alice Walker’s
writing above is a case of It Writing Her – the process of writing the book
required some significant life changes.
It
Writing It
There are a number of ways in which this
can be articulated. Firstly, one sometimes reads, hears or sees interviews with
authors in which they assert that the characters ‘wrote the novel
themselves’; they ‘just took over and ran away with the story’.
Again, for some writers, art can be
described as a matter of inner necessity, a compulsion or drive, prompted by
unconscious forces, the desire to actualise an expression of deeper aspects of
their identity. Writers tell of stories or 'characters' seizing them by the
throat and forcing them to write them down.
Another,
ostensibly more ‘spiritual’, way of putting this is where the writer is
described as a kind of channel for inspiration, the outworking or outpouring of
certain text-producing energies. Here, there is a (flattering) suggestion that
the author is the humble servant of higher powers, a channel for greater wisdom.
In such cases, the author has to ‘get out of the way’ and let it do it –
rather like the ‘effortless effort’ of Zen.
Alternatively, according to certain
confused French thinkers, owing to the death of the author, the text is simply
written by other texts, without human agency. While it is true that readers make
their own meaning from stories, and in that sense the author is dead, or absent,
while they are doing so, and therefore not in control of the meanings the
readers make, to deny authors any role
in the shaping of these texts seems to me to be completely absurd.
I suggest, therefore, that authorship is
plural, sometimes passive, but always involves some human agency, whether
conscious or unconscious.
Implications of Multiple ‘Selves’
for Writers of Literary Fiction
If there are many subpersonalities in
the writer’s psyche, and if these beings in our unconscious mind are, as Jung
believed, autonomous or semi-autonomous, there are many implications for the
working writer seeking to construct texts:
The duality of writer versus inner
critic or editor needs to be expanded to include a multiplicity of selves, any
of whom can be blocking/helping the process.
The writer has a choice to make: which
is more important - writing the novel, or his own self-actualisation through
interaction with these subpersonalities? If a writer ‘buys into’ this
process, it may take a long time: it’s about putting one’s life straight,
about facing one’s self/selves and becoming them, allowing them to become
oneself for a time. The writer has to take the risk that coming out of this
process may mean she decides it is no longer worth writing, that the drive to
write, an obsession with writing is no longer appropriate in her life story. It
may mean that writing has been a crutch, a prop, an escape from socialisation
and self-actualisation. Rilke said he preferred to hang onto his neuroses. Or it
may be a way to unlock all one’s
potentials as a writer – by facing oneself and not running away from one’s
self? Subpersonalities may be acting as gatekeepers to the secret of a deeper
‘story’. The writer, in contact with an ‘inner image’, in-process, can
be regarded as looking at or listening to not only a scene from a
novel-in-process but also a scene from the movie or story of his own
relationship to himself. Scenes from a 'book' can be read as scenes from a
writer's inner life - e.g. in terms of aspects of his psyche - e.g. ego,
archetype, shadow, anima. Story and selves are closely linked; one might also
say they are two sides of the same life/story. In this way, every story is
somehow a metaphor for the (re-)construction or actualisation of its author's
psyche.
Who does the writing? If these figures
are truly autonomous and have story-telling potential, or energy, then surely it
makes sense to leave the writing to them, the
'characters' and let them get on with it, let it do it? The implications
of this for writing are that the longer one leaves these figures alone, the
longer one simply observes them, interacts with them and records their unfolding
interactions, the deeper one is going into story and into oneself. Not writing the story that one would
immediately like to write could be an effective way of looking for a better,
deeper, fuller story making. Eventually, the figures find their own reality,
write their own stories. By letting the figures tell their stories, the writer
is respecting their right to self-determination. This is at the heart of the
writers’ dictum: show, don’t tell. If the writer lets the characters speak,
this is showing; if he speaks for them, without really listening to them, he is
telling.
Luigi Pirandello in
his play Six Characters in Search of an Author in effect treated these
figures or subpersonalities as characters unable to resolve their own story.
This raises the intriguing possibility that writer's block is actually characters'
block, in effect subpersonalities squabbling amongst themselves! There is an
unhappy relationship amongst the figures (as selves of the writer) and the
writer himself, or even amongst the figures themselves (internal conflict). The
characters block the writer - in effect the writer is standing in his own light.
This is not as daft as it may seem – if
these energies in the psyche have the quality of human minds, then they are
presumably just as capable of projection of their own stuff onto others as we
are.
A writer needs to be clear who’s doing
the writing. When she is reading her imagination for signs, with whose eyes is
she looking? Do they belong perhaps to a subpersonality through whom she may
currently be working something out, or whose identity she has not yet fully
separated from?
Writers need to make money to survive,
and it may not always be possible for professional writers to wait the length of
time it may take to work so intensively with the psyche.
How Might a Writer Work with Multiple
Personalities?
Interacting
with Inner Figures
I am not aware of anyone who has dealt
specifically with writing applications of this idea. However, Mick Cooper and
Helen Cruthers have collated some thoughts on working with subpersonalities in
their chapter entitled ‘Facilitating the Expression of Subpersonalities: A
review and analysis of techniques’, in The Plural Self (ed. Rowan and Cooper, 1999). They mention a number of techniques
which can be or have been used in a therapeutic context, namely: verbal or
written description of subpersonalities; an evening review of the different
people one has been during the day; writing answers to the question ‘Who am
I?’; dialogic interaction with the therapist; guided visualisations, art work,
role work, chair work, etc.
They also mention a list (first used in
Rowan 1990) of questions to ask one’s subpersonalities, to make them more
concrete and explicit, as follows:
What do you look like?
How old are you?
What situations bring you out?
What is your approach to the world?
What is your basic motive for being
there?
What do you want?
What do you need?
What have you got to offer?
What are your blocks to full
functioning?
Where did you come from
When did you first meet (name of
person)? What was going on?
What would happen if you took over
permanently?
How do you relate to men/women/children?
(Rowan 1990:198)
I would suggest that these can also be
used within the writing process as filtering criteria for deciding whether inner
figures are subpersonalities, representations of the inner energies which are
driving the story, or characters for a story, or a combination of some or all of
these possibilities.
Freefall
and Meditation Techniques
In my experience, the above kind of
exercises, although potentially helpful, particularly if facilitated by another
person, are too ‘cognitive’. To counteract the inherent tendency of the
conscious mind or ego to manipulate or otherwise subvert the process, it is
necessary to have methods that go deeper. One such is the Freefall technique
taught by the Canadian writer, Barbara Turner-Vesselago
(1990). This technique has five simple principles:
write what comes up
give all the sensuous detail
do not change anything
go where the energy is
if in doubt about where to go, go where
the fear is.
This simple yet powerful method enables
one to locate and write about, or from the point-of-view of, these inner
figures. An alternative is Natalie Goldberg’s use of
writing like a Zen meditation practice (1986). In both these ways, inner figures
are encountered naturally, organically, without pressure on, or abuse of, the
creative process.
Conceptualising the Interaction of
Multiple Selves in the Creative Writing Process
Although this paper is partly about
switching the emphasis away from conscious writing to writing which draws on the
workings of the so-called ‘unconscious’ mind, it will be important for
writers from time to time to find a way of conceptually grasping what is going
on with their specific writing project. This is about making sense of the
process. Using a plot-character-text focus in these situations is only partially
helpful. Time and again, in my observation, writers invest energy in making
sense of the product-in-progress, the half-finished text, and the story so far.
Perhaps better answers would emerge from sense making about the process instead.
It is more effective to search for a metaphor
for the process of putting the text together, particularly if the metaphor is
also a metaphor for a process.
There are a number of ways in which the
internal symbolic interaction of story-making can be conceptualised
metaphorically and worked with internally, for example, the idea of the
writer-self as:
A king ruling in a court full of
scheming barons and baronesses (the king has final author-ity on what goes into
a text);
Hero on a journey;
Ambassador working in a foreign country
(the territory of unconscious mind);
Ethnographer studying a strange tribe;
Detective seeking to find someone or
solve something;
Someone lost seeking to return home;
Therapist seeking to heal;
Therapee seeking to be healed;
Character searching for author.
While these are helpful, it may make
matters clearer to use process metaphors that are closer to creative process in
the ‘real’ world. [4] The most helpful metaphor I have
encountered in studying this subject, however, is to imagine the writer-self in
the role of director, and the figures, images and voices as actors in rehearsal,
but within a particular kind of rehearsal process.
There is an example from the real
external world of how this metaphorical process can work. To understand this it
is necessary to look at the work of Mike Leigh, whose film Secrets and Lies
won the Palme D’Or at Cannes some years back. Leigh has an unusual way of
‘writing’ films. He works with carefully selected actors, improvising
dialogue (in rehearsal, not performance) in order to work out a script. There is
no given script requiring actors to work their way into certain roles. The
actors are, in effect, co-generating a script with Leigh.
… the films and plays are developed in
such a way that the actors (and indeed the director) do not know what will
happen until they have explored and discussed the possibilities in the situation
where Leigh has placed the characters. [p.61] … He no doubt thinks that he
might deal with this or that theme. And of course what happens is to a large
extent dictated by the actors he assembles. But he must keep his mind open, and he can’t
have too much pre-ordained detail in his head because he couldn’t then work
with the actors and respond to what they are giving him. The whole process would
fall apart. So, to protect his own creative spark, he cannot know what the film
or play is going to be before he starts. He couldn’t possibly. [p. 96-97] (Coveney, 1997):
Transferring this example into the
‘internal’ domain of the psyche, we can use it metaphorically. The
relationship between Leigh and his actors is similar to that which ego
consciousness should have to inner figures or subpersonalities. I use the word
‘should’ deliberately, because I believe this to be a more correct,
psychologically healthy, effective and ultimately creative way of working
internally, as well as externally.
Coveney quotes Terry Hands, the UK
theatre director, as saying that Leigh’s method of co-writing with actors:
is an Elizabethan principle, and exactly
comparable to the manner in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote their
plays …[p. 130] Mike serves the actors who will then create the play [p.138]
But how to get finished performances
using this method?
The
democratic nature of Leigh’s process allows, of necessity, for the strongest
performances to swim to the fore and the top. In the end, it is down to how
Leigh, as the dominant artist himself in the creative process, absorbs and
responds to what the actor brings into the discussions and the rehearsal room.
[p. 166]
And
Leigh says (p. 166):
You
obviously exploit people who have a lot to offer, and people who have less to
offer, less so.
Towards the end of the book (p. 229),
Coveney states:
…
as he [Leigh] grew in wisdom and gathered experience, it became clear that he
was uniquely dedicated to the science of acting; and to the idea of creating
works of theatre and film which sprang from the
liberation of an actor in a text on which he collaborated, not his imprisonment
within one to which he was bound by traditional responses and ways of seeing. [emphasis added]
Clearly, working intra-psychically in
this way – with, for example, writer-ego as director, and subpersonalities as
actors co-working on a script that emerges from the daily (and nightly)
interaction of all parties – is a radically
different concept of the writing process than any of those mentioned in
contemporary ‘how-to’ books, or indeed scholarly works such as Grabe and
Kaplan’s.
5
Conclusion
This conceptual paper has been an
attempt to open up a new perspective on the relationship between consciousness
and literature. It examined the importance of self-identity in creative fiction,
reviewed approaches to writing (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996) and
focused on the expressive, process view for further consideration. It then
reviewed ideas from psychology, namely Jung’s encounter with the unconscious,
and recent work on subpersonalities. These were then traced in some literary
fiction examples. This led to the presentation of a model that offers a way of
answering the paper’s title question: ‘Who’s writing whom?’ The paper
then considered the implications of multiple personalities for the creative
writer and suggested ways in which she may work with these inner ‘selves’.
Finally, it pointed to the work of Mike Leigh, the film director, as a model for
a way of working with the inner ‘actors’, or characters, in the
creative-expressive writing process.
1 Note the term ‘direct’ which I shall
return to later.
2 It is interesting to note from a fiction
character point of view that ego/shadow/anima reflect the hero/villain/romance
triad in so much popular as well as literary fiction.
3 Note that I am not talking here about
multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder (MPD/DID). Mollon makes
it clear that there is a significant difference between ‘normal’ splits in
personality and clinical, much more severe, manifestations of this phenomenon.
Writers who engage in inner dialogues with their characters are not mad, or
delusional, but simply people who have a heightened ability to perceive inner
psychological processes, or representations thereof, signified in figures,
images and voices.
4 Sometimes, the subject matter of a
creative work may reflect in some metaphorical way the process that the writer
went through in order to write it. For example, Martin Amis’s novel ‘Money:
A suicide note’, which is the story of a porn film director’s journey
through “development hell” can be read as a metaphor for self dis-integration
and regeneration. The main character is called John Self. Similarly Dennis
Potter’s screenplay ‘The Singing Detective’ can be read as the story of a
writer healing himself through interacting with his inner selves
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