Consider today’s post a sort of prolegomenon. Or a prologue to a prolegomenon. Consider this a 1st installment on a discursive inquiry inspired by a quotation from Haruki Murakami’s Novelist As a Vocation (gifted to me by my sister).
What are we creating when we create, when we write, when we tell a story, when we artistically alchemize artifacts into artwork? If we are persistent, patient, productive, skilled, and fortunate we may succeed in creating a poem or a memoir or a novel. Or we create art. But what else might be created in the process?
“What I want to say is that in a certain sense, while the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel as well.”
— Haruki Murakami
Delicately delivered, beyond beautiful, and 100% spot on.
Elizabeth Santiago, author of the novel, The Moonlit Vine, and mastermind of The Untold Narratives, connects Murakami’s observation to a similar declaration by Toni Morrison.
“Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”
— Toni Morrison
Even more succinct than Murakami. Radical indeed, self creation through the process narrative creation. But what exactly does this mean? Santiago offers her perspective.
This is why we write – to discover parts of ourselves and the intricacies of the world around us that we might not have been able to explore or express using any other method.
— Elizabeth Santiago (Source: Writing Your First Novel? Be Messy and Be Radical)
I find this distillation intriguing, especially because it relates both to our creative endeavor rehabilitating Rosslyn and to the still ongoing act of creation that is Rosslyn Redux. Indeed the creative process is a journey of discovery.
But I believe that Murakami and Morrison are proposing something even more radical, even more generative. Narrative — and I’m extending the concept to include artistic creation in disciplines beyond the word as well — concurrently invents the artwork and the creator of the artwork. That assertion is indeed radical! It speaks to the transformative nature of creativity. In creating we are created (or recreated). Sui genesis.
In breathing life into the artwork the artist is born. Or reborn. In giving birth to a child the woman becomes a mother. The wordsmith conjures a world out of words and becomes an author. My mind flits to Vicente Huidobro’s The Poet is a Little God. Time to reread after 30+ years.
There’s another angle from which to consider this. A creator’s creation once created alters the creator. That’s the cost. That’s the reward.
More anon…
What do you think?