Bukowski and the Self-Negating Writer

"Reading the poets has been the dullest of things...even reading the great novelists of the past, I said 'Tolstoy is supposed to be special?' I go to bed. I read War and Peace. I read it. I read it. I say 'Where's the specialness in War and Peace?' I really tried to understand. I mean, and then many of the great poets of the past...I've read their stuff; I've read it. All I get is a goddamn headache and boredom. I really feel sickness in the pit of my stomach. I say 'There's some trick going on here. This is not true. This is not real. It's not good.' You see poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry, as much industry as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private, hidden art, not appreciated. The reason it's not appreciated is because it hasn't shown any guts. It hasn't shown any dance. Hasn't shown any moxie. Poetry is generally very dull. Very pretensive. Uh...those who say the poet is a very private and precious person I don't agree with. Generally he's just a dumb, fiddling asshole writing insecure lines that don't come through, believing he's immortal, waiting for his immortality which never arrive because the poor fucker just can't write. Most co...poets, coets, hoets, carrots can't even write a simple line. Like: the dog walked down the street. Nothing should be ever be done that should be done. It has to come out like a good hot beer shit. A good hot beer shit is glorious...man. You get up. You turn around. And you look at it. And you're proud. The fumes...the stink of the turds. You look at the--you say, 'God I did it. I'm good.' You know...and then you flush it away and there's a sense of sadness. When just the water's there. It's like writing a good poem, you just do it. You...you...it's a beer shit. Nothing to analyze. There's nothing to say...it's just done. Got it?"
--Charles Bukowski as interviewed in Poetry and Motion


"Not only does the writer respond to his muse's quasi-sexual excitation with an outpouring of the aesthetic energy Hopkins called 'the fine delight that fathers thought'--a delight poured seminally from pen to page--but as the author of an enduring text the writer engages the attention of the future in exactly the same way that a king (or father) "own" the homage of the present. No sword-wielding general could rule so long or possess so vast a kingdom. Finally, that such a notion of 'ownership' or possession is embedded in the metaphor of paternity leads to yet another implication of this complex metaphor. For if the author/father is owner of his text and of his reader's attention, he is also, of course, owner/possessor of the subjects of his text, that is to say those figures, scenes, and events--those brain children--he has both incarnated in black and white and 'bound' in cloth or leather. Thus, because he is an author, a 'man of letters' is simultaneously, like his divine counterpart, a father, a master or ruler, and an owner: the spiritual type of a patriarch, as we understand that term in Western society."
--The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Ninteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Second Edition, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Yale Nota Bene

Is as, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, writing simply, to quote John Irwin, "'an autoerotic act...a kind of creative onanism in which through the use of the phallic pen on the 'pure space' of the virgin page...the self is continually spent and wasted....'" (Gilbert and Gubar). Or is it something more? Has the act of writing been grafted with a patriarchal fantasy of sexual tension/release, of ownership, of domination? Well this, certainly, cannot be denied. But can we, on certain grounds, refute the idea that this is all that writing is? A fantastical onanism, an engendering of oneself? Can the writer be captive to his/her own work? Can that work, as many have said, "get away from" him or her? Or perhaps, to escape such rampant speculation, can we say that the writer must first submit to his/her work before he/she can possess it? It seems to me that the majority of objections grounded in this principle view authorship as existing within a forward-moving trajectory, that is, as possessing or being possessed by a certain telos in which the author has something to "say."

But what of the self-negating writer? What of the negative writer as embodied by Bukowski? Can he be warranted to have something to "say?" Much like the preface ("When the double necessity, both internal and external, will have been fulfilled, the preface, which will in a sense have introduced it as one makes an introduction to the (true) beginning (of the truth), will no doubt have been raised to the status of philosophy, will have been internalized and sublated into it. It will also, simultaneously, have fallen away of its own accord and been left 'in its appropriate place in ordinary conversation.' A double topography, a double face, an overwritten erasure. What is the status of a text when it itself carries itself away and marks itself down? Is it a dialectical contradiction? A negation of negation? A labor of the negative and a process of the works in the service of meaning? Of the being-abreast-of-itself of the concept?" Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago), much like the preface, the self-negating writer is left in an existential quandary.

When I say a self-negating writer, I do not mean a writer who attempts to erase all traces of him or herself from the product. I use Derrida's question of the preface as analogous to what I call the presupposed profundity of authorship. It is not that the self-negating writer denies his/her own work, it is that he/she denies the profundity, that is, the credit of having written. Bukowski may appear pretentious in saying "Tolstoy is supposed to be special?" Even more so by equating writing with a beer shit. Examine closer however, and you will see the necessary steps of self-negation. The refusal of pretension, the refusal even of the interview, the interview of pretension, that is that he, Bukowski should even be interviewed, that is a necessary refusal for the self-negating writer. But the self-negating writer consents to being interviewed to say that writing has become a farce, perhaps always was a farce, but fiction is for the most part a dry and boring affair.

As Tim O'Brien says in his essay "Telling Tales" for Atlantic Fiction 2009:
"Let's say, for example, that a story is set in Nigeria. No matter how much detail is offered to help me see and smell and hear Nigeria, if the story itself does not surprise and delight and enchant me in some way, all of that detail is mere information, which better belongs in a travelogue or an encyclopedia entry. I might be wholly convinced of the setting, yet wholly sedated by the story. Or, said a different way: the research might be a resounding success but the drama a dismal failure. The failure, almost always, is one of imagination [it has no "moxie"]. In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination. And for the writer, of course, beefing up a character's physical description is easier than envisioning a sequence of compelling and meaningful events in which that character is engaged. So we nibble at the margins, shying away from the central difficulty."

The question of "good" writing must never boil down to an equation, a sequence of weights, a balance. It must be a question of an opacity, a beyond experience, sans affirmation. That which cannot be spoken. And like the proper zen master, Bukowski erases the trace of exposition (that is, of pretension or knowledge as to the success of writing) by likening it to a beer shit. A necessary act is much like the necessary being of St. Anselm's ontological proof. In the strictest sense, can writing have any affirmation but itself? Can it mean anything other than itself? If we question in this way, we must discard the theory of onanism on the grounds that we shift God from author to process. We shift the unknowable, the set of all sets, to writing itself. We arrive at a paradox.

As Derrida properly pointed out in the majority of his works (I here reference Writing and Differance in particular), if writing is supposed to take on the traditional role of representing speech, then it will always be imperfect as a representation. If writing finds its validity, its purpose, its affirmation in speech, which, in turn finds its purpose in intention (intention to communicate), then it will remain as the shadow of speech. But we must question this heirarchy. We must question the assumption that writing and speech have a particular telos. For example, if we are to communicate anything it must be assumed a priori that we, the communicators are privy to knowledge unbeknownst to whomever we are communicating with. If that knowledge were self-evident, then the need to communicate would be rendered void.

Following this line of thought, we reach an obstacle. If the writer is attempting to communicate something unbeknownst to others, then the leap from personal to universal becomes contradictory. If we are to take the purpose of the author as revealing a truth, revealing a beauty, revealing an irony, etc. then we must understand it as a revelation, material, or more specifically, truth that was already there. That, due to whatever circumstance, though existent, required elucidation. This then would mean that whatever is being communicated was not self-evident. But how so? The idea pushes the capacities of a writer to a higher state, the capacities of a writer to the highest state, so to speak. To reveal a truth through observation that other human beings cannot, for whatever reason, see. The writer becomes a seer. And we must push the act of writing back a step to a form of primitive mysticism.

The self-negating writer denies primitive mysticism, denies that he/she is even saying anything. Instead, they retract what has been posited. They deny the trend from personal to universal, regress to writing as the irreducible, to a beer shit, to a satisfaction, to a necessity. They reduce it to a paradox. If writing is to be viewed as an act of creation, as the Overflowing, the Abundance, it must also (according to a communicative paradigm), be viewed as a relinquishing, a dispersal, a "letting go" from Self. And if it is a relinquishing of what must be said, communicated, if it is the recording of a knowledge already possessed, then it cannot be an act of creation. It cannot be an act of God (an act of creation must entail the production of from nothing; there is a corollary metaphor here that follows: the blank page serves as Nothing, from which the writer conjures word, Something). And if that knowledge is not, as may be supposed, anything special, if it is, in fact, something self-evident, then it is not being communicated, it is being reiterated. We thus reduce writing to a simple tautology.

Bukowski then must deny the act of writing or what has been written as being profound, as being "above," as being special. He must do so in order to escape the tautological trap, in order to escape the paradox of creation/sublimation. The question then of what writing is takes a backseat to the question of the purpose, the validation of the act. What good is writing to the self-negating writer? The self-negating writer most likely would respond that there is nothing good about it. It is necessary. It validates itself. A true writer writes for him/herself.

The beer shit is the "gateless gate," the unknowable, the self-affirming, the self-validating. Or maybe...it's just a beer shit.