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answer: I don t know. It s not about anything. It s about everything. It s not about something the way an
elegy is about the death of a young friend, for instance, or the way The Maltese Falcon is about solving
the mystery of the fat man and the black bird. It s about everything that anyone wants to write about. I
suppose what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human. I
mean, what else is there? When Stephen Hawking writes A Brief History of Time, what is he doing
except telling us what home is like, describing the place where we live? You see, being human takes in
just about everything, since we want to know about space and time and this world and the next,
questions I m pretty sure none of my English setters have ever really pondered. Mostly, though, we re
interested in ourselves in space or time, in the world. So what our poets and storytellers do for us
drag a rock up to the fire, have a seat, listen to this one is explain us-and-the-world, or us-in-the-
world.
Do writers know this? Do they think about it?
a. Good heavens, no.
b. Absolutely, yes.
c. Let me try again.
On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible. Everywhere you
look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing
someone else has been there before. Think of it this way: can you use a word no one else has ever
used? Only if you re Shakespeare or Joyce and coin words, but even they mostly use the same ones as
the rest of us. Can you put together a combination of words that is absolutely unique? Maybe,
occasionally, but you can t be sure. So too with stories. John Barth discusses an Egyptian papyrus
complaining that all the stories have been told and that therefore nothing remains for the
contemporary writer but to retell them. That papyrus describing the postmodern condition is forty-five
hundred years old. This is not a terrible thing, though. Writers notice all the time that their characters
resemble somebody Persephone, Pip, Long John Silver, La Belle Dame sans Merci and they go with
it. What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the
opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with
prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover,
works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading. I
suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity
as to be quite unnerving to readers. So that s one answer.
But here s another. Writers also have to practice a kind of amnesia when they sit down or (like Thomas
Wolfe, who was very tall and wrote on top of the refrigerator really) stand up to write. The downside
of the weight of millennia of accumulated practice of any activity is that it s very...heavy. I once
psyched out a teammate in an over-thirty men s basketball league quite by accident. We were
practicing free throws before a game when something occurred to me, and like an idiot I couldn t keep
it to myself. Lee, have you ever considered, I asked, how many things can go wrong when you shoot
a free throw? He literally stopped in mid-shot to offer his view. Damn you, he said. Now I won t
make one all night. He was right. Had I known I could have that kind of effect, I d have warmed up
with the other team. Now consider Lee s problem if he had to consider not merely all the
biomechanics of shooting a basketball but the whole history of free-throw shooting. You know, not too
much like Lenny Wilkins, a bit of Dave Bing, some of Rick Barry before he switched to the two-handed
underhand shot, plenty of Larry Bird (but don t plagiarize him outright), none at all of Wilt
Chamberlain. What are the chances any of us would ever make a free throw? And basketball only
dates back about one century. Now consider trying to write a lyric poem, with everyone from Sappho
to Tennyson to Frost to Plath to Verlaine to Li Po looking over your shoulder. That s a lot of hot breath
on the back of your neck. So, amnesia. When the writer gets to work, she has to shut out the voices
and write what she writes, say what she has to say. What the unremembering trick does is clear out this
history from the front of her mind so her own poem can come in. While she may never, or very rarely,
think at all about these matters consciously, she s been reading poetry since she was six, when Aunt
Tillie gave her Robert Louis Stevenson s A Child s Garden of Verses, burns through a couple of
volumes of poetry a week, has read most of Wallace Stevens six or seven times. In other words, the
history of poetry never leaves her. It s always present, a gigantic subconscious database of poetry (and
fiction, since she s read that, too).
You know by now I like to keep things fairly simple. I m no fan of the latest French theory or of jargon
of any stripe, but sometimes we really can t do without it. What I m talking about here involves a
couple of concepts we need to consider. The first, as I mentioned a few chapters back, is
intertextuality. This highly ungainly word denoting a most useful notion comes to us from the great
Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who limits it pretty much to fiction, but I think I ll follow the
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