Literary rites and rituals

by Prof. Yasmine GOONERATNE

In The Practice of Writing, a series created especially for readers of MONTAGE, award-winning novelist, poet and critic Yasmine Gooneratne considers aspects of literary composition from a writer's point of view.

The following observations are not prescriptive. They are part of my own experience as a life-long writer and teacher of English, and I have put them together in the hope that they may be useful to my fellow-writers, as well as to writers who work in languages other than English.

To begin at the beginning …

What plants the seed of a poem or a story in a writer's mind? The word 'inspiration' is often used to describe the moment in which a work of literary art is conceived. From very early times, and in many different cultures, poets believed that gods and other divine beings actively assist the creative process. The poets of ancient Greece would invoke the Muses at or near the beginning of an epic poem or a classical Greek hymn. Muses have also served as aids to authors of prose, being sometimes represented as the true speaker for whom an author is only a mouthpiece. So, in 12th century India, the poet Sri Jayadeva Goswami attributed his masterpiece, Gita Govinda, to the divine hand of the God Krishna. A charming legend has it that when the poet found himself one day the victim of what we might today call 'Writer's Block', the God Krishna left his temple to sit at the poet's desk and complete the partly-written poem.

Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

The prayer for divine assistance - inspiration - was no mere matter of form. There was a time when poets in Sri Lanka, like their counterparts in India, wouldn't have ventured to begin a poetic work without first invoking the blessings of the divine Sarasvati, Goddess of arts, music, knowledge and wisdom. Nor is that time past, for some of us writers, at least! There is a small, very beautiful, image of the Goddess Tara, which was presented to me by the Samvad India Foundation, together with the Raja Rao Award in 2001, that overlooks the desk in my study. Tara embodies the feminine strengths of caring and compassion, the ability to endure stressful and even terrifying moments. She is the source of sustenance and protection: but most significantly, she presides over acts of creation.

Whether we believe in the divine power of gods and Muses or not, the invocation of a deity indicates that a writer is working inside an established poetic tradition, and according to the established formulas recognized by a particular culture. When Shakespeare wrote the Prologue to Henry V, his play about a 14th century English king, he invoked the classical Muse of Poetry:

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act …

Milton, writing the opening lines of Paradise Lost, famously one of the world's most Christian poems, did the same:

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing, Heavenly Muse …

In 18th century England, Alexander Pope was achingly aware that to the dedicated poet, verse-writing can be a baptism of fire.

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

Dipt me in ink, my parents' or my own?

Pope, a Roman Catholic, uses here the Christian image of baptism, but his religious faith didn't prevent him indulging a real-life fantasy about his own personal Muse. He was famous as a designer of gardens, and when he wanted to extend the garden of his own property at Twickenham, he bought the lot across the road and dug London's first pedestrian underpass to connect it to his home. In that underpass he created, beneath the London-Twickenham Road that ran between his own house and his newly created garden, an underground grotto in which his Muse could dwell.

William Faulkner, the American author of The Sound and the Fury, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, believed in giving his work another kind of baptism - he drank whisky while writing. Coleridge famously sipped laudanum, Balzac drank 10+ espressos a day. The Irish poet Yeats thought of the writer's life as lived within an imaginary tower. When he was offered (by his patron, Lady Augusta Gregory) the rental of an actual tower on the Irish coast, he took it although the weather made it uninhabitable for a great part of the year. Inspired by setting and atmosphere, Yeats wrote there some of his greatest poems, including 'A Prayer for My Daughter'.

Birds, presumably because they can fly high above the mundane things of this world, seem to attract the affections of many authors. In the 15th century Sinhala poem Selalihini Sandesa, the great scholar Totagamuve Sri Rahula Thera chose as his 'messenger' that strikingly beautiful bird, the selalihini, whose black and gold plumage he wittily exploited when he advised the bird not to fly too high, lest some goddess of the skies mistake him for a flower and use him as a hair ornament, for then the message carried by his poem would be lost. The sacred hansa carved on moonstones at Polonnaruwa and elsewhere has been chosen by our own Cultural Ministry as the logo of Sri Lanka's Sahithya Rathna awards: the hansa is credited with the ability to separate with its beak pure water from polluted, so it's a very apt symbol for the literary critic who tries to do the same for literature.

A bird that makes a wonderful symbol for a writer is the Australian Lyre Bird, so named because its feathers, when outspread, resemble a lyre, the musical instrument carried by Erato, the classical Muse who presides over love poetry. It's no accident that the wooden pen-holder on my desk, made by an Australian craftsman in the Blue Mountains, has a lyre bird carved on its surface. But I am not the only Sri Lankan poet, nor even the first, to adopt the Lyre Bird as my personal logo. James Meary Tambimuttu, the Sri Lankan writer and editor who co-founded the Lyrebird Press and edited Poetry London, used a different artist's representation of a lyrebird on the cover of every issue of the magazine. Poetry London was a pioneering literary journal that published the early poetry of Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Durrell, Kathleen Raine, Stephen Spender, Edith Sitwell, David Gascoyne, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, and Lucian Freud; many of whom, like Tambimuttu, lived the Bohemian life of wartime and post-war Soho.

When, in 1972, I was about to leave Sri Lanka for Australia, and didn't know when, or indeed whether, I would ever be coming back, I attempted writing a sandesa (or 'message-poem') for the first time … in English.

(Poets do some crazy things!) To carry my message of farewell to my homeland I chose as my 'messenger' a much less glamorous creature than the hansa or the selalihini. I chose the gecko on my wall, because our culture regards it as a domestic adviser who is believed to transmit accurate messages direct from the gods. That poem has since been published, as "The Lizard's Cry".

We might think of ourselves as much too modern these days to go in for sacramental rites or prayers to the gods. Despite that, many writers devise rites and rituals to get the creative juices flowing when they sit down to write. Not every author, incidentally, actually 'sits' down to write. Vladimir Nabokov (creator of Lolita) wrote on index cards, standing up at a lectern, in his socks! Thomas Wolfe (author of Look Homeward, Angel) also wrote standing up. Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code) apparently keeps an hour-glass on his desk, and every hour on the hour he puts his ms aside and does push-ups, sit-ups and stretches. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope built himself a portable writing desk, a sort of box, which he carried with him on long train journeys, writing all the time.

Trollope's record is so astonishing that it deserves special attention in any essay devoted to literary rites and rituals. He worked, as was his habit, to a regular and rigorous schedule, assisted by his niece, Florence Bland, as secretary.

Prof. Yasmine Gooneratne

Rising at five-thirty, he would write till eleven; then, after breakfast, he would ride or drive. Between tea and dinner a favourite diversion was whist at the Garrick Club; and at night he would dine out or entertain some of his many friends at home. This routine was interrupted (though he never stopped writing) by journeys to Ceylon and Australia (1875), to South Africa (1877), and to Iceland (1878). No author has been more methodical. He worked out schemes, set himself time-schedules, and rigidly adhered to them. He wrote his earliest novels while working as a Post Office inspector, occasionally dipping into the "lost-letter" box for ideas. Trollope began writing on the numerous long train trips he had to make around Ireland to carry out his postal duties. Setting very firm goals about how much he would write each day, he eventually became one of the most prolific writers of all time.

Ernest Hemingway wrote 500 words a day, Stephen King writes no less than 10 pages a day, even on holidays, but Trollope, most readers would agree, leaves them both for dead. He wrote 5,000 words a day. He wrote forty-seven novels and five volumes of short stories as well as travel books, biographies and collections of sketches. He always wrote while travelling by rail or sea and as soon as he finished one novel, he began another.

The late Martin Wickramasinghe's writing day began very early in the morning, before sunrise, and involved walking up and down, up and down the veranda of his home at Koggala, humming or singing quietly to himself, so as not to wake the little boy asleep in an inner room. For Anne Ranasinghe, literary inspiration arrives as a very special 'moment'. For her, poetry is

"the rare champagne. To write poetry there must be an experience that is so intensely felt as to exclude all other forms of writing: love

or anger, fear or remembrance, and above all the perception of great

beauty, create a moment that demands, or wakens the demand for a

poem. … It is a momentary vision, a crystallization which compels

you to follow … right to the end of the poem,"

'Behind my Writing', in A Long Hot Day, p. 104

I am often asked about my own writing practice: do I compose in longhand, or on a computer? At what time of day? Do I revise, making one or many drafts? Shakespeare is said to have never blotted a line: that is, he didn't revise. Neither did Isaac Asimov: he never revised anything or turned back. He just wrote on, letting the story unfold on the page. Most of us do not, I imagine, have the creative genius of Shakespeare or Asimov. But that shouldn't worry us. Some British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were so masterly and precise in their shaping of verse and prose that as a literature student I believed that they, too, must have begun at the beginning, with a magnificent opening line or sentence, and gone on writing until they reached the end, when they stopped. It was a revelation to me to view the manuscript of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and see how frequently he had crossed out words and corrected phrases, casting about for the perfect rhyme; or to study Volume 2, Chapter 10 of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, in which, though weakened by illness, she re-wrote and revised the last pages of her last book. The discovery should not have surprised me, of course: for it was Jane Austen who wrote: 'An artist cannot do anything slovenly'.

To know that even the greatest writers make mistakes and correct them is a great help to the hopeful amateur. When I recently worked on a definitive edition of Leonard Woolf's 1913 'novel of Ceylon', The Village in the Jungle, I worked with the original manuscript beside me. Woolf's habit was to write amendments and additions on small pieces of paper, and pin them to his pages at relevant points. Relative Merits, the first book I ever wrote that was not a book of poems or an academic venture into literary criticism, was written in long hand. I wanted to canvass the opinion on my text of my former tutor, then teaching in Canada, and because the ms was so bulky, one of our secretaries in the English Department at Macquarie University helped me to put it on a computer diskette so that I could take it along by air. Having learned from this experience how useful computers can be, I now compose on the computer, print out a first draft, work on the printout with a ball-point pen, and enter the changes into the text on the computer. After I think I have written the last word, I give writing a rest, and get on with something else, something quite different, returning to the computer file after a fortnight or so. Invariably, there are changes to be made, paragraphs to be revised and re-written. Each of my three published novels has taken about five years of my life.

As most of the examples I have cited show, the most important ritual of an author's writing life is, probably, the ritual of revision. Nothing can substitute for it, nothing can replace the patient craftsmanship, the tireless rewriting which turns darkness into light, and inspiration into art. That, in my view, is what what good writing is about. Very few things in life are as satisfying as placing a comma or a fullstop in the right place. And that's why all the computerized spellchecks in the world, all the 'How To' books and all the writing courses available are of no use whatever to the slipshod writer. That's why careless spelling and poor punctuation are such a give-away. They show that someone is lazy, that their thoughts are unfocused, and that what they are telling you is not worth reading.