Art for Art's Sake?

The soporific effect of William Fiennes' presentation at Goldsmiths this afternoon may possibly have had more to do with the quantities of ibuprofen I had imbibed than with him being a less-than-scintillating speaker (which he is not). Yesterday I inflicted a large and brooding swelling upon my own shin after a slow-mo, high impact fall whilst jogging in the park. Still, whichever way you look at it I was 'lulled' in the truest sense of the word – I listened to Fiennes speak as if he were singing to the room, a lullaby to hold and soothe and comfort us as we drifted towards our dreams of writing.
It didn't matter that we had no clear destination in mind – as Fiennes himself said, 'I can't really do plot' – what mattered was the language, the poetry, the evocation of the universal and the mythic: beauty, return, home, suffering, nostalgia, memory, family, loss, resurrection. Those of us who choose to honour (some may say, indulge) the compulsion to write need no convincing of the inherent value of language for language's sake - we choose to see and to interpret the world through the filter of words, that most constitutional and essential of media. And here was a wonderful, enriching meditation on this theme exemplified in both the readings and the presentation.

Nevertheless, I would normally be the first among those to jeer and taunt at art-for-art's-sake for its inaccessible elitism, its implied narcissism, its self-satisfied superiority over the plebeians left at the academic gate. I'm interested in literature with balls, real literature, literature that teaches and provokes and has something to say about the world – literature that means something. So what's all this pining after language for language's sake?

Fiennes spoke of the writing impulse arising from 'necessity' and 'strong feeling' – no one is ever going to say there are not enough books in the world, he reminds us. It is critical to write what you really care about, not some dross you think will sell – but writing that you are compelled to do, stories that cannot not be told. This resonated deeply with my own sense of what I'd like to write (and hope that I am writing). I have lost count of the times I've read a manuscript shared in a writing group and wanted, were it not for a very English sense of politeness, to chuck it in the bin and run around the room, hands waving overhead, shouting 'what's the bloody point of this?!' - another gratuitous tale of scatalogical sexuality, another gap yaah jaunt around Asia, yet one more fucked-up marriage on a beach.

I.

Just.

Don't.

Care.

I understand that this is all relative – one girl's Proust is another's Jilly Cooper, after all. But doing my best to write well about things that matter is absolutely fundamental to my own developing practice, to my sense of myself as a writer in the world.

I hope to write the kind of fiction that has something to say and in so doing write with an energy that conveys that sense of the necessity of saying it – at the moment I have at least three books in my head that I feel I can't not write: they've been following me around for years – stories that want to be heard and understood. So where does the beauty bit come in? The attempt to create something beautiful – what might at first appear as the use of language for language's sake – is bound up with the impulse to say something and say it well. Books can teach us things about life, about people and history and power and love and war and any other Big Idea you can name – and the best ones do that without us even realising it, most often by beguiling – by lulling – us with their beauty. Language, style, tone, theme, motif, symbol, pattern, structure and so on are all elements of a book that contribute to the imperative and effect of aesthetic enjoyment: the stuff that makes us like books and words.

Listening to Fiennes today – talking about all of the above, along with form and genre, structuring techniques and principles, editing and economy of words – has somehow given me the permission again to reconnect with the more 'poetic' qualities of my own writing and not to feel self-indulgent doing so. And he has reminded me that having an opinion about something and wanting to put that in (creative) writing need not deliver bland finger wagging didacticism but, rather, can be done in a way that uses the 'stuff that makes us like books' to have a meaning and resonance that takes us beyond 'mere' words.