... McEwan told the man in the audience that if he didn’t think as a mathematician at all times then he couldn’t be a very good one (not a polite response, but then the mathematician had just, in so many words, told McEwan he wasn’t a very good novelist); that he, McEwan, always thought like a novelist, whatever he was doing.
It was an odd thing to say – as if being a good mathematician or a good novelist mainly depended on how much time you spent thinking like one – but many of McEwan’s novels seem to be underpinned by that sort of assumption.
It is odd also because it not only defines people by what they do, but confines then to what they do.
Yeah, but that kind of thinking is rampant in literature. I've been on the receiving end of a parallel criticism, "You can't be a poet if you don't think like a poet all day long." That sort of thing.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I no longer claim to be a poet, although I do commit the sin of making poem-like substances. LOL On the third hand, some of those have been declared to be non-poems by those same "you can't be a poet" types.
I wonder if this sort of thinking on the part of literary types doesn't express some deep insecurities about their self-identities.
Gee, Art, I guess I can't be a poet, either. Right now, I'm taking a break from writing a review and I couldn't think about the review if I were thinking like a poet. Oddly, I think a lot like a poet when I'm cooking or gardening. Or, no, maybe I think like a cook or a gardener when I write poetry. I guess I'm just messed up.
ReplyDeleteI would find life utterly insane and unnavigable if I was forced to think all the time like a "writer." I prefer thinking all the time like a human being, and bringing as many different points of interest into my various activities as I can. McEwan sounds like a miserable guy to be stuck talking to at a party. (The new book, SOLAR, is awful by the way.)
ReplyDeleteEd, absolutely! It's also one of the reasons I avoid the company of writers.
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