Sooner or later, every professional writer gets hit on the head with this question: Whom (or what) do you write for? If other writers wince, and I am sure some of them do, they manage to hide it better than me, and they give elaborate answers. The answers usually perform a fine balancing act between two positions: “I write for myself” and “I write for others.”
Very few writers actually say that they write only for themselves, though some, like the great Saadat Hasan Manto, liken it to a morning fix of liquor, which is fair enough. Writers know that they do not just write, they also publish. If you wrote just for yourself, you would have no need to publish. I once knew a woman who was a good writer, and wrote for herself, but never published. I doubt that she continued to write.
Hence, when writers privilege the fact that they write for themselves, what they actually want to convey is their creative freedom: they do not write for critics, publishers, fame, money, etc. This is fair enough too – and perhaps just as unavoidable as Manto’s, or Charles Bukowski’s, identification of the Muses with Dionysus and Bacchus. Because, obviously, given the complexity of factors that go into the linked and yet separate processes of writing and reading, only a very brash writer would set out to write something just for a readership out there. He would be incurring two huge risks: running against his inclinations and hence his talent, and assuming that the readership out there is so dumb that he can dish it out any book to be consumed like marmalade. Even, as marmalade makers know, not all brands of marmalade sell: the consumer, also as a reader, is nefariously unpredictable, and can usually detect a fraud.
On the other hand, these days, when monetary factors rule the roost and hence inevitably make authors less abashed to acknowledge them, it is nevertheless a rare writer who would say that “I write just for people who read XYZ type of literature.” This would be too large a claim: any group of readers, even those who prefer the treacliest of pulp, are unpredictable and no writer can take their patronage for granted. So, writers who slant towards this end of the scale, still add stuff about their background, ethnicity, cultural practices etc. – all of which inserts the “I” of the writer back into the “others” out there.
In my case though, I think writers should refuse to answer this question, because it betrays a total misconception of the nature of any kind of “creative” writing, actually any kind of creative activity. Let me illustrate it. Adam Smith, often called the father of economics, takes a typically economic perspective when he dismisses “poets” and “men of letters” as simply seeking “public admiration,” which he considers immaterial and hollow in the context of what we can call political economy. Smith is not altogether wrong; he is just one-sided. He is looking at writers from the perspective of publication – the “market” – and not from the perspective of the process of reading and writing, the urge that Manto, rightly lacking a better explanation, identifies with a morning peg of whiskey for the alcoholic. Smith overlooks the process of engaging with life – what Aristotle considered the greatest of human capacities: contemplating the cosmos – which both reading and writing involve. As do other forms of creativity, including theoretical science.
Strangely, Karl Marx, despite sharing many of the economic premises of Smith, has a better instinctive understanding of this. The incessantly critical Marx, whose appreciation for literature and culture has often been undervalued by both Marxists and anti-Marxists, is on record as refraining from being critical with only two groups of human beings: workers and poets.
With workers, his reasons are clear and obvious enough: it comes to an aversion from what one can call “bourgeoisplaining”, a word I have concocted on the pattern of “mansplaining”. With poets, Marx is not that clear about his reasons to listen rather than talk. Marx, being an atheist, cannot suggest “divine inspiration”, but he suggests something in the process of the poet’s praxis which offers an instinctively superior or deeper vision of life and the world.
I do not accept this explanation, but it points in the right direction: it points to the kind of deep attention on and through language that “poets” (or other similar writers, including philosophers) bring to bear on life and the cosmos. It also points to something that, I am sure, Marx must have sensed: Creative work, like creative writing, is not “for” anything. That “for” indicates an end towards which the work is dedicated, but it is in the nature of all creative labour that it is not directed towards an end. Its end is the activity itself. This is so also if the writer is addressing a deeply personal (say, a childhood trauma) or a deeply social (say, racism or gender injustice) issue. Whether it is the “I” or the “other”, at the moment of the writing the writer has only one end: it is the writing. True creativity always sidesteps Capital in the process of its praxis.
Hannah Arendt notes that “public admiration and monetary reward are of the same nature and can become substitutes for each other” and adds that both are to be used and consumed. At the moment of the writing, the writer is not seeking either, if she is a serious writer, whether she is writing a literary tome or a good popular work of science fiction. There is no “for” after the writing. Neither “who”, nor “what”. I suspect that Marx sensed this: creative work stands outside the “political economy” of the world.
This might be the reason why, as some Marxists failed to understand, writers do not just replicate the bourgeoisie status quo; they also often question it, implicitly or explicitly. Even Rudyard Kipling, that stiff-starched colonialist in his journalism and public persona, ends up inadvertently tripping the assumptions of colonialism in his fiction. Despite everything that the “market” – publishers, agents, booksellers, prize committees, etc. – do to make the writer write “for” something or someone, every good writer, at least in the moment of her writing, is not writing for anything. The activity of writing does not allow that luxury, as it demands full concentration. One writes. Period.
