The Coming of a Writer

I figure since all the seniors seem to be reflecting on their time in individual classes and at Uni as a whole that I can spend one blog post reflecting.  Of course I'm not leaving this school, but it is the end of the year after all.  For all the books that I've read this year in AA Lit and now Coming of Age, the amount of allusions, allegories, social commentary, and a whole host of other literary elements found in the books we've read has been amazing.  Last semester I remember wondering if Ralph Ellison intended everything that we (and professional literary critics) were able to see in his words.  Surely, I thought to myself, it would be impossible for Ellison to finish a novel of Invisible Man's complexity and intentionally add in all that he did.

This curiosity of mine was reinvigorated when I began writing the semester project.  There was so much I wanted to say, I wanted to continue the story lines of Holden and Jane, have Julia meet new people, make social commentary, all while trying to make a just plain interesting story at the surface level.  In the end, my semester project turned into a long, roughly thirty page short story that really did hit almost everything I wanted to cover.  At times though, I sacrificed brevity to make sure everything was fleshed out.  Sure, it made the paper more accessible to an average reader who hadn't read the books it was based on, nor was versed in reading between the lines, but did that make it better or worse?  Is it the author's responsibility to make it possible for nearly any reader to understand their work, or as the author is it okay to make the reader work for it a little bit?

In the end, I realize that maybe it isn't always best to spell everything out so much.  That may be where the genius of someone like Ralph Ellison lies, he puts in just enough that an astute reader (or group of readers) can get an inkling as to his point, and from there notice it recurring and being supported later in the novel.  James Joyce didn't write Portrait with all the notes that we had the benefit of in the back of the book.  That was a publishing decision, and one which I imagine he wouldn't have chosen.  Those notes certainly made the already complicated novel more understandable for modern readers, and in turn more popular (because an average reader doesn't like books it doesn't understand).  That is what a publisher's job is then: to sell the most books possible.

That was Salinger's greatest success, maintaining control over the physical book, not just the story.  He's famous for not including a picture of himself in his bio, not allowing the cover of the book to be fancy, and to control all the information from cover to cover.  Take that in comparison to another book from a few years earlier in The Great Gatsby.  That book is known for it's cover, with the faceless eyes and lips, and the stylized version of the New York skyline.  Fitzgerald was even quoted as saying once that the cover art came first (without the artist having read the manuscript) and he, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then incorporated images into the book that could be related to the cover.

Of course my "Re-Illusion off Oxford" will never be a world famous work.  There won't be movie deals or famous cover art, but I can still, in some small sense, relate to the struggles of authors to maintain ownership over their own work.  In my case I fought with myself, over giving my work a more accessible level of detail, or keeping it more below the surface in an elusive attempt to create art.  The reader friendly version won out, though even the struggle between the two roads diverging was important for me, both as a writer, and as a reader relating to the authors I've begun reading more and more.