Out of Sheer Rage, Part 3

Acts of literary petulance

I was thinking, as I read this week’s section of Out of Sheer Rage, about the way that writers are made. Somebody once suggested to me that all writers endured a long period of illness during their childhood, and I have yet to find very many counter-examples of that. Very often, writers are easily bored, and yet addicted to their own company. A kind of void is created between those two contradictory states of being, and into it flows words, almost unbidden.

I wonder if this is why many writers believe they must live a kind of half-life in order to create: it replicates the constrained situations in which we become writers in the first place. Like Geoff Dyer, I’m suspicious of too much comfort. I cannot create in fancy hotel suites or times of great bounty. Instead, I am like a weed that thrives best in thin soil.

Perhaps for that reason, one of my favourite parts of this book is Dyer’s petulant rant against literary theory, which seems to him to be at once bloodless and decadent. Had I studied English at university, I would probably have been equally irate. (As a social scientist, I didn’t exactly get to avoid the theoretical; you should have seen my face when I realised that my first term was to be spent reading Hobbes’ Leviathan and Marx’s Das Kapital, among other turgid delights; and that was before we moved on to post-structuralism.)

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that I found the burning of the book cathartic. It is probably a terrible thing to say in a time like this, but in freer times, we get the choice to rebel. That’s the opposite of being forbidden from responding in the first place.

I’d love to know in the comments: if you could burn one book you had to study (without anyone thinking you had slid into fascism), which would it be?

While we’re at it, Dyer references DH Lawrence’s poem, Snake, in this part of the book, and I’ve always failed to love it. Others adore it. I think it could be happily cut down to, say, the neat 14 lines of a sonnet and lose absolutely nothing. I’ll let you be the judge.

Is Geoff Dyer encouraging my acts of literary petulance? I couldn’t possibly say.

Next week, we’re taking a little breather, but we’ll be back reading together from 5th May.

5th May - 11th May: pages 122 - 162, section ending ‘I read other letters in the same spirit, obsessively, eager to see what will set him off next.’

12th May - 18th May: pages 162 - 208, section ending ‘then you can despair.’

19th May - 25th May, pages 208 - end.

And alternative page numbers for the Canadian Canongate edition:

5th May - 11th May: pages 124 - 166, section ending ‘I read other letters in the same spirit, obsessively, eager to see what will set him off next.’

12th May - 18th May: pages 166 - 212, section ending ‘then you can despair.’

19th May - 25th May, pages 212 - end.

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