Appendix Sources, Selection, Classification of Metaphors Sources The metaphors I examine are drawn from a wide range of literary interviews of the type made famous by The Paris Review. I examined some 3000 interviews with contemporary authors. The interviews were all published from 1965–1995, the majority in the 1970s and 1980s. As I indicate in the chapter on authorship, there have been historical changes in the role of the authorship, writing, and conceptions of the writing process, and my concern is only with contemporary “cultures of writing.” I focus, then, on interview discourse published during the recent past; I suspect that future interviews will reflect changing conditions for writing, particular changing technology. In only about half of the interviews did writers discuss their writing processes—some 1460 interviews with about 1035 different writers. In a few cases, the interview was a translation; such interviews were still used because they represent a contribution to the “cultures of writing” of English speakers. Once translated, they become part of the discourse of writers’ inter- views in English—one discursive arena for demonstrating conceptions of composing. My own definition of “author” in this project is both simple and “opera- tional”: authors, for the purposes of this project, are those writers interviewed about their writing activities and ideas, with their interviews subsequently pub- lished in journals or books. They are a subset of published writers perhaps most accurately described as “interviewed authors.” Because my interest here is to examine authors’ discourse on the activities of intellectual labor, I sidestep con- sideration of the quality of the texts authored by those interviewed (whether considered “literary” or not, for example). For my purposes, the structured affinities in the discourse community of writing commentary are more impor- tant to understand than the individual achievements and aesthetic triumphs of any one author. Thus this project is not specifically “literary,” though its subject is authorship and representations of the activities of literary writing. Interviewed authors are primarily notable novelists and poets, but they also include journalists, historians, and writers of mysteries, science fiction, and chil- dren’s stories, writers often overlooked by studies of writing activity. Thus there are interviews with authors of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, plays, with authors who vary in nationality, ethnicity, and gender. All are published writers; many are distinguished and well-known; most are writers of fiction or poetry, though they often write in other genres also. Some are authors of genre fiction or local authors. Not all “expert,” or “professional” writers are published (skilled engi- neers writing reports, for example); not all “published” writers are interviewed 132 Sources, Selection, Classification of Metaphors 133 in the corpus (few journalists and historians, for example). Most interviewed authors have written in several genres, some have had several nationalities and written in several languages. My arguments based on this evidence are designed to elucidate concepts of composing specifically in recent contemporary “cultures of writing.” My concern is with discursive practices, with shared social imaginaries inflected by individuals. I move back and forth between the two but am not concerned with developing an understanding of an individual writer or “schools” of shared interests. Selection The contemporary figurative discourse about “composing processes” or “writing processes” that I examine concerns itself with writerly activity and daily authorial creativity, with reports on the prosaic intellectual labors that make up people’s writing lives. These activities include the various behaviors, acts, events, pro- cedures, and processes that writers engage in order to complete the thinking and inscribing that get words “on the page” and “to readers.” The metaphors I examine situate the act or process of writing as a movement, an action, an inte- grated sequence of activities, a series of steps, or flux. This “definition” of “writing processes” is necessarily provisional, revealed primarily in the detailed discussion of major themes found in subsequent chapters, but emphasizes engagement with text production, particularly that sustained over time. In selecting metaphors for the writing activities as processes, I exclude figura- tive language about poetic philosophies, poetic principles, the “product” of writing, readers’ responses, issues of style, and the nature of “craft” judgments (though these all are influential in writing). The following examples demon- strate the distinction I make between metaphors for composing activities and metaphors for other matters of concern to writers. For each author, the first instance that follows is the kind of comment on “process” included in the corpus; the second is the kind of “stylistic” comment that is not. In the exam- ples I provide below, the authors have used similar words but in two different ways. The first, I argue, refers to an activity of thinking and producing text; the second refers, rather, to features or qualities of texts. Gore Vidal (1) I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. (1980, p. 74) (2) It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view. (1980, p. 74) In the first instance Vidal describes something that happens in the writing process. In the second instance he characterizes an effect of the text. James Dickey (1) … in the process of writing, it’s absolutely necessary that [the poet] surrender himself and flow with the poem wherever it may go instead of trying to order it in the early stages. (1970, p. 91) 134 Appendix (2) I worked with the anapest a great deal because I liked it, and because it seems to me to have a carrying flow as well as its well-known hypnotic quality. (1970, p. 48) In the first instance Dickey describes something that happens in the poet’s process: he “surrenders,” he moves along with the poem in a certain manner. In the second instance he characterizes an effect of the poem. Robert Frost (1) A real poem … is a sort of idea caught in dawning: you catch it just as it comes. Think it out beforehand and you won’t write it. (1966 Bracker, p. 276) (2) If there isn’t any surprise for the poet in writing it [a poem] … there won’t be any for the reader. A poem should have a quality of dawning. (l966 McKenna, p. 117) In the first instance Frost describes something that happens in the poet’s process: he “catches” an idea at the moment the idea is coming into being. In the second instance he characterizes an effect of the poem. To understand fully the functions of composing process metaphors within the interview would require considerable knowledge that is unavailable, since part of those functions stems from authors’ intentions and readers’ responses. Authors’ intentions, often complex and to some degree unavailable, cannot be ascertained fully from the text. Readers, of course, don’t respond to texts uniformly: individual readers participate in different social and linguistic communities and interact with the world according to their own knowledge and interpretations. Some readers will recognize instances as “metaphorical puzzles,” while others will consider the statements merely to be accurate repre- sentations of “reality.” Not all readers will approve of an author’s invitation to “puzzle out” a proffered metaphor, or approve of the view that the metaphor promotes—and consequently may not feel themselves in community with the writer. When authors intend to be instructive, readers may take them to be patronizing; when authors intend to locate themselves within a tradition of metaphorical stories, readers may taken them to be banal; when authors intend to be novel, readers may take them to be posturing and pretentious. My own efforts are simply those of a relatively practiced interpreter. Classification I am concerned with the production of the metaphorical stories and their setting rather than with the specifics of readers’ reception of them. Notes 2 Composing and Metaphoricity 1. Concepts of truth are important to the way we consider subjectivity and vice versa. There are tensions, then, between concepts of subjectivity that reflect this tension between a “deep” truth, perhaps eternal, and the con- cept of truth as multiple and changing. Arnold’s poem, by using imagery of buried life as well as imagery of the flowing, ever changing river, straddles these notions. I am not arguing that “The Buried Life” is a poem about writing processes, but about language, the self, and self- knowledge—all of which are important to the ways writing processes have been considered. According to Tinker and Lowry (1950), from 1852–1877, line 54 read, “our thoughts come” rather than “our lives come” (the first phrasing encourages the use I make of this section of the poem). Stange (1973) and Levine (1973) discuss nineteenth-century writers’ negative attitudes toward the city. Culler (1966) and Roper (1969) discuss Arnold’s landscapes, including subterranean rivers. Riede (1988) points out that the central metaphor of “The Buried Life,” like that of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” is a “subterranean river that casts up mysterious voices” (p. 192). Miller (1987) discusses the complica- tions of using river metaphors connected to the passage of time. Miyoshi (1969) and Stange (1967) discuss the “divided self,” or the two selves of Arnold, Stange connecting Arnold’s conceptions to those of Freud and Jung. The desire for the mysterious inner gulf that is impossible to know is a motive principle, here, for poetry and for one’s very being. I am not arguing that Arnold was unaware that writing also involved labor. 2. As Etienne Balibar has argued, “All identity is individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical or, in other words, constructed within a field of social values, norms of behavior and collective symbols…. The real question is how the dominant reference points of individual iden- tity change over time and with the changing institutional environment” (Balibar, 1991, p.