April 12, 2021
Tortured Artists: Is Suffering Necessary for a Fiction Writer?
Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ernest Hemingway. Troubled souls, phenomenal artists. The idea of tortured artists is a sort of a trope or stereotype that wants great artists – writers, painters, musicians – to be constantly frustrated or even self-destructing. But is suffering necessary for a fiction writer? Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?
The truth is, I don’t know. That’s also one reason I’m phrasing the title of this post as a question mark. Based on purely historical precedence, we can draw the following two conclusions regarding tortured artists:
- Not all tortured souls become exceptional artists.
- Not all exceptional artists are tortured souls.
In other words, I’d say we can’t really reach any safe conclusion regarding tortured artists. What I believe we can do – and it’s the reason this post exists – is attempt to answer the more modest question: Can “normal” people be exceptional artists?
The lessons from this attempt can be very important indeed, because they can let us see the ingredients of a great fiction writer.
Tortured Artists and Suffering Souls: Defining “Normality”
Together with words such as “love” and “success”, “normality” is notoriously difficult to define.
If we equated “normality” with “like most other people”, then we’re already in trouble, for two reasons:
- Normality is subjective, therefore we can’t compare one’s normality with another’s.
- “Like most other people” literally means average, and that puts us in a very precarious position regarding tortured artists and artistic excellence.
Therefore, for our purposes, it would be fruitful to define normality as “growing up without being disproportionately exposed to hardship”. In other words, in this context normality would mean to be raised in a more-or-less functional home, that can more-or-less provide necessities (including access to hobbies, toys, etc.), allowing one to more-or-less discover themselves and their interests as they wish.
So, can a “normal” person become an exceptional artist?
From “Normal” to Artist
Not being a tortured soul – or, in our milder version, not having suffered disproportionately – is not in itself a problem. There isn’t anything inherent in suffering that is artistically superior, that turns one into an artistic genius. However, we must also recognize one inevitable repercussion of “normality”.
“Normality” leads to unexceptional lifestyles, which are an obstacle to artistic greatness.
Those who grow up having lacked little or nothing, tend to go to colleges and universities their parents did. They tend to get similar jobs to what their parents had. They marry similar people, they have 1.8 kids (or whatever the average is in their country), a house with picket fences, an SUV, and two Labradors. The bourgeois dream becomes complete with a week off per year and a trip to Las Vegas.
There’s no room for artistry there – let alone artistic greatness.
Artists in general and writers in particular – and hey, let’s not forget they’re not quite the same – must have a need to express something. Writing isn’t something you do, it’s something you can’t help.
How can you have something to express if everything is akin to preordained by fate?
Suffering Isn’t Obligatory; Avoiding a Mediocre Lifestyle is
Look around you (or “around” you, if we can use such adverbs for the internet). Take a look at the mediocrity surrounding you on Twitter or Facebook – here’s why I left them. Look at all the hopeless regurgitation of stale concepts – “growth”, “progress”, “success”, “work”…
The overwhelming majority of people try to be special, just like everybody else. As in, literally: They try to do exactly what everyone else is doing.
They are brought up in systems that promote conformity and sameness; hard work, the good worker, the obedient child. Just look at the binary dilemmas people become entangled with, and draw your conclusions.
Or, if you want a literary example, here’s one in the words of Hidetoshi, the ghostly character of Illiterary Fiction.
The truth is, we are overrun by sameness; we have become intellectually inbred. And just like in actual evolution, it’s the random mutations that produce something unique, something that breaks the unbearable safety of being.
Artists are the mutations of our societies. Thank goodness.
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Interesting question.
No one gets through life without some suffering. But whether that is enough for understanding the world and creating fiction about it depends on some intangible – or we’d be overrun by writers. Something needs to trigger the reaction of hiding from the world for many hours to create a different one.
I’d postulate that the ‘something’ is UNFAIR suffering. Suffering that can’t be addressed by ordinary means, or can’t be addressed at all. That focuses the natural creative drive into proving we can leave a mark despite that unfairness.
‘Unfair’ is our relative understanding – there is no objective ‘fair.’
But why does one person manage to write it out, and another, in similar physical and mental circumstances, never even think of trying to write, no clue.
I’m just glad I’m on the writing side.
There is merit in the concept of “unfair suffering” – and your observation that is subjective is an apt one. Perhaps what (unfair) suffering creates is a sense of imbalance; of the world being out of sync. It’s the job of literature, then, to rectify it. Very interesting!
I can do something with my life – what’s left of it – or I can spend my days trying to entertain myself. As the child of long-lived parents, I can somehow get through a life in which I can do very little – or I can corral everything I have left, and write with it.
What would other people do? Don’t know, and don’t particularly care. But I can try to tell a damn good story, and have it include someone like me (but significantly younger and somewhat less disabled by our common condition) – and hope to subtly raise awareness as a secondary aim.
People hate being preached to. And only I can write this one. I like the challenge.
From what has been said, I would believe it is about what Mallarmé described as the battle between the words on the page, the disappearance of the author. It is not, of course, the disappearance of the author as a textual function, for if the author disappears, so does literature. What must disappear is the author as a confession, the text that only matters to one, to the one who wrote it, the family drama so intimate and personal that we feel ashamed to read the text, because we feel we are invading the privacy of a home of strangers. Maurice Blanchot studied this in The Space of Literature.
There seems to be a twofold movement: on the one hand, the world needs to be made other than itself, which will culminate in another world than this one we inhabit; on the other, there is something of trying to speak the unspeakable, to write (The Real, according to Lacan).