The Stream of Freewriting

A number of years ago, I attempted to encourage a friend of mine to spend his summer reading Finnegans Wake. I asked him also to develop an argument that the work was something more than mere masturbation. The previous year, I had become infatuated with Joyce’s other works such as Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the short story collection Dubliners. But during a lecture illustrating stream of consciousness examples, Finnegans Wake became a case in point. It seemed like pure madness. It felt extremely under thought, or more than likely, the polar opposite. It seemed like too much work. I later read an article in which one of my heroes, Vladimir Nabokov, gave a scathing review of the work. I felt I could sleep better knowing I was not damning a work that many scholars felt was a literary masterpiece. In addition, my friend refused to follow along with my request after he glanced through the novel and was confronted with dialog such as, “countlessness of livestories have netherfallen by this plage, flick as flowflakes, litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlworlds. Now are all tombed to the mound, isges to isges, erde from erde.”

This week, as I was reading through Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, I thought once again about my dear friend, Finnegan. Whether the novel was a gimmick of monumental stature or not, it seemed irrelevant. I’m sure there is brilliance hidden beneath the text somewhere. Joyce could not have penned his earlier works if he was not slightly more intelligence than the average human being. But I was able to connect with Elbow’s concept of free writing at a personal level: the madness must essentially be released beforehand.

When I was in high school I used to write everything on a typewriter. I refused to work on computers for anything. In fact, I did not even own a computer until I was in my early twenties. Computers were too distracting. When we were given time in class to work on an essay, Internet Explorer always taunted me to explore anything other than an essay on the Bard. In addition to this, it pointed out all my errors by underlining them in hideous red pixels. It felt too painful. A typewriter did not do this. Sure, I made plenty of mistakes, but I corrected them later during the editing process by hand. Unfortunately, I still felt like I spent entirely too much time crafting the final product in my head, long before I wrote an initial article at the beginning on my first sentence.

Elbow’s experiences seemed to run parallel with my high school and early college experiences. After our in-class writing experience late last week, I became more interested in Elbow’s idea that we are capable of developing good ideas as we write without considering them. Sure, the page was erupting with a visual cacophony of both green and red pixels, but there were indeed some noteworthy phrases and ideas that came off the cuff. Of course, these ideas never would have seen the light of day if I had not eradicated the madness that surround them. I would like to see how successful his technique is in writing a much larger paper. At the moment, I am skeptical of the process for a scholarly research paper, but am not certain why. I am going to take that risk. If it fails, I can always start smoking again.