Automatic Writing

Explaining the power of liturgical habit, Paul Griffiths (Decreation) offers writing as an example of the self-forgetful, and world-forgetful, character of habit. It’s one of the best descriptions of the experience of writing that I have come across.

A few preliminaries to make sense of the analysis: Griffiths makes use of the phenomenological concept of qualia, “mental entities” that are differentiated from one another by their “phenomenal properties” but also by “the subject to whom or for whom they appear” (222). Qualia can be layered in several ways. The sound of the alarm clock may make its auditory impression without being heard-as, without being categorized as the alarm clock summoning me to wakefulness. We have the experience of hearing the alarm again when it comes under the category of “alarm clock.” This is an example of the categorical layering of qualia.  Qualia can be possessively layered as well, when a quale is felt as belonging to me. Benedick eavesdrops on the conversation; her not only hears sounds, not only categorically layered as language, but possessively layered as words about Benedict himself. Someone else eavesdropping on the same conversation will have a very different experience and response (224).

Now, on habit and writing, which, Griffiths argues, “is often, perhaps ordinarily, done largely without qualia, being in that like speech. Certainly no qualia layered categorically or possessively need occur to writers as they write: if need not, and often does not, seem to them as they write that they are writing, that this writing is theirs; neither, ordinarily, do they note and categorize the first-order qualia that do occur to them – the feel of fingers on keyboard, for instance, or the changing visual patterns as words take form on the screen before their eyes, or the tactile stimulus of the pen between the fingers. The qualia that do occur when writing, first order and unlayered, lass mostly at a low level of intensity, demanding and receiving little attention” (228).

This, Griffiths says, seems odd. Even those who are innocent of post-Romantic myths of literary prowess and mastery will ask the obvious questions: “Does writing not involve searching for the appropriate word or phrase, imagining the balanced syntax of a well-ordered sentence in advance of tapping that sentence out on the keyboard, actively considering various lexical alternative, and so on?” Griffiths admits that all this is true, but adds, “in terms of what seems to the writer to be going on, experientially, there is nothing like this. The sentences are formed in very much the same way as the gestures of etiquette are performed; and the processes that permit their formation are about as evident to writers as they write as are the causally connected chains of physical events that make it possible for polite people to shake the hands of those they meet – which is to say, not at all” (229).

Writers prepare ahead of time, but during the writing itself, there is little of the “inner theater,” little experience of the writer watching himself write. In fact, if there were, writing wouldn’t go very well. Writing is not a matter of “embodying one or another aspect of the inner theater in words on the screen or on the page; it requires little or no consultation or participation in the inner theater. It is, rather, an activity of the fingers. It can be done, sometimes for as much as an hour at a time, with little or no occurrent experience” (229).

The skilled writer is, in short the writer who is “habituated to . . . generating sentences and paragraphs in this way.” As a result, the more skilled the writer, the less it seems “like something to them to do it. The words flow; sometimes there are accompanying qualia, but more often not; and after a while, something has been written” (229).

One of the most important implications of this analysis is that the writer, who doesn’t experience the writing possessively but does it as a habit-of-sentence-formation, loses the sense that he possesses what he has written as his own. And that sense of dispossession is, Griffiths rightly insists, “theologically speaking, pure gain” (229).