Negotiating With the Dead

The book begins with an introduction that frames its central inquiry. Originating from a series of lectures, the text explores the fundamental questions surrounding the act of writing: why writers write, for whom they write, and where their material comes from. After compiling an extensive list of writers' stated motivations and finding no single common thread, the author shifts to exploring what the creative process feels like. She recounts conversations with other novelists whose descriptions share a common theme of journeying into darkness, obscurity, and disorientation, using metaphors like a labyrinth, a cave, or a dark room. This leads to the book's central proposition: writing is an act compelled by a desire to enter this darkness, illuminate it, and bring something back into the light. A prologue then outlines the book's structure, explaining that each of the six chapters circles a set of themes concerning the writer, the art of writing, and the relationship between the writer, the work, and the reader.

The first chapter, “Orientation: Who do you think you are?,” distinguishes between the act of “writing” and the social role of “a writer.” To explore this, the author provides an autobiographical account of her development. She describes her unconventional childhood in the northern Canadian wilderness, her sudden and definitive decision to become a writer at sixteen, and the uncomprehending reactions of her family and peers. The Canadian literary scene of the late 1950s is depicted as a cultural backwater where the role of the writer was virtually nonexistent. During her university years, she discovered a hidden literary subculture, energized by figures like Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, which brought with it new anxieties about artistic merit and judgment. The chapter concludes by analyzing the title of an Alice Munro story collection, Who Do You Think You Are?, as an expression of the social resentment often directed at artists who set themselves apart.

Chapter 2, “Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double,” argues that the act of writing splits the self into two entities: the ordinary person who lives day-to-day and the shadowy, authorial self who creates the work. This theme of the writer’s double is traced from superhero alter egos to the Romantic movement. Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” serves as a metaphor for the writer confronting their monstrous authorial self. The literary history of the Doppelgänger is explored through works by James Hogg, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde, as well as the trope of the disembodied writing hand in “The Beast with Five Fingers.” The analysis culminates with Jorge Luis Borges’s piece “Borges and I,” which explicitly details the split between the living self and the literary persona. This feeling of being an impostor is heightened by the solitary nature of writing, which contrasts with the communal performance of oral storytelling.

The third chapter, “Dedication: The Great God Pen,” examines the conflict between art and commerce. This dilemma stems from the 19th-century elevation of Art to a near-religious status, casting the artist as a priest who must remain pure from worldly concerns like money. The chapter details the “art wars” between proponents of art-for-art’s-sake and those who believed art must serve a moral or social purpose. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A Musical Instrument” is interpreted as identifying Pan, a cruel pagan deity, as the god of this new religion of Art, a god who demands the artist be sacrificed for the sake of the work. This cult of Art requires the artist to renounce human parts of the self, a sacrifice demanded even more extremely of women writers, who were forced into archetypes of the doomed female artist, such as the self-denying “nun of the imagination” or the dangerous, destructive “priestess.”

In Chapter 4, “Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co.,” the focus shifts to the writer’s relationship with power and social responsibility. Three “quasi-magician” figures are analyzed as archetypes for the writer wielding power through illusion: the Wizard of Oz, a benevolent fraud; Prospero from The Tempest, a magician who uses his art for moral ends but also acts as a tyrant; and Henrik Höfgen from Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, an artist who corrupts his talent by collaborating with the Nazi regime for personal gain. Contrasting these powerful figures with the modern writer’s common feeling of inconsequence, the chapter considers the role of the “witness” as an alternative that combines artistic integrity with social responsibility, an identity the text suggests the modern age might propose. However, this role carries its own dangers, including fakery, voyeurism, and the appropriation of others’ suffering. The chapter concludes that because language is inherently moral, the ultimate arbiter of a work’s social relevance is not the writer but the reader.

“Communion: Nobody to Nobody” explores the writer-reader relationship, depicted as a triangle where the two parties are connected only through the book. The question “For whom does the writer write?” is addressed by examining diaries, letters, and the concept of an ideal reader. This ideal is contrasted with the “demonic reader,” exemplified by the treacherous O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the obsessive fan in Stephen King’s Misery. Drawing on an Emily Dickinson poem, the pure writer-reader relationship is defined as a private communion between two anonymous “Nobodies.” Publication shatters this intimacy, turning the writer into a public “Somebody” and the readers into a quantifiable market, or an “admiring Bog,” creating anxieties about popular success. The book itself is presented as a living entity, a “wordchild” that can become monstrous, as in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” where the text is a literal killing machine. The author concludes by offering two personal answers for whom she writes: a specific, ideal reader from her past (her “Brown Owl”) and a divine entity that wants the books written.

The final chapter, “Descent: Negotiating with the dead,” presents the book’s ultimate hypothesis: all narrative writing is a negotiation with the dead, motivated by a fear of mortality and a desire to journey to the Underworld and bring something back. Writing, with its permanence and narrative voice, is uniquely suited for this journey through time. The chapter explores the universal human need to manage the relationship with the dead, who are believed to make demands. The archetype of the hero’s journey to the Underworld is examined through four primary motivations: the quest for riches, knowledge, victory over a monster, or a lost beloved. The quest for the lost beloved is highlighted as central to the writer’s purpose, citing the myth of Orpheus and Borges’s theory about Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Mesopotamian hero Gilgamesh is proposed as the prototype of the writer: he journeys for immortality but returns only with stories, which he then engraves on a stone. This journey becomes a metaphor for the creative process, a descent into the darkness where stories are kept. The book concludes that all writers learn from their ancestors, reclaiming stories from the past to make them live again for readers. It is through the voice, preserved in writing, that one can achieve a form of immortality and, as the poet Ovid’s Sibyl says, “be known.”