A personal profile by Greg Dening:
Writing fills the hours of my day and the years of my life—reviews,
launches, reports, lectures, essays, books. It is a good life
constantly trying to find words that discover myself in my relationship
to the good and evil of the world, the ugly and the beautiful
of living. Maybe it is self-indulgent. I'll have to live with
that. I tell myself that I write to change the world in some small
way—morally, intellectually, politically, culturally. We
all know, I suspect, the self-love that is any altruistic aspiration.
I suppose I think the realism of my writing depends on me displaying
that and other sorts of dialectic tensions in living. I have in
my notes my first words in print over fifty years ago. It is really
a bit of a shock to see how little has changed in fifty years.
My first printed writing was a piece about lying in the spring
grass listening to small sounds, seeing small sights, and asking
what makes them larger at the same time by their being joined
to something else, by their being experienced through different
perspectives. I suppose that if there is anything central to what
I do as I see it, it is that: exploring the smallness and largeness,
the particularity and generality, of every cultural act. I've
gone to those disciplines of knowledge that respect the wholeness
of human living. There is a multivalency, a multivocality, in
every human act. That is its realism. But to represent that multiplicity
as well as that uniqueness, writing has to be artful, even magical.
I count as one of the greatest compliments a reviewer has ever
made me was when he wrote that I was a "magical realist".
I work at the fictions in my non-fiction ,because there is no
humanity and no representation of humanity without fiction—the
transformation of one mode of experience into another mode. That
is why I see writing as theatre—where the artful magic of
stage, performance and dramatics close the attention of an audience
down, to see things they otherwise would not have seen. That is
why, too, I find theory foreign to my writing, but not reflection.
Reflection gives multivalency and multivocality to my narrative.
Reflection is the double helix of my story-telling, binding past
and present, self and other, author and text. |
