The Creative Impulse

Near the end of the fourth narrator's story in Wedding Song (1984)* by Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), the pressures of life and love have created a sense of resentment against the still living woman whose death forms part of the center of the reflections by all four of the novel's narrators. Abbas Karam Younis recognizes his creative impulse as a manifestation of evil.

The days passed by, my agony increased, and some satanic power enabled me to give form to my innermost desire: sitting at the typewriter, I was suddenly overcome with a longing for freedom, for my lost humanity, and for dissipated creativity. How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.
Mahfouz, 159-160

The creative drive in Abbas Younis leads him away from the community of others, away from responsibility, yet he struggles to imagine this world as one of righteousness. Of course, this world of fantasy cannot sustain him.

More than a century earlier on another continent in a letter for posterity, rather than in the guise of fiction, we see another community providing distractions that interfere with the impulse to write. In this case, the writing deigns to reflect accurately that community. George Catlin (1796-1872) is best known as a painter of Indians, but his letters remain a treasure trove of first-hand observation. I access them through the paper-bound George Catlin, North American Indians, edited by Peter Matthiessen (1989).

Epistles from such a strange place as this, where I have no desk to write from, or mail to send them by, are hastily scribbled off in my notebook, ... the only place where I can satisfactorily make these entries is in the shade of some sequestered tree, to which I occasionally resort, or more often from my bed (from which I am now writing), enclosed by a sort of curtains made of the skins of elks or buffaloes, completely encompassing me, where I am reclining on a sacking-bottom, made of the buffalo's hide; making my entries and notes of the incidents of the past day, amidst the roar and unintelligible din of savage conviviality that is going on under the same roof, and under my own eye, whenever I feel disposed to apply it to a small aperture which brings at once the whole interior and all its inmates within my view.
Catlin, 193

With the party continuing in Black Moccasin's lodge, where Catlin is a guest, he retreats behind some animal hides for solitude. In this solitude, he records those observations--even those made through a peep-hole--that would become a principal source for historians of the American west.

The scene in Black Moccasin's tipi conjures an image from the cover of a collection of essays, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986). The cover shows Stephen Tyler at work writing during fieldwork in India in 1963. Editor Clifford highlights some ambiguity in the scene.

The ethnographer is absorbed in writing--taking dictation? fleshing out an interpretation? recording an important observation? dashing off a poem? Hunched over in the heat, he has draped a wet cloth over his glasses. His expression is obscured. An interlocutor looks over his shoulder--with boredom? patience? amusement? In this image the ethnographer hovers at the edge of the frame--faceless, almost extraterrestrial, a hand that writes.
Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," in Writing Culture, 1

In all three scenes--character in a novel, ethnographer or painter in the field--writing demands solitude. In all three, the impulse towards creative work as an individual enterprise is highlighted and rendered problematic. Solitude requires freedom from responsibilities, from society.


Individualism and Nation

Conservatism, we are told, "assumes the existence of an objective moral order." Abbas Karam Younis imagined such a world, but his longing for solitude, for the individualism demanded by his creative impulse, violated his sense of the "objective moral order." His sense of moral order diverges from one offered by Frank S. Meyer (1909-1972) in The Conservative Mainstream (1969).

Within the limits of an objective moral order, the primary reference of conservative political and social thought and action is to the individual person. There may be among some conservatives a greater emphasis upon freedom and rights, as among others a greater emphasis upon duties and responsibilities; but, whichever the emphasis, conservative thought is shot through and through with concern for the person.
Meyer, The Conservative Mainstream, 14.

Meyers asserts that there are "objective standards for human conduct," but these standards lead one to be suspicious of assertions that we bear responsibility for one another. Conservatism "rejects the ideological concept of associations of human beings as collective entities" (15), but it does not reject the concept of the nation. Rather, American conservatives devote themselves to a "firm American patriotism" (15).

In the logical development of ethical commitments first to family, from family to tribe, and from tribe to nation, Meyer's conservatism appears to reject only the tribe. His "objective standards" embrace commitment to family and to nation, but they reject as collectivist the intermediate step. Meyer almost certainly disagreed with Catlin's assessment that North American indigenes are "by nature, a kind and hospitable people" (7), for he saw their tribal orientation as communist.

Does Meyer's prescription for ethical individualism fail as did that of Abbas Younis? At the end of Wedding Song, Abbas has the solitude he craved, and as a consequence, he has lost his creativity.



*First published in Arabic as Afrah al-Qubbah (1981). The English edition was translated by Olive E. Kenny; edited and revised by Mursi Saad El Din and John Rodenbeck.

Eliza Farnham's Millennial Vision

Two religious traditions are pervasive in American culture. The evangelical tradition is the spiritual; civil religion, the political. These two traditions interrelate in complex ways; sometimes in competition, they also draw power from and build one another. In Life in Prairie Land (1846) by Eliza W. Farnham these traditions interact to create a vision we might call evangelical nationalism.

Farnham ends Part I of her work with a narrative of spiritual renewal that provides a framework for understanding the millennial vision at the end of the book. She holds forth her sister as an exemplary moral character; to the extent that she follows this moral leadership, the book's structure conforms to the pattern of conversion narratives, albeit conversion as secular as it is religious.

The voice of Mary is presented as a sermon from her death bed; it is a testimonial of her life of faith. Mary reads her own life as a text:

Those were dark volumes to be opened by gay-hearted girls, that we learned to read during those seven years: gloomy commentaries on the world in which we were left to make our way to happiness or ruin.
Farnham, 148

In Mary's reading, the world is hostile, full of "tempters ... spreading their diabolical nets" (149). Her happiness results from having been blessed by God with a good mother, among other things. She testifies to the experience of God as a kind parent; it was her discovery that she could approach her "Maker as a tender father and friend" (150) who carried her through her trials. Mary characterizes her spiritual transformation as "newly awakened sentiment" (150), then turns to the climax of her sermon: evaluating Eliza Farnham's need for a similar experience.

The transition from her reading of her own experience to reading the experience of her sister employs the disarming pronoun "they".

Most young persons think their enjoyment of life will be diminished by an allegiance to the laws of christianity, but I think they are in error. Mine was infinitely increased! I wished everyone to feel as I did.
Farnham, 150

Turning then to a more personal evaluation of Farnham's need, she describes the views of her sister as those of an atheist, but in a manner that releases Farnham from full responsibility. Farnham is presented in her youth as having been changed passively by life in a "moral wilderness ... away from everything but the tyranny of a selfish, passionate woman ... [and] that woman an Atheist" (150). Having escaped this woman, however, Eliza began "to seek the education and mental culture which should have been the work of earlier years" (151).

The second half of the sermon is a defense of the American West as an Eden, with a landscape that is always feminine. But in this Eden life is hard because of unregenerate man:

I feel that the responsibility of my early death rests on human beings ... [whose] repeated transgressions of His law have placed it out of my reach to be happy and useful.
Farnham, 157

Following the death of sister Mary and her sermon was the death also of the Farnham child and attempts at consolation by the pastor. From books lent by the pastor, Farnham, "found nothing of the peace and resignation which I had often seen others manifest under similar afflictions" (167). Even so, she experienced an awakening of her spirit, "a new set of faculties was called into action" (167).

The consolation to which her sister testified was now hers. Mary's sermon forms part of the text of the conversion narrative of Eliza Farnham, and Mary's experience becomes descriptive of Farnham's experience. Farnham, however, occupies a marginal place within the evangelical tradition. Hers is not the testimony of repentance from sin and salvation in Christ.

But the comfort which I found was no miraculous shining forth of anything external to myself; it was no overflowing fountain which poured itself out, independent of my own state of mind; such as many seem to have found, but simply a more exalted action of some powers which I had always possessed, and a partial subduing of others. ... I found no power superior to my own mind.
Farnham, 168

Her consolation was not one of personal redemption; it was the feeling "that there were infinite love and infinite pity in the divine Mind" (168). Theologically, she is much more in tune with Ralph Waldo Emerson than with traditional evangelical piety; in contrast to Emerson, however, she emphasizes affections and feminine virtues.

Life in Prairie Land as a whole forms a larger conversion narrative theologically compatible with Emerson's "Nature" (1836). The entirety of Eliza Farnham's experience in the West culminates in a religious vision of nationalist expansion in the final chapter. In reading this experience, Eliza again follows the lead of her sister Mary.

Farnham surveys the history of settlement in the West, identifying five distinct groups of inhabitants, and assessing the moral relationship of each to the land. In her mind the pattern is one of moral progression culminating in a society "free from want, from oppression, from ignorance, from fear" (268)!

Originally inhabiting the prairie was a group that Farnham encountered only through traces: she describes Indians through burial grounds and legends. Within Edenic nature lived the noble savage who simply vanishes when the land comes under cultivation. Their successors, the first EuroAmerican settlers, had much in common with the Indians. Coming from Kentucky and Virginia, these settlers had lived with, fought with, and married Indians. White in color, they were primitive in nature, according to Farnham. They applied "only partial industry" (266) to cultivation of the land.

These first settlers were pushed out by a more industrious group. These built loftier cabins and added fences and barns. This group was characterized by constant industry and determination to reap the potential of the land. However, when the land began to become crowded, they moved on, settling other regions. They sold their lots to Yankees.

The fourth group of inhabitants becomes the "permanent population" (267). They replace the cabins with "stately houses" (267). From their stock emerge the fifth and final group: inhabitants of the future. These are not new immigrants; they are those whose cultivation of the land is reciprocated in the awakening of their moral faculties by the sublime features of the land.

These future inhabitants will learn to read the land, and their experience upon it, as Farnham outlines. In her view, the land itself contains

so much to stimulate the nobler faculties and gratify the senses; so much that is calculated to induce a high state of physical development and fine perceptions of the beautiful, the grand, and the true.
Farnham, 268

As Eliza Farnham bids farewell to the prairie, she echoes her sister in greeting the millennium. Nature in the West, according to Mary, is "in her loveliest and benignest aspect" (54). In contemplating the mystery of the irresistible charm of the land, she concludes:

It is the mystery of the mighty Future which lies before a country possessing resources like ours. To bear a part in developing this, seems to me equally calculated to stimulate and gratify our noblest powers.
Farnham, 55

Evangelical concern for the future enables Farnham to publish her narrative. Her writing, often accepted by historians as a primary source concerning the settlement of the West, is as much prescriptive as descriptive. The text is a document of the ideology of manifest destiny at the very moment when that term was coming into being.

Borges on Patriotism

From an essay published in 1946.

There is no end to the illusions of patriotism. In the first century of our era, Plutarch mocked those who declared that the Athenian moon is better than the Corinthian moon; Milton, in the seventeenth, observed that God is in the habit of revealing Himself first to His Englishmen; Fichte, at the beginning of the nineteenth, declared that to have character and to be German are obviously one and the same thing. Here in Argentina we are teeming with nationalists, driven, they claim, by the worthy or innocent resolve of the Argentine people. Yet they ignore the Argentine people; in their polemics they prefer to define them as a function of some external fact, the Spanish conquistadors, say, or an imaginary Catholic tradition, or "Saxon imperialism."
Jorge Luis Borges, "Our Poor Individualism," in Selected Non-Fictions, 309.

In the essay that follows, Borges explores Argentine individualism through other literary references, suggesting that the state is untrustworthy not only because Argentine governments are typically corrupt, but also because Argentine heroes are loners that quarrel with the group.

He concludes,

Nationalism seeks to captivate us with the vision of an infinitely tiresome State; this utopia, once established on earth, would have the providential virtue of making everyone yearn for, and finally build, its antithesis.
Borges, 310.