What am I unconsciously performing?

Melissa Febos and George Sand

Note: Originally published in January 2023, before moving over to Substack.

This week I read two very different books and caught a thread. The books are the novel Indiana by George Sand (published in 1832) and the craft book Body Work by Melissa Febos (published last year).

Febos writes about realizing she was still serving old purposes in her writing, and encourages everyone to interrogate who/what our writing serves. A related quote from page 38: "What I am interested in ferreting out are those other instincts, the ones we have inherited or practiced for reasons other than our good writing, the communications of our imaginative intellect. Which brings me back to sex: so much of writing that describes it is still performing unconsciously, still comprises a series of decisions that were not so much made by the writer but by the matrix of inherited values that inform the reader's own beliefs around the acts."

In Indiana, Raymon is an arrogant, intellectual man trying to seduce a married woman. "He had a rare ability to argue skillfully even against proven facts; this had made him an invaluable man to the ministry…" Which made me think of how lies and disinformation ('fake news') hurts people, and serves oppression.

And then on page 40 of Body Work: "I had been telling the story I had been telling myself as those events happened, not the story of what happened."

Our story and the story we tell ourselves can be different. And writing can be used to 'argue skillfully even against proven facts' which can uphold systems of oppression (and suppression), whether within ourself, our family, our country.

George Sand wrote about the process in a later introduction to the book, "It was my first novel; I wrote it without any fixed plan, having no theory of art or philosophy in my mind. I was at the age when one writes with one's instincts, and when reflection serves only to confirm our natural tendencies."

And on page 42 of Body Work: "However deeply suppressed, the true story of our experience always plays out simultaneously, and is recorded in the private archives of memory."

Sometimes our natural tendency is to suppress a story (or a version?) because it's too complicated (compromising, heartbreaking?), even without realizing we're doing it.

A favorite link

Melissa Febos on Her Literary Inspirations, Writing Habits, and Notebook Fetish (Interview Magazine 2021)