Dana Gioia and René Girard on the Art of Revision

The British novelist Muriel Spark (author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie among many others) is said to have revised her work very sparingly, if at all. In this interview on the BBC she cheekily summarizes her novel-writing method: “I begin at the beginning, I write the title, then I write my name, I turn over, I write the title of the book, I write ‘chapter one,’ and then I write on. I leave a space so I can make alterations as I go along, but I don’t revise it afterwards. And then it goes to the typist, and she types it, and I revise that, and that’s the book. That’s finished.”

“Man mistrusts everything that is effortless,” the philosopher Joseph Pieper once wrote, and much as I love her novels, I will confess to mistrusting Spark’s approach to the art of fiction. But this may only be because I am so incapable of emulating it. I am the sort of writer whose drafts are usually bad to an embarrassing extent, though as a rule I only realize this in retrospect. Perhaps you have had the experience of sending what you think is a finished piece of writing off to a friend. No sooner has it escaped your control than its flaws become glaringly, horrifyingly obvious. Or else you close your laptop and go to bed in the smug belief that you have written something masterful, only to wake up the next morning, reread the previous night’s pages, and realize how abysmally wrong you were. If these experiences have the ring of familiarity about them, then you and I are the same sort of writers.

The first reaction in such cases is usually to do everything possible to save face—frantically revise and resend, begging your recipient to ignore the previous message; delete the subpar pages and, chalking their mediocrity up to fatigue, pretend they never existed. I suspect that this is because most of us, deep down, feel somehow that we should be capable of tossing off novels (or poems, plays) with the same ease as Muriel Spark. We see our imperfect drafts as evidence of a shameful defect from which our artistic betters have been spared.

Everything scholarship tells us about the genesis of literary masterpieces, however, suggests that this view is simply wrong. If we want to be like the great writers, instead of wishing away our tendency to write awful first (or even final) drafts, we should own it, even lean into it. This is not to say we should subject our editors to sloppy, lazy efforts. It’s often better, and simply more courteous, to keep going over something again and again until it’s truly ready to be shared. But when we realize that work we thought was good actually isn’t, we should not despair. St. Thérèse of Lisieux once said that the secret of the spiritual life consists in serenely undergoing “the trial of being displeasing to yourself.”¹ At the risk of sullying her insight by transposing it into an artistic context, it could be said that a capacity for losing face in our own eyes can also bear fruit in the writing life.

A Genius for Revision

A few years back, poet and critic Dana Gioia (who has been called “the most exquisite poet writing in English today”) began posting videos of himself reciting poetry and lecturing on art, beauty, and literature. There are any number of gems to be found on his YouTube page, but my favorite is a lecture on “The Art of Revision” (the video thumbnail also happens to be my favorite Hopper painting):

About one minute into the roughly eight-minute video, Gioia recalls his experience curating an exhibit of great poems in manuscript by the likes of John Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Butler Yeats. He says he looked at the first draft of a poem by Yeats and thought to himself: my first drafts are just as good as or even better than this. But by the time the poem by Yeats had gone through multiple drafts (fifteen in all) to completion, Gioia was convinced that there was “no way” he could have written anything as good as the final version.

Gioia says he came away from those manuscripts with two main insights. First: “the revision process was part of the creative act.” And second: “a certain kind of writer has a genius for revision—and those are the writers that we end up reading.” 

What goes for poetry also goes for the novel. A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of A Piece of Work: Five Writers Discuss Their Revisions at a used bookstore:

The book is edited by Jay Woodruff, and includes interviews about the revision process with fiction writers Tobias Wolff and Joyce Carol Oates, as well as drafts of stories and poems at various stages all the way through to the final printed versions. The book aims to give a sense of “how good writing becomes better.” In his introduction, Woodruff cites Raymond Carver:

Most writers of my acquaintance, and most writers I know anything about, have been great rewriters. It’s instructive and heartening to us all, all of those who want to be writers, to look at the early drafts of the great writers.

I take it that when Carver uses the word “heartening” he means that the early drafts of “the great [fiction] writers,” like those of the great poets, can often be surprisingly unimpressive. I say “surprisingly” because received ideas about creativity have skewed our expectations. We assume that those who end up displaying extraordinary proficiency in some field will necessarily manifest that superior skill out of the gate. A first draft by a great writer will be clearly better than a first draft by a lesser one. But maybe that’s just not the case.

Radical Revision 

Part of Gioia’s lecture is dedicated to the painstaking process of polishing a work to perfection—cutting, condensing, reshaping. But he also recommends that poets engage in a kind of revision that is messier, deeper, and less under control. When you have what you think is a finished poem, he advises, send it to a friend who hasn’t seen any of the drafts, and get his reaction. He gives the example of T.S. Eliot, who showed the final draft (or what he thought was the final draft) of what would become The Waste Land to Ezra Pound. Pound cut half the poem and threw out its original title (an obscure allusion to Dickens). In doing this, says Gioia, he took what would probably have been a minor creation and helped to forge it into a defining work of literary modernism. The credit, however, goes to Eliot, and rightly so: in order for The Waste Land to come into existence as we know it today, its author had to grit his teeth and accept Pound’s feedback, which destroyed huge swathes of verse over which he must have labored long and hard. Simply accepting feedback is often powerfully creative.

Gioia’s account of how Eliot produced The Waste Land bears more than a passing resemblance to a kind of deep artistic change that René Girard writes about in his literary criticism. In fact, Girard’s approach to the novel is surprisingly similar to Gioia’s method as curator of the poetry manuscript exhibit. In one of his essays on Proust, for instance, Girard discusses the changes in the author’s handwriting from manuscript to manuscript. In Deceit, Desire, and the Novel he compares Proust’s unfinished novel Jean Santeuil to his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time; the first and final drafts of Stendhal’s Lamiel; and the first version of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education to the finished novel that we read today. Girard’s monograph on Dostoevsky is likewise built on a series of contrasting comparisons between the author’s early novels (White Nights, Poor Folk, The Insulted and the Injured) and his later masterpieces—as if the early works were “first drafts” that we think of as finished only because they were published. 

Girard’s conclusions are similar to Gioia’s. For one, Girard observes that the early drafts and sometimes even the early published works of major novelists can be mawkish and unpromising. A case in point: what Proust had achieved as a writer before he finally produced the first volume of his masterpiece was so unimpressive that André Gide, then an editor at France’s leading publishing house, rejected the manuscript of Swann’s Way without ever really taking a close look at it. Gide was familiar with Proust’s previous output and was certain the “fashionable dandy” (as he deemed him) would never be anything more than a dilettante. (He would later express his bitter regret for this mistake.)

The second conclusion that Girard draws also tracks with Gioia’s observations: by the time the novelist arrives at the full realization of the material he first handled so clumsily, the transformation is breathtaking. If you look at Jean Santeuil, or at Proust’s competently executed but relatively unimpressive early short stories, you might muster the temerity to think: I could do something as good as this. But read a few pages of In Search of Lost Time and at once you are in the presence of a literary master.

Girard, like Gioia, acknowledges the importance of “workmanlike revision” (Girard, Oedipus Unbound). But for him the first draft is not just an imperfect approximation of a work that must be chiseled out of it the way a sculptor releases a finished form from a rough chunk of marble. It is flawed in its core conception. This is because it is an embodiment of the novelist’s fantasized self, what Girard calls his “chimera.” “The author’s first draft is an attempt at self-justification,” he says in an interview with James Williams.

The late Anglo-Hungarian novelist Stephen Vizinczey (author of An Innocent Millionaire) expresses the same idea in similar language:

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders. If you think you're wise, rational, good, a boon to the opposite sex and a victim of circumstances, then you don't know yourself well enough to write.

Mere incremental reworking is of no avail in such cases. Something deeper has to happen for an aesthetic fiasco like Jean Santeuil to be transformed into a thing of beauty like The Guermantes Way. The egotistic foundation on which the author’s first draft is built must be dynamited; the writer’s self-concept has to collapse in the realization that the work organized around its defense is of little value. Girard (interviewed by James Williams):

If the writer has a potential for greatness, after writing his first draft, as he rereads it, he sees the trashiness of it all. His project fails. The self-justification the novelist had intended in his distinction between good and evil will not stand self-examination. […] This experience is shattering to the vanity and pride of the writer.

Here Girard probably has Proust in mind. But he may also have been thinking of Gustave Flaubert. When he was thirty, Flaubert’s two most trusted literary friends became a captive audience as he read to them, in its entirety, the manuscript of his wildly romantic novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony, over which he had been toiling for years. When he had finished the marathon read-aloud session four days (!) later, they told him that the book was awful (“We think you should throw it into the fire and never speak of it again,” one of them said). Flaubert must have been utterly crushed. But he accepted their verdict. Not too long afterwards, he began working on Madame Bovary.

A Paradoxical Position

Flaubert’s case shows that for the Girardian “conversion” to take, the novelist has to find himself in a strangely contradictory position. On the one hand, he must be inspired to write a whole novel. He can only do this if on some level he thinks he’s producing something of sheer genius. But on the other hand, once he has finished, he must recognize that he was completely wrong about the value of his attempt. And here we come to a crucial insight. Girard says that if a writer is too technically competent, he may never end up in this paradoxical place. The genuine inferiority of what he produces will be masked by his writerly skill, his professional polish: 

Having reached what he believes to be the end of his toils, [the writer] gazes at last upon the work that he had dreamed of as perfect and discovers its weakness. On the seventh day of creation, the God of Genesis looks at his work and finds it to be good. The novelist looks at his and finds it to be bad. In short, he recognizes that he is not God. That is the first step of true art, the most essential perhaps and the least recognized. A merely skillful writer would never see this weakness; perhaps he would know better how to conceal it. (Oedipus Unbound, “From Novelistic Experience to Oedipal Myth”)

Oddly, then, the distance from a clumsy first draft to a novelistic masterpiece, long though it is, may still be infinitely shorter than the distance from a skillful draft to the same destination. This is because the clumsy draft, by its very clumsiness, creates the conditions for the collapse of the writer’s vanity, his recognition that “he is not God.” Gioia’s observations suggest the same may be true of poetry. The poets who end up in the canon are not those whose revision process traces a linear and gradual progression from competent first attempt to polished final product, but those whose revisions, alchemically transmuting lead into gold, display the utmost amplitude of transformation.

Feedback, Not Mystical Conversion

Muriel Spark is one of those rare writers who can produce brilliant work without much revision. But Gioia and Girard show us that her parthenogenic capacity is almost certainly an exception to the rule. Which is not to say that the laborious acquisition of technical skill can substitute for the native facility with which Spark was so generously endowed. Rather, most of the works we think of as great—including many of those that dazzle us by their apparently effortless genius—spring not only from craftsmanlike polishing and shaping but also from a writer’s willingness to bear, as St. Thérèse put it, “the trial of being displeasing to [himself].”

For any writer who has undergone Girard’s influence, understanding the importance accorded to mundane revision in his account of creativity can be a corrective to the heavy emphasis he places on mystical conversion. Throughout his literary criticism, but most particularly in his writing on Proust, Girard implies the need for a kind of novelistic grace to bring about the transformation from novice to master. But you have to read him carefully to see that, sometimes (as with Flaubert), that grace comes in the simple form of feedback from others. For years, I hoped to undergo a Proustian metamorphosis myself, without understanding that “novelistic conversion” can be a very concrete, very everyday thing. No great transcendent revelations ever happened to me. And so the quest for Girardian conversion became frustrating, an impediment even.

Thankfully, at some point I abandoned my quietism, forged ahead, and sought out and (often reluctantly) accepted criticism. The whole trick, it seems to me now, is to get to the point where the dread of being seen gives way to actual hunger for competent feedback, even if it blows up something you thought was working. I’m not sure I am there yet. But, resigned to my inaptitude for mystical illumination, I have concluded that the pedestrian act of soliciting and accepting feedback along the lines Gioia advises can serve as a poor man’s proxy for the Proustian ecstasy of “affective memory” or the clairvoyant vision of the Dostoevskyan epileptic. Getting an honest critique from a trusted friend or editor is not, to put it mildly, as sublime an experience as rediscovering childhood in the taste of a tea-soaked madeleine. But it has the advantage of being within anyone’s reach.

1. I found this quote in psychologist M. Scott Peck’s book People of the Lie.