It's not quite a matter of no expectations at all
Fascinating piece by Rebecca Solnit in today's Guardian Weekend, which made me think (yet again) of that thing of the burden of expectations vs the feeling that any achievement is an accomplishment.
Years ago I knew a Promising Young (Male) Scholar, who - and maybe this was not the case, maybe he was just a mega-procrastinator - who never seemed to produce anything that really fulfilled those expectations, and I have always wondered whether it was the expectation that Wow, he would eventually produce some Epoch-Making Work in the Field that laid a heavy hand upon him and meant he just produced odd articles and editions of things.
Whereas - and I think that there is a distinction here between 'you'll never amount to anything' and just coming from a place where there are not those expectations that you will naturally Do Great Things - if you don't have all that laid upon you, anything you do achieve is an uncovenanted grace, perhaps.
And there fleeted past me the other day some mention of a conference panel 'Is It Worth It to Write Ambitious Books?'. To which I say well, it depends what you mean by worth it and also by ambitious.
But do people actually sit down and say to themselves, I am going to write An Ambitious Book? Which to me, alas, sounds like those people who are determined to Write The Great American Novel and that prospect squats, pretty much like a Larkinesque toad upon any actual endeavour to write.
We may also consider that phenomenon of people who wrote things to pay the bills, and had a Big Serious Work that they thought was their real claim on Posterity, a belief with which Posterity seldom agrees.
I am reminded of something in EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel where he says something to the effect that beauty in the novel should always look a little surprised; and certainly, my dearios, we have sometimes been irked by the sense that the writer is striving to write Beeeyoootiful Prose (I may have also made similar murmurings apropos of 'Cinematography should be in the service of the story the film is telling...') This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2649160.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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