The desk was a mahogany behemoth out of place in our digital age, with its stacked drawers, shelves, and nooks meant to hold the debris of an intensely physical time. The down comforter was fluffy and soft. I rolled over to the bed. I rolled back to the desk.
The former owner of the desk, deceased, had, in his lifetime, been a usurer in charge of a veritable army of usurers, or so my mother had told me — I’d hardly known him, my grandfather. He was a highly successful, disreputable businessman who, from what I gathered, had clawed his way out of poverty by sinking other people into it. This was abhorrent. However: He’d left me the desk and a heap of money, so I was inclined to forgive his tactics and think kindly of him. Without his largesse, I would have led a far less pleasant life. I might have had to earn petty cash by grading moronic undergraduate papers, leaving me little time for research, including the research currently spread out on my grandfather’s desk.
The nutritional facts on the back of the Pop-Tarts box informed me that a strawberry pastry contained two hundred calories, fifty of which came from fat. The first ingredient was enriched flour, the ninth was dried strawberries, followed by dried pears, dried apples, and leavening. A blueberry pastry was identical in every way except that it contained dried blueberries rather than dried strawberries.
My dissertation, my heartbreaking work of staggering scholarship, was very nearly finished. Soon I would print out the two-hundred-plus pages for the last time. Soon I would bring those pages to the university copy shop and have them bound in leather. Soon I would enter the job market and bask in the praise of the usually taciturn interviewers, uncorked by my greatness. Next I would turn my dissertation into my first book. I would receive grants. I would accept visiting professorships in Paris and Rome. I would give well-attended talks at literary festivals. My scholarship would breach the academic-real-world divide and grace the pages of the New York Review of Books. A dark-haired man with a British accent would recognize my virtuosity and excuse my lack of charm.
Any student of narrative would agree that my life had been leading up to a brilliant dissertation and a secure position at a topnotch university. Of course that was my future; it was a matter of course. Even as a child, when my mother read to me at night, I knew where the stories were headed and could guess the characters’ motivations. That’s the protagonist’s long-lost sister, I’m sure of it. The man in the mustache will betray his betrothed for her diamond earrings. Why else would the author linger on their shiny contours? I had never seriously considered a career unmoored to reading and writing.
Narratively speaking, success could not but lie ahead for the valedictorian of a pressure-cooker high school who had finished summa cum laude at an elite college and had her pick of graduate programs. As had been expected, Bs an affront to her — my — honor. At twenty-two, I published my first article. (A spruced-up version of a term paper on the use of coincidence in Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.) At twenty-four, I published a second. (Mistaken identity as allegory for literary misinterpretation in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.) At twenty-six, I passed my oral exams with high honors. There was just one step left for me to take, a step that would come as naturally as — as taking steps. As walking.
Titled “Where Does Art Come From?” my dissertation was an intellectual history of inspiration. To early civilizations, it was a gift — or curse — from the gods. The ancient Greeks held the Muses responsible for inspiration, which they distinguished from skill or technical ability; mere artisans toiled to refine their craft, whereas artists were mouthpieces for what divine entities wished to express. But if ventriloquism was semiautomatic, it was still exhausting and not exactly fun. Plato in Ion described poetic inspiration as a sort of possession, a maddening ordeal.
The Hebrew tribes also looked to the divine. Samuel gave Saul fair warning that Yahweh’s inspirational methods were heavyhanded: “The spirit of the Lord will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy … and you will be changed into a different person.” Christians replaced Yahweh with the Holy Ghost. Tertullian, for instance, explained that God, through the Holy Ghost, “flooded” the minds of the prophets. Granted, Jews and Christians were preoccupied with revelation, not epic poetry, but in those days there wasn’t such a clear distinction between theology and fiction.
As Western societies became more secular, the explicit God talk fell out of fashion. The Romantics compared the artistic process to a passive chemical reaction. They argued that poets were — unconsciously — sensitive to mysterious energies or winds, which they converted into creative enterprise. Yes, wind was a metaphor, but not for anything terribly concrete. “Poetry,” Shelley said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.” On the contrary, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”
Then along came Sigmund Freud, who said that what his forebears had thought was supernatural or, at any rate, external to the self was actually the subconscious at work. Writers wrote, painters painted because of early childhood trauma, deep psychological wounds, which they sublimated into poems, novels, paintings. Marxists, for their part, thought that was just as silly as Shelley’s fading-coal theory. They looked not to infancy but to the economy, theorizing that art was always, necessarily, an expression of social conditions. Artists were mirrors.
Although the concept of inspiration had changed dramatically over the centuries, I argued that one element remained steady: Everyone seemed to think that it was out of the artist’s control. The artist cannot train the Muses or the Holy Ghost. He cannot force his mind to channel inconstant winds. He cannot will his parents to traumatize him. He cannot tame macroeconomic trends.
I also argued that, although this lack of control in one sense minimized the role of the artist, it simultaneously made the artist seem special. Art was not just another trade. If a young woman decides she wants to be a doctor, she can go to medical school and learn about the human body. If a young man decides he wants to be a builder, he can find a job at a construction company and learn about concrete. But if that same young woman or young man decides, No, I’d rather be an artist, then it’s game over. You’re out of luck. Unless, that is, you happen to have been chosen by God/have the right disposition to channel winds/have had a difficult childhood. Either you’ve been touched, or you haven’t.
But — this was totally ridiculous, was it not? All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds became artists, and no brain scan had ever discovered some artist-specific pathway. Each and every theory of inspiration was bullshit designed to make artists feel as though they belonged to a special class, even though there was no evidence of that class beyond the tautology that all artists had something in common — which was that they were artists.
“It’s a little thin,” said Professor Carl Davidoff. My adviser was short and pudgy and somehow pulled off the trick of looking swarthy despite having light skin, a result of his thick, dark, almost black curly hair and equally thick, dark eyebrows. For a full professor, he was young, in his late thirties. He cleaned his glasses to avoid taking in my expression. “The historical overview is fine but your conclusion, your actual thesis, feels a little thin,” he repeated.
“Care to elaborate?”
“My assessment is more or less the same as it was three months ago, and six months ago, and twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem to be sinking in —”
“This has changed a lot in the last twelve months —”
“Let me finish, Anna,” he interrupted. He was in the habit of using my name when he wanted to convey that he meant business, like a kindergarten teacher scolding an unruly five-year-old. “It’s a good observation: There’s a seemingly universal tendency to place inspiration beyond the artist’s control. You believe this tendency, this assumption, is wrong, even stupid. Fine. But if you really think that all theories of inspiration are stupid — all
