The Act of Creation

My office is in chaos.  I’m researching and writing my course thesis on Oscar Wilde – a Bakhtinian analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and books, critical essays, pads and Post-its with my scribbled notes, my highlighted and dog-eared MLA Handbook and dictionary, half-empty water bottles, bags of cookies, and uncapped pens are scattered on my desk and around the floor of the room.  For days, this project will consume me as I work hastily to create an organized, meaningful, well-written essay from a jumble of notes and fragmented ideas.  I’m familiar with the disorder of my surroundings and in my mind and am oddly calmed by it.  This is how I work.  Even without the looming deadline, this is my process.    

Yesterday I learned that the crude journals in which Mikhail Bakhtin had written one of his most influential manuscripts were lost for nearly seventy years, buried in a lumber room where rats and seeping water had severely damaged much of them.  About what could be discerned, Michael Holquist says this: “In the faded scrawl we can see the race between the occurrence of ideas and their feverish transcription.  This volume provides a chance to see Bakhtin in all the heat and urgency of thought as it wrestles with itself.  In Toward a Philosophy of the Act we catch Bakhtin in the act – the act of creation” (ix).

An 1890 typescript of Dorian Gray with Wilde’s corrections and emendations reflects a similar approach to the process.  Words and even entire sections are crossed out or rewritten, and handwritten insertions run between the typed lines and up the margins.  Nearly illegible notes and corrections to himself and to his typist fill the white space of each page of what we know is not even an early draft of the narrative.   

The act of creation, it would seem, is simply messy.