On Convention: A Burden or Blessing for the Writer?

By Ari Singh

The sticky web of conventions are both restrictive and nutritious for the writer’s soul.

Obscurity or accessibility? An age old dilemma that has struck all creators of art indiscriminately. Should writing be unrestricted by convention, or does it have the duty to be comprehensible to everyone? What is the degree of experimentation that is too excessive, too obscure? What is obscurity defined by, what institutions does it uphold? These questions have come to me as I write, as I read; I wonder why I am scared to experiment, to create radically?

The fear of being perceived as obscure, or cryptic has caused me to float away from exploring beyond convention. I fear that my writing would be misunderstood, misinterpreted or uninteresting in proportion to its ‘obscurity.’ Am I allowed to play with grammar? Can I betray tense, syntax, punctuation? Or will my work be lost in the haze of my betrayal of convention? I understand the building block that convention serves as for writers and its value in enabling writing to function at its most comprehensive.

But isn’t it tempting to forfeit that? To write ungrammatically, unassumingly, unfiltered! I do not wish to negate the necessity of convention, in fact I recognise that in order to play with form, you must have form. Instead I wish to unwork my inhibitions, the inhibitions of the writers reading this, I want to urge us to create radically! To reach into our minds, search for unhinged compositions of words, rebel against conventions that contain our voices.

The fertility of our minds to create unconventionally is a genius we must nurture and preserve as writers. Convention may be a curse, in the way it suppresses the wanderer of our mind, the way it erodes our purest forms of childlike expression. Expression that is untainted by rules and regulations. Baudelaire understood the value of unadulterated creation when he wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” That which dilutes our authentic work in favour of comprehensibility fails to cultivate our childlike wonder. We must, as writers, understand that a blank page is a valley and we must venture out, pick flowers, plant seedlings, dig a hole, we must do what we want! 

“My dear good Emilie, my dear Friend!

[…] Do not only practice art, but get at the very heart of it; this it deserves, for only art and science raise men to the God-head. If, my dear Emilie, you at any time wish to know something, write without hesitation to me. The true artist is not proud, he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal; and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.”

July of 1812, Beethoven wrote this letter in response to a gift from one of his fans, he urged that she create, and create. The artistic life must be animated by this passion, we must remain invigorated; Our better, radical genius must continue to be a distant guiding sun instead of a snuffed whisper. 

Camus writing in ‘Create Dangerously’ insisted that the pressure of the masses “discourage(s) free creation by undermining its basic principle, the creator’s faith in himself.” If an artist wishes to freely create, radically write, unconventionally make fringe works they must not be contained  what the masses wish. For art is human expression, cloaking it with any form of convention or ideology works to disintegrate its ingenuity. 

“If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation. If it blindly rejects that society, if the artist makes up his mind to take refuge in his dream, art will express nothing but a negation. In this way we shall have the production of entertainers or of formal grammarians, and in both cases this leads to an art cut off from living reality.”

Camus insists that art and artistic expression must remain unbruised by the majority but also understands that art created in solitude is far too obscure. He writes:

“But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death — these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving toward realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.”

With this I arrive at my conundrumous solution for the writer who is both burdened and blessed with convention; Realistic experimentation! We as artists, writers, creators, must navigate the phantom spaces between convention and unconvention. Realistic, reasonable and grounded experimentation fulfils the thirst of art to be understood while nourishing the artist’s genius child. Camus expressed these sentiments with clarity when he wrote: “As a result of rejecting everything, even the tradition of his art, the contemporary artist gets the illusion that he is creating his own rule and eventually takes himself for God. At the same time he thinks he can create his reality himself. But, cut off from his society, he will create nothing but formal or abstract works, thrilling as experiences but devoid of the fecundity we associate with true art, which is called upon to unite.” 

We should and we must explore but within reasonable expectations that ground our creations, that pull our works away from the foggy plane of tangled abstraction and obscurity. We must continue to infect with our art, to cause sorrow, to cause happiness but we must also oblige our guiding sun. Such is the blessing and burden of convention!