[Image: excerpt from a letter my Dad sent home to his family in the early 1940s, from wherever he was doing his basic training. (His hair had always been wiry, and before his Army experience he’d let it grow probably a bit too long even for the style of the day — hence the joking remark about the “something I had never experienced before… fresh air striking my exposed scalp.”) Note the edits, especially the replacement of “out of line” with “out of rank.” When does a writer ever make such a change, without picturing the effect of words on a reader… on the writer him- or herself?]

What, if anything, does a writer “owe” to their readers? The perennial question…

The answer seems bound up in this further question: what kind of writer does the writer imagine themselves to be? That is, roughly: does the writer write for themselves? or for others, known or unknown?

(It’s also a question never seriously asked of pretty much any other creative art: does it make sense to ask what a sculptor owes to viewers of a particular statue? a composer, to listeners of a song? etc. I guess maybe because writing was originally a tool of communication, one person to one or more others, and only belatedly an art form — maybe that’s why writers get this question, and other artists don’t. It’s a bit annoyingly envy-making, whatever the reason.)

Whatever the “right” answer might be about a writer’s obligation, there seems little doubt that an imaginary reader exists for every written work — from the moment the first word passes from writer’s mind to physical medium (graffitied wall, paper or papyrus, tree trunk, the very sky…). Sometimes this “you” is actually the writer him- or herself, in disguise, and in those cases the writer may or may not be even aware of the fact… But what of those works in which writer explicitly addresses reader? When the word “you” appears in a sample of creative writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, whom does the writer address?

All of this Friday woolgathering comes to me (and, haha! now to you, whoever you are) this week courtesy of a couple recent entries over at the whiskey river blog. First:

Poetry — and writing in general — is a solitary vocation. But I have never felt alone in it. I am not alone in it now. Look, you’re here, too.

(Maggie Smith [source])

…and then, more obliquely:

The Mysterious Arrival of An Unusual Letter

It had been a long day at the office and a long ride back to the small apartment where I lived. When I got there I flicked on the light and saw on the table an envelope with my name on it. Where was the clock? Where was the calendar? The handwriting was my father’s, but he had been dead for forty years. As one might, I began to think that maybe, just maybe, he was alive, living a secret life somewhere nearby. How else to explain the envelope? To steady myself, I sat down, opened it, and pulled out the letter. “Dear Son,” was the way it began. “Dear Son” and then nothing.

(Mark Strand [source])

My own most recent “oddball reading experience” — begging the question of whether the writer felt obligated to me at all — came courtesy of a book called Under the Glacier. Here’s the description as it appears on the corresponding Amazon page:

Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead.

But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress.

What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced “ooh-a,” which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept?

Piling improbability on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound.

…and that’s pretty much all I had to go on when I first cracked it open. Here’s one of the longer passages I highlighted during the reading:

[The professor] is a big, thickset old man, not too fat but heavy in the shoulders and beginning to stoop; he would probably be a full six feet tall if he were stretched. He is splay-footed, and carries his head sunk into his neck like some seabirds, the guillemot, for example, or more particularly the penguin. There is no sign of his having knees when he walks. He has an enormous face. His eyes have the moist sheen of a snake’s. For an elderly man, his hair is wavy and vital, chestnut in colour and with a life of its own like Saint Olaf’s beard after his death; a grey toothbrush moustache. The lower lip sags in a loop to one side; in dogs this is called baring the teeth; perhaps the professor once had a protruding tusk there that was extracted, leaving a kind of sag in the lip; perhaps the professor has also clenched his teeth too hard at one time or another. The pastor’s empty room is filled by this man alone, yet he did not move much, at least never more than necessary; even his hand movements were measured, perhaps long training in self-control, or just a sign of old age. He also tended to speak in rather short sentences. A hint of a grin accompanied his words, as if the speaker expected that the listener wouldn’t take them too seriously. He screwed up his eyes and looked sidelong at the person he was talking to, like an experimental scientist keeping an eye on the indicator on some sort of dial while he is making up his concoctions.

(Halldór Laxness, translated by Magnus Magnusson [source])

Maybe I’m imagining things, but I suspect that a hint of a grin accompanied Laxness’s own words as he set them down. (And I’d bet that Magnus Magnusson displayed more than a hint of a grin during his own labors.)