Do writers really need a purpose?

This summer and fall, my reading list has been conscripted. I inherited two literature classes from a colleague, and in short order I had a list of thirteen books to be prepared to teach, about half of which I had read before, about half of which were new. Among them were a few wonderful new discoveries. Among them too were a couple books I dreaded, ones I never imagined I would read or much less teach. But it had to be done. I read Lolita.

I can appreciate the craft with language and the bald portrayal of budding commercialism in the mid-century United States. But ultimately, the book disturbed me. Is such material really necessary to write?

Nobokov wrote in his afterword to the novel something that has stuck with me in a more positive way. It speaks to this very question of purpose when we write. What was Nobokov trying to accomplish with Lolita, after all? Maybe, he says, that’s the wrong question to ask:

Teachers of Literature are apt to think up such problems as "What is the author's purpose?" or still worse "What is the guy trying to say?" Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book and who, when asked to explain its origin and growth, has to rely on such ancient terms as Interreaction of Inspiration and Combination--which, I admit, sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by performing another.

Of course, the afterword goes on to very precisely explain Lolita‘s origin and growth, yet I have to appreciate that such recounting does indeed seem to miss the reality of the creative process. What is the guy trying to say? I ask this of my literature students all the time. But what would I answer, as the writer?

Sometimes writers seek to make a statement. I think of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, written for an explicitly didactic purpose (although its ultimate effect was something very different). I think of some climate change literature today.

But I believe that just as frequently, what we write has no purpose beyond the simple telling of a story. A story is burning in our brains and so we write it. Perhaps only later might we see some so-called purpose in it. If the purpose is there at all, perhaps we’ve just invented it, so much so that we go on to believe in it it ourselves.

We might say the reader finds a purpose. I suppose that’s fine. Yet even here, it’s a sad state to which to reduce a story or a poem. What was it trying to say, we ask, as if the poem stands before us bound and gagged, inarticulate mumblings through the taped mouth. Just spit it out, why don’t you–just tell us what you mean! If what I was trying to say was a one-sentence theme, maybe I should have just written one sentence.

The best reading, of course, will always be the whole work. The summary is not the story. The name is not the human being.

I’m reading now for pleasure once again. I’ve chosen Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. What is Rhys trying to say to me? I’m holding off my judgment yet. I’m soaking in the world she’s invoking. I want to imbibe this whole story. I see that it’s about gender, and it’s about race, and then it’s about mental illness, and colonial rule, and it’s about fires and great trees and indigenous religions and language. It’s about family, marriage, school, and convents. It’s about childhood bullies. It’s about being cared for, about islands, about 1830s Jamaica, about memory. It’s about a hundred things I can’t name but are in that book. To reduce it is to caricature. To say it is a feminist novel and to stop there is to decontextualize it to the point that is becomes meaningless. You have to just read the book.

Writers, what are we doing? Are we just writing? Do we have some greater purpose? Do we need one at all? Or do we really? I think of a poem, a strange and beautiful piece, from Daniel Ladinsky’s Love Poems from God, inspired by the mystic Meister Eckhart. This quote, the second stanza:

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever
wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing
I could not
love.

I’m thinking about this stanza again now. We think of purpose as so essential. I think there might be more to things than that, or else less.