Joyce remarked that a writer is ‘a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life’. The extractable point from this flowery prose is that writing, as a medium, has the capacity to immortalise. There is a legitimate sense in which the written word moves that which it records to a zone beyond death, as it freezes moments in time that would otherwise fleet away, as moments tend to do.
Familiar versions of this phenomenon abound. Publications of posthumous letters or diary entries preserve identities and stories beyond their ephemeral embodied life — famously, see Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, or, less famously, see Charles Bukowski’s selected musings in On Writing. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 — ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ — purports to confer eternal life on the speaker’s muse, as his existence in the poem’s ‘eternal lines’ defies the inevitability of her death. In characteristic Shakespearean fashion, the closing couplet captures the profundity of this point: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’.
In these instances, people are not cryogenically but linguistically frozen.
Yet, not only does language preserve life but also animates life, and is this sense is not only a freezer but also an oven (to borrow from the natal idiom ‘bun in the oven’).
There are obvious examples of this in prominent religious texts. The Christian God said ‘Let there be light’, and ‘there was light’. The act of divine speech is an act of creation. Indeed, John’s Gospel states that ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. Comparably, in Islam, “When He [Allah] decrees a matter, He simply tells it ‘Be!’. And it is!”.
In a similar vein — albeit considering the written, not spoken, word — in the Jewish Kabbalah tradition, the 22 consonants of the Hebrew alphabet are not arbitrary signs but instead divine building blocks. The world, for Kabbalists, is a kind of poem composed by God out of these eternal letters. This concept is represented by the myth of the Golem, wherein the Golem is brought to life by the placing of a divine letter on his forehead, and its life taken away whenever that letter is removed.
In this sense, writing can be seen as a kind of Horcrux. A Horcrux, in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, immortalises its creator’s life on the condition that the creator has committed murder, for as long as the Horcrux remains intact. The written word immortalises its creator insofar as the writing is being read, and with no prerequisite of murder. Writing freezes its creators in time, and gives life to their ideas and identities. Perhaps, instead, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 should have concluded thus: ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to me’.
Tom Carne 