Perhaps this has been done somewhere, but I'd love to see a genealogy (a la Michel Foucault) of the concept of the artist as a "tortured soul." This idea strikes me as a romanticized re-narration of the hero of classical tragedy. Some sort of agonistic struggle with nature or some other institutionalized given (i.e. The Fates) depicts their role. It hasn't always been viewed this way and despite its present popularity, it doesn't seem very stable.
As a pastor, I’m called upon to pray in public settings quite a bit. One of the things you learn to do in your public prayers is to try to eliminate words and habits of speech that can be distracting to the listener. Along with the ubiquitous verbal pause (think “um”), there is the notorious use of the word “just.” (As in “O Lord, we just….”) Of course, this pressure to eliminate these aural stumbling blocks is felt by most people who are frequently engaged in public speaking. And yet, one wonders if there is something lost by the speaker for the sake of the listener.
Marilynne Robinson touches on this idea in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead. In one particularly brilliant passage, the Rev. John Ames records in his journal the glorious characteristics of water, after having watched a young couple walk home following a heavy rain. He goes on to write:
In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word “just.” I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened, and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed – when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. So it seems to me at the moment. There is something real significant by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge. It’s a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.
