Against the Grain

Abstract

How I write is against the grain. I think this has always been the case, although now that I’ve been doing it for several years — doing it to the point, now, where I think of myself as a professional writer — the terms and conditions of interference have changed. There are things that get in the way of my writing and things that I put in the path of my writing that are different now than they were when I was younger, but the essential resistance — both mine and writing’s — remains.

Do we choose a tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition?

Why nothing at all happens, just nothing. You cannot write or teach or think or even read without imitation, and what you imitate is what another person has done, that person’s writing or teaching or thinking or reading. Your relation to what informs that person is tradition, for tradition is influence that extends past one generation, a carrying-over of influence. Tradition, the Latin traditio, is etymologically a handing-over or a giving-over, a delivery, a giving-up and so even a surrender or a betrayal.

— Harold Bloom, A M ap of M isreading