Lisa's Reviews > Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing

Deborah Levy was asked to write a response to George Orwell's essay "Why I Write." She uses the four motives he proposed as titles for the four parts of her essay, Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing.

"Political Purpose" - In her meandering way Levy explores the role of woman/mother.

"chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn't really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain."

"Motherhood was an institution fathered by masculine consciousness. This male consciousness was male unconsciousness. It needed its female partners who were also mothers to stamp on her own desires and attend to his desires, and then to everyone else's desires. We had a go at cancelling our own desires. and found we had a talent for it."

"When a female writer walks a female character in to the centre of her literary enquiry . . . she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best if she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It's exhausting to learn ow to become a subject, it's hard enough learning how to become a writer."

I appreciate the points Levy makes. She does not, however, tie these thoughts together; and I feel dissatisfied as I move on to Part 2

"Historical Impulse" - Having recently read Damon Galgut's The Promise, I especially appreciate these reminiscences of the first 9 years of Levy's life spent in South Africa, especially the 4+ years during the period her father was a political prisoner. Apartheid, racism, and sexism are more of the things that Levy wishes she doesn't know about. And yet these are the meat of many histories with which societies are grappling.

"There was something I was beginning to understand at seven years old. It was to do with not feeling safe with people who were supposed to be safe. The clue was that even though Mr Sinclair [the school principal] was white and a grown-up and had his name written in gold letters on the door of his office, I was definitely less safe with him than I was with the black children I had been spying on in the playground. The second clue was that the white children were secretly scared of the black children. They were scared because they threw stones and did other mean things to the black children. White people were afraid of black people because they had done bad things to them. If you do bad things to people, you do not fee safe. And if you do not feel safe, you do not feel normal. The white people were not normal in South Africa."

"Girls have to speak up cuz no one listens to them anyway."

"I had been told to say my thoughts out loud and not just in my head but I decided to write them down."

"Sheer Egoism" - In this essay I see 15 year-old Deborah Levy in her black straw hat and lime green platform shoes hanging out in a greasy spoon by the bus station trying to imitate the poets and philosophers who inhabited the French cafes in years past. She already had the living in Exile thing down pat as her family moved to the UK a few months after her father's release from prison. And then her parents separated some time after that.

"Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad. That was what I thought writers should be."

Writing led her to questioning and she questions her homeland.

"I had so many questions to ask the world from my bedroom in West Finchley about the country I was born in. How do people become cruel and depraved? If you torture someone, are you mad or are you normal? If a white man sets his dog on a black child and everyone says that's okay, if the neighbours and police and judges say, 'That's fine by me,’ is life worth living? What about the people who don't think it's okay? Are there enough of them in the world?"

"Aesthetic Enthusiasm" - The final part of Levy's essay is the shortest. Here she sums up her thoughts on why she, this woman, writes.

"We [women] were on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics, from myths about our character and our purpose in life. We were on the run from our own desires too probably, whatever they were. It was best to laugh it off. The way we laugh. At our own desires. The way we mock ourselves. Before anyone else can. The way we are wired to kill. Ourselves. it doesn't bear thinking about. I did not want to know that I had been shut down. . .

"To become a writer, I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all."

"What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?"

In Levy's case, she writes.