becoming self-referential (pt I)

on separating babies from bathwater and getting creatively unstuck

“The ugly fact is that books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.”

-Cormac McCarthy

I tried to read Blood Meridian for the first time when I was about 21, after I saw it on a list of best American novels somewhere (it felt like something I had to do, on some level, at the time). Like anyone, I was wowed by Cormac McCarthy’s expansive vocabulary and inventive syntax, but I abandoned the book halfway through because the actual narrative was so hard to follow. The style was great, but the story, frankly, felt a bit boring.

I picked it up again four or five years later and finished it, again wowed by its style and scope while still straining to understand it all.¹ Like any good millennial, I took to YouTube to look for a video that would help me wrap my head around it.

The best one I found was a course taught at Yale by Prof. Amy Hungerford on the American Novel since 1945. The whole lecture is amazing (as are all her lectures in that series, all free on YouTube, many of which I’ve now seen), but the part that stuck with me most is hidden at the very end of the 50-minute video (beginning at 45:56 and ending around 49:55).

Prof. Hungerford points out part of what makes Blood Meridian both so difficult and so rewarding is that it is so composed of other texts. It is thoroughly layered with references to other canonical literature (Moby-Dick, Paradise Lost), religious traditions and texts (the Bible, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita), and historical documents (an autobiographical account of the Mexican-American War by 19th-century soldier Samuel Chamberlin). But it is also layered with references to McCarthy himself, and to his own text.

Hearing this the first time was kind of a revelation. McCarthy was perhaps not as grim and severe as his prose seemed on the surface; maybe he was capable of being a little tongue-in-cheek. Maybe he even had a sense of humor about himself!

I started to see in McCarthy’s self-referentiality not solipsism or self-absorption. In context, it was actually a sneaky form of generosity and kindness to the reader.

Prof. Hungerford had unearthed an idea that knocked around my brain for (no joke) another decade until I finally realized why I couldn’t stop thinking about it:

It was a crucial insight to living a full and satisfying creative life.

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“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”

-Miles Davis

There are countless ways to measure what makes a “good” or “great” artist in any field, but to keep it short, one of the most pragmatic and relatively objective metrics we can use to measure an artist’s impact and mastery is their depth of self-reference.²

Taken at face value, a great artist’s life and career ideally both deepen into themselves. An artist may have different eras, motifs, inspirations, and masterworks, but their audience can begin to feel a through-line, at least in retrospect. Not every work has to be great in isolation, in other words; nor does a great artist have to be popularly or critically successful. Great artists often miss one or both in their lifetimes (though in some rare cases, they may also enjoy one or both).

Taking subjectivity out of it, being an artist is a practice. A good artist is first derivative of the work of other artists;³ a great artist is eventually derivative of themselves,⁴ and my only point in saying all this is to help anyone struggling with creative self-definition to get where they want to go, including myself.

So many people want to define their own voice and share it with the world, but doing so is a kind of existential struggle. In my view, this struggle can be helpfully reframed as the struggle to become self-referential, which doesn’t carry the same negative emotional baggage. We are taking up the project of constructing a self we might reference on the path to becoming great artists.

We construct a self out of whatever fragments are available, not out of a sense of lack. We do it out of the realization that the self is fluid, that there is no fixed self to lack to begin with.

If we are to define a self or voice, it won’t be something we find that we lost. It’ll be something we discover or nurture through curious and ongoing call and response with the world and ourselves.

All of this is mental scaffolding to help us get unstuck, a way to feel a sense of ever-elusive “creative progress,” and a way to shake up the creative process to make it kinder, easier, more productive, and more satisfying than it was before.

Being ironic and self-referential comes pretty naturally to most people of my generation, but I don’t often see it being leveraged into living the kind of fulfilling life we’re all looking for. If you truly feel stuck and nothing has helped, I think the best advice might be to relax.

Self-absorption may be a terrible place to stay, but it’s a fine place to start.

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From here, if we accept that becoming self-referential is a decent enough proxy to being creatively unstuck and on the road to a fulfilling artistic life, how do we actually do it?

And once we develop a strong enough sense of self, how do we pilot that self in our life and our creative work to actually connect with an audience and help shape the world in a way that aligns with our values, even if the effect we have ends up being relatively limited?

In my own experience, the first answer comes down to a few simple things, though each one of them could fill its own section; the second question will take a bit more thinking on my part, as it is a work in progress.

For these reasons, I’m going to call this Part I of this essay, with Part II (and potentially Part III) soon to come.

For now, the takeaway is this:

Life is a creative practice. We do not have a self, we constantly create a self which is always changing and always an illusion. But consistency and self-reference help shore up that illusion—a necessary one, because we will always lack enough “true” knowledge about the world and yet we can’t stop seeking it if we are to live a fulfilling and functional life.

Without appealing to any excuses, we have to create.

Ryan

1. In recent years, Aaron Gwyn’s tweets about Blood Meridian and his Substack dedicated to it have been a delight—I only wish I’d had access to his insights earlier. Follow him on Twitter for his musings on language, publishing, classism in literature and much more.

2. Put another way, this is a more accurate way of describing an artist’s originality, voice, or style. As they’re usually used, all those words tend to imply some kind of visionary or transcendent connection with a greater intelligence or force (a reputation that artists and their handlers often carefully cultivate when audiences begin to assume it, by the way). The truth is simpler: artists are archivists, of other art, of their own history, of their sensory experiences, and of themselves. We may experience a few bolt-of-lightning moments of inspiration or “downloads” here and there, but more often than not, great artists are a product of a lifetime of accumulation and creative interconnection.

3. I’m reminded of Pablo Picasso: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

4. For a more timely example of this phenomenon, I can’t help but think of Lana Del Rey’s delicious delivery of “Don’t forget me…” on “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” on her album of the same name. Why is that hook so satisfying? For me, it’s because I recognize the delivery as a reference not to some other style but to other Lana Del Rey songs. By slipping into self-reference (and borderline self-parody), her stylistic choices comfort her listeners, reaffirm her style, and somehow deepen her themes instead of cheapening them. Critical reception obviously isn’t the only way to gauge art (nor should it be), but it feels worth mentioning that Lana’s mythos has seemed to condense and her reviews to improve the more she has leaned into this tendency.