12 CREATIVITY VERSUS MATERNITY . . . sitting at the table, thinking of the book I have written, the child that I have carried for years and years in the womb of the imagination as you carried in your womb the children you love . . . —JAMES JOYCE TO NORA JOYCE Only a man (or a woman who had never been pregnant) would compare creativity to maternity, pregnancy to the creation of a novel. The comparison of gestation to creativity is by now a conventional metaphor, as largely unexamined as the dead metaphors in our everyday speech (the arm of a chair, the leg of a table), but it is also inexact. Although the idea for a poem or novel often comes as if unbidden, a gift from the muse, and although at rare moments one may write as if automatically, in the grip of an angel who seems to speed one’s pen across the page, most often literary creativity is sheer hard work, quite different from the growing of a baby in the womb, which goes on despite one’s conscious will and is, properly speaking, God’s miracle.
