Pathologizing Procrastination; Or, the Romanticization of Work

Abstract

IN THE NEW TELEVISION SERIES CASTLE, protagonist Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a best-selling author of detective novels. While framed as a series of murder mysteries, Castle is very much about writing and textuality, peppered as it is by references to writing process, nonrealism of fiction, inventiveness of everyday speech, and cliches of detective fiction in print and on screen. For instance, a victim's relative tells a police detective trying to comfort her, work in Public Relations so you can save your speech because I have heard them all. I'm one who drafts all of that pathos after airline crashes and E.Coli poisonings (Home is Where). Where there is it seems, there is procrastination. From first episode, Castle is berated by his mother for working enough on his new novel, and in Hedge Fund Homeboys a scene opens on Castle asleep in a chair in his spacious New York apartment, as his computer's screen saver flashes (facing viewer, and near centre of televisual frame), one word at a time, Be Writing Should Be ... He has had a long day, he is already wealthy, he seems to love his work as a novelist, and yet he has set his computer to nag him to keep writing. Procrastination arises here from imperative of perpetual work for its own sake-for those who live to work instead of work to live, as saying goes (and in an episode that focuses, by contrast, on idle rich). And yet, given series' thematic interests in textual production, how can Castle escape writing? For this is peril of being a writer in an age in which computers, as well as pen and paper, are ubiquitous and portable: writing (essays, books, lectures, e-mails-even novels) is always, everywhere, possible, and so every waking minute is potentially a minute in which we have to answer admonition, You should be writing, with not now. Procrastination arguably emerges in relation to writing in late eighteenth century. When I was first invited to contribute this essay on procrastination, I puzzled over that for a while, in part because I am deeply wary of tendency to see one's own literary period as exceptional and transformative, a tendency of which Romanticists are (perhaps) exceptionally susceptible. But William Wordsworth fussed over The Prelude for over half a century, S.T. Coleridge was a notorious procrastinator, and I had just taught part of Zhe English Mail-Coach (1849) in which Thomas De Quincey's speaker laments, Oh, this mail, and oh this post-office! Can't they take a lesson upon that subject from me? Some people have called me procrastinating (266). It is tempting to suggest that procrastination appears in this period because of Romantic formulation of inspiration. P. B. Shelley's image of the mind in creation as a fading coal (531), Coleridge's lament that he lost most of Kubla Khan because he was interrupted by man from Porlock (250), Wordsworth's spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (598)-these are among familiar representations of poet grasping at wayward, ephemeral inspiration. Earlier writers complain of fickle muses, but this Romantic view internalizes even as it mystifies, rendering inspiration both a product of mind and beyond mind's control. But because it is beyond poet's control, it is beyond poet's embarrassment as well. The pathologization of procrastination arises from a different ethic, of poet awaiting his muse but of malingering worker who ignores his screen saver. Eighteenth-century usage of term procrastinate was generally less focussed and morally weighted than now, often meaning simple deferral or, when negative, merely wasteful. In 1779, Zhe Accomplished Letter-Writer advised, in an epistle To a Friend against Waste of Time;'every Moment brings us nearer to our End. Reflect upon this, I entreat you, and keep a strict Account of Time. …