Pathologizing Procrastination; Or, the Romanticization of Work

In the new television series castle, the 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 the writing process, the non-realism of fiction, the inventiveness of everyday speech, and the cliches of detective fiction in print and on screen. For instance, a victim’s relative tells a police detective trying to comfort her, “I work in Public Relations so you can save your speech because I have heard them all... I’m the one who drafts all of that pathos after airline crashes and E.Coli poisonings” (“Home is Where”). Where there is writing, it seems, there is procrastination. From the first episode, Castle is berated by his mother for not 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 the viewer, and near the centre of the televisual frame), one word at a time, “Should ... Be ... Writing ... You ... 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 the imperative of perpetual work for its own sake—for those who live to work instead of work to live, as the saying goes (and in an episode that focuses, by contrast, on the idle rich). And yet, given the series’ thematic interests in textual production, how can Castle escape writing? For this is the 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 the admonition, “You should be writing,” with “not now.”

Procrastination arguably emerges in relation to writing in the 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 the 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 The English Mail-Coach (1849) in which Thomas De Quincey’s speaker laments, “Oh, this procrastinating mail, and oh this procrastinating 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 the 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 the man from Porlock (250), Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (598)—these are among the familiar representations of the 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 the mind and beyond the mind’s control. But because it is beyond the poet’s control, it is beyond the poet’s embarrassment as well. The pathologization of procrastination arises from a different ethic, not of the poet awaiting his muse but of the malingering worker who ignores his screen saver.

Eighteenth-century usage of the term “procrastinate” was generally less focussed and morally weighted than now, often meaning simple deferral or, when negative, merely wasteful. In 1779. The 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. Procrastination is the most dangerous Thing...