Craft - Forging a self

The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Craft
Forging a self

I’ve returned several times in this book to two competing ways of imagining writing. On the one hand, writing is often pictured as an everyday skill that almost anyone ought to be able to teach or learn. On the other hand, it is also seen as a window onto the self. Writing teachers are thus viewed as either low-level professionals, skills instructors, or as something closer to shamans or priests, guardians of a secret, gatekeepers of a higher realm. I think the novels I’ve looked at in this chapter begin to offer a way beyond this standoff between the mystical and the mundane. For what they suggest is that learning to write involves becoming not a disciple but an apprentice, that it is an entrance into a craft, a guild, rather than an imitation of genius. As Lucy Winter remarks at the tea party in The Small Room, the relationship between a teacher and student needs to be grounded in the study of a subject, in something outside of them. Otherwise, they have nothing to work on together.

But what does it mean to say that when the subject is writing? Old School warns against reducing the craft of writing to technique. For while the schoolboys in Wolff’s novel possess the skill to parrot the phrasings and attitudes of Frost, Rand, or Hemingway, they lack the experience to do work that is meaningfully like the authors they are imitating. In a similar if perhaps more sophisticated way, the young woman caught plagiarizing in The Small Room is so driven to impress her mentor that, unsure of what she herself might have to say as a novice scholar, she substitutes the voice of an authority for her own. In both cases, what the student is writing about turns out to matter less than who they are writing for. As for Lee Fiora in Prep, there is never really any subject, only a desire to fit in (although in her case with her classmates rather than teachers). Angela Argo in Blue Angel is a bit more complicated; she has a true talent but still ends up less interested in what she is writing about than in using her work to seduce and punish her hapless teacher.

What I take away from these novels, then, is that it can be dangerous to focus on craft in the abstract—that what almost always matters is why a specific writer uses a certain technique to say something in a particular situation. Or to put this in slightly different terms, to really teach writing as a craft, you need to consider and respond to what an individual writer is trying to accomplish. Otherwise, you are simply repeating formulas.

Jayne Relaford Brown speaks to this need to keep both the writer and her craft constantly in view in her wise and funny poem, “Emily Dickinson Attends a Writing Workshop” (2000). Brown’s one-page poem consists of a typewritten version of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” as though it had been submitted as an assignment in a creative writing course, with extensive markings and comments handwritten all over it by an anonymous teacher. These comments are both perfectly ordinary and comically obtuse: “Why all the Caps? (—And dashes?) why a ’loaded’ gun?” The teacher also warns against beginning too many lines with “And,” reorders Dickinson’s stanzas to establish a consistent time line, and cuts the famous closing verse (“For I have but the power to kill / Without—the power to die”) as “too confusing.” They conclude with a note that begins “Emily—Nice language here but I end this poem feeling confused,” before going on to ask, “Is there another poem behind this one that still needs to be written?” In short, the teacher notes all the ways Dickinson violates the conventional techniques of poetry workshops but fails to ask why she does so. Instead, they simply assume that any deviation from the norm is a mistake and then proceed to show Emily how it might be corrected. It is advice that could be given to any writer about any poem.

Of course, the joke here is on the teacher. Dickinson’s poem has fascinated so many readers for so long not despite but because of its eccentricities. To revise it according to workshop dictates could only lessen its impact. There is a moment in their closing note when the teacher verges on recognizing as much, writing to Emily that “you seem to be alluding to some anger, yet the cause is never explored or revealed.” But that is the very point of the poem. The sense of anger and yearning in Dickinson’s poem is haunting precisely because it has no clear origin. She is describing a state of mind or feeling, not telling a story. But to begin to appreciate how she does this, you need first to trust that she knows what she is doing. As the critic I. A. Richards (1942, 41) once advised about approaching a difficult poem, “Read it as though it makes sense and perhaps it will.” But the imagined workshop teacher fails to extend this sort of trust as a reader to Emily. Brown’s parody plays upon the lack of respect that lies behind so many teacher comments on student writing. Since we’re not convinced that what students have to say is all that new or makes all that much sense, we offer them general tips about writing rather than specific responses to their work. And so Emily—like all those other writers whose ambitions exceed or elude our formulas of response—is left pretty much to her own devices. The workshop has failed her.

Let me be clear. I admire the theories of rhetoric and writing the field of composition has developed. I have tried over the course of my career to contribute to them. But what I take from the books, movies, and plays I have discussed so far in this book—most of them composed not from our point of view as writing teachers but from the vantage of those we teach—is that our theories of discourse gain the most meaning, are set most powerfully into motion, when we connect them to the aims of individual writers. Astronomers may happily predict eclipses without reference to those who happen or not to view them, but writing theorists and teachers need actual writers to make use of their ideas. The allure of teaching writing is that it asks us to connect our ideas about how language works to the attempts of students to write pieces that actually say what they hope to say. Our ideas matter as they are embodied in the writing of our students.

In chapter 5, I look at two fictional accounts of teachers who fail to connect their ideas about writing to the work of students. The first is one of the foundational texts of Western literature and philosophy, Plato’s Phaedrus (1995), in which Socrates is shown as spinning an elaborate theory of writing and rhetoric at the same time he seems to loose interest in the actual views of the young man he is speaking with. The second is Peter Dimock’s fine if overlooked 1990 novel, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family, in which we watch a man constructing a modern version of the ancient Rhetorica ad Herennium as a way of staving off grief and madness. My sense is that both Plato and Dimock hope to reveal the sterility of rhetoric, of method, when it is not tied to the aims of specific writers. Then, in the brief postscript that follows, I look at yet another reason why teachers seem so depressingly often to substitute a canned response (“Why all the Caps?”) for a genuine engagement with student work—which is that they lack the time, support, and training to do any better. Most of the accounts of teaching I’ve looked at in this book have been intense, direct, one-on-one encounters. In closing, I think it’s important to consider why such scenes should stand out from the norm, why they should seem remarkable rather than routine.