Za Granizza - Трудное в искусстве

Louis Menand

It is a strange fact of life on earth that a human being who reaches college age under the imp;ession that "it's" is the possessive form of "it" cannot be disabused of that belief. No amount of red ink will wash it out. When I was a college writing teacher and knew no better, I used to deduct half a grade for the misuse of "it's." This was using a Ayswatter on an ox: students took the hit and moved on, confident that somewhere, in some other classroom, there existed a teacher who shared their primitive faith.

 A few other grammatical superstitions are similarly ineradicable after high school--the belief, for instance, that the semicolon is essentially a big comma. Students who hold this view will listen politely to the orthodox interpretation of the semicolon and its uses, and then, in their next paper, they will stick a semicolon right in the middle of a clause. If you ask them why they put the semicolon there, they will reply, very sweetly, "For emphasis." For many years, the almost hopeless task of undoing this tangle of hearsay and delusion fell largely to graduate students in English departments, people whose own writing abilities were not necessarily greater than those of the average sociology student, and whose training in the science of instruction was entirely on the job. The business has since been taken over, in many places, by persons credentialled in a field called Rhetoric and Composition, or, as it refers to itself, Rhet Comp.


Rhet Comp specialists have their own nomenclature: they talk about things like "sentence boundaries," and they design instructional units around concepts like "Division and Classification" and "Definition and Process." These are trained, disciplined professionals. They understand writing for what it is, a technology, and they have the patience and the expertise to take on the combination of psychotherapy and social work that teaching people how to write basically boils down to.

 David R. Williams, Ph.D., the author of "Sin Boldly! Dr. Dave's Guide to Writing the College Paper" (Perseus; ~6~7.95), is not one of these new writing clinicians. He is a throwback to the days when teaching college students how to write was assumed to be the sort of thing anyone interested in literature was competent to do. Dr. Dave's particular interest is American literature-he wrote his dissertation on the Puritans-and his observations on writing are accompanied by sample exegeses of (among other standards) "The Awakening," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and "Moby-Dick."

 Dr. Dave attended college exactly when you would expect~ a person now calling himself Dr. Dave to have attended college, in the nineteen-sixties, so he has been grading papers for a long time. He works at George Mason University, in Virginia, and anyone who reads his book will feel that he must be very good at hisjob. He is witty and direct, he draws on a stock of sophomoreappropriate illustrations from sources like "Doonesbury" and "The Simpsons," and he has a firm grasp of the serial comma. On the other hand, he styles himself something of an academic maverick In this respect, he may exaggerate a little. Dr. Dave is readily categorizable as a politically incorrect liberal, the sort of person who thinks that Ronald Reagan is an idiot and that people in wheelchairs are cripples and ought to be referred to as such. There are probably a lot more people like him in academe than an outsider might guess. But few of those people are as up front about the politically incorrect side of their views as he is, and it is fair to warn students that "Dr. Dave's Guide to Writing the College Paper" will be helpful mainly as a guide to writing college papers for Dr. Dave. Its advice should be used in other people's classrooms with caution. Dr. Dave is a big proponent of a writer's "voice," and he prefers voices that are distinctly out there. He seems to feel that students should write like Camille Paglia. It is not completely settled that even Camille Paglia should write like Camille Paglia; what can be said with confidence is that she is not a writer whom college students would be prudent to imitate.

 Sections of "Dr. Dave's Guide" are given over to rants against Marxism and deconstruction-theories that Dr. Dave, for some reason, regards as virtually synonymous. Students can, and probably should, skip these pages. On the purely technical aspects of termpaper writing-one of those skills in life that people are obliged to master in order to be excused from ever practicing them again--Dr. Dave's advice is generally mainstream and judicious, and it can be heeded with profit. Except by students for whom it can't-and here we run up against the fundamental difficulty of trying to teach people how to write, which is that there is no one way to do it.
   The interesting thing about the or~ ganized effort to dispel the fog of superstition and anxiety about writing ~ that many people bring with them to ~ college is that it consists largely of the

incantation of another set of superstitions, probably equally effective or ineffective, depending on the person who adopts them. It's the classic missionary appeal: replace those bad rituals with these good rituals, and we guarantee salvation.

  Students are often told, for example, to write many drafts. (Dr. Dave recommends four.) The general line is "get your thoughts down on paper," push right through to the conclusion, and then go back and revise. But would you tell a builder to get the skyscraper up any way he or she could, and then to go back and start working on the foundations? I think not. I think you would tell a builder to set down one row of bricks, and, when that row looked pretty sound, to put some mortar (or whatever stuff builders use) on top of it and set down the next row. Seamlessness is the illusion you are seeking to create; you cannot achieve it by accident. Why burn through limited time and brain cells trying to coax coherence out of a ramshackle string of half-baked ideas embedded in badly written sentences when you could be forging your verbal chain one exquisite and unbreakable link at a time? Here is a scandalous thing to say, but it's true: you are reading the first draft of this review.
 Which is not to say that it is any more seamless, exquisite, or even literate than the next thing you will read, only that its author could not have written it any other way. Many people find this method an affi-ont to Enlightenment values. Lionel Trilling once wrote a halfhearted intrQduction to a posthumous collection of essays by the critic Robert Warshow, entitled "The Immediate Experience," in which he reported that Warshow waited until he was completely satisfied with the sentence he had in his head before he wrote it down, and that he then proceeded to the next sentence without ever looking back. Trilling plainly found this procedure repellent. In fact, Trilling himself was a famously blocked writer. A brickby-brick person might suggest that he should have stopped composing drafts; but that was just the way Trilling wrote, and he was, in the end, a better writer than Warshow. Trilling's essays read as though they had been written one finished sentence at a time, and Warshow's read as though he probably should have done one more draft.
 Then there's the whole "get your thoughts down on paper" routine. This belongs to the psychotherapeutic side of writing instruction. One reason people have trouble writing, the theory goes, is that they have a subconscious phobia about soiling the nice, clean page with their messy mental effluvia; if they can be persuaded just to go with the, as it were, how, they will eventually conquer their self-loathing and turn into happy and well-adjusted little graphomaniacs.

 This confuses two aspects of writing. Writing, even term-paper writing, is a kind of self-disclosure, and a natural instinct of prudery does tend to inhibit people when they are faced with the task These people can be treated; shamelessness can be taught. It also seems to be the case that people discover what they have to say in the process of Miting it. But writing, even term-paper writing, is also an effort to express an idea, and if you don't have an intelligent idea in your head writing a stupid one down in a notebook is not going to help you. Once on paper, words assume a horrifying concreteness. All the beautiful Auidity of thought is gone, replaced by rows of squalid and humorless squiggles. Yet these squiggles (this is the horrifying part) have somehow become "your idea." Theywon't go away, and they won't change by themselves. "If you want your idea to get better," they seem to say, "you will have to deal with us." But you are already realizing, as you stare at them, that your idea the utterly vapid--and you haven't even had it yet.

  Still, one hears all the time of writers honored for the crystalline elegance of their aper~us who kept notebooks. "He would sometimes arise in the middle of the night and write for an hour in his notebook," one reads of some deceased belletrist. Maybe an inability to get depressed by the inanity of anything you scribble down is a prerequisite for literary productivity and renown. But it does not follow that a college sophomore can expect to benefit from the future contemplation of random midnight jottings. The belief that if you wrote it, it must mean something is probably responsible for half the world's bad writing.

 Finally, there is the business about "voice." Dr. Dave's point about the importance of developing one is well taken, but the metaphor is misleading. The trouble most students have with grammar and punctuation comes from their assumption that one of the goals of writing is the reproduction of speech effects--which is why, for example, they insist on using commas and semicolons "for emphasis." In fact, speech is characterized by all the things writing teachers tell students to eliminate fi~om their prose in the interest of clarity: repetition, contradiction, exaggeration, run-ons, fragments, and cliches,·plus an array of tonal and physical inflections-drawls, grunts, shrugs, winks, hand gesture~unreproducible in written form. People talk for hours without uttering a single topic sentence. Yet we generally understand speech perfectly and instantaneously. We don't have to keep going over the same sentence three times to figure out what the person is trying to say. People communicate with their bodies much more effectively than they do on paper. You cannot make a semicolon mistake when youire talking. You can stick that emphasis any place you want, baby.

  But the illusion persists that the spoken word can somehow be carried over into print with all its personality and expressiveness intact. Friends of the critic Desmond MacCarthy, who was a member of the Bloomsbury circle, thought that he was a fantastic talker, and that his genius was never re~ected adequately in his writing. One day, some of them invited MacCarthy over, and hired a stenographer to hide outside the room and record his conversation. MacCarthy showed up and: obliged by talking brilliantly. After he i left, the friends waited impatiently for f the transcription to arrive. They read it. The writing was completely banal.