About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
Stein tells the nineteen-year-old composer and writer Paul Bowles, “If you don’t work hard when you’re twenty, Paul, no one will love you when you’re thirty.” It’s the first piece of literary advice I ever remember conscientiously deciding to take. The book also brought home to me a lesson without which it is almost impossible to become a professional writer: from it I first learned that the writers who wrote books, the writers who created published works, brilliant works, exciting works, were people. They had bodies. They lived in actual houses. They ate meals. They liked certain of their acquaintances and disliked others. They had personalities. They were neither gods nor primal forces—voices alone, moving, bodiless, through space and time. Their day-to-day humanity ceded them the material for their art. This was as true for Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton as it is for Jay Wright (b. 1935), Richard Powers (b. 1957), Angela Carter (1940–92), Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), Alice Munro (b. 1931), and William Ernest Gaines (b. 1933). Had I not suffered this revelation at seventeen, I wouldn’t have published my first novel three years later at twenty.
Having read and so much profited from one of Stein’s books at seventeen, at nineteen I gambled on a second, Lectures in America—and again lucked out. Among these half dozen meditations on English literature, Stein writes, “The paragraph is the emotional unit of the English Language.”
There are myriad technical reasons to begin a new paragraph: another character speaks, the narrative switches focus to what another character is doing, the writer changes to a new rhetorical mode (from external action to internal reverie, from internal reverie to external description), and, of course, the all-purpose change of topic. But all are, finally, one form or another of movement between Stein’s emotional units. In reading over his or her own prose, the writer who can forget the emotions that impelled the writing and can respond to the modulations in the emotions the words on the page actually evoke will generally be able to solve the problem of when to begin a new paragraph, that is, when the tenor of those emotions shift—and it’s time for a new line and an indentation.
Stein was famous for writing in a kind of baby talk, with many repetitions and what was often taken as a childish disregard for punctuation. In that same collection, in what some critics during her lifetime called “Stein-ese,” she wrote:
The thing that has made the glory of English literature is description simple concentrated description not of what happened nor what is thought or what is dreamed but what exists and so makes the life the island life the daily island life … And in the descriptions the daily, the hourly descriptions of this island life as it exists and it does exist it does really exist English literature has gone on from Chaucer until now … That makes a large one third of English literature. (14–15)
Description (or psychological analysis, or any other rhetorical mode associated with fiction) without story to support it risks becoming interminable. But story without description soon becomes insufferably thin. “Good prose,” Flaubert wrote his mistress, the aspiring writer Louise Colet, “is stuffed with things”—another observation of what I suspect is only a different aspect of Stein’s perception.
The more I read and reread Gertrude Stein, the more I am convinced that, for writers, she is the most important critic-writer between Walter Pater and Antonin Artaud—with both of whom, indeed, she overlaps.
I have always found George Orwell’s (1903–50) essay “Politics and the English Language” (1948) a wonderfully clarifying document. In certain circles, during the 1970s and 1980s, Orwell’s piece was used widely as a writing aid for college freshmen and sophomores, most of whom were neither sophisticated nor widely read enough to take in its points. It has never been a popular text with beginning writers (an audience it was never intended for). As well, if you read it carelessly, it can be taken as attacking some of the cherished pleasures of those of us who enjoy the rarified heights of literary theory and its attendant complex rhetoric. But Orwell’s essay is for people who seriously want to write—and who have done enough general reading in fiction, journalism, and criticism so that it is possible that they might even succeed; the essay offers little help to writers who still must learn how to put together grammatical or logical sentences or a coherent argument. Orwell’s piece is specifically for people who can write what passes for “competent” prose, but who need someone to point out why their “competent” efforts are so often empty or worthless. The essay has occasioned a barrage of recent attacks. But the best I can say for them is that most of the essays I have read are notably more muddled than Orwell’s. What these academics are muddled about is why Orwell’s bit of eminent good sense does not turn students who can’t write into thinkers who can. They fail to see that their students have not read enough, while Orwell’s piece is addressed to people who have read too much—specifically too much of the wrong thing, and in the wrong way.
When the writing of literary theory is bad (and often at the general academic level it is), what usually makes it bad is something Orwell’s essay points to—what Orwell calls “operators” or “verbal false limbs,” which save the writer the trouble of “picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad the sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry” (130).
Often when graduate students find themselves having to write about a difficult passage from, say, Flaubert or Heidegger, which is developing a point (or, more usually, a portion of a larger point) that the graduate only dimly understands, again and again I have seen one or another of them break the passage up all but arbitrarily and put “On the one hand he writes” in front of the first part and “But on the other hand, he says” before the second—or, indeed, any other possible verbal limbs that effect the same suggestion of symmetrical contrast—establishing the idea that a single passage outlining a development actually expresses contrasting or contradictory ideas. The rest of the student’s paper—or section of the paper—will cite other examples of one or the other of these “two contradictory ideas,” sometimes through the medium of a shared word or phrase or sometimes just through hazily similar notions.
Only yesterday morning, while marking a Ph.D. preliminary exam, I found one such false contrast—not in the student’s answer but in one of the questions posed by a colleague: “D. H. Lawrence called the novel ‘the bright book of life.’ Contradicting this, however, he also said that the novel was the receptacle of the most subjective responses to the world. Choose three novels written between 1850 and 1950 in which subjectivity is fore-grounded and discuss them in terms of the formal techniques the writer employs to present or invent the modern subject.” The fact is, there is no contradiction between the novel’s function as ‘the bright book of life’ and its presentation of subjective responses to the world—since subjective responses to the world are part of life. It’s far too limited a reading that would assume “the bright book of life” referred only to the object world around us. The relation is one of “as well as,” not one of “contradicting this.” The point is to understand how B follows from A, not how it contrasts with it. But such careless articulation often suggests to someone whose critical lens is not highly focused that the discernment of such “contrasts” represents “close reading,” or that finding contrasts that aren’t there is the way to trace out some “problematic” or “aporia” (Greek for “contradiction”) in the passage, when all it does is sow confusion on top of misunderstanding. One can write clearly about complex notions. Those complexities still require concentration, repeated reading, and careful articulation to get them clear.
Orwell discusses this process in the context of political journalese, in which the commentator will use “the appearance of symmetry” to set up conceptual antitheses where no antitheses exist. But today this is what makes three out of four graduate student papers (not to mention too many “higher thoughts” from the already securely tenured) reaching after the heights of theory flounder off into fogged failures of logic, leaving their works all-but-pointless exercises in verbiage.
Again, it’s professors, journalists, graduate students, and critics who do write for others who need Orwell’s piece—not undergraduate students who don’t.
I am a lover of the verbal sensuality and conceptual richness of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Jacques Lacan (1901–81), just as I enjoy William Faulkner (1897–1962), John Cowper Powys