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March 7, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 3
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The Purpose of Writing
Styles: Well, the notion that Nietzsche brings up that Jesus and Socrates are "they who did not write."
Richard: They did not write, no. Northrup Frye, by the way, importantly makes that point in his new book on the Bible. But Plato says that if we teach these students to write, then they will write, and if they write, they will stop using their memories, and their memories will atrophy, and they ought to be able to keep a long, long line of argument in their heads, and writing for Plato is just a crutch.
Styles: It's a crutch, but the same argument is being made today with respect to electronic communications, electronic instruments that--like the word processor and things like that--that somehow, these new things are coming along and are?
Richard: Oh, well no, I don't think that is the same argument. I think it's very different. I think, you see, in the case of Plato's argument, we have to remember that Plato was a genius, and it's a very bad idea to take practical advice from geniuses. Probably, Plato could do that; I can't do that, you see. I need writing, my own, and other peoples.
Styles: You need the crutch, is what you're saying.
Richard: To keep my mind in order, yes, of course.
Styles: But the thing that happens when we write, it would seem to me, is to give us a chance to look at our words, to hold a great many more things in mind at any one time than a memory can hold, and that it opens up to us a new way of handling language, and giving us over to language in a way that we can't be given over to in speech.
To speak is to lose words in the air, but to hold on to those words on a page is to look at them and to say, yeah, I've seen a development of a line of thought that wouldn't otherwise have occurred to me.
Richard: Is that a bad thing?
Styles: That's not a bad thing, but what I'm suggesting is then, what is the relationship between face-to-face speech and the communication of the community that we develop from, and not face-to-face writing. The writer sits alone at his desk, he writes. He expects someone down the line to take time to sit. The great enemy of reading, we say, is sleep, and if you're going to write well, you're going to be able to overcome that tendency to sleep in the chair.
Richard: I wonder if the writer really does write to someone else. Now, of course, his work is completely vain unless someone reads him.
Styles: You're raising the issue of whom I'm writing for.
Richard: Yeah, anyone who has written knows this one thing about it--it is the most painful occupation that most of us normally encounter?
Styles: ?and it's slavery of the pen.
Richard: ...and its painfulness arises from its loneliness. There is nothing more lonely than composing a piece of writing. I often stop right in the middle of a sentence. I don't even wait for a comma because I decide that it would probably be better to go and retile the bathroom than do this; it's such a hateful work, but that loneliness is an important part of writing, because the business of writing is in some ways an outward symbol of the inner business of thought.
Thinking is possible only to the mind alone; committees don't think; task forces don?t think; Congress doesn't think--of course, that I suppose goes without saying--only a mind alone can think, which is furthermore to say that only a mind alone can learn.
In a way, a class can never be taught anything, really strictly speaking. Only some minds in that class, and the process of writing is a wonderful paradigm of the whole larger process of learning, because it is as though you went into dialogue with yourself. You write a sentence, and there it stands; it does not fly away as a spoken sentence does.
There it stands with a lot of empty paper underneath it. It calls you; it rebukes you; it reminds you; it requires you; and the you that is being required is already a different you from the you that has written that sentence, that in a sense was another you, a you of the past--in that sense, another mind. So the mind of you now must make the proper response, must go on from there, and this process is a kind of continual exploration.
I don't teach writing myself except very rarely. I think every four or five semesters, I draw a section of our special expository writing course for English majors, and when I do teach it, I hate it, because I'm no good at it, absolutely no good at it. And of course, I console myself with the theory that writing cannot be taught. But at least I do try this when I teach it, try to suggest that the purpose of learning to write is probably not clear to most of my students.
They have been told that one reason to learn to write is to write that damn letter of application for a job, and of course, it would be nice if you could spell things correctly in that letter. They have been told that the purpose of writing is to communicate and, of course, I don't believe in that.
I try to urge on them that the purpose of writing is exploration. That every piece of writing is a kind of adventure into the dark unknown; the very heart of darkness, which is where you will eventually have to end up.
I do not want my students to be writers; I really don't. I don?t think we teach students to write in order that they become writers. I'm a writer; I make money writing; I don't need any more competition, thank you. No, I don't even want them to be writers.
But if I ask a student to sit and think about something, his mind will very quickly wander, as mine will. I have an attention span, I have measured it, of twelve seconds exactly; that's maximum. It's usually less than that, but the continuous rebuke, the reminder of the written page, enforces this exploration, and perhaps enforces habits which might eventually give some specially gifted person an attention span of more than twelve seconds.
Styles: Are you suggesting here that a person who learns to write, even though he may not in his own work use writing regularly, still learns something from that process, from the ability to write?
Richard: I have to believe its true, and one of the things he learns, perhaps, is how to read. Now those things probably should go the other way around. We should probably learn to read in some way prior to our learning to write?
Styles: I think we should do that anyway.
Richard: ?just as we learn to hear prior to our speaking. I'm not sure we do that. I think, by and large, we never learn to read, but having learned to write, or having given a great deal of attention to the care and precision and selection, and the judgment that goes into a good writing, I think we are more attentive to it in reading.
Not that we can now read, because this is really an idle point, not that we can now see exactly how Emerson gets a certain effect, or why Gibbon can sound so sarcastic while saying the most obvious things. No, not that.
But that the reading itself becomes more of an enlarging experience for us, and that the reading, I suppose, also becomes more of a pleasure for us, and because now it's as though we were at home in this world of judgment about words.
The problem of reading is inescapably connected to the problem of writing. I think we never learn to read in the full sense of the word. Never. I don't know, there may be some who do.
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 4
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Posted by witnit at March 7, 2005 10:05 AM
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