Richard: See, but then you would go behind that and ask, "Why does this clich頥xist in the first place? What organized frame of thought is there which makes this so attractive and so acceptable?" And then you discover a great many more things about yourself and the culture in which you live, but the Heidegger aphorism is a good one.

Language does use us, and probably one of the things we ought to mean by literacy is the reversal of that fact. Of course, our language uses us, all of it. All of its slogans, all of its suggestions, its very grammar and syntax use us and enforce upon us certain ways of thinking.

The literate person would be one who has gotten beyond that barrier in some way, or at least is aware that language is using him, and therefore, pays a certain kind of thoughtful attention--I was about to say and I would say thoughtful discretion--to it, because discretion is the business of making things discreet.

Styles: A kind of discretionary attention to language is what we are looking for.

Richard: Yes, and the ability to write an application for a job, which is, I believe, the highest imaginable goal of the minimum competence movement, is not close; it's not close to literacy, nor is the ability to read a want ad.

In its highest sense, literacy is a profoundly destructive talent. It is destructive certainly of all received opinion; it is destructive of all orthodoxy, all traditionalism, and, therefore, from a government's point of view, it is very undesirable.

Styles: Well, in your case, you wrote something?you say on the force of language, which, because of the force of your own literacy, you could question, you become more self-critical of yourself as well as critical of your own language.

Richard: Well, ourselves are the only things of which we ought justly to be critical. Socrates says somewhere among his other inflammatory things, I think it's in the Gorgias, probably the best life is to mind your own business. And he says it in almost a snide moment, but I think he means it quite seriously, too.

Our own business is the only business we have any business to mind, and rather than rushing around to make the world a better place, Socrates seems to suggest, first sit down and make yourself a better person; that is your business.

And I would say of literacy that literacy is, among other things, that skill by which we can pursue our own business. Examine the work of our own minds; judge between what is worthy and unworthy. It is a great deal more than reading and writing.

Styles: Your own work, here at home, is to produce a little paper called The Underground Grammarian. You have your own press; you have your own mailing list, your own readers and subscribers, and you yourself suggest that it's a kind of subversive activity. How did you start?

Richard: Well, that began?oh, it began quite some time ago now. We are in the middle of Volume 6, which is really surprising, since with each issue I expected there would be no more.

It began in the bicentennial year, and it began really as not much more than a lark. I had been--every teacher has this experience--I had been vexed for years by the fact that nobody in the Dean's Office seemed to be able to make his verbs agree with his subjects. That the Vice President forAcademic Affairs couldn't put his modifiers in the right place, and as far as I can tell can't spell either, and I had for years simply shrugged this off.

But finally I bought a printing press, which every American is supposed to have by the way, and looking at one of these awful memos, this idea came to me. Why not publish these things with cheerful commentary; give the names, ranks, and serial numbers of the perpetrators, along with their salaries, by the way, which The Underground Grammarian frequently does.

Here's a man we're paying $38,000 a year, and his verbs don't agree with his subjects, and basically it subjects him to ridicule, and so it did, and at first, it did mostly that. Little by little it drifted. I mean there's just so much you can say about dangling modifiers and having said that, well the hell with it; if you don't see the point, there's no helping you.

Little by little, it drifted into rather vexing considerations, and they are all considerations really, of the relationship of language to thought. So that what we end up examining finally is not simply the syntax of the utterance, but the thought which must produce that syntax; and then, I'm sorry to say, even further, the morality which must underlay that syntax.

I can give a very convenient example of that because it was terribly striking to me at the time. This was already many years ago, and I was working on a commentary on a piece by some very silly boob, a professor of some kind of education or other somewhere, and he had written the following sentence: "The childhood years may be perceived as formulative."

Now I suppose he meant formative unless he was thinking of babies, you know, sucking on formula; I don?t know, but probably he meant formative and that may even have been a typo, and it's not important, so I'm willing to concede him formative. Now he says then, "The childhood years may be perceived as being formative." Now, one would not think that there is a grammatical problem here, and unless one is paying a certain kind of attention to it, you go right by, but I was for some reason trapped by that modal auxiliary may.

In the first place, what is the man saying, that we are formed in early childhood in some way? Well, that is not exactly a revolutionary notion, you know. That, as a matter of fact, is a little bit too obvious to bother saying. Now that being so, having said such a banal and obvious thing, why does the man take great pains to say it as though he really hadn't said it?

Notice he says?he doesn't say the childhood years are formative--they may, but it isn't even that they may be formative--they "may be perceived as being." He moves this perception away from himself.

It's almost as though he fears that later on someone will discover that they're not, and he can then say, Well, I didn't say they were, I said "they may be perceived as being formative," and that there is in this a kind of, well, there is nothing else to call it--mendacity.

Yes, this is a way of lying, and this is a way of doing another thing that seems to me very important in all considerations of literacy. This is another way of shrugging off responsibility.

When you and I speak to one another, of course, we take some responsibility, but when we write to one another, especially when we write in general to our fellows, we take on a tremendous responsibility, and if I write an article that I expect you to read, in effect I say, Now just a minute, you sit down, don't do anything except listen to me; now I am going to tell you something.

This is audacious; nevertheless, we do it all the time, and we must never forget its audacity because when I do ask that of you, I also now owe you something. I owe you, first of all the best truth that I can tell you; I owe you also the courage out of which to tell it.

I do not really serve you properly when I give you mealy-mouth mendacity, and when I myself try to evade responsibility even for the mildest of generalizations. It seems to me here there was an inescapable moral quality.

Styles: What occurs to me here is that the academic administrator you were talking about, who uses the language poorly, is enforcing on you, through his own rather unskilled use of literacy, some of the very things that literacy gives us--bureaucratic organization, the ability to communicate at a distance, and sometimes the irresponsibility that comes as a result of living in that kind of world that literacy gives us. So literacy is part of the thing that your're combatting.

Richard: If by literacy you mean the ability to make meaningful marks on a piece of paper or a flat surface of some kind, yes, that is true. But I don't really mean that by literacy. However, I think you're in good company. I think even Plato was opposed to teaching students to write, wasn't he?

Richard Mitchell Interview, Part 3

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Posted by witnit at March 6, 2005 10:13 AM

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