June 21, 1999
WRITERS ON WRITING
From Echoes Emerge Original Voices
By NICHOLAS DELBANCO
ecently I've been preparing a course for the fall semester, "Strategies in Prose." My writing students, a cohort of fiction writers in the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan, will read modern masterworks like "The Good Soldier," "To the Lighthouse," "As I Lay Dying," "A Farewell to Arms" and "Ulysses." As readers we will focus on aspects of technique, and the strategy for written assignments is that of emulation, the close copy and pastiche.
I've taught a version of this class before, both to undergraduate and graduate students, and the results have been remarkable. To engage in imitation is to begin to understand what originality means.
I'm hoping for additional language in the mode of Joyce or Faulkner, for paragraphs that Ford or Woolf might well have drafted and cut. While reading Hemingway, for instance, we might take the final rain-drenched scene of "A Farewell to Arms" and see what would have happened to the mood of its conclusion if the weather that day had been bright. Or if, instead, it had snowed. What would happen to the dinner scene at Woolf's Ramsay family table if the fare were not a boeuf en daube that "partook . . . of eternity" but pigs' trotters in wax paper or a fresh-caught trout?
We'll alter intonation, so that Joyce's Stephen Dedalus will hail from the Deep South; we'll give Faulkner's Anse Bundren the Irish accent of Leopold Bloom. We'll make Ford's Edward Ashburnam take a walk with Woolf's Lily Briscoe and see who proposes to whom. Much of this results in parody, of course, and it requires a tongue lodged in cheek, but I want to release young writers from the foredoomed expectation that their work must prove original. I want them to focus on manner, not matter, to study our great predecessors in an attempt to analyze not so much subject as style.
It's my conviction, moreover, that the two are inextricable, that Hemingway's short sentences stand in more than merely stylistic opposition to Faulkner's long ones. In the former, things are separable; in the latter, linked. We can tell the way a writer thinks by looking at his or her desire to use, say, the opposite comma or, as a sentence nears completion, the subordinate clause.
A system of values attaches to style. In "To the Lighthouse," for example, the protagonist dies in a parenthesis, yet Virginia Woolf's decision to excise Mrs. Ramsay from the text in such a manner has as much to do with the conventions of her syntax as it does with her sense of mortality.
A characteristic device in the punctuation of Ford Madox Ford is the ellipsis, and this tells the reader something about what's unsayable or, in a scene, unsaid. There's an important difference, clearly, between a character whose mode is associative, digressive, trailing off into silence . . . and one who ends his sentence fragment with exclamation points!
If art is an act of mimesis, a mirror held to nature, then it follows as the night the day that what we write must be impersonation, a way of tricking out 26 letters in order to ape "reality." That thing in quotes. We do this unconsciously always, sometimes consciously, in a kind of infection by inflection, a nearly viral transmission of a world view via words. And in this forward-facing moment at the end of the millennium it seems we've acquired the Janus-faced habit of also looking back.
Michael Cunningham's prize-winning book "The Hours" is an extended act of imitation, that sincerest form of flattery; he enters the world both of Clarissa Dalloway and her creator, Woolf. "Shakespeare in Love" is highly allusive, a comedic tip of the cap to the language of Elizabethan England; the joke of "Romeo and Ethel and the Pirate's Daughter" requires prior knowledge of "Romeo and Juliet." Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels constitute an almost uninterrupted foray into the imaginative discourse of a world at war 200 years ago, and large swatches of the story pay homage to Jane Austen or borrow from naval accounts. And these are just the iceberg's tip; present examples abound.
In other forms of performance we take repetition for granted, and personal expressiveness may even be a mistake. The members of a dance troupe must follow their choreographer's lead, moving in trained unison, and woe betide that member of the string section of an orchestra who chooses an exotic bowing.
The apprentice in an artist's shop might have mixed paint for years or learned to dado joints for what must have felt like forever; only slowly and under supervision could he approach the artifact as such. The French luthier J. B. Vuillaume took his pattern for stringed instruments unabashedly from his much-admired predecessor Stradivarius. This is not forgery so much as emulation, a willing admission that others have gone this way before.
Imitation is deeply rooted as a form of cultural transmission; we tell our old stories again and again. The bard in training had to memorize long histories verbatim, saying or singing what others had sung. In the oral formulaic tradition, indeed, the whole point was retentiveness; the impulse toward individual expression is a recent and a possibly aberrant one in art.
In this regard at least the early authors had it easier, had fewer doubts. They would have found nothing shameful in prescribed subjects or in avoiding the first-person pronoun. Since the stuff of the epic was constant, the apprentice could focus on style. A copyist must pay the kind of close attention to the model that a counterfeiter does, and though such results may not be art, they are, when successful, real proof of technique.
It's possible, in other words, that the problem is not what to write but how to write it, and that a great weight can be lifted from young writers' shoulders if subject matter is predetermined, not something they need to invent.
Nor is signature important. The bulk of our literature's triumphs have been collective or anonymous. Who can identify the authors of the Bible, the "Ramayana," "Beowulf"? More to the point, who cares? The "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are by an unknown bard, as are, for all practical purposes, the plays of Shakespeare. This is not to say that these works don't display personality -- the reverse is more nearly true -- but rather that the cult of personality should fade. It, too, is recent and, I think, aberrant; it has nothing to do with the labor of writing as such.
All this conjoins with the nature of language and our presumed literacy: a native familiarity with English that more often than not breeds contempt. No one presumes to give a dance recital without having first mastered the rudiments of dance, to perform Mozart before playing scales or to enter a weight-lifting contest without first hoisting weights. Yet because we've been reading since age 5, we blithely assume we can read; because we scrawled our signature when 6, we glibly aspire to write.
So one task of the teacher is to point out antecedents. "Tom, you might want to look at what Dick did with this plot device; Harriet, you might (re)read the novel by X, which your Y appears to follow." And more often than not the student has no notion that it's been tried before. Often the apprentice has not seen the model he or she has somehow come to imitate, and there's a way in which such ignorance is bliss, a precondition of the imagination engaged. Yet Ezra Pound's injunction "Make it new" predicates some knowledge of what was yesterday's news.
Therefore my students in September will look at the use of incantatory repetition, not the meaning of the snowstorm in "The Dead." We'll study image clusters in Virginia Woolf, and the way the lighthouse looks to the separate characters who look at it, and why a sentence that has commas differs from one that does not. By semester's end these writers may not know the map of Dublin or the population of Yoknapatawpha County, but they will know -- or the course will have failed -- in what ways Hemingway's good soldier talks differently from Ford's.
Originality is rare indeed, not subject to instruction; and in any case it's not the purpose of "Strategies in Prose." Still, I expect that, having studied and absorbed these inimitable voices, their own voices will start to emerge.
The first phrase of what follows is the first of "The Good Soldier," the last the last of "Ulysses." The speaker of the second sentence is Faulkner's troubled Vardaman, and the third sentence of this brief pastiche belongs to a bitter Jake Barnes. Each of the words deployed are Anglo-Saxon in their origin, not Latinate; the longest have two syllables, yet authorial intention, tone, alters altogether from first to last:
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
My mother is a fish.
Yes, isn't it pretty to think so.
Yes yes yes yes yes.