Whole words, whole sight

I’m teaching a course on essay-writing this semester at New York University, and so naturally I assign short essays to my students. One essay I got back was interesting in part because it was so incoherent: it started off about a specific event, but thereafter devolved into a series of disconnected descriptions - almost if the writer had tried a free-writing exercise before giving up. And yet I knew the student in question was too diligent for that to be the explanation.

When I got in touch with him, he abashedly confirmed that indeed, he hadn’t wanted to write a straight account of the event in question: what he was after was an “allegory,” in which actions and consequences would seem so unimportant that their details could be discarded. His inspiration, he added, had been a Hemingway short story and a related commentary by the late novelist and literary critic, John Gardner.

Quelle mésaventure littéraire! I realized that what had happened to my student had happened many years ago to me, back when I too was a budding writer. (I’m not sure whether I’m still budding - let us get a little further into spring and I’ll tell you).

I found a copy of the out-of-print book that contained both the story and the commentary, secreted in a special collection at the NYU library, and read them carefully, trying to learn for myself how my student could have gotten so off track. What follows here is the essence of a letter I wrote to him about all this, and which I will also read to my class. It’s my commentary on Gardner’s commentary - more specifically, a warning about taking “literary” ideas too seriously when you sit down to write.

Dear ____________:

When I first read this & considered my reactions to it as a reader, I thought it might represent some freewriting that never got completed, perhaps for lack of time. Only later did I decide this was not possible, based on how seriously I knew you take your work. I then looked again & found evidence for it as an attempt at a meditation of some kind, with plot given a secondary role.

Later on I learned from you that you had intended to craft an allegory about the nature of belief, and that you had used as your model a short story by Hemingway, “After the Storm,” plus related commentary by John Gardner; both found in a collection of fiction & commentary co-edited by Gardner, titled “The Forms of Fiction.”

I managed to dig this book up in the NYU library & read both the story and Gardner’s commentary. Here are some observations.

To start with, although I like a lot of what Gardner wrote as instruction for writers, I think he did his readers a disservice with the way he presented his analysis of this particular story. Fiction offers many pleasures, but as Gardner himself said elsewhere repeatedly and with great emphasis, such pleasures become available if and only if the root story is clearly told. This is true even when, as is usually the case, the dependent pleasures and not the story are what we ultimately cherish. Or as the novelist E.M. Forster put it, writing in his critical guide Aspects of the Novel: “Yes - oh dear, yes - the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different - melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.”

Hemingway’s story in this case is quite clear - we have no trouble whatsoever following along. Hemingway creates a rambling, slightly repetitive voice for his narrator, possibly to emphasize that the man is illiterate and that we are listening to what amounts to oral rather than formal storytelling - but this voice does not in any way interfere with the descriptions of events. ¹ Therefore other pleasures can arise, depending on what each reader in particular enjoys. Gardner happened to enjoy analysis, so he peered at the story for a while and decided it was using metaphor to talk about larger social issues, e.g. the narrator of the story “represents” primitive man, while the Greek salvagers and the ship captain “represent” social man. My quote marks here are deliberately skeptical - for in fact these representations exist only in Gardner’s analysis.

It is fine to speculate and extrapolate. But we must bear in mind that these are collateral and not primary effects; and beyond that, effects which typically were never intended by the author. As an example, Gardner asserts that when Hemingway identifies the persons who ultimately manage to salvage the drowned liner in the story as “Greeks,” he does so for a purely literary reason: as an allusion to the story of Scylla and Charybdis, a metaphor for successfully steering between two extremes. It’s an interesting thought. But in fact Greeks have historically been involved in maritime diving and in salvage; Hemingway would have known this; and therefore, since he was writing a naturalistic story dependent on verisimilitude, “Greeks” would have been his inevitable choice. There was nothing wrong per se in Gardner suggesting Scylla and Charybdis as a latent metaphor; his mistake was only in asserting it to be intrinsic to the story, rather than a product of his musings as critic.

The larger harm done by analyses of this sort, whether by Gardner or any other overly self-involved critic or teacher, is that readers are apt to get the process of writing and reading fiction backwards. This happened to me back in my 11th grade English class: we were reading “In Our Time” and “The Great Gatsby,” and our teacher focused with zeal on what he saw as the symbolism employed by both these authors, ignoring virtually everything else, including what his students thought of the actual stories and whether, uh, they enjoyed them or not (a minor point, that). I took this teacher’s bumbling so seriously that when outside of class I attempted to write my first “adult” short story, I wasted an enormous amount of time trying to embed symbols in it. The story was unsuccessful for many reasons; I don’t have a copy of it any more, but I can say without doubt that I would have been better served simply trying to make it enjoyable as a story.

The essential of a clear story applies with nearly equal force to nonfiction and to essays. I was reminded of this recently in re-reading Phillip Lopate’s introduction to “The Art of the Personal Essay.” On p. xxxviii he says, “The essayist must be a good storyteller … All good essayists make use at times of storytelling devices: descriptions of character and place, incident, dialogue, conflict. They needn’t narrate some actual event to produce a narrative. Even a ‘pure’ meditation, the track of one’s thoughts, has to be shaped, given a kind of plot or urgency, if it is to communicate.”

Myself, I’ve often attempted to write what I thought of as meditative essays, with the hope that I could simply string together like beads thoughts on different topics that to me seemed related. It was tempting to believe a string would be enough - but painfully I learned that readers require more than that, forcing me to tear apart and rebuild along more conventional lines. However inconveniently, an essay must be “about” something - not many unrelated things, but one central thing.

I think a useful gauge is this: if the external subject of an essay - that is, its “story” - can’t be described in a single fairly compact sentence, there is a good chance it is not yet about anything whatsoever, at least from the perspective of readers other than yourself. If so, more work is needed. This could be anything from analysis & revision, to putting aside the essay for a time to let your subconscious go to work on it (assuming you have the luxury of doing this).

And I would also suggest that when you read imaginative fiction or nonfiction by other authors, that you do a little analysis to see how the pleasure you get is supported by the way the piece is presented. Look for the solid thing - the story or ostensible subject - and then look for how subsidiary ideas and pleasures branch off from that, yet without getting entirely detached.