Hello! This was meant to be a couple of introductory paragraphs but it turned into its own whole thing. Oh well!
I took a couple of writing workshops in college. The first was really weird for reasons it would take at least a half-dozen letters to explain, but the second, at a different college, was very conventional. You went around in a circle and said what worked and what didn’t, and then the teacher said what she thought worked and what didn’t.
I think if everyone is on something like the same page this format can go pretty well. You can kind of suss out what someone wants their story to do and you can tell them what things landed and what didn’t; it’s can be helpful enough for figuring out how to read your own work critically, and hearing people say words about what you’ve been doing is very nice for generating the feeling that you exist in reality and are not, as I sometimes feel when I am writing, trapped in some solipsistic nonsense McDonald’s jungle gym of the mind, wandering endlessly on my hands and knees through the sticky prison-house of language, yelling nonsense at the unhearing adults eating in the adjacent dining area, etc.
But it was really hard for me to figure out what to do with some of my classmates’ writing. The class’s output was both hectic and highly variable. Some of the stories we read were basically done, and what do you say about something that’s basically done except “I like this; it’s basically done”; some of them were obviously written in about four minutes, and what do you say about something obviously written in four minutes except “maybe spend some more minutes on this”? Some of them were going somewhere potentially interesting, but I had no understanding of how to help get them there. Some of them were just not my thing. And so on.
What I discovered during my time in this workshop was that I could shift into a mode wherein I found basically anything on a page interesting. To paraphrase Rumi, beyond all ideas of right and wrong is a field; there I will find aesthetic merit in your two-page monologue about how much your girlfriend sucks. You can justify the inclusion or exclusion of basically anything if you decide to.
The most lucid expression of this mode that I have ever found is, oddly, a piece by Todd Pruzan from a 2005 best-of collection of humor writing from McSweeney’s called Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, a book I bought on a whim from Borders as a kid. (It might not actually be funny at all, but I thought it was funny when I was twelve.) The joke of the piece is that the actual scene in the body of the text, which involves a bunch of famous people with the surname “Glass” on a boat, is extremely unfunny; but in the footnotes the author meticulously details why every “joke” is actually very funny. (“The famously soft-spoken Ira Glass would never swear; this disconnect creates a humorous tension,” etc.) I have no idea whether this story holds up, as the footnotes are omitted from the Google Books preview, which is itself kind of a joke, I guess.
An earlier version of the gag can be found in Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph,” in which the narrator’s friend reads his banal poetry to the narrator and then explains why it’s so good:
He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others.
For Borges’ Daneri, this inability to judge his own work is a side effect of the “small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance” that lives in his staircase: the “Aleph,” an object which grants its beholder the simultaneous perception of the entirety of the universe. When the house gets torn down, Daneri gets good at writing poetry, because the density and richness of his experience can no longer compensate for the meagerness of his work.
My experience is neither particularly dense nor particularly rich, but it’s nonetheless true that, once I got the justification machine up and running, I could make an argument for the aesthetic merit of basically anything the workshop put in front of me. (My third and final school workshop took a variation on this idea as its operative principle; classmates distributed one or two pages of a draft and we all explained what in it interested us and disregarded what didn’t. It worked pretty well!)
I’m not against disliking things; it is a productive and, I think, necessary part of discovering what the things that speak to you are saying. It’s rewarding and useful to cultivate taste. Ultimately, in the workshop as in life, I think it comes down to kind of a gut check: is there enough going on in this story to justify a given form reading? And it’s nice to figure out where you stand — or at least to identify and understand your ambivalence.
But I also think “overreading” like this is intrinsic to so many of our most thrilling and revelatory experiences of art. Our attachments are often excessive, irrational. A cultural object comes along and sounds the particular resonant frequency of the hallways of your psyche and you find yourself in love with something silly, moved to tears by the strangest things. Often we feel first and justify second; and something doesn’t have to be visible to everyone to be worthwhile to you.
To take a particularly ludicrous example, I was deeply moved by the ending of the movie “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” in which (spoiler alert?) the wizards surreptitiously wash away with magical rain the collective memory of the nightmarish trauma New York City has just incurred; especially in light of the United States’ world-historically destructive refusal to engage with the causes and effects of 9/11, this vision of a kind of impossibly easy communal psychic repair struck me as a devastating portrayal of the literally magical thinking required to sustain the dream of a successfully paternal liberal state. The film’s conclusion felt like an unwittingly revealing manifestation of the desire, barely submerged beneath the aspirations of modern technocrats and their supporters, to forego emotional and political reckoning in favor of finding a magical sovereign parent capable of making America feel okay again.
For whatever combination of reasons, I was very moved at that moment to see this desire laid out so nakedly, with such unselfawareness. It was a cathartic and revealing movie-going experience. But as best as I can tell, this dimension was not an intended feature of the film—which was, of course, actually very bad. Accordingly, it did not feature in the general critical response.
Without getting into the debates surrounding the ethical or pedagogical merit of the “literary canon,” I think one of its appeals, at least, is that it gives the student permission to read books this way. If you know in advance the book is good, you can read the damn heck out of it. Or, as our sad friend Stephen says in Ulysses, “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Like a lot of Stephen’s loopier philosophico-aesthetic proclamations, I do think that Joyce thinks this is a funny thing to say—the kind of thing a dude who hasn’t bathed in a year says. This declaration is made regarding Shakespeare in the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter, in which Stephen outlines his elaborate theory of Hamlet to a librarian; at the end of the chapter, when asked if Stephen believes his own theory, he says no. Joyce, who definitely thought that Ulysses was a work of genius, is preemptively ribbing everyone who will claim to find errors in his book.
But I don’t think Joyce thinks it’s a dumb idea, or even a wrong one. I’d take it one step further: mistakes can be interesting even if we throw the idea of “genius” in the trash can, where it possibly (probably?) belongs. Imperfections of all kinds can be a portal to discovery, and the unintentional – the “mistake” – is often the most revealing. This principle is clearest, I think, in the realm of popular recorded music: musicians since the dawn of recording technology have often made a point of keeping in the weird banter, the flubbed takes, the vocal imperfections. (The band Big Thief’s discography, especially lead singer and songwriter Adrienne Lenker’s vocals, provides a lucid example of this principle in action. As they’ve become more confident musicians, their recordings have become singularly good at simulating the feeling that a real performance by four people in a room is being summoned into present-tense existence; in keeping with this, Lenker’s singing has increasingly sacrificed accuracy for expressiveness and urgency—to really good effect, I think.)
Anyway, this was all going to culminate in a reading of the first chapter of Book of the New Sun, which I find both vexing and wonderfully revealing, for what it tells us about Severian’s psychology, but I didn’t get there this time. Oops!
To be continued...