1. In “Teasing Myself Out of Thought,” from her excellent last collection of essays and reviews, Words Are My Matter, the recently departed and much missed Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: “Kids are taught writing in school as a means to an end. Most writing is indeed a means to an end: love letters, information of all kinds, business communications, instructions, tweets. Much writing embodies, is, a message.” Not surprisingly, Le Guin despised writing as “merely…the vehicle of a message,” because for her writing’s purpose was to write “as well as we can.” And in another essay, “The Operating Instructions,” she writes: All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. That last sentence hammers at my head. I worry about getting made up by other people’s language; and I worry about the same for my students, my friends, my community. How should one address this? Through science fiction. And while science fiction novels and stories have a long history of dealing with language (1984, Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and China Miéville’s Embassytown), I think a cult film serves us best right now. 2. I’m referring to John Carpenter’s sci-fi movie They Live (1988). Here’s why: the plot and dialogue talk right back to Le Guin’s concern about who gets to invent whom nowadays. The plot of They Live is plain as pancakes. A drifter arrives in Los Angeles and stumbles upon a world-wide alien-robot conspiracy to keep the human race in submission through subliminal messaging through all forms of media. The drifter discovers the alien-robots with woo woo science sunglasses. A battle between undeceived humans and alien-robots ensues. So the plot is nothing if apt to the world in which we find ourselves. Sort of. The film was based on Ray Nelson’s (very) short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1963. The story has nothing to recommend it (other than sheer bloody forward momentum), as it’s more of what Le Guin called “a vehicle,” an extended scene that allows the flat main character, George Nada, to act simply as an idea (rebellion, waking up to authority and consumerism) charging through the landscape murdering disguised and oppressive aliens. (It was turned into a much more interesting and funny graphic story called Nada with artwork by Bill Wray.) But I want to give They Live a bit more room to breathe. I want to look at it as Le Guin would’ve, as a way not to have “our lives get made up for us by other people.” Mostly because I think the film comes off (unfairly) as schlock. It is, no doubt, a clumsy movie. A product of its time: a reactionary (if cartoony) condemnation of Reaganomics and '80s hyper-bourgeois materialism. It’s also admittedly a B-movie (alien-robots, guns, violence, cursing, blatant and needless nudity), one that doesn’t take itself too seriously or try excessively to prove its credentials. That sort of insouciance is in the movie’s favor. To me, the oddest trait of the movie is a lack of dialogue. Again, much of the film silently follows the main character, now styled John Nada (Roddy Piper), in his travails around the down and out of Los Angeles. Famously, there’s a six minute fight scene between the two main characters in the middle of the movie. (Slavoj Zizek has humorously made much of this scene regarding the role of ideology. Do with that what you will.) There are a couple of scenes where I jolt and go, What the hell was that dialogue for? And what can it tell me about how language is working for me and working on me? [millions_ad] Odd Scene #1: Frank (the badass Keith David) asks Nada if he wants some hot food and shelter. If he does, he knows a place. Nada silently declines. Frank, rebuffed, cuts his losses and leaves. Nada trails behind more like a confused dog than someone with a lot of confidence. After a half-minute of this on screen, Frank turns and makes it known he hates being followed. Nada replies stoically: “Well, I don’t join up with anyone, unless I know where they’re going.” My immediate reaction to this was Yeah, okay, Big Shot. Nada’s so independent and hardy. What a stud. But as I thought back on it, this doesn’t make any sense in relation to the rest of the flick. It’s an outright political and ethical statement nailed right into the script without any softening or rhetorical care. Just, thwack!, right in there. Deal with it. Odd Scene #2: Here’s dialogue from the movie. The main characters are hiding out in a hotel room after escaping the alien-robots. Nada: A long time ago things were different man. My old daddy took me down to the river, kicked my ass, told me about the power and the glory. I was saved. He changed when I was little. Turned mean and started tearin’ at me. So I ran away when I was 13. He tried to cut me once. Big old razor blade. Held it up against my throat. I said “Daddy please”... Just kept moving back and forth... like he was sawin’ down a little tree... Frank: Maybe they’ve always been with us... those things out there. Maybe they love it... seeing us hate each other, watching us kill each other off, feeding on our own cold fuckin’ hearts... Nada: I got news for ‘em... There’s gonna be hell to pay. ‘Cause I ain’t daddy’s little boy no more. Again, I thought What the hell is this doing here? None of it really lines up with the rest of the movie, and in and of itself, doesn’t make much sense. (Moreover, the dialogue was more “believable” in Nelson’s story.) But I kept thinking that there had to be some connection between the dialogue and the violence (both on screen and in the movie). Again, the Long Fight Scene between Frank and Nada was (perhaps) a way to show how deeply rooted and difficult it is to change ideologies. When Nada falls into this reverie about “a long time ago” I thought maybe he was trying to connect this up with the fight. And maybe he is. Maybe his dad’s rough handling was a change of ideology. Clearly the father had gone from wanting to save his son (with religion) to wanting to kill him (for whatever reason—one assumes that 13 is a classic age for rebellion and questioning authority). His father saw him as a thing (a little tree, a sapling) not as a person. So it was a negative change of ideology—that is, Nada lost his ideology through violence; he didn’t gain an ideology in return. If we follow the idea that Nada’s father wanted to threaten him at 13 for doing what 13-year-olds do, then it makes sense that Nada has been a drifter. A quester. A journeyman. He’s skeptical. He questions everything. To say that this is commentary on “staying awake” or “paying attention to propaganda” or (god forbid) getting “woke”—is an overstatement at best and a banal observation at worst. So then, what can we do with it? I’d prefer to use it, as I’ve said, as a way to think about language. Most of Nada’s lines are goofy, and now famous, (“I came here to do two things: kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m all out of bubble gum.”) but memorable for that exact reason. (And, as has been pointed out to me, many are in popular culture now, especially through video games or Shepard Fairey’s OBEY artwork.) Nada’s language is tortuously precious in its idealism (see the exchange between Nada and Frank above) and awkward in its earnestness (“Life’s a bitch, and she’s back in heat.”). In a way, Nada is speaking through memes (even if no one spoke of them in the '80s) and talking in the way of magazines and ads, short memorable snippets, the sort of language he reviles and which the magical resistance sunglasses translate as coded messages of consumerism and obedience (OBEY, CONSUME, CONFORM). So where does Nada’s language fall? Nowhere? Into nothingness? John Nada’s language is a warning. If you want, call it Le Guin’s Warning: a warning to those who dare to break away and question and turn skeptical—and the warning is this: “If you reject following, of any sort, don’t banish all language of power, because you then end up taking on whatever is around.” And that move is just as dangerous as obeying because you have to have language to function. But how to tell which language is oppressive and which isn’t? Especially when one might be “ideology-less”—if such a position even exists. What kind of language is a function itself of propaganda or bullshit, and what is Trying to Get It Right? (I’m not sure what that last phrase means, but it seems correct to have it in all caps.) The conclusion I come to with They Live is that we can follow John Nada and Frank (who, himself, is just that: frank and forthright and pulls no punches, literally) and use them as models: Question, but have trust. Do good work, but don’t let others take advantage of it. And so on. As for the alien-robots, it seems that they are whatever hi-jacks or forces language on us. Are we to obey or follow what’s around us just because we see it? How much pressure is there to follow and ape it? And how much of that pressure is real or made up? How much of forced or obedient language is in your work, professionally or artistically or otherwise? When I ask questions of my own writing, e.g. What does this sound like? I’m often thinking of answers like: “This sounds like a bank teller, or a barista, or a grandmother, or a presidential candidate.” Or I’m thinking, “This sounds like an economic report from the Secretary of the Treasury or a salesman on QVC or it sounds like the guy at the end of the bar who’s been drinking for too long.” John Carpenter got it because Ray Nelson got it. John Nada got it. And Le Guin got it. Learn how to invent your own life through language and don’t get made by another. The Voice of Ursula is, and always will, gently hammer inside my head. Who do you sound like, and why do you want to sound like that?

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.         —Seamus Heaney, “Lightenings” 1. For most of us, rhetoric boils down to what you learned in high school when the teacher drew a triangle on the chalkboard and wrote logos, ethos, pathos. “These are the three appeals to the audience,” the teacher said. Reason, character, emotion. “A composition will try to include all three of these for best effect,” you may’ve heard. But these three alone aren’t rhetoric. Instead, consider adding Kenneth Burke’s idea of “identification” from A Rhetoric of Motives, that states “[y]ou persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.” Prince Hamlet is a prime rhetorician in the Burkean sense. (Actually, William Shakespeare was the rhetorician, but I’m being generous.) After speaking to his father’s ghost, Hamlet confides to Horatio: “I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on;” antic, as in, grotesque; meaning, Hamlet’s fixing his words and actions to fit the ass-backwards scene in his home. Because “time is out of joint” in Elsinore. And Hamlet, too, will be out of joint if he doesn’t persuade those around him he’s mad. Oddly, Hamlet will persuade everyone he’s nuts, but it will be against their common sense, against his prior character, and against what passes for royal emotion among his kin. That is a type of persuasion. What Hamlet reminds us of in his “antic disposition” is the strong ability to forget what we identify with; that we overlook or push away the strange or skewed because we’re worried it will remind us of a slice of ourselves. So we approach unlikeness with curiosity like nattering Polonius. Or we approach unlikeness with parental concern like cautious Claudius and Gertrude. But there are few who approach Hamlet fully identifying as Burke suggests. If anyone, it’s the players who arrive mid-way through. With respect to rhetoric, the question to ask isn’t: “What does it say about Hamlet that he acts mad?” Rather, the question should be: “What does it say about everyone else such that Hamlet thinks he’ll identify with and persuade others by acting mad?” Rhetoric, then, is for uncertain situations, where there is no known outcome. (Who knows about King Hamlet’s murder? Why are people ignoring it if they do? What should Hamlet do when he finds out who’s guilty?) Which is why rhetoric is frequently (and classically) broken down into judicial (parents deciding punishment, judges, lawyers, etc.), epideictic (entertainments, best man speeches, TED talks), and deliberative (in short: most political situations). None are cleanly removed from the others. Almost all of these combine at particular moments in life, especially as Hamlet (surely a student of classical rhetoric at the University of Wittenberg) felt played by his one-time turncoat pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. HAMLET: …why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil? GUILDENSTERN: O, my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly. HAMLET: I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe? GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot. HAMLET: I pray you. GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot. HAMLET: I do beseech you. GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord. HAMLET: ‘Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops. GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony; I have not the skill. HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me. They engage in deliberation, they entertain with metaphor, imagery, and jokes (epideictic), and finally Hamlet passes judgment (“Call me what instrument you will…you cannot play upon me”). The idea here is that we are inherently suspicious of those who may try to charm us with honeyed words when we’re not sure of their intentions. (Or, in Hamlet’s case, even when we are very sure of their intentions.) But that’s exactly how the art of rhetoric can be useful—when there is indecision and a way forward needs to be born. And despite what you read and hear, rhetoric isn’t one thing. It’s both the art of persuasive language, and it’s also the whole set of tropes, schemes, and figures that make up how and what we write and speak. So, for example, Hamlet’s use of anaphora, the repetition of “you would,” prodding Guildenstern and his intentions—it is just a basic rhetorical device. But, how do rhetorical devices do what they do? Why do they do what they do? Rhetorician Jeanne Fahnestock has addressed how figures and tropes work as lines of argument in her book Rhetorical Figures in Science. Fahnestock says that it may seem unusual, but readers can identify certain rhetorical figures with “forms of argument or reasons” that traditionally were the “topics”--or topoi--of classical rhetorical education. Moreover, Fahnestock’s point is that this action, i.e. the use of argumentative lines, still exists, but that we may not be fully aware of it. In fact, we may even shun it. 2. Rhetoric is complicated. Say you’ve read a CNN article about Donald Trump’s use of a rhetorical device known as paralipsis, also known as apophasis. Or say you read James Fallows’s “When Trump Meets Hillary” in The Atlantic. In it, Fallows anticipated the first debate at Hofstra with all the rhetorical elements a viewer should look out for in the then-Republican nominee’s language (simplicity, ignorance, dominance). Or perhaps you meanderingly googled “Trump” over lunch, or you just happen to see that nasty, nasty word—rhetoric—pop up all over your news feed during this Season of Political Discontent. The word itself—rhetoric—has a long pejorative tail that wags the dog. When we read “X’s negative rhetoric” or “Y’s demogogic rhetoric” or anyone’s being “merely rhetorical,” the implicit disgust in those claims is far from understood and what’s been old and useful is turned sour for lack of reflection. This is because while “rhetoric” can generally mean “the way one uses words” or a particular set of syntactical moves one can make with language, it definitely doesn’t mean, especially to those of us who study it, “inherently deceitful language.” Sure, fine, you may say. But why care about it? Rhetoric is persuasion, and persuasion is seduction. And seduction, in human language, is syntactical. If you find yourself agreeing with that, and you don’t like it, then you’re standing next to Plato and his famous distrust of rhetoric. In the dialogue Gorgias (named after the Greek sophist), Plato has his mentor and mouthpiece Socrates grill Gorgias for details about just what it is that Gorgias could be said to do. If Gorgias is a successful orator, what does that entail? SOCRATES: …What is it that oratory is the knowledge of? GORGIAS: Speech. SOCRATES: What sort of speech, Gorgias? The kind which tells the sick how they must live in order to get well? GORGIAS: No. SOCRATES: Then oratory is not concerned with every kind of speech? GORGIAS: Certainly not. SOCRATES: But you would say that it makes men good at speaking? GORGIAS: Yes. SOCRATES: And presumably good at thinking about the subjects on which it teaches them to speak? GORGIAS: Of course. Plato has Socrates corner his interlocutor into a conundrum. Gorgias obviously can’t admit to teaching people to be doctors if he himself has no knowledge of medicine. So how can a student of Gorgias be “good at thinking” about it? Just because a person may have the vocabulary of a discipline doesn’t mean she automatically can claim the know-how. If this is Plato’s definition of rhetoric—the conflating of knowing-that-something-is-the-case with knowing-how-something-is-the-case—then we’re shading into the realm of philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s bullshit. From his Frankfurt’s 2006 monograph On Bullshit: Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. It may be used for rhetorical purposes, it may even use rhetorical tropes and schemes, but still—bullshit just isn’t rhetoric. Famously, Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric was “an ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion.” A pretty sanguine take on the concept, the one most readily to generate agreement from those who study it. What it seems was most important for Aristotle was the acknowledgement and understanding of the persuasive technique used; to see and recognize the means and choosing of the rhetorical device for the situation. So one aim is to know that Hamlet uses anacoluthon in his dealings with Polonius because the irruption of one disconnected thought after another will mimic madness. Or when Herman Melville writes in Moby-Dick: “There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness” he’s using anadiplosis, and exploiting the repetition of “woe” at the end of the first phrase and the beginning of the second because woe is the strange relation yoking wisdom and madness. The syntax of the sentence creates the conditions for possibility. Because rhetorical devices are lines of argument. 3. Rhetoric isn’t going anywhere. It’s us who’re going away. Ideally, then, we would all have a Pauline in our brains. Pauline is the name of “a qube,” an implanted quantum computer in the head of Swan, the main character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312. Besides being designed for informative conversation, Pauline studies rhetoric, and she points out her owner’s patterns in language and argument, or lack thereof. Pauline finds rhetoric “a useful analytic tool.” Yet she finds anaphora “one of the weakest rhetorical devices, really nothing more than redundancy.” And later, when Pauline starts to riff too far on tropes, she declares: “One could also argue that the classical system of rhetoric is a false taxonomy, a kind of fetishism…” Later in the novel, she points out anacoenesis, synchoresis, and her owner’s use of sarcasm and aporia. All of these instances are used to try and explain and make plain Swan’s attempts at poor persuasion. If we had a Pauline in our noggins, maybe we’d be better off. Maybe we’d just be constantly irritated by the recognition of all the ways we talk to each other and try to persuade and move one another. The point, it seems, is to know how you’re doing the persuading. Or with what means. From all I can tell, Aristotle wanted to stop people ignorantly persuading each other and unwitting groping within language and push them toward a knowing body of information. And this is what decidedly makes someone like Donald Trump—or, really, anyone like him—not a good rhetorician. He’s an illusion of an orator. A two-dimensional man. He’s a pilaster, not a column. Not an oracle, but a mountebank. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian wrote that “no man can speak well who is not good himself.” How outdated that might seem to us now, but how badly we should want it. Shouting down an opponent isn’t rhetoric, it’s bullying and stupidity. Responding with comments just to trip up a debate isn’t a rhetorical strategy, it’s a plan built on exhaustion. It’s argument for argument’s sake, also known as eristic. We do a disservice to the art of rhetoric and those who can actually debate and discuss and persuade in the public sphere and among intimates with an attention to the warp and woof of language when we prize the word “rhetoric” from its moorings and set it loose into a sea of bullshit. So yes, rhetoric is old. But it’s also current. And according to science fiction, it’s still with us 300 years into our future. If we pay attention to rhetoric and the lines of argument in its tropes, we can avoid misnaming it. Instead of knowing that language persuades, we can know how language persuades. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition.” —Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation” 1. As one-time student, then adjunct, and now teacher of writing, I’d like to think that I’ve been unknowingly grasping toward but never yet fully reaching Gertrude Stein as an avatar in the composition/writing classroom. Here is a modernist monolith who lectured and wrote considerately and freely on the sentence and the paragraph. But where is her influence in college composition? While it can’t be said she synthesized a solid theory of writing, one can cobble something approaching a theory from her career. Or, if not a whole-cloth theory then at least usable principles. Guy Davenport found that we’d ended the 20th century feebly knowing how to read some of its greatest literature. Among those: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Stein, and yet we are “still not clear what Gertrude Stein was trying to do. Where we can understand her, she repays attention in great measure.” William H. Gass, in the intro to The Geographical History of America, has gone so far as to say that she “never argues anything,” instead her writing “demonstrates far more than it proves.” Maybe. I’m not sure of that. Take the following from “Sentences and Paragraphs” in How to Write: The balancing of a sentence is mound and round. They will thank you anywhere. What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value. Even which it may be they do not know that their right hand is their right hand nor their left hand which is their left hand. A sentence then can easily make a mistake. A sentence must be used. Who has had a sentence read for him. He will be pleased with what he has and has heard. This is an exceedingly pretty sentence which has been changed. Throughout this piece she often asks “What is a sentence” with no question mark. Why? It is a refrain. A reminder. What is a sentence? For Stein, it is a constant reminder to the reader not to read with habit, not to read with the eye only. Stein scholar Ulla Dydo writes that Stein believed “Writing by unthinking habit, relying on usage rather than consciousness, is wrong.” Try going against usage and see how far you get, folks. Stein insists, though, as elsewhere, on giving an answer to this: “A sentence is a duplicate.” Duplication here means corresponding copies or enlargement. Sentences then are related and tied together, even, it seems, if they don’t exchange content or relate thematically, though here they do). Overall, arrangement is key (and one of the five canons of rhetoric). Duplication, change, mistaking, depreciating, confusion. These are Stein’s personal rhetorical canons, the elements fueling her writing. And the words/fuel are all states or actions that inhabit uncertainty, movement, and (I would like to think) notions of vagary and vaguery. As another example, re-read the first sentence of the second paragraph -- “A sentence then can easily make a mistake” -- which can be understood two ways: as a warning and as a discovery. No one should feel obliged to choose one or the other outcomes because right after this we read “A sentence must be used,” which alerts us to her endgame. That is, in all the hemming and hawing, sentences will get used and read and heard and had. A slower reading gives up the claim that “an exact duplicate is depreciated,” and by this, I take it she means a Xeroxed sentence. One without a change. And then: “Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value.” It is a witness. It is a witness of the previous sentence, a revision upon what came before. I understand that her point is every sentence adds something, has value, is necessary, despite the confusion of a continuous series of sentences laminating on top of each other. Trust consciousness, not usage. And by “usage,” I mean convention. 2. In spite of the above examples, Gertrude Stein’s writing isn’t, on the face of it, a style that we’d traditionally encourage in college. But, I ask again: why? Doesn’t it uphold the tenacious inquiry we ask of collegial adults? Doesn’t it allow for play and interest? Doesn’t it, contrary to Gass’s belief, make claims? Answers: Yes, yes, yes, and yes. 3. All that aside, we have to admit she confounds what we often consider clarity, legibility, and to some extent, taken-for-granted literacy. Reading Gertrude Stein can make one feel foolish, stupid, and bewitched. What Stein enacts in her prose is the full range of a sentence’s ability. She prompts this in us with, “The balancing of a sentence is mound and round. They will thank you anywhere.” And I take her seriously when she states later that sentences aren’t emotional but paragraphs are. This is because, to me, a sentence on its own, unless a one sentence paragraph (which then entertains a whole other essay), plays off no other sentence, has no cause or effect, as such. Again, Ulla Dydo believes “She meditates about composition” -- understanding “composition” to mean (simply) the arrangement of words. To Gertrude Stein, the arrangement and creation of sentences and paragraphs was always paramount, no matter the origin: “[o]rdinary sentences in succession, or talk, which of its nature is irregular, becomes an irregular commonplace.” From what I can determine, an irregular commonplace is not a place to find an argument or a syllogism or a narrative per se, even though she may show a passing interest in these. What I can make of the irregular commonplace is that it’s some sort of oddplace or weirdplace. A location that seems familiar but which is skewed or composed such that the reader senses discord underneath the skin of the sentence. 4. Gertrude Stein weaves her attention in the action of writing as the focus. What comes from the actions fund what follows. (This is close to what Gordon Lish calls “consecution.” The OED defines it variously as “Proceeding in argument from one proposition to another which follows from it…inference” and a “Succession of similar intervals in harmony.” For the rambunctious to-and-fro-ing between composition and creative writing, see Jason Lucarelli’s “The Consecution of Gordon Lish.”) The point here is that Gertrude Stein collapses most borders we use to slot writing. Does this make her a rhetorical genre unto herself? Perhaps. Although, to declare Gertrude Stein an island upon which one only occasionally vacations is to ignore her influence on writing. Let me rephrase that—is to ignore her troubling influence on writing and the teaching of writing. I would go so far as to say that reading Stein is like viewing a map, which offers scale, distance, and depth in one go. Ulla Dydo compares her writing to the work of visual artists: “Stein composes words somewhat as painters, with the tools of their art, model three-dimensional perceptions on canvas or paper to create pictorial space. Yet words, whatever their arrangement, always carry referential meanings, unlike brushstrokes, lines, and colors in a painting or rhythms, sound, and phrases in music.” So what do we do with this acknowledgement? From here, I’ll pose some questions I don’t necessarily have all the answers to: Why isn’t Gertrude Stein taught as a model in college? Why isn’t Gertrude Stein a methodological signpost for composition? Lastly, what can writing teachers do with the incoherence we find in Stein’s writing in conjunction with the frustration found in reading student writing? As an attempt to answer the first question, I’d conjecture that what gets written in a majority of first year writing courses isn’t close to what practicing academics think of as academic writing. The writing is, in a way, incoherent. Incoherent to students, incoherent to teachers, and incoherent to the system. Moreover, student writing with fuzzy borders encourages incoherent reading because the audience will almost always come down to the teacher herself, no matter the assurances fobbed off on the student about “a wider audience” and “writing for oneself.” It makes sense that this incoherency would persist because writing teachers talk about composition as if it were a genre, when in reality it’s not. It’s a synonym. Better yet, it’s an action. Again, this is how Gertrude Stein approached composition, and it would behoove the student writer and writing teacher to also frame it this way. 5. Further, I would suggest she’s not a model or a method because she is squarely against the goals of academic writing, the kind of writing that is often encouraged in composition. And yet, what if her approach to writing was taken seriously and offered to writers as a way to encourage the kind of density that literary critic Richard Poirier described? Poirier’s focus on density was the progress from “fairly direct access to pleasure” into a place that, while vague and “strange and imponderable,” never repulses the writer because of a disconcerting change. Difficulty baldly declares the so-called pain needed to endure writing upfront, while density lures. Density intrigues. Poirier assigned difficulty to those reading writing, but it makes more sense here as the background in which students have received writing instruction in high school, and in which they go on to perform their writing in college. It is also the way they read their peers’ work. As readers, “[d]ifficulty gives the [student] a chance to strut his stuff, to treat Literature [or any composition] as if it really were a communication of knowledge rather than a search for it.” We want students to wander inside language, and by wandering, to wonder, as well. We don’t ask them to exhaust language into tidy packages. It is by this dense approach to teaching writing that I hope students don’t merely try to “convert wonder into knowledge,” but instead realize that any tidy package will “have only to do with the wonder of events,” as poet James Longenbach writes, “not the wonder of language, which cannot be dispelled by explanation.” For a hyper-focused sample, let me apply Stein’s spaciousness and Poirier’s density -- that quality of language that allows direct pleasure at first, but imponderability second -- to another sentence: Here is not something where you can flip to the end and read the final conclusion, because there is none. Let me describe why this fits a frame of density. It sings. “Here is not something” jolts. (It reminds me of Robert Frost’s “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”.) We are present here; then whatever here is gets negated. It is not something. Notice, too, the words corresponding to ends and negation: “not,” “end,” “final,” “conclusion,” “none.” Front to back this sentence is all about existence, nonexistence, and the travel between those two points. In meter and sound the dactyl and the trochee collide and take turns. (A quick reference will tell us that dactylic meter is the traditional meter of Greek lyric poetry. Further, this combination of dactyl and trochee are prominent in Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” I mention these facts because there’s history in rhythm. A history which bears down on all writing.) I will rewrite the above sentence with the stressed syllables in bold, separated into metrical feet. Here is not | something | where you can | flip to the | end and | read the | final con |-clusion Seen this way, the sentence carries a new weight, a new density. The sentence, now that I reread it for the 15th (27th?) time, starts to take on a Wallace Stevens-esque haunt about it (the “Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is”). But it’s not just about scansion. Revealing rhythm isn’t profound. Instead, I think, especially here, revealing rhythm confounds. Perhaps it’s not a surprise if I reveal that the sentence was from a student essay. Why do I bring this up? Because imagine what a composition teacher would say in response to a sentence like that. Think of what you’d say. Would you let this sentence go? Moreover, would I (did I?) let this sentence go? Here’s what I wrote in my comments: As poetry, it’s magnificent. As informative prose, it’s beleaguered. OK, maybe not that, but it’s archaic in a way not suited to the overall purpose. I think because you start with “here” which makes us feel present, then you negate it, “is not”. What if it was: Here’s a place where you can’t flip to the end and read the conclusion because it’s not there. This is shameful to re-read, but that’s why I include it. As an act of theorizing, my approach is lackluster and boring. Look at how I destroyed the sentence in my revision. I dumped a bucket of needless clarity all over it. I shaved the density right off. Why did I do it? Why did I unStein this wonderfully Steinian sentence? I don’t know. Probably because the inveterate chorus of composition is Clarity, Concision, Craft. It’s never Compromise, Confute, Confect. I’ll take a crack at what went on in my response. I quote from Stein’s lecture “What Is English Literature” where she elaborates on Geoffrey Chaucer, writing that he didn’t choose his words as words, but as sounds. “They had not yet to be chosen, they had only as yet to be there just there. That makes a sound that gently sings that gently sounds but sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds of course as words but it sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds that is to say as birds as well as words.” That is to say, Chaucer worked by sound. The words were sounds, not words as we think of them today as heavy, portentous concepts. In Stein’s estimation, Chaucer’s words could very well have been the air he breathed. That’s a Romantic sort of thing, I know, though I think she wants to draw us to the selflessness of Chaucer’s words. Words like birds, like songs. Swooping, fluttering. Then she tells us that that kind of hearing and writing declined. After this, “so many words…were chosen.” She remarks: In the poetry of that long period as well as in the prose everybody was livelily busy choosing words. And as the words were chosen, the sounds were very varied. And that is natural because each one liked what they liked. They did not care so much about what they said although they knew that what they said meant a great deal but they liked the words, and one word and another word next to the other word was always being chosen. For me, choice and chosen are terms begging to be called upon. These are tied down with and by trust. (Where does the trust come from? Student or word? Reader or writer? Conscious or unconscious? Thought or sound? Class or individual? Word, sentence, paragraph, essay? The draft? Which draft? All writing are drafts.) Composition -- whether affect-based, network-based, process-oriented, or model-driven -- must fashion choices. Where does the choice exist? Stein says in one word next to another word. When we lose the choice there, we lose it everywhere. There’s no harm in knowing and liking what you want to say. For the love of a word, where are the choices in the writing? Asking a writer in freshmen composition to attend to the arrangement of one word next to the other à la Gertrude Stein is not only pyrrhic, but eventually draconian. 6. What we need, what Gertrude Stein writes toward, is an intelligent misrecognition of the sentence. We miss thinking about sentences when we only approach them one way -- that is, correctly or clearly or corruptible; and if that’s too reductive, then we consider them too thinly. We need to applaud the elusiveness of the sentence. Also, the allusiveness of the sentence. William H. Gass suggests in The World Within the Word that “Stein regularly requests us to find other words within her words in exactly this way”; that is, allusively. I vote for encouraging and cultivating misrecognition in readers. How to unstring the sounds and restring them. How to mine and dig and retrieve. Then string, restring, sing sing sing. Even if the rest between the notes is noise. Image Credit: Flickr/Sharon Mollerus.