Writing On Trial--The Essay

from Issue 14; Spring 1991; The Essay; Editors: Jack Beaudoin and Margaret Himley

James Thomas Zebroski [skip to the REFLECTION]

As my first year had wore on, I wrote more and more, with greater and greater difficulty. It was really frustrating to put so much time and energy into this stupid activity and like the results less and less. By the end of the first year, I was writing many twenty-page papers in a variety of courses and disciplines including English, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and geography. I pushed hard to write well. By school standards, I suppose I was somewhat successful. I got an A- on a fifty page monster paper I wrote at the end of spring term. But in another sense, that huge fifty page (not counting references) paper was a complete failure.

Writing, when all is going well, leads to more writing. Good writing generates surprising words and sentences and ideas, that invite us to write more, to explore more in writing. Successful writing is that writing which creates a desire in us for more.

But that paper... I can still remember the topic with dread: it was on the fiscal crisis of state and the inequalities created in the schools by the extraction, appropriation, ebb and flow of unregulated capital in and out of local school districts. So it was not an easy topic. Very theoretical, but also involving a lot of research. I gathered a huge amount of information, webbed it out on a single sheet of paper covering my entire dining room table, then outlined it and wrote it up. That paper was the end of my academic writing for more than a year. It hurt for me to write academic discourse after I finished that paper. Because I couldn't write more than a few sentences at a time, I decided for more than a year to take only courses that had no required writing. This then was the end of my schoolwriting for a long time. Writer's block at its worst. And the irony was that my area of specialization was composition! Here I was trying to get a Ph.D. in composition to teach freshmen to write and I couldn't even put words on paper myself. Writer heal thyself!

So the moral to this story?

In September of 1979, while Hurricane David was wreaking havoc on Florida and I was getting more and more depressed about school starting and about eventually having to do schoolwriting, I was writing journal entries. I didn't write regularly, every day. Sometimes I didn't even write once a week. I usually wrote very short entries. I never wrote about school or intellectual topics. Instead I wrote about the most mundane stuff. I wrote about things that were going on in my life, everything from the girls I was dating to changes in the seasons and the weather. Hurricane David survives in this essay because he was tracked in the writing in my journals as he slammed into Columbus that early autumn and howled and blew and dumped a pile of rain there. As writing flickered and went out in my school-life, it continued to burn bright in the rest of my life. My journals, begun back in August of 1969 and persisting through this dark September of 1979, continue to this day. True, I might go weeks, even months without scratching a page, but later I would always come back, the prodigal son.

Writing does not equal schoolwriting.

* * *

Here is an entry from my journal from immediately before Hurricane David. The writing is recorded here as it was. It's not pretty writing; but it is writing out of my life.

I kiss my mother goodbye and tell her not to give up EVER because I am not going to and I'll be back. Shake my father's hand and talk briefly with him before leaving-- he's a bit more realistic and has a firmer grasp of the situation and what's really going on and how desperate it is. Leave my parents and brother and sisters at the old farmhouse in Poland we had returned to and set out thinking can you imagine Hitler in the age of nuclear bombs? An electric truck right outside on the road. It's dark out. Perhaps fifth column Germans? Lights flashing. Cars going down the road-- away from the advancing Germans ? Why do they always pick on Poland? Why must we go through this again and again? How many times can we become the "perfect holocaust"? If I take the railroad tracks, it's less likely I'll be seen and caught though my chances still are not good. How far is it likely I'll get in this storm? In the rain? Not knowing the land? Without food, shelter?

The entry breaks off here. Now what in the world are we to make of this little piece? What can this "try" at writing possibly say to me (or anyone else, for that matter) over twelve years later? Perhaps it's a typical dream entry in my journal, though I don't record that many dreams. I wrote this immediately upon waking when I was still half asleep, a habit I still try to encourage. The best writing happens early in the day, before the mind gets frittered away by stupid detail, at least for me.

I guess the one thing that people might say about this little "writing attempt" that would really bother me a lot is to call it simply a piece of "personal" or "expressive" writing. This journal example is a hell of a lot more than this academic attempt to dismiss it as touchy-feely, "subjective" (versus "objective") writing. True, I was writing out of MY life, but my life wasn't and isn't lived in isolation from others. It isn't separable from the so-called "objective" circumstances of that time and place and this time and place.

Well this sure isn't schoolwriting either. I feel strange even sharing it. What it is is writing that tracks my life, writing that made and continues to make meaning of who I am and what my crazy world is like. This is a sort of survival writing, or better, it is writing for life. It is writing that reflects the world but that also reflects on the world.

Strangely enough, this kind of writing was extremely common a hundred years ago in the US. Farmers and workers who were not schooled or considered educated, often wrote for dozens of reasons totally unrelated to school (or the job). Marilyn Ferris Motz in her article "Folk Expression of Time and Place: 19th- Century Midwestern Rural Diaries" gives many interesting examples of writing done between 1830 and 1900 in Michigan and Ohio by common people for their own purposes. [1] Then, people in this context, it turns out, wrote for the same reasons they made quilts or sang ballads or told the old stories. Because it was fun. Because it was pretty or was about pretty things. Because it made a better community. Because it helped them to make sense of their lives.

But, you whisper, he's getting off the track. What about that Germans-invading-Poland journal entry? Well it hit me a few minutes after I wrote the piece and was in the middle of my shower. I can remember the event as if it were this morning. I had been very close for nine years to college friends who were still in town. But at the same time I was frustrated and intimidated by my first year in the Ph.D. program, I realized I was losing my close friends. They were all doctors or lawyers, making money, raising families, less and less interested in ideas and talk. But I hadn't yet really made any friends in graduate school. (Remember all those "smooth talkers"?) I felt alone and friendless and frightened. In fact, worse. I felt my close and dear friends were betraying me, abandoning me at the very time I needed them. It hit me in the shower-- their names were all German- American. I am Polish-American. This dream and entry seemed as much about my friends (Germany) at "war" with me (Poland) when I was in a "new" country, forging a new identity in graduate school, as about World War III. It was a kind of world at war in my world and my soul.

* * *

Too often we forget that the word "ESSAY" which we bandy about to mean a finished, perfected, almost gem-like polished piece, originally meant a test, a try, an attempt, at writing. The essay seems to have originated with Montaigne a kind of adult, French Bart Simpson, who seemed to hate the schools and schoolmasters of that time (1533- 1592), but who wrote for his own purposes, in his own way. Montaigne wrote very untraditional little sets of explorations, of tentative wonderings, about himself and his world. We would do well to recover that earlier sense. Writing is a sort of dialogue with one's world, open, unfinished, not always pretty, ongoing. Writing is in this sense a bit like our talk with friends. We don't know exactly what will happen next in talking with a friend. That's the fun of it. Sometimes its a horrendous flop. We wonder why we even bothered. We keep at it, keep trying. Through good times and bad. Writing is the same sort of dialogue, the same sort of try.

Joan Didion is probably my favorite writer. She says a writer is " a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper." [2] Notice what she doesn't say. She does not say writers are born or writers are the ones who put together the good stuff and get in "literature" books; she doesn't say writers are the ones who can sell their writing for money. She doesn't even mention that writers are the people in school who put together papers. Rather, she opens the community of writers to anyone who would become absorbed and passionate about writing words. I like that. That's very democratic. The door to writing is open to anyone who wants to come in. If you have ever felt passionate about something or someone and have sat down and poured it onto the paper, no matter the form, and felt a great release afterwards, that is the beginning of this attempt to be and to become a writer. So writing instead of being the stodgy stuff, the academic act of some wimp, becomes a dialogue with the world.

And so the frightened graduate student who faced the trial of September of 1979, who could barely say a word in his behalf, who could hardly put one word down after another, is writing this essay, this try, this attempt, to you.

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NOTES

1 Motz, Marilyn Ferris. "Folk Expression of Time and Place: 19th-Century Midwestern Rural Diaries." JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE. 100 (1987): 131- 147.

2 Didion, Joan. "Why I Write." JOAN DIDION: ESSAYS AND CONVERSATIONS. Ed. Ellen Friedman. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1984. (5-10)

It is interesting to consider the larger context of this quote. Didion was giving the Regents' Lecture at her alma mater, University of California at Berkeley, speaking, one presumes, to an audience composed at least in part of students who, as Didion, had done their share of schoolwriting.

Didion notes that "During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract. In short, I tried to think. I failed." (5) Didion goes on to assert "I knew I couldn't think. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a 'good writer' or a 'bad' writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on a piece of paper." (6)

I am asserting here that the sort of "thinking" Didion in this essay says she never could do, even though she could and did, obviously, write and write pretty damned well, the sort of "thinking" that Didion describes as involving abstraction and the intangible, removed from the physicality of everyday life and from the writer's experience, is SCHOOLTHINK and a cousin of schoolwriting and what others in our field (Bizzell, Bartholomae et al.) have called (shudder) "academic discourse." It is the very equation of "thinking" with "schoolthink" that sets us up for the dangerous identification of "writing" with "schoolwriting" that this try is railing against. I wonder how many of our students, how many of us, (secretly) feel with Didion that we are somehow traveling on forged papers, that we really do not "think" not like the intellects of our fields.

On the issue of of "expressive" discourse versus "academic discourse" a debate whose very terms make me nervous, compare Didion with Steve North in "Personal Writing, Professional Ethos, and the Voice of 'Common Sense' " and David Bartholomae "A Reply to Stephen North" both in a recent PRE/TEXT 11.1-2 (1990) 105- 119 and 121-130, respectively.

Finally, (yes, I am well aware that this note is trying the patience of even my kindest readers) try Pat Belanoff "The Generalized Other and Me: Working Women's Language and the Academy" in the same issue of PRE/TEXT (60-73). She is raising similar questions and attempting to deal with them both in terms of content and in terms of style. My reaction to Belanoff's essay is the same (to bring it around) as Joan Didion's daughter's reaction to Georgia O'Keefe-- " 'Who drew it,' she whispered after a while. I told her. 'I need to talk with her,' she said finally." (126) (Didion, Joan. "Georgia O'Keefe." THE WHITE ALBUM. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979.)

The Unsaid, The Unsayable, and the "Inappropriate": An Un-Reflection

Syracuse University is the most class biased institution of all the universities I have taught at since 1978. This is not to say that the other institutions, two state schools and one private, were any less constructed by social class or produced students who occupied positions that were marked any less by social class. But people at these places were fairly aware of the class nature of academe, of academic work, and academic discourse and were not averse to talking about it and about its possible connection to students and curriculum. At Syracuse, on the other hand, talk of class and class conflict, for all the worries of the conservatives on campus about political correctness, is taboo. It is as if there is no social class here or that we are all of (or should be part of) the same social class--both propositions, absurd. Syracuse University, far more the US society as a whole, which is itself uncomfortable with class, is largely constructed by questions of social class, but all of this remains for the most part unsaid and unsayable. It is the last thing in the world that people here want to talk about, let alone acknowledge. I have learned the hard way over the last decade that to bring up social class at Syracuse University is to be labeled "inappropriate." To come out as gay on this campus, hardly an easy thing, is far easier and far more acceptable than to come out as an academic from the working class.

Margaret Himley is the other great unsaid around here. No other person had a more important influence on the development of this curriculum. Yet Professor Himley's contribution has hardly been mentioned. The issues of Reflections (all but one or two, at least) and all the essays and articles therein can trace their way back to the teacher curriculum groups that put together the theory and practice of the curriculum, and these issues of Reflections, those teacher curriculum groups, were all guided by Professor Himley. Take, for example, my essay "Writing on Trial--The Essay" which appeared in a relatively late issue of Reflections devoted to an reexamination of "the essay" and to its possible uses in the studios, especially in WRT 305. At the time. there was a reading group of teachers who read essay theory of the sort that Professor Himley describes in the introduction to the issue. These teachers were trying out different forms of essays as assignments and students were crafting essays after reading and discussing essay theory. In the fall of 1991, I was on research leave, writing what would later become Thinking Through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing (1994) and took time from that task to respond to Professor Himley's request to write a short piece on any aspect whatsoever of the essay and the studios. Margaret was an excellent group leader and editor and perfected the art of civil, polite, productive nagging, an absolute necessity if anything is, to get writing and publication accomplished in otherwise very busy lives. All the really great editors--and teachers--have perfected this practice. I knew that Margaret would be on my case if I didn't get something together, and as it turned out, I was at the time immersed in thinking that lent itself to the topic of the Reflections and to the discussions going on at that moment among teachers regarding the future direction of the undergraduate writing curriculum.

As I show in "Writing (the) Studios: Composition Curriculum Development at Syracuse, 1986-1991," that great "lost" epic (it was twenty five pages single-spaced!) of the disastrous self study project (has anyone in these "celebrations" brought up that event and text to cogitate over?) from about 1986 to about 1990 or so, the studios brought together what came later to be called "expressive discourse" and "academic discourse." As it has turned out, these are terribly unfortunate terms that simply became binaries that opposing camps bash each other over the head with--intellectually speaking of course. One reason I was excited to come to SU in 1987 was that the writing studios then tried to transform these sorts of dry dichotomies through third categories like "reflective writing."

Studio I, for example, was NEVER supposed to be the expressivist course and Studio II the academic discourse course. Rather, reflective writing was to supplant these untenable dualisms, as John Dewey once termed similar categories, as was contrastive rhetoric in WRT 205. The line is not from expressive discourse to academic discourse (or argument), but rather from reflective practices to contrastive rhetoric of the sort Robert Kaplan had pioneered at U.S.C. in the 1970s. By the time of this essay, curricular drift had already set in and the camps were reforming as expressivist versus academic discourse, with the essay as part of the latter. My essay was a response calculated to try to counter the drift toward overrationalization and overemphasis on academic discourse (and High Theory) by doing academic discourse (argument, theory, privileging reason and shared norms) with so-called expressive materials--i.e. dreamwork recorded in a journal I wrote in 1978--all in a reflective way.

Obviously with little effect.

Why?

Because at Syracuse University discussion of social class is taboo.

What???

Let me back up a bit.

Erich Auerbach in an essay titled "Figura," perhaps the most erudite thing I have ever read apart from his tome Mimesis, notes that for the second and third century "Christian" reader, recent events in history textualized in the New Testament were no less real than earlier ones, recorded in the Old Testament, but that the earlier "prefigured" or were "figures of" the later fulfillments. One of the major points stressed again and again by Tertullian, for example, is that one should not allegorize the earlier events and texts, and privilege the later, but take them both as real, concrete, and material, but also as related as and by figures. It is almost as if there are two temporalities which intersect in a third temporality called "figura." Figura is a gate leading from one event to another event.

Every Marxist and every phenomenological critic of Marxist theory ought to read Auerbach's essay because the same relation holds between the social and the individual, between the public and the private, and between academic discourse and expressive discourse, so called. These are not opposites or binaries, but rather mutually construct each other through a third, a figure. One cannot reduce the one to the other. So why then has it never been a good thing at the SUWP to identify with expressivism? Why was this constructed as such a heretical thing to do--and it was--from the very first? Because this curriculum was from its inception a phenomenological curriculum and expressivism was seen as relativism gone wild, the deepest nightmare of an over rationalist philosophy that takes subjectivity as its subject. It is a threat from the inside, the worst kind.

I would go one step further, though, and argue that another reason exists for this local bifurcation of the world into academic discourse and expressivism, writing across the curriculum versus freshman writing, writing in the disciplines and the professions versus writing as general education or as basic skills, ad nauseum.

The acknowledgment of feeling and emotion logically calls for the investigation of the composition of identity which itself throws into relief issues of affiliation--that is, social and cultural differences and alliances, which are themselves hierarchized. Emotion and identity are social as much as they are individual. In an environment in which social class must always be suppressed, issues of emotion and identity lead in fairly quick order to the question of what is "appropriate" which leads to questioning of the reigning emotional stance and the sort of identity that is acceptable on campus. In other words, under the rubric of maintaining "appropriate" behavior--and discourse--it is the hegemony of the ruling class that is maintained. The ruling class, of course, in this process doesn't have to give up its emotional life or its identity, as it is tarring as inappropriate or unnatural discourse the emotional behaviors and the identity construction of others, ruling them out of bounds, asserting that these "others" are not playing the game by the rules of academic discourse, so-called. Hence the demonizing of the romantic, the expressivist. Academic discourse in this specific historical context is a figure of the ruling class; expressive discourse becomes the figure of the working class. All of this is suppressed, of course, as we merely discourse on the philosophical merits of teaching or not teaching one or the other. But expressive discourse is both a language function and a figure of the unspeakable danger. If students actually start putting the social and individual, the public and private, the thought and the felt, the ideal and the experienced, together in their writing, then we all will have to begin to deal with the underlying themes. The research of my current Writing 305 students indicates that social class is the most suppressed and the most dangerous theme since it raises questions which are directly related to the financial viability of this institution, like who pays for their entire tuition and whodoes not and why. My students are extremely interested in such questions and have developed not a few answers, many of them inaccurate. But as long as we can separate their daily experience from the arguments they compose in their writing studios and other courses, we will never have to deal, except in the most abstract, distanced, rarefied, and "safe" way, with the huge inequities among classes of people on this campus and in this country.--JZ, 1997