What is Writing?

Thank you all for attending this forum. My name is Ben Pfeiffer, and it falls to me now to phrase the rhetorical question we will be answering, or maybe dodging, during this discussion: What is writing? The question at first seems simple, then rapidly becomes complex. Maybe this complexity is one reason for the pressing need to classify, label, and otherwise stunt dialogue. We fear that writing would remain unconquerable without the walls we have built, the theories we hold up as gospel, and the gods and idols we worship. Yet to truly understand the act we love, we must tear down the façade. To paraphrase John Gardner, Let total war be declared between those age-old enemies, the Real and the Fake.

This panel is concerned with a hypothesis: Writing is an Art. My personal concern is that, in teaching writing, we too often teach the logic of argument and not the craft of writing, which contains the soul of the discipline. We created a specialty called Composition and filled it with Compositionists as opposed to Writers, effectively distancing ourselves from an ancient tradition including Homer and Hemingway. We did it for respect and funding at the university level. We did it because we're lazy. Also we did it as a defense mechanism, an excuse that we don't play our game on the same field as Cormac McCarthy and Chrétien de Troyes.

I am not suggesting that Art and Science are at odds. Quite the opposite. I am suggesting that writing professors teach--through accident and convenience--reprobic (or false) writing. What is false writing? In my mind, this reprobic writing is related to Richard A. Lanham's "Official Style," which he denounces so forcefully in Revising Prose. Worse than just weak verbs, convoluted thinking, and strings of prepositional phrases, reprobic writing is utterly, and contemptuously, worthless. It may even harm a student's ability to use more powerful intelligences.

In On Moral Art, John Gardner writes that criticism, at its best, is similar to art, and that the successful critic "makes up stories about stories." However, he worries that criticism had become filled with nonsense words like hermeneutic, heuristic, structuralism, formalism, and so on (not unlike how discussions of "composition" have become dominated by distinctions between Reader- and Writer-based prose, Cognitivists, Expressivists, Social Constructivists, etc.). He argues--"by reason and by banging the table"--for an old-fashioned view of art that condemns the hollow, the tinny, and the academic. Why should we be concerned with Gardner? He describes, on page 8, the kind of writing compositionists often teach, although I have modified the passage, substituting "reprobic writing" for "criticism":

Depending as it does on logic and scheme, on arguments well argued, [reprobic writing] uses parts of the mind more readily available to us than are the faculties required for art. And since the tests of [reprobic writing] are completeness and coherence, whereas art's validity can only be tested by an imaginative act on the reader's part, [reprobic writing] is easier to read [and to grade]; that is, it does not require the involvement of as many faculties of the mind.

In his introduction to What is Art?, translator W. Gareth Jones admits that Lev Tolstoy's iconoclastic attack on aestheticism inflicted minimal damage beyond the Iron Curtain. The book--published for the first time as an uncensored volume in 1898--was dismissed by critics and admirers as the senile ranting of a 70 year-old literary giant. The text is self-contradictory, as well: Tolstoy uses the tools he condemns, the "craft" of writing, to make his case for True Art. If the text has one great failing, this is it: Tolstoy's inability to recognize the subtle and enormous differences between Shamans and Charlatans. Again, real and fake. The important difference between Shamans and Charlatans is this: Both know how to manipulate the craft beneath Art to convince people of their message; Charlatans do it for selfish reasons; Shamans do it for the greater good. If rhetoric is the counterpart of cookery, then both shamans and charlatans know how to cook. The difference, as Gary Zukav once told me, is intention. Magicians use sleight of hand to make us believe in magic; pickpockets use the same techniques to steal our wallets. Think also of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Rev. Ted Haggard. I believe that, in his intention, Lev Tolstoy was a shaman.

Yet Tolstoy also subverted concepts that we struggle with today. First he preached the importance of art's "infection," a feature of both J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Malcolm Gladwell wrote extensively about the mechanics of infection (as it refers to culture) in his book The Tipping Point. Second Tolstoy preaches the importance of "awareness" and "love," although he dresses his conversation in the religious robes and cloaks of his time. Third, and most importantly, Tolstoy recognizes and celebrates the relationship between science and art.

The transmission by some people to others of what people know by proof and reasoning; the arts transmit this by awakening in the other emotions which the transmitter experiences. Both are essential for humanity because if there were no sciences or arts people would live like animals, in no way differing from them.

It may be argued convincingly that defining Writing as Art is also a political move. I do not deny it. As a writer myself, I have a personal stake in how writing is perceived at the university, in the community, and around the world. What matters most is that students learn to write. English Departments seem to me to be broken mirrors in need of repair and even unity. Technical, creative, composition, and literature classes should celebrate their similarities instead of picking apart their petty differences. Bickering ultimately harms the students. Rather than denounce my stake as political posturing, I would urge you first to listen with an open mind as we argue--by banging the table and, as Douglas Adams once suggested, with enough controversy to provoke an outburst of chair-throwing at the end--for the ancient view of Writing as Art; and for Art as a way of seeing.