Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "writing"

Forster’s Aspects of the Novel is being used in this country by most teachers of creative writing/fiction. While this is a book that has some interesting points, the biggest problem with it, or rather with using it in a class, is that its definition of a good work of fiction only applies to a certain kind of fiction: 19th century realist literature, in particular Anglo-Saxon literature. To define fiction in light of this very limited time and space, by using this one frame as some kind of universal frame, means to think that 19th century American/British literature is universal. It reveals that literature is not thought of as a concept that has changed over time. How can one write literature if one cannot even understand that the way we write is time-and-space specific—not in the sense that we have “different cultural values” (as the cliché would have it) according to the time and space we inhabit, but in the sense that the way we create always follows our understanding of time and space?

Forster’s interpretation of the tale of Scheherazade (in Aspects of the Novel) is the perfect example not only of Anglo-Saxon cause-effect logic but of a cultural appropriation of a tale conceived according to a different structure of thinking. Scheherazade avoided her fate, says Forster, because she has in her power the weapon of suspense; the king spares her life because he wants to find out what happened next. This is one way of looking at things. But one may actually say that the essence of the story of Scheherazade resides not in the “suspense” (i.e., the plot) but in a perpetually postponed climax. A story is here only the beginning to another story, which is itself a part in an endless chain of stories—a Borgesian labyrinthlike view rather than a linear structure underlying the logic of “next.” To think of this story in terms of “suspense” means to imagine a “resolution” of the “plot,” when in fact Scheherazade’s story is anti-climatic. Pleasure comes here from the constant postponement, not from the gradual movement toward an orgasmic ending, as in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. If Scheherazade’s story had been written by an Anglo-Saxon, it would have surely ended with a killing—either of Scheherazade or of the king. It is amazing that Forster can read the following sentence—which he considers the backbone of A Thousand and One Nights—as an example of his theory of suspense and of the universal power of “what’s next:” “At this moment [when the sun rose:] Scheherazade saw the morning appearing and, and discreet, was silent.” For me, this sentence is clearly built on the opposition between night and day; like in old creation myths—Orpheus and Eurydice, to name only one—the power of storytelling is directly linked here to darkness. The sentence tells us quite literally that the light of day kills the story. The power of telling comes from the mysterious dark of the night and not from rational daylight.

Many years ago, a neighbor who was in constant competition with my mother and tried to prove her that her son was smarter than me because he studied engineering while I merely “memorized” foreign languages, expressed an idea that seemed puzzling at the time, but which, as I realized later, represented the view of many people who don’t know other languages. For her, in order to learn another language one needed a good memory, but one didn’t need to “think;” one just looked up the word that is the exact equivalent of the word in the original language, memorized it, and when one had memorized all the words, one had learned another language.

In fact anyone who ever tried to study another language knows that words in the dictionary rarely are an exact equivalent of the word in the original, and behind each word in a given language there is a vision of the world that may not exist behind the word in the other language—in spite of the reassurance given by the dictionary that they are “the same thing.”

I often think of this neighbor when I meet people who don’t seem to realize that the concepts they have of certain things are merely reflections of the language they use, and that, if they thought in a different language, they would hold an entirely different view. To a great extent, our “beliefs” are the result of the language we use. Which brings me to the notions of “craft” and “writing,” two words that for many American writers seem to be synonymous.

The notion of “craft” doesn’t really exist as such in other languages. The idea of “craft” is expressed in many other languages in words derived from the Greek "techne," which has given, for example, "technique" and "technology" in English. The word “craft” implies a technique of the hands—as in “arts and crafts,” a concept expressed in Romance languages by a word derived from the Latin and meaning “folk art:” “artisanat” (Fr. and Rom.), “artigianato” (It.), “artesania” (Sp.). “Craft” also conveys the idea of labor, of a repeated gesture that eventually leads to a work whose perfection—or closeness to perfection—is the direct result of hard labor. A puritan idea, if I may say so.

Briefly, in its current usage, this word carries simultaneously the ideas of hard labor, manual work, repetition, but also, paradoxically, mechanical work. Through repetition, the work of the hand becomes somehow synonymous with the work of the machine, insofar as technology always harks back to the machine. It is not by accident that the definition of man by an Anglo-Saxon—Benjamin Franklin, more precisely—is that of “a tool-making animal,” while for Aristotle man is a political animal, and for French and German philosophers, man is an animal endowed with the gift of language.

That the essence of man is in one’s hands (literally and figuratively) is probably the main characteristic that defines, from the perspective of a non-American, an American. The word “craft” may be used by most American writers or would-be writers in the sense of “writing,” but behind this word an entire (American) view of the world is hidden: the belief in the possibility of continuous (self-) improvement and the idea that one is what one makes.

But what does it mean to make something? Because for us making has shifted from manual work to mechanical work, that is, from man’s hand to the machine, the idea of making is also related to that of producing something mechanically, according to a given pattern. In the same way that the idea of work has shifted from the industriousness of a unique hand to generic mass-scale production, the idea of craft has insidiously shifted from something unique to something generic, from the individual print to the industrial, mechanical pattern, and thus the marketable recipe. This is why for those who think that a writer is a “craftsman” there is no contradiction—as it should be, logically—in thinking that one’s craftsmanship comes from the practice of the individual hand, but also that this craftsmanship can be “improved” if one follows some general rules.

A writer is a craftsman. We hear this again and again. That may be so, but this is true only in English. In other words, this is not necessarily a universal view (though, to a certain extent, this idea is associated with the notion of “writing” in many other languages). But to see literary writing primarily as a “craft” means to value (American) ideas like making, production, hard labor, and to believe in the virtue of repetition (i.e., mechanics) and rules.