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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, December 04, 2006

Writing: Love and Hate



"As [Gore] Vidal heads towards what he calls, 'The door marked Exit', so too does the species he represents: the famous writer. Nowadays, writers simply aren't famous any more – or rather 'to speak of a famous writer is like speaking of a famous speedboat designer. The adjective is inappropriate to the noun.' The reasons for this are twofold, Vidal believes.

'The French auteur theory of the 1950s had a lot to do with it. People who might have written books started trying to make movies instead. I remember all these terrible hacks in Hollywood coming up and telling me, ''I'm an auteur, you know." And I would say, ''I always knew you were by the way you parted your hair."

'Also, the GI Bill of Rights after the War meant that milllions of people who had never been educated before went to university. The trouble was they liked it so much they decided to stay there and become academics. And if you want to meet someone who really hates literature, then just talk to an academic.'"


Do literature professors hate literature? People like Vidal, who think they do, think so for a number of reasons which have varying degrees of plausibility.

1.) Many literature professors theorize in ugly language about literature. The ugly language tells us that they are themselves incapable of recognizing beautiful language, which is what literature primarily is; and the theorizing suggests an incapacity to respond directly to literature, and a related compulsion to cover the delicate wash of art with mental smog.

2.) Literature professors are jealous. They wanted to be novelists and poets and dramatists themselves, but weren't good enough. They channeled their frustrated aesthetic impulses into lecturing and writing about aesthetic objects, but their undying resentment of the great writer means that their primary motive will be to destroy.

3.) Many literature professors secretly believe literature is an airy-fairy sort of thing that needs butching up, not only with scientific theory, but with a primary insistence on art's political utility. Hence, they are drawn to dull, didactic stuff, like Uncle Tom's Cabin.

4.) The influence of psychoanalysis remains pernicious. Professors think literature is mainly about making readers feel better about themselves -- empowered, liberated, whatever. The result is similar to #3 -- a decided preference for mediocre literature with a marvelous message just for you. None of the difficult, often unpleasant, often irresolvable, complexity of art; none of the dense linguistic challenges and delights of the greatest writers (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner).

*******************************************************





Not hating literature means, in large part, loving the particularity of a great writer's voice -- and this includes essayists, for the principles of great writing are pretty steady across fiction and non-fiction. Great writers share many of the same writerly tricks, but manage to use them with unique results.

For instance, this spectacular essay in last Sunday's New York Times magazine has all sorts of things in common with the sorts of essays George Orwell wrote, yet it finds its own powerful register.

The basic move of this essay, a move Orwell made again and again, is to seem at first to narrate an event with clinical distance, but in fact, gradually and rather horribly, to mark the writer's implication in the event and its meanings. James Agee did this all over his great long essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men -- described the poverty of Southern tenant farmers in an almost cold photographic way, only bit by bit to sense and own up to his own inner poverty. Gerard Manley Hopkins is after the same point in his poem "Spring and Fall," in which the poet watches a little girl grieve over fallen autumn leaves:

It is the blight man was born for.
It is Margaret you mourn for.


If you want a popular culture visual of what I have in mind here, think of the final scene of The Sixth Sense, when Bruce Willis, to his horror, realizes that he's dead too. That cornered look on his face.

Why are we so moved by this writerly move? I think we're fascinated generally by epiphany, by a moment of serious insight. More particularly, though, these epiphanic expressions represent non-insipid ways to convey our shared humanity; they actually narrate the way the truth of your embodied being can creep up on you.




Procuring organs was part of the job description during my transplant-surgery fellowship, and the operation was like any other. [Note the matter of fact tone here, and the way the writer just gets into it. No handshake, no introduction. Instant narration. You are there, and the operation at hand is a routine one.] There were patients who required more care, others who seemed made for a surgeon’s hands. And though brain-dead, they all seemed remarkably alive. They bled bright red, and their chests rose and fell regularly, albeit with the aid of medications and life-support machines. [Dead, bled, red -- she's a poet and don't she know it. Wonderful weird morbid shit on offer. Admit that you love it.]

We often worked in the middle of the night, keeping the body functioning for as long as possible. The less time we exposed the organs to the stillness of death [A little poetry there, stillness of death. She's going to do something Don DeLillo, one of UD's favorite novelists, does -- mix Romantic and scientific, archaic and jet-age writing. It's difficult to do this well, though.], the greater the chances of success in waiting recipients. But every operation ended the same way. [Again, she's lulling us with the routine nature of this operation. Of course we know something's going to break the routine. We're playing along.] The senior surgeon cross-clamped the aorta, the anesthesiologist disconnected the medications and breathing tube and I snipped across the vena cava, letting blood drain into tubing connected to clear wastebasket-size canisters on the floor. [Great writers know where the great images are. She'll return to those wastebasket-size canisters collecting blood -- because they're so damn good.]

I always emerged from those operating rooms feeling more alive than when I had entered. I became energized by the act of operating, the hope of transplantation. [An important bit of information about the writer -- her routine feeling, given that she's doing something life-saving in these procedures, is to feel enlivened. But we suspect that as the narrative heats up, things, again, will become non-routine.]

That was until my 83rd procurement. [Nice use of pointless arbitrary number. As if to say it could have happened anytime.] She was a 35-year-old Asian-American woman, like me. She was driving on a Southern California road when a drunken driver collided into her car. [Please note the emotionlessness of tone. Not indifference --just calmness. The material here is incendiary all on its own. For her to write, "I was horrified to hear of a poor woman who..." would be to turn this into the Oprah show. All the reality would bleed out.] Three days later, brain-dead, on my operating table, she looked merely asleep. Her warm skin was taut, with few blemishes, and her full hips and thighs suggested a metabolism beginning to slow. Her toenails were painted pink. [So much good stuff here. Ends with the trivial detail of the pink toenails -- but they tell us that she was a fun person, well-groomed, maybe a little silly. The trivial detail packs a wallop when it's the right detail. And again notice the weird mix of science and poetry: "metabolism," a doctor's word, alongside "full hips and thighs" -- almost the language of the pornographer... which is fine, since there's something undeniably pornographic about what this surgeon is doing.]

Hasan, the senior surgeon that night, began working on her abdomen. I was to open her chest.

As I placed the pencil-like electrocautery instrument at the top of her breastbone, the surgical drape covering her right breast fell away. I pulled it up again but noticed the undulations of each rib and the gentle fall of breast tissue to her side. [See how the oscillation between soft humane writing and hard clinical writing begins to hint at the writer's own inner division? The very style of the writing tells us -- the writer doesn't have to do so directly -- that the humanity of the woman on the table is insinuating itself into the surgeon in a way she has not experienced before.] Her nipple and areola peeked through; they had a coloring and shape that I had seen on only one other person: myself. [Bang. Nice, the way she nails it with a full stop. : myself.] In fact, the very shape of her breast, the thinness of her chest and the texture of her skin reminded me of my own upper body. It was as if I were standing naked after a shower, looking in a mirror.

I stopped for a moment, unable to put my instrument back to her chest, and my nose suddenly filled with the smell of flesh burned by Hasan’s cauterizing pen. It was a familiar odor — surgeons use electrocautery in almost every operation — but this time, it found its way into the pit of my stomach. I stepped back, tasting the smell in my mouth, and looked away to try to breathe in anything but what was wafting up into the air.

“Are you sleepy?” Hasan asked gently. The clock read 3 a.m.

“I’m all right,” I replied, trying to recover.

“Come here and feel her liver.” He took my hand and plunged it into the woman’s upper abdomen. “It’s perfect.” [Typical doctor, Hasan. It's all about the excellence of the organs for him, not the disturbing continued vibrancy of this not quite dead woman. Nothing wrong with that. But our narrator is someplace else altogether.]

The abdominal incision closed around my forearm. Her liver — soft, smooth, well formed — was perfect, but my fingers felt lost in the warm sponginess of organs. Loops of bowel slid by, and her pulsating aorta persistently nudged my palm. [We love this stuff -- the down and dirty inside, er, scoop. That's another mark of great writing -- we learn words we never knew, inhabit worlds we never knew. And notice what's arguably the best bit of prose in the whole piece: "her pulsating aorta persistently nudged my palm." Glorious. Not merely because of that poetic alliteration -- pulsating...persistingly...palm -- but because we're onto quite an objective correlative here. The heart of this woman insistently beats against the surgeon's hand with the reiterated message of the surgeon's own mortality....]

Hasan asked me to hold her abdominal incision open. I tried to pull the edges apart, but her abdominal wall had a vibrant elasticity that resisted. [The not quite dead woman resists, asserts her life and her bodily integrity against the killing instruments of the surgeons.] I looked closer at the cut edge and noticed that her dermis, the layer between the fat and the outer skin, was particularly thick. It was white, pearly.

I remembered that as an intern I let medical students practice placing intravenous catheters in my arms. They always noted how difficult it was to drive those needles through. “Thick skin,” I’d say, trying to make a joke about internship. But then I would add, “My dermis is probably pretty thick.”

Looking at her dermis now, I felt as if I were looking at my own. [Only now, as we finish the essay, does the writer become fully explicit.] As we snipped away at the organ attachments, about to take her liver, pancreas and kidneys, I tried to ignore the aliveness of her body, to believe that she was only a cadaveric reflection of myself. ["Cadaveric" -- that's what we go to great writing for. Words like that.] But then, in my sleep-deprived state, I found I could not bear to think of her — of myself — as dead.

The drape across her chest continued to slip, and I would have to see her breast yet again. Her thick dermis kept resisting our attempts to keep her belly open, making it difficult to take my eyes off that strong layer below the skin. And in the end, as I watched her blood fill those canisters on the floor, I felt as if my own life force were draining away.

When we finally closed her stone-cold body, the warm blood replaced by preservation solution, my mind felt as emptied as she was. The muscles in my palms ached, and my legs were numb. I was profoundly exhausted, from sleep deprivation, overwork and an unbearable grief. [Bang. Hits hard. Because no emotion has been forthcoming until now. And now, only now, at the very last word, she lets it rip. Grief.]


Composing great writing is like composing great music. Calm, suspense, calm shattered -- you have to pace it.