Life Among the Obliterati, #9

The Ragged Edge

I’m teaching a course at Grub Street Inc., a writing center here in Boston, called "Popular Fiction: Writing The Page-Turner." Despite the title, I have a few students with more literary inclinations. One is so literary in fact, that he won’t write anything. I had instructed them that they could only bring in completed work – material with a beginning, middle, and end (though not necessarily in that order). I simply didn’t want to spend class time brainstorming a climax for some half-formed short story, or someone to hand in everything they’d written of a novel so far. You know, three-and-a-half chapters. Our friend, let’s call him James Joyce, took "completed" to mean "finished", and is thus paralyzed. Nothing is ever ever finished until every phoneme is perfectly aligned in a matrix of liguisto-thematic purity so quintessentially perfect that our mere brains can scarcely comprehend what we’re reading. Indeed, our minds register the material as blank pages, except for a few doodles.

I can’t say I ever understood this quest for perfection, which is self-evidently quixotic at any rate and of course just a neurotic response to the possibility of failure. Perfect stuff isn’t even likely all that much fun to read, even if it does exist. Good writers always leave us something to mull over, a flaw to mess with. Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?

Thou are more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date

"Temperate," eh? When was the last time you called your lover temperate? Oh, he’s great. Very temperate. More temperate than summer. You know, like spring, really? Which is less good than summer, except when it comes to temperance. So I really am contrasting him to a summer’s day, and comparing him to a spring one. Anyway, I love him. He rubs my feet after a long day of trodding the boards at the Globe and running from my many creditors.

In addition to making little sense, "temperate" is just a weak adjective. Almost by definition it suggests moderation rather than passion. Further, to read the poem correctly, you must pronounce the word "temp-er-ATE," which may well have been the pronunciation in Shakespeare’s day, but which falls a bit flat here in 2008. Perfection cannot be bound by time, after all. Poetic license is fine, but license works better when the first instance of that "B"-rhyme is pronounced normally, thus signaling the use of license in the fourth line. However, that would lead to the fourth line sounding like this when read aloud:

And Summer’s lease hath all too short a "debt"

This line, with that last word, would thus mean just enough to mean almost nothing. And this is Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language. James Joyce, of course, is second. (The real James Joyce, not the kid in my class.) So I explained this, and explained how imperfections are not only inevitable, but can be a tool. Think of the ellipses of Celine, or Kerouac’s tortured sentences, or even the purposeful confusion generated by leaving out dialogue tags for an extended period. All these things make the reading process more difficult, purposefully, to make a specific demand on the reader’s attention. Work that is too obviously and highly polished becomes soulless rather than elegant.

It was a pretty good speech I thought. (Not perfect, of course.)

Anyway, James Joyce dropped out of class right after that. It’s almost a demographical inevitability – a male student who is younger than I am and who just graduated from a prestigious school and course of study (e.g. Harvard Business, MIT engineering) and who comes in to my class will freak out at the in-class writing assignments, refuse to hand in stuff to the workshop, and will then vanish. There are some people who just cannot comprehend the possibility that the norms of their own field do not translate in an uncomplicated fashion to writing. And learning something new, even about good old perfect Shakespeare, well, that’s just too hard for an engineering genius or a business school prodigy or a hotshot associate attorney. My writing advice for people who really do worry about having perfectly polished work stands: be less temperate. Keep those ragged edges, and learn how to use them.

From Flytrap #9, June 2008.