Language Study #6: enjoy writing

Ideally, students learn to enjoy the satisfactions of composing and comprehending.

Satisfaction takes time; digestion proceeds across minutes, hours or days.  For students to experience satisfaction in composing or comprehending, they need time to feel it.  Recognition of accomplishment plays an equally important role in this process.  Teachers promote this satisfaction by giving students time to compose, alongside the burgeoning ability to recognize accomplishment.  These are quiet joys, internal joys amid today's spectacularly visual and electronic culture.  [Ed. note, I wrote the first pieces of this series eight years ago, but have chosen to keep their original wording.]  In terms of composition, students can feel satisfaction, for example, at overcoming an obstacle.  How will they begin a letter, essay or poem?  How will they find a word or sentence that says what they want, that, according to Tolstoi, infects the audience with the writer's feeling?  In terms of comprehension, students can feel satisfaction, for example, when detecting a pattern.  While reading The Age of Innocence recently, I was made impatient by the narrator.  I began to think Wharton was cheating me with her omniscient narrator.  From the beginning, again influenced by Tolstoi's What is Art?, I asked which character Wharton cares about.  She sides with no one, except perhaps Countess Oleska.  Her criticism runs so close to anger that she exploits the narrator.  She uses it as her own personal tool.  As a result, moments of Archer's thoughts in the narration ring less true.  I enjoy comprehending the story to this degree, and wish similar enjoyment for students.

Literature and History in Stegner's ANGLE OF REPOSE

As noted in the post about ancient Celtic Culture (01 July 2010), I will be exploring the relationships between literature and history.  Since I began teaching Humanities six years ago at a brand new high school (The BAY School of San Francisco), I have been challenged and intrigued by these relationships.  Hired as a Humanities teacher with primary experience in literature, I have had to identify, for myself and colleagues, the core benefits of studying imaginative literature.  What distinct gifts come from this study?  What do poetry, drama and fiction bring to the table--for example, when studying modern China, ancient India, Renaissance England or the contemporary Americas?  These posts help me articulate what I am coming to see as the enduring values of the literary experience.

As also noted in the recent Celtic post, sometimes literature and history overlap--as with the master-poets who served as historians.  Even with the overlap, the differences seem worth exploring.  I have enjoyed what my new teaching assignment has shown me, and the challenge has sharpened and deepened my appreciation for the primary values of imaginative literature.

With these comments as preface, I offer an excerpt from Wallace Stegner's novel, Angle of Repose, for which he won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize.  If you have read the novel, you know that Lyman, the narrator, imagines the life of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward.  At the same time that he is working on this writing project about the past, he has present-day encounters with his son, Rodman, who helps care for his wheelchair-bound father.  In the father-son discussion about Lyman's work, some of Lyman's distinctions emerge.  For example, where one finds primary meaning figures in his definitions.

Here is the brief exchange, which occurs about half way through the novel.  Throughout the novel,  Lyman fights what he sees as Rodman's history-deprived need for "zing."  (As in earlier posts, I have used bold font to emphasize certain ideas.)

      "I'm not going to put any of that [information about Lyman's grandfather's Deadwood days] in," I say.
     "You're not?  Why not?  You know all about it.  You're writing a book about Western history.  Why leave out the colorful stuff?"
     "I'm not writing a book of Western history," I tell him.  "I've written enough history books to know this isn't one.  I'm writing about something else.  A marriage, I guess.  Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage.  Why waste time on it?
     Rodman is surprised.  So am I, actually--I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right.  What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in.  What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.  That's where the interest is.  That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

Stegner, Wallace.  Angle of Repose.  Doubleday, 1971. Penguin, 1992. 211.
    

Literature and History in ancient Celtic culture

Woven into the fabric of the following passage from Alwyn and Brinley Rees's book, Celtic Heritage, is an idea I first explored in an earlier post (Literature and History, 26 March 2010) and will likely keep addressing in order to assay the validity and value of this distinction:  what literature does best and most distinctly among the written genres is evoke for us another world in which we can empathize with the people who inhabit it. Literature brings that world alive for us, re-creates it in us, and through that experience we enlarge our selves and enable connections between those selves and others.  Whereas history helps explain these other worlds, literature finds artistic ways to embody or enact them.

In the following passage, note the part in bold.  Ancient Celtic story-telling masters carried audiences with them into the world they were re-creating, re-inhabiting.  As an aside, I cannot help but also notice the legal status enjoyed by these master-poets.  In the West we no longer have kings as did the ancient Celts, but wouldn't it be nice, and smart, to elevate master-poets in a modern fashion.  We have made a mild start with poets at Presidential inauguration ceremonies and the naming of national Poets Laureate.  Thank you, Kay Ryan, and congratulations, W.S. Merwin.  
For a brief commentary on Merwin's path, see Drew Brachter's "Capital Comment Blog" (01 July 2010).  For fuller treatment, see the always-rich Poetry Foundation site (William Stanley Merwin).

There is evidence from the Celtic countries and from India that the poets were also the official historians and the royal genealogists.  The poet's praises confirmed and sustained the king in his kingship, while his satire could blast both the king and his kingdom.  There was a tradition that the learned poets (filid) of Ireland were once judges.  They were certainly the experts on the prerogatives and duties of the kings, and a master-poet (ollam) was himself equal to a king before the law.  Such priestly functions as divination and prophecy also came within the province of these early Irish poets who, it may be added, wore cloaks of bird-feathers as do the shamans of Siberia when, through ritual and trance, they conduct their audiences on journeys to another world.  It was the initiates with this power and authority who had the custody of the original tales, and they recited them on auspicious occasions, even as the priests of other religions recite the scriptures.

Rees, Alwyn and Brinley.  Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales.  New York: Thames and Hudson, 1961. reprinted 1991. 17.