Dartblog

David Gessner, assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina, has an essay in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, a long wandering thing which eventually tries to answer whether he and his colleagues in the world’s English departments are worth anything at all as writers.

Mr. Gessner writes:

Consider that our first great national literary flowering constituted, in part, a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing. It slightly complicates things that this flowering was greatly influenced by an Englishman, Wordsworth, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that in the 1850s Melville published “Moby-Dick” (1851); Thoreau, “Walden” (1854); and Whitman, “Leaves of Grass” (1855), while at the same time Emily Dickinson began to hit her private stride and Emerson was still lecturing. Thoreau claimed to have never wasted a walk on another, and it’s hard to imagine him taking a break from one of his marathon strolls to waste three hours teaching a graduate workshop. Equally difficult is picturing Melville asking a group of undergrads, “What’s at stake in this story?” or Dickinson clapping a colleague on the back after a faculty meeting.

Oh, but it is so true, that “what’s at stake” tripe. The first time I heard the phrase—the first time it was asked of me, as I recall about Blake, with whom very little was ever “at stake”—I apprehended at once its intended meaning, as well as its absurdity, its provenance from the abstruse, self-regarding world of professional English instruction. The very inanity of the question so disturbed and angered me—the undergraduate is generally close in spirit to the Saturday customer of the D.M.V., always wanting to know where in the hell all that money is going—that I refused to answer it, telling the professor that his question didn’t make any sense, would he please rephrase it in a way that asked either a direct question or a direct opinion, but did not permit the professor subsequently to blend his proffered opinion into taught fact.

His gorilla dust thus exposed for all to see and abhor, I left, my doffing and bow met with appreciative applause. This story has been only slightly altered.

But Mr. Gessner’s point is a very good one. There should not be anything wrong with “indoors-y” writing, but there is something very much wrong in modern academic writing, which tries so hard to be original that it becomes narrow. This is the sort of writing of which one might fairly ask “what is at stake here?” because what is at stake is so pitiably petty that it is not at all obvious to the reader. Mr. Gessner seems to conclude the article thinking that there is after all some great distinction between the life of the writer and the life of the teacher-who-writes; and the difference is that the latter has lost artistry’s requisite: monomania. But it is not clear why we are to see English professors as wanting for monomania.