I’m probably one of the “pedants” Stephen Fry so articulately criticizes.
I’ll admit, my favorite error in high school and college, and one I still commit frequently, is the “split infinitive.” And part of me agrees that language ought to be played with and enjoyed. Or to playfully be enjoyed.
See what I did there?
But I also think there’s sort of a deconstructionist, nothing-really-has-meaning, there-are-no-rules flavor underlying his comments that is both seductive and untrue.
Yes, language does change according to convention. And perhaps there is no such thing as “correctness” as the grammar nazis conceive of it.
But what’s truly amazing is that all languages DO have a certain order, a certain logic and sense to them. You know, kind of like buildings do. Yes, we made them up, so we imposed order on blocks and stones and “worse than senseless things” — but the reason the Pyramids of Giza and Hadrian’s Wall are still standing is because these structures we made up also adhere to the mysterious logic of physics. I would argue the reason language holds up is very similar – because it adheres to a certain logic of the world, of reality.
And it’s the mark of a humble and educated person to try to learn and adhere to that logic. If you break the rules for the sake of creativity and newness, fine – but you should be aware that you are breaking them – as Picasso was aware, and Shakespeare, other great artists.
Otherwise, you’re just a little kid throwing paint or words at a wall, hoping it sticks.
Warning: the following thoughts are not completely coherent or organized.
A former student, now a freshman in college, contacted me the other day asking about whether or not she should use the present tense in the essay she’s writing for class.
I said yes, and gave her some examples.
And then I began to think about how strange it is that we say things like: “Emily Dickinson urges us to approach reality with care in her poem ‘Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant'” or “Homer challenges prevailing notions of war in The Iliad” or “Dostoevsky confronts the problem of evil like no other writer.”
Urges, challenges, confronts.
We say that these people do these things, now — even though we know they stopped doing things at all hundreds or sometimes thousands of years ago. The University of Richmond’s Writer’s Web and many other sources call this mysterious grammatical custom “The Literary Present”.
Why is that?
Why do we use the present tense in writing about literature — especially the literature created by the long-dead?
It’s a question that continually perplexes (and confuses) my high school students. Essay after essay, they slip into the past tense no matter how many times I tell them otherwise. For so many of them, practical and down-to-earth as they are, literary authors remain irrevocably entombed in the past – in the coffins of Romanticism and Realism and Colonialism et al. “Ilibagiza told her readers to forgive” and Shakespeare “used really complicated words” and that random poet “showed a sad tone.”
I think that for many of my students, Dickinson is always that weird lady in white from Massachusetts obsessed with death and dashes. Homer is a Greek or Roman guy (we can’t remember) who wrote about Brad Pitt – er – the Achille’s heel. And Dosto-who?
In some sense, aren’t they right? Why do we treat them like they are alive when they very clearly are not?
If you google “the literary present” you will find that lots of websites claim you should use the present tense when referring to art or literature, but not when you refer to historical events or scientific things.
These things are no less historical events than Colombus sailing the ocean blue in 1492 and Martin Luther beginning the Protestant Reformation in 1517. (Thank you, Dr. Hansen, for forever ingraining these dates in my memory.) And yet we talk about how Michaelangelo decides to create a youthful Mary and Dickens illustrates the abject material and moral poverty of his time.
So why is it that art – and, most particularly, literary art – earns a special place in the “eternal present” while the conquests of Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Ghengis Khan do not?
It’s not even as though art always lasts, as Shelley reminds us in his famous “Ozymandias”:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. (Shelley – full poem here)
I don’t think the ironic transiency of the poem itself was (is?) lost on Shelley, either.
And I’m not sure that survival alone earns literary works the honor of inhabiting the present tense, while the impressive Pyramids of Egypt, Great Wall of China, and continual influence of ancient Indo-European languages remain embedded in the past tense of history.
If you think I’ve got the answer… well, I don’t. That’s really why I’m writing about this. Why do you think we enforce this strange custom?
This is my experience. In college, I wrote about Flannery O’Connor like she was sitting right next to me (or, more probably, gazing skeptically over my shoulder). I read Augustine’s Confessions in high school and found myself constantly forgetting that he was some old saint from the 4th century. As I child I heard C. S. Lewis’ voice resonating in my ears: “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia” (The Silver Chair).
For me, these people were there.
Better yet, they are here.
They are speaking now, to me, in this moment, as I lie on my couch under my blankets and type at the bright Macbook screen. Just as they spoke to me years ago. Just as they spoke to their first readers. Just as they whispered to the type writer, the blank page, the fresh parchment, the scribe.
And somehow we know this and therefore require our students to speak of them in the eternal present tense.
I can’t help but wonder if all this may have something to do with God being “I am”?
Mali’s point about speaking with conviction is a very good one: “In case you haven’t realized, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about?” He’s being very meta, of course, by actually enacting the phenomena he is describing — using an interrogative tone when he is actually making declarative statements, interjecting with mindless phrases like “you know what I’m sayin’?” etc.
He is basically showing us the way the average teenager speaks all of the time, and the way many adults speak too much of the time.
I plan on showing this video to my kids next semester.
But I think his video raises other questions, like: What is the relationship between language and thought? How does the way we speak reveal the way we think?
Yet the funny thing about language is that it not only reflects our thinking — it also shapes it.
A lot of people think of language this way:
you think something —- THEN —- you say it
ie: language REFLECTS thought.
When really you should take into account this phenomenon:
you say something —- THEN —- you think it
ie: thought REFLECTS language.
That is, you have to be very careful what you say. Because you might start actually believing it.
People who go around searching for compliments by saying things like, “Oh I look so horrible today!” or “I don’t think I’m going to do well on that test!” — not because they actually believe it, but because they want affirmation, often end up believing those statements if they say them often enough.
What you say and how you say it shapes what you think and how you think it.
I see this all of the time with my students.
But to be more precise, the commonly accepted temporal succession between language and THEN thought, or even thought THEN language, is really quite silly. Thought and language are more like the chicken and the egg. Which came first? Well…
Your average dualist would probably say thought came first, then language.
But I’m not so sure.
“In the beginning was the WORD” (John 1:1). The nicely ambiguous thing about logos though, in Greek, is that it kind of means both “word/speech” and “rationality/thought” at the same time.
One of the things my kids say to me all the time is: “I know the answer, Ms. Shea, I just can’t say it.” Or “I remember it, I just can’t put it into words.”
False.
We have all felt this way, but we are all deceiving ourselves. As a teacher, I have found that if you cannot put something into words, then, practically speaking, you don’t really know what you’re talking about at all.
When you really and fully know something, you can also articulate it.
*Caveat: For certain people with certain learning disabilities, there may be some kind of gray area here. But for the average person without said learning disabilities, I think my claim holds up pretty well.
What’s the point of all this?
Well:
1. I think an English teacher really needs to ponder this relationship between language and thought if she plans on helping her students write, read and think coherently. So much of the difficulty in teaching, after you get past the classroom management / grading / parental horrors, comes down to getting inside the heads of the kids and figure out what the heck is going on and how to help them fix it. That’s why I try to focus on “metacognition” so much in my classes.
2. The famous Catholic “both/and” of grace and nature shows up everywhere. Separating thought and language, soul and body, grace and nature, scripture and tradition, form and matter is the kind of Gnosticism our culture suffers from very badly these days. When you separate things like that you are unable to see either of them clearly.
3. The mysterious immateriality of language and thought shouldn’t make us forget how intimately tied both are to the “stuff” we are made of — neurons and gray matter etc. But neither should it make us reduce language or thought to our neurons and gray matter either. If that is *all* thinking is, then we have really no reason to trust it.
Poets seem to understand this language-thought, word-world thing better than most.
Here is one of my very favorite poems by Richard Wilbur. Note his description of how the English language works — and his Edenic imagery at the end. For him, in Paradise, language and thought, word and world, were not separate as they are now.
Mysteries and Manners 