Writing – Mysteries and Manners

Theme and the Holy Spirit

September 5, 2018

382467-Flannery-O-Connor-Quote-I-write-to-discover-what-I-know I remember during my first year of teaching being rather terrified of students asking me to help them, because I wasn’t sure that I could.

I distinctly remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when one of my seniors asked if he could stop by during lunch and get help on his first essay for my class. “Sure!” I said cheerfully, as dismay and tension settled into my shoulders.

Fast forward to this afternoon during my planning block in the library of my new school. Another senior had asked for help on her first in-class essay. I’m teaching the AP classes how to write the dreaded “Open Prompt” essay in preparation for the exam— where, in roughly 40 minutes, you need to choose a play or novel “of literary merit” with which to respond to a thought-provoking prompt about life and literature. (See this link for all the prompts on AP Literature exams from 1970-2017. They’re really worth reading– some of them are fascinating to ponder.)

My student is writing about the motif of blindness in King Lear, but was having trouble formulating a theme statement, what the AP exam usually calls “the meaning of a work as a whole”. In other words, what is Shakespeare trying to say to us about blindness?

As often as high school English teachers talk about theme, I’ve realized it’s actually a very difficult concept to teach well. In fact, I never used to teach it ostensibly because I agreed with O’Connor that trying to “find the theme” of a story is actually the wrong way to go about reading literature in the first place:

The result of the proper study of a novel should be contemplation of the mystery embodied in it, but this is a contemplation of the mystery in the whole work and not or some proposition or paraphrase. It is not the tracking down of an expressible moral or a statement about life. (O’Connor, “The Teaching of Literature,” Mystery and Manners 129).

Yet theme is a statement about life–some kind of claim, the theory goes, that a novel or play makes without ever coming out and spelling the idea out for you word for word. People often mistake the theme of a work for a mere topic like “revenge” or “ambition” or “the role of women”–but a full-fledged theme is a sentence with a subject and a predicate.

Flannery goes on to say in the very next sentence, “An English teacher I knew once asked her students what the moral of The Scarlet Letter was, and one answer she got as that the moral of The Scarlet Letter was, think twice before you commit adultery” (Ibid).

…

Okay, Flannery, but you could (with some fear and trembling) argue that a theme in The Violent Bear It Away is that “spiritual hunger is, for all its pain, a kind of poverty that makes way for satiety.” Or something like that. Couldn’t you?

51uTjOmSPXL Flannery responds,

I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully. (“Writing Short Stories,” Mystery and Manners 96)

I mean, I do plan to share that quote with my AP kids… but not until they have more confidence in developing themes and have written some good ones in a bunch of essays.

I’m essentially teaching them how to do something I plan on un-teaching them later.

Alas, the depths to which prepping kids for the AP exams will make one descend.

But my feelings about theme have softened over time through repetitive exposure and also through the private (perhaps naive) hope that I’m teaching in a way that does not encourage merely the “tracking down” of morals, cliches, or definitive life lessons.

So I’m sitting in the library, listening to this new student describe how hard it is for her to “come up with” a theme for King Lear that will “work” in this revised version of her essay. (I sense O’Connor’s non-plussed gaze–not on her, on me.) The good thing is, my student, like Socrates, knows that she doesn’t know– she sees that her essay can’t really go anywhere without a real thesis, without some kind of guess as to what Shakespeare is up to, but the reality is she simply doesn’t know what to say. “I don’t just want to say X is the theme,” she explains, “because that’s not what’s really going on.” Bravo. She cares about saying something true. (Another student I had spoken with earlier, after she had finally come up with a theme statement about undergoing trials in order to mature, when asked if she thought Cormac McCarthy was actually trying to convey that theme in his novel, replied that she didn’t care. She could write an essay about it, and that’s what mattered, and now, I suppose, she could go “feed the chickens”. Yikes.)

“I tried last night to come up with a theme, but they all just didn’t sound right,” my current student explained, gazing at her laptop screen with its strikethroughs and different colored fonts and other fragments of her labor.

As I listened, I realized, in the back of my mind, that I didn’t know how to help her.

That is, how to really help her. I could pretty easily come up with a theme statement and just give it to her, or ask her extremely leading questions that would help her to think of something rather similar to what I had in mind–but how to help her discover a central theme in King Lear on her own? I recalled, momentarily, that sinking feeling I got during my first year of teaching.

Flannery O’Connor says somewhere, probably in one of her letters, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say” (source).

It’s an idea I try to share with my students, especially those that feel like they have to have everything planned out before they can start writing. Although I fully support outlines if they are helpful, I do think kids need to learn that so often we only get to discover the deeper riches and beauty and meaning in a work while we write about it– not before.

Flannery says elsewhere, “I write to discover what I know.” Perhaps her preference for an organic meaning over a formulaic theme comes from her experience of what writing is really like. She knows that real writers don’t plant themes in stories like trophies to be dug up once you’ve cleared away enough of the distracting dirt of the plot. In fact, this is impossible. All they have is the dirt–the plot, I mean. There are no trophies to hide. Meaning simmers in the words themselves. The author only really knows what the work is going to mean after she has written it–and even then, not completely.

This rambling blog post itself, which has moved from a distant memory to an event in the library today to some musings on theme and the act of teaching illustrates her point too. I didn’t know, exactly, what I was going to write about until I began writing. (This post also highlights the importance of editing, and how once you DO discover what you want to say, you should probably go back through your work and delete all the irrelevant parts, if you have the time or inclination…)

I find O’Connor’s experience of writing in order to find out what she wants to say to be true of teaching as well. When I was a student I had this notion that teachers walked into a classroom with all of their thoughts carefully planned out–almost like a speech. And, perhaps, some teachers do teach this way, especially if they are giving a lecture of some kind. But there is so much in teaching high school kids that cannot work that way, that is unexpected, that cannot be planned ahead of time. The conversation comes and goes where it wills and often seems to have a plan of its own that you never could have anticipated. That definitely happened today.

So, back in the library, I paused for a moment, cleared my throat, and—gathering some confidence in the Holy Spirit who also likes to come and go when He wills and “who intercedes for us with sighs to deep for words” when we pray, but also, hopefully, when we teach—I said,

“Tell me more about the first time you saw Shakespeare mention blindness in the play. What did you notice?”

My Writing Processes: A Blog Hop

June 2, 2014

Thank you to David Mosley over at Letters from the Edge of Elfland for suggesting I undertake this “blog hop” task.

I will let him describe the process for you:

Michelle over at Soliloquies––an excellent blog that mixes philosophy, life, and writing––has invited to participate in a Writing Process Blog Hop. She has previously invited to a similar ‘event’, though in the previous case it was an award of sorts. I was remiss in not attending to the previous invitation and so willingly and gladly do I participate now. The Writing Process Blog hop invites bloggers to answer four questions about what, how, and why they write. The bloggers are then encouraged to recommend three other bloggers to do the same. (Mosley, “My Writing Processes: A Blog Hop”)

Here they are:

1. What are you currently working on?

I feel a little abashed by this question. It implies that I actually am working on something literary.

Up until a few days ago, I was working on trying to help my students learn how to write. Most of the time I am teaching persuasive writing, but this past semester I agreed to teach a Creative Writing class for the first time. So I had the much easier job of being the literary critic rather than the anguished author.

Still, I learned a few things. My favorite unit was murder mystery stories. As we investigated how these stories work, I began to realize just how important form can be. Mysteries demand attention to plot structure and physical objects more than most other genres do. Character development is ideal but not essential to a good mystery (witness the success of relatively static characters like Columbo, Magnum P. I., Miss Marple, etc).

Interestingly, it is all too easy for inexperienced writers to wander too far into the psyches of their characters and their motivations rather than into plot. Too often my students tried to turn their mystery stories into novels— they got the emphasis all wrong. They wanted to focus on character and dialogue primarily like Jane Austen, because, for a new writer, that seems easier.

Am I writing anything besides this blog?

I write music. I play guitar and write songs. It’s really interesting how similar – and how VASTLY different – writing music is in relation to writing poetry.

I have been reworking a paper I wrote in college on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I hope someday to publish it. It has already been rejected, however, so I have lots of work to do! There is a lot of pressure in the literary academic world to say something new, although the writing I admire most simply tries to say what is true and usually results in being ancient.

And a private fun project of mine is writing my own Narnia book. It’s about Susan Pevensie’s daughter, and in the last six months I’ve made it to chapter three. The fact that Susan never made it back with the others “beyond the Stable door” has always bugged me to no end.

It’s the Hans Urs von Balthasarian “universalist” in me.

2. How does your work differ from others in its genre?

Well, I suppose I can say two things about that.

1) Although all blogs, even if they fall under the “Catholic” genre, are as different as the writers who create them, I do think that my blog is attempting something unique. It is a sort of casual, musing way of reflecting on the art of teaching — in particular, teaching in Catholic schools, which for better or worse is a whole epic educational saga in itself. Many other blogs have a more political, theological or family-oriented focus: for example, the mommy blogs, the “public square” blogs, the ecumenical/theology-debating blogs, all of which I love reading.

But I’m not really doing any of those things. I touch on theological and political issues insofar as they relate to my experience working with high school kids, but my writing focuses on the act of trying to engage in a very specific type of relationship and to perfect a very particular type of art. (Teaching is an art, by the way.)

2) Because I am an English teacher, I often end up writing about literature. But I don’t really write about it in the way many other blogs do– I’m not usually evaluating it on its own merit, or providing reviews of it, or even really describing my own personal reactions to it. Instead, when I talk about literature, I almost always talk about it in reference to a very particular and frequently hostile audience: teenagers in a “school” setting.

For better or worse, I often think about literature as a vehicle for learning certain skills. I suppose that’s very “Common Core”-ish of me. Notice that my primary successes with Dante seemed to be using his illustrious Commedia as a vehicle for reading strategies. Julius Caesar was great for teaching persuasive techniques.

Sounds rather utilitarian I guess, but that is a hot topic for another time…

3. Why do you do what you do?

What do I do again?

Teach?

I feel that teaching is primarily what I do, and writing is an extension, a goal, a byproduct, and even an “efficient cause” of my teaching.

Well, then I suppose I write and teach because God is pushing me into it, and I’m trying my best not to get in His way (with varying results).

4. How does your writing process work?

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, but I have found that my best writing (the stuff I don’t scrap) is pretty spontaneous. As Flannery says, “I write to discover what I know.”

In high school and college, friends of mine who painstakingly outlined their ideas beforehand seemed to be engaging in an impossible task. Even others who think a lot about what they want to say, even if they never create a formal outline, are engaging in something I have never been able to do. I have no idea what I want to say until I say it.

A wonderful professor in college (painfully) taught me the importance of revising. So now I do that instead of just allowing my unsupervised thoughts to wander about.

Most of the time.

Well, like David Mosley, I am going to nominate three other bloggers to try this out.

1. Ironical Coincidings by Joseph Simmons. Joseph is a friend of mine from college who takes a much more analytical, philosophical approach to his work than I do. So I’m really interested in what insights he will have into the writing process.

2. Comos in the Lost by Artur Rosman. I am relatively new to Rosman’s blog, but I read it almost daily, which is saying something since most of my time is spent sifting through high school essays. His own “About” page says “He is husband, father of three, professor, public speaker, translator of several books (Polish to English), and onetime television personality (several times) on Polish TV. He is presently writing a dissertation on the Catholic imagination of Czeslaw Milosz at the University of Washington in the Comparative Literature department.”

He is also a fellow admirer of Hans Urs von Balthasar. When Rosman writes, I often feel like “oh, that is what I want to say, but am not really equipped (intellectually and otherwise) to put into words!”

3. The Wine Dark Sea by Melanie Bettinelli. I have actually been reading Melanie’s blog since I was in high school. I found it while looking for stuff about what the University of Dallas was really like. She is a UD grad and writes with clarity, humor and grace about family life, poetry, and more.

7 Quick Takes Friday (4/11/14)

April 11, 2014

-1-

My friend Oscar has just started an awesome new website about education that you should check out! It’s called The McGuffey Reader, named after William Holmes McGuffey.

From the “About” Section of the site:

An independent organization committed to the improvement of local schools and to the reform of education in America, The Mcguffey Reader is the first ever online space for the exchange of school-specific solutions, and a source for the latest in education news, policies, and pedagogies that are currently changing education. (The McGuffey Reader About Page)

guffeyhimself — source: mcguffeyreaders.com

-2-

Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies!

What a Godsend! I am definitely ordering one of these for my classroom next year…

FallaciesPoster — source: yourlogicialfallacyis.com

Especially this one.

Logical-Fallacies-strawman-620x391 — source: churchm.ag

-3-

I love this:

What I Never Would Have Known About Becoming a Teacher Before I Became One

It’s a list of 10 things.

But especially this thing:

slide 5 -126490696 — source: takepart.com

Some teachers ask me incredulously why I often wear heels when I teach. Aren’t I just asking for sore feet?

Well, yes.

But I began wearing heels because, during my first year of teaching, I was so much SHORTER than the huge senior boys who came marching into my classroom.

And I realized as well that a decisive click click click on the classroom floor, or in the hallways, can have a surpassing amount of power.

Although of course “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Especially the responsibility of not tripping and falling during class. THAT has almost happened.

-4-

My friend Serena has another great article over at Public Discourse: “Crowdfunding, Selfies, And Mommy Blogs: Finding Community in the Internet Age.”

Very, very interesting. You hear in homilies and articles all the time how “the internet” and its forms of social media have ironically only isolated us from one another–but Mrs. Sigillito (!) challenges that oft-repeated narrative:

I believe that social media have the capacity to help establish new forms of community that fulfill our innate desire to be part of a group that is larger than ourselves, but small enough to for us to be known, accepted, and loved. (Sigillito via Public Discourse)

She gives some great examples:

Blogs like these document the place where the rubber meets the road. They take general political and religious statements about the importance of the family and they make them real, personal, and incarnate. It’s one thing forHumanae Vitae to explain why contraception is wrong; it’s another thing to read the words of a woman who’s struggling to keep the faith through her fourth or fifth surprise pregnancy. And because blogs express their authors’ personalities so strongly, they provide a powerful opportunity to encounter others. (Ibid)

Bottom line: go read it.

Her article also gives me some hope and encouragement about my own blogging here. One wonders, at times, what the point is of sharing one’s musings with a silent computer scene… until you get a comment here or there that acknowledges that someone else has felt the same way, or has come to see things differently or more clearly because of what you said.

As I learned in ACE , community can come in all sorts of strange shapes and sizes. And yet God can work through them–even through the Internet.

-5-

Speaking of blogging…

I’m gathering ideas for several different upcoming blog posts, but I wanted to ask if there is any topic in particular that you would like to see explored.

Here are some things I’m thinking of writing about:

1. More About the Common Core and its Implications for Catholic Education

2. Vocation – Br. Justin Hannegan has a disquieting thesis about discernment that all of us should take into consideration. I’ve been meditating on this for a while, and though I am not expert on vocations by any means, I thought I’d tackle it.

3. My Top 10 Pieces of Advice for Teachers – which is kind of funny, because I’m not exactly a veteran teacher myself…

4. Should certain books be excluded from Catholic high school classrooms? If so, any notable ones? Why? – This has become rather a sticky issue at my own school, and though I know the sad majority of Catholic high schools don’t take their identity too seriously anyway, I thought it might be useful to ponder for those of us who do kind of care about being “Catholic” and what that means. For example, one parent does not think Homer is appropriate. (!)

5. Why Anthony Esolen isn’t completely right about writing … See what I did there?

-6-

Well, I’m not going to go into a very long tirade about writing right now…

But I am going to venture into a little one.

I had a student from another English class ask me for help with her paper. Long story short, I didn’t think this student really had a thesis statement at all. I thought her thesis was basically a universal truth that any sane person who read her novel would agree with, and therefore wasn’t really worth writing about.

And then her current English teacher told me her thesis was absolutely fine, because this wasn’t supposed to be a “persuasive essay” anyway. It was an “analysis” essay.

I swallowed my astonishment, and then began to doubt everything I ever knew (and, honestly, everything I have ever taught) about essay writing.

Okay. I know Middle School teachers are taught to teach different “genres” of essay writing: the Descriptive Essay, the Analysis Essay, the ever-revolting Compare-and-Contrast Essay, the Personal Essay, the Persuasive Essay… which seems rather silly in a way. The only benefit I can see from over-complicating essays like this is teaching kids how to take purpose and audience into account. That’s a good thing, but I don’t think you need to make up fake essay genres for that.

But here’s my problem.

To me, an essay–even a thesis for that matter–is nothing at all if it does not argue something.

To me, ALL essays are persuasive essays.

Describe something? Okay, well prove why this thing is best described in this way.

Compare and contrast? Basically it’s just a list of stuff if you don’t throw in an argument somewhere–this thing is BETTER than that thing, or this character achieves X whereas the other one doesn’t.

Personal Essay? It’s just a journal entry if you aren’t trying to teach your reader or yourself something true about human life.

Am I wrong? Am I missing something? Is this just me?

ESSAYS MUST BE PERSUASIVE.

*Caveat: I said essays. Not necessarily science research papers. But even then…

-7-

A little Calvin and Hobbes to put writing back into perspective:

calvin-writing — source: moonlightandhershadow.blogspot.com

Once in a while my students will try something like this. Thing is, I’ve tried it before myself. And ya can’t BS a BS-er.

Please excuse my French.

Happy weekend, everyone!

“It’s Really Baffling”

March 17, 2014

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the one thing I would love to teach about writing, if I could.

I was thinking about Flannery O’Connor’s advice: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

It takes a lot of courage to write like that. To be really truthful – especially when you’re in over your head.

And then a friend of mine who teaches 5th graders sent me a paragraph, composed by one of his students, that shows so perfectly what I was trying to express about good writing I was absolutely amazed.

Here is the poem this student was writing about:

A Patch of Old Snow

by Robert Frost

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten —
If I ever read it.

One is tempted in all sorts of literature to over-analyze, to impose, to project–but most of all to do such things (to) poetry, because it’s so elusive. So many high school students (I was one myself) dislike poetry because of its difficulty. As my favorite UD professor says, poetry demands you to develop “the skill of life” which is “the capability of always acknowledging that condition of dereliction out of which alone we can know the preciousness of what we love” (Gregory, “Lyric and the Skill of Life”).

Good writing always comes from humility before what is true.

What would you say if you had to write a paragraph about Frost’s poem?

This is what my friend’s 5th grade student said:

I think (I don’t know) that Robert Frost is trying to remember a day in the past. The simile “It is speckled in grime as if small print overspread it” doesn’t mean a lot until it said “the news of a day I’ve forgotten if I ever read it.” It gave me the idea he’s trying to remember the past. It’s almost as if he has lost his mind and can’t remember anything from that day. It’s really baffling though. That’s what I think about the poem.

I think that is so beautiful. Flannery would be proud. So would Frost.

If I could Teach One Thing About Writing…

March 3, 2014

… this is what it would be. I don’t know how I can really teach this, or rather, impart it. I do not know even if I have grasped this myself really.

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.” – Flannery O’Connor

I had a conversation the other day with someone asking my opinion about Ayn Rand. Suppressing an (involuntary) shudder, I replied that if you’re vocation is propaganda, go into advertising, not novel-writing.

But Ms. Rand is just an extreme example of what most bad writers do. They come at a work with an “idea” they wish to impart– a “meaning”– or, much worse, a “moral“. You see this especially in bad fiction, but also in bad essay writing where the essay is supposed to be concerned with drawing out the meaning of a poem or work, and instead imposes a meaning upon it like a straightjacket.

You hear it in the worst English classes: “water means baptism, renewal. the sun means energy, new life. green always means X, and red Y, and this that, and blah blah blah….”

I want to tell my students: life just isn’t like that. Stop trying to impose your own patterns on it and let the God of all patterns show you His strange and forever-suprising designs. They might not be what you think. And if He doesn’t show them to you, so be it. It is okay. You don’t have to know.

It’s better to say, “I don’t know” than to pretend like you do.

Even in essay writing. Even in English class.

Some of my favorite essays I have ever read express an honest uncertainty– not a cop-out-I’m-too-lazy-to-think-about-anything– but rather a truthful and painful acknowledgement of inadequacy before the truth: “It seems like Dickinson could be saying … although it is possible that she … and ultimately this ambiguity shows the reader that …”

Flannery got it right when it comes to fiction. As much as she was (and is) an opinionated and ornery Southern lady, she was also a humble Christian and knew when to shut her own mouth and let the mystery speak for itself–whatever it meant to say.

The hard thing is literature is like life–and tells us about life. Life, too, is far beyond our silly pattern-making. I know several people (including myself) who love to “discover” patterns in their lives and thus ascribe different meanings and morals and oh now I get its, but these are just silly.

How do I tell you that writing reveals the secret?

It is better–far better– to discover a meaning in your writing, in your reading, in your life than to impose one.

And, as Flannery says, don’t be afraid. Nothing you write–or live– will lack meaning, because the meaning is in you.

There is the Holy Spirit, who “breathes in us sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).