The following remarks were prepared for the Pacific University “low residency” MFA program in creative writing. I will be at their winter program from January 7-17th and will not be blogging for the next ten days. This talk is part of a faculty series of craft lectures. Mine is about nonfiction writing.
S.K.
If I were to tell you that I’m a Knight in Shining Armor would you believe me? Look at me! Here I am: five feet six inches tall, myopic, contraindicated for lethargy or psychosis and yet, despite all signs to the contrary, should I say this, some of you will indeed imagine that I am a Knight. You will do this because you are literary people and accordingly you are all ironists and wildly addicted to complexity. You are, in short, as nuts as Cervantes who was not only the first novelist but who understood that comic irony is, along with diction, the business of modern men and women. Every last one of us is a knight in shining armor. We believe this because it sounds good to say so and because all the signs say the idea is wrong. Repeat after me: “I am a Knight in Shining Armor and I’m Nuts!”
What’s comic irony? It’s a narrative device only available to literate people. You my dears, my scrivening infans, greenhorn studentii, or vatic, seasoned colleagues are in the audience and you know more than the characters on the stage. “Well,” you say in haughty umbrage, “the Greeks understood that Pentheus was dead meat before the play began, didn’t they?” Yes, and they understood this because they’d heard all the oral tradition stories about Dionysus. Comic irony is when you’re at the play and you’ve never heard of Hamlet before and suddenly you start to hear things in the language that make your antennae go up for you have two of them, and they go up just like that TV Martian and you sense that what’s being said and what’s happening are miles apart. And you have this odd euphoria because the language is wicked and shunty and higglety pigglety and Oh yeah, it sounds great.
By the way, women can be knights. Florence Nightingale, Eleanor Roosevelt and Imogene Coca come to mind. I’ve just added Imogene Coca because I felt like it. She was a pioneering comedienne in a room full of cigar chomping men so I say she’s a knight.
Alright. Back to my theme. It turns out that before books came along there was no such thing as heroism. All the knights of old represented a kind of apotheosis, semi-divine, and they were illiterate which meant that only their benefactors, kings and queens (also illiterate) would find them to be of any interest. In short, you ain’t no hero if you’re half divine; and you ain’t worth a second look if you can’t tell a story with angled diction and comic irony. Pity the old kings having to sit there listening to knights who sounded like fifth graders reciting their adventures with all the narrative brio of “what I did on my summer vacation” and you’ve got the picture.
Before I say anything else, I just want to point out that the fifth grader’s narrative called “what I did on my summer vacation” is not creative writing but its method of development is often adopted by people who want to write literary nonfiction. The method works like this:
We went here; we went there; someone said something; someone else said something; Billy threw up; my father got locked out of the motel; it was funny; then we came home.
Against this narrative, which surely was also the pre-literate narrative of the demi-god round table knights of old, let’s look at the prose of Cervantes. This is from the Edith Grossman translation:
And so, let it be said that this aforementioned gentleman spent his times of leisure–which meant most of the year–reading books of chivalry with so much devotion and enthusiasm that he forgot almost completely about the hunt and even about the administration of his estate; and in his rash curiosity and folly he went so far as to sell acres of arable land in order to buy books of chivalry to read, and he brought as many of them as he could into his house; and he thought none was as fine as those composed by the worthy Feliciano de Silva,2 because the clarity of his prose and complexity of his language seemed to him more valuable than pearls, in particular when he read the declarations and missives of love, where he would often find written: The reason for the unreason to which my reason turns so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of thy beauty. And also when he read: . . . the heavens on high divinely heighten thy divinity with the stars and make thee deserving of the deserts thy greatness deserves.
With these words and phrases the poor gentleman lost his mind, and he spent sleepless nights trying to understand them and extract their meaning, which Aristotle himself, if he came back to life for only that purpose, would not have been able to decipher or understand.
In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind.
**
Let’s pause here for a moment. How clever Cervantes is! Don Quixote loses his mind NOT because of the sequence of events in chivalric narratives but owing to “the clarity of… prose and complexity of …language {which} seemed to him more valuable than pearls.”
Of course there are two jokes here. The prose that knocks Don Quixote off his pins is hopeless and silly even in 16th century Spain and yet, and yet, Lo, Cervantes conveys to his ironic and literate readers a further literary joke, namely that clarity and complexity of language—what we call “diction” is the most powerful thing you’ll find in a book and not the events of a story which, after all, are only a secondary matter. In effect Cervantes is making a bet with his readers. He will demonstrate to their satisfaction that diction is more important than the material of scenes. We could call this a third joke. Joke number 3 is what we mean by the term “intentionality”—the author is making a wager with the reader. In the case of Cervantes he’s saying that by means of diction he will keep his readers occupied with what is otherwise a middling and foolish story—the sequenced travels of a man whose mind has been destroyed by bad books. The latter idea is a tedious matter if it’s the incitement principle of the narrative. All by itself that story would be nothing more than the fifth grader’s summer vacation. This book will be possible because it employs the very thing that destroyed its hero: clarity and complexity of language. Here’s Don Quixote dusting off his armor:
… and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired. And the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfathers and, stained with rust and covered with mildew, had spent many long years stored and forgotten in a corner. He did the best he could to clean and repair it, but he saw that it had a great defect, which was that instead of a full sallet helmet with an attached neckguard, there was only a simple headpiece; but he compensated for this with his industry, and out of pasteboard he fashioned a kind of half-helmet that, when attached to the headpiece, took on the appearance of a full sallet. It is true that in order to test if it was strong and could withstand a blow, he took out his sword and struck it twice, and with the first blow he undid in a moment what it had taken him a week to create; he could not help being disappointed at the ease with which he had hacked it to pieces, and to protect against that danger, he made another one, placing strips of iron on the ins
ide so that he was satisfied
with its strength; and not wanting to put it to the test again, he designated and accepted it as an extremely fine sallet.
Then he went to look at his nag, and though its hooves had more cracks than his master’s pate and it showed more flaws than Gonnella’s horse, that tantum pellis et ossafuit, it seemed to him that Alexander’s Bucephalus and El Cid’s Babieca were not its equal. He spent four days thinking about the name he would give it; for–as he told himself–it was not seemly that the horse of so famous a knight, and a steed so intrinsically excellent, should not have a worthy name; he was looking for the precise name that would declare what the horse had been before its master became a knight errant and what it was now; for he was determined that if the master was changing his condition, the horse too would change its name to one that would win the fame and recognition its new position and profession deserved; and so, after many names that he shaped and discarded, subtracted from and added to, unmade and remade in his memory and imagination, he finally decided to call the horse Rocinante, a name, in his opinion, that was noble, sonorous, and reflective of what it had been when it was a nag, before it was what it was now, which was the foremost nag in all the world.
Having given a name, and one so much to his liking, to his horse, he wanted to give one to himself, and he spent another eight days pondering this, and at last he called himself Don Quixote,11 which is why, as has been noted, the authors of this absolutely true history determined that he undoubtedly must have been named Quixada and not Quexada, as others have claimed. In any event, recalling that the valiant Amadis had not been content with simply calling himself Amadis but had added the name of his kingdom and realm in order to bring it fame, and was known as Amadis of Gaul, he too, like a good knight, wanted to add the name of his birthplace to his own, and he called himself Don Quixote of La Man’ cha,12 thereby, to his mind, clearly stating his lineage and country and honoring it by making it part of his title.
Having cleaned his armor and made a full helmet out of a simple headpiece, and having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realized that the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love; for the knight errant without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul. He said to himself:
“If I, because of my evil sins, or my good fortune, meet with a giant somewhere, as ordinarily befalls knights errant, and I unseat him with a single blow, or cut his body in half, or, in short, conquer and defeat him, would it not be good to have someone to whom I could send him so that he might enter and fall to his knees before my sweet lady, and say in the humble voice of surrender: ‘I, lady, am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island Malindrania, defeated in single combat by the never sufficiently praised knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who commanded me to appear before your ladyship, so that your highness might dispose of me as you chose’?”
Oh, how pleased our good knight was when he had made this speech, and even more pleased when he discovered the one he could call his lady! It is believed that in a nearby village there was a very attractive peasant girl with whom he had once been in love, although she, apparently, never knew or noticed. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo,13 and he thought it a good idea to call her the lady of his thoughts, and, searching for a name that would not differ significantly from his and would suggest and imply that of a princess and great lady, he decided to call her Dulcinea o/Toboso,14 because she came from Toboso, a name, to his mind, that was musical and beautiful and filled with significance, as were all the others he had given to himself and everything pertaining to him.
**
All literary writers are knights of narrative, not because of their shapely arrangements of incidents in a story but because they employ what the Victorians like to call “the shield of irony” and whatever you may choose to call it, it’s made of poetic diction.
“… and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired. And the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfathers and, stained with rust and covered with mildew, had spent many long years stored and forgotten in a corner.”
“Then he went to look at his nag, and though its hooves had more cracks than his master’s pate and it showed more flaws than Gonnella’s horse, that tantum pellis et ossafuit, it seemed to him that Alexander’s Bucephalus and El Cid’s Babieca were not its equal. He spent four days thinking about the name he would give it; for–as he told himself–it was not seemly that the horse of so famous a knight, and a steed so intrinsically excellent, should not have a worthy name…”
In short, it’s not the incidents that make a noble tale, important though they may be, it’s the intrinsically excellent tantum pellis et ossafuit, the rust and mildew, the pate and sallet, and all the pleasure our madman takes from them that tickle our ironic itch, covered as we are by our own ill fitting armor…
**
Let us consider another literary knight in a different age, one Mary McCarthy whose memoir of a Catholic Girlhood is one of my favorite books. The point is “diction” over events, as in, listen to how she manages this, much as Cervantes did. It’s all about the lingo, baby, O my little crawlers, infans, scriveners, greenhorns and leavened wags, its all about the lingo. Here’s McCarthy:
For the formation of the vocative with my thirteen-year-old son, I pulled down from a top shelf my old Allen and Greenough Latin grammar. The worn green book fell open at the flyleaf, and I saw my name, school, and class written in ink, in the ornate handwriting I had been forming during my idle hours in Annie Wright Seminary in Tacoma. Three years before, I had been sent there despairingly by my grandparents, after a year in public high school. The Sacred Heart nuns, they thought, had made me an atheist; the public high school had made me boy crazy–what next? Peering over my shoulder, my young bantam crowed to find that his haughty mother had dotted her i’s with circles; there they were, spattered over the page like bird droppings. Otherwise, the hand was my own, with its Greek e’s, flamboyant scroll capitals, and narrow, precisian small letters; it dashed us both to perceive that already, in my senior year in boarding school, my present character had been set. Upside down on the same page, written in pencil in a far more careless style, was a list of some kind. I inverted the book and stared. Next to three crudely drawn cylinders (the influence of physics?) and enclosed in a rough bracket was the following:
Indianhead–Flame
Dishrags
Oilcloth
Gold Paint
Unbleached Muslin, 10 yards
Blue Indianhead 2 1/2 yards
Ye gods, it was my Catiline costume for the Latin Club play, “Marcus Tullius”!
Or, rather, it was the matrix from which gorgeous Catiline would emerge: those dishrags, dipped in gold paint and sewed together by our Latin teacher, Miss Gowrie, would be my chain-armor breastplate; the oilcloth, gold, stiffened with cardboard and crowned with a red plume, my helmet; the flame Indianhead my military cloak, as I appeared in the fearsome scene of the Battle of Pistoria, where I rushed into the ranks of the enemy and met my death with great bravery. The blue Indianhead I could not account for (perhaps a short military tunic?), but the unbleached muslin would seem, by its length, to have been my toga, which I flung around myself in the Senate scene as I turned on my prosing detractor and strode exultant from the stage, promising to “extinguish the flames of my own ruin in the conflagration of all Rome.”
And yet, stay, I said to myself, frowning. Why unble
ached’? The senatorial toga was white, surely? And in my own recollection of that evening, the togas of my fellow senators were white, with a “purple” stripe or band, this “purple” being in actual fact scarlet, just like the Roman purpura, which came, said Miss Gowrie, from the Greek porphyra. But unbleached the togas must have been, for unbleached muslin is cheap, and Miss Harriet Gowrie, a Highland Scotswoman, was a great relier on the power of illusion. To an audience, natural muslin on a brightly lit stage is supposed to look white, just as it now looked to me across the footlit proscenium of time. I smiled ruefully to think of Miss Gowrie, with her tall, lean, doll-jointed “figger” and rustic, homely, frugal arts, so out of place amid our marcels and water waves, riding waistcoats and crops and bowlers, fur coats and Toujours Moi and Christmas Night perfumes. Her original drama “Marcus Tullius” is preserved in my memory as a fabulous example of the homemade.
The Latin Club presents a drama in five acts, written and produced by Harriet Gowrie, B.A., M.A. Act I, the Senate at Rome, 63 B.C. Characters in the order of speaking: Cicero . . . Frances Berry.
The thronged scene still frames itself for me like a painting by David. The curtain is ready to go up. Black-haired Miss Gowrie, in a freshly steamed black velvet dress with a wide white bertha and a corsage of roses sent by the cast, is standing in the wings, her black eyes snapping, her apple cheeks afire. Cicero, an honors student in a boyish bob, is at the rostrum, tightening her toga over her large, firm bosom; foppish Caesar and sallow Cato and other patres are sitting on wooden benches, while I, in a tier apart, lounge with a scornful smile on my dark, ruined features. In the audience, programs in hand, sit the lady principal, the dean of the Episcopal church, the bishop and the bishop’s wife; the publisher of the newspaper, the big and small fry of Puget Sound doctors, dentists, lawyers, insurance men, steamship-line owners, and lumber operators–our relations; the girls in their crepe de Chine dress uniforms; and a few of the town Lovelaces who have braved the principal’s eye. With Miss Gowrie tugging, the curtain goes up, on time. Cicero scans her teacher, waits for the applause to die, receives a vigorous nod, opens her mouth, points her finger at me, swells the bellows of her lungs, and launches on the first Catiline oration: “How far, at length, O
Catiline, will you abuse our patience? To what ends does your audacious boldness boastfully display itself?”
How far, at length, Miss Gowrie, could you abuse their patience? Cicero’s oration lasted thirty-one minutes by Miss Gowrie’s watch. The white column of Frances’s throat from time to time trembled faintly from strain, but her steady, clear first soprano had been trained by years in the choir. As the bobbin of words in her was unreeled, she grew paler, like a patient undergoing a long extraction, while the audience sat hushed and respectful, as if in the presence of death or of one of those harrowing athletic feats, tests of endurance, that were popular during the era. There was no coughing or rustling; the only movement was on the stage benches, where the other senators, in character, drew farther away from Catiline, shaking their heads and registering dismay, disbelief, horror, or what-did-I-tell-you, according to the part they were supposed to have played in history. Cato nodded grimly to Catulus and Caesar scratched his pate. As the arraignment of Catiline proceeded, I could feel the curiosity of the first rows slowly transfer itself to me–Lucius Sergius Catilina, adulterer, extortioner, profligate, bankrupt, assassin, suspected wife-killer, broken-down patrician, democrat, demagogue, thug. The wearisome indictment made this person smile. He glanced shruggingly at his fingernails and carelessly loosened his toga, to reveal a glimpse of his tunic, with the broad scarlet clavus of the patriciate running down the middle. As a libertine and man of deeds, he found the womanish rhetoric of republican institutions oppressive; at prescribed intervals, his heavy brows jerked up and his ringed fist tightened in a gesture of menace. At long last, it was over. Cicero rounded off her peroration and stepped from the rostrum. There was a great burst of applause. Miss Gowrie signaled. My moment had come.
**
Ms. McCarthy’s moment had come, indeed. Even at 16, boy crazy, sneaking her cigarettes, sometimes jumping from dormitory windows to make out with the crippled boy in the near woods, unendingly saucy, intemperate, pugnacious, stilted, by Jove, the girl had discovered the secret of literary consciousness which is (and yes, even in a tragic tale) the glory of diction wielded in the service of comic irony. I will close here with some further examples of the art.
Here’s Bernard Cooper
If I were inclined to collect art, I’d want objects made on the spur of the moment by people at bus stops and coffee shops and bars: straws bent into Mobius strips, impromptu paper-napkin puppets, sculpted wads of
chewing gum. I’d place my address on the back of that matchbook that tells you to draw Binky the Duck and send in the result to be evaluated by an art expert. I bet I’d receive mutations on the mallard that would set Charles Darwin’s hair on end. Think of the mail laden with ducks, a room full of variegated Binkys, piles dividing good Binkys from bad.
I’ve had bad experiences with authoritarian art instructors who came right up, grabbed my charcoal, and ruined what I thought was a good composition. The worst transgressor in this respect was Mrs. Arlington, the seventh-grade teacher who told me I’d never master hands-they dangled below the sketchbook’s edge; they were held behind the subject’s back. Versed in child psychology, she considered each picture a self-portrait and thought my omission problematic, the sign of a stingy temperament. (Dear Mrs. Arlington: those hands were present all along, dipped below the threshold of vision, in the nether world of white paper.)
Home from school on hot afternoons, I’d draw on the pavement with a feather dunked in water. I’d start with Mrs. Arlington and watch her image disappear. After that was seared away by the sun, I drew my brother lying in bed, his body fading second by second, the molecules sucked invisibly up. And I drew my mother doing the cancan. And I drew myself, handless of course, a mortal boy staring straight ahead.
One afternoon toward the end of his life, my brother spoke on the phone to his doctor. His voice was weak, the telephone black and oracular, Gary repeated, “yes, yes,” nodding to no one. He absently drew on a pad of paper. A spiral twisted in or out; it was hard to tell. Jagged stars hovered in a corner, their light a burst of lines. Some random spots were marked with an X. The box could have been a house, and the lumps surrounding it, trees. Perhaps they were dogs. Or cars. They may have been shapes for the sake of shape. Superimposed over that scene was the profile of a face-man and woman, young and old-seemingly the face of everyone at once.
Days later that sketch was torn off and tossed away, the sheet beneathit embossed with abundance: objects that seemed to be molded from snow, vague symbols rimmed in shadow. Impressions. Perimeters. Ghostly. Gone.
–from “How to Draw by Bernard Cooper”
Here’s Barry Lopez describing the view from his boyhood Manhattan apartment:
In the afternoon a dozen young girls in private-school uniforms swirled in glee and posed with exaggerated emotion across the street, waiting to be taken home. By dinner time the street was almost empty of people; then, around eleven, it was briefly animated again with couples returning from the theater or some other entertainment. Until dawn, the pattern of glinting chrome and color in the two rows of curbed automobiles remained unchanged. And from night to night that pattern hardly varied.
Overlaying the street’s regular, diurnal rhythm was a more chaotic pattern of events, an unpredictability I would watch with unquenchable fascination for hours
at a time. (A jog in the wall of the Advertising Club of New York next door made it impossible for me to see very far to the west on 35th Street. But if I leaned out as far as I dared, I could see all the way to the East River in the other direction.) I would study the flow of vehicles below: an aggressive insinuation of yellow taxis, the casual slalom of a motorcycle through lines of stalled traffic, the obstreperous lumbering of large trucks. The sidewalks, with an occasional imposing stoop jutting out, were rarely crowded, for there were neither shops nor businesses here, and few tourists. But with Yeshiva University down at the corner of Lexington, the 34th Street Armory a block away, a Swedenborgian church midblock, and 34th Precinct police headquarters just up from Third Avenue, I still saw a fair array of dress and captivating expressions of human bearing. The tortoise pace of elderly women in drab hats paralleled the peeved ambling of a middle-aged man anxious to locate a cab. A nail, loose-jointed in trajectory down the sidewalk, with wide-flung strides. A button hooking young woman, intently scanning door lintels and surreptitiously watching a building superintendent leaning sullenly against a service entrance. Two men in vested suits in conversation on the corner where, rotund and oblivious, they were a disruption, like a boulder in a creek. A boy running through red-lighted traffic with a large bouquet in his hand, held forth like a bowsprit.
–from “Replacing Memory”
**
By now you get the bobbin and snick of our weave—the Knight’s cloak, worn after hours, stitched of experience and dyed with cinnabar is superior to his or her quest.
Planet of the Blind 