Monday, February 12, 2007
Pushing furniture
My wife has a habit of pushing furniture that sits against the wall up against the wall. Sideboards, beds, dressers—she believes all these should touch the wall. I believe they should sit about a third to three quarters of an inch from the wall, depending on the size of the object. Objects need to breathe, I tell her.
Stanley Fish, in his blog on the NYTimes today, (subscription only), recounts hearing Diane Rehm interview Colm Toibin about his short story collection “Mothers and Sons.” Stanley Fish is first annoyed when Toibin is cool to the callers on the radio show, most of whom want to tell stories, sometimes punctuated with tears, about how he helped them get through their own psychological traumas. On consideration, though, and after Toibin talks about his desire to craft a beautiful sentence, Fish believes he understands. The craft of writing is self-referential and self-validating, he says, so to talk about its therapeutic effects is to debase it. It is pure craft, and for the writer it is only about the pure joy of creating it.
If writing is only about crafting beautiful sentences, it must be about making judgements like the one my wife and I dispute. My wife and I disagree on a question of form, of the formal relationships between object and space. Who is right: me or my wife? Well, we can have a long, happy marriage pushing the furniture back and forth and never resolve the question. But in literary writing, the sentence has a final form. A judgement has to be made, and it needs a basis. What could the basis be? The autonomous will of the author who pronounces it finished? The taste of select readers? Some sort of mystical truth?
I think the basis for judgement must be in all the stuff that Fish wants to exclude. The judgement about which sentence will be most beautiful in a particular piece finds its basis in other writing, in history, in politics, in ethics, in morality and in the contingencies of what the writer lives and desires.
Colm Toibin is perfectly right to avoid discussing his work as therapy, but not exactly because he would contaminate himself if he embraced the effect it has had on some of his readers. He is right because he already said his bit, in the writing. If his craft in the writing is of such demanding subtlety, I'd suggest, it is because he believes the themes he treats require it. After all that joyful, painstaking effort, why would he want to muck it up by treating the same themes carelessly on the radio? ¶ 11:04 AM
Stanley Fish, in his blog on the NYTimes today, (subscription only), recounts hearing Diane Rehm interview Colm Toibin about his short story collection “Mothers and Sons.” Stanley Fish is first annoyed when Toibin is cool to the callers on the radio show, most of whom want to tell stories, sometimes punctuated with tears, about how he helped them get through their own psychological traumas. On consideration, though, and after Toibin talks about his desire to craft a beautiful sentence, Fish believes he understands. The craft of writing is self-referential and self-validating, he says, so to talk about its therapeutic effects is to debase it. It is pure craft, and for the writer it is only about the pure joy of creating it.
If writing is only about crafting beautiful sentences, it must be about making judgements like the one my wife and I dispute. My wife and I disagree on a question of form, of the formal relationships between object and space. Who is right: me or my wife? Well, we can have a long, happy marriage pushing the furniture back and forth and never resolve the question. But in literary writing, the sentence has a final form. A judgement has to be made, and it needs a basis. What could the basis be? The autonomous will of the author who pronounces it finished? The taste of select readers? Some sort of mystical truth?
I think the basis for judgement must be in all the stuff that Fish wants to exclude. The judgement about which sentence will be most beautiful in a particular piece finds its basis in other writing, in history, in politics, in ethics, in morality and in the contingencies of what the writer lives and desires.
Colm Toibin is perfectly right to avoid discussing his work as therapy, but not exactly because he would contaminate himself if he embraced the effect it has had on some of his readers. He is right because he already said his bit, in the writing. If his craft in the writing is of such demanding subtlety, I'd suggest, it is because he believes the themes he treats require it. After all that joyful, painstaking effort, why would he want to muck it up by treating the same themes carelessly on the radio? ¶ 11:04 AM
