Book Review, sort of: A Scanner Darkly

I'm not going to review Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, other than to say that if you haven't read it, you should. It's a wonderful mix of humor, pathos, and paranoia — and Dick's paranoia is among the best, up there with Delillo's and Pynchon's.

(Speaking of Pynchon: unlike The Disappeared, which I reviewed earlier, Dick's prose does not suffer from being read while still working through Against the Day.)

Instead, I'm going to take a look at how A Scanner Darkly caused me to re-examine a position I've held (and taught) for some time about what critical theorists call the "expressive theory" of writing or, more generally, art.

Ask students what writing is, and the majority will fall squarely within this "expressive" theory: writing is expressing your feelings, presenting your ideas, showing what you think, etc. (And yes, they almost always use the second person pronoun.)

Students, whether they know it or not, are largely 19th-century Romantics.

In a comp class, the expressive theory is seen most clearly when students say, "I know what I want to say; I just can't find the words." This complaint assumes that they have their idea preformed, ready, just waiting to be spilled out onto the page, and if they could just find the words to match up with that idea, to ex-press it, to press it out, then their thoughts would be accurately reflected on the page, and the reader would know what they think. And, of course, they'd automatically get an "A."

Now, I suppose there are instances where finding the words really is the problem. A Spanish speaker, for example, may have well-formed ideas in Spanish but not be able to get them down in English. But for the most part, I don't buy it. Students often can't find the words to match their thoughts because their thoughts aren't clear enough to find words to match them – even assuming language is up to that task.

In Creative Writing, it's no different. Poems are meant to express your feelings, so the trick is simply to find the words that do that. Yet even in narrative or drama, where students are consciously working in fiction, students will say, as one said this semester, that no matter how hard you try, when you write, a part of you will be revealed in the writing. So don't buck it, bucko. Write, as the adage goes, what you know.

Express yourself.

One of the most important things I offer as an English instructor — more important than issues of organization, or clarity, or focus, and certainly more important than mechanics or grammar — is the theoretical view that writing is not merely expression.

Of course, I'm not saying that writing is never expression. But students need to understand that writing can be — and, I would argue, almost always is — much more. Writing is thinking; we think by writing. Putting words on the page, whether by pen or word processor, is the process of thinking. Students need to see themselves as working through their ideas, not merely reflecting them.

Why is this distinction so important? After all, if a student "works through" her thoughts, the resulting writing subsequently expresses those thoughts, right?

There are several answers to this, but the one that I find most compelling involves issues of self-esteem and self-efficacy. Understanding that we think by writing can free students from that "stupid" feeling — expressed (yes, expressed) in that complaint I mentioned earlier: that they know what they want to say but just can't find the words to say it. Instead of believing that their struggle with language confirms that they just are "no good at English," for example, students can see that their language will struggle most when they are grappling with new, complex, or sophisticated thoughts. Bad writing becomes a sign of growth, not inadequacy.

Clean, clear, concise poetry or prose thus may express deep and provocative thought, and with the best authors, who make writing look effortless, it's probably true. But it also may express shallow, cliched, and stale thought. Student writing, in my view, should struggle.

But the problem is not merely that the expressive view is generally wrong; it serves as a bad excuse. Students write bad poems and then dodge criticism by saying, "But that's what I felt." Memoirs, or short stories written from personal experience, remain beyond critique because "that's how it happened." And so on.

I hit this pretty hard in my classes by designing writing assignments that force students not to write about themselves, and by challenging the expressive theory whenever it raises its head. And I rarely, if ever, regret doing so.

Enter A Scanner Darkly, which Dick announces explicitly arises from personal experience. In fact, in his afterword, he announces, "I myself, I am not a character in the novel; I am the novel."

Talk about hackles rising. This seems to challenge everything I try to instill in my students. It took a couple weeks – and writing this blog entry – to realize that the "rules" I'm inscribing in my class aren't really rules at all; they are guidelines or suggestions, and as such should be tested, challenged.

Basically, I lost sight of the pedagogical nature of my position. It took A Scanner Darkly to remind me that I don't want so much to squelch self-expression as simply to expand beyond the "bad excuse" reflex that discourages revision or openness to critique.

A Scanner Darkly does feel like it expresses a life – and it does so better than just about any biography, autobiography, or memoir that I've read, despite its departures from the conventions of realism. The skilled writer, I am reminded, need not fear expression.

And since a number of my students are, in fact, quite skilled, perhaps I need to fear it a bit less as well.