An Essay on Poetry

According to the Judeo-Christian Bible, God created the world by means of words, by divine fiat. He said "Let there be," and there was. So it was words that brought the world into existence in the first place, and it is words (by means of human fiat, if you will) that create our own worlds as well. For it is by means of words that we apprehend, categorize, and even think and feel and know our world. We even interpret our most important experiences (like falling in love) in terms of the words our culture uses to talk about them.

When I taught my composition courses in college, I presented my classes with two theories about the relationship between language and reality. I called the one most people assume to be true the Expressive Theory, and I called the one I still think is true the Creative Theory. According to both, of course, "things are what we say they are." But in the case of the Expressive Theory the emphasis is on "are" ("things are what we say they are"), whereas in the case of the Creative Theory the emphasis is on "say" ("things are what we say they are"). What this simple scheme tells us is that words come before meaning, words give rise to meaning. But once words have given rise to meaning, it seems to most of us that meaning came before words. That's just how "creative" of our realities words actually are.

Poetry is art by means of words. The word itself is of Greek origin and its etymological meaning is "making" (to say that someone is a poet is to call him or her a "maker"). This oldest of the human arts was born in song (and dance). Rhythm and rhyme (and reason) go hand-in-hand when it comes to poetry. Though the language of poetry is the language of emotions, it is not devoid of rationality either. In a good poem the head is the head of the heart, even as it is the heart that gives life to the head. And this is true even if we accept Pascal's famous dictum about the heart having reasons that reason will not understand.

Trying to define poetry is probably a useless enterprise. The literature on it is vast. Most famous poets have written about it. For Alexander Pope, for example, the essence of it came from what "oft was thought but never so well expressed," for Wordsworth it was a matter of the "overflow of powerful feelings . . . emotions recollected in tranquility," whereas for Shelley poets were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." Coleridge was perhaps the most ambitious in asserting that in writing poetry the human mind imitates the divine mind in a god-like act of creation (by a kind of human fiat, which is thus an imitative repetition of its original counterpart).

My own attempt at getting at the essence of poetry will be more humble: poetry is the creation of meaningful beauty (or beautiful meaning) by means of words, which thus both create and express who or what we are. There are no limits as to the subject matter of poetry (today's poets even use so-called obscene language in their poems). Whatever our human hearts and minds can contemplate or brood over or entertain (pun intended?) is fair game. Love & death & sex & marriage - even the price of tea in China.

Poetry used to enjoy great popular appeal. This was especially evident in the nineteenth century. In the second half of the twentieth century things began to change. Poetry seems to have gone to colleges and universities where it is nowadays only read in literature courses and, of course, in creative writing courses. It seems that today's readers of poetry are other poets. (And if "hell is other people" - as Sartre would have it - how could other poets be the salvation of poetry?) There is, of course, another way of looking at this: poets (of the academic sort) are alive and well in academia (as well as in coffeehouses here and there), and still have their fans, limited as they may be, whereas the popular appeal that poetry once enjoyed has by now shifted over to popular music. It is through popular music that most people still enjoy "poetry," even if they don't think of it in those terms.

One problem that lots of people have with poetry is that poets don't "tell it like it is," they use strange and incomprehensible language, full of "quaint and curious" metaphors (not to mention metonymies and synecdoches). There is, of course, a good reason for this. But it has a circuitous history. Once what we now call clichés were indispensable. In an oral culture repetitious and formulaic phrases aided and abetted memory. After the invention of writing, repetition and formulaic prose came slowly to be seen as hackneyed, as not truly responsive to realities (thus, as even perhaps distortive of them). The same old same old deadens our senses and our perceptions, so that using the same old words for new feelings would render the new feelings prematurely old.

Poets use new metaphors (or put things in new perspectives) in an attempt to make us see and feel things as if for the first time. They renew the old so that we may, like children, have that sense of wonder again about what's around us or in us, for that matter. Of course, famous poems, poems that we love and perhaps even know by heart ("knowing by heart" is an interesting phrase, is it not?), seem to bear up under repeated readings or recitations. Here repetition of what is fixed ("formulaic") does not diminish our perceptions. This may be a paradox. Or perhaps just the old-fashioned "test of time." Certain poems pass this test with flying colors (if I may be permitted a cliché here).

Actually, this problem of poets not "telling it like it is" is intricately related to common phrases and expressions, too. There are innumerable common phrases and expressions in our languages that were once fresh as daisies but have become overused and worn out by time. So we no longer think of the mental feat it takes to understand them. We seem to understand them instantly (even automatically), as if they were all so clear that they needed no interpretation at all (like "passing a test with flying colors"). The difference between such commonplaces and "difficult" poetry is a difference in degree and not in kind.

One way I used to illustrate this in beginning literature classes was by means of a comparison between a popular song and a poem that students might have found too difficult to understand. Here's an example:

Love in the First Degree

by Alabama

I once thought of love as a prison,
A place I didn't want to be,
So long ago I've made a decision
To be footloose and fancyfree.

But you came and I was so tempted
To gamble on love just one time,
I never though I would get caught,
It seemed like the perfect crime.

Baby, you left me defenseless,
I have only got one plea,
Lock me away inside of your love
And throw away the key.
I am guilty of love in the first degree.

I thought it would be so simple,
Like a thousand times before.
I'd take what I wanted
And just walk away,
But I never made it to the door.
Now, babe, I am not begging for mercy,
Go ahead and throw the book at me,
If loving you is a crime I know that I'm
As guilty as a man can be.

Baby, you left me defenseless,
I have only got one plea,
Lock me away inside of your love
And throw away the key.
I am guilty of love in the first degree.

Like many a poem, this song also sustains a metaphor. It talks of love as if it were a crime for which the lover can be imprisoned. But how and by whom? Clearly the imprisonment in question is not an imprisonment at all in a literal sense. The speaker wants to be locked away inside of his beloved's "love," so that prison here emerges as, in some sense, a commitment, even a marriage (of happily ever-aftering fame to boot). Note, too, that these connotations are not at all negative. The speaker is more than willing to become his beloved's "prisoner." In any case, people (young as well as old) have no problem with a song like this. Yet they might have difficulty understanding the following:

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

by e.e.cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

I have copied this poem here with all the idiosyncrasies that e.e. cummings is famous for (like the liberties he takes with punctuation, for example), but (of course) there is much more that's idiosyncratic here than meets the eye. Yet "irrational" as the words of the poem may seem when taken literally, they amount to a beautifully intense expression of a man's love for a woman (in this case, of e.e. cummings's love for his wife). What the reader (who stops resisting what at first may look like strange and unfamiliar metaphors) can quickly see is just how wondrously and uniquely love is described here, so that the reader may actually experience it with the speaker of the poem in such as way as if it were the first time ever anyone ever fell in love.

Such is the power of poetry. The trick is to stop resisting it. The trick is to recognize, implicitly, that the language of poetry is simply our ordinary language renewed and intensified. It is as if something were being said (and thus created and brought into reality) for the first time. When it comes to a good poem, each time is the first time. The words become ours. We become the words. So that only after things are what we say they are, can they really be what they are to begin with.

*This article is written by Steven C. Scheer.
*The writer notes: This short essay tries to get at what poetry is all about and what it can do for us. Your comments on this (or on anything else on this Web site, of course) are welcome: Send e-mail to: scheer@sigecom.net

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Unthinking Thinking

Steven C. Scheer

This brief little essay is based on talks I have given to most of my classes in a simple attempt to explain what education is all about. It was inspired by a statement I once made spontaneously in a class many years ago:

"We must unthink our thinking lest our thinking become unthinking thinking."

During the last few years of my teaching career I had used "We must unthink our thinking lest our thinking become unthinking thinking" as a motto for my philosophy of education. The reason for this is simple enough: the greatest enemy to critical thinking is habitual ways of thinking. The scheme is, roughly, as follows: You are what you say, but what you say depends on what you feel/think/know, and what you feel/think/know depends on what you have learned so far.

Question: Are you sure that what you have learned so far is right, correct, true, & good? (surely you would not knowingly hold onto what was wrong, incorrect, false, & bad? But, like it or not, there is a good chance that there is mixture in you between the right and wrong of things. Question: Where has "what you have learned so far" come from?

From your culture, that is: from your parents, peers, schools, teachers, churches, temples, priests, rabbis, politics, politicians, TV, movies, newspapers, magazines, textbooks, books . . .

It is not easy to give the lie to one's culture. It is not easy to give the lie to what we habitually accept as true. But that's precisely what an education should do. One definition of education (as opposed to indoctrination) is that it is a series of inquiries that lead to the student's ability to think critically - that is, to his/her ability to transcend the prejudices of his/her time and place.

This is difficult, in part, because the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts." Which is true in either direction. What we have learned may be more than what we have been taught. Or what we have been taught may be more than what we have learned. In the first case we may be wiser than our culture. In the second, less wise. But either case depends on whether what we had been taught is good or bad, right or wrong, in the first place.

Another (and related difficulty) is that some parts of our culture may partake of educative moves whereas other parts may be highly indoctrinative. And it isn't always easy to tell the difference. One way of defining wisdom, in fact, would be along these lines. Those who can tell the difference have obtained wisdom, those that can't, have not yet (and may never do so). "Word to the wise."

An example: in the ante-bellum South many believed that white people had a God-given right to own and sell black people. It is important to realize that in the eyes of many this was a God-given right. In retrospect it is easy to see that this wasn't a God-given right but a kind of will to power (to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche). In any case, the institution of slavery had rested on what we might call a "societal fiction" (in this case the white people's alleged right to own and sell black people). People in the ante-bellum South who accepted this "truth" at face value were practicing what I call a habitual way of thinking. Or unthinking thinking, if you will.

Such thinking is very, very difficult to change. At times great social upheaval seems necessary to bring about a change. It took the Civil War, for example, to abolish slavery. And more than a century after the abolition of this now admittedly inhumane institution racial prejudices, conscious and unconscious, still prevail among large segments of the population.

Critical thinking is important because without it habitual ways of thinking would never be challenged. Again, the trouble is that forms of unthinking thinking can be deeply rooted in our consciousness. They exist in us in myriads of assumptions and unquestioned opinions. It was with this idea in mind that I ended a section towards the end of one of my published books with the words: " . . . our least questioned ideas may very well be our most questionable ones" (Pious Impostures and Unproven Words, p. 133).

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The Fictitious Term Paper

Imagine that you are a student in a writing course where you receive the following instructions: Your task is to write a fictitious term paper. The catch is that the format of your paper must follow the style established by the MLA Handbook to a tee. The paper itself must be seven pages long with six pages of text followed by a page listing your works cited. On the seventh page of your paper you must, in fact, list seven works cited representing the following categories: two single-author books, two essays from collections of essays (that is, from books that have editors rather than authors), two articles from the same number of learned journals (I said learned journals, like PMLA or Diacritics, not Time or Psychology Today), and one work of literature of your choice (any work will do).

In the text of your paper you should quote from the work of literature of your choice from time to time, varying short with long quotations, in order to make your paper look real even as you are careful to maintain the illusion that the work of literature of your choice is the subject matter of your paper. Interspersed with the quotations from the work of literature of your choice you should cite at least once from each of your other sources. Otherwise, the text of your paper should have nothing to do with either the work of literature of your choice or any of your other sources. You may write whatever you wish. Your writing, in fact, may be humorous, parodic, irreverent, or irrational - in other words, completely "off the wall." Your grade will be based on the form of your paper and on the quality of your writing.

The initial reaction of my students to these instructions is usually mixed. On the one hand, they seem delighted with the prospect of writing a nonsensical paper, on the other, they seem anxious about the apparently complicated requirements for the scholarly, professional format. To reduce their anxiety, I provide them with a sample fictitious term paper (see Appendix) in which I myself painstakingly fulfill all of the requirements in question. In fact, in my sample fictitious term paper I even cover all those little tidbits that forever bedevil our students, like the use of ellipses for omissions from and the use of brackets for interpolations within quotations, or the commonsensical distinction (which never strikes my students as commonsensical) between the author of an essay and the editor of the volume in which the essay in question appears, and so on. In addition to the sample paper, I also provide my students with a set of recommendations for the whole procedure. The instructions typically say something like the following: Go to the library and select the works you will cite in your paper. Pick up a work of literature (The Scarlet Letter, for example), two single-author books (such as Derrida's Of Grammatology), two collections of essays (Reader-Response Criticism, edited by Jane Tompkins, for example), and two recent issues of any two learned journals (American Literature, Critical Inquiry, what have you). Having recorded the necessary information for your list of works cited (author, title of book, essay, or article, publisher, date, and so on), flip the pages of each of your sources until you find a few sentences or paragraphs that strike you as worthy of being included in your paper. Once you have copied down all the quotations you think you will need, you will have completed your "research," and you may start working on the paper itself. Just give it a title and begin writing. Remember you may write whatever you wish (you may even use obscene language, for all I care) - anything goes, nothing matters, as long as whatever you write is well written.

Experimenting with this fictitious term paper requirement for approximately a decade now, I have learned a number of things, some of them pleasantly surprising. My initial motive for establishing this assignment was to spare myself the painful experience of reading terribly botched papers where the form was as badly mangled as the content. I figured that if I could just trade the content in for the form I would be able to insist on the form without appearing to be in mindless conformity to the letter of its law. At the same time, I also wanted my students to realize that the conventions of scholarly writing are simply the rules of the game. Since students don't mind the rules of baseball or basketball, why should they mind the rules of scholarly writing? Doesn't playing by the rules simply show them that they belong, that they know what they are doing, and that the penalties for breaking the rules are as much part of the logic of the game as the rules themselves? Furthermore, don't the rules of the game facilitate rather than hinder the players, don't the rules, in fact, make the game? My students had no trouble with this analogy, nor did they begrudge the formalities of scholarly writing once it was clear to them that they didn't have to bother with its content.

I myself was very confident the first time I gave this assignment. I felt that my students could now concentrate on the "how" without worrying about the "what." I also hoped that not worrying about the "what" would free their writing of its customary constraints. I certainly expected it to flow with ease rather than meander aimlessly in the choppy current that usually passes for their expository or argumentative prose. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt when I collected the first batch of fictitious term papers. Every single one of them looked professional. So far, so good, I sighed. Scanning the titles also made me realize that I would be in for a lot of fun reading. One of the titles, for example, was obviously a take-off on that time-honored assignment I am sure we have all struggled with when we were students: "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" - it was called "I Was a Deconstruction Worker." Reading that first batch of papers made me discover a number of things.

The first discovery was a pleasant surprise. As I read paper after paper, I soon saw that the vast majority of the fictitious term papers were highly self-reflexive. Since self-reflection is not as a rule the forte of most of our students, this was a welcome discovery indeed. And along with the self-reflexivity came a sense of fun, playfulness, even mischievousness. Many a fictitious term paper seemed enamored of mocking and teasing the assignment itself or the "crazy professor" who thought it up in the first place. Here is a typical quote from a recent paper: "You say this paper should be fun to write. Well, I am not quite sure I agree. In fact, I am positive I don't agree. Writing (any kind) is work for me and work isn't fun. In other words, you lied to me, in a sense." A few sentences later the student quotes a passage from a scholarly work, which admonishes us against the disguising of the truth, then she comes back to the issue of the professor having lied to her. She writes: "Really, I am just kidding . . . I've always wanted to accuse a teacher of something. Now I have, so don't take it personally (doesn't the song "Personally" come to mind when you hear that word?)."

Note that in addition to the mocking/teasing "intimacy" between the teacher and herself which this students feels free to project in her paper, she is also manifestly writing by a kind of free association of ideas. Not only is the quotation which warns the reader against disguising the truth sandwiched between the playful accusations hurled at the teacher who said that writing a fictitious term paper might be fun, but the word "personally," used in one context, suddenly becomes the title of a song, and so on. Obviously, the student's attempt to write nonsense merely to fill the gaps between the various quotations which constitute her "research" has backfired. It is clear that by merely playing with words, the student has begun to think on paper, so to speak. It is also clear that the quotations, which according to the requirements for the assignment do not have to be linked up in any way with the student's own text, have nevertheless become subtly intertextual with it. This same phenomenon appears in fictitious paper after fictitious paper. The quotations selected prior to the act of writing (or, perhaps, alongside with the act of writing, as the case may be) begin to influence the student's own "nonsensical" composition in such a way that a kind of context emerges in spite of the fact that this is precisely what the student seems to want to avoid or, at least, remain nonchalantly indifferent to, with the teacher's prior blessing to boot. In other words, not having to worry about what he/she is writing, each student seems to naturally and spontaneously worry about precisely what he/she is writing. Since there are no pressures on this process, though, since the process is "merely" a kind of play or game, since it is "fiction," in other words, the process itself unexpectedly takes on all the desirable qualities we ourselves try to project into or extrapolate from our own "real" writing.

Speaking of our own "real" writing, it is clear that the customary distinction between the real and fictive is vastly overstated. I take it that Robert Scholes is right when he claims that "[a]ll writing, all composition, is construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it. There is no mimesis, only poiesis. No recording. Only constructing" (7). I also take it that this same statement applies to reading as well. The only difference between writing/reading the real and the fictitious term paper, therefore, is that while the real is serious the fictitious is not. But no sooner have I made this distinction than I am troubled by it, partly because I cannot forget one of Derrida's curious and apparently odd remarks concerning this issue. "There is always a surprise in store for . . . any criticism that might think it had mastered the game." Speaking of a "hidden thread" in the text, Derrida goes on to say that

[i]f reading and writing are one, . . . if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart. One must then, in a single gesture, but doubled, read and write. And that person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this [du coup], would feel himself authorized merely to add on; that is, to add any old thing. He would add nothing, the seam wouldn't hold. Reciprocally, he who through "methodological prudence," "norms of objectivity," or "safeguards of knowledge" would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read[/write] at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the "not serious" as in the "serious." The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play. (63-64)

If the difference between the real and the fictive cannot be maintained in terms of the presence/absence of "mere" seriousness, then I think it would be helpful for us to distinguish the two in terms of intent. The intent of the fictitious term paper is to exemplify the student's mastery of the game or play of scholarly, professional writing. The fact that this kind of writing is "game" or "play" does not one whit detract from its customary/ordinary "seriousness." On the contrary, the fact that the assignment requires the student to play the game self-consciously "merely" guarantees that he/she is going to discover the real in the fictive. And this leads me to a consideration of the second discovery I have made repeatedly during the history of my fictitious term paper requirement in the last decade or so.

I would, of course, be overstating the case if I didn't admit that the self-conscious or self-reflexive papers my students keep writing for me are miraculously self-inventive or self-generative. My students usually "imitate" me. Not in the sense denied by Robert Scholes ("There is no mimesis, only poiesis"), but in the sense of playful burlesque or mischievous travesty. I must further confess that the sample fictitious term paper I provide for my students is not only itself self-conscious or self-reflexive, but that it, too, fails to keep its own text from being contaminated by the quotations intertextualized with it. In other words, while my own fictitious term paper is itself humorous, parodic, irreverent, and irrational (that is, completely "off the wall"), it nevertheless makes a kind of sense concerning the "theme" of (excuse this barbaric coinage) "fictitious term-paperality." Not only do I extol the virtues of the "theme" in question in a variety of playfully mocking/teasing ways, but I keep quoting texts like "[b]oth the author and the narrator . . . maintain their sanity and discover truth by the creation of a rational lie, a fiction" (Dryden 37) or "[b]y the end of the story what appeared to be real but turned out to be fake appears to be more real than if it had been real in the first place" (Scheer 46-47).

My second discovery, then, has to do with an answer to the question: why is it that our students write terribly bad real papers when they are demonstrably capable of writing pretty good fictitious ones. As I have already indicated, the answer cannot be that the fictitious paper is not real. If anything, it appears more real than if it had been real in the first place. Perhaps the answer is hidden in the intent I have mentioned above. But why should the "intent" in question make such a difference? To answer this question I shall have to invoke my third discovery (and collapse it with my second still under consideration here). Judged by its etymological meaning, the word "school" once meant "play." Perhaps the trouble is that we have managed to turn it into something altogether too "serious." And that's the problem, as I see it, with asking our students to write "real" papers. The "real" papers aren't real in the first place. They are certainly not destined for publication, which renders their very ethos unreal. In other words, the "real" papers in question are written for the sake of learning how to write a real paper. They are real only in the sense that the students are required to go through the customary procedures ordinarily necessary for their production. Which is the same as saying that the "real" papers are not real since they ipso facto represent (albeit in a pretentiously disguised form) exercises in futility. This is precisely why they deprive the students of a voice just at the time when they have the greatest need for a voice of their own.

And this takes me back to the notion of "school" as "play." The fictitious term paper requirement instantly restores the institution in which we, as teachers, ply our trade to its own forgotten intent. No wonder our students get confused when society distinguishes the schools they attend from the "real" world for the sake of which they attend schools in the first place. No wonder that they, along with society, tend to despise schools, the customary rhetoric of "lip service" to the contrary notwithstanding. To restore its rightful importance we must recognize the school not as a place in which to work but as a place in which to play - that is, pretend to work. The fictitious term paper succeeds precisely where the real paper is doomed to fail. What is paradoxical is that in spite of the requirement for the professional format it does not impose on the student the stultifying burden of conformity. But perhaps this is not paradoxical at all. By making going through the motions the obvious game or play going through the motions has always already been meant to be, the fictitious term paper liberates the student from "work" so that in "play" he/she may master it. Furthermore, by playing the game seriously, we will also give our students an opportunity to experience for themselves that leisure is indeed the basis of culture (as explained in Joseph Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture) and that the human race is a naturally playful species (as exemplified by Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture). Perhaps the time is ripe for recognizing that the school is not a place of stultifying "reality" but the arena of liberating "fiction."

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Dryden, Edgar A. Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.

Scheer, Steven C. Kálmán Mikszáth. Twayne World Authors Series 462. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1977.

Scholes. Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

APPENDIX

The following is a "typical" fictitious term paper (one of many I have written during a twenty-year period while using this assignment), actually used in the spring semester of 1986. The sample fictitious term paper should perform a double function. On the one hand, it should exemplify the format established by the MLA Handbook, on the other, it should serve as a model for the students to imitate. What my own experience clearly tells me is that such a "model" works best when it is not only playful but also a bit irreverent, even perhaps a bit risqué.

Steven C. Scheer
Professor Scheer
En 101
February 11, 1986

The Fictitious Paper as the Real Thing:
Or, How Your Inimitable Professor Attempts to Show You Why

The fictitious paper is not only real, it is also a lot of fun. The fun comes from fiction. Reality, as we all know, is a bore. It is, to be precise, a series of relentlessly boring little hassles punctuated by uncertain anxieties, not the least of which may come in the wake of assignments given by lethally boring professors who stay up nights to think up new methods with which to torture their students. I don't know, I just don't know. But at least I am honest. Which is why (I suppose) I seem to be haunted by one of Hawthorne's clever remarks in The Scarlet Letter (1850) according to which "[t]o the untrue man, the whole universe is false" (142). And that's as it should be, except of course it shouldn't be that way, even if it should (not) be.

Let me try again. The purpose of this course (one of its purposes, if you like) is to teach you (and allow you to practice, of course) certain things about writing scholarly/critical papers. Such papers have two basic ingredients: form and content. Both, in a sense, are institutionalized. The reason is that both, in a sense, require certification. To get the point I am trying to make here, just think of all those people you know who may be certifiable and should, thus, be institutionalized. There you go. Perhaps this (in any case) is why Derrida is interested in the following perplexing questions:

Where does writing begin? When does writing begin? Where and when does the trace, writing in general, common root of speech and writing, narrow itself down into 'writing' in the colloquial sense? Where and when does one pass [gas? Just kidding] from one writing to another, from writing in general to writing in the narrow sense, from the trace to the graphie, from one graphic system to another, and, in the field of a graphic code, from one graphic discourse to another, etc.? (74)

I myself am, of course, deeply interested in (and perplexed by) all these questions but in a slightly different way. Raising them in a different context, on the other hand, is not going to get us anywhere. Nevertheless, "[t]his attempt to deconstruct Peirce could go on citing other instances of self-referential inconsistencies or self-contradictions in 'The Fixation of Belief,' though it could never point to 'mistakes' in Peirce's logic which Peirce himself could have avoided" (Scheer 336). You may question my own logic here, of course, but remember that you run the risk of flunking this course. Which may well bug you no end (am I mixing metaphors here? Never mind). I mean, why should the teacher be always right. Right? Just to show you that I am a really, really nice guy, I shall hereby declare that at this particular point in the history of my mental decline I AM WRONG! I would appreciate it, of course (I keep using this splendid little expression because, you know, this is a course), if you didn't quote me on this. Thank you so much.

At this point (in time) I seem to be fascinated by the narrator's question attributed to Hester in The Scarlet Letter which raises itself (and I quote) in the following manner: "Hester could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a defect of truth" here somewhere (161). One may go along with another critic in this case (even though the quotation coming up deals with quite another con/text) and reluctantly agree that "[t]his sentence deliberately frustrates the reader's natural desire to organize the particulars it offers" (Fish 81).

Tickle, tickle, funny bone;
How I wonder why you laugh.
If writing, it is such a bore
What makes you write this . . . graph?

I just made up this little ditty for no reason whatsoever. One needs an interruption every now and then. (If you can't beat them join them, right?) In any case, we were talking about some defect (original, to boot) in some truth. A truly fascinating subject. I was reading this article in a recent issue of PMLA the other day, and I encountered the following intriguing statement: "The plot is distributed through five principal images: apple, wilderness, temple, body, and seeds" (Teskey 14).

This issue is so significant (it is so fraught with a kind of highly problematic [non]sense) that it deserves a new par/a/graph. We were (I hope you still remember this) speaking of some original defect of truth. This is important. The reason is not difficult to find. You see, the images in the quotation from Teskey remind me of some very genetic things. The apple. Could this be the pro/verbial fruit (forbidden, to boot) that Adam and Eve (ladies first?) consumed in the Garden of Eden? Wow! "Wilderness, temple, body, and seeds" suddenly form a con/text fraught with sign/if/icance (please notice the "if" in the middle of that marvelous word). What is (was) outside the Garden is (was), of course, wilderness. Temple. How should I take this? Of course, one's body is, in a sense, the temple of one's soul (which may well raise another question: which is the "meta" in the metaphor, the temple as body, or the temple as church? Never mind), in which case "seeds" are not necessarily apple seeds but spermatozoa. The "seminal" in seminal fluid (which carries the semen [seeds, lit.]) is, of course, related to such words as "seminar" and "seminary" (this last place is where young men study for the priesthood, for example - which would make the young men in question "seeds" or "seedlings" of sorts - never mind).

You may wonder (wonder, wonder, wonder) how all this relates to the question we are considering here, the question concerning some original defect in some truth. I shall tell you in due course. Right now I want you to consider another "questioning" sort of quotation. Here it comes: "Here the 'godless' becomes the 'blameless'; the man whose 'conduct' is an 'eloquent sermon' makes the 'professional preachers' seem odds-on favorites to be 'narrow-minded and bigoted'" (Regan 223). In another context (once again, I shall invoke The Scarlet Letter) we encounter passages such as this one: "thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril" (157). What begins to loom large here (and is, consequently, writ large here, too) is something in the nature of a paradox (para + doxa = aside/beside itself + opinion). To spell this out more clearly, I might say as follows: from two radically unrelated con/texts we seem to be getting the message that the good are really bad whereas the bad are really good. No comment.

That's a lie (I mean the "no comment" above, of course). The truth is that perhaps the truth itself is always already a lie. This does not work vice versa. In other words, lies are not therefore truths, except of course the ones that let you know that that's what they are from the beginning (works of fiction, for example - which would make "works of fact" [factually "true" works] really lies, which is [and I kid you not, in a sense] what they really are. So there). Here's cryptic proof for this (nothing is too good for Uncle Steve's students): Culler exclaims, explaining a point in Derrida, that "[m]eaning is context-bound, but context is boundless" (123). This leads Culler to consider that "structural openness of context" which is "essential to all disciplines; the scientist discovers that factors previously disregarded are relevant to the behavior of certain objects; the historian brings new or reinterpreted data to bear on a particular event; the critic relates a passage or a text to a context that makes it appear in a new light" (124).

I hope you are beginning to see the way in which my "funny" argument is beginning to make alarming sense: since the human condition originates in a fall from divine grace, all human truths are subsequently tainted by lies reminiscent of the first one (in my hopefully soon forthcoming book [an referene to my Pious Impostures and Unproven Words which has been published more than 10 years ago by now] I call this the "lie about a lie that was not a lie"). Which should bring me (around) to my conclusion. This paper is intended to exemplify the fictitious term paper. As usual, it fails. That is, though is was meant to be entirely spurious, irrational, and parodic, it has (I don't exactly know where I took the wrong turn) almost become "serious." I know from past experience that you will experience something not unlike the experience I have just experienced. Let me nevertheless lay this down as a "law": your paper must not make sense. This isn't, of course, an absolute law. Nor could I enforce it, even if it were. So do the best you can. But have fun, in any case. I think I shall have written this in a later handout for this course (which you may or may not receive in this one), so let me "prepeat" (the opposite of "repeat") it here: what is no fun to write, is no fun to read. In other words, no fun for the writer, no fun for the reader. In other other words, without fun there is no fun. Or words to that effect. Are you still with me? Good, because if what I have been saying here is a true lie, then the fictitious term paper you are about to write will have been the truest thing you shall ever have written in your life to date. Makes you think, does it not? And wonder, too.

Works Cited

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Fish, Stanley E. "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics." Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 70-100.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Leo Marx. New York: Signet-NAL, 1959.

Regan, Robert. "The Reprobate Elect in The Innocents Abroad." American Literature54 (1982): 240-57.

Scheer, Steven C. "Unfixing 'The Fixation of Belief': Can Peirce Be Deconstructed?" Semiotics 1984. Ed. John Deely. Lanham: UP of America, 1985. 333-340.

Teskey, Gordon. "From Allegory to Dialectic: Imagining Error in Spenser and Milton." PMLA 101 (1986): 9-23.

*This article is written by Steven c Scheer.
*The writer notes: Originally delivered at several conferences, this paper was subsequently published in the Journal of Teaching Writing (see the whole story of this paper in the previous Web page). This version has a "typical" fictitious term paper appended to it, one of many I had written years ago, as a model for my students, so they could see what the fictitious term paper should look and sound like. They actually wrote many that were funnier and, in some cases, better than mine, which is the best testimonial of the success of this assignment.

Send e-mail to:
scheer@sigecom.net

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On Plagiarism: For Students Everywhere

Preface: Even established scholars get into trouble from time to time when they fail to acknowledge their sources or fail to use quotation marks around words taken from materials they have read. The word "plagiarism" can apply to a paper even if a student dutifully footnotes every paragraph lifted from sources without the use of quotation marks. The word itself is of Latin origin and it has to do with "kidnapping." The worst case scenario is when a person puts his or her name on a piece of writing written entirely by someone else and does this without the permission of the writer of the original with the sole purpose of passing the piece on to the unsuspecing reader as his or her own.

The case in the wonderful movie Finding Forrester is unique. There the student uses the words of a famous writer with the writer's permission. There the issue is an egotistical teacher's prejudice against a black student from the "slums." The teacher in question can't believe that such a student could write so well, so when he finds that the student in question has "lifted" certain words from a published article (the student is actually not really aware of the fact that the article in question has been published), the teacher tries to destroy the student's career at the fine school that he is attending on a scholarship. Justice triumphs in the movie. May it always triumph in real life as well. But - if you are a student - don't count on getting away with someone else's words, especially not if you are trying to cheat by using them.



USING AND ABUSING SOURCES

Acknowledge your sources: That's really the heart of the matter. You may use whatever sources you want. You may use books, essays, articles. You may use learned journals, magazines, newspapers. You may use the Internet. Novels, stories, drama, poetry. It doesn't matter what you use. You are allowed to use anything and everything, so long as you acknowledge the fact! Nevertheless, here's a general breakdown of the types of use (rather than abuse) of sources:

Quoting: You may quote all you want. Papers about literature usually have lots of quotations in them. Historians like to paraphrase. Sociologists and psychologists like to use lots of references which they tend to briefly summarize. When writing a paper in a given field it behooves you to use the format and standards customary in a given field, such as the MLA Style Manual or the Chicago Manual of Style (in literature) or the APA style in most of the social sciences.

The main thing about quoting is not to misrepresent the author. That is, don't quote only those parts of his/her work that make him/her "look bad." In everyday parlance, don't take things out of context. (Of course, strictly speaking, all quotations are lifted out of their original context, but this still can be done in an honest way, in a way that indicates what the original context is.) The point is that when you are fair to your source even if you disagree with it, you are bound to come off looking better than if you had not played fair.

Paraphrasing: This means to say the same thing in other words. In other words, you repeat the point(s) made by an author using your own words. If the words used by the author are too special in some sense to be "paraphrased," then (by all means) quote them. In a paraphrase it is possible to incorporate bits and pieces of someone else's writing into your own, but those bits and pieces need to be enclosed by quotation marks.

The thing about paraphrasing (and the thing that makes it difficult) is that you must understand the point(s) made by the author. Otherwise you simply cannot properly represent his/her meaning with any degree of accuracy. (If you can spare the time, you might want to read my essay on "The Art of Reading" elsewhere on this Web site.) A paraphrase is usually practically as long as the original. That's what distinguishes it from:

Summarizing: This also means to say the same thing but in much fewer words. It is possible to sum up the thesis of a whole book in a sentence or two. A brief summary doesn't even have to be documented, provided that you acknowledge what you are doing by mentioning the book in question (e.g., John Doe in his You Name It argues that people who are weird give weird names to their children). Obviously summaries can range from brief re-statements of theses to rather detailed analyses. One big mistake a student can make in writing a "research paper" chock-full of "innocent" or "unintended" plagiarism (which is plagiarism nevertheless), is to follow a single source too slavishly and to use much of the language of the original too frequently without the use of quotation marks.

Influence and Common Knowledge also go into the writing of papers. You may be influenced by someone else's thoughts and/or words without being conscious of the fact. This happens to all of us. If you do remember that you have read something somewhere you are about to put in your paper though you no longer remember the source, it is still good practice to acknowledge the fact (e.g., "I read somewhere that those who have to steal ideas from others are more pitiable than those from whom the ideas are stolen"). What constitutes Common Knowledge should be fairly obvious, though (once again) different fields may have different standards. Nevertheless, you may safely assume that whatever most reasonably educated people know is in this realm (e.g., that George Washington was the first president of the United States or that Shakespeare was an Elizabethan playwright or that Freud is the father of psychoanalysis and the like - footnoting statements like this would just make you look silly).

Final Words of Advice: When everything is said and done, no matter what you say and do in a paper, acknowledge your sources and no one shall be able to accuse you of intellectual dishonesty. Not acknowledging your sources doesn't simply make you look bad. It makes you a thief. It also deprives you of all credibility.

You really and truly owe it to yourself to do your own writing. You deserve to get credit for what you do. And you will get the credit, too, if you do it right.

*This article is written by Steven C Scheer.
*The writer notes: In the last decade of my active career in teaching, I used this handout in all my classes for all my students. I hope students who visit this Web site will read it and apply its advice to their own writing.

Students everywhere: you owe it to yourselves to do your own writing. And you owe it to yourselves to honestly and properly acknowledge all your sources.

This handout should help you towards realizing that goal. Take this advice to heart. It comes from an old teacher who offers it to you with all his heart. Send e-mail to:
scheer@sigecom.net

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