"Writing is not an art," a PhD student objected after reading last week's post: "it's a craft." Naturally, it depends on what you mean by "art" and what you mean by "craft".
To call scholarly writing an art is, of course, an attempt to elevate it by association with, for example, poetry. But we should remember the great effort that modernist poets made in the early twentieth century to recover their art from triviality by referring to themselves as craftsmen. We generally think of art as the pursuit of beauty and craft as the pursuit of utility. The "fine arts" make beautiful things, while our craft traditions make things we can use. It is the stylistic ideal of modernism, however, to bring these two pursuits together. "One definition of beauty," writes Ezra Pound, "is: aptness to purpose." As a poet, he traced his tradition back to the troubadours, the most famous of whom perhaps, Arnaut, was praised by Dante as "the greatest craftsman [il miglior fabbro] of the language". But it is worth keeping in mind that poetry held a much less, shall we say, decorative place in society during the twelfth century than it does today. It was very much a part of the "media" in which social life went on (they didn't have television or newspapers, of course). Poetry had a purpose, and its beauty was indeed to be apt to it.
He praised him as "the better craftsman," but he also sent him to hell!
ReplyDeleteWhich speaks well of his objectivity, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteEliot's use of the expression is backhanded anyway: "You're the better craftsman," he says, while also implying, "But I'm the better poet."
ReplyDeleteEliot did not send Pound to hell, but Ezra ended up in his own hell anyway.
I'm not sure he "ended up" in hell. He certainly went through hell, though. Anyway, "'I don't know how humanity stands it with a painted paradise at the end of it without a painted paradise at the end of it." I've always liked that line.
ReplyDeleteThe key point in the contention that writing is a craft, not an art, could be that the elevation of writing to that level makes it overly in-approachable and, basically, much harder than it needs to be - almost a dark art of sorts and not 'just' something that you can train, get good at by virtue of repetition (i.e. not inspiration) and needn't be very talented (from the outset) to do. Writing surely can approach being or just plain be artful, but for most of us (especially those in the process of acquiring the second language of research) it can be a very mundane thing, something that gets done by showing up for it, paying attention, turning distractions off and the pomodoro on, if that's your thing. The mundane nature of the work of writing is the message in what I guess is your approach to writing and that's the empowering thing. Today, for instance, I've written four paragraphs (they're a little long, but that's a question of shape, right?) and done an after-the-fact outline for a new paper (building on a fixed paragraph-by-numbered-paragraph structure) by setting the timer, taking breaks and being decidedly non-artful. For me, it makes academic work just a little more approachable and that's kind of a groovy feeling to start the weekend with.
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