Prose and Progress

"Prosaic writing," said Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "limits itself to using, through accepted signs, the meanings already accepted in a given culture." Against this, he sets "a poetry of human relations—the call of each individual freedom to all the others". This way of constructing the difference between prose and poetry appeals to me, I must admit, but there is a danger in interpreting it as an argument against "prosaic writing". (When Adam Banks admonishes us to "retire" the essay and instead cultivate a "funky" sense of freedom in our students, even invoking Lorca's "duende", I imagine many people hear him as saying something like that.) After all, if given the choice between "limiting" yourself to "already accepted" meanings, on the one hand, and calling out to "each individual freedom", on the other, it seems obvious what your ambition should be. I get it. (I, too, have invoked the duende. I, too, have suggested we "put some stank on it".) But let's not abandon our culture altogether.

After all, culture is a collective accomplishment that needs, for the most part, to be conserved. When we learn to write prose, we are learning to say what our culture has already become capable of saying, what it is already "acceptable" to say. When we compare the available range of expression in prose today, with that of, say, one-hundred years ago, we have to recognize that progress has been made. Even the diversity of voices that are allowed to express themselves in prose, i.e., that may speak as though the signs they are using are accepted in the culture, has vastly expanded over the past century. It is true that this required a great deal of "poetic" subversion of the institution of prose by great writers. Merleau-Ponty treats "great prose" as the way we realize the gains made by the "ostentatious display" of poetry's freedom. It "captures" and makes "accessible" meanings that hadn't yet been "objectified". If in poetry we call out to each other's desire to be free, in prose we help each other understand our limits. Every now and then someone figures out how to institutionalize something new, making it available to all.

The state of our prose is the current stage of the progress we have already made. In the composition classroom, I believe, we have to spend most our time consolidating those gains, passing on the ability to express "the meanings already accepted in a given culture". If we don't do this, and instead give the students the impression that they should be fighting against the limits of the prose essay, always transgressing the boundary of acceptable usage, forever trumping the composure of a well-crafted paragraph with the momentary excitement of a picture or a video or a song, then we are simply robbing them of their heritage. We are not teaching them the foundation of our own composure, perhaps because we ourselves have lost faith in it, overwhelmed by "the pace of change". Well, prose was always the means by which we slow things down, the way we find the time to get it right, after our poets have told us that there is something terribly wrong.

Perhaps it is true that poetry is progressive and prose is conservative. I prefer to think of the "limits" of prose as the frontier of the progress we have made. There is no shame in trying to enjoy the freedom we already have. Otherwise, what is the point of achieving it?