Only a small sliver of the students who attend the University of Austin (henceforth UATX) already care about writing. True in any school, perhaps, but in other schools, there are many students interested in writing-adjacent things: other arts, like dance, or critical disciplines engaged with art, such as art history.
UATX disproportionately draws young people interested in computer science and tech-heavy entrepreneurship. How do I persuade them that writing matters?
It isn’t hard. I tell the truth. Effective narratives, effectively delivered, whether on the page or verbally, get you what you want. They get a politician votes. They get a litigator verdicts. They get a founder investments. They get a young person the attention of that boy or girl. At least for this part of the class, the yawns stop.
But then, okay, next-level challenge: how do I make these eighteen-year-olds care about Hamlet? I am the ideal person to try—I used to have a very hard time myself. (I am not only a spokesman, I am also a client!) I remember my eyes glazing over those oddly-phrased lines; wondering why anyone would stay with a play with so many holes, and so many flat characters.
I begin by asking my students to understand the difference between a literature class and a writing class. I tell a story from the first week of my own graduate education, at NYU. We read a Michael Chabon story about—if I remember correctly—two guys trying to decide whether they’re going to cheat on an exam. The professor, David Lipsky, asked what the story was about. I raised my hand and said, “integrity.” I don’t remember if he made that game-show “you got it wrong” buzzer or not, but his point was: “That’s a lit-class answer. We’re in a writing class. This story is about two guys who are trying to decide whether they’re going to cheat.”
And of course, we have to care about the guys. And of course there has to be a cost—a cost that matters to them, and to us, and a benefit that matters to them, and to us—to the cheating. But otherwise, you’re already off on the wrong foot if you’re writing from a theme instead of a concrete situation, a predicament with stakes, conflict, and tension. (Plenty of authors don’t bother with this. But it’s not the worst thing to know how to do. Especially if you’re just starting out.)
So, yes, Hamlet is about all those wonderful things it’s always said to be about: madness, revenge, families, the modern conscience. (You really can’t overestimate the revolutionary quality of the lattermost detail: Shakespeare was one of the first playwrights, if not the first, to imagine that dramatic heroes didn’t always know exactly what they wanted, or needed, to do. There aren’t a lot of things in life, except maybe a very old vineyard in Burgundy, that remain as true five hundred years later.) But it’s also about a guy trying to figure out whether he will avenge his father’s murder at the hands of his uncle. In my class, we move quickly past: what does it mean? And we linger on: how was it made?
And so, I ask my students: what would you do in Hamlet’s place? No, really. What would you do? Because unless you think Hamlet is an already disaffected person looking for an excuse for violence (I don’t), here is a young man who happens upon one of those bitterly seminal life experiences: a self-defining crossroads of which he wished no part. Life has put to him a question he had no desire to be asked, and his answer will shape the rest of his life (however little of it turns out to remain). He has been forced to find out who he really is.
So I ask them again: you have come to school here because you want to be founders, doers, shapers, drivers of history. Certainly, that is the marketing narrative of the school. But what are you going to do when, metaphorically speaking (or not!), your uncle kills your father? Will you look away, or will you engage? (Hint: you’re going to get a drama only out of the latter.) Again, the yawns briefly stop.
Life has put to him a question he had no desire to be asked, and his answer will shape the rest of his life (however little of it turns out to remain). He has been forced to find out who he really is.
If I haven’t enlarged what we’re discussing to existential questions that will affect us all, whether these young people read or write another word of literature or not, then I haven’t done my job as I prefer to conceive of it.
But you’ll notice that I got to the part where I talk about the meaning of my job, if not of life altogether, without having delivered on the promise of my headline, which teases what it’s like to teach Hamlet to conservatives. And that’s because there’s no there there, at least not in such broad terms. First, raw politics rarely enters the classroom—not because my students don’t have passionate political beliefs, many of which I suspect don’t line up with mine. It’s because I take great care not to exploit my authority to push mine, and they return the favor. They are there to see what they can learn from me about writing—and they go about it with curiosity and respect. I do my best to earn the generosity of that posture.
Also—Captain Obvious saluting for duty, but for some reason, his services are needed more than ever—it’s very easy to generalize incorrectly. I know that many of my students grew up in religious households. I know many were home-schooled. The school where they have enrolled features largely conservative speakers and offers internship and employment opportunities in largely conservative environments. But I haven’t spent much time yet really getting to know the new freshmen. And every time I spoke with last year’s class, I came away with a dizzying spin on my assumptions (which I profiled in this Free Press essay about teaching at UATX).
That said, of course, there are many moments when implicitly political material—or what has become implicitly political in our over-politicized time—wanders into the classroom. You can’t avoid it. You don’t want to avoid it, if you’re going to be honest about teaching writing, which is, of course, in the business of understanding the human condition. (“My task … is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” —Joseph Conrad. “[The artist’s task] is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth.” —Flannery O’Connor.)
For class this week, we’re reading William Zinsser’s seminal On Writing Well,* which includes a celebration of H. L. Mencken’s evisceration, as part of his coverage of the Scopes Trial, of the “professed pieties of his countrymen. The sanctity in which Americans bathed their heroes, their churches and their edifying laws … the self-righteous wrath of the Bible Belt … a well of hypocrisy for [Mencken] that never came close to drying up.” I wonder how my devout students will take it. Will they believe that Mencken doled it out equally to all sides? That any good writer does? We are also reading Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow,” and surely no short story flips on its head what we feel about the main characters in a shorter number of pages: Tub, the bullied overeater, turns out to crave not kindness but someone else to bully. Now that Tub is alpha dog, Frank, who used to beat up on Tub, licks his hand instead. And that asshole Kenny is harder to hate, cruel moron though he is, considering his friends would rather sing each other’s praises over coffee in a diner than take him to a hospital after Tub has shot him.
It was James Baldwin who said some version of: the oppressed don’t emerge from oppression as saints. Watch they don’t emerge as murderers. That’s Tub. A writer has to see this as clearly as Mencken saw what he saw in the Bible Belt. Only a very mediocre fiction writer deals in saints. Will my students believe that such objection to piety is not only tolerable, but critical in a society dedicated to free inquiry? Digging deeper, do they understand that those who represent themselves as flawless are often readiest to flaw, and it is the holiest among us who constantly search themselves for error?
So you see that even an innocent passage in a book on craft, a passing moment in a hundred assigned pages, quickly gets us to Donald Trump. But I don’t say that name. That name forecloses nuance. That name forecloses critical inquiry. I talk about the idea. Or I will—this reading is due for class tomorrow.
Digging deeper, do they understand that those who represent themselves as flawless are often readiest to flaw, and it is the holiest among us who constantly search themselves for error?
If Zinsser gets us to Trump, you won’t be surprised to hear that Tristram Shandy gets us to the tech utopia that hangs in the air especially heavily in a place like Austin. (We’re reading a portion of the novel next week.) The novel was in its infancy when a clergyman named Laurence Sterne, whose previous claim to fame was his Sermons, issued this antic and transgressive middle finger to the pieties of his time. The renowned books of the period transmitted knowledge or taught people how to live; this novel was seen as entertainment for the “young, the ignorant, and the idle.” (It was the TikTok of its time. There was once a time when writing itself was the TikTok of its time. Socrates: “Through trusting to writing, they will remember outwardly by means of foreign marks, and not inwardly by means of their own faculties.” These quotations, and some of the facts here, comes from Ian Campbell Ross’s wonderful introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Tristram Shandy.)
So the least a novel could do was be serious, to offer a roadmap to virtuous self-improvement. Tristram Shandy declines to do that. It starts out by talking about sex. By page 2, it’s comparing a sperm to the Chancellor of England. Then it goes back to talking about Tristram’s parents copulating. It interrupts itself constantly. (It even interrupts the interruptions.) It instructs you to skip parts of the story. It jumps around in time. (I always wonder if some of this has to do, subconsciously, with Sterne’s own constant moving around as a child.) It changes its tone: it’s petty, it’s hectoring, it’s pleading, it’s arrogant, it’s insecure. It has a hero who declares himself to be unimpressive.
And we don’t know where Sterne stands in relation to that hero. Is Tristram a fool? A genius? A victim? An author was supposed to let us know, clearly. But here the author says: No, you decide. This was radical. The novel addresses itself to the unlearned rather than the learned reader. It seems abstruse to us now, but it used speech that ordinary people understood, that they used among themselves. It was a watershed moment in the passage of authority from elites to ordinary people. (Sound familiar?) This was a time of absolute truths dispensed by the authorities, by scholars, by learned men. Why does an ordinary man get to have opinions? Why do opinions even matter? But it’s right there in the title: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.
To the idea that the human being is perfectible, as so many of the “founders” and biohackers and longevity gurus around here believe, Tristram’s response was the same as Rage Against the Machine’s (scroll all the way down in the link). UATX’s motto, “The fearless pursuit of truth,” would have made him hot under the collar. Yes, we must be fearless, and we must pursue. But how often is there a single truth, once we get past numerical matters? Unless we’re talking about the fact that all beings are as capable of hypocrisy as the opposite.
None of this needs to enter the conversation. We can limit ourselves to literary matters. But as much as I don’t want politics in class, I want—need—this debate over values. Because if we are not discussing the ways in which the literature that has lasted—literature that sometimes feels as remote as a ruff on a consumptive prince—reaches into the present day, we are short-changing the literature, and we are short-changing ourselves.
Last year, most of the freshmen hated Shandy, which is, admittedly, nearly impenetrable on a first read. (That’s why I tell them to read everything twice.) Some loved its disorder and disobedience. But all of them heard out and pondered my extrapolations. I’m sure many didn’t agree. (I explicitly invite them to disagree every step of the way—that feels crucial.) But I was grateful to make the argument. I was grateful to have it received. And I’m grateful to teach in an institution where such conversation is the norm.
* Bet you forgot about the asterisk. I can’t ever mention William Zinsser without mentioning that my father was a doorman in the Upper East Side building where Zinsser lived. The doorman’s son got to visit the wizard. And he was such a kind man.