Pardoning the interruption. Thoughts on allowing other voices into our essays—

The Art of Interruption

by Steven Harvey

When I teach college writing, I often begin with an in-class assignment. Once the assignment is well underway—the heads all bent over pages and pens scratching—I interrupt the class by speaking while the students write. “This,” I say, “is the miracle, the distinctively human miracle. The voice in your head that gives you the next word is your genius.” I want them to know the value of what my teacher, James Britton, called “shaping at the point of utterance.” I want them to know the joy of staking a life on that voice. “Attend to that voice in your head,” I say. “It is your great friend for life. Trust it.”

Of course, that is a lie—one that I will need to disabuse them of later in the semester when they write their first research papers. One voice alone is never enough. Consider the student in my class looking at a blank page and praying for the miracle I’m talking about. All of us face that page eventually when our “great friend for life” sulks in the back of our stilled brains. Even when the miracle happens, that voice in our head can get carried away. Any voice—no matter how adorable, witty, brilliant, or miraculous—becomes dull over time. The miracle of utterance uninterrupted becomes the monotone of indulgence—and those of you who have suffered the long-winded know what I mean.

I am Socratic enough to believe that learning happens always and only in dialogue, not monologue. Other voices offer new words that open up possibilities for meaning for us. I think of the smart-aleck at the back of the class whose hand shoots into the air, and the way we in the class turn to that hand expectantly. If the lecture is long enough that interruption is always welcome. I think of the obscenity—language meant to be spoken in the wings—and the shock it creates when it grabs center stage. I think of the way any words—as long as they are not our own—can quicken our words. The research essay is not so much an exercise in bringing new information to bear on a subject as it is a forum in juggling contending voices—and there is always room for a shout from the back of the class.

The reason that I enjoy assigning the research essay is that it offers relief from the solitary voice that I encouraged students to trust the first day of class. What, after all, is an interruption but another word for a breakthrough. When a lone voice is compelling—even mesmerizing as it can be with so many writers—an interruption is sometimes the only way for inarticulate truths to come crashing in. Some writers search out other voices for confirmation of their views. Montaigne was given to quoting classical authors who agreed with him in order to reinforce points he made. Other writers like adversaries. I’m reading Harold Bloom now on Shakespeare, a writer who relishes his enemy’s words as a goad and stimulus to his own. My point is that the nature of the interruption does not matter as much as the simple fact that it is there. Doris Smith—the writer of children’s books—says that she would re-read her novels and at the moment she got bored, throw in some dialogue. Not bad advice, I’d say.

All writing may, in fact, be the author’s attempt to interrupt the otherwise relentless flow of literary history. I had a professor who believed that our essays bounce off of the writing of others, our words beginning as the marginalia of someone else’s text. My first essay, an assignment for his class, began as a margin note on this sentence from Thoreau: “We live in furnished rooms.” This sentence reminds us that even Thoreau, who wanted to build his life from scratch and in the nick of time, knew that we don’t do either, and my essay lived—still lives, I hope—in the cabin he built. According to this view, our essays begin when we try to get a word in edgewise.

But it is the art of interrupting the interruption that reveals the essentially dialectical nature of writing and thought. Here, we approach the holy of holies. Increasingly, as I get older, I find myself lingering over where to place the “she said” and “he said” in quotations. Am I alone in this or have you noticed the tendency in yourself? It does make a difference—and in that difference is all meaning. “If music be the food of love,” Orsino says, “play on”—and if I put the “he says” there, at the comma, I share Shakespeare’s notion that his sentence is about love, the word just before the interruption. If I want to shift our attention away from love to music, I change the syntax. “If music,” Orsino says, “be the fruit of love, play on.” On days that I’m particularly fussy I might try an earlier interruption: “If,” Orsino says, “music be the food of love, play on.” And when I’m feeling downright athletic I would write the sentence this way: “If music be the food of love, play,” Orsino says, “on.”

The point is that I choose. I get to play with the words of those who have, for the moment, usurped my own. Choosing and placing the interruption—and interrupting it at my whim—is my chance to reclaim some of what I give up by inviting another voice to speak. The language is not mine—I have not invented a single word—but with a little help from my friends and enemies, I learn to wield it. It is for that reason that I tell my students—without really lying to them at all—to trust their voices. That truncated instrument—the vehicle for original thought without a single original word—is what they have. It is never solitary. That voice is a chorus, which is their cultural inheritance, and can indeed become a friend for life.