I can’t recall the exact words of the exchange here, but our cohort was in one of those god-awful classes on how to teach first-year writing. We were going over students’ papers and grading them, and then we discussed each in its turn, to see where the grades fell and why. (This was one of the most helpful exercises in the course, and so I can’t say it was all bad.)
One student’s paper made every single one of us laugh out loud. Now I don’t know about you but I hardly ever laugh out loud when I read, even if something is genuinely funny. (One book that makes me laugh out loud on every page is A Confederacy of Dunces, but most writing simply can’t be this funny, right?)
Anyway, I don’t remember which grade we all gave it, because what happened was that we were sunk into an irrelevant conversation, sunk by yours truly.
Well, I had help. Our professor was asking what made the paper good, and I made the tragic mistake of saying that the student was a ‘natural’ writer. This caused her to make a dangerously sharp turn from the task at hand (i.e., going over the practical bits to help us to grade papers later on). At that point we were on the rough side-road of quasi-philosophical, pseudo-psychological and all-political ‘theory’.
In short she said that our laughter, caused by excellent writing, had absolutely nothing to do with natural abilities. Instead it had everything—and I mean ‘everything’—to do with the student’s background.
I tried to avoid the classic, and classically hopeless(?), nurture-versus-nature quagmire. And I tried to be agreeable by walking back my words. I told her I shouldn’t have used the word ‘natural’, while thoughts of Haraway and her epigones flashed across my mind. This satisfied her.
But it still irks me. Especially since I believed then, as I do now, with Pope, that
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.
Or, with Pascal, I think that ‘[w]hen we see a natural style, we are quite astonished and delighted, for we were expecting to see an author and [instead] we find a person’ (XXXV. 554).
And only a naturally subtle, gifted person can do these things. Or maybe a naturally unsubtle person who takes a lot of time to watch other naturally gifted people at work can at least see these things even if he cannot do them.
(I also don’t know how you could prove the ‘nurture’ side of the coin here. It can’t just appeal to upbringings, for example, can it? After all, too many of the students in our case had very similar upbringings. So I’d ask, with Tallis (p. 286): What would be the sufficient condition for why that one wrote so well whereas the others struggled so mightily?)
Of course there is a larger issue here. This interaction is not primarily about nature or nurture, but about something like looking first at your own work and then looking inward. For example, if I say that this writer was naturally talented, I must mean also that others are not so and may never be. And those others may include me or the professor.
And it’s a dirty task to look at yourself to determine this. I really shouldn’t speak for the professor, but the group lacking in subtlety does include her, as it does me. I think I can see subtlety, or der richtige Takt, in others, but I see none in my realm.
What’s more the last thing the professor wanted was for me to go forth into the classroom and speak the words ‘gifted’, ‘excellent’, ‘natural’ to the students.
Them’s excommunicating words.
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Notes, in order of appearance above.
J. Kennedy Toole. Confederacy of Dunces.
A. Pope, An Essay on Criticism.
B. Pascal, Pensées.
R. Tallis, Aping Mankind.