The prompt for us after reading Nancy Sommer’s “Between the Drafts” reads:
In “Between the Drafts,“ Sommers looks back at her earlier research, including the essay we read last week, and finds much that she no longer accepts. I personally have a mixed response to Sommers’ essay. Part of me very much admires her ability to stand back from her earlier work and reflect on it. I also find the writing in “Between the Drafts“ quite powerful. But another part of me wonders about the logic of Sommers’ essay, which at least in part pits bad (old) inauthentic writing against new (good) authentically voiced writing. How did you respond to Sommers’ essay?
I wrote:
This is the third time that I’ve read this essay. The first was for Writing 511 last fall, and the second was to remind myself what Sommers says later that same quarter for a paper. How did I respond then? I was enthralled by what Sommers writes, and I position this essay as one of the most influential on the way I think about my own writing, although I have perhaps found it more difficult when applying to my own teaching. This time re-reading this essay, I found myself moved once again by the powerful prose, but mostly noticing fresh ideas that I did not recall from my first reading.
I found it refreshing that Sommers sees her daughter as exerting her own authority while Sommers is too busy deferring to Foucault; her perspective on her daughter is perhaps the one we should take with our students. What authorities are they bringing to the classroom, to their writing, that they feel they must squelch, or at least hide, to “accommodate“ (319) the academy? I love Sommers words: “They might, if given enough encouragement, be empowered not to serve the academy and accommodate it, not to write in the persona of Everystudent, but rather to write essays that will change the academy“ (319). Bartholomae writes about students who are attempting to enter academic voice, but whose prose is stilted and awkward because they are overcompensating. We all experience this—this Everystudent who writes “Since the beginning of civilization mankind has…“ (318). We have all been this student; we are all this student. I still write papers where I kick myself out, where I let some other authority who I don’t understand fully talk for me (this Everystudent voice takes over). Sommers’s essay reminds me that every text, every authority, is something to be revised; their ideas are not complete, and it is my job, and my students’ job, to revise their ideas and their words. What needs to be added, rejected, fought for, or fought against? These texts ask us (demand of us?) “to answer them, to speak back to them, to use them and make them anew“ (318).
One of Sommers’ most influential ideas on me was when she advocates suspending herself “between either and or“ so that she “can…move away from conventional boundaries and begin to see shapes and shadows and contours—ambiguity, uncertainty, and discontinuity, moments when the seams of life just don’t want to hold….My life is full of uncertainty, negotiating that uncertainty day to day gives me authority“ (317). This involves listening, seeing, re-seeing, revising, using our eyes, ears, and tongues in new ways to exert our own authority. We too often fail to see, blinded by the authority of others, deafened by the voices that tell us what to do and what to think. It is only when we admit ambiguity—admit that things aren’t as black and white as we once believed—that we can truly listen and see this conflicting uncertainty.
Sommers relates writing and revising to life: “It is deeply satisfying to believe that we are not locked into our original statements, that we might start and stop, use the delete key in life, and be saved from the roughness of our early drafts“ (315). Perhaps this is a romantic notion of writing, that it is so strongly linked to the visioning and revisioning of life, but I want to believe that these are the same stories: When I listen and look for uncertainties, conflicts, and ambiguities, I gain authority in my life and in my writing; I can look for what I need to revise and change, and I can accept that I am revising others’ authorities (teachers, writers, institutions, politicians, parents) so that I can revise myself and my writing.
Perhaps you are right, Lisa, that Sommers unfairly pits old/bad/inauthentic writing against new/good/authentic writing. Perhaps this can be complicated by viewing all writing as old and inauthentic? Aren’t we all trying to make ourselves more authentic; shouldn’t we all constantly be trying to revise ourselves as writers and therefore revising our writing? Perhaps there is a goal of the new and authentic and good that can never be reached, but it is in striving for that goal (a very Sisyphean task) that we can grow and value life. I can imagine being fully authentic, but I cannot imagined what that would feel like. It is striving towards that “who I am and want to be and what I want to say“ that I find my own authority. What would it feel like to be good and fully authentic? Very disappointing indeed. For what else is there to strive for?
