I drew a tree on the board. I tried to make it look unbothered. It hadn’t suffered from scarcity or excess. It was straight, strong, and upright. It had water, nourishment, sun, and space: no pests and no pestilence. My point: this tree had unity, but it remained a tree "in general." It lacked specificity, more closely resembling an idea than an organism.
We began to imagine another tree, one which had to struggle toward its growth in a complex environment. This tree, having survived drought and flood, woodpeckers, nests of owlets, wind and erosion, competitors, parasites and plagues, had a much different look than the untroubled tree. Yet this tree, too, possessed unity. It was only that this unity had greater complexity than that of the “ideal” tree: disrupted patterns, tender or calloused boundaries. The unity of this tree reflected not only its internal movement, its self-generated becoming through time, but revealed the imprint of the energies, investments, dissipations, and aggressions of all that is external to it. The unity of the second tree is a raggedy unity, absorbing and reflecting the nature of the world.
This, I said, is like the literary work, which in composition is driven toward a kind of ideal unity, but in the process of form finding, of actualizing, becomes imprinted by life: partial, composite, "interesting," articulated, and individuated.
These two energies – the internal drive of each thing toward formal unity, the external vicissitudes of history, natural forces, accident, and so on as they act on it – shape all that can be shaped, but especially shape our novels, essays, and poems.
This account is not sufficient or complete. Even in the internal movement toward becoming, the acorn bears the death of the oak tree. That is, there is within even the most robustly unified work the germ of doom, the thing-moving-through-to-its-opposite-ness. Even literary work that seeks to conceal its own doom, bury its contradictions, never can.
Somewhere, then, in the inner motion toward becoming, in the external motions imprinting and shaping, and the ongoingness of this work's burgeoning end or undoing, is much of what a writer needs to know about literary form.
Everything is instruction in this: Beethoven's late string quartets, the moss on the path, the cagey vulture, the shape of an hour or a season, an Emily Dickinson poem, the relationship between generations.
This was the penultimate class. At the end of it I asked the writers to please continue to study the entire world.