19. When Beside the Point Is Precisely the Point: Ditch Your Thesis and Improvise
Tea and Cigarettes, Description and Enlightenment
In a different essay reacting to the same Thoreau assignment from my last newsletter, the author told the story of reaching a decision while home in Pakistan not to go into the family business with his father like most sons would if given the chance. D claims his story was an illustration of Thoreau’s saying that what’s “true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow.” In his story, he described being served tea and biscuits by family servants and then riding in a Jeep with a friend while smoking Benson and Hedges cigarettes and talking about their futures. The summarized discussion in the Jeep is about how he and his friend were happy that they were going to be handed everything on a “silver platter.” But deep down, the writer was not resting easy with this.
Since describing was part of the assignment, the role of description was on people’s minds. There was a fair amount of pushback with this essay. Sure, classmates said, we can see now how ideas can come from things like William Carlos Williams said, but some things still might be beside the point. For instance, what’s with the tea and the cigarettes? It’s good description, but it seemed like extra, you know, like padding the paper. How do these “things” relate to the “ideas”? What did tea and biscuits and cigarettes have to do with Thoreau or working in the family business? What did they have to do with “may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow?” Maybe they’re just extra and should be cut in the revision.
To address these things, the class thought there was a need to say more about the family business, and also more about the tradition that was being broken, but there was no clear consensus on whether the tea should stay. Some said if the conversation in the Jeep had been presented as dialogue instead of just summary, we might have learned more about the tradition and the pressures the writer was facing.
Then someone said, “I see a connection between being served tea and being served a livelihood. So, maybe he should keep that part. The cigarettes, too.”
This comment led to a moment of realization for the class and turned things around. Suddenly, the class was in favor of keeping the parts they thought were extraneous just moments before. Not only did they want to keep those parts, they wanted more of that stuff.
Letting readers “be there” as the tea is being poured, meeting the family members and servants, and hearing the conversations could do more than anything else to help readers feel the pressure the writer is under to do what has always been done and to understand the cost of going against the family’s and by extension, the society’s traditional role for a good son.
Maybe some of the relatives say things while having tea that would get that point across. Perhaps the father says, “I’m so pleased that my son is now old enough to be a part of our family business,” or the grandmother says, “What a good grandson I have,” or one of the servants says, “I can’t believe the baby boy I used to dress will one day soon be in charge of things.” Maybe the father asks the son what he would like to do now that he is a major part of the family business. Maybe there is laughter and high spirits all around, yet something inside the writer is holding back. The possibilities are limitless.
During the cigarettes part, if we could hear the conversation directly—the pros and cons, the family expectations—then his moment of realization or enlightenment—or “ehsaas” he said, using the Urdu word—would become ours, too. We would feel the impact of how the writer suddenly understands that this silver platter life which to many would be highly desirable can be a burden. With these details available, he would be able to use Thoreau’s words more effectively to help him articulate his dilemma. We would see that Thoreau has given him new language for writing about things that may have been vaguely defined for him previously.
Yes, he could choose to go his own way, to go upon “the deck of the world” where he can “see the moonlight amid the mountains,” which all sounds just grand, yet in his case, it’s not an easy choice. He says Pakistani society would look down on such a decision. Is he being selfish and disobedient, or does Thoreau give him a deeper understanding of why this is so important to him? More of the story would help readers understand the true implications of his decision and perhaps more importantly, it would help the writer get deeper into the complexities of the issue and deeper into his reading of Thoreau.
This essay raises questions not only for the author, but for our interpretation of Thoreau. A person could read selections from Walden and say that Thoreau advocates going against the tide, bucking the system, etc. It wouldn’t be wrong, exactly, but it would only be part of the story and a rather trivialized reading of those parts. Henry the rebel, Henry the recluse, Henry the Transcendentalist, Henry the hippie. This kind of skimming the surface is something students will never go beyond as long as their focus remains on main ideas or prematurely on thesis statements.
It’s Henry’s “beaten track.” Kick that main idea pail, and leap that thesis statement fence. Start with images and describe them. Starting with your equivalent of a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water or a white chicken, show us how so much depends upon a smoldering cigarette or the scent of jasmine tea.
Let’s imagine what the passages might have been without tea and cigarettes:
In Pakistani society, there is strong pressure to follow custom. For sons this means to uphold the family name, since you are known as your father’s son, and you are expected to follow family wishes. This is a powerful force in society, and to resist, you must pay a heavy price.
This approach, though admittedly not enthralling, can be highly competent, and can “communicate” information efficiently. Problem is, with this kind of writing, the writer would be hard pressed to add anything new to the conversation. At best, such an essay is a skilled restatement of known issues, a kind of report. The focus is not on the material as much as how to fit it together clearly. The only role for description or metaphor is to add spice here and there to make a dull recitation seem a little less so. This is the kind of writing you get when all you are doing is to take a thesis statement and try to support it. There are few surprises, maybe none. Sure, what’s true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, but while writing like this, you’ll never have the chance to find that out.
What if your job at the beginning is not to know what you will say, but to use the writing process as a search engine to look for something worth saying? As with the previous paper, go ahead—let us go with you to play with your Shudra friend. Let us hear what the adults say to you about it. It’s bound to be chilling, and it’s bound to lead you beyond what people usually say about such things. Or in the silver platter essay, take us to tea, and let us be served. Let us ride in a Jeep and smoke a Benson and Hedges and experience what it’s like to have your whole life planned out for you, what it feels like to have everything handed to you yet feel like you are confined to a cabin passage. You will likely surprise yourself and say things you never imagined or make a connection you never saw before.
If you do these things you will experience ehsaas after ehsaas. You will see things anew. You will have insights you didn’t have when you started the essay. And your readers will also experience these moments of realization because they will witness you talking about the complexities of tradition in ways only you are able, and you will be reading Thoreau like no one, not even your professor, ever has.
Images, description, they help you get new ideas and they sharpen your sense of audience. They help you to help readers be there with you to see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Readers will get to stand in your shoes. And as Flower and Hayes say, writers who “think about readers and their own goals for the assignment” who “rearrange and play with alternatives” are “simply solving a different problem” than other writers. They are being “extravagant” in Thoreau’s sense and “will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
After all, though the class was focusing on Thoreau’s idea of extravagance, what we were really talking about was writing. As a writer, how do you get off the beaten track? How do you kick that pail and leap that cowyard fence? How do you begin to “lay the foundation of a true expression”?
Notes
Next we’ll bring in a little math to break down the problem.