Signposting Without Signposting (2)

The “late modernism” that developed in Spanish poetry during the final decades of the twentieth century—identified with José Ángel Valente, Antonio Gamoneda, and similar poets—is not a mere revival of historical modernism, but a highly selective revision of the cultural poetics of Spanish modernism as developed in the work of three figures: Miguel de Unamuno, María Zambrano, and Federico García Lorca. A complete intellectual genealogy of the late modernist movement would have to include several other precursors as well, from Heidegger to Machado, Cernuda, and Lezama Lima. Nevertheless, the particular strain of Spanish cultural exceptionalism inaugurated by Unamuno, with its exaltation of Saint John of the Cross, occupies a privileged place in the development of Spanish late modernism.

The importance of María Zambrano for Valente and numerous other contemporary poets and critics in the late modernist line is self-evident, since her name appears so frequently in connection with theirs. Unamuno and Lorca, in contrast, exert their influence in less direct and obvious ways. Unamuno’s influence is filtered through Zambrano’s further elaboration of his poetics of Spanish cultural identity. Lorca would not appear to form part of the lineage of late modernism at all, since this tradition emphasizes pensamiento (thought) and Lorca is still considered to be a naïve genius or poeta tonto. Yet Spanish late modernism also emphasizes forms of Spanish cultural exceptionalism and prelogical forms of intuition that are strongly reminiscent of Lorca’s duende. The author of “Juego y teoría del duende”casts a long shadow over the late modernist poetics of Valente and Gamoneda.

This is another attempt at the introduction to an article without explicit signposting. The rest of the article will consist of three main sections. One on Unamuno and Zambrano, the second on Zambrano and Valente, the third on Lorca and Valente, with a line thrown in about Gamoneda. So the intro (with some footnotes you aren't seeing here) does tell the reader what to expect, but without the type of language that says: "First, I will examine the influence of X on Y. Then I will return to Z." My idea is that as long as a reader is not lost, she will not complain about the absence of signs.

Tasks for an Introduction

1) Introduce the topic. What is the subject matter being treated here? I like to do that in the very first sentence rather than starting out with a kind of vague generality that some undergraduates favor. "People have always fallen in love."

2) Provide necessary background information. When was the novel published? What other information is necessary to understand the argument?

3) Frame the debate by identifying a critical problem. Your approach to the topic differs from previous ones. You have to set forward a framework for the discussion of the topic. Theory enters here.

4) Put forward a thesis: a distinctive idea emerging from the way you have framed the problem.

5) Tell us what you will do in the paper.

You can use anywhere between 1 and 5 paragraphs to accomplish these tasks. (5) can be implicit if you want to avoid excessive signposts. The reader should know what the paper is going to do one way or another.

Once you get into paragraph 6 or 7 you might be putting into the introduction material that belongs more properly to the body of the paper. My first published article, in one of its earlier drafts, had a ten page introduction followed by a ten page body.

Introductions Everywhere

Every part of the book, the article, has a beginning. Each chapter, each subheading of a chapter, each paragraph. Even the conclusion has an introductory paragraph with an opening sentence. Every sentence has a first word.

Every musical note has an attack, or onset. Curiously, a large part of the identifying timbre of the note is determined by its attack, so that if you took away the onset by electronic editing, you would not longer be able to tell what instrument is playing. The articulation of a musical phrase consists of the way the attacks of individual notes are linked Staccato or legato? (or not linked). Is the trumpet-player double tonguing? Does the violinist lift her bow, or switch its direction, in the middle of the phrase? I notice how the violinists in the orchestra typically use the entire length of the bow, from top to bottom or bottom to top, keeping the bow on the strings with very little interruption.

So writing is a process of constantly beginning, then continuing something for a while, then beginning again. Fluency is continuity, flow, while articulateness is differentiation (hearing each note distinctly) within an ongoing flow. Short sentences in succession might feel articulate but choppy.

The other part of the musical notion is the sustain or decay. That might require another post.

Jump Start

I decided to write a chapter a month. The first day of every month will be a jump start or stealth attack, in which I put a lot of effort into beginning. The momentum should carry me through.

Now I doubt that I will be able to sustain this pace for five straight months, but even if I write twice as slow I will still finish the book in 2011.

Naturally, since I am writing more, I am also blogging more.

Beginning

Following up on the previous post, here is a good way of beginning a project.

Day one: only brainstorm. Write as much as you can in a given period of time (an hour?)

Day two: Begin by reading what you have written. Rewrite some of the sentences or phrases you have written as though they were sentences you would actually put in a finished version of a the paper. When you have done that, then brainstorm some more. Take about an hour and a half the second day.

Day three: Begin by tweaking some of those "finished" sentences. Revise them for style. Connect some of them up into a fragment of a paragraph. Then convert some of the brainstorming of days one and two into serviceable prose. By now you should have an actual paragraph. End by brainstorming again.

Day four: Repeat. At the end of day four, if you are like me, you will have a document of about 1000-2000 words. Some of it will be finished prose, some merely coherent prose, and some informal brainstorming.

Continue until the article is complete. During the last few days everything will be at stage two (serviceable prose) and your entire effort will be devoted to making it finished prose (stage three). When the entire manuscript is in stage 3 (every sentence tweaked, all references complete) then it is a penultimate draft that you might want to show someone else. It's penultimate because it is the best you can do by yourself, without outside critique. (I never show a "rough draft" to anyone else, because that would be asking someone else to do my work for me: improve sentences I could easily improve myself. I never write rough drafts, only smooth ones. That doesn't mean I write perfect drafts, but that I get them as good as I can before showing them to anyone else. If I want earlier feedback I explain my ideas to others, but in very careful language. I might spend more time phrasing a question in email than I would writing a paragraph of the article itself.)

(The only caveat here is that a document will sometimes get too messy, with too many unconnected brainstorming ideas and not enough finished prose; in this case I start a new "cleaned up" version in another document, retaining only finished sentences. I don't throw away the brainstorming, but I remove it from the document to increase efficiency, usually around day 10.)

Modified Stealth

One thing you might want to do is work on all the chapters of your book in one day and try to get a significant portion done on several of them. Just write like crazy and when you get stuck, move on to the next chapter.

Envisioning the Project

Writing is unlike many other activities, in that thinking about writing is actually (almost) writing itself. I often write things out in my head when I am not in front of the computer or a notebook. By doing so, I usually have phrases in mind when I sit down to write. We call writing the actual putting down the words in some written form, analogue or digital, but we also call writing the composition itself, independent of its physical manifestation.

Almost writing. Obviously if you do a lot of writing in your head and never put anything down in written form, you will forget a lot: eventually almost everything. That is why mental writing is incomplete. Yet it is hard to imagine not forming sentences in your mind as you are working on the project--reading something else about your topic, for example. With book reviews, for example, I find that I start to write the review in my head the minute I start reading.

I find it useful to do a lot of purely mental work at the beginning of a project. Imagining the book already complete and the relation of each part to every other part. This almost has to be done mentally because not much is written down yet!

You also have to develop advanced memory skills to be able to hold a lot of complex information in the mind at once. Not memory of details, so much, as of the bigger picture.

Preface or Introduction?

I prefer the preface to the introduction. The preface puts forward a brief summary of the chapters and says what the book is going to be about. Writing a preface is like writing a grant proposal or plan for the book. The nice thing about it is that you are writing the book while planning to write it at the same time.

Introductions are typically longer, and include more contextual and theoretical background. What I like to do is to make the first chapter do double duty: be introductory in some way, but also present substantive, non-introductory points. For example, in Apocryphal Lorca I used the first chapter to talk about Lorca himself, rather than his American imitators. I wasn't introducing the book, but writing another kind of essay that prepared the ground for the rest of the book.

I'm not saying this is the right way to do it. Your project--or your own personal style of doing things--might require an introduction rather than preface--or both. If you have both you have to keep their functions rigorously separated, which I've always found difficult.

Encerrona

1. f. Situación, preparada de antemano, en que se coloca a alguien para obligarle a que haga algo contra su voluntad.

4. f. En algunos exámenes, oposiciones, etc., ejercicio que consiste en la preparación, durante un tiempo determinado y en un lugar aislado, de un tema que luego habrá de exponerse ante el tribunal.

6. f. Taurom. Lidia de toros en privado.

The "encerrona" is an exercise you might try. Basically, it means a "shutting in." Definition 4 is the most relevant definition but I like 1 and 6 as well. [ A situation prepared before hand in which someone is placed in a position to do something againt their will; a private bullfight.]

"In exams, competitions, etc... the exercise of preparing, during a predetermined time and in an isolated place, a theme that then must be presented to the judges."

So the idea is to lock yourself in where nobody else can reach you and just write as much of your project as though you were taking an exam on it. No internet, no books, just yourself and a computer or pen and pad, for 3 hours. This is a jump start method most appropriate for the beginning of a project. You can also do it all day, with breaks. If you have the luxury of an encerrona of a week, that would be great. Most of us have families and other obligations that prevent that.

Jump Start

At the beginning of a major project you'll need to spend a full day just doing as much as possible on it. Open up a blank word document and write the title page, a table of contents, some notes for the acknowledgements, the first sentence of a preface. Then just write notes for any aspect of the book that you have ideas for. Put in bibliographical items in the proper format. Basically, you have one document that is your entire book in germinative form. You can return any time, any place to this document and add stuff to it. You will always have a sentence to re-write, or an idea to jot down in rough form. Just always be working on this project.

If you wait until you have abundant time, like a vacation, you will get less done than if you had always been working on it, because the first day of your abundant time will simply be a continuation of ongoing work. That is why I did my jump start on my current project during the busiest time of the semester.