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Conference Presentation: Anscombe's Elephants (Intention and Creative Writing)



(See paper here for footnotes)

(See slides here)


Introduction 


D.G. Meyers begins his history of academic creative writing with a story about Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov wanted to work at Harvard but when the critic Roman Jakobsen reviewed his application, he quipped “What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?” (Meyers v) 


Here, Jakobsen represents a historical rift between English on the one hand and creative writing on the other. 


Meyers thinks this is, in part, CWs fault: our failure to offer a “system that transcends the subjective needs of individual expression” (179) in contrast to literary theory, which has developed useful criteria for evaluation. 


However, I’ll argue this rift is explained by two, inter-related concepts: intention and value. It is that CW is committed to these concepts that separate us from theorists. 


Notions of value are, after all, implied when a writer is told to improve diction, eliminate passive voice, or insert dialogue—all for the sake of (what else?) improving the piece. And, workshops assume the role of intention in interpretation. Why introduce new techniques if they don’t help the writer say what they mean? 


Theory, on the other hand, has made a discipline out of deconstructing these ideas, that one text is no better than another and that the author’s intention can’t be recognized the page. 


Today, I’d like to propose some arguments by which creative writers can justify their practice while offering a framework interesting enough to attract theoretical interaction. 


Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’ work, particularly Michaels’ use of Elizabeth Anscombe’s philosophy of action, give theoretical resources to creative writers. By thinking of interpretation in terms of acts, Knapp, Michaels, and Anscombe allow CW to engage theory without abandoning its commitments to intention and value. 


With their help, I think we can progress a historical conversation which has stalled, but which is primed to begin again. 


The Problem: Intention and Value in Creative Writing


Creative writers have tried to introduce Theory to the workshop, but with little success. The history of Creative Writing and Theory is marked by chilly receptions. This history cautions us not to overlook our own theoretical needs.

Amanda Boutler agrees. When discussing grading in CW classes, she says that “behind” the language we choose for criteria are “implicit and…unnamed assumptions about what makes good literature.” “Words like “vividness, power, authenticity…” reveal a commitment to value, a notion all “theoretical schools…agree” is inappropriate because, as they argue, there is “nothing intrinsic to any text that [makes] it better than any other.” (Boutler 136) 


She also sees this problem when grading students’ critical responses to their own work. When doing so, instructors are faced with a dilemma. “Do we down-grade a student…because they did appear to realize the meaning of their own writing—or do we reward them for creative writing that works on deeper levels than they were aware?” (ibid) 


CW is posed with Paul Dawson's question, “how do writing programmes negotiate the insights of contemporary theory…while still maintaining the central pedagogical aim” (Dawson 161, 2005) of the workshop? 


Answers to these very theoretical problems are not easy. Past attempts to integrate theory show they are easily overlooked. Some creative writers like Cassandra Atherton or Jay Parini argue that the problem is structural, that “theory and practice [tore] apart…when the major creative writers…” stopped being “the major critics.” (Parini 127) To fix this rift, English departments must “stop ‘separating student’s into streams.’” (Atherton 5) 


But these solutions inevitably ignore real conceptual differences between CW and Theory, giving little thought to the working premises of CW pedagogy, not to mention the arguments of individual theorists. 


Other writers have proposed a synchronistic approach. John Parras thinks we should “loosen up the idea of authorship…” (Parras 160) without abandoning it completely. These kinds of solutions see theory as a way of avoiding “authorial tyranny” in the workshop, allowing students to “virtua[ly] suspen[d]...authority…unmooring…[their work] from the intention of the creator…” (ibid) 


But this ends up in a failure to take theory seriously enough. It’s well and good to have your students read Roland Barthes. But, if they take him seriously, they will be faced with his claim: that the author dies when he puts pen to paper. Other attempts at recontextualizing the problem fall victim to this mistake. Dawson promotes a Marxist view of the creaetive writing profession which rejects a pure craft approach to CW. Instead, the workshop must help create a kind of academic laborer, what Paul Bove and Terry Eagleton call a “literary intellectual”


But, this ends up punting on the theoretical problem itself. Dawson admits that the question of what literature is—what a creative writer is supposed to know how to evaluate—is “notoriously difficult to define.” But, the literary intellectual can more easily “accept what sort of writing operates as literature.” (173) But this, of course, is cold comfort to the student actually trying to settle the question for herself.


Introducing Anscombe's Philosophy 


All this to say, the problem of intention and value for CW doesn’t go away when we simply combine theory with the workshop. It has a way of popping up in inconvenient ways. When engaging theory, a creative writer is better served by tackling the question of intention and value head on. 


To this end, I’d like to discuss the thought of Elizabeth Anscombe and its application to theory by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. 


Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1919-2001) work on action and ethics made her one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. She was controversial for criticizing Harry Truman who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her argument was that since Truman knew he was killing innocent bystanders by dropping the bomb, his actions were properly described as murder. 


This argument has interesting connections to her theory of action. She is saying that a description of evil acts like murder pick out a concept with two important features. We can say Truman is a murderer when we observe (a.) what he knew in acting, and (b.) what happened—the death of innocent people. In this view, describing actions as intentional (murder) or unintentional (an accident) are different forms of description, forms that can be true or false. 


In other words, one of the differences between the descriptions of certain events are whether or not we are observing something called “intention.” This argument finds its roots in Anscombe’s friend and teacher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. 


For both Anscombe and Wittgenstein language is an activity—not a system of symbols—but a form of life like a game. Language  is a way of organizing our activity in a social way to accomplish certain ends—playing chess, voting, falling in love. In this approach, language is something we use.


Anscombe wrote her most famous text, Intention, to investigate what we are observing when we use the word. She begins with an observation. The idea of intention is always oriented toward the description of events. These events are actions like, “I intend to write a poem,” or “I intended to play a practical joke.” But problems come up when we try to distinguish between these kinds of actions and actions which are unintentional. 


To distinguish between the two, she suggests that intentional actions are those to which “the question why is given application,” (Anscombe 5) but a certain kind of application, for if the answer to “why are you jiggling your leg,” is “I didn’t realize I was doing that,” then we find that intentional action is not really what is described. She calls this a refusal of the why-question. So, by identifying the way a why-question is refused, she says we can develop a reasonable criteria for intentional acts. 


She finds three refusals in everyday language. An action is not intentional if the actor says: 

  1. I didn’t know I was doing that; 

  2. I observed I was doing that; 

  3. And, when answers involve no mental cause. 


From these she develops four conditions for intention—when the why question is accepted. An action is intentional if 

  1. I know I am doing it; 

  2. I know without observation that I am doing it. 

  3. I do not need observation to know why I am doing it. 


These are the conditions which allow for the proper description of intention.Intentional actions are those performed with a knowledge that doesn’t require observation to possess. 


So, for instance, I know I am reading this paper, not because I observe it, but by another form of practical reasoning—the kind of reasoning I make perform when I think about the position of my arm without looking. This allows me to offer answers to the why question, “why are you reading that?” My answer (to present at this conference) is just an account of the means end order making sense of the act itself, what I am trying to do. Something I know. 


In other words, what makes it intentional is, in part, the goal I have in mind. This orders my actions and makes them intelligible as intention. Notice the connection to Harry Truman. Because of what he knew dropping a bomb would do—i.e. kill innocent people—we can just say he killed innocent people. His knowledge in acting just is what he intended to do; just as my knowledge in presenting this paper just is what I intend to do. 


Application to Creative Writing 


What does this have to do with creative writing?


One, I believe Anscombe gives us reasons to understand our student’s writing in terms of their intentions; and two, Anscombe gives us a way of evaluating that writing as better or worse in terms of their intentions.


Lets take those one at a time. Understanding our student’s writing in terms of their intentions. 


In their famous essay, “Against Theory” Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels apply Anscombe’s account of action to questions of literary interpretation. In it they give a helpful example. 


Two people walk along the beach. A wave crashes and recedes to reveal the first stanza of Wordsworth’s, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.” Here is a good candidate for unintended meaning, the beach walkers may think—a text which doesn’t need the intention of the author to be interpreted. But just then, another wave crashes and reveals the second stanza of the poem. This compels teh beach walkers to provide a deeper explanation of the phenomenon. As they make a list—Wordsworth’s ghost, a practical joke, a geologic or oceanographic phenomenon—their explanations fall into one of two categories. Either the marks are caused by some agent—ghosts, practical jokers—or they are accidents, as in the case of natural events. 


From this, Knapp and Michaels want us to ask a question: what do these two kinds of explanations mean? In the case of accidents, the poem means the mere causes which brough it about. But, for explanations involving an agent, the meaning is different in kind. The difference between them is the idea of intention. 


Arguments like these give creative writers good reasons to think that the meaning of their student’s text, that which describes it, is their intention. Now, this does not guarantee that we will be right in knowing what exactly that intention is. But, this shouldn’t discourage us. Surely, our having written texts ourselves and having read many texts like there’s will help. Also, the dialectical practice of workshop is uniquely suited for determining, at least, what the student is trying to write. 


Which brings us the second application of Anscombe’s work. The question of value. Our commitments to our students intention lead us to a common issue: their failure to realize their intention in the work; or their failure to have thoughtful intentions in the first place. Here Asncombe is also helpful. 


In Intention, she asks us to imagine two different lists. One is a shopping list given to a husband by his wife. The second is a list made by a detective who follows the man while he shops. Anscombe points out that “...the relation of [the shopping] list to the things [the husband] actually buys is one and the same” but “...that there is a different relation” in the list made by the detective.” (Anscombe 56) 


The difference is the order of intention of the list as it relates to the things bought. She says, “if the list and the things that the [husband] actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes a mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man’s performance… whereas if the detective’s record and what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in the record.” (ibid) 


Its Important to notice that in this example, the lists are identical but mean entirely different things by virtue of their intention. They are therefore evaluated by different criteria. 


Here we find an argument for the kinds of literary analysis writers make in workshop—identifying mistakes in the intention to write. Imagine an author writes a scene which is intended to be suspenseful. They take it to workshop only to find their intention has malfunctioned. No one feels the suspense. The author takes suggestions for the improvement of their scene, implements them, and finds success. 


This commonplace event underscores the premises of Anscombian action. Here, the unfortunate scene is evaluated in terms of the intentions of its author. It is bad insofar as it fails to realize suspense, what the writer wanted. So, it is only by virtue of intent that the scene can be said to have failed or succeeded at all. 


Just like the detective, the mistake in the text is a mistake to do what one wanted in acting. 


Here, failures in our student’s work are one of two kinds. 1.) they are failures to realize what they want; but 2.) they could be failures of wanting the wrong thing. I remember, early in my writing career, being terrified of looking stupid. This became an intention in my work. I wrote dense, complex, meta-fiction that, predictably, wasn’t very entertaining or enlightening. It took a good teacher, the writer Chris Abani, to see within my intention, something unsuited to story writing. He pointed out that it was, in fact my fear, that was holding me back from the kind of writing I was capable of. It's just these kinds of interventions that Anscombe gives us good reason to make. 


Conclusion


So, what we find in Anscombe then is a theoretical language for explaining CW practice. This is a language which holds possibility for future dialogues with theory just as theory is re-emerging on the literary scene. The idea of authorship need not, in John Parras’ words, be loosened up (Parras 160) to accommodate theorist scrutiny. Nor should our commitment to literary value be abandoned. Indeed, as Theory embarks on new projects, CW has the potential to contribute its own ideas of creative practice that ground and deepen theoretical concepts. Thus, by representing our field in Anscombian terms, CW could contribute to these discourses, instead of merely watching them unfold.


Works Cited:


Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.

———. “Mr. Trueman’s Degree.” Oxonian Press, 1958.

Atherton, Cassandra. “Sleeping With The Enemy: Creative Writing and Theory in The 

Academy,” 2010.

Benn Michaels, Walter. “Blind Time (Drawing with Anscombe).” Yearbook of Research in 

English and American Literature, 2020, 1–12.

Boutler, Amanda. “Assessing The Criteria: An Argument for Creative Writing Theory.” 

International Journal For The Practice And Theory Of Creative Writing 1, no. 2 (2004): 

134–40.

Dawson, Paul. “What Is a Literary Intellectual.” Cultural Studies Review, 2003.

Hubbs, Graham. “Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention,” 2021. 

Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 

723–42.

Myers, D. G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880. University of Chicago Press

ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Parini, Jay. “Literary Theory and the Writer.” In Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking 

Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, 127–30. Urbana, Ill: National Council of 

Teachers of English, 1994.

Parras, John. “Literary Theory In The Creative Writing Workshop.” Journal Of Teaching

Writing 22, no. 1 (n.d.).


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