Free to Constrain

Yesterday I found out that 826 Chicago accepted my workshop proposal, which is really good. Essentially I'll be teaching high schoolers about constrained writing techniques (a couple of which I tried out on this blog). I think this will be my first official teaching experience, so I'm a bit nervous and I have to actually write a syllabus, which shouldn't be too bad, as the workshop only meets three times.

But of course now I'm in a position where, for the first time in my life, I'm directly responsible for teaching a group of people younger than me about something, albeit something rather esoteric and non-functional. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of constraint, and it seems to be one of those things that has a tendency to blur at the edges when you start to examine it. For example, the simplest constraint is to deny yourself the use of one letter (a la Perec's A Void). Easy enough, very constraining (if the letter is common). But the next step is to actually ask what consitutes restraint, or what kind of work constraint does in the field of meaning, or in the telegraphic or communicative aspects thereof.

An easy thing to say if you want to push it is, "Oh, well isn't all writing a kind of constraint on thought? Isn't all language?" and this sounds facile and like the sort of thing that gets people all riled up: "No, asshole, language is the condition of thought." At the same time, though, if we consider constraints, that is deliberate constraints, as a given condition of writing, then the frustration we feel when looking for that word without an e, or whatever, starts to feel a lot like the frustration we feel when we just cannot find the right wording for that clincher sentence when writing without constraint. Which leads me to believe that constraint isn't useful so much as a neat trick (though it is a neat trick), but really as an exercise in exploring the limits that language sets before us by constricting those limits.

This is where the telegraphic aspects of constrained writing comes in, because it seems to me that there is one major bifurcation in constrained method, and then probably a bunch of subsets after the split. One way to do it is to attempt to say what you want to say even in the face of the constraint. This turns constraint into an obstacle rather than a method (obviously I think I know what a method is), and it seems more fruitful as mere exercise. Practicing this kind of writing seems more (auto)pedagogical than experimental in the true sense, and so probably something I'll try asking the kids to do in the workshop.

The other way to go is to let the constraint guide the writing, and this, to me, is the more interesting way to do it. The experience of grammar, of syntax, of the rules of language, basically, becomes so heightened that whatever you end up writing has to sacrifice, perhaps paradoxically, a certain communicativeness in order to communicate more effectively. The negotiations implicit in all writings are pushed so sharply to the fore that whatever it is you intend to do as a writer ends up conflated with the rules of language (which, of course, have been augmented by the constraint, and this is where it becomes apparent that constraint is, in fact, not so much restriction but rerouting).

Needless to say, again, I'm very excited about the whole thing.