My teachers would often write ‘slow down’ or ‘unpack this’ on my essays. I do the same thing now with my students’ writing, and – during this research leave especially – with my own. The comment appears whenever something is explained in insufficient detail, when the author makes a point and then rushes to another subject without hanging around to substantiate it or connect it to the rest of the argument. Too much of this can result in a weird, paratactic style where there seem to be many many ideas, but none of them have a distinct form.
I’ve been thinking about encouragement to ‘slow down’ your writing for a long time. I used to be of the belief that, like lifting weights, most people could throw up an argument quickly but only a true master could do so slowly. I still think that the best writing appears to be moving slowly, never leaving its reader behind, but this post is intended to make my metaphor for critical speed a bit more sophisticated. Up until now I’ve only been thinking of the speed of the critic: the student (or I) should slow down, take an hour or two to read a poem a dozen times, to study the nuances of an argument or the development of a novel; the bad student (myself included) does not do this, rushing through their work in order to get somewhere else and missing so much of what is happening on the page in front of them.
To this model of critical speed, I would like to add the idea that the object of criticism is also dynamic, and can even be moving very quickly indeed. The opening stanza of a poem can do a thousand things in the time it took me or you to read it. The closing chapter of a novel achieves so much in a bare few hundred words, compressing a great deal of movement (emotional and narratorial) into a couple of pages.
Now, if both the critic and his or her object of study are in motion, then my advice to the critic should really concern his or her speed in relation to that object. The essay that seems to rush through its material is actually the product of a mind that is not running at the same speed as that material: the poem has shot past the writer and she or he has only caught a few glimpses of what is going on. What I originally thought was the writer’s failure to slow down is actually their failure to speed up, and make the effort to analyse everything that is going on in the complex object of their study.
How should it be? The poem, the novel, the play or any artwork really (and maybe not just artworks) is there in front of you. A cursory study allows you to catch a glimpse of some of what it’s doing, but so much else is happening in this small space than you can see right now. So you work on it in detail, noticing more and more things, trying again and again to keep up with the unfolding multidimensional intricacies around you. When you come to write your criticism, if all is well, your criticism will move at a speed that is commensurate with your object, carrying the reader along at a fast enough pace that – like looking into another car on the motorway – everything about that object seems to move slowly, allowing it to be seen and understood in sufficient detail to convince.
But only because you are going very very fast indeed. So fast that your criticism matches speeds with its object.
