Judith J. Katz
Reading the work of the writers who came before us, listening to the unique voice each brings us, attempting to walk in the footprints left to us, is as good a way as any of learning how to find the unique, authentic voice within each of us. In this way writers are no different from any other artists. We must practice scales like musicians, we have to stand at the barre like dancers, and we have to break great paintings down into the major lines and shapes we see so that others can see them too.
In order to begin to master the elements of reading and writing in our own authentic voices, we must apprentice ourselves to the "master writers" who have done this work so successfully before us. We must choose some literary elements to focus on, read for those elements, discuss them with each other, and then write using those elements, initially imitating what the master writer has done. We must question the writers by questioning what we see them doing in their texts. Of course they cannot answer us verbally, but their work answers our questions. Over time we make those elements our own and their use becomes as fluid and natural to us as our own ability to walk down stairs. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent
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T.S. Eliot also writes about the impact of what I am calling the master-apprentice method:
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No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. [. . .] The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so [. . .] the values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is the conformity between the old and the new. [Hence no one should] find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. (2)
In our disposable society it is certainly no surprise that students who have been on the planet for 15 to 19 years do not have a clear sense of the way in which what is past is prologue. Nor is it a shocker that they believe that what they are doing is new, improved, cutting edge, and was never done before. And yet I have never had a student who did not react with pride at finding out that the writing they were doing was part of, or fit well in, a larger movement or ideal that preceded them. How much better, easier, and more comforting to have them start out knowing that one of their goals is to add their voice to the existing canon and that by doing so they may change perception of the past and redirect the future.
