In pursuit of originality

The Kitchen Sink
    By Karen Abravanel

All Yale columns," a friend said over frijole tortillas, "fit into, like, three categories. One: `I'm a senior and it's been a great four years, even though there were some tough times.' Two: `Why don't Yale students care about x?' Three: `Freshmen are really, really dumb.'"

"Don't forget two-ply toilet paper," I offered, becoming the Benedict Arnold of Yale columnists. "That makes four."

"Yeah, so many words," he replied, "and so little that I want to read."

Beyond balancing publication deadlines with course due dates, the most difficult task for a Yale columnist--or any writer--is to write something that people want to read. Forget the adage about "art for art's sake." Columnists want to make people think, to help them examine an issue in a new way. First, we have to get them to read our pieces. And to do so, we need to fight the notion that everything we write has been written before.

If we respond by limiting our column topics to what has not been written, we expose ourselves to the temptation of originality for originality's sake. We run the risk of choosing a controversial issue, whether or not we feel strongly about it, simply because we want to increase our readership.

Contemporary academia demonstrates the consequences of this temptation. My professors have warned that after several months of research, there is nothing worse than discovering that Professor X wrote an entire book proving the same thesis you planned to prove. Attempting to avoid such a situation and believing that their work must be original to be worthwhile, some scholars limit their research to minute topics of questionable relevance ("Tourism and Aesthetic Perception in Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman"). Others try to present radical interpretations of more common topics, which forces them to defend assertions that they may not support.

A diluted version of this latter response, which calls for an original position rather than an original issue, might instruct columnists to explore old topics from new angles. Writers are bound to respond in droves to the Clinton scandal, for example, but each of a hundred different interpretations of the scandal could form original columns.

True originality might demand that writers consciously vary even their own interpretations. In these pages last semester, I wrote that the three thousand miles between New Haven and my hometown had forced me to redefine my role within my family. A few weeks later, based on a conversation with a Catholic guest at my family's Passover seder, I wrote about the delicate process of interfaith dialogue.

"Yep," my friends said, after reading the second piece. "Karen wrote about her family again." Originality, even partial originality, seems a tricky pursuit.

Yet perhaps it is not a necessary pursuit. Every year, one quarter of us experiences Yale and its publications for the first time. To a freshman who has never read The Yale Herald, any article printed within these pages seems original, and any interpretation might seem like a revelation. Even two-ply toilet paper might sound like a great new idea.

Freshman have spent too little time at Yale to decide what is original. Yet we should not assign this responsibility to seniors either, simply because they have spent more time here. The fact that a senior has read more columns in Yale publications might actually be the source of the problem: many seniors still cling to the positions they developed during their freshman year.

Why don't Yale students care about New Haven? After three years of reading Yale publications, the senior would quickly reply that "Yalies are self-obsessed, they are only here for four years, and they just view the city as a giant resumé-building community service project." We have read these explanations so many times that it no longer matters where or when we saw them first; the established interpretations seem correct because we have seen few alternatives. Trite writing only condones trite thinking.

Yale has the opportunity to recreate itself with the addition of each new freshman class, and Yale columnists have the opportunity to assist with this recreation. We are not of much use if we only offer this new class the same interpretations offered to us, but neither does it help to resort to extremes of originality.

Columnists can write about what has been written before without thinking what has been thought before. Our purpose is to interpret and to analyze; our responsibility is to re-interpret and to re-analyze.

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