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Richard Rodriguez, “Aria,” and David Foster Wallace,

“Tense Present”

Anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt says that languages live in speech communities “and that these tended to be theorized as discrete, self-defined, coherent entities, held together by a homogenous competence or grammar shared identically and equally among all members” (Pratt 325). In “conversation, classrooms, medical and bureaucratic settings, [people] take it for granted that the situation is governed by a single set of rules or norms shared by all participants. The

analysis focuses on how those rules produce or fail to produce an orderly, coherent exchange” (326).

In the college classroom, each discipline (sometimes each instructor) will expect you to speak a different language and follow the norms of that language, even before, in some cases, you have learned it.

In her article, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Mary Louise Pratt makes three major points:

she defines a contact zone

she explains the meaning of an imagined community

she explains speech communities and how they function

To understand contact zones, there are other basic premises that need to be understood.

Jacques Derrida, a poststructuralist philosopher, argues that in the West we think in terms of binary oppositions, dichotomies which evaluate hierarchies. Each opposition contains two words, one that is typically seen as superior to the other, such as

White Rich Male Presence

Black Poor Female Absence

Derrida was among the first critics to deconstruct these oppositions, examining how these ideas can coexist and define each other, as opposed to one always being seen as having more meaning than the other. As a result, new ways of reading (post-structuralism, deconstruction, queer theory, gender theory) have allowed us to consider these notions in new ways.

Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone” works from several of these binary oppositions, such as Europe/Latin America, Colonists/Indigenous People, Christian/Non-Christian, Logo-centric communication/Image-based communication. Assuming that these oppositions exist in many aspects of our daily lives, Pratt argues that the relationship between the two aspects of the opposition are engaged in a contact zone: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 319).

Two cultures or communities meeting is not enough to define them as a contact zone. They have to have some quality of opposition which leads to struggle. Thus if you are describing a group that always get along, they are not experiencing a contact zone, and they are not even considered in that context unless some binary opposition is at work.

According to Pratt, communities are “governed by a single set of rules or norms shared by all participants” (326). Communities establish these rules so that there is order. One of the rules they establish is their language and how it is expressed. Another is the meaning of symbols and signs. This sign: means peace in the US and other nations

influenced by that culture. It has been widely used and is easily recognized. It is related to the “v-sign,” V-for-victory, used throughout the Second World War and used in recent years all over the world to indicate a desire for peace, though often through military action (as in the “Arab Spring” when the sign was used in Egypt, among other places in the Middle East during theprotests against totalitarianism at that time).

In the UK, this sign, with two fingers up and the other three down and facing away from the signer still refers back to V-for-Victory as much as anything else. However, if you reverse it, and it’s two fingers up and the other three down and towards the signer, it becomes an obscene gesture, like “the finger” in the US.

The community of those living in the UK agree to that

meaning of the sign, but in the US we generally do not

do that—we use one finger extended up as “the finger.”

We are excluded and ridiculed by residents of the UK if

we get the V wrong because we do not live in their community.

Pratt goes on to cite Benedict Anderson’s definition of an imagined community as one that is “limited by ‘finite, if elastic boundaries”; . . . Imagined as sovereign; and . . . fraternal, ‘a deep horizontal comradeship’ for which millions of people are prepared ‘not so much to kill as willingly to die’”(325). Imagined communities are communities that share common language, signifiers, and traditions and present an image of themselves as the communities themselves want to be seen. We imagine these communities as perfect, Plato’s ideal utopias, because they are ours and we want to be associated with the best we have to offer.

Pratt, again citing Anderson argues that “communities are distinguished . . . not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (325). However, according to Pratt, because of the constant state of failure to reach that ideal (á la Plato) in which we live, our imagined communities never quite live up to the imagined version. This can lead to conflict within a community, and it’s an important part of a contact zone because when two imagined communities meet (forming conflict and, thus a contact zone), there will no doubt be further conflict when each community projects not fact but its imagined ideal.

Pratt ends with a reflection on her own teaching and political stakes involved for her and for education itself: “we are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history (including their own histories), ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity; ground rules for communication across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all-important concept of cultural mediation” (Pratt 329).

If you apply her theories of imagined communities and contact zones to this utopian description of her academic situation, you could find a lot of intriguing problems and conflicts in what she says. But what is important is not the details of this statement, rather the fact that she is politicizing her classroom and her pedagogy. This is where Wallace comes in.

Wallace’s article is a review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. He also has a sub-title, which he includes in a footnote: “or, ‘Politics and the English Language’ Is Redundant.” Thus he starts from the position that all speech is a political act, that anything you say (or write) is a political choice on the part of the speaker/writer.

Wallace writes, “language is everything and everywhere; it’s what lets us have anything to do with one another; it’s what separates us from animals” (390).

If you do not think that your language functions in that way, think again. Anytime you use “u,” for example, as shorthand for the word you or use slang or non-standard grammar, even if you do not mean to do it deliberately, someone is going to hear it as a deliberate choice, and a choice for which you must be accountable.

I’m about to skrt

Black Panther is G.O.A.T.

Wallace uses a lot of humor in his writing and coins the term SNOOT as one who is “a really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to hunt for mistakes in the very prose of Safire’s column. . . . A SNOOT is someone who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it” (390).

He argues that although we Americans consider ourselves in possession of a Democratic Spirit, “it is indisputably easier to be Dogmatic than Democratic, especially about issues that are both vexed and highly charged . . .issues surrounding ‘correctness’ in contemporary American usage are both vexed and highly charged, and . . . The fundamental questions they involve are ones whose answers have to be literally worked out instead of merely found” (391-2).

Wallace is touching on several of Pratt’s ideas here: language is a contact zone in which judgment and “correctness” operate. Also, he points out that there is an imagined community among speakers of English that sees Democracy as preferable to Autocracy (how we see ourselves) but that the way we prefer to function is through dogmatic principles (how we actually function/are seen by others).

Correct usage Educated SNOOT

Slang Uneducated Everybody else

Wallace asks a fundamental question: “we regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance. Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who exactly decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronunciations get deemed substandard or incorrect” (393).

He divides up the authors of dictionaries and usage guides into two camps: prescriptivists and descriptivists. Prescriptivists believe that there are rules in English usage and that mistakes are the result of breaking those rules. There is a clear right and wrong in writing. Descriptivists observe the language and make assumptions based on common usage. Some of that common usage can become a rule, but rules are always in flux and can change as the language changes. Right and wrong is a temporary state for a descriptivist. If you want to see this as a binary opposition, you have to decide which is more acceptable in a given situation, otherwise you have two binaries, both of which are simultaneously true:

Prescriptivist Descriptivist

Descriptivist Prescriptivist

Wallace writes:

Descriptivism so quickly and thoroughly took over English education in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively — via "freewriting," "brainstorming," "journaling," a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, the very language in which today's socialist, feminist, minority, gay, and environmentalist movements frame their sides of political debates is informed by the Descriptivist belief that traditional English is conceived and perpetuated by Privileged WASP Males and is thus inherently capitalist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, elitist: unfair. Think Ebonics. Think of the involved contortions people undergo to avoid he as a generic pronoun, or of the tense deliberate way white males now adjust their vocabularies around non-w.m.'s. Think of today's endless battles over just the names of things — "Affirmative Action" vs. "Reverse Discrimination," "Pro-Life" vs. "Pro-Choice," “Undocumented Worker” vs. “Illegal Alien,” “Perjury” vs. “Pecadillo,” and so on. (398)

Wallace continues:

The point of the analogy is that claims to objectivity in language study are now the stuff of jokes and shudders. The epistemological assumptions that underlie Methodological Descriptivism have been thoroughly debunked and displaced — in Lit by the rise of post-structuralism, Reader-Response Criticism, and Jaussian Reception Theory; in linguistics by the rise of Pragmatics — and it's now pretty much universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed by the interpreter's particular ideology. And the consequence of (a) and (b) is that there's no way around it — decisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer's ideology. And every lexicographer's got one. To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism. (400-401)

Our use of our own language, within our own speech communities, is an ideological choice, and it raises the stakes when we speak and write in English.

Wallace:

“Just because people sometimes lie, cheat on their taxes, or scream at their kids, this doesn't mean that they think those things are "good." The whole point of norms is to help us evaluate our actions (including utterances) according to what we as a community have decided our real interests and purposes are. Granted, this analysis is oversimplified; in practice it's incredibly hard to arrive at norms and to keep them at least minimally fair or sometimes even to agree on what they are” (402).

Pratt:

The idea of imagined communities “is strongly utopian, embodying values like equality, fraternity, liberty, which the societies often profess but systematically fail to realize . . . Modern views of language as code and competence assume a unified and homogeneous social world in which language exists as a shared patrimony—a device, precisely, for imagining communities . . . It depends on what workings of language you want to see or want to see first, on what you choose to define as normative” (325-26).

Wallace gives several examples of how much we judge others’ speech and how our speech is judged. He gives the example of someone wanting to terminate a social interaction:

Very delicate social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to handle it. “Wow, look at the time”; “Could we finish this up later?”; “Could you please leave now?”; “Go”; “Get out”; “Get the hell out of here”; “Didn’t you say you had to be someplace?”; “Time for you to hit the dusty trail, my friend”; “Off you go, then, love”; or that shy old telephone-conversation-ender: “Well, I’m going to let you go now.” (407)

There is judgment in what we say and how we are heard, and there is, inherent in that, a need to be accepted, and we change out speech and writing in order to be accepted by the peers we have found in a particular community. This reverts back, again, to Benedict Anderson and the imagined community: speech acts are part of how communities define themselves, and in order to be accepted, we must adjust our speech.

Wallace reminds us that “most of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in several subdialects and are probably at least passable in countless others . . . The dialect you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and on whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group” (410-11).

Think of Guaman Poma’s New History, which is written in Spanish and in the pictograms of his indigenous language.

Shakespeare demonstrates this when Hamlet communicates in slang and innuendo with the grave diggers and then turns, in the same scene, to the more courtly prose he shares with Horatio.

Another example is Julia Kristeva’s “ Stabat Mater,”

in which she writes on one side of the page in masculinist prose and on the other side in feminine,

non-linear prose.

Wallace’s article ends with his discussing the SNOOTlet, a child who has exceptional grammar and diction, and how ill-suited he is for communicating with his peers. Just like the student whose grammar is so poor that he cannot be understood, the SNOOTlet cannot be understood and is therefore rejected by his peers.

the little A++ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectical position as the. class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed. Exactly the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another way with family and another way with T-ball coaches and so on. (413)

The SNOOTlet is fluent in SWE, and Wallace’s article (which is summarized at the end of the essay) ends with several calls to action, one of which is that “teachers need to develop ‘honest, and compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth learning . . . The real truth, of course, is that SWE is a dialect of the American elite’” (413). It is, he argues, a language “developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people” (414).

From the prologue to Richard Rodriguez’ The Hunger of Memory:

Once upon a time, I was a “socially disadvantaged” child. An enchantedly happy child. Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation . . . Aztec ruins hold no special interest for me. I do not search Mexican graveyards for ties to unnamable ancestors. I assume I retain certain features of gesture and mood derived from buried lives. I also speak Spanish today. And read García Lorca and García Márquez at my leisure. But what consolation can that fact bring against the knowledge that my mother and father have never heard of García Lorca and García Márquez? What preoccupies me is immediate: the separation I endure with my parents in loss. This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story. An American story. (1, 4)

Rodriguez establishes his thesis in this prologue as trying to come to terms with the loss of his family, a necessary loss for him as he pursued education.

When Rodriguez describes his family’s Spanish as private and his teachers’ and classmates’ English as public, he draws an important distinction. On one level he is echoing Pratt and her discussion of speech communities. At home he has a speech community of Spanish:

my parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family. (Ricardo.) (15)

As he goes forward in his education, he realizes that the language of school is not only different, but a public language, a second speech community in which he is (at first unwillingly) participating.

Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom. I would have felt much less afraid. I would have trusted them and responded with ease. But I would have delayed—for how long postponed?—having to learn the language of public society. I would have evaded . . . Learning the great lesson of school, that I had a public identity. (18)

The reality of living in two speech communities created a crisis for Rodriguez as a child, but once he began to connect with his classmates and teachers, he realized that he could only live in one world: the world of English, a language in which one could “make oneself understood by many others” (19).

Wallace argues that although we may belong to more than one speech community, those of us who are educated include SWE as one of those communities, and it is SWE (Standard Written English) that Rodriguez begins to learn in school. Wallace writes:

A dialect of English is learned and used either because it’s your native vernacular or because it’s the dialect of a Group by which you wish (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted. And although it is a major and vitally important one, SWE is only one dialect. And it is never, or at least hardly ever, anybody’s only dialect. This is because there are—as you and I both know and yet no one in the Usage Wars ever seems to mention—situations in which faultlessly correct SWE is not the appropriate dialect. (411)

As a child, Rodriguez does not understand this, so he rejects his family’s language and embraces SWE because it is what his classmates and teachers speak; it is what people with wealth and influence speak; he wants to be part of that Group, so he changes his very identity in order to be accepted:

One Saturday morning I entered the kitchen where my parents were talking in Spanish. I did not realize that they were talking in Spanish however until, at the moment they saw me, I heard their voices change to speak English. Those gringo sounds they uttered startled me. Pushed me away. In that moment of trivial misunderstanding and profound insight, I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief . . . Again and again in the days following, increasingly angry, I was obliged to her my mother and father: “Speak to us en ingles.” (Speak.) Only then did I determine to learn classroom English.

In “Aria” Rodriguez says he got so “good” at English that he was unable to speak Spanish, even to his family, and found it impossible to speak articulately in Spanish at all. His family and community started calling him a pocho, which he defines as “the Mexican-American who, in becoming American, forgets his native society” (29). His parents are embarrassed by his poor Spanish, and his family berates him.

As a child he is frustrated at home and grows silent. He doesn’t ask his parents for help, and he looks to his teachers as his role models and guides. In comparing himself to Hoggart’s scholarship boy, he says

Initially he wavers, balances allegiance. (“The boy is himself [until he reaches, say, the upper fors] very much of both worlds of home and school. He is enormously obedient to the dictates of the world of school, but emotionally still strongly wants to continue as part of the family circle.”) Gradually, necessarily, the balance is lost. The boy needs to spend more and more time studying . . . He takes his first step toward academic success, away from his family. (341)

This is the heart of the essay: education changes you, and one of the first changes, and the most painful, is that education distances you from your family.

You might not be feeling that separation from your family yet. You will feel it more strongly if your parents are not as fluent in English as you are. You will already have begun to sense a distance as your English becomes better and your native language becomes your second language. Rodriguez (again, in the chapter before the reading in your book) articulates this as the difference between his being Ricardo at home and Richard at school: “I . . . needed my teachers to keep my attention from straying in class by calling out, Rich-heard—their English voices slowly prying loose my ties to my other name, its three notes. Ri-car-do” (20).

The separation you feel from your parents does not have to be based on language: you will understand a lot of topics as you become better educated, and if you are better educated than your parents, although they will be proud of you, you will become separated from them on certain levels. They won’t understand what you are studying, as Rodriguez writes, “What could I tell [my parents] of the term paper I has just finished on the ‘universality of Shakespeare’s appeal’? I mentioned only small, obvious things . . . We tried to make our conversation seem like more than an interview” (346).

Rodriguez makes his thesis very clear in the essay—he even italicizes it:

A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student (339).

From that basic idea, he continues to make an argument both for and against education as an access point to the middle class.

Central to Rodriguez’ argument is his analysis of Richard Hoggart’s book, The Uses of Literacy which outlines the life of what he calls “the scholarship boy” (in Rodriguez 340). He argues that “the scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed. With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s consolation in feeling public alienation . . . at school, there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the value of reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action” (340).

At home, for “the scholarship boy,” the lower-level needs are met, or at least the struggle to meet those needs is played out: physiological needs, needs of security and safety, and those associated with love and belonging.

Once he gets to school (and for Rodriguez, as he points out, it is a school in an affluent area where his classmates are middle class), he still has to address the need to belong, but he begins to experience the categories of esteem and self-actualization, as well. He becomes creative, confident, and he finds, eventually, that he belongs (especially when he sheds his identity as Ricardo and becomes, in name and in self, Richard. His parents, who are not educated, spend their working lives struggling for safety and physiological needs: in the middle class, one has the ability to think beyond those needs, and for “the scholarship boy,” as well as most people, access to the middle class is only possible through education.

So all the positive skills and achievements that are possible through your education (and there are many) come at a price.

Furthermore, Rodriguez argues, it is not just that the “scholarship boy” embrace higher thinking. He has to formally, somehow, reject his family and what they represent. Why else does one become educated? For everyone this takes a different form. Some “educated” people reject their parents’ religion; they change their appearance; they become vegetarians or vegans; they speak a new language (like Rodriguez); they change some ideology held sacred to their family (pro-choice or pro-gay marriage). Sometimes they date someone they know their parents will reject (this is detailed beautifully in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, when the main character, Gogol Ganjuli, the child of Bengali immigrants, dates European women, including a long-term relationship that starts in college. He marries a Bengali girl, Moushumi, but their marriage ends in divorce. His sister marries a European man before the novel ends.

For Rodriguez he says he became “especially ambitious” and eventually studies a very traditional English poet, John Milton. And as he becomes better educated, he becomes conscious of his parents’ class and their lack of education. “I was not proud of my mother and father. I was embarrassed by their lack of education. It was not that I ever thought they were stupid, though stupidly I took for granted their enormous native intelligence. Simply, what mattered to me was that they were not like my teachers” (343).

Again, returning to the notion of binary oppositions, and to the deconstruction of those oppositions, Rodriguez has a really thought-provoking approach.

There are so many oppositions one could analyze in his work:

Educated SWE Education Confidence Acceptance

Uneducated Other dialect Native intelligence Survival Isolation

If we were to deconstruct them, we would see that we define, for example, educated people not necessarily by degrees earned or projects completed by how different they are from those who are considered “uneducated.”

We know, as Wallace says, that SWE has authority: “you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call ‘Standard White English’ because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people” (414). But he also says that there are times when SWE is not appropriate (ask the SNOOTlet who has been beaten up on the playground).

We all want self-esteem and confidence, but they go out the window if our survival is threatened—watch how quickly people stop being brave when their lives or the lives of those they love are seriously threatened.

So how do Wallace and Rodriguez overlap?

Speech communities

Imagined communities (which are defined in Pratt)

Speech is political and

One chooses one’s speech based on the impression he wants to convey or the community to which she wants to belong

Prescriptive (dogmatic) grammar versus Descriptive (democratic) grammar

Educational reform

Language use is ideological (and inescapable)

Judgment of those who speak differently (Rodriguez’ parents, SNOOTs)

Standard Written English (SWE): what it means to speak it, what you lose by speaking it, what it represents (for Rodriguez it offers social mobility and authority; for Wallace it represents an oppressive conflict zone in which the standards are imposed on students)

SNOOTs are at the same disadvantage as those who speak English poorly: both are ultimately excluded form mainstream speech communities but neither can easily adapt and change.

Wallace brings us, in the end, right back to Pratt and her contact zones. Language is a contact zone, and no matter how or with whom you speak and write, there will be conflict.

As students in a writing class, in fact as students in any class, you will be in conflict with the way you are being taught to speak and write, and your response to that is critically important to your ultimate success. It’s about what your goals are: to which communities do you wish to belong? What is compelling argument for being fluent in more than one English dialect, and is SWE a dialect that will benefit you professionally, academically, or even personally?

The community of academia expects you to write and speak SWE – even if that community is an imagined one, one that we know will fall short of its goals and will fail to accommodate all of its members hopes and expectations, it is a community into which, by your application to attend this college, you have sought acceptance.

Are you going to be Guaman Poma, and try to speak multiple dialects in an effort to stay true to your native self and to the community you want to enter? Are you going to reject your native community (to at least some extent) and pursue SWE as a means to accessing the power and professional benefits is can bring you? The choice is yours: just make it consciously and honestly.

Works Cited

“David Foster Wallace Interview.” YouTube, uploaded by manufacturing intellect, 24 July 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ytSdSM-Kk. Accessed 28 February 2017.

Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater,” translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Poetics Today vol. 6, no. 1/2. The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives (1985), pp. 133-152. JSTOR. Accessed 28 February 2017.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Ways of Reading, 5th edition. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky. Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. Florida International University, www2.fiu.edu/~ereserve/010035191-1.pdf. Accessed 28 February 2017.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Bantam, 1982.

Wallace, David Foster. “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” Harpers, April 2001. Sandy LaFave, West Valley College, 2017, instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW _present_tense.html. Accessed 28 February 2017.