Writing as Performance
Revealing "the calculation that underlies the appearance of effortlessness"
by Stephen Greenblatt
The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance—and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig—is to understand the nature of the occasion. This particular occasion, the Gordon Gray Lecture, is unusually gratifying, since I am called on to talk about something I care passionately about—writing—and, indeed, about that aspect of the subject to which I have given the most sustained practical attention: my own writing. Under most other circumstances, so self-centered a focus would seem fatuous, and I would fear to cut what Italians call a brutta figura. In the sixteenth century, a famous behavior manual by Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, counseled what it called sprezzatura, or “nonchalance.” The successful courtier must cunningly hide all signs of practice, calculation, and effort, so as to make everything he or she does seem spontaneous and natural. But the Gordon Gray Lecture is an invitation to lift the curtain and reveal the calculation that underlies the appearance of effortlessness.
Editor’s note: Cogan University Professor of the humanities Stephen Greenblatt adapted this essay slightly from his Gordon Gray Lecture on the Craft of Scholarly Writing (sponsored by Harvard’s Expository Writing Program), presented to students and colleagues last October.
So let me begin by reading you something I wrote last summer, something that, as it happened, turned out also to be self-centered. It is short piece for a volume being put together in honor of a friend of mine. Such volumes are called Festschriften—literally, celebration-writings—and the German name, used even in English, somehow suggests their nature: these are honorific books that are almost never read, even by the person who is being honored. As the summer waned, the last thing I wanted was to stop working, even for a day, on the book on which I am currently engaged, a study of the loss and miraculous recovery of the manuscript of Lucretius’s great philosophical poem, On the Nature of Things. But the person being honored by the Festschrift, a Stanford professor of comparative literature named Sepp Gumbrecht, is an old friend of mine, and I could not refuse. So I sat down to write something about a recent book by Gumbrecht on the aesthetics of sports, published by the Harvard University Press.
Illustration by Joseph Ciadiello
The book was controversial. It had been sharply attacked by the historian Hayden White and others who thought that, in focusing so sharply on the beauty of sports, Gumbrecht had almost entirely ignored the sociological dimension. The aesthetic appreciation of sports, White argued, is not innocent: it serves as an excuse, one among several, for a grotesque over-expenditure of money for team sports, and particularly male-dominated sports, at many universities, universities that could be using this money for financial aid, teaching, and research. More broadly, Gumbrecht's critics charged, the aestheticizing of sports conceals the actual motives that draw people to invest their time, money, and passion in spectatorship. What is needed, instead is a disenchanted analysis of the kind that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had offered for “the love of art,” a love that Bourdieu revealed to be merely a piece of the cultural capital by which people attempt to secure their class distinction.
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