Donald Murray and the "Other Self" (Newkirk)

“Don Murray and the ‘Other Self. ’” Writing on the Edge, 19:1 (Fall, 2008).

This essay was written during an intellectually productive period in Don's career, the decade from 1978-1988--in which I feel he made his most significant contributions to the field of composition. I have chosen 1988 as an endpoint, as it coincides with James Berlin's publication of "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class." In that essay Murray was critiqued as an "expressionist," a term (usually transmuted to "expressivist") which follows him and many of us at the University of New Hampshire to this day, and one which he found too bizarre, too unreal to even challenge. I believe that one can date his own marginalization--and alienation
from the intellectual field of composition--from that point, though many other forces, including an invigorating social turn in composition studies, were also at work. In Kenneth Burke's terminology there was a shift from the agent to the scene of writing, with gains and losses in the process. (47)

Murray's great achievement, the great gift he offered to aspiring writers, was a description of another kind of "other self." One that was not morally tied to an original purpose, that could accept the accidents of language and association, that trusts in the generative possibilities of language to help us discover things we hadn't planned on writing. It encourages us to give into digressive temptations, to sin again and again, for these sins could be absolved by the delete button. He advocated a form of self-generosity-and tellingly the words "generous" and "generative" have the same linguistic root. This "other self" might say, "hhmmm, this is interesting, where can it go?," "tell me more," "try that tangent." It is a voice that keeps you
writing, keeps you believing in yourself... (49)

Don always hoped that a combination of writing and reading researchers might combine to study the reading of unfinished writing, and thought that researchers like Sondra Perl had made a good start with her work of retrospective structuring and "the felt sense." Yet this research strand never really materialized, though there is still interesting work to do. (50)

I am unconvinced that Don's work can be so neatly aligned with a particular ideology. He appealed to a huge range of writers, of varying political orientations. These writers appropriated from it what they needed. Some might be personal journal keepers writing to explore a personal trauma with no expectation of publication. Others, like Denise Grady, might be reporters for the New York Times explaining to hundreds of thousands of readers the latest research on diabetes. Don himself would sometimes use his Globe column to challenge the glamorization of combat. In other words I believe that it is debatable-if not doubtful--that one can predetermine the ideological or political use that will be made of a writing pedagogy... Appropriation, it seems to me, is a sloppy, unpredictable business. (51)

Now, after twenty years, "expressivism" has been part of the vocabulary of composition studies, a frequently used shorthand that dissolves the complex work of Murray and others into a compact position that in my view was never accurate in the first place. It can lead to intellectual reductiveness, to assertions that there really is this "rhetoric" that to my mind no thinking person would really subscribe to. It marginalizes and diminishes-to the point where I suspect Murray would be totally unknown to emerging professionals if Cross-Talk didn't have a four-page essay, written in the early 1970s. My hope is that he might be given a second look, a good rereading-particularly the great essays in this time period 1978-1988. And most particularly, "Teaching the Other Self." (51)