The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts March 4, 2005

Peter Ho Davies expresses that some literary mistakes are actually worth making

“If at any time,” Peter Ho Davies warned us at his book reading last week in a thick British accent, “my pronunciation sounds strange, it’s just because it’s correct.”

This is a common joke for those who speak the Queen’s English to tell us Yanks; although for Davies — a half-Chinese, half-Welsh teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor — it seems something of a personal creed. His multicultural background has led him to study and master the English language.

This philosophy was evident in his story “What you know,” which examined the various mistakes we make when we write and how these mistakes may not always be wrong. The narrator began the story by saying, “write what you know.” This statement appears quite personal, as the story is narrated by a high-school writing teacher (although he insists that the teacher is not him and this is not his story).

His narrator spends the beginning of the story describing all of the students’ mistakes with grammar, usage and spelling. As audience members we were both amused by the fact that anyone could freeze like a “d-e-a-r in the headlights” and horrified by memories of similar past mistakes in our own writing. Although the narrator expresses dislike for the subjects of “escapegoats” and death knolls, he professes that the biggest mistake one can make is to write about suicide.

The story takes a sharp turn when a student in the writing class brings a gun to school and shoots classmates and himself. Suddenly this is a story about suicide. The literal suicide of the story brings to light the narrator’s lackluster existence that continues only because it is not worth dying any more than it is worth living.

Davies manages to delve into the darker parts of his characters with uncanny insight and honesty. This story also deals with the fear of what could have happened had he become another disillusioned, unpublished teacher. It is, in the end, a lesson about humility. The teacher searches for answers and ends up empty handed, facing the same old mistakes and a failed career. In the end it is about the failure of language to explain with complete acuity the nature and intricacies of living.

The main difference between Davies and his narrator is that Davies does not believe that all mistakes are wrong. In fact, his hypothesis is that these malapropisms are what will drive the evolution of language. If Davies’s writing is any indication, a re-evaluation of what we consider mistakes will indeed result in a step forward, both in language and in the art of writing.
 
 

   


Search powered by