I’m deep in Torpor (Chris Kraus), and have come upon these paragraphs:

Tenses situate events relative to their closeness or their distance from the speaker. Rules of grammar give the empty space of human speech some shape. The simple past: We left. In more complex tenses, “have” and “had,” the helping verbs, help to separate the speaker from the immediacy of the events. We had left. Had forms a little step between what happened and the moment when you’re telling it.

There is a tense of longing and regret, in which every step you take becomes delayed, revised, held back a little bit. The past and future are hypothesized, an ideal world existing in the shadow of an if. It would have been. (157)

And I wish I had this the night before when I was trying to make the case that grammar is important for students to have, that English grammar, say, isn’t just an impression forced by the dominant culture: every language/speaker has (its own, particular, unique) grammar, and understanding how tense or particles or subjects or objects or any of it function in language-space is not (I was trying to argue) the parameters of oppression. Should the dominant grammar rules be challenged? Always. But the rules are arbitrary, and in my mind, distinct from grammar. Let’s not deny students grammar for fuck’s sake in the name of including non-dominant ways of speaking. This is actually counterproductive? If the idea is to champion diversity in form?

We were working with different definitions of grammar, I see that now. I understand grammar to be a tool of production, or at least this is the first metaphor to come to me — and there’s no doubt it is because I am once again reading Chris Kraus — a tool in the way a film editor splices and reorganizes and accelerates or slows the footage. Tell students they can do this, show them how to do this, the moving parts of it all. I see now that she, for her part, was frustrated by the rigidity of the rules that constitute “good” grammar, and as a creative writing teacher has plenty to say about how a student’s writing shouldn’t be assessed according to the rubric of these rules.

And I am sympathetic to this impulse to tell students to write freely, to express what is true, and express in ways that are true to them (i.e., adhere to their own grammar). But there’s freedom, and then there’s throwing the baby out with the bath. (Almost) all structures in grammar emerged spontaneously, there’s a history to it, patterns, lovely logics, etc. There’s ways to teach grammar and its history critically, simultaneously, no?

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One of my favorite lines in Torpor (so far) is found earlier on, when the narrator, “Sylvie” somehow, is telling us why it is that “Jerome” (whose father and uncle were both sent to Auschwitz) is unable to write about the war, or speak to his experience about the war because, “[…] to do these things, Jerome couldn’t know the things he knew, because this knowledge left him paralyzed and empty.” (32)

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I have considered before perhaps the reason for not doing something, or even being unable to do something, is because it means too much to me. This is not what Jerome knows of course. This is only what came to mind as I was reading, from my considerable remove from his experience.