The Principle of Instruction
Show, Don’t Tell
This is a short chapter on a vexing subject. Diderot found printers and typesetters inarticulate in explaining what they did; I found myself unable to put clearly into words how hand and eye coordinate. Language struggles with depicting physical action, and nowhere is this struggle more evident than in language that tells us what to do. Whoever has tried to assem- ble a do-it-yourself bookcase following written instructions knows the problem. As one’s temper rises, one realizes how great a gap can exist between instructive language and the body.
In the workshop or laboratory, the spoken word seems more ef- fective than written instructions. Whenever a procedure becomes diffi- cult, you can immediately ask someone else about it, discussing back and forth, whereas when reading a printed page you can discuss with yourself what you read but you cannot get another’s feedback. Yet simply privileging the speaking voice, face-to-face, is an incomplete solution. You both have to be in the same spot; learning becomes local. Unscripted dialogue, moreover, is often very messy and wandering. Rather than getting rid of print, the challenge is to make written in- structions communicate—to create expressive instructions.
This vexed problem has a biological side, revealed by studies that relate the activities of the hands to the uses of language. The most useful to us of these studies focus on coordination of instructions in words and hand gestures. Researchers have probed this tie by study- ing connections between apraxia and aphasia. Apraxia (loss of skilled movement) concerns the difficulties people may suffer in performing a task like buttoning a shirt. Correspondingly, aphasia (loss of the ability to use or comprehend words) can take the form of a person’s not under- standing the verbal instruction to button one’s shirt. The neurologist Frank Wilson has worked with patients who suffer from both disorders. He proposes that treating apraxia first will aid in then coping with aphasia; that is, recovering a physical skill helps people then to under- stand language, particularly the language of instructions.∞ Aphasia it- self can, as Sheila Hale has shown in her moving memoir The Man Who Lost His Language, take many varied forms, but in all forms ap- hasia becomes especially stressful when the aphasiac is told to do something physical.≤
Wilson’s therapeutic insight has suggested more broadly that bod- ily movement is the foundation of language. The suggestion appeals to many of the researchers who collaborated on the influential volume Gesture and the Nature of Language.≥ Their guiding idea is that the very categories of language are created by intentional hand actions, so that verbs derive from hand movements, nouns ‘‘hold’’ things as names, and adverbs and adjectives, like hand tools, modify movements and objects. The focus here is particularly on how experiences of touch and grip, such as were presented in our previous chapter, give language its direc- tive power.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks has followed a different route in un- derstanding the instructions given by hand gestures. His fascinating study Seeing Voices explores the work of ‘‘signers’’ to the deaf.∂ He is struck by how the signers’ hand movements often illustrate a verbal concept in gestures, rather than making an abstract sign, as when the sign ‘‘watch out for’’ is signaled by the right first finger pointing for- ward, the other fingers curled back into the palm. The procedures he describes for the deaf recall the art of mime, as developed in commedia dell’arte in the Renaissance, or the use of mime in nineteenth-century ballet. Like mimes, signers to the deaf are engaged in the physical activity of display.
Display translates into a craft command frequently given young writ- ers: ‘‘Show, don’t tell!’’ In developing a novel this means avoiding such declarations as ‘‘She was depressed,’’ writing instead something like ‘‘She moved slowly to the coffee pot, the cup heavy in her hand.’’ Now we are shown what depression is. The physical display conveys more than the label. Show, don’t tell occurs in workshops when the master demonstrates proper procedure through action; his or her display be- comes the guide. Yet this kind of miming contains a wrinkle.
The apprentice is often expected to absorb the master’s lesson by osmosis; the master’s demonstration shows an act successfully per- formed, and the apprentice has to figure out what turned the key in the lock. Learning by demonstration puts the burden on the apprentice; it further assumes that direct imitation can occur. To be sure, the process often works, but equally often it fails. In music conservatories, for instance, the master often has trouble putting him- or herself back into the rude state of the pupil, unable to show the mistake, only the right way. Sacks observes that deaf people learning signage have to work hard to figure exactly what they should be absorbing about what the instructor has actually done.
Written, directive language can make the process of osmosis more concrete and definite. Specific tools in the writer’s workshop enable instructive expression. In this chapter I will show how these can be effectively used, and their lessons concretely absorbed, by probing a written direction that every reader has tried to follow: the cooking recipe. The recipe I’ve chosen is demanding—how to prepare a boned, stuffed chicken—but this arcane challenge opens the gates to the large, difficult subject of the role of imagination in craftsmanship.
The Written Recipe
During the Napoleonic Wars, General Suchet won an important victory over the English at the Spanish lake of Albufera in Valencia. A grateful Napoleon transformed General Suchet into the duc d’Albu- fera, and the eminent chef Carême invented a series of dishes in his honor, notably Poulet à la d’Albufera. This boned chicken, stuffed with rice, truffles, and foie gras and coated with a sauce of sweet peppers, veal stock, and cream, is one of the glories of nineteenth-century haute cuisine—and undoubtedly a relentless source of heart attack in that era. As is true of much French cooking, high art eventually made its way into more ordinary practice. How in that practical realm would one go about preparing it?
Dead Denotation
The Misfortunes of a Chicken
Let’s start with the fact that the chicken is to be boned. The Provençal-American cook Richard Olney tells precisely how to do so, using a seven-inch, thin-bladed knife rather than the Chinese chef’s cleaver: ‘‘Sever the attachment of each shoulder blade at the wing joint and, holding it firmly between the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, pull it out of the flesh with the other hand . . . Force the flesh loose from the breastbone, working along the crest with the point of the knife and forcing that at the sides loose with fingertips. With finger- tips, loosen all the way around the rib cage, and finally, at the highest point of the breastbone, cut through the cartilage connecting it to the skin, being careful not to pierce the skin.’’∑ Olney tells rather than shows. If the reader already knows how to bone, this description might be a useful review; for the neophyte it is no guide. Many unfortunate chickens will be hacked to bits if a beginner follows it.
The language itself harbors a particular cause for this looming disaster. Each verb in Olney’s instruction issues a command: sever, pull, loosen. These verbs name acts rather than explain the process of acting; this is why they tell rather than show. For instance, when Olney counsels, ‘‘Force the flesh loose from the breastbone, working along the crest,’’ he cannot convey the dangers of tearing the chicken’s flesh just below the bone crest. In their sheer number and density the verbs cast an illusory spell; in reality, the verbs are at once specific and in- operative. The problem they represent is dead denotation. The prob- lem has a visual parallel in do-it-yourself illustrations—the twisting arrows, pictures of different-sized screws, and the like are all accu- rate but serviceable only to someone who has already put the piece together.
One remedy for dead denotation is to ‘‘write what you know,’’ a piece of advice frequently given to young writers. The idea is that a person can unpack instructive meaning in experiences he or she has lived through. However, this remedy is no remedy; what you know may be so familiar to you that you might take for granted its touchstone references, assuming that others have identical touchstones. Thus you might write of an architect, ‘‘McGuppy’s slick mall resembles a Bon Jovi song.’’ A reader in Borneo might not be able to summon up the image of a slick shopping mall and I have never heard a Bon Jovi tune. Much contemporary writing is stuffed with casual references to con- sumer products; in two generations, this writing will be incompre- hensible. Familiarity risks producing only more dead denotation. The challenge posed by dead denotation is precisely to take apart tacit knowledge, which requires bringing to the surface of consciousness that knowledge which has become so self-evident and habitual that it seems just natural.
When I’ve taught writing, I’ve thus asked my students to rewrite the printed instructions that accompany new software. Perfectly accu- rate, these nefarious publications are often unintelligible. They take dead denotation to an extreme. Not only do engineer-writers leave out ‘‘dumb things’’ that ‘‘everyone knows’’; they repress simile, metaphor, and adverbial color. The act of unpacking what’s buried in the vault of tacit knowledge can make use of these imaginative tools. By invoking the signals birds send by twittering or bees by dancing, the person rewriting software instructions can make comprehensible what hyper- text does and how economically it should be used. (Hypertext calls across documents; if there’s too much calling, too much twittering, too much marking of hypertext, the procedure loses value.)
The twittering birds of hypertext is an image based on analogy. The culinary recipe takes the task I set my writing students a step fur- ther. The imaginative trope becomes itself the explanation. I’ll show how this happens, and how unpacked tacit knowledge can become expressive instruction, via the challenges faced by three modern cooks in contriving recipes based on Poulet à la d’Albufera. Two of these cooks became famous; the third died in obscurity. All admired Rich- ard Olney; none wrote like him. Their chicken recipes stressed, vari- ously, language’s powers of sympathetic illustration, narrative, and metaphor.
Sympathetic Illustration
Julia Child’s Poularde à la d’Albufera
Americans in the 1950s suffered the first onslaught of industrial- ized food; the shops generally favored fruits and vegetables that packed and shipped well rather than tasted good; meat and poultry processing became standardized; everything fresh was wrapped in protective cel- lophane. Of course some forms of American cooking had great finesse, particularly cuisine from the Old South, but the suburban chef in those sterilized years was more likely to look for inspiration abroad. Child led them to France.
To expand her readers’ horizons, Julia Child wrote down proce- dures she learned professionally in Paris as a young woman. She re- imagined these procedures for the foreign novice; crossing that cul- tural divide prompted her to transform the denotative recipe. Child’s recipes, I think, are meant to be read twice, once before cooking be- gins, for overall sense, then again in stages during the process, as the cook puts hand to bird.
Child’s Poularde à la d’Albufera uses a bird, the poulard, which in Brittany runs free for most of its life, then is confined and fattened for cooking. Stretching over four printed pages, her recipe divides into six detailed steps. (Her version makes use of a half-boned chicken [demi- désossée], the breast meat and breast cage removed so that the chicken can be stuffed and trussed for cooking.) In each stage she expresses forebodings. For instance, she imagines the neophyte picking up the knife and counsels: ‘‘Always angle the cutting edge of knife against bone and not against flesh.’’∏ In cooking on television, Child pioneered the use of the close-up to make sense of the hands moving from one task to the next. The drawings that accompany her book text similarly focus on the hardest procedure the hand will have to work with.
Child’s recipe reads quite differently than Olney’s precise direction because her story is structured around empathy for the cook; she focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird. The result- ing language is indeed full of analogies, but these analogies are loose rather than exact, and for a reason. Cutting a chicken’s sinew is techni- cally like cutting a piece of string, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. This is an instructional moment for her reader; ‘‘like’’ but not ‘‘exactly like’’ focuses the brain and the hand on the act of sinew cutting in it- self. There’s also an emotional point to loose analogies; the suggestion that a new gesture or act is roughly like something you have done before aims specifically to inspire confidence.
In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, sympathy was thought to bind people together, as for Adam Smith, who asked his readers to enter into the misfortunes and limits of other human beings. Sympathy in his view instructs ethically—but not because we are supposed to imitate the misfortunes and difficulties of other people; understanding them better, we will be more responsive to their needs. The writer of instructional language who makes the effort of sympathy has to re- trace, step by step, backward knowledge that has bedded in to routine, and only then can take the reader step by step forward. But as an expert, he or she knows what comes next and where danger lies; the expert guides by anticipating difficulties for the novice; sympathy and prehension combine. This is Julia Child’s method.
Child is occasionally criticized by chefs for being a fuzzy writer and in the same breath for being too detailed. Each of these six steps is necessary, however, because there are so many danger points in cook- ing this particular dish. Supporting the reader at such moments places a burden on any writer who aims to instruct expressively. He or she has to recover the sentiment of insecurity. The paralyzing tone of authority and certainty in much instructional language betrays a writer’s inability to re-imagine vulnerability. In craftwork done for ourselves, we of course seek for closure. Child, as I’ve observed her in televised presen- tations, adopts a particular, not to say peculiar, way of holding the boning knife. Practice has led her to arrive at that decision; the practice has given her confidence; she bones without hesitation. When we wish to instruct, however, particularly in the fixed medium of print, we have to return emotionally just to the point before such habits were formed, in order to provide guidance. So for a moment Child will imagine holding the knife awkwardly; the cello master will return to playing wrong notes. This return to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor gives.
Scene Narrative
Elizabeth David’s Poulet à la Berrichonne
Like Julia Child, Elizabeth David sought to improve the quality of cooking by teaching her readers how to cook foreign food. After the Second World War, there was much less food to be had in Britain than in America; what there was, was massacred. The domestic cook’s ad- dress to vegetables, for instance, treated them as adversaries who had to be boiled into submission. David sought to remedy this miserable state of affairs by teaching her readers not only about foreign foods but how to cook in a foreign way.
David is most often a writer of clear, simple recipes, but she prefers another kind of writing when she has to take her readers far abroad. Her recipe for a country cousin dish to Carême’s masterpiece sets the example. David describes the making of Poulet à la Berrichonne as though it were a tale from Ovid, the transforming journey from a tough old hen flopped on the butcher’s cutting board to the tender poached dish nestling inside its cushion of parsleyed rice. Unlike Child, she seeks to impart technique through evoking the cultural context of this journey. Her recipe for poached, demi-désossé chicken first evokes a chef in Berry pondering what to do with old hens that by Easter are no longer fit for laying. David notices the local cook touching and prod- ding the bird, like a musician who has removed Suzuki tapes from a violin. The cook’s education in touch will continue by assessing the tex- ture of the solid ingredients that will fill the bird’s cavity—the ground pork and veal one would use for a pâté, how light do they feel? These ingredients, laced with brandy, wine, and veal stock, are sown beneath the skin. The story moves forward as David describes how a cook in Berry achieves lightness in poaching; it is slow, very slow, a bird cooking at low heat, bathed in a thyme, parsley, and bay leaf–scented stock.
The long recipe works as a once-read procedure: it is an orienting short story one would read before cooking; one might then go to work without referring again to the book. It’s a safe bet that even now not one in a thousand of David’s readers had ever visited the province of Berry, where her recipe originates. But like her mentor the travel writer Norman Douglas, David believed you need to imagine first and fore- most what it’s like to be somewhere else in order to do the sorts of things people do there.
This particular recipe embodies a phenomenon we previously ex- plored in the chapter on consciousness of materials: the domain shift. In David’s account, the state of the bird’s flesh governs the story throughout, just as the tight right angle of the weaver’s loom served as a guide in other ancient crafts. With the fleshy reference as a guide, the neophyte chef is ready to travel. In all production processes, change of position frequently serves us: the sculptor walks around the statue, the carpenter turns a cabinet upside-down, just to get a fresh perspective; the cut-and-paste function in word-processing programs helps the writer quickly move a paragraph into the foreign territory of a different chapter. The sustained point of reference in a domain shift, be it right angle or flesh, keeps these shifts from dissipating into fragments. A specific kind of writing issues the passport for such guided travel.
This is the scene narrative, in which ‘‘where’’ sets the scene for ‘‘how.’’ If you have the estimable privilege of a Middle Eastern uncle (Jewish or Muslim, it makes no difference), you will immediately un- derstand the instructional point of the scene narrative. Words of advice are introduced with the phrase, ‘‘Let me tell you a story.’’ The uncle wants to grab your attention, get you outside of yourself, rivet you in an arresting scene. Journalists have, unfortunately, written scene narra- tives almost to death; accounts of political negotiations in the Middle East or advances in chemotherapy inevitably begin with a vignette of personal history in order to take the reader ‘‘there,’’ even if ‘‘there’’ is a diplomatic document. Effective scene narratives are not perfect encap- sulations of a point; rather, as in the great travel writer Robert Byron’s
Road to Oxiana, we are taken to a place, and there shown a scene that is clear in detail but puzzling in import.
So it is with your instructional uncle: the more he wants to drive home an indelible message, the less direct will be the connection be- tween the scene he sets and the moral; you’ll work that out for yourself once the frame is set. This is the provocative function of any parable. In Elizabeth David’s writing, too, the scene narratives frequently skirt making specific instructional points. It has indeed been objected that this way of writing ducks coming to terms with technique. For in- stance, in David’s recipe for boned bird she tells the reader that if the boning task seems too daunting, ‘‘The poulterer or butcher must be persuaded to bone the bird for you; there are still many competent ones who will do this and you never know until you ask.’’π
In her defense it could be said that David’s purpose is to jolt the reader into thinking gastronomically. Gastronomy is a narrative, with a beginning (raw ingredients), a middle (their combination and cook- ing), and an end (eating). To get at the ‘‘secret’’ of preparing unfamiliar food, the reader has to move through this narrative rather than focus on just the middle term; it is by imagining the whole process that you get outside yourself. The scene narrative has a specific role—like a passport, you use it to gain entry to a foreign place. Because she wants this entry to be a jolt, David’s prose has few of the reassuring, sympa- thetic supports that figure in Child’s pages. Instead, she has applied uncle-logic to the culinary recipe.
Instruction through Metaphors
Madame Benshaw’s Recipe for Poulet à la d’Albufera
A third way of writing expressive instructions was furnished me by Madame Benshaw, who taught me to cook Poulet à la d’Albufera. Madame Benshaw had come to Boston, a refugee from Iran, in 1970.
Her name she could scarcely pronounce herself, since an immigration official had simplified a more complicated Persian moniker, and she spoke English haltingly. She was an amazing cook, somehow mastering French and Italian cuisine as well as Persian. I became her student at a night-school course and, until she died, her friend. (So imposing was she that I never called her by her first name, Fatima, and she will remain Madame Benshaw here.)
Because her English was poor, she taught cooking mostly by hands- on example, coupled with slight smiles and emphatic, frowning contra- dictions of her thick eyebrows. I nearly cut off my left hand trying to bone my second chicken, and she frowned not at my pain but because there was human blood on the chopping board. (Cleanliness and kitchen order were indeed to her godly virtues.) To explain the stuffing ingredients, she could only hold up what she’d found in the market; she didn’t know their names in English, and neither did we, her students. Hands-on learning didn’t work very well for us; the problem was that her hands were too quick, and once she started working she never paused or hesitated.
So I asked her to write down the recipe; I’d correct the language and then give it to the three other students (we were all at an advanced level, so it wasn’t a question of the basics). I’ve kept what she wrote, because it was a monthlong struggle for her to produce this formula and because the result was quite surprising from such a technical virtuoso.
Here’s the unadulterated text: ‘‘Your dead child. Prepare him for new life. Fill him with the earth. Be careful! He should not over-eat. Put on his golden coat. You bathe him. Warm him but be careful! A child dies from too much sun. Put on his jewels. This is my recipe.’’ To make sense of it, I’ve inserted my own crude references: ‘‘Your dead child. [the chicken] Prepare him for new life. [bone] Fill him with the earth. [stuff] Be careful! He should not over-eat. [stuff lightly] Put on his golden coat. [brown before baking] You bathe him. [prepare
the poaching liquor] Warm him but be careful! A child dies from too much sun. [cooking temperature: 130 Celsius] Put on his jewels. [once cooked, pour the sweet-pepper sauce] This is my recipe.’’ Many Persian recipes, I’ve since learned, are couched in such poetic language. And they are meant to be recipes: how could they possibly work?
This is a recipe conceived entirely in metaphors. ‘‘Your dead child’’ stands for a chicken straight from the butcher, but making this simple substitution takes away the gravity Madame Benshaw evidently wishes to convey about slaughtered animals; in classic Persian cuisine, animals have an inner being, an anima, no less than human beings. Certainly the command ‘‘Prepare him for new life’’ is a charged image. An ancient Egyptian mummifier or an especially devout Christian undertaker might find the phrase unremarkable; to the cook, the command alerts the hand. Madame Benshaw’s image of preparing for a new life magni- fies the mundane task of scraping away flesh from the bird’s breastbone, the technical trick of not breaking the skin in boning now seeming an act of child protection. The two cautions are also arousing. An error beginning cooks make is to stuff birds too tightly. Madame Benshaw’s caution, ‘‘He should not over-eat’’ arouses the cook’s own physical revulsion so as to prevent that error. ‘‘A child dies from too much sun’’ clarifies the logic of slow cooking; the bird-child should feel warm to the touch but not burning. My Celsius number of 130 derives the sensation of touching my own son’s skin in and out of fever. (Some cooks would reduce the temperature, indeed, to just above the human fever level.)
Fanciful? Not if you are Persian. The metaphors that figure in material consciousness of brick as ‘‘honest’’ or ‘‘chaste’’ are no more fanciful. The issue is the purposes such acts of imagination serve.
Analysts of metaphor treat it in two ways.∫ The physicist Max Black thought that metaphors like ‘‘the rosy-fingered dawn’’ create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, complete in itself, a stable compound. The philosopher Donald Davidson is somewhat unhappy about this way of understanding metaphors. To him metaphors are more like processes fashioned from words. The point about metaphors as processes is that they roll forward and sideways, allowing one to touch on further mean- ings—whereas to Black the metaphor, complete in itself, has come to rest. Davidson’s view derives in part from empirical work the linguist Roman Jakobson did on aphasia. What aphasics can’t do well is use metaphorical language as a tool to generate more understanding; in- stead, the metaphors seem inert nonsense. If and when aphasics re- cover, they are shocked with what they can do with metaphoric lan- guage. (I am sensible of Sheila Hale’s caution that many aphasics are fully capable mentally, even if they cannot speak or write down what they are thinking. As far as is possible to determine, Jakobson’s sample was of people who had suffered more invasive internal damage.)
Madame Benshaw is firmly in the Davidson-Jakobson camp. Each of her metaphors is a tool to contemplate consciously and intensely the processes involved in stuffing, browning, or setting the oven. The meta- phors do not prompt us to retrace and reverse, step by step, the manner in which a repeated action has already become tacit knowledge. Instead, they add symbolic value; boning, cooking, and stuffing create together a new metaphor of reincarnation. They do so for a point: they clarify the essential objective the cook should strive for at each stage of the work.
We three students found ‘‘your dead son’’ a metaphor too over the top for our American taste but found the cautions useful and the meta- phor of dressing even more so. ‘‘Put on his golden coat’’ is an excellent guide to judging how much browning to do of vegetables as well as meats; ‘‘put on his jewels’’ makes clear the purpose of saucing and is a better guide to how little sauce to pour than any cup measure—a sauce should adorn rather than conceal the food beneath. Our cooking visibly improved. Madame Benshaw was at last content. ‘‘This is my recipe.’’
In these three ways expressive imaginative language can serve the prac- tical end of guidance. We might compare the three chefs as follows.
Julia Child has identified with the cook, Madame Benshaw with the food. The scene narratives employed by Elizabeth David are meant to decenter the reader, while the story Madame Benshaw tells is meant to induct him or her into a sacred performance. Julia Child’s language makes instructive use of moments of difficulty; these she is able to foresee. The scene narratives devised by Elizabeth David make produc- tive use of lateral data; she brings in facts, anecdotes, and observations that have nothing directly to do with cooking. Madame Benshaw’s lan- guage sticks strictly to metaphor, in order to give each physical action heavy symbolic weight. All these ways of writing culinary recipes guide by showing rather than telling; they all transcend dead denotation.
The three kinds of guidance are not limited to cooking recipes. Ex- pressive directions connect technical craft to the imagination. These language tools can be applied to musical instruction, to writing com- puter manuals, or to philosophy. But what about physical tools? We need now to delve deeper into the issue that lurked in the historical discussions of machinery in Part One, that of how tools might be used imaginatively.