In Praise of the Tangent

 In Praise of the Tangent

When I was young, middle school, early high school. I was part of a new teaching program called associative learning. Handed down, in spirit at least, from Aristotle to Roland Barthes, it found an unlikely champion in my principal, Mr. Oppenheimer, who was the first to recognize that I was dyslexic. I was tested at the University of Pennsylvania. Reading was difficult, writing nearly impossible. My frustration often spilled into protest.

Associative learning turned that obstacle into an opening. Instead of forcing me to grind through the jumble of letters, it taught me to absorb facts and ideas by linking them together, firing imagination instead of drilling repetition. The idea had an old pedigree. It echoed the conversational drift of the original French salonnière, Madeleine de Scudéry, who made digression a form of discovery.

As a boy with a short attention span, not so different from today’s readers, I’m sorry to say, I learned best when knowledge arrived in constellations, not columns. The teacher would show us a turtle. Twelve-year-old boys love turtles. We’d learn how to feed it, how to keep its water clean, then talk about where turtles live. That led to environments, ecosystems, and the famous race between the tortoise and the hare. I’d do the math comparing their speeds, then wander into the meaning of the fable. From there, the teacher would mention the Greek writer who told the tale, which opened the door to other stories, other worlds.

While my classmates drilled facts that seemed disconnected, I absorbed them almost without effort. The chain of association made knowledge vivid.

Writing, however, remained a life-long challenge. Only through practice, strategy, and generous teachers have I come to the skill I have today. And lately I’ve begun to wonder: is the MFA workshop style a little like rote learning compared to the more luxuriant style of the salon?

There is a certain kind of silence that falls in a salon when someone goes off-topic. You can see it in the faces a momentary flicker of indulgence, the unspoken decision to let the speaker wander. At first glance, it’s nothing more than a detour, a delay in getting to the point. But if you’ve ever lived inside these rooms, you know the tangent is often the point.

The modern MFA-trained mind bristles at this. Workshops are surgical theatres for the excision of anything deemed “extraneous.” Every stray thought must earn its keep. Every deviation from the spine of the plot is a sin. Cut, they say, it slows the story down.

But life does not move in straight lines, and neither does the mind. The café table, the library corner, the half-lit salon at midnight, these are places where thought blooms sideways. A conversation about the Treaty of Versailles can drift into someone’s recollection of their grandmother’s kitchen, then into the smell of baking bread, and suddenly we are speaking of hunger, famine, the private wars fought in the stomach. What began as history becomes memory, and memory, if we let it, becomes literature.

The tangent is the hidden architecture of the European novel. Montaigne’s essays are all tangent he begins with one subject and, like a river, finds another course entirely. Proust could spend twenty pages on the texture of a wall or the vibrations of a spoon in a teacup. Musil’s The Man Without Qualities advances not by plot points but by philosophical drift, a perpetual negotiation between thought and scene.

What the workshop misses is that tangents are not digressions from reality They are reality. In a single day, how often do we return to the thing we meant to say? Our minds skip tracks constantly, pulled by scent, by music, by the turn of someone’s head in a crowd. To edit these moments out of fiction is to edit out consciousness itself.

A good tangent is a confession in disguise. It tells the reader something the main narrative cannot the heartbeat under the plot. It may not move the story forward in the conventional sense, but it deepens the soil from which the story grows. Without it, the roots are shallow.

When I write, I keep the tangents others would strike. I want the reader to feel they are in the room with me, that we are talking, and that neither of us is in a hurry. The story will still be there when we get back to it. Meanwhile, there are detours worth taking: an unexpected book left open on the table, a remembered face, the smell of rain from a decade ago.

The tangent resists the tyranny of efficiency. It asks for patience. It trusts the reader to follow without a map. And in this trust, something happens the reader becomes a companion, a fellow traveler, not a consumer waiting for the next plot point.

The MFA workshop can have its clockwork stories. I will take the long road, the winding path through the orchard where the air smells of something I can’t quite name. Perhaps by the end I will remember what it was. Perhaps not. Either way, the walk was worth it.