The Stink of Mortality: In Memory of Herbert Blau

I was saddened to read that Herbert Blau has died. Whenever I teach Beckett now, I use this passage from one of his many important books about theater:

When we speak of what Stanislavski called Presence in acting, we must also speak of its Absence, the dimensionality of time through the actor, the fact that he who is performing can die there in front of your eyes; is in fact doing so. Of all the performing arts, the theater stinks most of mortality. (Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater At the Vanishing Point, 83)

Vivian Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. But, as Blau reminds us, it is impossible to stage a play in which nothing happens. Because even when the actors sit mute and motionless on stage—and in Beckett’s plays, they often do—there is one thing that’s always happening: time is passing. And since we are all mortal beings with finite lifespans, that means at least one other thing is always happening: we are all dying.

In memory of Blau, I want to talk more concretely about theater and the stink of mortality. Specifically, I want to talk about the fact that my response to being diagnosed with and treated for endometrial cancer was to get involved in community theater.

I understand now, as I did not before my diagnosis, that there is a point in life at which one’s mortality ceases to be theoretical and becomes real. This is not an original insight. In fact, this past Good Friday, the rector at our church gave a sermon asking the question, “When was it that you began to die?” She started with an anecdote about something that happened soon after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. That made perfect sense to me, because I believe that I began to die after I regained consciousness following the hysterectomy that removed the endometrial cancer from my body—along with my uterus, cervix, and ovaries.

(As an aside, let me just say that you should feel free to point people toward this post whenever anyone asks you why you care about the ordination of women. The fact that, by 2009, I was a practicing Episcopalian meant that when I needed to talk to my priest about the fact that I had cancer and that the best case scenario was that I would lose all of my reproductive organs, never have a child, and go into surgical menopause at the age of 40, I could talk to someone who was living in a woman’s body and had experienced having parts of it cut away. Also if anyone wants to know why the ordination of openly gay clergy matters, you can let them know how much it meant to us that the priest who came to pray with us in the hospital before the operation was in a long-term same-sex relationship and well equipped to understand what about this situation was terrifying to both of us.)

But I digress.

As I say, others have had this insight before me; but the thing is that you cannot really learn that you are going to die from anyone else. It comes to you through your own embodied experience. The diagnosis was bad. But endometrial cancer has a very high survival rate, and mine was caught early. After the operation my oncologist reported triumphantly that my “pathology was perfect” and that it was about 99% likely that I was permanently cured. I just passed the four-year-mark and so far so good. So you’d think that the crisis is over. But it is not. Because it was only after the operation that the knowledge finally entered me: I’m not going to die of endometrial cancer. But I will die of something.

At around the time that I was done healing from the surgery, we went to see the first production of a community theater that had just started up in our neighborhood. They were a new organization and looking for new members. I thought, my life is finite, and I’ve always wanted to do this. So I went to the next general meeting.

A few months later the founder of the theater and I were directing W. B. Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand together. (In my defense I should say that he was a Yeats fanatic long before he met me.) I found that working on that show made me feel alive and happy at a time when nearly nothing else would. It was partly because I was learning something new; partly that I got to work with all these new and interesting people; partly because I’d always loved the play. But I figured out, eventually, that it was really because directing that play was helping me deal with my mortality.

Blau is talking in that passage about the spectator’s experience. But as Blau must have known, the stink of mortality is even stronger for those involved in the rehearsal process. A show has a life cycle, one which is obviously and intentionally finite. Everyone who commits to the show does so knowing exactly how long it will live and when it will die. Everyone who comes to rehearse in your living room—at least if you are in community theater and have no money and no dedicated space, that’s where you rehearse—chooses to dedicate some of their living and dying time to help create this ephemeral thing. Ever since film and television definitively and forever surpassed theater’s ability to create an illusion of actuality, performance studies has been trying to explain what it is about theatrical performance that matters. This is one of the things they keep coming back to: performance as evanescence, performance as an always-disappearing present moment. What Philip Auslander calls theater’s “liveness”—the fact of live human bodies sharing the same space at the same time—is the other. (Auslander doesn’t actually believe in theater’s “liveness;” his argument is that in the digital age there is no such thing as unmediated performance or unmediated human experience. I reject this argument as far as theater goes; but on the human experience front, well, look at what I’m doing, right, posting about the removal of my internal organs on fricking Blogspot.com.) The combination of these three definitive conditions—ephemerality, liveness, and the stink of mortality—is what makes theater a compelling analogue for human life. As Jill Dolan points out in “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative’” (Theatre Journal 53 (2001): 455-479), Blau’s insight suggests that theater’s “liveness" matters precisely because it “promotes a necessary and moving confrontation with mortality” (459).

Which is lucky for me, because as it turned out there would be several more opportunities for me to confront mortality as we worked on putting On Baile’s Strand together during the fall and winter of 2009. It no doubt helped that On Baile’s Strand itself kind of stinks of mortality. For Cuchulain this takes the form of reproductive anxiety; all the kings are marrying and starting families, and he has no one (as far as he knows) to continue his legacy. And then, of course, he winds up killing his only child, knowing and yet not knowing that that’s what he’s doing—after which he engages in a suicidal battle with the sea itself. (Whether he actually dies at the end of On Baile’s Strand is a complicated question for many reasons, but let me not get started on the Yeatsgeekery, we’ll be here all day.) In the journal I kept during that production, I can see myself doing some of this “moving and necessary confrontation with mortality.” I will now favor you with a few choice excerpts.

This is from my entry about the first time we rehearsed the play’s final scene, in which Yeats in his wisdom decides to have Cuchulain come to grips with the fact that he’s killed his own son while the Fool and the Blind Man are fighting over a stolen chicken:

When Cuchulain, fresh from slaughtering the Young Man, walks into the middle of this, the effect is astonishing. The way [our Cuchulain] did it, it was as if he had stepped off Mount Olympus and landed in a Chuck E. Cheese. I give Yeats grief about his writing mistakes; but watching the three of them I thought, you know what, this part really works. The fact that Cuchulain has come to his tragic realization while these two clowns argue about that damn chicken makes it real. Because that’s what it’s like. A terrible thing happens to you, and it catapults you into a soul-annihilating world of fear, terror, and grief. And yet, you still have to go to that staff meeting and listen to the same people have that same fight they’ve been having for eleven years and when they come to drag you into it they look straight at you and they have no idea that none of that stuff matters any more.

Much later in the process, the woman playing the Fool—it was community theater, we were just starting out, we were short on men, there was a lot of highly nontraditional casting in that show—was trying to work out how to handle the very end of that scene. The Fool watches Cuchulain’s fight with the waves from the doorway, and has to say “The waves have mastered him” four times. We talked about it, and before long, the stink of mortality was wafting through my living room:

We decided to use the repeated lines to show the Fool’s emotional trajectory as he moves from optimism to grief. The Fool initially thinks that Cuchulain might actually beat the sea, whereas we all know he can’t. She asked if the Fool was capable of understanding what it meant for Cuchulain to die. I heard myself say, “It’s like talking to a two-year-old about death.”

I’ve talked to my own two year old about death twice. The first time was when her little cousin died in October at the age of three months. For a while after we broke it to her she kept asking, “What’s G [her cousin] saying?” and we would have to say, “G can’t say anything any more,” and explain it again. But she said things afterward that showed she was understanding it in her own two-year-old way. Things like, “Mommy is sad about G,” or “I want G to come back,” or “I will grow.” And we would say yes, you will grow big and big and big and become a grown-up woman, and we would be glad not to have to explain to her yet that grown-up women eventually died too.

We had been talking all along about the Fool as being an overgrown two-year-old. But I had just learned fairly painfully that when it comes to death, I am a two-year-old too. Other grownups may understand and accept death, but I don’t, and I can’t. In those final moments, the Fool isn’t just a two-year-old; he’s all of us, hoping without any reason for it that maybe this time the inevitable won’t happen.

So, yeah, when you direct a play, you learn things about it that you never knew before. But that’s not the most important thing that happens.

I’ve directed two other shows since then, with the same very patient Yeats fanatic as my copilot. Doing that has, I would say, helped my work in that my understanding of drama and performance is more complex and, dare I say it, smarter. But that’s not really why I do it. And for God’s sake it’s not money, of which there is none, or professional cred, since community theater is the repudiated abject that defines the boundaries of professional theater. It’s the stink of mortality. It’s the chance to go on teaching myself, and the people who share the process with me, that living is dying. That liveness is mortality. Which sounds depressing until you realize it works the other way. We live because we are mortal. Life is precious because it will end. The body matters because it must inevitably decay. We think that we have the past and the future but our living is done in the disappearing present and there are too many forces constantly trying to snatch it from us. The next time you go to a theater, and they remind you to turn off your cell phone, remember that this is not just so it doesn’t distract the actors and piss off the people sitting near you. It’s so that you can be present. It’s so that you can all be present and live together, to watch the actors live and to watch the actors die.

Reader, I Married Her

Sometimes I think the only reason I ever agree to do this survey course is that it gives me a chance to reread Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre was one of the first 'real' novels I read--I think I was maybe 14 at the time--and thirty years later I am still not tired of it. It is true that my relationship to it is much changed. Even when I was in college, I couldn't treat Jane Eyre like a novel. I had an irrational attachment to the characters and the narrative that made it very hard for me to consider questions of literary interpretation. I remember a discussion about it in section where the TA asked what it means that Rochester goes blind and loses his hand at the end (do I need a spoiler alert for this? Surely to God not). And off they all went speculating about it while I was thinking, "But that's just what happens!" And as for the novel's unconscionable treatment of Bertha, well, for a long time I just didn't want to hear it. Get away from me with your Madwoman in the Attic and your Wide Sargasso Sea, I cried.

Ah well. I learned.

At the beginning of Volume III, after the whole brouhaha at the church and the Dramatic Revelation of Bertha, Jane and Rochester have a long scene together in which they hash out what just happened. There's so much happening there one can't do justice to it all. But there was something that struck me this time around, because of the times that are in it, that I took for granted for a long time, and that is Rochester and Jane's argument about marriage.

"I am a fool!" he shouts, a few pages into it: "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain why." His 'explanation' is highly tendentious--there's a lot he has to say about his marriage to Bertha that someone less upset than Jane is at this moment would challenge--but the thing that struck me is Rochester's conviction, repeatedly expressed, that despite Bertha's continued existence and despite his inability to divorce her, he is not married in any meaningful sense. He is not married because he and Bertha never really loved each other; because she was never good to him; because she wasn't faithful; because he didn't know what he was getting into when he married her--now that I think about it, a lot of the things Rochester says about how he was manipulated into marrying her would be considered grounds for annulment by the Catholic Church or by the pre-1996 Republic of Ireland--and because in her MAAAAAAAAADNESS she is incapable of being a companion to him. Milton's arguments in favor of divorce made the same appeal to the idea that being each other's 'helpmeet,' being compatible, being committed to each other's mutual aid and comfort, is so foundational to the definition of marriage that the absence of this kind of cooperation actually negates the marriage. Rochester, being a Byronic hero and therefore given to sinning boldly when it comes to the pursuit of liberty, decides that he is free to marry because Bertha cannot be his helpmeet and is therefore disqualified as a wife. He forms this idea, takes Bertha to England, locks her up in Thornfield, and starts traveling the world looking for the woman who will be his real wife. His plan is initially to tell this woman about Bertha before 'proposing' to her--because in his own mind, when he's forming this plan, he's sure that the woman destined to complete him would be just as forward-thinking about the true meaning of marriage as he is.

Of course, when he discovers that this woman is Jane Eyre, he decides not to execute this plan, shrewdly suspecting that Jane is unwilling to sin boldly in this area. But this time around, I realized that when you subtract the obligatory Christian rhetoric, what Jane and Rochester really disagree about--what splits them up and sends her to wander homeless and starving through the countryside--is the question of whether, in the absence of a legal sanction, Rochester is capable of offering Jane something equivalent to marriage. Jane after all is not concerned about Bertha; as soon as Rochester tells her that Bertha was "at once intemperate and unchaste" Jane stops defending her. She no longer believes that his love for her was never real, and she has forgiven him his manipulations of her and trusts in the strength and sincerity of his love for her. The reason Jane refuses to run away with him is that she believes that unless Rochester can legally marry her, she can only ever be his mistress; and he says himself that "Hiring a mistress is the next worst thing to buying a slave."

But Rochester doesn't see it that way at all. He insists that Jane will be his wife, not his mistress--because in his mind, the legal aspect of marriage is "a mere social convention." In his mind, he can 'marry' Jane simply by committing himself irrevocably and exclusively to being Jane's helpmeet and partner for the rest of his life. He is perfectly willing to create for Jane, to the extent that it's possible, the social reality of marriage by moving far away from Thornfield and Bertha to a place where no one knows about his first marriage and presenting Jane as his wife. He doesn't want Jane to be his mistress. He wants her to be his wife; and he believes that he can make her his wife and be her husband without going through a legal or religious ceremony.

Normally, the more often I read this book the less sympathy I have for Rochester. But I found myself enormously compelled by his insistence that he can make Jane his wife--because, of course, it reflects in a distorted way many of the things that those of us who maintain long-term same-sex relationships believe. We are not, of course, bigamists. But in the bad old days, when legal marriage was as far out of our reach as it was out of Mr. Rochester's, many of us strove all the same to create whatever we believed were the essentials of marriage. We told ourselves and each other that we were married, in all the ways that mattered. The legal ceremony, the religious ceremonies, these are mere social conventions. Wife and wife, husband and husband. Without the law, without the church, without the social approval.

And yet I also can't help thinking in my heart of hearts that Jane is making the right decision by leaving him. And it isn't just because of the inexcusable things he's done--which, she tells us, she forgives him for before this conversation even gets rolling. It's because she's right, too. She knows something that he refuses to understand, which is that Rochester cannot marry Jane simply through an act of will. Without the legal foundation, it is in fact not marriage, and this has material and social implications of which Jane is keenly aware. If Rochester dies, there is no guarantee she will inherit. If he tires of her, he can abandon her, and no authority can force him to provide for her in any way, shape, or form. She will be his 'wife' for only as long as he chooses to make her that. And if one day he wakes up and decides once again that he's not married, Jane is ruined forever.

They're both right; and this is what makes that scene so wrenching. Jane almost goes for it. She can feel the strength of the bond between them and absolutely agrees that it transcends social conventions and legal forms. She still believes that she is Rochester's one and only true partner. But she is also well aware that the position Rochester thinks he can offer her does not exist. She knows that marriage is something that has to be conferred by church and state, and cannot simply be asserted by an individual. Not even by the irresistible Mr. Rochester.

It is, I think, very hard for straight people to understand the ambivalence that many of us have about marriage. But this sort of gets to it. I will fight anyone who tells me that the 20 years during which my partner and I loved each other before we got married were somehow incomplete, or second-rate, or Not Quite the Gold Standard, simply because our relationship was not legally recognized. Love, passionate love, faithful love, compassionate love, enduring love, all of these things exist independent of marriage and indeed some of us if pressed might say that our commitments may be stronger, our appreciation of each other more intense, precisely because we have had to keep our love alive in the teeth of opposition from all and sundry. And yet, we know that what we have been denied by being denied marriage is also real, and also matters. Like Jane, we know that the absence of that legal sanction leaves us intolerably vulnerable. The fact that so many of us willingly make ourselves that vulnerable--something Jane is ultimately not willing to do, partly because it would require her to challenge orthodox Christian doctrine--by entering into permanent relationships without either social approval or legal sanction is, though I say it myself, a testament to human courage, audacity, and optimism. But that doesn't mean that we don't need marriage.

It comforts me, I suppose, to rediscover just how much of a problem marriage has really always been, even for One Man And One Woman. Even before Bertha, the prospect of marrying Rochester is in many ways terrifying to Jane. Though marriage will make it much harder for Rochester to break off the relationship, it seems in most other ways to bring out the worst in him. Jane struggles throughout her entire engagement to prevent Rochester from taking possession of her--as marriage, she understands, will authorize him to do. The embrace of the State is not always warm; it is not always friendly. But in the wilderness outside the reach of the State's long arms, it can get pretty cold and desperate.

Reader, I married her. Actually, we married each other. Twenty years after we first fell in love; a year and a half after we had a child together. I like marriage. I want all of us who need its shelter to have it. At the same time, many of my thoughts about marriage, love, romance, and related matters would completely scandalize my fourteen-year-old self. Poor kid--still believing she was as plain as everyone told her she was, still straight as far as she knew, still just as sure as Jane is that no human has the authority, in matters of the heart and the body, to say, "Let it be right." At fourteen I was all Jane. At forty-four I'm all right with the fact that in order to realize Jane's dream of passionate, everlasting, mutual and equal love, I had to become just a little bit Rochester.

Sages On Stages

When I was visiting my parents over break I saw that my mother had thoughtfully clipped Thomas L. Friedman’s piece ”The Professors’ Big Stage” for me. This was not totally unexpected. I’d seen the piece already on Facebook, of course. I had in fact already read a couple of deconstructions of it. But my mother likes clipping things and sending them to me, and she is also a big fan of Thomas L. Friedman.

She asked me about it. I said, “Well, let’s remember that Friedman also thought the war in Iraq was the right thing to do.”

Because he did. And not just at the very beginning when everyone was all wild-eyed and gung-ho and the minds of pundits everywhere were bathed in terror and gushing with fantasies of revenge. He kept arguing that Shock and Awe and the carnage that followed and follows and will follow on for years was the necessary and noble sacrifice that Americans had to make to bring peace and democracy and progress to the Middle East. That it was not the strategic thing to do but the right thing to do. I know, because my mother’s opinions about the Iraq war appear to have been almost wholly formed by reading his New York Times columns. So this is not a response to Friedman’s column. I feel like I’ve been arguing with Thomas L. Friedman for ten years and I’m tired of it. He never learns.

No, really, the only interesting thing about the piece itself is how nakedly Friedman displays his hunger for the particular kind of stardom that the Massive Open Online Course makes available to male intellectuals. Read the following two paragraphs from the original piece:

“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas.

Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”

Can you hear it? That sighing sound as Friedman happily contemplates a world in which the men who think brilliant thoughts with their massive brains can finally turn to the actors and the athletes and say, “At last, I am FINALLY cooler than you?” Because I can.

I say men because apart from Daphne Koller, the computer science professor who, along with Andrew Ng (who of course gets top billing in Friedman’s argument about this) developed the software for Coursera, which Friedman hailed in May 2012 as the harbinger of educational revolution, all of the professors named in the three columns that Friedman has written about this phenomenon are male. I figured they would be.

Though Friedman claims in his latest piece that the MOOC will replace the outdated “sage on stage” model of higher education, others have argued—and they are absolutely right—that the MOOC is simply the “sage on stage” model amplified a bazillionfold. The question of what happens when we lose the “liveness” of the classroom experience—when, instead of sharing a physical space with the professor and other students, the student follows the lecture, whether in real time or not, in mediated and infinitely replicable form in a completely different physical space—is theoretically an interesting one; but in practical terms I do not believe for one moment, as Friedman persistently claims, that the MOOC model actually leads to more and better interactivity.

Why do I not believe this? Well, for one thing, take a look at what Friedman cites as his prime example of how awesomely interactive the brave new MOOC is:

Mitch Duneier, a Princeton sociology professor, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall about his experience teaching a class through Coursera: “A few months ago, just as the campus of Princeton University had grown nearly silent after commencement, 40,000 students from 113 countries arrived here via the Internet to take a free course in introductory sociology. ... My opening discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1959 book, ‘The Sociological Imagination,’ was a close reading of the text, in which I reviewed a key chapter line by line. I asked students to follow along in their own copies, as I do in the lecture hall. When I give this lecture on the Princeton campus, I usually receive a few penetrating questions. In this case, however, within a few hours of posting the online version, the course forums came alive with hundreds of comments and questions. Several days later there were thousands. ... Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching, which significantly influenced each of my subsequent lectures and seminars.”

I’d just like to point out a few things here:

1) Duneier seems quite pleased with the fact that he’s had “more feedback” from this course than from his entire teaching career. He says nothing in this passage as to the content of this feedback. Indeed the opposition he sets up between the “few penetrating questions” he got under the old model and the “thousands” of comments produced in the discussion forms suggests that his enthusiasm over quantity is discreetly concealing his assessment of quality.

2) Note that what Friedman emphasizes by citing this passage is how useful all of this feedback is for the professor. One hopes that the hundreds and thousands of students posting these comments are learning something from conversing with each other; but they’re certainly not conversing with Duneier, who can’t possibly be reading and/or responding to them all.

For another, I have never forgotten an experience I had in graduate school back in the late 1990s. Like many of my colleagues, I was teaching in the composition program, which was at the time directed by people who were extremely enthusiastic about classroom technology—partly, if not largely, because they had been very successful at pulling in grant money to pay for it all. They were planning to transition to a model in which more and more composition classrooms would be set up with individual terminals so that they could carry out their discussions online instead of face to face. Yes. We were moving to a model where instead of talking to each other, the students and the instructor would be essentially be texting the people sitting next to them. The comments all went into one big chatroom, and the instructor handled them as best s/he could. As part of our training we ran our own online discussion. It was a bizarre and frustrating experience, partly because you could never focus on any one conversation for any length of time, partly because things moved so fast that by the time you were finished typing a response to something it had already become irrelevant, and partly because of the irreducible weirdness of communicating with people who are after all in the damn room with you in this highly chaotic and mediated way.

Later on I attended the meeting at which the directors of this program invited undergraduates to give them ‘feedback’ on this new model. The fiction of this meeting was that they were presenting this idea to the students to see what they thought of it. The reality, which was clearly obvious to those of us who had some classroom experience, is that the decision had already been made, and the purpose of this meeting was to manufacture consensus. Nevertheless, I was impressed at how much resistance was voiced at this meeting. Most of the students who spoke were alarmed at the prospect of giving up face to face interaction in the classroom for this new thing, no matter how often they were assured that it was much much better. It was touching to see how much they valued this face to face interaction, even if it was also depressing to know that they were going to lose it anyway because after all, the program directors had their grant and were going to order the flipping technology regardless. Now all of that was in the dark ages, of course. The idea of making people interact online while in the same room has no doubt by now been largely abandoned. But I do still believe that the “revolution” Friedman hails so joyfully is in fact driven by the corporations that manufacture this technology, the people who develop the software, and the university administrators who are looking to maximize profits and minimize expenses. And yeah, the MOOC can get content to more people faster than the traditional model. So can Wikipedia. That doesn’t mean the education you get from a MOOC is better than, or even comparable to, the education you get from the bricks-and-mortar classroom, where at least there is a human being who knows who you are (even if it ‘only’ a teaching assistant), speaks to you face to face, and is responsible for a) ensuring that you are doing the work (Friedman’s first piece admits that a vast percentage of the people enrolled in some of these MOOCs don’t complete the coursework) and b) evaluating it and providing feedback.

But this was not supposed to be about arguing with Friedman. And here I’ve gone and done it. Isn’t habit a curse.

No, this is about the ‘sage on stage’ fantasy. Because I will admit that the image of myself up on stage, addressing a large lecture hall, watching them all hang on my every word as I explain my brilliant and extremely interesting thoughts on literature to them, was part of what drew me into the profession. I went to a university that followed the Sage On Stage model in its English curriculum, though I hasten to say that their English major also made considerable use of the seminar, and that in terms of my future life in the profession, the seminars were in the long run much more influential. I took quite a number of courses that consisted of listening to a professor talk for 100 minutes a week and then discussing the material with a small group of students led by a graduate student assistant for another 50 minutes. I remember some of these courses quite fondly. It was, in fact, during such a course on Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies that I looked up at the professor who was lecturing—Suzanne Wofford, who like nearly all of the professors whose courses I took there has since moved on to another university, since at that time, at that institution, the description of these jobs as “tenure-track” was purely a prevarication—and I thought, I think I would like to do this. And I bet I would be good at it.

I ran into Suzanne Wofford a couple years ago at MLA and told her this. She, of course, had no idea who I was, since during the actual course we never met. Still, I hope it cheered her up.

I still believe that this moment was possible only because the professor was another woman. That allowed me to see myself in her place. It allowed me to imagine that one day I too might be treading the boards at an august university, lecturing about the great works of literature, basking in the admiration of hordes of young English majors. It was that fantasy that enabled me to form an image of my own future, an image to which I could point and say, “Yes. I want to be that.”

I call it a fantasy for two reasons. One: I now understand more about the realities of being an assistant professor at that institution during that time period. Two: After fifteen years of doing this job, I have never taught a large lecture course.

Why? Well, mainly because my department doesn’t offer them. Why not? Because our department is big enough and our university small enough that we don’t have to. And since we don’t have to, we don’t. Because here’s the thing: when it comes to how much and how well the students learn and how long they retain it, the seminar kicks the Sage on Stage model’s ass.

I am frequently struck by this because I’m teaching the closest thing our department ever had to the large lecture format, which is our British literature seminar. Partly because the class used to be twice the size of the typical seminar, I teach it as a combination of lecture and discussion. The one thing you can do better in a lecture format is straight-up content delivery, and in a survey course some of that is unavoidable. And so this course gives me a chance to live out the Sage On Stage fantasy in a small way. I enjoy preparing my lectures. I venture to say that I’m good at it. I base this not purely on my own delusions but on student feedback. I am funny, they tell me. Perhaps the most interesting student comment I had on that course was the one that began, “I just can’t help but pay attention when Professor Lucy Cannon lectures.” As if this student was sitting there struggling with all his might not to pay attention and yet somehow, I managed to foil his intentions again and again.

It is telling because it reveals something true: No matter how good you are at lecturing, no matter how smart and engaging and charismatic and funny you are, the students just do not pay the same kind of attention to you in that mode as they do when you are running a discussion. I see it happen. I get up at the beginning of class and explain what the two or three things are that I’m going to talk about before we get into discussion and I look at them and it’s as if I can see in their eyes the blinds coming down. They take notes. I see them do it. Some of them do it, anyway. Others are clearly just waiting for it to be over. But I’ll tell you, when I give them the signal that lecture time is over—I don’t, like, blow a whistle, but you have to give them some signal, or they won’t start talking—I feel them all starting to pay a different kind of attention. Lest people attribute all this to fuzzy performance-theory-inspired ideas about the “energy in the room”—though the energy is real, and it matters, and so believe me does the room, but that’s another story—I will say also that I see the difference on the exams. I know for a fact, for example, that my students learned more about the sublime in romantic poetry from a fifteen-minute group workshop than they did from me blathering about it up at the front of the room.

In the seminar model, or even in the working-group model, the instructor does not disappear. You’re still guiding the discussion, you still design the activity, you still help them share the results and arrive at conclusions. But they remember it better because they have their heads in the game, and because they understand that their ideas are the fuel that makes the engine go. It is hard to convey to people who don’t do this kind of work how fascinating the work of leading a discussion of a text really is. There’s the preparation process, during which one forms all of one’s beautiful plans for what to touch on and how to link all these points of illumination together into a fabulous constellation of insights that resolves itself in the last two minutes of the period into a celestial glyph aflame with revealed meaning. And then there is the actual class period, during which you scramble to scoop up what the students toss you and shape it into something which is changing even while you handle it and at the end of which, when you finally have something mapped out with string and pushpins and tape and have thrown it onto a makeshift display board that you improvised on the fly with a cardboard box and a stapler, you realize that the thing doesn’t even have a head because 45 minutes ago you forgot to ask the question that generates the neck because someone said something new and interesting and so you went off in that direction and wound up building a pair of wings instead.

Both phases have their joys and torments. But when I think about what it is that I do, it’s this, this strange combination of the scripted and the improvised, this thing that can only happen one time in one place and in a room with between ten and twenty people in it, that makes me want to get up in the morning and do my job. I fondly believe that this is what most of my students will remember when they look back on their English major. Because I look back at my English major; and yes, I have some fragmentary and isolated memories of the sages on the stages. But I remember the papers I wrote and the discussions we had much, much more clearly. Students by and large don’t understand the point of English papers. Or at least, they don’t understand that the real reason we ask them to write papers about literature is that you will never know a text better than when you have just written a paper on it—the same way that you never know a play better than when you have just directed it. If I had a dollar for every student who has said to me, during a conference about their paper on The Waste Land, "You know, this poem is finally starting to make sense to me," I...well, I could at least buy myself dinner with it. At a chain restaurant.

Do they assign papers to the students who take MOOCs? And who grades them? Who is grading 14,000 freaking papers three times a semester?

[crickets]

I will never be a rock star. I have come to accept this. It is a little easier to accept it because I know that the rock star model really belongs to the days when women were essentially excluded from the academy; the sage on stage model is after all an image of patriarchal authority. I will instead be someone who keeps alive things that can only exist on a small scale. I believe that this is foundational to the real value of the kind of education that my department provides. I’m here, on campus, because I’m about to see a student production of a play that I love. It is directed by an undergraduate who first encountered it in a course he took with me. I have never seen this play done anywhere. It isn’t staged very often. It’s complicated, and strange, and nobody ever feels as if they fully understand it. It has never been to Broadway and it would astonish me if it ever got there. But it’s being done, here, because one day a couple semesters ago I walked into a room with twelve students in it and we had a chaotic, unshapely, but very lively discussion about this play which made one of them want to get to know it better.

There are days when I don’t feel like coming to work in the morning. We all have them. But today, I feel like the fifteen years I’ve spent in little rooms with small groups of people doing the strange form of real-time shared-presence face-to-face interaction which it has been my calling, over the past 20 years, to try to develop into an art, have been worth it. Tonight, my teaching will reach the biggest stage it’s ever going to have. I won’t be up there; I won’t be in charge; nobody will even really know I ever had anything to do with it. But it will matter more to me than any MOOC ever could.

I Fear Thee, Ancient Mariner

So, a while back, after much conversation, I agreed to advise a senior thesis on the Harry Potter books. One does not do this without some misgivings. It has started me thinking about the role that fantasy now plays in the English major.

I teach our gateway majors course, and one of the things I do on the first day is ask the students to explain why they declared as English majors. Along with the inspiring stories of beloved high school English teachers who opened their minds to the wonders of literature--thank you very much, beloved high school English teachers, without whom our entire field would wither away and die--what typically emerges is evidence that reading contemporary mass-market fantasy was a major part of their formation as readers. It used to be that everyone mentioned Harry Potter. HP hegemony, however, seems to be in jeopardy, judging by the most recent group, who are more drawn to Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. It is interesting that though most of these students have read the Twilight books, these are typically invoked only to be reviled; perhaps this is their way of saying, "Look, I read genre fiction, but it has to be GOOD." I was teaching an early Northrop Frye essay on archetypes--like Foucault says, power is most effective when it's invisible, so if you want your students not to be controlled by an interpretive paradigm you teach them about it, that's my theory--last semester and suggested that fantasy is the contemporary survival of what Frye demoninates as "romance." I suggested that fantasy series in particular might lend themselves to "Fryed" readings (the whole patronus thing in Harry Potter is also a fascinating demonstration of the continuing power of Freud's "Totem and Taboo," but let's not go there). I was startled by the explosion that followed. I like to think that my students are typically animated during class discussion, but this was something different. Pretty soon they were engaged in their own intellectual debate, without any help from me, about whether this or that series did or didn't follow the schemata that Frye lays out in that essay--and it was obvious that they had a personal investment in this debate that I sadly foresaw would not carry over into our upcoming discussion of the pros and cons of using Frye's paradigm to read Yeats's "The Second Coming."

I can see why people would see this as a sign of the apocalypse. But fantasy was part of my formation too, and I believe that an exposure to fantasy can have its benefits. Fantasy, for instance, is one of the few places where the idea that another world is possible is kept alive. Fantasy allows writers to imagine what the world would be like if the givens were changed, and therefore encourages us to wonder which of our givens might not actually be irrevocably given. Readers who discover the pleasures of entering into a created universe might be more likely to think it worthwhile to imagine ways of re-creating our own. If historically fantasy and science fiction have frequently replicated imperialist narratives of conquest and produced harmful and oppressive visions of the Other, they have also provided women writers, queer writers, and writers of color with ways of representing experiences and visions which could not easily be conveyed in literature that had to confine itself to the "real world." I suppose that it is precisely because I reject the tyranny of "common sense" that I see anything that expands the boundaries of the imaginable as a potential ally.

I phrase all this conditionally because mass-market fantasy seems to be getting more and more dystopian. And though there are different lessons to be learned from dystopian fiction, I always fear that the primary lesson will be: the world is irretrievably broken and cannot be saved, no matter how heroically you as an individual struggle with it. With fantasy set in a dystopia you basically have three possible resolutions for the protagonist struggling against it: 1) protagonist is crushed. 2) protagonist escapes. 3) protagonist teams up with revolutionaries to change the world. Ending #3 is very difficult to pull off, especially now. Everyone is too skeptical of the staying power of a revolution; and of course since 9/11 it has become much more politically dangerous to depict revolution as either positive or necessary, even in a fantasy context. Ending #1 just makes the reader feel like the world is a cruel and horrible place; and ending #2 does nothing to encourage people to think about changing their own world.

Even in fantasy aimed at children you can see this now. I took my five year old daughter to see Rise of the Guardians (it was not my idea, I should point out) and was appalled by it from start to finish. Though the film is clearly marketed to children, it is based on the action-movie formula that controls so many movies for grown-ups. A group of folk characters known as the "Guardians"--the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman--are appointed through some mystical process controlled by the moon as the 'guardians' of various precious childlike qualities (wonder, hope, fun, etc.). Why do children need 'guardians'? Because they are menaced by creatures like Pitch Black, the movie's Big Bad, who seeks to transform the happy dreams that the Sandman gives them into dark and terrifying nightmares. The art concept on Pitch Black was stolen straight out of the Harry Potter movies--PB even looks and talks a little bit like Ralph Fiennes--and Pitch commands an army of nightmares who are a cross between the Nazgul mounts from Lord of the Rings and the Dementors. There's so much wrong with that movie that I hardly know where to start; but the biggest immediate problem was simply that the world created (with a great deal of technical expertise and artistic pride, I should note) by Rise of the Guardians is dark, dark, dark, and more dark. The good guys win in the end, but only after about an hour of despair, darkness, violence, destruction, the 'death' of the most sympathetic and lovable character, and infintely proliferating minions of evil filling the screen with their menace. My daughter was compelled by its sensory power, but also terrified by it. She was relieved to hear me express a dislike for it and we spent a lot of time talking about why we didn't like the movie. Now, it is clear to me that this movie was pitched to older children--boys in the 7-10 range, I would imagine--and so the fact that a group of five-year-olds were terrified by it is not surprising. But even for its target demographic, I still have to ask: Why so dark? Sure, there's a lot about the real world that's mean and hateful and scary and bleak and dark dark dark. But wouldn't this be an argument for using children's entertainment to offer brighter alternatives, instead of creating a world which is actually darker and more violent than the real one?

Oh. Wait. Newtown.

I take it back. Rise of the Guardians is not darker or more violent than the world a twenty-first century American child lives in. Not any more.

But I digress.

For my students, at any rate, I would say that fantasy does not have the effect on their literary sensibilities that I would hope for; and I think this has more to with form. A couple gateway courses ago my students went off on a tirade about Shakespeare's use of magic in The Tempest. It was easy enough to find the source of the antipathy. Contemporary mass-market fantasy incorporates all kinds of antirealistic content, but formally speaking it is typically indistinguishable from realism. In fact, to the extent that an individual fantasy series rises above the herd, it's usually because the author is better at realism than his or her peers. What satsifies people in fantasy is the experience of being immersed in the world, and that world is typically built using techniques that haven't changed that much since Middlemarch. The pacing and style are different, of course; the proportion of action to characterization and description is often much higher; the standards for what counts as a credible plot are often more flexible; but otherwise, your typical mass-market fantasy novel follows the same rules that govern realistic fiction.

What this means is that readers raised on Harry Potter and its competitors expect magic to be rational. In other words, to render magic credible within the boundaries of realism, the author has to create what is known in the biz as a "magical system" with a coherent and explicable set of rules founded on some kind of symbolic logic. These rules, of course, are invented; but once invented, they have to be followed, or else they are no longer 'real' and the world is no longer compelling. My students' problem with magic in The Tempest is that it appears to be arbitrary. There are no clear rules or obvious boundaries defined for Prospero's magic or for Ariel's power. Prospero's magic is in fact often used to allow Shakespeare to end-run around dramatic conventions and to break what my students see as the iron laws of plot and causality; and as a pre-realism text, The Tempest does not conform to most of the expectations created by the fantasy they're familiar with. So magic, from their point of view, may not be real; but they do demand that it be realistic.

All this is just to say that I was once again defeated by Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" yesterday. I love Coleridge to death, but I find it difficult to get his work to behave in a classroom. The students all seemed to have read it and to be interested in it; but the imperative to interpret--the drive to find a reading that will make sense of the entire text--is something that poem in particular seems to be designed to both evoke and frustrate. Rightly or wrongly, I see "Rime" and "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel" as fantasy; it seems to me that much of their appeal initially must simply have been their ability to transport the reader into a world s/he would never have been able to imagine on his/her own. I like the poem precisely because it resists explication--because its mythologies are so many and so self-contradicting--and then every time I teach it I get to rediscover the obvious fact that it is difficult to teach something that resists explication. The students all want to understand it, of course; so we typically wind up debating the various symbolic/allegorical interpretations. This usually--for me, anyway--generates not so much a reading as an ever-expanding pool of ambguities. And I like ambiguity; but I find that no matter how much I commit intellectually to the idea that my job is not to provide them with an authoritative reading that they could just as easily look up on Wikipedia, I can't help being frustrated when at the end of the period we've got a huge pile of question and not very much answer. I suppose that if I were a romanticist for real, instead of someone teaching a survey course that only barely intersects with my field of expertise, I would have better strategies. But then I also think that the only reason I enjoy teaching this course is that it takes me beyond my field of expertise, and forces me to grapple with texts that my mad pedagogical skillz have yet to subdue.

And I suppose that what I really want them to get out of Coleridge's poetry is exposure to a kind of imagination which is unconstrained by the demands of realism, and which is therefore wilder and weirder than what they have been introduced to via Harry Potter and friends. Wild and weird and macabre but not, despite all the pain involved, dark in the way that so much of our post-idealism literature is dark. An imaginary world that includes both perdition and redemption; a story that celebrates the saving power of love in the midst of horror. A story that kind of turns me into the Ancient Mariner, walking into that room and wishing that I had the power to hold them all with my glittering eye...and instead, I feel like all I can do is repeat, like the greybeard loon I have become, "There was a ship...There was a ship."

The Value of a Humanities Major, Or, How Ubu Roi Saved My Soul

Sometime last year we got a directive from our dean to schedule some class time to discuss with our first-years the value of an undergraduate major in the humanities. This was a response to a trend that we all noticed right after the Great Capitalist Apocalypse of 2008: a drop in enrollment across the humanities and a concurrent rise in the number of undergraduate business majors. The level of panic seems to have subsided somewhat, but even so, it has become the norm for our English majors to double-major, many of them in business or premed or something that they believe will lead directly to employment. I say "believe" because I'm not really sure that the business major really is a golden ticket; but that's another conversation for another time.

Looking at this missive and thinking about how one would have such a conversation, I thought, well, obviously we are meant to make the standard speech about how the English major teaches you writing and communication and critical thinking and all these skills are highly in demand in the job market and all of that is true but really if I was going to tell them a story about what majoring in the humanities has meant in my life I would tell them about Ubu Roi. And then I thought, no way can I tell them that story.

Long long ago in a graduate program far away, in the December of the last year before I was due to go on the job market, I was struck suddenly and violently about the head by a major clinical depression. I had never felt anything like it before and luckily I have never experienced anything like it since. Depression is familiar to many of us who have been through the PhD program; but it was my first experience with it, and it was terrifying. I felt as if my psyche had crumbled into a million different pieces and then been slapped back together by someone who had no idea who I really was. Things I had always enjoyed gave me no pleasure. Things that had always comforted me caused me intense anxiety. Thoughts appeared in my head that were frightentingly and bizarrely unlike me, and then refused to vacate. I could make no sense of my extreme emotional responses to apparently ordinary stimuli.

I got through this terrifying but, in the grand scheme of things, short period of my life with a lot of help from my partner, who was also obviously quite distressed by all this, and a great therapist, who was recommended to me by a friend of mine in the program to whom I will always be grateful. But in December, I hadn't started going to see her yet, and I was waking up in the Pit of Despair every morning, and I felt as if I had been permanently broken and had no idea how I would ever get fixed.

Before this happened, I had noticed that a local theater group called the Rude Mechanicals was doing a staged reading of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. I first read Ubu in one of the drama courses I took in college with Prof. Guicharnaud. Ubu Roi is...well, it is difficult to describe. It's an anarchic journey through a surreal world in which political intrigue becomes a battle of untrammeled libidinal drives. It's presided over by King Ubu, an overgrown childlike monster with gargantuan appetites and strangely naive ambitions. He's assisted by his queen, who might have been Lady Macbeth if she hadn't married this guy and instead had to spend her life trying to control this lunatic with a combination of sexual manipulation and sausages. The excessive, irrational, dismembering violence that explodes all over Ubu's world is beyond cartoonish; it's nightmarishly hilarious. When first staged in Paris in 1899, of course, it caused a massive uproar, and the Rude Mechanicals promised that they were going to stage both the play and the riot. So naturally, being who I was--pre-depression--I had to be there, and my parnter wanted to go too, once I had explained.

Well, between when I bought the tickets and when we actually went, the depression happened. We went anyway, neither of us looking forward to it. I thought that I would never have a pleasant feeling again for the rest of my life, and my partner was very worried and deeply sad about what was happening to me. But we crowded in and sat down. The cast sat up front with the scripts out on music stands. There was a lot of food, including cream pies which we later learned were used in the show: whenever a character was killed, someone would yell "Pie!" and the narrator would give him/her a cream pie in the face. At various points during the show we were invited to throw food at the actors and each other. It was everything Jarry would have wanted.

For two hours we laughed our asses off. And when we left, we looked at each other, and I felt like myself again. And for the rest of that night, I was who I was and I felt the way I felt.

The next morning I was back in the Pit of Despair. But from that point on, I had that night to look back on. I knew that the person I was still existed. Something about going to see that show revived the person who had wanted to take those courses in the first place, the person who responded on some level to France's craziest play of all time (and that's saying summat), the person who had wanted to share that with the woman I loved more than anything in the world. All of the things I had lost--all of the things that make me who I am--were, now that I look back on it, the very things that the marketplace feels most people can do without. It is interesting to me that throughout this whole experience I kept doing my job, and even doing it well. The classroom was the one place where I never felt anxious. In fact, my student evaluations for that horrible semester were higher than they had ever been. The things I had lost were the things that made life valuable to me, which is to say, the very things that capitalism tries to crush because they are not productive. And going to Ubu brought me back into touch with all those things.

It was six months before the depression was over. Now, the savvy reader might look at this story and think, look, it's nice that your undergrad education came to the rescue, but what got you into the depression in the first place? Graduate school, that's what. Isn't this really another cautionary tale about why going on for a PhD is only opening the door to a world of hurt?

I don't see it that way. I know a lot of people who went through depression in graduate school, but then most of the people I knew in my late 20s were in graduate school. I think there is something about the passage into your 30s that typically unsettles people no matter where they are. My mother has told me she went through a depression at around the same time--not because she was in graduate school, but because she was married with 3 kids under five. Her choice of life had become as irrevocable as mine had by the time I hit that age; and maybe there is some kind of psychic defense mechanism that kicks in and starts asking is this what you really want? is this who you really are? I think, personally, that I was lucky to be in graduate school when this crisis hit. I remember, during this period, reading Ann Cvetkovich's Mixed Feelings for the first time, and then sitting in my therapist's office saying, "If I don't like the affect I have, I can construct another." It is, of course, not that simple; but still, being able to think about depression as something which is not necessarily individual and personal, as something which is a gendered social phenomenon produced in part by the uneven distribution of power and the operations of capitalism, was important. Like that performance of Ubu, it helped me believe that I would one day have myself back. And that was important. It is difficult to work toward a goal if you don't believe you will ever arrive there.

The person I became, having gone through it and come out the other side, was different--but different in a way that made sense, different in ways which I believe have made me stronger. But when I think about the value of a humanities major, this is one of the things I think of: that one day, when you are afraid you have lost all those intangible unproductive non-capitalizable things that made you who you were, literature or art or theater or music or history or philosophy or whatever will give them back to you. That one dark day when everything seems black you will open a book or walk into a theater and you will be given back to yourself. That your psyche doesn't have to try to survive all alone in a world that is at best supremely indifferent to it. That you can recruit all kinds of visions of all kinds of worlds for support when your own vision seems to be faltering. And then you can go on, and do your best to put something good back into the world.

All of this, of course, is precisely what public education in our fair city routinely denies children by cutting music and art and by organizing the whole curriculum around standardized testing. But let me not get started on that.

A couple years ago we found out that one of the student groups at our friendly neighborhood university was putting on Ubu. We were there. It was, of course, a completely different experience. It was a full production, staffed entirely by 18-21 year olds who had been advised by one of Chicago's best "alternative" directors (Sean Graney of the Hypocrites). And I was not depressed. But visiting Ubu's universe for two hours was just as hilariously world-changing then as it was before. There are moments that will be right up there with anything I remember from any of the professional shows I've been to--most notably the moment at which Ubu confronts a bear--materialized in this production by an eight-foot-tall blue plush stuffed animal which came wheeling out through the back curtain on a swivel chair pushed by three roaring undergrads. It was a moment of ferocious surprise and perfect delight and it couldn't have been produced any other way.

This cannot be explained to your students in fifteen minutes. It would have to be learned. And so I never did have that conversation with my first-year students about the value of a humanities major. I decided I would instead hope that the course would teach them the value of a humanities major. It did for some of them. Others, based on the evaluation comments, were merely irritated by the fact that I kept bringing up gender issues. Ah well.

Teaching and Time

Complaining about how our universities handle students' evaluation of their professors has kind of become a competitive sport for American academics. But amongst the many things we complain about--all justified! richly!--I have lately been thinking about something that doesn't get as much attention, which is the way the student evaluation process completely misrepresents the temporality of teaching.

The end-of-semester evaluations (we call them CIFs; I will refer to them that way from here on in) take a snapshot of your students' response to your teaching at a moment when the course has just ended/is just ending, on the assumption that this will give them the most accurate assessment of what your students got out of your course. After reading last semester's CIFs--purely to disable the assumption that we only bitch about student evaluations because we don't do well on them, I will say that as far as the administrators at my place of work are concerned, my CIF numbers are fine--I felt this sense of letdown. Reading the comments, I thought, only brings home to you how very one-sided your investment in teaching is. Teaching a course becomes the most important thing in _your_ professional life for the time that you're doing it; but even if it goes well, it will never mean to the students what it meant to you.

And then I thought, this is not a problem with the form itself, it's a problem with time. The evaluation process fixes the moment at which your student fills out the form as the moment at which The Truth About Your Course is forever determined. But why that moment more than all the other moments? And if these things are supposed to measure what the student learns, as opposed to how the student feels, why assume that one day after the course is over is the optimal time to assess that?

Because sometimes you learn from teaching years after it's over. I am reminded of this now as I teach my graduate course on Irish drama and the world stage. When I first put the thing together years ago, one of the first things I did was start tracking down French symbolist drama. I found an English translation of Villiers de l'Isle d'Adam's mammoth symbolist extravaganza Axel, and was startled to see that it had been translated by June Guicharnaud, with an afterward by Jacques Guicharnaud. Maybe it's overexposure to Yeats, but I kind of felt like I had seen a ghost.

Jacques Guicharnaud taught at Yale when I was there as an undergraduate. I took three courses on French drama with him. I was aware even at the time that if evaluated by the standards used to assess pedagogy in the modern age, he would not have been a high scorer. Class was only haltingly interactive--partly, surely, because we were all discussing this stuff in French, which for most of us was a second language--and Prof. Guicharnaud's style sometimes tended toward the digressive and the anecdotal. And yet we--I say we because there were a few students who kept showing up in the next course right along with me--kept coming back. We weren't entirely sure why. There was something we were getting from the experience of being in the room that nobody could quite articulate, and which we'd have had no idea how to represent on the forms. (I can't remember whether we even evaluated our professors. I'm not sure we did.) It was the more baffling by contemporary standards because as an English major I didn't need this many French courses and I didn't ever expect to have any practical use for them.

June Guicharnaud died in the middle of the second course I took with her husband. We were of course all young and had no idea what mortality and grief meant, and yet we were moved to try to do something for him. The day he came back to class, I think, we brought food; at least I remember one of the other students, hoping to cheer him up with an allusion to Jarry's _Ubu Roi_, identifying her contribution as "un gateau a la merde." I heard with regret from a friend several years ago that Professor Guicharnaud had passed away too.

Were he still here, I would have liked for him to know that 20 years later I finally started using what he taught me. Or maybe that's the wrong way to look at it. Maybe I was always using it, in some way, and it just never took concrete form until right now. And what I learned from him is not a fixed and finite thing, even now, as I am reminded every time I read that afterword to Axel and mark it up in the margins.

You could look at this story and see it as proof that college education is wasted on undergraduates. I had access, in my callow youth, to a lot of famous names and heavy hitters and most of the time had no idea what they were really capable of. But I would rather see it as a demonstration of how the work we do as teachers eludes crude attempts to assess it. I would rather see it as a reason to believe that some student I taught back in 1998 may be only just now watching Downton Abbey and thinking of The Moonstone, or reading the newspaper and recognizing imperial discourse, or watching a woman on stage and finally getting what I was saying about acting and embodiment. The effort we make is obvious enough to us. The results are necessarily less obvious. But certainly they are not contained in that spreadsheet they send us at the end of the semester. . Like · ·Unfollow PostFollow Post · Promote · Share.

Blake's Lost Children

I created this blog because I wanted a place to post about the things that I don't say in class about the literature that I teach. Contrary to what non-teachers might imagine, teaching literature at the college level is usually not about communicating or even expressing your personal feelings about the text under discussion. One's performance in the classroom is, of course, always driven obscurely and fundamentally by one's own emotions and experience; but to get from what you do with a text in a classroom to what happens when you encounter it on your own you have to go through many, many layers of mediation. I believe that this is as it should be. The romantic/confessional/charismatic pedagogical model so beloved of Hollywood films about teaching is great entertainment, but as far as making the learning happen, it's really not very effective in an actual classroom.

One's research is also obscurely driven by one's own subjectivity. But there, the layers of mediation proliferate even more aggressively because of all the different things our research has to prove to all different kinds of people. Indeed, my fear of being caught out by some other member of the profession expressing a subjective response to a text is so great that I have adopted the pseudonym Lucy Cannon. It won't be very hard for people to figure out who I really am if they care to try; but somehow it comforts me to post this stuff under a name different from the one that goes with my 'real' scholarship.

Anyway. I just finished up teaching Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. I had a mixed experience working with the images of the original plates at The William Blake Archive; I love the art, but the site makes it difficult to compare images from different plates. SOI&E includes a number of poems about lost children, most of whom are found in the end--though exactly what being "found" means changes dramatically between poems.

It is a strange experience teaching those poems now. In 2009 my brother and his wife lost their second child at the age of 3 months. Though I don't often talk about this in the classroom, that experience--and the experience of surviving cancer, also in 2009--have radically changed my response to a lot of the literature that I teach. Everything is different once you understand mortality--I mean really understand that you are going to die, that death is not just something that happens to everyone else. But going through the death of a child, even in my once-removed way, is a different kind of change. The first time I taught Blake after 2009, it suddenly occurred to me, in the middle of a discussion about something completely different, why I was having such a visceral response to Little Boy Lost. The poem itself is deeply unsettling. So many unanswered questions: where is the father? was the father ever there? what is this 'vapour' that the boy is following? if the father ever was there, why did he take the child through this swampy wasteland in the first place? Why is it that even in "Little Boy Found," what the boy gets back is not his actual father, but some divine simulacrum of him? Is that a "vapour" too?

But looking at the art it came to me: This image represents so many of the nightmarish things about losing a child. When I make a prayer flag for my lost niece for Day of the Dead, I always draw her being held in the arms of God, which due to my artistic limitations sort of look like disembodied human arms. This is the only way to find consolation: imagining that God now holds the child who can no longer be held by her own mother or by any of us. And Blake's image is the reverse of that: the child unmoored, floating in a void, still a child but no longer capable of being held or comforted, drifting alone in all that vastness. A nightmare for the child, for whom as we all know this kind of isolation is supremely terrifying; a nightmare for the parent too. Being able to see--to imagine--to envision your child, but to know also that you can no longer touch your child, that your child exists somewhere in some form but you will never be able to hold your child again.

This is perhaps why the Newtown massacre still has its hooks in me, and in many of the other mother/teachers I know, long after much of the rest of the country has moved on. Since 2009 there is a lost child inside me that was not there before. There is a place, created by the death of my brother and sister-in-law's baby, which is permanent, and to which I will always return when I recognize its image elsewhere. And it's strange to be in that place in a room full of people who know nothing about me, really, while I talk in this veiled and remote and impersonal way about the work that this poem does.

I love teaching Blake. I don't know that I do it well; certainly I don't do it very often; but I do enjoy it. And sometimes I'm not sure, when I look back on it all, how much the quality of the instruction really has to do with how people respond to the literature. Because the professor who taught me most of what I know about the English romantics was, pedagogically speaking, disastrous. All of the people in that course with me were by turns baffled, bored, and infuriated by it. But all the same, I read the material; and though I found much of it baffling and impenetrable (go read the books of Los and Urizen and tell me what you make of them) it obviously stayed with me. I wonder sometimes whether our primary job isn't just to keep people reading the material.