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.