It's been a long time since I posted here. Ironically, that's largely because I've been writing too much. However, as the University of Chicago letter has once again revived the debate around trigger warnings, I want to tell here a story I told an undergraduate not too long ago. She had been debating the trigger warning issue in her own mind, in terms of how she might handle it in the future if she went into teaching. I said, well, I don't use trigger warnings, but let me tell you a story about that.
Even as I am about to tell this story, I'm realizing that to say that I don't use trigger warnings is really true only in the sense that I don't use them all the time, I don't want for specific content, and I don't call them trigger warnings--in part because whatever I'm doing now, I have been doing since long before the phrase 'trigger warning' became part of academic discourse. I think that if you sign up for a course you should know what you're getting, so I do my best to use the course description to let people know what they are in for. And before we move on to something I expect will be particularly difficult, either intellectually or emotionally, I will often let people know they should brace themselves. How much difference that makes to them, I don't know. But I do know why I do this, and that's because of the story I'm about to tell.
It takes place probably 30 years ago now, in the lower levels of a research library on a campus far, far away. It is a story about something I read for a graduate course long ago, and which would, nowadays, probably be the sort of thing people would want a trigger warning for. This paragraph constitutes your trigger warning.
I was a graduate student at the time, in my first or second year. I was taking a course that I was enjoying, given by a professor I admired. He had included, on the syllabus, a list of texts that weren't going to be covered in class, but which he considered part of the course and which we were supposed to read on our own time. I don't know how many people taking this course actually took this seriously; but I did, and as the end of the semester loomed, I thought I'd better head down to the library and get through some of the stuff on this list.
So there I was, reading away, and I got to the W. B. Yeats plays he'd assigned, one of which was The Herne's Egg. I had read a lot of Yeats by that point, but I'd never heard of this one, ever. It had never been mentioned in class. As I would later discover, most of the people who worked on Yeats really didn't want to talk about it.
So I started reading it.
Let me just say that the climactic event of this play is an episode in which a virginal priestess named Attracta is raped by seven soldiers while she is either in a trance or completely unconscious. It's not entirely clear, because the rape is not actually represented. But the intention to rape is explicitly stated, and the seven soldiers go through a kind of lottery to determine the order in which they will rape her, and we see them boasting to her afterwards about having raped her.
Yeats thought of this play as a farce, by the way.
I can still remember, after more than two decades, the experience of being blindsided by The Herne's Egg. Let me say right now that I am not a survivor of rape or of any other form of sexual violence. This play was not 'triggering' in the technical sense, in that it did not produce a somatic flashback of an earlier traumatic experience. It just made me violently upset. I couldn't believe that Yeats had done something like this--even though I'd read "Leda and the Swan" many times. I couldn't believe he would put something this horrible in the middle of a 'farce' (granted that Yeats's idea of farce is highly idiosyncratic and really never ha-ha funny). I was stranded on the rock of my own bafflement at discovering that an author I thought I knew, whose work I still love, could have so little understanding of rape that he thought it was fair game for satire. And what I most remember thinking, as I stared at the thing, was, "We're never even going to discuss this."
And that was what bothered me most. This thing that was such a major emotional event for me had just been thrown onto the supplemental list along with a lot of other texts that were not considered important enough to discuss. We were expected to read and assimilate them on our own. Embedded in that expectation were a few assumptions: 1) None of this should upset you. 2) If you are upset by it, it's your job to deal with that. 3) Actually, probably I do believe in #1 and #2 but the reality is that when I put this list together it hadn't ever even occurred to me that this text could do anything this memorable to anyone.
So what upset me, down in the lower levels, was not just the text itself--although that's startling enough--but the feeling of isolation and exclusion I experienced as I registered the vast gulf between what was important to me and what my professor thought was important. I did not suspect my professor of deliberate callousness. It had simply never occurred to him, I was sure, that in this day and age, a play that he probably thought of as a marginally successful satire on the Irish Free State could have that kind of impact on a 24-year-old. Regardless, the fact was that I was now walking around with this thing in my consciousness and I had no idea what to do with it and the course for which I had read it was not going to help me with that.
I could, of course, have made an appointment to discuss it with my professor. I never did. In fact, I never spoke to my professor about this play at all. I felt sure that I had no way of making him understand the effect that it had on me, and I felt equally sure that it would hurt his feelings, which I did not want to do.
So what did I do instead? I talked to my partner about it; I talked to other students about it, probably; I wrote some not very good feminist poetry about it; and I applied to other PhD programs--not specifically because of this, but because I now knew I needed a program that was stronger when it came to gender studies. And, after I had found my PhD program, I started reading about The Herne's Egg. I wanted to understand how the thing had happened. In the process, I arrived at a better understanding of the nature of metaphor and articulated for the first time my conviction, which I continue to try to impress on every intro-to-the-majors class I teach, that the vehicle matters. That it is a mistake to think that once we have 'decoded' the metaphor by discovering the transcendant tenor, the humble and mortal shape that it has assumed should be discarded like a husk. I bring in Tom Paulin's "Where Art is Midwife," which includes a couplet that perfectly demonstrates this principle: "This poem about a bear/ Is not a poem about a bear." Both things are true. The poem is a political satire (according to Paulin's speaker) and so is not really about a bear. But we only know that because of the bear. So it is a poem about a bear. The bear is still there. Do not leave the bear out of your reading, I say. Everything the metaphor has to teach you is in the way it brings the literal and the figurative together.
This memory is valuable to me for many reasons. One, it reminds me that my students don't read the way I read. We are, by the time we start teaching at the university level, protected by so many layers of analytical detachment that it can be hard to remember how vulnerable readers are to texts--particularly texts which incorporate things they genuinely love into a story which is bound to cause them pain. Two, it reminds me that feelings matter and that it is part of my job to help my students articulate and understand their responses to the texts I assign them. Three, it reminds me that when people talk about this kind of shock as generative, as part of the learning process, it is not a total crock. My encounter with The Herne's Egg turned out to be enormously productive. I don't know how other people decide what to write about. I myself am driven to write about things that are emotionally important, but which I do not yet understand.
Should my professor have given me a trigger warning about The Herne's Egg, 20-odd years ago? Would my life as a scholar or as a human being have been improved or harmed by that? I don't know; but in a way, it seems to me that a warning, itself, wouldn't have made all that much difference. What I think I felt the lack of, at that moment, was not a warning label, but some indication that my life experience and my emotions were considered part of the pedagogical process--that my reaction to this text was something that I would be welcome to share, that it was considered something that I and my classmates and maybe my professor could learn from.
And that is what I try to provide in the classroom, because that is what I think, based on many of the student-written pieces about this that I have read, many students who want trigger warnings are asking for. Sometimes this does mean telling people that something unpleasant is coming up. But more often, it means making the reader's responses part of the discussion. It means understanding that the reader's experience of the text is part of what it means, and making that part of the analysis of it that we develop.
Warn or do not warn; do what you think is best. But to deny that emotions are part of the educational process, and that they are among the things we need to bring into the classroom, is to betray our own old selves, to say nothing of the students we're teaching. Our whole profession is founded on the idea that people learn better when they're not alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment