Inside Out

I'm teaching my graduate class on theater and theory again, and in it we do some acting theory. I teach it because, as I tell them, all acting theories are really theories about embodiment. In the process of trying to figure out the best and most convincing way for someone to become another person, Diderot and Stanislavski and Strasberg and Adler and Mamet come up with some interesting ideas about how human subjectivity works. After we had our class on Diderot's The Paradox of the Actor (and Joseph Roach's chapter on it from The Player's Passion), during which (inevitably) we discussed its relationship to Stanislavski's System and the Method, one of my students asked me afterward, "Which acting theory do you believe in?"

You would think that someone who spends as much time directing (and thinking about directing) as I do would have an answer to that question. But in fact, I don't. At least, not at the moment. This is the first time I've had a chance to really sit down and think about it; and by the time I get to the end of this post, I'm sure I'll have some kind of an answer. Because that is actually one thing about directing that I'm really good at: making things up.

Tale of a Trigger

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.

The Lost Children

In Mary Lavin's 1969 short story/novella "The Lost Child," a Protestant Irish woman (Renee) married to a Catholic Irish man (Mike) converts to Catholicism while she is in the early stages of pregnancy. They've been married for years and have several children already, and Renee's sister Iris is very dubious about this. As they head to the church for the ceremony, Renee remembers a day when she, Iris, and Mike were touring the countryside and discovered a strange arrangement of stones in an unused field. With the help of a guidebook, they work out that this is one of the graveyards in which unbaptized infants used to be buried. Iris is horrified at the exclusion of these children from consecrated ground, from salvation, and from public memory; Mike, initially excited to have identified this piece of genuine Irish history, becomes defensive. Renee is obscurely troubled by the experience but not enough to reconsider. Later on in the story, Renee miscarries, and is plunged into depression. Mike assumes that she's brooding over the fate of her baby's soul, and asks her if she's still bothered by the memory of those unmarked graves. Renee says she'd forgotten about that; but his reminding her "makes it worse."

I thought of this story because another unmarked grave for Irish children has been much in the news of late. Though initial media reports that the remains of 800 children had been discovered in a septic tank have since been modified, nobody is disputing these facts: local historian Catherine Corless, who has been tracking down the death certificates of the children who died at the St. Mary's mother and baby home operated by the Bons Secours sisters in Tuam, Galway between 1925 and 1961, has verified that 796 infants and children died at St. Mary's in the 36 years of its existence. As this piece points out, this means that they were losing, on average, 22 children a year, or one every 2.3 weeks. Infant mortality in general was high in Ireland at this time, but not THAT high; the same piece links to a 1934 Dail Debate on a bill proposing to regulate maternity homes, which cites a report generated in 1927 by the "Commission on the Relief of the Destitute Sick and Poor, including the Insane Poor" to the effect that "one in every three illegitimate children born alive in 1924 died within one year of its birth, and that the mortality amongst these children is about five times as great as in other cases." 

I would like to note (since The Explainer doesn't) that the 1927 Commission's report is not describing conditions in homes run by religious orders. The Commission was much more concerned with the "poorer classes" of private maternity homes which, instead of housing the children on-site or arranging adoptions for them, often put them out to nurse. It was the Commission's opinion that in many cases everyone involved in this transaction "connived at" the death of a child whose existence was a major social problem for the mother and her family. "The illegitimate child being proof of the mother's shame," the report remarks, "is, in most cases, sought to be hidden at all costs."

But the mother wasn't the only one trying to hide this "shame." Jim Smyth's 2007 book on the Magdalene Laundries arose out of his work on the Irish Free State's "culture of containment," which he argues was driven by a desire to suppress the material evidence of Free State Ireland's divergence from Catholic ideals. Pregnancy made sex visible, Smyth argues, and so the Free State sought to "contain"--not the men who fathered these children, but the women whose bodies were "proof" of Ireland's "shame." Much of the academic work done on these homes since has focused on the treatment of the mothers; so have most of the cultural treatments of them produced in the 1990s and after (e.g. Patricia Burke Brogan's Eclipsed, Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters). The story on the children was always that many of them had been adopted out, often to Catholic families in the US, often without the mother's consent; and obviously, this was what happened to many of the children born in these institutions. Clearly, however, adoption was not the fate in store for many others. As Lindsay Earner-Byrne has documented, many of the religious-run mother and baby homes had mortality rates comparable to the ones at Tuam.

Why post about this? I suppose it's partly because I would like everyone to know that without the slow, patient, and often un- or under-compensated labor of Irish historians, we wouldn't know about most of this. And I would like to do my part to see that their work, and the work of other people who have patiently documented the lives and deaths of all these mothers and children who were "sought to be hidden at all costs," gets the attention it deserves. To arrive at an accurate understanding of which children died in the Tuam home, Catherine Corless had to track down the original home's records through all the authorities to which they had migrated over the years, spend hours interpreting them, and then request--and pay for--796 individual death certificates. I can only guess at the thousands of woman-hours of work put in by Linsday Earner-Byrne to generate the statistics about mortality rates that were quoted in one little snippet of the Explainer piece. I would like the vast amounts of bone-crushing work involved in producing a reliable history--even of one institution in one town--acknowledged and appreciated, regardless of how the story then became sensationalized by the media.

But mainly I'm posting about the grave in Tuam because I just can't stop thinking about it. It's not really because the number itself comes as a shock. It's always been dangerous to be an unwanted child, especially one who lands in an institution; and that's true no matter who's running it. Currently in the US we are looking a scandal, which will unfortunately probably get little attention outside of progressive circles, regarding our treatment of undocumented immigrant children, who are being crammed into overcrowded holding facilities in Texas where they have about as much freedom of movement as battery-farmed chickens. Margot Backus and Joseph Valente have a book in press right now about literary responses to the mistreatment of children in twentieth-century Ireland. It goes back much further, in Irish history but undoubtedly in the history of other societies as well. James Connolly's The Re-Conquest of Ireland quotes a parliamentary debate in the Dublin House of Commons in 1790 on the disastrous history of the Foundling Hospital in Dublin:

The number of infants received in 1789 was 2,180; and of that number 2,087 were dead or unaccounted for. In ten years 19, 367 children had been entered upon the books, and almost 17,000 were dead or missing. The wretched little ones were sent up from all parts of Ireland, ten or twelve of them thrown together in a kish or basket, forwarded in a low-backed car, and so bruised and crushed and shaken at their journey's end that half of them were taken out dead, and were flung into a dung-heap. (qtd in Connolly, The Re-Conquest of Ireland, 231)*

I knew this about the Foundling Hospital; but it was startling to rediscover it in the middle of a 1915 tract by Connolly, which I happen to be reading right now, along with a lot of nationalist, socialist, and republican propaganda from the period before the civil war. It was the "dung-heap" reference that struck me. Connolly points out that earlier writers had used the dung metaphor to describe the true state of class relations under capitalism: not only are the poor refuse to be discarded, but the trashing of the poor is actually necessary for the fertilization of the civilization the rich enjoy. And that's really what rendered sensational a story with which many of us have been substantially familiar for the past 20 years: the suggestion that the members of a Catholic religious order had treated the bodies of the children they were ostensibly nurturing (materially and spiritually) like human waste. This is why it mattered so much to people to correct the initial misconception about the evidence uncovered by those two boys in 1975, and why I suppose some people will derive comfort from the knowledge that there were, at most, maybe 20 bodies in that pit, and maybe when they were put there it wasn't actually a working septic tank.

But none of that changes the fact that these children were, to the authorities in charge of the Irish Free State, the abject--something "to be hidden at all costs." Those babies may not all have been dumped in a septic tank; but like the unbaptized children buried in the graveyards that Mary Lavin represented in "The Lost Child," they were consigned to oblivion to the extent that it was possible to do so. Local memory, as some of these stories point out, was not that easily erased, and the field in which those children must have been buried, unmarked as it was, was nevertheless recognized as a graveyard (though for a while it was apparently assumed to be a famine grave). And there is, also, the question of why those babies were being raised at that home in the first place. How many of those mothers would have been willing and able to raise their children in the outside world if the social cost of doing so had not been made so punishingly high?

Another thing that strikes me as I think about this story is how long it took us--how long it took me--to start questioning my own assumptions about where all the children were going. It seems obvious to me now: of course they couldn't all have been adopted. Of course they couldn't all have survived. I wonder if it is simply that to Americans, at any rate, the idea of a religious institution having the power to hold an adult woman against her will when she has violated no laws is unusual and sensational--whereas the neglect of poor children is unfortunately quite familiar to us from our own culture. And in fact it is not only poor children who are being ground up in the machine of twenty-first century American politics. I live, after all, in a country whose lawmakers have decided that the occasional mass shooting of students ranging in age from 6 to 22 is an acceptable price to pay for their own job security.

As it happens, I'm reading a lot of propaganda produced during the late teens and early 1920s in which the writers set forward their visions of what Ireland will be like after the war is over and independence achieved. The contrast between these dreams of a Gaelic and Catholic state to come which will become the spiritual light of a chaotic world which it will lead out of the darkness of violence and anarchy and the many postindependence failures represented by the bodies buried around the home at Tuam is quite painful.

The 'correction' of the septic tank detail will no doubt accelerate the international media's inevitable loss of interest in the story. But the historians are still there, doing their work; and I believe that they will uncover and substantiate more stories that we didn't know--or only half-knew--about what happened to the children in these mother and baby homes. Not all of them will go viral. But watch for them anyway. The tragedy these histories document is one that is not confined to Ireland; and it is certainly not over.

* In James Connolly, Labour in Ireland, with an introduction by Cathal O'Shannon. Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles, n.d. [1950?]

The Nurse's Tale

Ironically, because I'm actually writing this year, I have totally abandoned this blog. For one thing, writing about writing is at best self-indulgent and at worst crazy-making; and for another, well, there is only so much writing you can do in a day. But in honor of Shakespeare's 450th birthday, I have decided to post about the only thing I'm doing these days that's not either writing or parenting. This would be our community theater's production of Romeo and Juliet, in which I am playing the Nurse. At least until this coming Sunday, when the production will be over forever.

My relationship to Shakespeare is conflicted. I get very irritated by the Shakespeare industry, and especially the way Shakespeare is promoted as the be-all and end-all of drama in the English language. In one of my classes years ago I was puzzled by the fact that this one very bright student kept asking me why all the plays we were reading were so short. It made more sense when I discovered that he had never read a single play that was not written by Shakespeare. He had deduced from this that all plays were five acts long. This is the thing that drives me insane. It's not that I don't enjoy Shakespeare. But there's so much other drama out there that is, to me, equally interesting and compelling and life-changing and whatnot, and people either don't know or don't care about it because it's not supported by the same kind of CanonMachine.

And yet, being in this show has reminded me of how important Shakespeare once was to my relationship with both literature and theater. It has caused me to have flashbacks both to my ninth grade English class, during which we devoted a large chunk of time to reading the play out loud (those not assigned speaking parts were assigned to play the 'groundlings') and watching the Zeffirelli film. For some reason I particularly remember an assignment that asked us to illustrate a Shakespearean expression with a visual pun. (More than one of my high school teachers must have used this assignment, because I also remember doing this with Macbeth.) One of my friends chose "thou and my bosom must henceforth be twain," depicting a dude wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Mark Twain on it. My contribution was a can of lite beer breaking through a windowpane (but soft, what light through yonder window breaks). It has also often reminded me of the two big Shakespeare survey courses I took in college, of which I also have unusually vivid memories, and of all the Shakespeare productions I saw while my family was living in London. They moved there during the 1980s, and I caught what must have been part of the first wave of modern-dress productions of Romeo and Juliet, set in (then) modern-day Verona. Everyone wore Armani suits, either Tybalt or Mercutio drove a red Ferrari which was on stage (there was a bit during the fight scene where both stopped to check and make sure that the car had not been damaged), when Romeo climbed the orchard walls he set off a burglar alarm, and so on. It evidently made an impression on me, given how well I remember it. And yet, I cannot remember anything about what that production did with the Nurse.

The Nurse is not what people usually remember about Romeo and Juliet. As I recall, Zeffirelli makes her a kind of doddering old bat who's pleasant enough but pretty stupid and maybe not totally compos mentis. I've been avoiding seeing more recent film treatments because, you know, the anxiety of influence; but my impression is that this is sort of the default version of the nurse: a dotty old grandma given charge of an intrigue which turns out to be waaaaay over her head. This, at any rate, was the interpretation that became the basis for the character Nursie on the second series of Blackadder. Described by Blackadder at one point as "a sad old woman with an udder fixation," Nursie is always sitting there at Queen Elizabeth's feet telling loopy and inappropriate stories full of bodily functions and double meanings she doesn't understand.

Not being old or dotty enough yet to pull that off, I looked at the character and discovered a few things that had heretofore eluded me. For better or worse, the way I approached her has a lot to do with my own experience both as a nonbiological mother and a mother who employed a nanny. The mother-nanny relationship is a complex and fascinating one. For a lot of women the hiring of a nanny seems to bring up feelings of inadequacy and anxiety which then sometimes leads to them getting jealous or competitive with the nanny. It was not like that for us--partly, perhaps, because neither of us ever expected to be our daughter's only female caretaker; but more, I think, because our daughter's nanny was experienced at handling this relationship and was good at drawing boundaries. I think one of the things that makes the nanny thing difficult for modern women is the strangeness of seeing someone genuinely care about your child, not in spite of the fact that she's being paid to do it, but because she's being paid to do it. We have this idea that real love is something that cannot be bought or sold and can have nothing to do with money; so a nanny's emotional bond with the children she cares for has to be read either as spontaneous disinterested love or as a mercenary deception. But I get paid to care about people too. Technically I am paid to teach literature; but everyone knows that we are also paid (or perhaps not-paid) for the work of investing in our students and caring about their success; and the caring is genuine, even though it derives from the accidental fact of their having signed up for a course that you teach. Those teachers who were shot at Newtown protecting the children in their care were being paid too; and although the job and the salary created the relationship, it obviously did not prevent them from being willing to sacrifice their own lives--and their own families--in order to protect the children for whom they were, between 8 and 3, responsible.

The Nurse, however, has no boundaries. For one thing, the Nurse literally breast-fed Juliet through her toddlerhood; for another, she's still living with Juliet's family and still caring for her just about 24/7 even though she's on the verge of what her society considers adulthood. In that sense, the Nurse's role in Juliet's life is closer to that of a nonbiological mother. The Nurse's first long speech establishes that Juliet was the same age as a child of her own who died in infancy. This was how wet-nurses got into the business--a woman with milk and no baby went to work for a woman with a baby she either couldn't or didn't want to nurse--but the fact that infant mortality was common in those days (Lord Capulet implies that he and Lady Capulet have lost a few children as well; Juliet's an only child, and Romeo an only son) doesn't mean that it didn't hurt, or that the experience of having just lost your own baby wouldn't encourage you to project those disappointed maternal feelings onto the baby you're nursing. The wet-nurse was an object of cultural anxiety--I know about this mainly through colonial anxiety about Irish wet-nurses who might be filling up their English charges with sedition, Catholicism, and wild irishness along with milk, but there were also the periodic campaigns (feminist and otherwise) calling for middle-class and aristocratic women to do their 'natural' duty as women and nurse their own damn children--and the relationship between caregiver and child was in those days far more intimate, physically and otherwise.

And yet, the Nurse's tragedy is that no matter how much she may feel like Juliet's 'other mother,' to everyone else--including, in the end, Juliet--she's a servant, and when push comes to shove she has no power and no rights. The one thing that's established about the Nurse early on is that by God, she can talk; and her ability to speak freely and get away with it has given her a false sense of her own status. In her opening scene with Juliet and Lady Capulet, she's all but openly insubordinate. That long speech of hers about Juliet falling down and bonking her head, which is so often taught focusing on the double-entendres and the foreshadowing, is from the Nurse's point of view about competing with Lady Capulet. She jumps at the chance to prove that she remembers the details of Juliet's birth and early childhood better than Lady Capulet does; she talks at some length about weaning Juliet, stressing the fact that Lady Capulet was not present for this milestone; and when Lady Capulet tells her outright to just shut the fuck up, she gives only token obedience before busting out with another reiteration of her husband's off-color joke. Though she obeys Juliet more promptly and reliably, the Nurse also uses her talent for rambling off-topic monologues to get her own back when Juliet bitches about how old and slow she is (in our production, the Nurse is within earshot when she does that).

This makes it all the more terrifying when, during the big knock-down drag-out Capulet family fight that happens toward the end of Act III, her license to speak is summarily revoked by an enraged Capulet. She makes one attempt to defend Juliet, to which Capulet responds with "And why, my lady wisdom? Hold your tongue,/ good prudence, smatter with your gossips, go." Her last line before the Capulet parents leave is "May not one speak?" And for her, the answer is no. Her silencing teaches her for the first time exactly how precarious her position in this household is and how little agency she really has. So for me, when she does what she does at the end of that scene, it's an expression of the panic she feels at suddenly discovering that she is unable not only to assert herself, but to protect Juliet from her parents' anger. She advises Juliet to do what she believes, after the shock of discovering her own powerlessness, is the only thing she can do to save herself: capitulate to the people who have the real power, viz, the Capulets.

It's a terrible moment for both of them. Juliet has just been verbally thrashed by her father and abandoned by her mother; now she's betrayed by the last adult that cares about her. The Nurse, meanwhile, has opened the door to a world of hurt. Juliet's rejection of her is the beginning of an unusually long and protracted period of loss, during which the Nurse not only loses access to Juliet while she's alive but is forced to mourn her death twice--and from a place both too close and too far away. It's the Nurse who finds Juliet's apparently 'dead' body in Act IV; it's the nurse who has to tell Juliet's parents that she's dead. But the Nurse is then shunted to the side while the Capulets and Paris mourn over a woman in whom they, unlike her, have a legitimate and recognized interest. "Heaven and you had part in this fair maid," says Friar Laurence, trying to comfort them; but the more he talks about "your part in her" the more it drives home to the Nurse that she's not the one he's talking to. The "part" she played in making Juliet who she was is invisible and inconsequential to everyone else.

The finding-the-body scene in Act IV has been the hardest thing for me about this part. That moment--the moment when you touch your child and discover that she is dead--has always seemed to me like the most unspeakably horrible piece of the hideous process of losing a child. One wishes that, in the manner of method actors, one could use one's emotion memories during that scene to make it real. But in fact, I can't. For one thing, I have discovered that for whatever reason I can only do this on the outside-in model: I figure out what reaction the Nurse should have and then I make my body do it. Not perhaps the best method; just the only one I can get to work. For another, that moment, in my mind, has become a kind of Lacanian Real--something which is actually too horrifying to perceive, and which would, if you could actually represent it, just rip the fabric of perception apart. By the same token I am acutely aware of the fact that no amount of performing will ever produce the emotional impact of a real mother's grief over the loss of her real child. Which is perhaps just as well. Sharing a room with that kind of grief is not an experience people would pay money to have.

Our show opened the weekend before Easter. The day before Palm Saturday my daughter went to a little workshop at our church and came home with a tomb. It's a planter using dirt, gravel, a flowerpot, and grass seed to represent Jesus's tomb; you water the grass seed and by Easter the grass is growing. She showed it to me proudly, and I thought, wow, you're building a tomb and I'm building a tomb, what are the odds. In fact the timing has been interesting. What Friar Laurence wants to do by pulling this insane stunt with the sleeping potion is create a kind of artificial resurrection, in which Juliet is laid in the tomb 'dead' and emerges on the third day (he's fuzzy about the time, but the first watchman says when he finds her that she's been in the tomb for two days already). This turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea, as his hoped-for resurrection becomes a spectacular illustration of the power of death. When you summarize the plot of this play for people who've never read it--my nearly-seven year old daughter, for instance--the first thing that strikes them is how very preventable Romeo and Juliet's deaths seem to be. My daughter will, apropos of nothing, occasionally come out with questions like, "Why didn't they make sure Romeo knew about the potion before Juliet drank it?" or "Why couldn't Romeo wait, like, another ten minutes before he killed himself?" That's before we get to the question of why Capulet and Montague couldn't just get over themselves, or why Juliet didn't just tell her parents why she couldn't marry Paris. At the end of the play, the men in charge--Capulet, Montague, and the Prince--try to make all this death generative by presenting it as the birth of peace. But the tomb is gaping open behind them, and I'll tell you, there are so many dead bodies in there at this point that it actually creates quite serious logistical problems for those of us who have to work with small stages and simple sets. ("Bear hence this body," says the Prince, indicating Tybalt's bloodied corpse; and the seven of us delegated to accomplish this task move warily into position, silently praying we won't trip on our way down the steps.)  The outrageous waste of life in this play--something emphasized by all the arbitrariness that my daughter complains about--is a rebuke not just to the feuding parents but to Friar Laurence, the young couple's other surrogate parent. You think you can play around with me? says Death. Think again, bro. I own you, I rule you, and I will EAT every last damn thing you care about.

Heavy as the tragedy part of this play is, the Nurse has been a lot of fun to play. Her language, as befits her level of education and intelligence, is comparatively simple and accessible, and in general our audiences seem to get most of her jokes. I will say that I am also grateful for how kind Shakespeare seems to have been to his actors. Nine times out of ten, before a character enters, someone on stage will call out, "Here comes X"--just in case, maybe, X was chatting with an orange wench behind the scenes and forgot he had an entrance coming up. Most of the Nurse's cues are bleeding obvious; during the telling-Juliet-the-news scene in Act II, for instance, all I have to remember is that whenever Juliet says OMG would you SAY SOMETHING, I say something.

But because I'm still a director at heart, I guess, in a way the most fun thing about being in this cast is getting to see what the other actors are doing. I remember the first time I saw our Romeo and Juliet do their balcony scene. We've all had bits and pieces of that drilled into us for so long and parodied and travestied in so many places; and yet watching them do it their way it was suddenly fresh again, with both characters so young and ardent and alive. At moments like that, you realize, no, it's not just the industry. It's not just institutional power, it's not just canonization, it's not just the myth of the white male genius, it's not just the way we've never really gotten over the Victorians' values when it comes to our definition of the 'classics.' All those things are there, and they are a major part of the reason why Shakespeare survives culturally in a way that, say, Marlowe doesn't. But this crazy edifice was actually built on something. There are infinite adaptations and imitations; but there's only one balcony scene.

So happy birthday, William Shakespeare. I'm not going to make you a cake. But thank you for showing me at a relatively early age what the English language could do; and thank you for making it possible for me to have this experience at my advanced age. But don't think I'm giving up modern drama for you.

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.