Dryden’s Dates: Reflections on Canons, Curricula, and Pedagogy
1991; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 17; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/esc.1991.0002
ISSN1913-4835
Autores Tópico(s)Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel
ResumoDRYDEN’S DATES REFLECTIONS ON CANONS, CURRICULA, AND PEDAGOGY R O B E R T K. M A R TIN Concordia University <4T h e y don’t even know Dryden’s dates,” one of my colleagues moaned recently. “Yes,” piped up another, adding querulously, “we had to know that the nineteenth century came before the twentieth: why can’t they?” “They” are of course today’s undergraduates, and they apparently seem increasingly to all of us like Huns at the gates of Rome. The assumption is that if they don’t know anything about Dryden’s dates, they can’t know anything about anything. But that assumption is of course false. They almost certainly know more about Ken Dryden than John Dryden, and they could probably tell you José Canseco’s batting average. In other words, like all of us, they remember the information they need, and discard (or never learn) the rest. If my colleague’s students don’t know when John Dryden died, it is largely because they have never been shown that it matters. The problem is that we have all reflected too little on what we are doing. What does it mean to study “English” ? Or even “English literature” ? The very name we give to our “discipline” indicates something of its history and its problems. English came into being as a field other than classics, at a time when literary study meant largely philology and when the relationship between the English language and the English nation was less obviously problematic than it is now. English as a discipline has, like all disciplines, always served a political and social purpose. As Terry Eagleton has argued, “English” could be used as a means of social control, providing culture and socialization for working men instead of the gentleman’s classical education, and a “soft” subject for newly admitted women in the universities (27-28). At the end of the twentieth century, in a distant outpost of what was once the British Empire, in a province whose official language is French and whose population is largely “other,” I ask: what am I doing?—and, more generally in Canada, what are we doing? If English came into being in part as a way of connecting things, of making literary study more contemporary and more directly related to the lives of those who studied it, can it still perform those functions now? Dryden has, after all, come to seem as distant as Horace. Of course, the fact that a text is distant in time, or culture, from our students does not mean that we need to abandon the attempt to teach it. English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , x v ii, 4, December 1991 It does mean, though, that we cannot simply present the material as prima facie interesting, or worth learning. Because material presented in this way will surely fall into the same oblivion as Dryden’s death date, and, what is more, we will perpetuate a system of class and privilege: students in a home without books will suffer far more than those who will already have encountered some of the magic names. Education, particularly in a Québec almost twenty years after the collège classique, needs to fulfil its mission to break down barriers of class. Our unthought-out curriculum has too often perpetuated a system of privilege and mystified the object of our study. Learning Dryden’s dates makes as much sense as learning about the ablative absolute: they may be essential to goals we want to achieve, but they depend upon an agreement, spoken or unspoken, about those goals. I learned Latin because I knew it meant “culture,” which I wanted so that I could converse with my family and their peers. I stopped learning Latin when I found it only got me into grammatical puzzles about the Gallic Wars. I have much the same response to my colleagues who are happy enough to dispense with Dryden’s dates, but not with prosody. How can we teach them theory, they wail, when they can’t recognize an anapest? The problem, it seems to me, is not so complicated: show them a poem in which an anapest— or an enjambement— matters, and they will learn what it is. But, as Eagleton argues (35), the ability to recognize an enjambement does not guarantee moral purity. The reader must be moved first by the poem sufficiently to want to enquire into the sources of its power. Like history, prosody should arise from the work and not precede it. I think my Latin learning could have been more exciting. I kept hanging on until we might get to Ovid and “poetry” : when we did get there I discovered it was only another set of translation problems. But even with the Gallic Wars, we might have learned something about conquest, about empires, about roles of male behaviour. We might have thought about the author, and read other accounts of him, from Plutarch or Suetonius to Shakespeare. We might even have thought about the account of a military career as a literary genre. We might have asked whose purposes were served by such an account? We might have wondered if any of the soldiers left their accounts, or what their lives were like, or those of their wives and children. We did, of course, none of those things. One of the first points they suggest is that it is not simply a question of which works we study, but of the contexts in which we study them, contexts that flow not only into the text, but also out from it, remembering that texts not only reflect history, they also make it. The model for much of our learning is the historical anthology, let’s call it the Norton for convenience’s sake. Such anthologies make, it seems to me, two fundamental errors, quite apart from their omissions of women, non whites, colonials, and so forth. The first is to claim to represent history 386 when in fact they represent only chronology. History is not, as we ourselves said when we learned it in high school, a mere list of battles and names of kings and queens: it is a series of conflicts of power. How are those conflicts rendered by the texts that they produce? What role did the texts themselves play in those conflicts? Why then should the history of literature be a list of great authors and works? Isn’t the history of literature, like all histories, a series of such struggles for power, in this case, for voice and articulation? There’s not a great deal one can do about those voices that have never been heard, since they were never allowed to emerge, or to record themselves, in the first place. They can only be imagined as a lost possibility, like Judith Shakespeare. But since no hegemony is ever complete, and since power consists in part in assuming the voice of the other, they can be heard and partially recovered in the texts of the ventriloquists, in Virgil’s Dido, say, or Ovid’s Sappho, or Richardson’s Clarissa. They can also be heard, perhaps, in a different way, in Shakespeare’s sonnets, or in his Shylock or Othello. In any case, we need to problematize the history we present. Let us talk about the fate of Sappho’s texts. Let us think about the soldiers in Caesar’s armies. Perhaps we might read Marguerite Yourcenar as well as Shakespeare as companions to Caesar. Whatever we choose will make an enormous difference. Our assumption of the need for chronological order (which is reflected not only in our anthologies but also in our construction of English majors), and the second major problem with the anthology approach, stems in large part from the idea of a literature in no relation to anything except other liter ature (and that only if written in English). In other words, the students have to have read Chaucer before T.S. Eliot so that they will recognize the beginning of The Waste Land as a reference to? parody of? the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Merely recognizing the relationship is not enough, as my question marks have tried to imply. What does the rela tionship mean? The answer to that cannot be found in literary chronology or even conventional literary history. By insisting that the students have read Chaucer or Dryden or Marvell first so that they can understand The Waste Land, we have also, less consciously, determined that they will not have read any number of texts that, I would argue, are equally important to it, but contemporary with rather than prior to. How, one can equally well ask, can you read The Waste Land if you haven’t read The Golden Bough or From Ritual to Romance or Hermann Hesse or an account of Ludwig of Bavaria or some version of Mayerling or an account of World War I or . . . . The possible contexts are almost endless, and most of them are omitted (or provided in a lecture or a footnote) under our present system with its em phasis on an isolated literary history. It doesn’t make much sense, therefore, to bemoan the loss of Chaucer, Spenser, and Marvell, let alone Day or Kyd, 387 as “sources” for the poem, when we have been happy for sixty years not to know much of anything about the political context, or the cultural context, we have not explored ragtime, or psychoanalysis, or homosexuality . . . . Since time (and memory) are finite, everything we know means (at least temporarily) something we don’t know. I would like to suggest, though, that if we want to teach The Waste Land (and I don’t accept that as an a priori decision), we must find ways to interest students in it. They know more about sexuality, and abortion, and anthropology, and pubs, than they do about the English literary tradition. By using what they do know, and enlarging it, we can make the poem exciting enough so that they may want to know about Chaucer in order to understand those opening lines. Suggesting that they read Hesse and Frazer and Weston and manuals of sexology and popular psychology does not mean bringing in the “nonliterary ” ; it means putting into question what is literary. It means replacing the notion of the “literary” with that of the “textual,” and understanding that all communication is textual, that history itself is a text, and that they had better learn to read it if they do not want to become simple pawns of it. It means, at least sometimes, replacing the vertical model of literary and generic descent with a horizontal model of what Foucault calls the episteme. Medical language of the first twenty years of the century may be as important for “understanding” The Waste Land as anything else, for texts are part of, indeed an embodiment of, a larger cultural discourse. A course on The Waste Land might thus turn into a discussion of its period, and students might spend their time looking at statistics on abortion and debates on the decline of the West, and the emergence of Fascism and the concept of the New Woman, and so on. Mary Poovey has put the challenge well: we must “abandon the pursuit of ‘complete’ readings of discrete texts in favor of analyses that reconstruct the debates and practices in which texts initially participated as well as the contemporary interpretive practices that make these debates visible now.” We are still the inheritors of a formalism that Eliot himself helped to establish, which means that some of us will feel ill at ease with the “non-literary,” but it, of course, is one of the properties of The Waste Land itself that it incorporates so much of the non-literary. The formal reading of The Waste Land impoverishes the text at least as much as the epistemic reading. A little imagination can suggest other models for such an “epistemic” or cluster course. One that seems increasingly attractive to me arises from a regular discontent with the way traditional American literature survey courses begin. One needs, clearly, to talk about colonial origins, but it seems hard to avoid the obvious conclusion that most of the first two hundred years of material is boring. Part of the problem is that colonial literature, as it is usually studied, doesn’t take its very name seriously enough: there is 388 not enough self-conscious exploration of the origins of the North American colonies in a European imperial frame. Students who have been trained in reading anthologies expect to leap from pinnacle to pinnacle, and are often frustrated by the introduction of “less interesting” material. One frequent solution is to begin with The Scarlet Letter, as a text about the Puritans. Hawthorne’s novel is a good place to start, but one need not be confined to talking about the Puritan culture the novel represents, and certainly not to talking about its theology. Using The Scarlet Letter as a centrepoint, one can throw out a number of filaments. Some of them will address such textual references as Ann Hutchinson, not simply as a fact to be noted, but as another text to be explored. What did Hutchinson actually do and say? Were there other women preachers in the seventeenth century? What in the culture or theology made Hutchinson’s challenge possible? Other filaments might ensnare more contemporary texts— reading Margaret Fuller, say, along with what may be a representation of her in Hawthorne’s text. Still others could investigate witchcraft, and Hawthorne’s ancestor’s role in it, while others explore the natives who take an appropriately marginal position in the novel’s tableaux. But, it may still be objected, we read The Waste Land because it is a “great poem,” and we want students to appreciate its greatness. I would rather students learned something about the notion of “greatness” and its construction, rather than simply accepting my (or your) judgment. Why is The Waste Land great? Is it because it can be read only by the classically educated? Will my judgment be different if I am a woman, or an African? One definition of “greatness” that we can perhaps keep to some degree is the old “test of time” : a work is great if it has survived the shifts of critical fortune. But even a work that has survived in that way has done so by becoming something different. Our Waste Land is not I.A. Richards’s. Let us then make the very process by which The Waste Land is judged a “great work” the object of our study. Let’s look at its reception, at its publication, at its interpretations. To do this we must begin by looking at it outside The Norton Anthology or even outside the Faber paperback. Let’s take that first issue of The Criterion, for example, and look at its contents. What happens when we read Valery Larbaud on Joyce’s Ulysses, Hermann Hesse on German poetry, Sturge Moore on Tristram and Isolt, and a May Sinclair story, alongside the unannotated Waste Land? How different when we encounter Eliot already packaged by the folks at Norton. Before reading a word of the poetry, one learns that he “was for over two decades the most influential poet writing in English,” that he “effectfed ] a major reorientation of the English literary tradition.” His critical writings, we are told, “combined Olympian judiciousness with . . . wit [and] urbane learning with . . . earnestness.” All writers appear in anthologies 389 packaged as “masters,” but there are some striking differences between the introduction to Eliot and that to Marianne Moore on the immediately pre ceding pages: she produced “a small but unmistakably unique body of po ems” (her collected poems are several times longer than Eliot’s!). She was “an inconspicuous figure in the literary world” (despite editing The Diall) and “a charming footnote to the public scene.” 1 The student’s response to these two poets is largely determined before a single line of poetry is read. That Moore appears at all may be due in part to a feminist critique of the canon, but it should be stressed that the absence of women writers from the American canon at least is the product of the last thirty or forty years: in the anthologies of the 1920s and 1930s women writers, and “non-literary” texts such els spirituals and work songs, are abundantly present. It was the victory of academic modernism that banished them. Thus the very nature of concepts such as “greatness” or “mastery” needs to be historicized. At the same time it is important to realize that merely enlarging the canon is not enough. The question of a canon and its constitution needs to be raised. Adding women to a canon already determined by men, and certain kinds of men at that, simply makes for ever fatter anthologies. It also ensures that a poet such as Moore can continue to be marginalized as “charming,” while Eliot is “urbane,” “judicious,” and “earnest.” The canon does need to be enlarged, not so much so that people can rec ognize themselves (surely one of the advantages of reading is of encountering difference) as that they can be empowered by the possibilities of language.2I was teaching an introductory poetry course a few years ago and had assigned a short paper on a poem by Audre Lorde. On my way into the building one morning I met a black student who had been quiet and apparently either hostile or bored during the first month of classes. “Can I ask you some thing?” she said. On my replying yes, she said timidly, “Is this Audre Lorde black?” When I said yes, she is, a great smile broke across the student’s face and she said exultantly, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew she was black!” Then a look of some puzzlement crossed her face. “And you professors study her poems?” she asked doubtfully. For the first time apparently it had struck her that a black woman might create work that we privileged white men might consider. In some very distant way it might even be possible that she herself was not beneath our attention, that she might also be heard if only she could write. The story does not have a marvelous happy ending. Although the student was attentive for the class on Audre Lorde and for several other classes, she soon lost interest again—and by losing interest I suppose I mean above all that she lost hope, the hope that somehow her world and mine might intersect in some way. I wish I could say that she woke up and became a great poet; the more likely truth is that the brief flicker of belief in herself, of a vision of speaking to us, was snuffed out. But 390 its having been there made me see how one could, in constructing a better course, make use of such a poem to awaken students before it is too late. Writers will not write unless they believe someone will read them. No one who believes that her life is invisible will record it. Teaching needs to be grounded in the local, although by no means re stricted to it. Just as I write this paper out of my own experiences in Quebec, and do not presume to be able to speak for all teachers of English everywhere, the teaching situation can draw on the students’ own experi ences, on the resources that surround them daily. It is possible to use what students know, rather than to bemoan what they don’t know. A discussion of images in the morning’s paper may reveal more about the cultural text than a lecture on Swift, and may indeed lead to reading of Swift, or Caryl Churchill. It is also good to feel free to improvise a bit, to allow the shape of the course to bend according to the events of the year, whether these be the “crisis” at Kahnewake or a local performance of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. I already teach A.M. Klein’s “Indian Reservation: Caughnawagha,” 3 but I might want to shift it from its “proper” place in the syllabus, as the Cana dian army invades that land. I might begin with an exploration of concepts of difference and containment, perhaps examining Klein’s phrase, “This is a grassy ghetto, and no home.” Students could then be asked to look at a large number of “Indian” poems, from Philip Freneau through Duncan Campbell Scott, as well as fictions from Cooper to Robert Lalonde or Leonard Co hen or Margaret Clarke. At the same time, that valuable history of the construction of the native in the white imagination must be placed against native accounts of themselves and their relationship to the colonizing soci ety around them, so that Klein’s poem might be read alongside those by Maurice Kenny and Beth Brant. The point, as I have indicated, is not simply to add a black woman, a gay chicano, and so forth to the canon, although those may be useful and necessary intermediate steps. In the same poetry course, I had scheduled a section on the villanelle. As it happened, around the time of that class the student newspaper included a section of gay poems, one of which was a villanelle about the murder of a gay man in Maine. Obviously that villanelle wasn’t “as good” as those by Roethke or Thomas or Merrill, but it had a power they didn’t have. Part of its power was in its subject, and the chance we had to talk about homophobia and violence; another part of its power derived from its author. My students know, most of them, that they will not be Dylan Thomas (actually a few, for better or worse, think they will be, but that is another issue); but they could be Peter Tyler. Once again part of the task is to make them aware of language as a means for addressing the things they care about. It doesn’t really matter, I think, how much they know about villanelles, but it does matter that they see something about the 39i possible uses of form, how rules can regulate anger and make it more potent. I think it would be useful to think about a course on political poetry, one that could include Audre Lorde and Peter Tyler and Milton and Dorothy Livesay. We have an urgent need, I think, to reimagine our categories. The no tion of “coverage” as the principle of English studies has got to go. For one thing, it’s simply not achievable without doing incredible harm. We either dash through the anthology, barely glancing to left or right, or we do the same old thing, a year on the Romantics, a year on the Victorians, adding (optionally only, of course) a semester on women poets (the time is not yet ripe to look at poets of colour or gay or lesbian poets, and anyway we haven’t got anyone qualified in the department). Even if it were possi ble, though, I do not think we should attempt it. Why should we privilege chronological organization, except as an aid to “influence” studies (and I have already suggested their narrowness)? We may want to require at least some courses that are historically based, but let’s imagine them in a way that makes the history matter. Why not a course on the American and French revolutions, say, that could include Lyrical Ballads and Billy Budd, as well as Dickens, Carlyle, and Mme de Stael? Such a course, when offered here, could be supplemented by work with local sources, including newspapers, diaries, and letters. In such a course history would not be simply a principle of organization but actually a motivating force, and one whose possession is contested. A course on nationalism and writing could include Quebec, Cana dian, American, English, Irish, Indian, African, and West Indian examples. What could one learn from juxtaposing Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, Au gusta Gregory, Tom Paine, Wole Soyinka, and Jamaica Kinkaid? What if one added an explicit twist of gender and talked about the relationship of a women’s movement to other political movements, reading Nicole Brossard, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth? If such courses were adequately thought out, they could provide much better “coverage” than any survey we can imagine, and they could also be arranged in ways that would reflect critical perspectives. Here the interests of the curriculum coincide with those of pedagogy. Far too often we function as mystic interpreters, revealing the truths of sacred texts that are appar ently only available to us. Far from empowering our students, we increase their sense of helplessness. Since they can never know what “we know,” they can only repeat what they have recalled of our knowledge. We have been teaching too much information and too few skills. We need to turn ourselves into living Beaubourgs, with our mechanisms exposed. How do we think? Where do we get our readings? How do we know what questions to ask? There is no truly naive reading, for any reading is always already an interpretation (where to pause, what to stress, what to skim, what to un 392 derline) that is based upon experience and politics. We sometimes act too much like talking anthologies, providing the “answers” without questioning the questions. And the anthologies themselves, by their ardent footnoting, provide interpretations that substitute the illusion of “meaning” for multiple possibilities of reading, and reenact the mystical transferral of information from source to empty recipient. The footnoted text is also in many cases a silenced text. I discovered this most clearly when I asked students in a Melville seminar to identify and think about the Biblical reference in “The Cassock” chapter of Moby-Dick for the next week’s discussion. I expected that the students might use different Bible translations, and that that might lead us into a discussion of interpretative problems.4 I wanted to encourage students to think about the relationships between the removal of what the King James version calls the “sodomites” and the “idol” recalling Queequeg’s that was burned. I was somewhat mystified when the topic did not arise the following week: no student could see any relationship between the passage from I Kings 15 and issues of sexuality and gender. The mystery was solved when I learned that the students were all using an edition of Moby-Dick that glossed the Biblical reference but without verse 12, concerning the sodomites (Melville 536, n. 1)! Seeing the text apparently cited in the note, they felt no need to proceed further. What a text tells us depends very much on the questions we choose to ask it. All of us, I am sure, have had the experience of going back to a work we have taught many times in the past, and suddenly discovering, because we asked different questions of it, that it wets a radically different text. When I first studied The Scarlet Letter it was “about” the Puritans (indeed one of the standard editions was entitled, I think, The Scarlet Letter and other Tales of the Puritans), or else it was about Romantic love. Then I got to graduate school to discover that it was really “about” colour and imagery. Now I ask my students questions about feminism and authority, about allegories of reading and textuality. Of course I think my questions are more interesting, but that’s largely because they reveal aspects that were otherwise ignored. I have no doubt that another generation will ask different questions. What was lacking in my education was not that the questions were “wrong,” but that they claimed to be “natural.” I think we owe it to our students to present the assumptions that underlie our questions as well as the answers that may follow from them. Once again the function of education is to empower, as Robert Scholes has so forcefully argued, and in order for our students to be empowered by our example, they must know what we are doing. This can be accomplished by pedagogical changes: by an individual instructor beginning a class by asking a whole set of questions very different from those she asked the previous day, and then, after the class has talked about these questions, calling attention 393 to the strategy itself. The first day on Kafka’s The Trial, for instance, might be devoted to a psychoanalytic exploration of questions of masochism and sexuality and father figures and so forth, while the second class might begin by looking at Prague in the early twentieth century, or at the relationship of Jewish identity to German-speaking culture, or at the nature of the bureau cracy. However one does it, the point is not to try to wrap these all up into a neat package. If critical pluralism means there are no contradictions and no choices, then let’s have none of it. Where is that splendid transcendent position where all difference evaporates? Wherever it is, it’s out of politics, which is precisely what needs to be brought back into the classroom. As Cary Nelson put it, however, it is precisely by deflecting their political thrust that critical schools get into the academy (47). Feminism, for instance, is ac ceptable as a critical discourse only once it has ceased to concern itself with any “real” issues: as long as it simply wants to read Milton differently, or add Virginia Woolf to the canon, it’s harmless enough, and in fact the best strategy of resistance is to give it precisely a “room of its own,” so that it can stay out of everyone else’s way. If we believe that real issues are at stake in our critical stances, as I think we do, then we should bring those issues to bear. An impassioned defence of what I believe is certain to have more power to move my listeners, in one direction or the other, than a dry summary of “all” the positions that is devoid of both politics and interest. Students are quite capable of resisting my politics if they choose to do so, but they need to at least be given the chance to know what they are. And I will play the advantage a lesbian or gay student (or the brother or sister or friend or cousin of one) will gain from seeing me function in the world as a gay man and a gay critic off against any imagined danger that the students will be offended or threatened. I imagine there may be a few students who don’t like being taught by a gay man; a lot of them come out of the experi ence having challenged much of what they once thought about gays, or even about themselves. Neither my politics nor my sexuality is private; both are too much a part of who I am for them ever to be silenced. Since one is likely to be uncomfortable “doing the police in different voices” for too long, it is probably best to accept Gerald Graff’s suggestion concern ing confrontational teaching. This, it should be stressed, is not the same as team-teaching (although it may overlap with it). In the team-teaching model, each person has her “expertise,” and intervenes only when issues pertaining to that “knowledge” are at stake. Confrontational teaching is not based on expertise, on the division of t
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