ALMOST NOTHING TO BE DONE: CONSUMER EDUCATIONNOTES
Conventional wisdom in our consumer culture suggests that educational environments should both reflect and determine the desirable models of behavior and understanding that produce, and reproduce, healthy socio-industrial conditions. In a capitalist system, driven by the politics of "laissez-faire" and the Social Darwinist ethics of individual mobility, these conditions are defined in terms of economics. This leads to grossly simplified assumptions about the relationship between education and a nation's health: good pedagogies produce productive, self-motivated functionaries who contribute to the financial wealth of the nation by working hard and adding to the well-being of society, inculcating their children with "good family values" that perpetuate the work ethic; bad pedagogies produce generations of unemployable, dependent "dead-beats" who sap the economic and moral strength of the nation. Hard economic times inevitably lead to charges, both from politicians and the reluctant tax-payers who vote them into office, that educational environments are, somehow, failing to expel bad (wasteful) nature from students, failing to fill them with good (productive) nature.
In the present climate any countercharge that the political environment itself is not conducive to the creation of good educational environments and that "good education" and "good nature" are complicated concepts that go beyond economic considerations is met with a sneer. As we struggle to teach our way through the simplistic cynicism that derides us as a "cultural elite," we find ourselves fighting over the same old words and concepts: "nature," "art," "history," "culture." The temptation is to define these words in ways that go against the conservative grain. But to do so puts us in danger of falling into the nasty, efficient, precise traps that were set in the brutal days of the Industrial Revolution. If we are to avoid these traps, avoiding the pigeon-holing that reduces political and pedagogical debates to grossly simplified oppositions and categories, we must proceed with Samuel Beckett's caution in mind: "The danger is in the neatness of the identifications."[1] Once I have made some rather neat identifications of my own, I will describe how I have used this warning as a pedagogical tool for gathering together and dispersing conversations and digressions that reveal the complexities of educational environments without esoteric enclosure, without simplistic bookkeeping, without the conscious imposition of prescribed judgments and values.
As yet another "recession" reveals the inherent boom-bust pattern of the military-industrial complex, high schools and colleges (especially those that receive state funds, but also those that rely on alumni contributions) are again under economic and ideological pressure (from "right-wingers" like the National Association of Scholars and the Dartmouth Review) to produce students who are "better prepared" for the "real world." This pressure is intended to counteract "liberal" policies that are held culpable for creating, among other evils, educational environments that lead to the breakdown of both "family values" and the nation's economic viability. Conservative politicians in Britain and the United States have fought and won elections since the late seventies by claiming that the movement away from such fundamental skills as reading, writing, and arithmetic (the three "Rs") and from traditional texts ("The Classics") has lowered educational and, hence, industrial standards.[2]Thus, by appealing to what they call "family values" or "Victorian values," the Right deflects attention from the roller-coaster pattern of laissez-faire capitalism. Because nationalism and isolationism go hand-in-hand with conservatism (and despite the fact that global capitalism is itself largely responsible for the erosion of neat cultural, national, and historical identitities), it is no surprise that "political correctness" (part of the noble but too often over-zealous effort to develop mobile vocabularies for discussing relationships in an age of fluid identities) becomes another derisory, fear-provoking label in the campaign against multiculturalism, internationalism, and revisionism. Neither is surprising the Right's implications that the proponents of these interdisciplinary, process-oriented approaches are responsible for the nation's failure to compete with those almost mythological icons of efficiency and precision, Germany and Japan. By appealing to the dual, though contradictory, senses that you have to be either (spiritually) pure or (commercially) fit in order to survive in this world, the Right makes it sound commonsensical that the only natural laws that belong in the classroom are either those associated with the patriarchal God of our Judeo-Christian tradition or those associated with Charles Darwin, Henry Ford, and Donald Trump. In either case the emphasis is on a neatly defined sense of what should be done and why. No equivocation is allowed: the only form of exchange worth attending to is commercial; nature's laws become the laws of hands-off economics; Protestant and Democratic ideology (which add up to Capitalist ideology) are for exportation only; other laws and ideologies must be expunged before the capitalist crusade can win the shining, man-made but God-inspired city on the hill.
But to return to earth, to teaching. In the debate over political correctness politicians and teachers struggle to assess the "actual effects in classroom practice" of "new theories and movements, such as deconstruction, feminism, multiculturalism, and the new historicism.[3] This political/pedagogical struggle is, of course, intensified by budget-cuts and job-shortages: research positions become more precious; teaching jobs become more burdensome. As the stakes rise, professional survival and intellectual integrity become matters of compromise and complex intellectual processes are reduced to lists of jargony words. We are forced to define our pedagogical relationship with the academy by accepting terms that we might well associate with politics that we oppose. Darwinist nature (careerism) concretizes our personal politics into an acceptable, fixed "academic nature" that can be spelled out on a Curriculum Vitę and in a neatly phrased cover-letter. Encouraged to present a "best self" that is manicured and dry-cleaned, we learn that our successful entry into the profession depends on the acceptance of generic codes that are rooted in conservatism. As we make ourselves more marketable we cannot help but make ourselves less radical.[4]Thus, as we revise ourselves for the transition from graduate student to assistant professor, we learn (once more) to accept the efficacy of manners that we, the post-sixties, post-structuralist generation, would ordinarily subvert or deconstruct or otherwise refuse. Bound by the codes of marketability during this crucial transition, how can we, in good faith, continue to interrogate the codes of capitalist ideology in our research and teaching?
Looked at from one dominant perspective, the framework that defines our profession (and the pedagogies that we use) is so unyielding that any changes in an individual teacher/academic's pedagogy and manners are about as effective, "in the grand scheme of things," as Cuchulain's fighting of the waves, or as the pseudo-revolutionary gestures of a pampered rock-singer (or a comfortable professor).[5] Such is the well known argument in Louis Althusser's rather pessimistic "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Althusser argues that "the educational apparatus [is] in fact the dominant ideological State apparatus in capitalist social formations" and that the school "drums into [children] . . . a certain amount of `know-how' wrapped in the ruling ideology" until they are "ejected" into a class function (154-55). Because "each mass ejected en route is practically provided with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in class society," this reproduces "the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited" (155-56). In addition, the "mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School" (156). With this dark critique assumed, Althusser apologizes to "those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they 'teach' against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped" (157). However dedicated these teachers may be, their labors are even less effective than Cuchulain's, being not only futile, but also counter-productive because their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as "natural," indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was "natural," indispensable and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago. (157)
Althusser arrives at this pessimistic conclusion because he assumes a closed, predictable, repressive system of relationships that can only be changed through a Lenin-style revolution--he is not interested in slight, uncertain gestures of rebellion; interested in investigating "the structure of every society" (134), he sees those who try to subvert this structure through individual efforts as selfless but misguided fools. Even though Althusser bases his findings on France's state-funded educational system, I think that his reproductive model of understanding is accurate enough as a representation of the basic relationships of production and exploitation under capitalism that it should be kept in mind during any discussion of the role of education within this economic system.[6] But, as I will suggest when I discuss the role of Samuel Beckett in teaching through uncertainty, Althusser's structuralist model does not allow for those slight sparks of unpredictable "individualism" that really do redefine the course of social, and educational, institutions. Lois Weis' argument in the introduction to Working Class Without Work helps us to move beyond Althusser:
Although it is understandable . . . how the reproduction framework took hold among academics in a period of relative stability, it is becoming increasingly clear that this framework will be unable to illuminate the complex social processes currently unfolding. It is important, then, for scholars to break out of the reproduction framework and begin to explore alternative conceptions of society and the ways in which schools are linked to this society. (4)
We must not only accept that an adequate model for understanding our profession and its relationship to the culture at large be open to quirkiness, but must also insist that it encourages the exploration of awkwardness and hesitation and the erratic tics that set us off balance. If habit is the great deadener, then uncertainty is the great enlivener. Because the danger is in the neatness of identifications; because identifications must be made while avoiding oversimplified structures; because we live in a rapidly revising world where today's reproduction of the means of production is not necessarily useful to tomorrow's social and political structures; because today's marketability is tomorrow's cliché; because the social structure is less and less tied to material, stable capital and more and more energized by immaterial, perpetually reconfigured, unstable information; because reproduction is no longer an adequate metaphor for the often invisible processes of cultural exchange that push us beyond traditional ("Natural") forms of behavior and interaction and production; because sentence fragments and other rule-breaking sometimes work: I contend that the environment we create in the classroom must be self-consciously uncertain in its shape and in its aims. If we are to prepare students for the almost entirely denatured, man-made, culturally relative environments that most of them will inhabit (unless they find a piece of "unspoilt" desert), we must prepare them to confront the kinds of uncertainty that accompany the profoundly unfathomable interchangings of human constructions. Because they present us with denatured textual environments that refuse pretentious responses, Samuel Beckett's later texts are indispensable pedagogical tools that let students learn how deeply they have been influenced by the radically denatured construction that gets called "the real world."
WHO'S NATURE?
"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
-- Dickens, Hard Times, 3
As factually correct as an entry in a comprehensive dictionary, Bitzer's anatomical definition of a horse is designed to be a blatant satirization of industry-oriented education in Victorian Britain. "Unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge" (3) because his education has purged him of his "tender young imagination" (2), Bitzer is another of Dickens' social stereotypes, and Hard Times itself is a paradigm of the main oppositions that have confronted teachers and professionals since the industrial revolution. Within this paradigm, Bitzer's definition of a horse represents an "unnatural" education and Bitzer represents unnatural humanity. Or, rather, he represents man as a de-emotionalized, and thus functional, instrument of efficient industrial production. Bitzer, in Althusser's words, "has a certain amount of know-how." Dickens' caricature is painted with a broad brush, catching the likeness of a general attitude towards education current in the mid-Victorian period. It is the less attractive part of the questionably balanced pedagogy that Thomas Huxley would define, in 1868, as "A Liberal Education":
That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself. (Huxley, 12)
Bitzer's intellect "is a clear, cold, logic engine" that "is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature," but his mind is, in Dickens' pedagogy, sans gossamers, sans conscience, sans love. Shaped by the tidy laws of industrial production and reproduction, he has been purged of all "life and fire," all "human nature" that does not serve his own interests. The selfish nature that remains is, of course, the Nature that would be given credence (albeit through convenient misreadings) by Darwin's Origin of Species.[7]Modeled on J. M. M'Culloch's "Improved System of Teaching," as he outlined it in the preface to A Series of Lessons in Prose and Verse (1831), Gradgrind's commerce-oriented education assumes that vocational fitness will follow if the mind is stored with "useful knowledge," with knowledge that allows no equivocation, no uncertainty. A product of a pedagogy that was forged at the same time that the Industrial (and Bourgeois) Revolution was being sanctioned by electoral reform, by the consolidation of middle-class power, Bitzer is a barely amusing caricature of the industrially efficient, but morally vacant, functionary. As I previously suggested, this type remains with us, being championed every time we enter another economic slump, every time efficiency and diligent application are seen as a way out of yet another recession, every time vocation-based arguments are used to make decisions about what should be taught and how it should be taught.
Bitzer's personal (though temporary) success in this world is assured by his training in the laws of the industrial-capitalist "jungle," in what was to help form the dominant principle of Western ideology, Social Darwinism. It's a case of the survival-of-the-fittest, and Bitzer is one of the fittest because he is a "reasoning animal" (Dickens, 1). Of course Dickens uses Bitzer, the grossly unnatural (in the sense of "inhuman") product of Gradgrind's pedagogical works because he wants us to see that utilitarian teaching methods are dehumanizing (teaching that self-interest comes before morality). Dickens leaves no doubt about this intention, framing the novel with a conclusion that reminds us to reread the beginning from an ironic distance: Bitzer is frustrated by the very forces that Gradgrind's pedagogy suppressed and that Bitzer, the "good" student, ignored; the quintessentially "natural" ("human") Sleary foils Bitzer by exerting his command over three clever animals (two of which fit Bitzer's denotative definition of a "horse").[8] The ultimately victorious "natural" forces that Gradgrind's catechism is designed to expel are, most simply and purely, represented by Sissy Jupe. Her story is that of a child raised among the "very natural attitudes" that go with "the Sleary Philosophy" (32). Dickens indicates the significance of the Bitzer/Jupe (industry/nature) opposition by introducing it in the opening pages of Hard Times. "Girl Number Twenty," who calls herself "Sissy," is told to call herself "Cecilia." The authorized name, the name that would appear on the Certificate of Birth, is asserted over the familiarized name. Thus, as in any efficient industry, the reproducible standard is valued above the individual. But Sissy's individualism, her "true self," her "human nature," her innate, God-given moral goodness, is strong and resilient. Asked to define a horse, which should be easy for her because her father is a circus-performer who sometimes breaks horses, she fails. And she fails because she is already too full of her own "natural" self to be contained by Gradgrind's man-made, socially constructed, environment. Unable to bring her "nature" under control, she cannot reproduce the factory-approved definition demanded of her. And this is her saving grace. Even though "Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in," Sissy absorbs a deep "lustrous colour from the sun"(48). In this environment that is hostile to all that is natural and human, she survives. She survives, not by the laws of the jungle, by the laws that kill off the unfit, but by God's laws. And she lives accordingly: by blind faith, irrational hope, and altruistic charity.
So Sissy embodies the main positive force that Dickens' pedagogy constructs in opposition to Gradgrind's world. This is akin to Wordsworth's fundamentally Christian, Romantic formulation of a positive force that exists in the "wilderness" (or at least in the Lake District), in humans who are untainted by the industrial world. It is the force that Wordsworth opposes to programmed scholarly reading in his two poems "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned." These anti-institutional poems, with their "back-to-nature" philosophy, assume a "Nature" that "May teach you more of man/ Of moral evil and of good/ Than all the sages can" ("Tables," 22-24). In this definition nature gathers its strength beyond the bounds of Enlightenment conventions and the social, economic, and educational institutions that these conventions produce and re-produce. It is not Tennyson's (or Darwin's) "Nature red in tooth and claw," but an idealized nature as the world beyond the grubby claws of man, beyond Coketown and towns just like it: trees and rivers and mountains and animals and the sea. Oh, and peasants: noble know-nothings who know it all because they know themselves and they know God, "natural" humans who live in pastoral simplicity without the need for logic, machines, facts.
Like Wordsworth and others, Dickens recruits "Nature" in the campaign against the apparently closed system of industrial "civilization" that Marx had critiqued in the Communist Manifesto.[9] And he recruits Sissy Jupe, with her humble background in a wandering circus, as a Christian soldier who fights the fact-grinding institutions that produce and reproduce this "civilization." Without being sacrificed (except as a credible character), Sissy Jupe will cleanse society of the pollutants that threaten the integrity of both the community and the individual. Like the little girl in Wordsworth's "We are Seven" or like one of Blake's innocent children, Sissy remains, in her "heart," pure, simple, and hopeful despite being confronted with the realities of the adult world: she remains true to herself and true to her God. Her main faults as far as the unreformed Gradgrind is concerned--her Faith, Hope, and Charity--are her best, her most "natural" qualities as far as the plot of the novel is concerned. Thus, Dickens aligns human nature and human goodness with Christian morality, with a morality that is set above and against the laws of industrial production.
The key opposition in Hard Times is, then, between Bitzer's "heart," which is a circulatory pump, a machine that operates according to "the facts established by Harvey" (217), and Sissy's "heart of infancy" (226), the seat of natural compassion and selfless love. Bitzer's is the heart of Mammon; Sissy's is the heart of Christ. With this neatly defined opposition, not only does Dickens end up supporting the kind of Christian idealism satirized, for example, by John Gay in "The Shepherd's Week" (1714) and by Samuel Butler in Erewhon (1872), but he also ends up recuperating the system of neat identifications that his novel attempts to reject. Sissy's almost supernatural (sickeningly idealistic) urge to be selfless turns her into a Florence Nightingale figure, into a figure who enables atrocities to continue by soothing the wounds of the victims:
[H]appy Sissy's happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights. (226)
Sissy rises out of the ashes of Coketown, she escapes from the "monotonous vault" of Gradgrind's schoolroom, but there is no indication that her efforts will stop either structure from grinding its victims into industrial debris. Unless, of course, we take seriously Dickens' parting suggestion that "It rests with you and me" to be inspired by her actions to change things (227). Perhaps, though, the "ridiculous idiosyncrasy" that Dickens' narrator confesses to, that the workers should have "a little more play," might be realized through the dissemination of the idea that uncertain, unpredictable tics and idiosyncrasies are the way of the future (48).
TOWARDS A PEDAGOGY OF UNCERTAINTY
How, then, do we explore uncertainty in man-made environments that seem doomed to reduce experience to tidy oppositional formulations? As I have suggested, Dickens is so intent on rejecting the extreme version of utilitarian education that he ends up embracing an unrealistic alternative that reinstates the neat essentializations he wishes to avoid. By borrowing his (or Althusser's) broad brush to paint a picture of the choices that confront teachers in the Capitalist system of Education, we certainly establish the parameters of our educational environments, but we also succumb to the neatness of identifications. Either we set out to cultivate students in the art of reciting facts, treating their minds (and training them to think of their minds) as if they are market gardens, good in so much as they produce marketable goods, meanwhile rooting out their idiosyncrasies (evidence of their "nature") as if they are weeds, planting in their stead what Matthew Arnold called, in Culture and Anarchy (published in 1869, fifteen years after Hard Times), "the best which has been thought and said in the world" (Preface, xi). Or we plan to "let learn," encouraging subjectivity as if the students' minds were nature preserves, good in so much as they flourish without interference; we protect their "sacred" idiosyncrasies, allowing "free" development in a state of contained but unbridled Anarchy. Trusting that each student will discover, or re-discover, her own "good nature," her own innate moral goodness, we "let go," letting nature run its course. But, as I suggested earlier, this bottom line dictates that we must justify our approach to those who provide the money and the capital to sustain our institution. While the product-oriented approach keeps these people happy and the "nature" approach makes them quake in their neat leather shoes, neither avoids the neatness of identifications. We, as teacher-scholars who make careers by turning idiosyncratic readings into re-visions of established habits, must resist the totalizing imposition of "objectivity" and structure, teaching students how to identify these totalities without drifting into statements of opinion that are so "natual," so personal, that they block conversation.
At some point my exploration must be grounded in the age-old Nature/Culture controversy, a controversy that is age-old because it is unresolvable. But it is not my intention to discuss this dialectic here.[10]Rather, I will gesture towards the avoidance of prescribed answers, deferring first to Samuel Beckett and then to some student responses to one of his later texts, Worstward Ho. Beckett's importance, like Derrida's, is that he shifts a number of important relationships and oppositions onto uncertain ground, putting us off balance, forcing us to wrestle in the mud of uncertainty with an uncertain foe.[11]He is not, of course, the first to do so. Uncertainty (accompanied by its allies Discomfort, Confusion, and Doubt) has been instrumental in composing and decomposing expressions of thought since our philosophical and literary tradition, and the language that goes with it, took on the guise that allows us to recognize it as our philosophical and literary tradition.[12]
The sources of this uncertainty are of course debatable, but it seems almost certain that, despite dictionary definitions and industrial standardization, language dooms us to fail again and again in our search for certainty. Beckett exposes this point with powerful effect at the end of The Unnamable. After one hundred twenty-three pages of contradictions and doubts, of failed efforts to answer the questions "Where now? Who now? When now?," the last sentence churns its way through two-and-a-half pages of wonderfully measured and rhythmical self-ablations that end:
you must go on, I can't go on, you must go on, I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. (127)
Words are both the seekers and the finders--they have to say and be said. But the speaker, the voice that is seeking itself, cannot tell when it has, or if it has, found itself. The narrative voice, split into the sayer and the said, the "you" and the "Me/I," is compelled to break the silence, going on until the narrative ends, but it knows that it cannot know, it knows that going on is futile but it also knows that it has no choice except to go on. The narrative voice is as double-bound as a narrative voice can get before it can't move at all--its movement is, in fact, circular, in tighter and tighter circles (reminding us of the RAF usage of "bind"--when a dog-fight of planes chasing each other's tails forces one into a dangerously vulnerable position). Hyper-aware of its own narrative failings (all is "ill-seen" and "ill-said"--to recall the title of Beckett's Ill-Seen, Ill-Said) this voice finally withdraws from the field of narrative strugglings by posing questions that surrender to the foe of uncertainty without surrendering to the more dangerous foe of neat identification. By the end of The Unnamable, Beckett arrives at some kind of answer, but it is an answer that flails around and around in the pain of uncertainty without knowing whether or not it is an answer. He had learnt how to explore the deepest levels of the self and its expression (or nonexpression) by using uncertainty.
Inspired by my deep-seated belief that Beckett's interrogation of double-bindings is instructive, and in order to explore uncertainty as a pedagogical tool, I have designed a pedagogical "experiment."[13]]I begin by reading aloud, with passion, the first four and a half pages of Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho (1983). I then hand out photocopies of the passage, telling the class to respond, in writing, for fifteen minutes. After ten minutes I write the word "Imagination" on the board and call their attention to it, saying "continue writing, with this word in mind, for another ten minutes." After ten minutes I write "Dead" underneath "Imagination" and suggest that they consider the words separately and/or as a phrase, adding to what they have already written. After fifteen minutes I write "Imagine" underneath "Dead" and suggest that they consider it as a separate word and/or as an addition to the phrase, adding to what they have written for another fifteen minutes.[14]
I use this passage because it is as "white," as denatured, as void of "imagination," as any literary environment that has ever been constructed. A short extract should demonstrate:
On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.
Say for said. Missaid. From now say for be missaid.
Say a abody. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still.
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (7)
The passage, beginning with the multivalent, provacatively open sentence "On," defines its own terms, its own space, its own rules, as it goes along. Or, rather, it leaves meaning so multivalent and open that it challenges us to define its terms, its space, its rules as we go along. And this is where the passage proves most powerful in the classroom. The responses to the passage are both fascinating and revealing. They demonstrate that Beckett's later prose-poetry is an extremely evocative teaching tool because it clarifies the rhetorical posturings and theoretical baggage that any reader, regardless of her level of sophistication or familiarity with a particular author, brings to a literary work. The practical uses of the experiment are two-fold. Many students learn from the immediate impact of the exercise, recognizing how much their interpretations of texts owe to their preconceptions and prejudices. This helps them to identify what these preconceptions and prejudices look like, and demonstrates how they both enable and restrict responses to a text. This, in itself, justifies the exercise, offering a practical lesson about the importance of the relationship between a text and the interpretive strategies that impose particular "meanings" on a text. The second practical use of the exercise develops out of the first. Because of what the responses reveal, the teacher can shape a course that responds directly to a whole set of deadeningly habituated expectations and prejudices about the relationship between the reader and the text, and between the student and the teacher, between conventional and unconventional writing, between the word and the world, etc. The very unteachability of Worstward Ho becomes its main strength as a pedagogical instrument. In conclusion I provide a selection of raw responses to my experiment. Make of them what you will.
If this is somehow the beginning of a longer work I am most certainly lost. Beckett's distinct style seems to be expecting ["assuming" is erased] far too much from this reader. Although each fragment, each word is understandable I cannot understand how they are meant to fit together. It seems much like trying to solve a puzzle without knowing the final shape all the pieces are meant to take . . . . Imagination manifests itself in this work in both productive and counter-productive forms. Beckett reveals some personal intimations of his imagination in what I would believe to be a very direct style as if he were collecting his thoughts as they flowed through his mind and permitted them to fashion their own order on the paper. But as these thoughts are very personal I feel that they fail to communicate their full message because of my lack of familiarity with the process Beckett was experiencing at the time. Perhaps this is intentional. I suppose Beckett would be writing from his own imagination directly to mine and my attempts to impose order on his words or attempt to translate them is inappropriate.
The words in these pages seem to be representing a struggle of some kind, probably an inner struggle. It seems to be some kind of an inner dialogue which one sometimes has with oneself when making an effort. It also appears to be being said almost subconsciously, as if the writer himself is not even aware of what he is thinking. Reading it for the first time, it appears not to make any sense at all, but reading it again or re-reading certain phrases makes one realize it does have meaning.
In my understanding of this passage, it is about struggling through life, and not giving up. It may get harder and harder and yet even harder than that, but keep trying. Once one takes that first step, keep going on, reach for that second step. It may take a while before reaching it, or one may not reach it, but keep going. No matter how long it takes to reach it, keep on fighting, because since you have taken that first step, why give up . . . . even when one's hopes and dreams are dieing. And all of it is just crumbling down. . . . Now one can imagine, and dream of what if, and set their goals. It is great to imagine, because who knows maybe those dreams and goal someday may become reality, and that reality is life.
[1 ]This is the first line of Beckett's first essay, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce," published in 1929. The essay, on "Work in Progress" (as Joyce referred to the writing that eventually became Finnegans Wake), was published in Transition and in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress and is now available in Disjecta (1984), edited by Ruby Cohn.
[2 ]As I write, the British Tory Party is advocating a return to the teaching of "standard English."
[3 ]This quotation comes from the "Statement of Principles" of the recently founded ("Leftist") Teachers for a Democratic Culture. Teachers for a Democratic Culture was formed in early 1991 by Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay. They can be contacted at TDC, Box 6405, Evanston, Illinois 60204.
[4 ]Many of us get jobs teaching by defining ourselves against ourselves, by stepping into clothes, personae, and patterns of thinking/talking that are, for us, unnatural and uncomfortable. ([ ]In my own case, I present myself as if I am from the Home Counties of England, adopting codes that an American will regard more favorably than my more natural, highly provincial, flat Lincolnese.) We conform in order to appear "professorial." Academic job-seekers are encouraged, in peppy career-orientation meetings organized by their relatively secure and "realistic" (but sincerely generous) colleagues, to present a safe, well groomed, carefully crafted and revised front: "radical" positions ("Rightist," "Leftist," or whatever) must be tamed and packaged to make them less outrageous; "conventional" positions must be rephrased and rejuvenated to make them more "hip." Those who go "on the market," attending the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, discover the necessity of this preparation. They find themselves in an environment that can only seem natural to someone accustomed to corporate or upper-middle class living: plush lobbies, exotic cuisine, haute couture. One begins to feel that this is what our profession is all about: teaching ourselves and others to be at ease in the plush lobby of an international hotel.
Most interesting, though, are those who don't quite follow the rules and decorums of these unnatural settings; it is often these people who get noticed, who get jobs. Unpredictable sparks of what can only be called "human nature" add life and awkwardness to every gathering. The conventionality of safe, color-coordinated jackets and ties and sensible shoes is betrayed, here and there, by "mis-matched" colors, MTV haircuts, and trendy accessories. Haunted by practical concerns in an era of economic instability, our most representative "social" environment reveals a bizarre blending of strict "professionalism" and (slightly outspoken, slightly gauche) individualism: on the one hand, a highly self-conscious struggle to behave according to a marketable pattern of codes, decorums, and discourses; on the other, an equally self-conscious inability to blend in, to be at ease, to relax. And it is in these splashes of mild embarrassment, in questions that don't sound quite right, in papers that are "unfinished," that we can begin to see glimpses of "the future": here we see those who will teach not only our nation's students, but our nation's teachers and other professionals for the next forty years. Thus we begin to describe how our professional structure moves in relation to the "real world" that it serves (or fails to serve). Economic and political pressures designed to reinforce this man-made environment form a frame, a "prison-house" that we work within and, occasionally, step beyond (only to be recaptured by the relentless processes of capitalist appropriation). As we dabble, not quite professionally, with the well-defined "extremes," we make slight incursions into the status quo, we add an element of uncertainty, of charm, to the sometimes claustrophobic environments in which we seek to further our careers.
[5 ]Consider the similarity between such "radical" MTV performers as Madonna and Axl Rose and academics such as Camille Paglia and Stanley Fish. Paglia's self-confessed identification with Madonna in Sex, Art, and American Culture clarifies how she uses pseudo-revolutionary techniques ("strong" language, a "sexy" appearance, bombastic self-praise, arrogant claims to uniqueness and originality) to promote ideas that are as safe and commercial as any MTV video. Like Axl Rose's clean-cut, multi-costumed punk-persona, Fish's glib, multifaceted, discussions of academic practice masquerade in the guise of subversion while they reinforce the institutions that they seem to call into question.
[6 ]Even though our system comprises a complex blending of public and private formations, these formations would, under ideal conditions, perpetuate themselves through a process of production and reproduction that operates with the same relentlessness as those created in a wholly state-legislated system. In the "real world" of laissez-faire capitalism, public and private institutions operate according to identical laws of economics; regardless of the supposed differences between the state school and the private school, the policies of both are always reduced to the exigencies of what gets called "the bottom dollar." Thus, the products of both, graduates with academic credentials (an accumulation of "credits" from institutions that are "accredited" and that are rated like any other producer of consumables--see Gorman's Report) become more or less "marketable" as a direct consequence of how much they have spent and how well they have spent their time and money.
[7 ]Origin of Species was published in 1859, five years after the publication of Hard Times in serial form in Household Words.
[8 ]The fact that the character inscribed as "Sleary" in the frame that carries the dialogue refers to himself as "Thleary" in his speech, is key to our understanding of Dickens' relationship with the one-dimensionally natured industrial complex that he critiques. Even as he subverts Gradgrind's philosophical position, Dickens confirms his acceptance of the laws that govern the printed reproduction of language. One of the best transcribers of the spoken tongue, especially that of the working-classes, Dickens nonetheless adopts standards that reinforce the centrality of a written language that is as pristine and reproducible as any product of John Adams' division of labor, as, say, a pin.
[9]Published in German six years before Dickens began to serialize Hard Times in Household Words, The Communist Manifesto was published in an English translation in the Red Republican in 1850. Even if Dickens did not read Marx and Engels, their ideas were sufficiently "current" to be an indirect influence on his work.
[10 ]Derek Attridge's Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (1988) is a brilliant study that, among other things, puts this controversy in a historical context.
[11 ]Here are a few of the interactions that are called into question by the very attempt to "read" Beckett's texts (this is increasingly true through the course of his long career): reader/text, sense/nonsense, truth/delusion, ill-seen/ill-said, you/I/he/she/we, dream/story/ memory, sleep/wakefulness, narrator/narrated, absence/presence.
[12 ]There is, of course, a long tradition that stretches and develops out of such powerful images of uncertainty as Plato's shadows of the images on the walls of the cave, the Old Testament's story of Job's struggle, Augustine's sentence "Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned," Dante's description of Belacqua in Purgatory, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Burton's Democritus Junior, Bunyan's Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle, Johnson's "Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded" at the end of Rasselas, Carlyle's Teufelsdroch in Sartor Resartus, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, bringing us to Beckett's incurious seekers in his Trilogy of novels.
[13]My experiment is a freer, less controlled, version of the one outlined by I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929). I think it is essential that the class is not given any introduction to the passage.
[14 ]I thus encourage the class to contemplate the title of a short piece that Beckett published in 1966--Imagination Dead Imagine.
WORKS CITED
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-86.
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. 1869. New York: MacMillan, 1912.
Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta. Ed. Ruby Cohn. New York: Grove, 1984.
----. The Unnamable. London: Calder, 1955.
----. Worstward Ho. New York: Grove, 1983.
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: Norton, 1966.
Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
Huxley, Thomas. Collected Essays. 9 vols. New York: Appleton, 1896.
The Gorman Report: A Rating of Undergraduate Programs in American and
International Universities. Los Angeles: National Educational Standards, 1977-1989.
Weis, Lois. Working Class Without Work: High School Students in a De-industrializing Economy. New York: Routledge, 1990.
[Praxis 4 (1993):13-28]
to Beckett Bethicketted