Jottings Logo - John Fraser

Cogitations

The Educated Imagination / Snooker, Pool, and Determinism / Poetry and Knowledge / Teaching Black

Teaching Black ? (2002)

Dear L.,

I

I see that the question of high-school literature texts is in the news again.

I don’t know about you, but during virtually my whole university career here I taught a freshman class every year. Which is to say, taught young people just out of high-school and mostly in those classes because they had to be and not because literature and writing were strong interests of theirs. Most of them were science majors.

It took me a long while to become a reasonably competent teacher of them and earn that cherished accolade from an anonymous student appraiser in my final year, “Professor Fraser is a darling, very bright and student oriented.”

Choosing fiction texts was a perennial problem, and I made plenty of mistakes over the years, particularly when I was lecturing. Lecturing is easy. You’re simply substituting a text of your own (oral) for the written text of the author. Eliciting discussion is something else.

A fiction text, I mean one that they read, should be a meeting place, a place the students can enter into together and talk about freely, as in my graduate seminars, which were the easiest classes to give. They should be able in some way to take possession of a work, experience it from the inside, feel it. Or feel/experience/learn how to work out, in discussion, the experiencing of it. Not all reaching the same conclusions (“Well, class, we decided last time…”), but each becoming clearer about his/her experiencings.

A “teachable” fiction for the young, it seems to me, should be one that’s accessible enough, in principle, for all the students in a class to be able to make their way through it at a basic comprehension level (who’s doing what to whom where), and interestingly difficult enough for them to want to talk about it with their peers, or hear their peers talking (why is this happening? what was she feeling? was that the morally right decision?)

Ideally, the bright students should enjoy talking about the work, the less bright or less articulate ones should be unafraid to offer an opinion from time to time, and the silent ones should enjoy listening to the others.

II

I haven’t read the three novels accused of not being Black enough, though not long ago I saw again , and liked, the movie of In the Heat of the Night. But my guess is that if they’ve been around in classrooms as long as they have (at least Harper Lee’s novel seems to have been around for a long time), it’s because they’re good “teachables,” meaning that kids like them and like talking about them. The Great Gatsby is another teachable. The Catcher in the Rye used to be a teachable.

I would think, guessing again, that To Kill a Mockingbird is about moral choice, standing against the pressure of one’s peers, not compromising the search for truth because of the demand for social solidarity (cf. Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People).

In the Heat of the Night also seemed to me about courage, integrity, a search for truth, a resistance to peer pressure. The sheriff does recognize the facts when they’re presented to him by a fellow professional. Who becomes established for him as a fellow professional (and hence a fellow human being) because of the claims of fact and reasoning.

I can make no sense of the notion that the Tibbs played so authoritatively by Sidney Poitier is “marginal.” To say so would seem to me a devaluing of the courage and other qualities of character that he displays. The old Marxist move, in fact, of saying that “objectively,” regardless of how someone may seem and act, they are really such-and-such. “Objectively” Helen Keller was an agent of prejudice against the handicapped, “objectively” Churchill was a fascist, or whatever the case may be. Only the unillusioned and, of course, un-self-seeking Marxists being really on the path of the general good.

III

I have read at least one novel each by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin—the first four when I was trying to choose texts for the pass-degree class in twentieth-century fiction that I was told off to give in my final year, and which proved to be one of my happiest undergraduate teaching experiences ever.

The Color Purple was obviously a teachable—schmaltzy, but you could see why girls would like it. Morrison seemed to me a heavy in the Faulknerian manner, which is to say difficult beyond my limited patience, as well as annoyingly slipshod in her prose at times (whatever happened to copy-editing?) and not a writer who I thought would be rewarding enough for the students for me to want to do the necessary back-up work.

Of which I did lots in that class, as I also did in my freshman class for George Clarke’s verse novel Whylah Falls, which I chose in the year that it came out, and which sure as hell wouldn’t have taught itself, being a lot more difficult than the play he derived from it.

The Invisible Man was good, but again a bit too complicated and requiring too much elucidation for my purposes (Joycean style shifts, political background, etc). Native Son irritated me politically. It seemed to be, in its relative simplicities, what Ellison was reacting against. I didn’t look at Baldwin again, but I vaguely recalled Go Tell It on the Mountain as a bit stodgy, and Giovanni’s Room as not all that good a novel.

IV

In the end I settled on Zora Neale Hurston’s rich and lovely Their Eyes Were Watching God, which over and above its gorgeous language seems to me one of the great love stories. But I didn’t pick it to make political points, any more than I picked Whylah Falls, unless one considers that experiencing emotional richness and a related linguistic vitality (as in other novels I like) is political.

My other picks? Pretty conventional—The Secret Agent, Portrait of the Artist, To the Lighthouse, The Garden Party, The Sun Also Rises, Good Morning, Midnight, Darkness at Noon, The Penal Colony. But what may be conventional to us (yawn!) may not be conventional to them, I mean if they haven’t read those works, and I was in fact touching a number of bases. I had also planned to include Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell and Marian Engel’s Bear, but there wasn’t time.

I did a hell of a lot of work for that class, in the way of providing preliminary hand-out material, time-saving plot clarifications, comments on style, lists of related works, visuals for the overhead projector, questions for thinking about. But it was almost all so that they could talk, and I had them move their chairs around so that the five-person presentation teams were sitting facing into a loose horseshoe, and I would guess that at least thirty-five to forty minutes in every 55-minute period were uninterrupted student-to-student talk.

V

My point? I guess I’m saying that what seemed to me the task was to get the students further and further into the works, and enable them to cope better with a variety of linguistic strategies in the works (and hence be better readers generally and maybe more likely to read a bit more). And get them to talk about what was there, and not to go off into loops of journalistic, pop-political generalities and argue about those (or listen silently while some student sounded off about them).

And the odd thing was that they didn’t go off into loops even when it would have been natural to do so. The Sun Also Rises cried out, I’d assumed, for observations about machismo (those bulls, those balls!), and antisemitism, but no, what they wanted to talk about (and believe me I was not steering things, they were free to go any which way) were the love affairs, Jake, Brett, the story.

Nor was I hearing feminist pieties about Mansfield, Woolf, and Rhys. And believe me, there were some very bright and articulate and independent-minded young women in that class, two or three of whom told me later, or told others who told me, how much they had enjoyed it.

VI

Should I have been introducing “all those big words that make us all so unhappy” (Stephen Dedalus)? Sermonizing about the Southern “situation” that Hurston herself (hence partly her shameful ostracism and neglect during her later years, including by Communist Blacks) didn’t talk about, contra the coarser Wright? Trotting out the comic-strip clichés about poor Virginia W. and the patriarchy (contra her own much richer exploring of her parents’ relationship with one another, and of her own complex indebtedness to both of them)? Moralizing against bullfights (which I would never dream of frequenting myself) and talking about animal rights?

In other words, move away from the things that I did and do know, namely the works themselves (as the result of a lot of preparatory work on them), and set up as a jack-of-all-trades purveyor of current clichés about things that I really didn’t know much about.

VII

For the same reason, when the freshmen “did” Whylah Falls and got into it so well that a number of them were able to write pretty good WF poems (including a sympathetic and in-character one by a girl about Saul, written, as she explained in her gloss, because she wanted to feel from the inside what it was like to be an abuser), I stayed away from the Black Nova Scotia history stuff that I didn’t know enough about, and that would have eaten up too much class time, unprofitably, had I tried fumbling around in it. Though of course the murder stayed in.

As you know, all it takes is one problematic question from a student to which one doesn’t have a good enough answer, followed up maybe by another student’s question or comment, and you’re no longer talking about the text, you’re off into pop sociology or pop history. Or else you become authoritarian and kill that line of enquiry.

And of set purpose (I guess you could call it my politics) I literally never, so far as I can recall, used the term “Black” during the several class hours on the book. And the students didn’t use the terms “black” and “white,” as I recall.

In that class, too I was using teams of five for the presentations and trying to maximize discussion. And it was people, individuals in their rich cultural identities and poetic languages, who were being talked about, Xavier, Shelley, Cora, so forth—and who of course were Africadian (Clarke’s admirable term), but were established (their pasts, their presents, their expectations) as individuals who were not merely individuals, and displaying a lovely passion and poetry that implicitly stood in contrast with the dreary granitic tradition of Nova Scotia “realism,” with its diminished expectations.

VIII

I will add that to the best of my recollection I never heard racist or sexist comments in any of my freshman classes over the years (well, apart from a cheerful, talkative, plump, curly haired guy who once tossed off some generality about what “chicks” felt, and got the instant gasp or hiss reaction that made him instantly do that semi-humorous raising of the hands protectively in front of the face. He was in fact a popular member of the class.) At that time the students were seated in a rough circle, again with the chairs moved, which helped. I mean, they could see one another’s faces.

Over the years the classes became increasingly variegated (they were granitic back in 1961 when I arrived) with Chinese-Canadian students, and Asian-Indian-Canadian students, and Lebanese-Canadian students, and African students, and the occasional Africadian student. One of them, first name Winston, was one of the two or three natural class leaders in his year, with some interesting tanglings, not racial, between him and a bright white chick.

Believe me, these classes were not a site of racial and sexual tensions and animosities. Nor did I ever, repeat ever, have racial or gender problems with any student.

IX

I say “believe me” because I’m aware of the current apparatus of accusation, intimidation, and de-individuating, principally Marxist in origin, with an admixture of Freudianism (you know, to deny something is the clearest evidence—ta-DAH! —of its existence), I am, obviously, a WASP paternalist unable to read signs effectively because of the blinkering effects of my own class upbringing, a contributor, willy-nilly, to systemic oppression, a beneficiary of racist imperialist capitalism who construes the status quo as the way things really are, and is incapable of entering into the experiences of persons oppressed and marginalized by the system, and suppresses creative and historically necessary conflict and consciousness-raising in the classroom.

Yes, well . . . .

But I do nevertheless believe that when I was in the classroom I was reasonably alert to tensions and how students were interacting.

And I think that for me to have deliberately introduced the rhetoric of group animosities and power-seeking would have worked against the dissolving of inappropriate categories; would in fact have contributed to the increase of group animosities. And to racialism.

Personally, too, when I observed the pressure in Faculty on behalf of speech codes, and the paucity of evidence offered for their necessity, it seemed to me that an inappropriate model from the States was being imposed, and that to some extent racism at the university was being manufactured, for quasi-Marxist purposes (faculty members, too, an oppressed proletariat, etc!) and that this was working against the peaceable interactions among students in my classes and, as far as one could tell from the variegated groups observable to the naked eye, outside it.

X

I think the primary task isn’t to “fight racism”, or “root it out,” or “meet it head on,” or any of those other dumb metaphors.

It’s to diminish ethnic animosities and harmful stereotypings where they exist. (Not all stereotypings are hurtful, as witness Orwell on comic postcards. Speaking as a Fraser, the jokes about Scotch stinginess were in part a tribute to the achievement-oriented Scottish canniness.)

And to help individuals to develop their potentials and do work that satisfies them. I myself can’t imagine not having had an academic career—and I wouldn’t have had one without one or two strokes of incredible good fortune. Believe me (again), I didn’t get to where I did because of any silver-spooning.

As always, in self-advancement (as one of the early writers in Clarke’s historical anthology of Black Nova Scotia writing Fire on the Water obliquely notes), it’s concentration, persistence, curiosity, and hard and not always enjoyable work that matters.

I’m not speaking of a dour Calvinistic plod, or a grim imposition of tasks and a moulding of “character.” I’m speaking of the kind of curiosity and growth and self-motivation that comes when one realizes that there are things that really do interest one, and problems that one can solve, and skills that one wants to acquire. And also that there are valid real-world expectations by others that one is going to have to meet if one wants to prosper. Professionalism at every level. And with it the self-respect that comes with doing things competently. (I myself was an appallingly bad high-school teacher during my two years in Israel after leaving college. I’m not being mock-modest.)

Among the effects of 9/11, it seems to me, is a renewed respect for competence and the rights and needs of clients, rather than conceiving of jobs as primarily ways of benefiting the employed. I’m not aware that there have been complaints because there were no women in those photos of exhausted N.Y. firefighters. And it appears to be felt now that if checking passengers and their baggage is desirable, it needs to be done well (and civilly).

But it was piquant hearing the head of the C.I.A. indignantly denying that the C.I.A. had been incompetent. I wish I’d written down his exact words. They were something to the effect that, no, no, the C.I.A. had been trying to do things, it had been thinking about them.

XI

I think that anything that works against the development of effective concentration is a disservice to the students.

I think that anything that causes students, particularly lower-income ones, to believe that such educational virtues aren’t necessary (or ones like honesty and reliability and competence in the workplace) is doing them a disservice, whether by leading them to believe that they are victims to whom things are owed, or by causing them to distrust teachers (and what they have to tell them) as cultural oppressors, or implying that such alleged virtues aren’t truly part of the cultural values of their own group, or making them believe that they won’t be able to get a job anyway because of, of course, racism.

In the States there’s evidently a destructive tendency among male ghetto kids to despise book-learning as unmanly, and to pick on, what’s the word, nerds? It used to be “swots” in England.

Obviously it’s related to the expressive “ghetto” vitality and gusto down there, manifesting itself over the years in all that seductive music, whether blues, or New Orleans, or rap, or hip-hop, a vitality that led in the Sixties to a privileging of that culture by well- bred young pinko-greys (e.g. Norman Mailer on “The White Negro”), seeing there what they felt they were being deprived of in their own lives. With a subsequent sentimental over-tolerance of behaviours that would be considered reprehensible were they themselves to engage in them. (The “war on drugs” has a lot to answer for.)

Jazz, at least up to bop, and the culture out of which it came, was one of the major sites in my own consciousness in high school and later. And still is. I can also understand the deep emotional Middle Eastern resistance to modernization, rationalization, and the related cultural bleachings.

XII

So obviously it’s a dialectic, since who does want to be bleached and lose energizing conviction?

But politically those Middle Eastern states are appalling.

And I don’t imagine one comes across complaints about a tradition of hedonism among Chinese males. And as a watcher of some thousand-plus Hong Kong movies, and an observer of couples on the street, I’m impressed by the obvious strength and self-confidence of Chinese women.

XIII

“Racism” these days seems to be at times what witches once were as a means of explanation. Whenever something undesired happens—the cow doesn’t calve, one’s marks are low, one doesn’t get or keep the job one wants, one isn’t promoted—it simply has to be the result of racial prejudice.

Which it may at times be, of course, but it’s the too easy invocation of the explanation that I’m speaking of. And the increasing weight given to “feelings.”

The Village Voice a year or two ago had a longish sympathetic piece about an African-American young woman, not all that long out of college, who was obviously well-established and upward bound in a good position at the N.Y. Times—the Times!—but just didn’t feel, you know, that her seniors were warm enough with her, and who had in consequence quit a job that lots of other young journalists would have given their eye teeth for. I read the article carefully, looking for evidence of mistreatment, and there wasn’t any. I thought she was simply a spoiled brat, with an exaggerated sense of personal entitlement.

XIV

I think, too, that it’s a mistake to essentialize “racism” so that it becomes a thing that’s in there in the body, like syphilis or AIDS, and is always the same, and that the racism-detectors (like the witch-seekers earlier) can hunt for, looking for tell-tale signs.

Though it serves a quasi-Marxist hunger for institutional power (so easy to point to an adversary in argument and say the one dreaded word, “racist” —as with “witch,” or “heretic” formerly), the term “racism” in fact covers a variety of behaviours and attitudes, an intermingling of the ethnic, the national, the cultural, the economic, the ethical, with skewings resulting at times from ignorance, at times from unawareness that one’s being insensitive or impolite, at times from over-generalizings from limited examples (one of the early Black writers in Fire on the Water complains about the indolent hedonism of some Africadians), at times from unpleasant personal encounters, at times from well-intentioned cultural theories (saving the poor benighted heathens), at times from truly vicious ones.

XV

The too-easy invocation of the “R” word makes social cooperation and profitable investigation harder.

I’m aware that part of the present terrible-seeming potency of the “N” word is the fear that it may pop out at any moment and disclose, irreparably, that that is how one is viewed oneself, or how individuals of high distinction and moral grandeur or simple decency are viewed by the lurking Yahoo within.

I can see how someone young might be disturbed by the disclosed intensity of hatred and contempt on the part of redneck Southerners—and lurking elsewhere for all they know—in movies like In the Heat of the Night and the one, Mississippi Burning, in which Gene Hackman goes after the Klan murderers of the freedom riders. It might, indeed, be that, rather than the word itself, that was doing the real bothering.

But personally I thought that the movie of In the Heat of the Night was an improving one, since you saw the nobility and strength of character of Tibbs with your own eyes (including an awareness of his courage in being and doing what he did) and also saw the odiousness of his redneck-trash adversaries.

And beyond that, you saw, too, that the categories were not immutable and that the Rod Steiger character could come to respect Tibbs as an individual because they were both looking in the same direction, a common task, with common expertise (or rather, Tibbs’ expertise superior) in the search for the truth about the killing.

XVI

Racist labelling—I mean the accusation of it, particularly the kind of us-against-them blanket indictment—can make joint enterprises harder.

Particularly since the “war” against racism, an ironic doppelganger to the “war” against drugs (ironical because of how disproportionately that war has damaged Afro-Americans) doesn’t require intelligence or sensitivity on the part of racism-detectors. And may in fact, like the “wars” against drugs and witches, be a growth industry providing careers or fields for a number of people who wouldn’t truly want the problem to go. Some people, anyway.

To adapt Lenin. Who?/How? (Who benefits? And how?)

Spectrums of motives, spectrums of temptations. By no means all the original Crusaders went East for ignoble reasons. Or the young Northerners marching south in the 1860’s, like that wonderful young officer in Glory having to deal, patiently and by force of character, with the obstructiveness of his seniors on his own side.

Diminishing something may be less glamorous than “fighting” it. But a good institutional pattern in recent years has been the successful use of means other than moralism—putting the paths where people walk, rather than endlessly cautioning people not to walk on the grass.

XVII

A general rule, it seems to me, is that sympathy flows and moral indignation is aroused rightly when one observes injustices being perpetrated on someone else whom one values and can identify with (I mean, injustices that one perceives as injustices) by a third party who isn’t coterminous with oneself.

People are capable of recognizing unfairnesses when they are presented clearly enough. The question, “How would you feel if this were done to you?” is, I take it, a major one in the socializing of the young, because enabling them to see resemblances, I mean really see them, that had eluded them before.

But it gets trickier when people are being asked to recognize an injustice to someone else in order that they will then, as individuals, convict themselves of sin, and not just of venial sins or errors but of major ones so great that they are immediately put in a position (reverse-N) of irreversible moral inferiority with their interlocutors or accusers.

“Racist!” “Sexist!” “Fascist!” So easy to say. And so risk-free, at least in conversation.

For what would the simplifying counter-accusation be? “Witch-hunter”? “Thought-policer”? “Commissar”?

XVIII

Self-protection and self-preservation (by which I don’t mean just rationalization) will kick in, especially when the intellectual underpinnings of the accusation consist of so complex a set of primary, secondary, and tertiary assumptions that it is impossible to argue one’s way into them and discuss things, ask questions, look for analogies and examples, and so forth, not least because the attempt to do so may itself be taken as evidence of the inner R.

As Nelly Dean says in Wuthering Heights, “Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run . . . ,” and after a point, being understandably unwilling to go on feeling guilty about something that they don’t really understand and are deemed powerless to alter, people are liable to say to hell with it and simply walk away. At least if they aren’t willing to have themselves put through “re-education,” in what will almost inevitably be a de haut en bas relationship, as distinct from a sharing of ideas and information between equals.

XIX

I believe that kids studying works of literature together in school in somewhat the fashion and spirit of my own classes are learning things of value to themselves—certain skills, ways of reading works, ways of discussing things where the “facts” aren’t simply known and quantifiable, an awareness that sometimes there may be no authorities to settle things and yet one isn’t wallowing in mere subjectivism—and also experiencing a humanizing bonding. I mean if the works are the right ones for them.

I also think that shoving in texts that don’t really work, but which are there because they’re considered good for the students, and provide occasions for sermonettes and the kind of would-be consciousness-raising that in fact annoys or bores a substantial number of students, including smart ones—that this is not a good idea, any more than it was when the works were by Milton or Pope or T.S. Eliot back in the Good Old Days in the early Sixties when (according to one of my mark books) standards were standards and virtually an entire section of mine got no end-of-year marks higher than a C.

XX

I also think that history should be taught as history, which is to say by people who have some competence in the handling of evidence and documents, and the acquisition of “facts”.

The history that one glimpses, and I do mean glimpses, in the first volume of Fire on the Water is a complicated one, where the persecution at one point was clearly for religious and not racial reasons, and where the treatment of the slaves, as distinct from the fact of servitude, isn’t discussed, and where the 1787 land grant in Tracadie worked out around 40 acres per family, and where Father Preston was widely admired for his witticism and enjoyed getting into debates with Governor Howe.

We are obviously a long way here from the horrors of the antebellum American South, and no intellectually respectable purpose is served by trying to equate the two societies, at least if it’s history that we’re talking about.

I am speaking here as a bright high-school student might wish to speak.

These are historical documents that require being interpreted and used as part of a fuller cultural investigation. They should not be taken as simply History itself and used to fuel a present moral indignation, I mean used in order to get present high-school students to feel guilty because of what was done in a vastly different society two centuries ago.

And theology should be treated as theology. If it’s felt that people need to learn more about Islam, it should be in a religious studies class and not as quasi-political apologetics and you-have-to-understands.

By the sound of it, we’re all going to become more conscious of Islam.

It would be a good thing to keep things as cool as possible inside the classroom.

But it shouldn’t be an artificial calm resulting (or sought) by the avoidance of real but “controversial” facts, such as about jihad.

In its original usage in the Stalinist years, “political correctness” meant, among other things, avoiding or denying facts that were not in accord with Russian policy at that point. It was politically incorrect to mention the appalling government-created Ukraine feminine.

XXI

So far as my own experiences go, understanding how things came to be the way they are can be a very good thing, provided it’s a real, which is to say humanly grounded, understanding.

I myself learned a lot from getting into the history of the English enclosure movement via my thesis-author George Sturt, especially in Change in the Village (1912), and the Hammonds’ great book The Village Labourer (1913). It totally shifted my pastoral-and-class-coloured view of English rural life as I had experienced it as a kid in the Wiltshire village where my grandparents lived.

Sturt was writing in part to explain the alleged and sometimes real defects of “character” attributed so lightly to the rural labouring classes, as compared to the Kiplingesque service-middle-classes and their trained soldiery, and showed how the old rural civilization had been destroyed so fully that retrieving it intellectually had been a complex act of cultural archaeology.

But perceiving such things has to be a real appropriation, not a mere parroting of formulae passed on by teachers. And I do think that when students are asked to study something, it has to be because it’s worth studying for its own sake, and isn’t there just as an act of propaganda. The history of Nova Scotia is presumably worth studying for its own sake, and what happened with and to Africadians and Native Peoples is part of that history.

Again, I’m not speaking of an arid assimilation of supposedly neutral and sanitized “facts.” History is in part a story of hopes, expectations, ideals, moral cowardice or indifference, failures, sometimes successes, sometimes heroism. But again, the point shouldn’t be the kind of accusation I’ve talked about.

XXII

The article on Africville in Fire on the Water is marvelous, and makes me feel odd.

Yes, I had known for a fair while, in a general way, that the withholding of services from Africville and its eventual obliteration had been shameful, feelings related to my seeing those arid areas of grassland up there now.

But Africville, in the sense I was given of it when we got here in 1961, was a slummy area, a sort of shanty town, where it would be risky for an outsider to venture. Those were the days when I carried a Leica, and I took a few pictures in the Gottingen Street area, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of venturing into Africville, nor did I know anyone who had any contacts there.

And then it went, just as the commons and the non-monetary economy that they helped sustain went in the English villages with the Enclosures. And I don’t think I was even aware of its going, though admittedly 1969–70 was when my wife and I were off on our first sabbatical.

So it’s strange and all the more saddening now to read of that vibrant community, so much more interesting than the “white” Halifax that we arrived in in 1961, just as Whylah Falls is more interesting than the dreary norm of depressive Canadian “realism.” And its destruction was part of the general moral ugliness of 1960’s bottom-line “rational” city planning that Jane Jacobs and others were speaking out against, and which led me to write occasional letters to the paper on the subject.

Africville indeed belongs in a larger context, and the wounds to its community, both physical and spiritual, were important for us all,

XXIII

Not everything has to be literally true, of course.

It has amused me to realize, belatedly, that whereas on my father’s side I am one-thirty-second part Scottish (as he himself would occasionally point out), I am on my mother’s side half Cornish. But the Cornishness was never mentioned while I was a kid, whereas I was given to understand by an aunt or two that I was virtually a bonnie wee Scots lad (I even had a little kilt at one point), and in fact I got pretty sentimental about the hundred pipers and a’, and a’, and the flowers of the forest, and Bruce, and Wallace, and Bonnie Prince Charlie. And I really do still thrill to the sound of the pipes.

A tradition of heroic rebels. A chivalric tradition. A tradition of small units—of clans. (I have no idea what a Cornish tradition would be.)

So I think of that, and of the partial shaping of my identity, when I get a bit sniffy about the myth-making in Alec Haley’s Roots. The Cornish aren’t particularly nice people, or so I gather (D.H. Lawrence hated them), and appear to have no romantic history at all, apart from wrecking ships for profit. I couldn’t name a single Cornishman of distinction apart from the historian A.L. Rowse.

But positive myths are better than negative ones.

And I think no good purpose would have been served at my quite nice prep school the year before the War had there been a boy called Campbell there and some meddling schoolmaster had made a point, however jocularly, of how the two of us ought to hate one another because the Campbells had been on the evil British side in the Massacre of Glencoe, whereas the last Scot to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason was the head of Clan Fraser.

XXIV

A sense of tragedy, as Yeats saw, is stronger than a feeling of pity. With tragedy, the loss we feel at times, the loss of something strong and good and growing, is in part a sense of our own loss, a defeat of potentials to which we too aspire.

I was excited when in one of those admirable Time-Life volumes of history, the volume about Africa, I came upon the information about those great, vanished African kingdoms. And I made a point of introducing the information in my “teaching” of Heart of Darkness (with its anticipations of the Nazi darkness). I simply hadn’t known. Any more than most of us know, if indeed it’s knowledge and not just supposition, about the small “primitive” Indian communities in the Americas being in fact the remnants of a larger structure of intertwining civilizations.

Holocausts need to be known about, as reminders of what can happen, with the imperative to figure out how they happened.

When I “did” Heart of Darkness year after year, I was teaching a holocaust classic. And I was energized when I read E.D. Morrell’s Red Rubber, with its infuriating, and still relevant, demonstration of the gulf between the bland, benign, official Belgian rhetoric (well, King Leopold’s) and the appalling actualities, plus the energy and persistence required by people trying to break through the carapace of that rhetoric. My own interest in the enclosure movement, not that it was a holocaust, but it was culturally devastating and lives were lost, was in part, like the authors’ own, an interest in the still-present mechanisms, modes of thought, etc, with respect to class relations and social organizing.

But people prefer identifying with, and so feeling the experiences of, more or less high-energy figures and groups. The Village Labourer , like da Cunha’s Brazilian Revolt in the Backlands, and Traven’s Mexican series culminating in General from the Jungle, is consciously and movingly epic/tragic in some ways, without any grandiosity.

And what makes us go on examining holocausts (using that term loosely) isn’t simply the horrors. The horrors of Auschwitz, the Middle Passage, King Leopold’s Congo, and so forth can be encapsulated relatively briefly. What keeps historians working on them is trying to figure out the how of it, the total dynamics, the ways in which the horrors connect up with the ordinary doings, and imperceptivities, and compromises, and image-makings, and career-followings of normal life. With our own professional lives. And choices that we may have to make. There were very few moral heroes at my university, so far as my own observation went, in the face of PC power-plays.

The Kenneth Branagh movie Conspiracy, the fictional presentation of the infamous Wannsee conference where the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed, was brilliant in that regard.

XXV

Positive energies. Movies like Glory, Dead Presidents, Jacky Brown, The Wood. Not that hideously embarrassing movie with Warren Beatty, Bulworth.

I myself when young was energized in complex ways by A Portrait of the Artist and Sons and Lovers, though neither an Irish Catholic nor a Midlands coal-miner’s son myself, any more than I’ve been a British establishment woman (Virginia Woolf), or a Russian Old Bolshevik (Darkness at Noon), or lots of other things.

I know, though, that there are some cultural works, probably lots of them, that it would require a lot of work for me to enter into meaningfully, such as Japanese haiku or Native People’s folk (as distinct from “educated”) poetry. And without that work, a teacher who makes a point about being multicultural is likely to be overlaying everything with a limited repertoire of clichés and getting the same back from the students. I can recall a friend (a poet himself) being mordantly funny, and somewhat scandalized, about a freshman class like that that he’d taken over halfway through the year.

There’s also the line these days that really only a member of a cultural group can truly understand a work from that group. A logical corollary of which would be that a Black teacher of Black literature would be unqualified to teach anything else.

XXVI

What novels should the kids really be reading in the Nova Scotia schools? I’ve no idea. I suppose it might depend partly on which schools one was talking about and the degree of freedom permitted to teachers. Personally I did better with my freshmen after we were all allowed to go our individual ways in our sections. One does best when teaching works that one really likes.

It would be a good thing, though, if the N word, which after all is used in at least one of the Fire on the Water pieces, and by the Black artist James Shirley in the title of one of his Nova Scotia monotypes, could be demystified for kids as part of a more general look at language, multiple meanings, etymologies, and connotations.

What makes it particularly odd, I take it, is that (a) in contrast to words like spick, dago, kike, yid, heeb, chink, wop, frog, limey, whitey, honky, it is used within a linguistic group, and isn’t merely applied pejoratively from outside, (b) it has had some kind of descriptive function within the group, and (c) it is hard to get along fictionally without it, whereas you don’t need “kike” or “heeb” to deal fictionally with Dachau and the Kristalnacht. A Brownshirt simply saying Jude (“Jew”) could get all the venom into it that he needed.

XXVII

I would also think that it would be a good thing if kids could be assisted outside the classroom (what are support groups for?) to respond self-affirmingly to insults to themselves (or simply insensitivities), rather than have their sensitivities and vulnerabilities increased because it may be in the political interests of others to have wounded victims to point to.

Some insults, some condescensions, really are the result of ignorance, or of understandable (if erroneous) suspicions, rather than indicators of a deep inner hostility or contempt in that particular “sinning” individual.

Some of them occur during the process of fumbling forward in a good discussion of a text (or maybe anything else), where one is trying to formulate something as one goes along, rather than getting it all cut-and-dried in one’s head and then popping it out. The kind of fumbling that weaker students—and not just them alone—may need to engage in and should be encouraged in. In contrast to all the TV think-shows (and an academic fat-cat jerk like Stanley Fish), we don’t all come into the arena with our “positions” already fixed and seek to impose them on others.

XXVIII

There’s also the question of majority rights, and of the authority of “feelings.”

The mere strength of someone’s feelings (so vague a word), someone’s sense of injury, someone’s indignation, doesn’t necessarily carry moral authority, and certainly not the prohibitory kind, as in, “Since I feel this, you may not do that.” If it did, the South would still be segregated, given the strength of segregationist Southern feeling or family of feelings, since again there was a spectrum. Always in lawmaking and rule-making there is, or ought to be, the implicit notion of what it is reasonable to feel. It was not reasonable, as happened somewhere or other, to be offended by the word “niggardly” once its etymology was explained. Any more than by a number of words with multiple meanings (“gay” among them).

When it comes to the activities of a group (a class, an association) there seems at times to be the feeling that some kind of opening into the monstrous, the undiscussible, occurs whenever someone “feels” strongly about something, I mean feels upset. Or might feel strongly.

Someone is sobbing her heart out in the privacy of her room? What image comes to mind? What were the actualities? Personally I’m irritated by talk about “feelings” when invoked politically (as I heard it done at the university). How many people, who were they, how did their feelings become known, what had they said, to whom had they said it? One can say that one was upset without being, behaviourally, upset. A kind of fiction, not necessarily a lie. Upset because one “knows” that that’s the appropriate reaction.

“Perceptions” are important, sometimes vastly so. My America and the Patterns of Chivalry talks a lot about perceptions. But perceptions have to be open to truth tests, otherwise we simply have a culture of competing solipsisms.

XXIX

But I was disturbed when, having picked The Sun Also Rises for some class, maybe a twentieth-century fiction one (not the great one), I reread it and realized that there were a couple of Jewish students in the class.

I forget what I said. I know I said something. I had to. Bill’s remarks were antisemitic. Like those infamous lines of Eliot’s. And Pound’s. But if a delegation from the university’s Jewish students organization (if there was one) had visited me and told me I shouldn’t teach the book, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have given it up. (Are there anti-Semitic slurs in Afro-American fiction?)

I also, I recall, very definitely didn’t want to put things in such a way that the rest of the class were suddenly aware that, yes, two of their fellow students were Jewish—and those two students were aware of the rest of the class’s awareness. Had I done so, I would have been contributing to racialist consciousness.

During my final two years, having at last realized the foolishness of trying to teach Heart of Darkness towards the end of the academic year when all the science students were thinking of the impending finals, I switched to that odd Canadian novel The White Motel with its overlapping Borgesian narratives and a puzzle ending. A great choice, as it turned out, but there was some potentially offensive stuff in it, so I warned all the students in advance in writing, and said that any of them who didn’t want to venture into it could read an alternative text (which I named) on their own.

No-one took that option. No-one objected when they read how a character cut up a child and implanted parts of it inside the bodies of four people.

XXX

Once the door is opened in a classroom through which ideological irrelevancies can swarm or sidle, I mean matters that a bright student could bring up, or simply someone who was watching TV the night before, well, voilà—

We’re likely to see more intensification of feeling here if there’s more terrorism, or the threat of it, that affects us. Particularly if we hear more about the passions and enmities of Islam.

And even if things don’t get that bad in the classroom, there is more likely to be the kind of class discussion in which the answer to the question of why some character didn’t return his sister’s call is, “Oh, men are like that,” rather than “Well, he probably felt that if he did so, he’d have had to tell her about Uncle Harry’s heart-attack, mightn’t he? I mean, look at what he says to Cousin Margaret at the bowling alley. ” In other words, a movement out of the text into pre-set generalities, instead of deeper into it.

In “Playing for Real; Discourse and Authority,” I go further into questions of communication and dialogue.

XXXI

I think that politicizing literary classes is a witches’ brew, and I know I was wise to stay the hell away from it all in my classes, since I couldn’t have coped with it myself. Partly I wouldn’t be quick enough on my feet if inconvenient doors were opened. But also there’s the question of accessible knowledge.

I myself had to go off and do homework in Irving Howe’s The World of Our Fathers when a student in the fiction class made some comment about rich Jewish immigrants into America in the early 1900s. I found that it wasn’t money they brought but skills, the result of a culture of learning and diligent application, application like that of the Chinese now.

I would say that it’s very unfair to expect the general run of high-school teachers to shoot such rapids or navigate such minefields. Unfair to them and to the kids. Who are quite capable of spotting insincerity and faking in a teacher who’s either doing things because compelled to or because of an unwarranted missionary belief in his/her own competence.

And it’s all the worse if at any point a student (or teacher) can cut off, or let’s say greatly inhibit, discussion by the ad hominem accusation. “Racist.”

A classroom, particularly a literary one, should be a sanctuary where those confusions and negatings and power-seekings do not obtain. There can still be lots of energy and enthusiasm there—but creatively.

A being there together. Which will indirectly contribute to communicatings outside it.

Learning how to read, how to cope with language, how to talk. I speak as someone who would have been tongue-tied in groups as an undergraduate.

Best regards,

John

PS. The vital thing is that discussion and debate at every level be ad rem, about the matters under discussion and the points being made, not ad hominem. Which is to say, being free to say that an assertion is stupid, but not that the person making it is.

We live in our interactions, our interfacings, whether at the check-out counter in the Super Store or over-the-phone gossiping, or coping with a child’s tantrum (lucky me, being spared that experience), or on a university planning committee.

To me, at any rate, it’s irrelevant in those relatings to be enquiring or wondering or trying to ascertain what the other person “really” is. Politeness is politeness, surliness surliness, competence competence.

I can recall at least one university committee where I’m sure two or three of us would have detested the other’s politics had we gotten into politics. But we didn’t. We were concerned with planning the new Faculty of Arts and Social Science, and maximizing good, workable, democratic self-government, and we worked comfortably together and did a good job.

PPS. G.K. Chesterton observed in Heretics that “We give to the European, whose complexion is a sort of pink drab, the horrible title of a ‘white man’—a picture more blood-curdling than any spectre in Poe.”

Whence schoolmaster Fielding’s non-pukka remark at the club in Forster’s Passage to India “to the effect that the so-called white races are really pinko-grey.”

“Take up the pinko-grey man’s burden” wouldn’t have had the same ring, would it?

© John Fraser

2002/abridged 2007

Email

Return to top