Litany Against Fear

Last week, in a monumental coup against the Common Reading Exam List, I finished not one but two books.  You’ve already heard what I have to say about Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  Book number two was the vastly different Mrs. Dalloway.

This may make me a horrible human being (and moreover a horrible woman literati), but I had never before read anything by Virginia Woolf.  In fact, the only reason I have a passing acquaintance with her is due to my close acquaintanceship with a Woolf scholar whom I met during my sojourn in Dublin.  She loved Virginia Woolf.  She ate Virginia Woolf for breakfast, lunch, comps and dinner.  I have always respected said friend, so I knew there must be something to dear Ginny… just not anything that I had ever chosen to delve for before.  It was a classic case of “Meh, I’ll read it later”.

When “later” finally caught up to me and I had finished succumbing to Woolf’s siren song, I must say I am left aswirl with half-formed notions which even now as I try to articulate them elude my grasp.  Nebulous thoughts and concepts, amorphous ideas, nothing concrete or solid.

I attribute this partially to the style of Woolf’s writing.  The best impression I have of Mrs. Dalloway’s writing can be summarized by the infamous first words of Finnegan’s Wake, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs”.  Woolf’s writing flows, perhaps not as freely as Joyce’s notoriously contemptuous bane of English majors everywhere, but still meandering itself down the progression of human thought.  Since the events of Mrs. Dalloway happen entirely inside the characters’ heads, one way or another, they are written to reflect this.  This freely flowing thoughtful writing, rather than capturing and holding my attention, encouraged it to wander as well.  There were several re-readings involved in the completion of this book.

I enjoyed it.  Immensely.  Let me start by saying that.  But that being said, I’m left with the age-old adage.  You know, the thing that academics are never supposed to say.  Those baneful words that expose one’s intellectual underbelly to the hungry dogs of snobbish competition and arrogance. 

I don’t get it.

No really, I don’t get it.  Why is this book a classic?  Why is it on my reading list?  What was I supposed to take from this book over anything else that Woolf wrote (or really anything else written in the history of literature)?  Like I have already said, it was a delightful little read, but if you asked me to write a paper on it I feel as though I have nothing new or interesting to add to the Burkean Parlor of intellectual thought surrounding this book.

So I did what any self-respecting scholar would do in my situation: I googled it.  I read the wikipedia article.  I even stooped so low as to peruse the cliff notes in hopes that a succinct summary of what I had read would help me to see some gem of scholarly thought that I had previously missed.

And I am just as stumped as I was twenty minutes ago.  I see the major themes; Woolf’s points about mental illness and its treatment, feminism and homosexuality; but I really (still) have nothing to say about them in relation to this book that wasn’t said in aforementioned wikipedia article.

So naturally what comes to my mind now is a question about scholarship in general.  I am certain that, at some point in their scholarly careers, everyone has felt this way about something.  But articulating that in any form is so strictly taboo that most intellects would rather pretend they have something to say than admit that they would much prefer to listen to other peoples’ incites.  My question is this: is there one work of literature, some book somewhere, a classic of the English language, that everyone feels this way about but is too embarrassed to admit?

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why is the playground of intellectual thinking so riddled with bullies that any sign of weakness makes one ready to tear apart one’s fellows rather than help to mend their brokenness?  Are we all so afraid that our brains don’t measure up to whatever standard we have silently communally agreed upon that human weakness makes us dithering idiots rather than human?  Yes, our job as scholars is to challenge each other in pursuit of some greater understanding, but does that mean we have to step on heads to advance our own careers?

Forgive me for being pessimistic, and perhaps this is all a reaction to my own feelings as an outsider in any English department.  I’m an actor/scholar.  That’s who I am, that’s what I’m trained to do.  I feel lucky to be considered a peer here in my English program because frankly I don’t consider myself one.  My knowledge of classics, theory and literature in general pales in comparison to most of my fellows.  However, I do know several peripheral areas of the field very very well.  That knowledge has served me in more ways than I can tell, but most importantly has given me the ability to make my way through English literature classes as an outsider welcomed into the inner ring.  As I look around me, I see friends, I see intellectual equals, but I do not see peers.  Our fields, though similar, diverge at several important junctures.  This divergence allows me to walk with my classmates along their paths for a time, but will inevitably send us to opposite ends of a great body of intellectual knowledge.

So as an inside outsider, let me say this: the fear of being wrong in a Graduate classroom is so stifling that it cuts off conversation before anyone has a chance to speak.  This shared fear is thus the mind-killer and we would all do well to recite Frank Herbert’s infamous passage to ourselves a few times before class.  Maybe then we could dispense with the trappings and posing of intellect and get to what really matters.

The More you Know...

Today, friends, I take a much-needed break from rambling incessantly about teenaged vampires. This may be because my shame finally caught up with me, but I will choose instead to lend it to the fact that I have succeeded in diving back into the Common Reading Exam List.

This past weekend, I got through the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I will admit first and foremost that I don’t have a great deal to say about this book. To me, it is a landmark piece about a time in history that is now not much more than painful memories and curling yellowed paper. Slavery was horrendous, of that there is no doubt. This book must have gone a long way towards proving that to individuals of the time and perhaps even individuals of a generation or two after the time. However, to me, modern liberal-minded girl that I am, it just is. I don’t feel more intellectually enlightened having read it (though I ate through it like it was a pound of chocolates… except without that bloated guilty feeling afterwards).

I suppose I should at least try to say something scholarly and insightful about it despite my current difficulty with thinking DEEP THOUGHTS. A few things did strike me. The first of which being that Douglass’ most salient simile for slavery was to piracy; the hard-won fruits of an honest man’s labor are then heartlessly and cruelly taken from him so that the thief may prosper. The pirate image stuck with me and has left me really pondering it. Doubtlessly, this simile is a romantic notion, but perhaps that judgment is simply my modern mind projecting anachronisms onto a dated piece. Still, I can’t help but imagine that Douglass was a man to whom pirates were all but myth. What I mean by this is that Douglass would never have met a pirate, even if they were perhaps more common in his world than in ours. To him, pirates (though very much real), were fictional characters and figures in stories told by his fellows rather than day-to-day realities.

Douglass was a highly trained caulker and worked on shipyards for many years, both before and after his emancipation. This nautical-centric life he led may also lend insight as to the curious choice in analogies. Perhaps putting things in terms of the sea came more naturally to him as this was how he lived his life. Perhaps the shipmen around him were so full of such analogies and stories as to pepper his speech and mind with images of the ocean. Perhaps this notion of the formation and source of Douglass’ choice in imagery is as romantic as the imagery itself.

A second thing which was prevalent to me throughout the narrative was the dichotomy between men and beasts. A “good slave” is essentially a man turned into a beast; a savage, someone whose sole focus is work, someone who has been stripped of any higher notion of hope for his life. Most importantly lacking from these beast-men is education. In a curious and fortuitous amalgamation of circumstances and ingenuity, Douglass was able to learn to read and write while still a slave. This knowledge, one comes to understand, is what drove him forward in his pursuit of freedom. With it, he could not ignore what was around him: that he was a man and thereby should be subject to the same freedoms as any other man. After all, he was capable of higher reasoning. Clearly there was no difference between him and the white street urchins so pivotal to his ersatz education. Despite this, Douglass himself admits several times that he wished he could return to ignorance. Once enlightened, there was no way for him to forget these lessons and thereby no way for him to be satisfied until he had attained absolute freedom.

“Knowledge is power”, certainly, and to me Douglass’ realization stands as a powerful statement about the importance of higher education. While something as simple as literacy could empower Douglass to understand his own innate worth as a human being, in modern times an individual must stretch further to find this empowerment. When my parents graduated from college, they could begin careers with merely undergraduate degrees. The fact that they chose not to speaks towards the values of my family, but that is besides the point. As the job market becomes increasingly competitive, education as a whole becomes devalued. In these times, it is well near impossible to get a high-paying career-type job without a Graduate Degree. Certain fields do bend and/or break this rule, and there will always be exceptions for extraordinary talent, but as a general rule getting one’s foot in the door increases with ease in direct proportion to the number of degrees one can list at the top of one’s resume.

While higher education is certainly vital for job-hunting, it is equally vital to the improvement of the human spirit. In school, we do not simply learn about books and formulas, we are also working towards the ultimate goal of expanding (and growing into) our potential as human beings. If literacy could unlock this for Douglass, think of the compounded factor of less fundamental knowledge on the human psyche. We learn about the world and we learn about ourselves. As the world devalues our education as it stands, we must counter with greater degrees of education to expand our worth and potential.

….as I read through this it sounds like a public service announcement. Coming from someone who does teach college and hopes to continue doing so in the future, it also sounds like a desperate plea to keep myself in a job. While I can’t deny the validity of either of these thoughts, I will also ask you to consider more deeply the value of your own education. What did college teach you? Okay, fine, what did it actually teach you? I can nearly guarantee that what you really learned had little to do with what the piece of paper on your wall tells you that you learned.