“Do we get any fookin’ say in anything? At all?”
“The Faculty Association encourages the tenured staff to consult us informally.”
“And do they?”
“Going home on the subway sometimes.”
“So when will the politicking start?”
“We seem to have an emergency, so my guess is right away.”
At eleven I was in the classroom, teaching the D.H.Lawrence story “You Touched Me” to an assortment of second year students. I long ago discarded Lawrence’s novels as fevered, over-written, and too long, but someone put his short story collection, England, My England, on the course and I had learned through these stories that I was completely wrong. Having failed to hear what Lawrence was banging on about in the novels, even in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I had assumed that the fault was his. But these stories blew my mind, took the top off my head, knocked me out, and left me gasping. The students liked them, too, or they seemed to.
The thing is, I’ve boiled the teaching of literature down to a single question: “Have you noticed this?” That’s all. I chat for a bit, of course, on related matters like what Lawrence thought of Freud and vice versa, but it all leads to the point when I ask the question. I’m talking about allegory, of course, which I’ve come to believe is what all teaching of all literature is about. In the case of “You Touched Me,” what I have to offer second year students is that the story is really the Sleeping Beauty fable, except that it is the hero who wakes up when touched. There’s even the high hedge around the house/palace. That, plus the orgy at the end, has students generally agreeing that it is the best of a very fine collection. They like “Tickets, Please” too, but “You Touched Me” is a revelation.
I mention this, not by way of a digression, but because much of the in-fighting in English departments these days is about literary theory. I have no theory; that is, I do not think talking about books in a particular way is more valid than talking about them in some other way, as long as you are talking about the books and not yourself. But without the allegory to look for, I’m soon reduced to reading aloud. And yet I must get this straight: I know that Dickens said that the function of allegory is to make your head ache, and I don’t think the allegorical approach is better than any other approach. It is just the one I find most interesting and the most, well, fun. It’s the one that can make for lively classroom discussion. Successful teaching of literature consists of keeping the students intrigued by a work long enough that they will go away from the course remembering the words Shakespeare used.
How you do it doesn’t matter.
chapter seven
After the class I scuttled back to get another look at Masaka. She was sitting behind her table, reading the index of our first year poetry anthology, choosing and ticking off her choices.
“How did it go?” I asked. It was an unfocussed remark, no more than a “hello” really, and she let me know it.
“How did what go?”
I started to stumble immediately. “The class. It was your first, wasn’t it?”
“Here, yes, but I’ve taught before.”
“How did you find them?”
“Who?”
“The students. Our students.”
“They’re like students,” she said, with a quarter of a smile.
“Sorry. I’m just making conversation.” In a minute, though, I would get irritated. I was just making conversation, just to be agreeable, so why was she doing the inscrutable bit?
But now she increased the smile to half-size. “I thought you might be going to offer me some advice,” she said. “Everyone else has, except Ginger. Everyone else wants to explain why Hambleton students are unique. I’d rather find out for myself.”
“What did you do with them?”
“Who?”
“The students. The class you just taught.”
“I just taught them.”
“What?”
“Poetry.”
“What am I doing wrong now?”
Now the smile was up to three-quarters. It was slowly filling her face like the blue bit at the bottom of the screen that tells you the computer is loading. I waited, and the blue bit reached the end and the face appeared, smiling on the imaginary desktop I was watching. “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m waiting to find out what you are up to.”
Now I had her. “In what way?” I asked.
“In all the usual ways.”
“I’m a happily unmarried man, if that’s one of the things we are talking about,” I said. It was still only eleven in the morning.
“That’s one of the things we’re talking about. Not the most important.”
“Tell me some of the others.” This was weird but engrossing. I had known her, after all, for a total of fifteen minutes, and here we were talking as if after an evening of exploration.
“I’ll be simple,” she said. “Our conversation has consisted entirely of you trying to take me over.”
“Me? You? I told you, I’m a happily unmarried man.”
“Indeed you are, almost an epigram, aren’t you, so I must have meant something else, mustn’t I? Think about what you have asked me since you came back to the office.”
“I’ve just been making conversation, making you feel at home. I don’t remember all the words I used.”
“You’ve been patronizing me. Would you have asked a forty-year-old male the same questions?’
Just what Ginger had said. Had they been talking?
“Let me think,” I began.
To give her credit, she waited while I did.
“First,” I said “I’m thirty-five, though I’ve had a hard life. Second, I think you jumped the gun. As a matter of fact I might have asked an exact male contemporary the same questions out of a spirit of collegiality, a desire to be agreeable to the new man, and a curiosity about how his past experiences had prepared him for his first class at Hambleton, and how our students differed if at all from these experiences. So you might have been totally and utterly wrong.
“However,” I held up my hand to stem protest although she hadn’t said a word or moved a face muscle to dislodge the set of her smile, “Although you might have been wrong, in fact, you weren’t. What I first saw in you this morning was a tyro, someone who might not have taught anywhere before, so my questions certainly flowed out of a patronizing desire to offer warmth and comfort to my new little young female colleague in case the rough engineering students had bruised her.
“Second I saw a Japanese person who I was surprised to hear speak my language so well and I was curious to know if her exotic foreign looks juxtaposed with her obvious command of idiom created a special dynamic in the classroom. Thus on top of patronizing, chauvinistic paternalism, we have to add ethnic stereotyping, and even racism, which, though benevolent—many of my acquaintances are Japanese—is certainly not neutral.”
She opened her lips for the first time since I had started my speech. “And