Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

H. R. SWARDSON

As PRELIMINARY to my discussion of pleasure I would like to picture for you a professor who has lost pleasure in everything. He is a white European male, nearly dead. All that once kept up his spirits is gone. No more canon, no more truth, no more objectivity, no more touchstones, no more anchors to windward in Great Books or Western Civ, no more looking in the back of the C. S. Lewis book for human­ity's reference points. There is no way for him to distin­guish the best that has been known and said in the world from the worst. In short, he has discovered that he can­not refute relativism, whether it comes from David Hume or Barbara Herrnstein Smith. He is in Bertrand Russell's shoes, but he is worse off than Russell. Russell at least felt some pain ("I cannot see how to refute the argu­ments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it"). This fellow, living longer after virtue, feels nothing, not even satisfaction in a moral sensibility that can be pained. Even the comfort of solidarity with liberal relativists like Richard Rorty is denied him. He is, or was, a conservative.

So there he sits, a foundationalist who has lost his foundation, another victim of philosophic melancholy, brooding on the tombstone of his illusions. Let us leave him there, this Eeyore, while we return to the normal world where, as you might have guessed, I am cleverly going to show how he might be returned to happiness. So here we are, at an English teachers' convention, brought together by common interest in the announced topic, Emphasizing Pleasure. We are already better off than my defeated foundationalist. We know that "plea­sure" is in the same boat with "good" and "value" and that it probably got in first, with the classic de gustibus non est disputandum, but we still think interesting things can be said about it. Pleasure comes in such varieties and is so revealing of personality that we, even if we are not psychiatrists and counselors, enjoy talking about mani­festations of it. "Oh, that's an interesting perversion." Pleasure is life, and interest in pleasure is interest in life. Even people who show no interest in pleasure are, for that very aberration, interesting to us.

I may be wrong but I see some of that latter interest in the choice of our topic. Do we have among us in our disci­

pline people who have been deemphasizing or neglecting pleasure? Are they the ones called postmodernists? Do we think they have to be brought back to life and reformed?

If we do think that, we are forgetting an undeniable truth about pleasure, taken in its largest sense, the truth leading to the Socratic paradox: pleasure can never be deemphasized or neglected. We always seek the greater pleasure or the lesser pain. Whatever we are doing must be a greater pleasure than the other things we might be doing; otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. So none of us gathered here can say that postmodernists are neglecting pleasure. We can only say that postmodernists are enjoy­ing, or emphasizing, pleasures different from the ones others are emphasizing. Certainly that's all anybody can safely say about anybody else's pleasures, that they are different. And anybody who has any interest in life will find the postmodernist differences interesting and a plea­sure to discuss.

Well, nearly anybody. We have over there that defeated foundationalist, who, now that he has been burned by relativists ("I'm sorry, I simply find X a pleasure"), no longer discusses any statements of pleasure. But let me take him, on the wings of your imagination, through a thought experiment. I am going to transport him to England and take him punting, an activity he knows well but never cared for. He will not know I am going to test him. He will think I am on this quiet university river in order to enjoy a traditional English pleasure. "Oh, I've so looked forward to the pleasure of punting," I say, as he settles in the bow. He, as usual, looks dead. We drift. I take the pole and put it over the stern of the punt. I move it back and forth in the water, thwartwise. We still drift. He watches me with his dead eyes. I waggle the pole more vigorously. We're not getting anyplace. "This is fun," I say. He says nothing. I move the pole quite energetically, trying to make a figure-eight motion, though I'm having difficulty because there is nothing on

The author is Professor of English at Ohio University, Athens. A version of this paper was presented at the 1990 NCTE convention in Atlanta.

ADE BULLETIN, NO. 100, WINTER 1991

16 • Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

the transom to hold the pole. I perspire, but smile. And, keeping my eyes on him, I continue to pursue the plea­sure of punting in more and more inefficient, miscon­ceived ways.

Now my prediction, based on my knowledge of Eey-ore, is that sooner or later his eyes are going to light up. And he, as the pressure builds in him, will at some point engage me in conversation designed to be helpful. It might begin with "Do you Americans go punting much?" But, if I have tried his patience long enough, it might begin with "For God's sake, Swardson, push on the bottom! You are not punting, you are sculling. You can't scull with a punting pole. A punt is not made for that. Look, here's how you get someplace in a punt." And, snatching the pole from me, he will demonstrate how to get someplace in the proper way, the way that lets me enjoy the river and the foliage without working up a sweat. And I think that, after he has relieved his feelings, he will not be able to stay out of a discussion of pleasure. If I say, "I'm sorry, I simply found what I was doing a pleasure," he will be moved to point out that I didn't know what I was doing, or saying. I had said that it was the pleasure of punting I was after, not the pleasure of sculling, or, more accurately, pole waggling. The rest of our discussion will be a short course in keeping things straight, as his demonstration with the pole was a short course in doing things right. And when our discussion is completed, and maybe while it's going on, I will see him feeling pleasure.

But what kind of pleasure can it be? It cannot be plea­sure in the activity itself, a realizing of its value. He could never see what the fun was in punting. And I had put him into a state of complete axiological apathy. It can only, I think, be the pleasure of helping. Here, in a thought experiment, we see this kind of pleasure in its pure form, but I think it is always a potentiality in a teacher. I also think it can be separated, conceptually, from the other main pleasure in teaching, pleasure in inspiring students, instilling values in them—what might be called axiologi­cal pleasure.

Indeed, our conception of the pleasure of helping is aided if we can picture a teacher who feels only this plea­sure, a teacher who is singlemindedly utilitarian, getting satisfaction only from helping students get what they go for, showing them the means to the ends determined by their own values. This will be a teacher exclusively rely­ing on, dedicated to, believing in what Aristotle called practical reason, "reasoning to an action." Reason to this teacher will be what it still was to David Hume, the power that puts means to ends. It is the power that makes helpers of teachers and gives them jobs.

Our utilitarian teacher shows us why people with this outlook look pained and bored when they hear subjec­

tive statements ("I simply find X a pleasure") without any indication of action toward an end. Their reason cannot go to work after such statements, which, as Humeans, they are bound to regard as expressions of the passions, something reason cannot even argue with. So they lapse into apathy and sleep. Only when they hear statements that they can test, argue with, correct, improve, or act on will they wake up and start analyzing and teaching.

Of course in real life nobody is going to be a pure util­itarian teacher. Real teachers are going to consult a set of values before they teach anybody to do harmful or stupid things. Otherwise they'd be showing terrorists how to dynamite and children how to take marijuana. Still, there are utilitarian teachers, people who cannot resist helping other people to a pleasure, and they need a theory as much as any other kind of teacher. So let me supply something to lead them toward one.

Clearly it is going to be easier to help people toward some pleasures than toward others—that is, easier to test, argue with, correct, or improve on the statements made or the measures taken. Many pleasures, like drinking tea or eating ice cream, are simple, and people need no help with them. Other pleasures, like surfing or playing Nin­tendo, are less simple and may require help. With most of these pleasures, people know when they need help ("How do you hold this thing?" "Where's the switch?" "Is this a good wave?"), and they know when they have been .distracted ("I just took my eye off the ball!" "The doorbell rang!" "That bikini caught my eye!"). Some pleasures, however, are very complicated, even in their simplest forms, and it is much harder for people to know when they need help or are distracted. Among these plea­sures is that of reading poems, within which pleasure I include the pleasure of understanding, or awareness, and to which I now turn.

I offer for your consideration what I have been told is the world's shortest poem. It is a poem foolish and low in the pleasure it gives, and I offer it to readers only because I have limited space in which to make a serious point about current conceptions of pleasure. The poem is titled "Fleas" and the entire text reads:

Adam Had 'em.

Trochaic monometer; rhyming aa; feminine. I read the poem and I can report that I am perversely

pleased because I like the idea of Adam, the first man, having fleas. He too. Oh those fleas. What initiative! They got in there even then, maybe before anything else. Before the Fall? Yes. A delightful idea. As a reader of Mil­ton I happily visualize our great progenitor, in the middle of a noble speech to Eve or Raphael, stopping to scratch. I tickle myself exploring the implications for Milton's

H. R. Swardson • 17

theology. In the pristine world could fleas bite? Would they not have to lie down with Adam as lions lay down with lambs? But how were they to live? What pleasure take in living? If fleas can't bite, that, for them, is no par­adise. They've been had. That's how Adam has 'em. Right where he wants 'em, helpless. For the last time, alas. Oh ambiguity, oh irony, oh the tragedy of the Fall.

Well, I've had fun but the fun's not over. Responding to the encouragement a deconstructionist textbook offers my students (Scholes, in Scholes, Comley, and Ulmer 266), I am also trying to discover the pleasure people get from finding names of people in a text, and here, with this anonymous poem, I wonder if the author's signature might appear somewhere in the abyss of this text. "Adam" itself would be too crude, but might there be some play with it? A family name, a relation, a bit of biography? A grandfather, an uncle, Adam, who was a dam against threatening nature? But wait, there's another name, Em. Aunt Em. Adam had Em. Uncle Adam had old Aunt Em. Out behind the barn. Ee-haw! The dam broke. Now I'm having fun. Morally superior fun, too, because I stand outside that sexist, patriarchal "had." Certainly not perverted fun. I didn't, after all, make Em the mule. I've had good clean fun and nobody can say I haven't. Of course people might, if they are still alive to values and taste, say that I have indulged only in an offensive absurdity, but I would like to point out that there is nothing in Derridean theory that stops me short of this reductio ad absurdum, which no relativist, no Humean certainly, can argue me out of enjoying.

With all that pleasure on the table, absurd or not, shared or not, I would now like to make a distinction. If you think that a distinction isn't really a distinction unless it is rigid—that is, rigorous and precise—you will not accept it as a distinction, but if you agree with John Searle that "a distinction is no less a distinction for allow­ing for a family of related, marginal, diverging cases," then you will accept it. For the sake of common ground under us in the rest of this essay, I hope you will accept it. As Searle reminds us, "People who try to hold the assumption that genuine distinctions must be made rigid are ripe for Derrida's attempt to undermine all such dis­tinctions" (78). And I cannot afford to have this distinc­tion undermined, for I think it is not just eternally essential in the teaching of poetry, it is immediately vital in the current debate over theory.

I would like you to look back at the pleasure I piled up before you as I read "Fleas" and to see a difference between directed and undirected pleasure. Begin by asking where I was taking directions. Start, preferably, with something so primitive and basic and familiar that it hardly feels like a direction at all: the direction in the word " 'em" to look back at the title of the poem. We

don't think of this as a direction, because by now every­body follows it. Nobody stares at the pronoun and refuses to connect it with, or look for, the antecedent.

Now, if you can see me taking directions here, you can see how I can call my pleasure in that Edenic scratching a directed pleasure. I had to follow directions to get to it. If through inattention or willfulness I did not use my expe­rience of the language (in which I from time to time saw pronoun reference leaping to titles) to connect the last word in the text to the first, I would not have had the pleasure of admiring enterprising insects or of plaguing earnest theology.

The difference between this pleasure and the Derridean pleasure I got from finding names of people in the text is illustrated in that same, primitive case. I not only found no directions to old Aunt Em in "Fleas," but, to see her possessed when her husband's dammed-up nature gave way, I had to oppose directions. The conventions of refer­ence told me that fleas, not an American mate, were what Adam had. I had to either ignore the directions or recog­nize diem and say, "I prefer not to follow them"—or, bet­ter here, "It is simply my pleasure not to follow them."

In life, to enjoy undirected pleasures—breathing, tak­ing a walk, finding shapes in the clouds—one does not usually have to oppose directions. And with some plea­sures, like fantasizing over inkblots, directions themselves are unthinkable. But in language, directions are not only always thinkable, they are unavoidable. It is impossible to read a sentence without being conscious of directions— directions to our eyes, to our ears, to our minds. If this were not so, we would never tell our freshman-composi­tion students, "Guide your reader carefully," meaning "Don't give confusing directions." Our assumption is that writers cannot avoid giving directions; the aim, we say to our comp students, is to spare readers the misdi­rections they will get if writers aren't careful.

So, though we cannot say much about undirected pleasure, we can say that, when taken in sentences, it at some point has to oppose direction. It is always enjoyed in the face of some sort of opposition. This is not to say that what is enjoyed is not language or that maintaining the opposition to direction might not be worth more than giving in to it. It just says that here the pleasure seeker is handling stuff that always has directions on the package.

Further, I am not suggesting that all directions are equally firm. My example presented a direction, from pronoun to antecedent, that is among the firmest. All grammatical directions are in this class. We have to fol­low them in order to construe sentences. For most edu­cated readers of poetry, this accomplishment is on a fairly low level. M. H. Abrams calls it "under reading" (173), and highly educated readers tend to think of it as

18 • Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

something college students can already do. But if more of those highly educated readers were low-level teachers, or just teachers of less-educated readers, they might be sur­prised at how high up in higher education the miscon­struing of ordinary sentences in a poem goes. By my experience it sometimes reaches into the graduate semi­nar, if not beyond, and it always reaches well up into the sophomore literature class, where students regularly miss the pleasure they might have got from poems just because they misconstrue the sentences. My example of direction in "Fleas" is extreme, but it is in the same class with the direction that keeps students from taking Mil-lay's imperative to Endymion at the end of an eight-line sentence ("Of all her altered state, oblivious lie!") as a noun modified by "oblivious." The student dwelling on forgetful prevarication in "Oh, Sleep Forever in the Lat-mian Cave" has missed the same kind of direction I missed in my second trip through "Fleas." To avoid miss­ing it—mis-taking the path to pleasure—the student must consider evidence, draw on experience, and reason logically. This is what we all do when we come on an unfamiliar construction. We take in the construction and every construction that bears on it, draw on our experi­ence of like constructions, and make inferences about the direction the unfamiliar construction is giving us.

We cannot remain fixed on cases of grammatical direc­tion following though, because these cases are not differ­ent in kind from cases of less simple, but still necessary, direction following. To get anywhere close to the pleasure Keats has arranged for us in the "Ode on Melancholy," we must follow the firm directions in the logical transi­tion words "For" (line 9) and "But" (11) from sentence to sentence. Otherwise we miss the linear development that gives us what the speaker is saying to the savorer of melancholy: "Don't drown the anguish in gloomy sur­roundings but sharpen it in beautiful surroundings." If we miss the directions, we may think, as inexperienced readers often do, that the speaker is saying, "Don't feel anguish. Lose it by looking at the beautiful things in life. Cheer up." To get to the pleasure of contemplating a Lord Randall of such great self-control ("fain wald lie down") that he can, under the most trying conditions, remain courteous to a very demanding mother, we have to believe that he is dying of real poison and not just of disappointment ("Getting jilted can make you feel as if you had been poisoned"). To believe this, we have to fol­low directions to the bloodhounds and make some infer­ences from common experience: bloodhounds eat leftover food; bloodhounds don't die of disappointment. We, readers, do what any rational person, any detective or scientist, does when moving into the unknown. And if we do that well, we will get to the plot of a poem and to

many other things—tone, allusions, figures—in addition to the grammar.

So, including grammar directions as a subclass, we have this class of more or less firm directions (less in cases of tone, etc.), and it is worth a pleasure seeker's attention, for a reader who ignores it misses a certain kind of plea­sure. It is also very much worth our attention if we want to see the importance of the distinction between directed and undirected pleasure for utilitarian teaching. For unless there are directions that get people to pleasures, utilitarian teachers are out of a job. They can give no help. A person inhaling the sea air, or seeing shapes in clouds, or fantasizing over inkblots, or whooping it up over a family name found in a text, or contentedly medi­tating on oblivious lies cannot be a student of these teachers. Only those who want to follow directions in language can be students of utilitarian language teachers. Only those who want to direct students to the directions in language can be utilitarian language teachers. You can't direct people to undirected pleasures.

But who in American education are we talking about here? Who is the term utilitarian teacher now going to include? I would rather ask, Who is it not going to include? Who can stay out of this category? For I think that all who take part in classroom conversations—not just those who might sometimes think of themselves as utilitarians, not just those, even, who are officially desig­nated teachers—must at some time or other become util­itarian teachers, whatever their formal designation. In a classroom conversation about a poem, students and teachers alike become utilitarian teachers because they cannot resist giving help when they see a need—the need of the pleasure seeker to get to the pleasure.

I am not saying that the pleasure seeker, the person they want to help, will know exactly what the pleasure will turn out to be. The seeker may only have heard that people in the past have got some sort of satisfaction out of the material now in everybody's hands. I am saying that when pleasure seekers who have achieved satisfaction in certain ways see somebody else failing to achieve that satisfaction—going about it wrong, missing directions, fumbling it—they will, by a human instinct too deep for me to know the dynamics of, speak up to help.

Now if we all share this instinct, the instinct that was the only sign of life in Eeyore, and if we can't satisfy it, or if we give up trying, then I think we are dead. Giving up on help to pleasure is, in teachers, what giving up on pleasure is in everybody else: a sign of extinction—of life in one case, of help to life in the other.

So, what is necessary in order for Eeyore to recover life is necessary in order for all of us to maintain it. But what is necessary? What must Eeyore do? Well, one thing that Milne's donkey needed to do was quit thinking so deeply

H. R. Swardson • 19

and so widely. The things that are getting in the way of our Eeyore's satisfaction of his instinct are mainly things that the roaming mind puts in the way. So let's first get him to get his mind to quit roaming. A roaming mind finds things to put in the way. And a teacher's mind can't help bringing them into the classroom because, being a human mind, it is proud of itself. So he will have to dis­cipline himself and humble his mind. He will have to see that pleasure is for him possible only in a very small sphere and that it is always teacher's pleasure, never philosopher's pleasure, and that protection of this sphere is entirely up to him and is out of any philosopher's hands. This doesn't mean that he can stop theorizing. It means, as my offer to supply a little theory shows, that he's got to theorize better. He, the expert in keeping things straight and doing things right, has to keep things straight in his own house.

First he must (if what I have supplied is sound) under­stand the kind of pleasure he is going for, utilitarian plea­sure, and how it is distinct from axiological pleasure. This will free him from the gloom of axiological rela­tivism, the Russellian gloom, since a demonstration that values have no objective foundation has no consequences for his job as a helper. He starts work only after some­body, a student, has declared for a pleasure, a value. He has to keep straight his entrance time (just after the stu­dent's speech) and his role (teacher, not philosopher or moralist). If he does not and if he indulges a blanket rela­tivism, then all he is going to produce are gloomy solilo­quies or dumb hand-wringing. The arguments that would stop his mouth in another's scene will be taken to stop it in his. Relativism will govern the whole play.

Second, when he looks at the work laid out for him, he must see that it is nearly all piecework. Reading is a series of small operations, leading to a large end, pleasure, the greatest of which is insight or understanding, some­times called meaning. His job is at the small end, and nearly everything he wants to justify against postmod­ernist challenge—teacher authority, appeals to experi­ence, logical inference, the necessity of probability—is justified only at this end. If, say, he claims teacher authority at the other end, where most of the challenges are pressed (Do you think poems, or texts, have a single meaning? Will you prescribe insights and emotions? Will you limit the imagination?), he will lose and head back to the tombstone. And deservedly so. His job is direction, and reactions to whole poems can never be directed. He as a helper shouldn't even be interested in whole poems. From his point of view expressions like^owz and text are meaningless. It doesn't matter to him what readers say about them. If readers take care of the small operations, those things will take care of themselves. Talk about

them, the quarrelsome talk, comes later—by which time he will have left the scene and melted into the audience.

Third, after he has started work, he must recognize the moments when students decide to go for an undirected pleasure. This perception, like his original decision to be only a helper, will save him from fruitless attempts to direct students to undirected pleasures. He will no more, in the middle of a discussion, prescribe reactions to petals on a wet, black bough than he will prescribe reactions to inkblots. Yet he will not deny help just because a student declares for an undirected pleasure at an unexpected point. He will see that just as, in getting to that point, students had to follow directions (language being what it is), they will have to follow directions in getting to further points. He will have to check to see if his students still want to go there, as when they first made their contract.

Fourth, as he goes forward, he must recognize those places where the directions become less firm or his stu­dents' experience becomes insufficient to follow them, either further along the path to an expected pleasure or into a bypath. Consider my first reading of "Fleas," where I followed directions toward the pleasure of seeing fleas on a fellow named Adam. I was directed to see Adam as the host of the fleas, but was I directed to see the Adam in the Garden of Eden, much less in Milton's Garden? Here we have the marginal, diverging case. Here directions become less firm, and, as they do, variety of experience enters. My experience includes Paradise Lost, the experience of others in the conversation may not. They may think of Adam Bede, scratching, or of Adam Comorosky, inordinately active on the base paths. Nearly all of us can follow directions from the subject of the sen­tence to the verb to the object to the antecedent of the object in order to enjoy our various pleasures, but not all of us can follow directions, if there are any, to the Gar­den of Eden. About such directions all that teachers can say is what they can say about any alternative end or value: Here's a nice way. If the student reading "Fleas" thinks my way is nice, then I can say, "But if you want to enjoy it, you'll have to learn some things about Milton and Christianity."

Finally, Eeyore must see that if he accepts the theory offered here, the theory that supports him as a utilitarian, he also accepts it for everyone who speaks up in the dis­cussion of a poem, for it supports them as teachers too. It is a theory of getting someplace. But getting to some place in a poem is so much a matter of individual handi­caps and capabilities that no single speaker can be counted on to take a group there—as a single speaker in other utilitarian enterprises, like navigation, can. So direction is different. The poetry teacher, who, when speaking as the designated "teacher," has a goal beyond that of other speakers, directs (indirectly, of course) by

20 • Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

directing discussion, not by issuing directives. That, con­sidering the limitations poetry teachers share with every­body, is the most efficient direction, the best means to pleasure in helping, their end. The utilitarian teacher, like others in the room, has a stake in making helpful contributions but a greater stake in keeping the conversa­tion helpful—that is, keeping it purposeful, directed to an end.

So, if we have been theorizing correctly, we can say that Eeyore's stake in pedagogical life, and the stake of any teacher who resembles him, lies in maintaining a purposeful conversation. Since the purpose comes from people in the group and help comes from people in the group, this means that life support is locally determined. Eeyore lives and dies only according to what happens within those four walls. He works in a community. If a statement or a point of view doesn't matter there, where he lives, it doesn't matter at all. A lot of those irrefutable statements that put him on the tombstone don't matter. The things relativism deprived him of don't matter. The canon doesn't matter, truth doesn't matter, reality doesn't matter. Only the ends the group agreed on matter. Which means that only the means matter. Everything governing the conversation—agreements, rules, stan­dards, appeals—is justified by one test: Will it help the helpers get everybody to the end? If it won't, Eeyore can throw it away and not weep about it.

As Eeyore's theorist and therapist I would be glad to see this community as one of Stanley Fish's interpretive communities. It would lighten Eeyore's gloom to dis­cover that an antifoundationalist formulation could allow him all he needed for happiness. I think Fish's does that. Fish allows a community to impose con­straints. Eeyore's community can go ahead and impose any "category of understanding" {Doing 83), any test for what counts "as a fact, . . . as a piece of evidence, as a reasonable argument" (Is There 356), anything cognitive that helps. "Entities like the world, language, and the self can still be named; and value judgments having to do with validity, factuality, accuracy, and propriety can still be made" {Doing 345). His community can still privilege one member of those old binaries: true-false, valid-invalid, correct-mistaken, supported-unsupported, justified-unjustified, and so on. As long as they make the teaching discourse more efficient and help everybody get where they want to go, Eeyore, as director of the conver­sation, speaking for the group, can require adherence by each speaker to all the old epistemological norms that postmodernist philosophers, outside the classroom, find "lying in ruins around us" {Doing 344). He can let them lie there. And he can let any philosophers of destruction, if they ever try to do any utilitarian teaching, if they ever find that they cannot deny themselves the pleasure of

helping, discover at their leisure why those norms have stood so high for so long.

But, happy as I am to bring Eeyore and Stanley Fish together, I cannot comfortably rest in Eeyore's purpose­fully conversing class seeing it as one of Fish's interpretive communities or even as a community requiring only local support. I see the people in the class often looking away and listening to others, outside. I see the member­ship changing, with entrances and exits, as in a play. Eey­ore himself comes on stage only after others have made certain speeches, declaring their aims. And while he's there, he and the others are constantly checking with outsiders, people in the audience, maybe.

"Is that right? In feudal Scotland bloodhounds did eat scraps from the table?"

"Check," says the historian. I hear a "Check" from all kinds of people in the audience. From everybody, in fact, who is taken by the class to be a reliable helper of helpers. I hear it from anonymous helpers.

"Is that right? In the eighteenth century spleen meant 'melancholy'?"

"Check," say the compilers of the OED. "Is that right? Turkey meant 'fifty-cent piece'?" "Check," say the compilers of the Dictionary of Ameri­

can Slang.

On language questions in general, I have the feeling that at times, the parties to the conversation, members simultaneously in another community, are checking with the larger membership of that community. Every time they use the dictionary or grammar book, in fact. I even hear some voices speaking up on general invitation and see ears cocked for them on the stage. "Invalid," says Patrick Suppes. "Not warranted," says Irving Copi. Beyond the writers of logic textbooks, but in their section, I hear J. L. Austin saying "infelicitous" and John Searle saying "Defectively performed." They are in line with Miss Manners, who, farther back, is murmuring, "Inappropriate." Furthermore, all over the university I see people in other purposeful conversations—in engineering, medicine, horticulture, business—contin­ually checking with reliable helpers, keeping in touch with larger memberships, accepting correction and instruction from experts.

Another thing that makes me uncomfortable is that no community organized to put means to ends in our world can be free of that world, as Fish's communities seem to be free. A community can decide what its goals are, but it cannot decide what the obstacles, the resis­tances are or the best method of overcoming them. It can­not decide that its form of discourse represents the resistances best and helps everybody to the ends more successfully than other forms do. "World" is just short­hand for the resistances, and it is what decides cognitive

H. R. Swardson • 21

reliability, not our social or linguistic resolutions. "The world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence to be true," said Richard Rorty and called that statement a "platitude" (5). He (to Eeyore's pleasure at finding another relativist allowing him what he needs) was using "world" as Eeyore uses it; and as long as Eeyore uses it that way, he cannot think that an interpretive commu­nity dealing with the world is free to judge all interpreta­tions generated within it or to judge its own interpretive method. The fact that Eeyore's community deals with poetry does not change this condition, for that commu­nity, readers moving toward an end, cannot change cer­tain things in the world of the English language any more than a community of navigators can change the position of a reef. Readers can't sail right over that prepo­sition that keeps them from getting to that noun in the way they would like to. When writers insert a preposi­tion or set down any other grammatical element, they deny free sailing to their readers. And what they deny it with must, like the reef, deny it in the same way for any­body going through that sentence, those waters. If it does not do so, then there is not only no reading help but no point in writing.

Finally, I am uncomfortable with Fish's assumption that members of any interpretive community will have absorbed the norms of its discourse and in their speech will naturally observe them—cannot avoid observing them, in fact. To him the teacher who, like Eeyore, wor­ries about lawlessness in discourse is suffering from another illusion. To sit in any class, though, is to be less sure about who is suffering from the illusion. Why do some members of a community need and accept correc­tion by other members not on substance but on stan­dards, rules, procedure—the community norms? The answer is that community norms are both used and taught at the same time, and the state of the untaught student is something for a teacher to worry about. A fully versed community springing into being, or already in place, waiting for the teacher to walk into the room, is an illusion. To speak of any such community is to assume that the essential teaching has already been taken care of, by somebody else. If the community is like the academic community, observing the norms of rational discourse, the assumption is that what we call "rationality" is natu­ral and needn't be worried about. Experience, however, weighs against the assumption. Natural rationality is no better supported by what we see in human beings than natural morality is.

I would include with the untaught the differently taught. I mean those taught with ends in view that are different from the ends in view in our community, those who observe standards of discourse that, however func­tional in another community, organized to different

ends, are in our functionally organized community either irrelevant or destructive—that is, either they distract attention from the community norms that need to be observed to get to the end, or they undermine them.

It is of great practical concern to utilitarian teachers to have in their classes, along with the well-taught and the untaught, students who have been differently taught or who are being differently taught while the course is going on. These students will be, in the strict sense of the word, subversive of the enterprise. It is of even greater concern to students to have in the class a teacher, a director of the purposeful conversation, who is or becomes differently taught. To be differently taught, in our sense, and to believe the teaching (or theory, or philosophy), is to be less equipped or less ready to distinguish in the conversa­tion what is irrelevant or destructive. Utilitarian teachers who become differently taught subvert their own enter­prises, or the enterprises the students thought they were signing up for, whether or not the aim is traditional English pleasure. And this subversion will occur whatever the value of that different teaching for other ends in other communities.

Of equal concern, I know, is the power of teachers to direct conversations according to their own understand­ing of what is irrelevant or destructive. This power, given the limits of human understanding, may well deprive a group of helpful, but at first strange-looking, contribu­tions. A teacher who is put off by the strange-looking can do as much harm as a teacher of the strange can. The problem is particularly acute during a period when aims and methods are changing. But nobody ever said it would be easy for us poetry teachers to keep things straight.

I have neither the understanding nor the space here, as anybody's theorist or therapist, to provide what would be most useful—a survey with, on one side, all the really strange ways people might be taught so as to unfit them for our kind of purposeful conversation and, on the other side, all the apparently strange. But I offer a guid­ing proposition to those who need to make their way and can't wait for a survey: any manner of teaching that causes participants in our conversation to doubt our standards of reliable belief is going to unfit those partici­pants and deserves to be called "strange" or "subversive." Helpful statements are never any good unless they are believed. Belief depends on the standards applied. That "Check" from the audience, just like the "Check" that comes from within the group or within the individual, has to be heard as a report of a test the individual trusts. This trust is assumed when the enterprise is undertaken and the community formed, the moment when the indi­vidual agtees to what is necessary to get somewhere in the enterprise. In an ends-means enterprise, you can't get anywhere unless you accept certain epistemological

22 * Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

standards, the ones that let you reliably distinguish and evaluate the resistances to your progress. If you can't do this distinguishing and evaluating yourself, if you need help, you have to trust your helpers, who themselves must trust the standards, so you have to trust in trust, if you know what I mean. In short, to doubt the standards is to doubt the help, and this doubt, carried to the end, destroys the community and the enterprise.

This point seems obvious, and a poetry teacher would have every reason to accept my guiding proposition, as other utilitarian teachers could easily do, were it not that among the standards of reliable belief is a test by com­mon experience, and that test, or appeal, however accept­able when one is trying to get someplace in a river or forest, just doesn't seem to be the same when one is try­ing to get someplace in a poem. Indeed, the appeal to experience is now in such deep and persistent dispute that I am going to have to take a while to justify it, though the main justification is not new.

The justification is already contained in the conception of the ends-means enterprise. Means to an end are known only by experience. How else? If we can't think of any other way of knowing means, then we have to say that in any conversation that aims at an end, the final test of what counts as a contribution has to be the test of experi­ence, direct experience or experience of testimony, other people's experience. Why should that be so hard to see? Why should something that is so easy to see when naviga­tors confer be so hard to see when readers confer? Granted that the relevant experience for readers is often deeply buried and tangled with other things, still, of any offering in poetry class, how are conferring readers (that is, teach­ers), as utilitarians, excused from asking, of any contribu­tion, "Does it get us closer to the pleasure that is our end?" That is, "Does it help?" And how can they think that they will know the answer, if they ever know it, by anything other than experience? Only some deep suspi­cion of experience, perhaps some bad experience with experience, can account for this.

The full explanation is beyond me, but I think that one reason poetry teachers might be suspicious of experi­ence and drawn to teaching that denies appeals to it is that so many questions, including the most inviting ones, should not and cannot be settled by such appeals. "Should we think of Robert Frost's dark woods as an invitation to death?" It would be a pedagogical and hermeneutical crime to say—much less to turn to the audience expecting to hear someone else, some reliable authority, say—either "Yes. Check" or "No. Doesn't check." But our doubt of the authority for such state­ments should not lead us to doubt the authority for other statements. It's a matter of knowing where we are on the directed pleasure-undirected pleasure line and of

keeping this straight in the conversation. Things are hard enough in the middle, with all the marginal, diverging cases, without getting the ends confused.

But the big reason, now, that poetry teachers are uncomfortable with appeals to common experience is that they have been persuaded that such appeals can have only relativistic answers. "Everybody's experience is different. Whose experience can we trust?" The English teacher who asked me that had, I think, found (at an institute on poststructuralism) that he was unable to refute relativism. Put that together with the number of times he doubtless, like the rest of us, has found not only that common experience is no help with questions of feeling and value but that it is of limited help with questions of image, metaphor, symbol, myth, allusion, association (all the things that add to the—yes, Eey-ore—indeterminacy and duplicity of the language we try to force to our purposes), not to mention the host of undecidable things that look as if they could be settled by probable inference ("Who came out of the open door, the lady or the tiger?"), and it is no wonder he is uncomfortable.

But discomfort cannot change necessity, and rela­tivism need not come down like a blanket. The only way a utilitarian teacher knows whether those things are worth discussing is by an appeal to experience. Means to an end are known only by experience. Appeals to com­mon experience are necessary to tell us which testimony about individual experience, which unfinishable explo­rations, which inconclusive discussions are likely to be helpful. They are also necessary to locate in all this the places where appeals to experience can give their best, most direct help: in establishing knowledge of things like reefs and prepositions. (Speaking of means makes us think narrowly of how-to knowledge, but any knowl­edge of the resistances, what's in the way, helps and comes under our term means)

But still, that word common takes such a beating from relativists that we in English departments can't see how it will ever stand up. When a philosopher tells us that there's no basis for belief in a real world that would give a common content to our experiences, which are all medi­ations, or constructions, of a "real" world, we feel stumped and find the argument irrefutable. And that predicament will keep bothering us until we see that we are stumped, again, by an imported question that doesn't matter. We have already assumed, by deciding to teach a class, that we can appeal to common experience. On any other assumption our enterprise is unthinkable. We can­not teach navigation or reading unless we assume that the reef and the preposition can, for the purposes agreed on, be experienced by the student as they are experienced by the teacher, whether or not those things are real,

H. R. Swardson • 23

whether or not the experience is mediated. In the naive realist's shorthand, the reef and the preposition must be there, for the student as for the teacher. And they must be there for the student when that student acts on the knowledge in the future. Unless the reef and the preposi­tion are assumed to be there for everybody, today and tomorrow, constructed in the same way, there's no point in the utilitarian teacher's standing up and talking pub­licly about them. To gather a class, to offer a course is to assume that you can appeal successfully to common experience. If common doesn't stand up, the class falls.

If this appeal can be accepted in science classrooms, and in so many others, why, once again, after all those discomforting but irrelevant problems have been set aside, should it be a matter of dispute in poetry class­rooms? The burden, it seems to me, ought to be on those English teachers who dispute it. How are means-end questions or other cognitive questions that arise in the discussion of a poem different from such questions when they arise in the discussion of, say, a shark? If (by another stretch of the imagination) one person in a class in marine zoology were to appeal to what that person saw in a Hollywood movie (to establish, say, the shark's diet) and another person were to correct that by appeal to listings of the contents of many sharks' stomachs by many people in many journals (another experience of testimony), how would that be in any important way different from the correction in our poetry class of the view that Lord Ran­dall is not really poisoned? How are we not scientists, as they are? We are appealing in our community to the same audience, the same larger community, and beyond that the same "world." We are what they are. Of course nobody in our community has conducted experiments on bloodhounds, disappointing them and then seeing how many die, but if we had we would perhaps be more evidently scientists, as we are already in actuality scien­tists, ready and able, on a foundation acceptable to our larger community, to settle disagreements by appeals to common experience. We ask, Is that commonly observed, or observable? That is just what scientists are doing when they ask that the cold-fusion experiment be replicable: that the results, the sensory perception of the needles on the dials, be the same for anybody who occu­pies the same position in the same lab set-up. They are asking that the experience of it be "common." And when they do that they are not worrying about Heisen-berg's uncertainty principle, or Godel's incompleteness theorem, or Einstein's relativity, or Kuhn's paradigm shifts, or any of those things that make poetry teachers think that appeals to common experience in science are losing their foundation too. Working scientists regularly and without question appeal to common experience.

And we certainly do that, with hardly a thought, when we leave our poetry classrooms and go to work in our composition classrooms. Imagine with me some freshman essays we might respond to there. Suppose (another stretch) we got a batch containing essays also submitted and accepted as stories in the 26 June 1990 edition of Weekly World News, identified by these headlines: "Cali­fornia Woman Has Werewolf's Baby," "Passenger Train Vanishes in Tunnel; Cars, Crew, and 600 People Disap­pear without a Trace," "Baby Born with Artificial Heart." You can imagine the essays. What would we be appealing to in our comments in die margin? The same thing scien­tists appeal to when they want to establish that a proposi­tion is true, a fact.

Were it not that this conclusion requires hard arguing and is so quickly forgotten by English teachers even when the argument is accepted, I would not try your patience by asking once more, Why should any of these things that we do and accept in science classrooms and in our own composition classrooms change when we are in poetry classrooms and we face questions of fact? We set­tle questions of fact by asking what the world justifies us in believing to be true. (I am following Richard Rorty here.) Whether doing X is a means to the end, Y, is a question of fact. Whether pole waggling moves punts is a question of fact. Whether "Fleas" is the antecedent of " 'em" is a question of fact. Whether bloodhounds do or do not die of disappointment is a question of fact. A sen­tence purporting to answer those questions either is or is not justified by the world, of which the language we are looking at is a part. When a poetry teacher answers one of those questions and is then, in the eternal provocation to epistemology, asked, "Why should I believe you?" the answer, "You should believe me because common experi­ence shows it," is the same answer that a teacher makes when making assertions about werewolves and prenatal artificial hearts, which is the same answer scientists make when making assertions about cold fusion. It is the same answer anybody in the larger community makes when trying to discredit irresponsible assertions of fact, such as the assertion that there was no Holocaust. Our answers must be determined by the question we are asked, not by the room we are in. To answer some questions we must look out of the room, into the larger community.

But there is a stumbling block that might really take some time. I cannot assume, without dispute, that every­one shares my conception of this larger community. More hard arguing is needed. Unless, of course, you are willing to grant me that there is such a thing (whether you call it the Republic of Letters, or the academic com­munity, or the community of worldwide rational dis­course, or something else); that we cannot shut it out; that it gives us, in its agreements and standards, all the

24 • Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

foundation we need; and that the only alternative to that foundation for all of us is Eeyore's tombstone.

Something tells me that I can't count on everyone's doing that, and I can't do the arguing here, but I can do one small thing. I can picture the scene of the arguing. Suppose we all got in on it and had a big dispute. Would we not, as we spoke, all have our ears cocked to an audi­ence in which we have to see seated, among others, our old logic teachers? Would we not hear voices from the authors of our own composition handbooks? "Limit your claims." "Support your most important assertions." "Use analogies carefully." "Address issues without evasion." "Summarize opposing points fairly." Would we not be pleased when we heard Copi say, about one of our own claims, "Check. Supported by the evidence"? Would we be entirely displeased when we heard him say, about our opponent, "No. Unsupported"? And when we leave this room and go to another, in the town, in the world, in all the places where appeals to common experience establish cognitive responsibility, in the room where the TV reporter interviews us, will we English teachers have escaped from that audience, that larger community, its norms, its appeals? No; if we forgot our membership, the public, by its expectations of professors, would remind us.

But, I hear you say, the American public doesn't understand us, nor, at the moment, does much of the larger community. I don't understand us either, but I know that our reluctance to submit ourselves to the stan­dards observed in other university departments (if they can be taken to represent this larger community) is not, as is sometimes said of us, our attachment to perverse philosophies. It is deeper than that, and I feel it, and I think Eeyore, before his departure, felt it. I think that what stops our ears to voices from those departments and that community when we are not arguing positions but teaching poetry is something not at all perverse: our sense of the mystery of poetry. We as readers know that with many poems that please us, maybe with the ones that please us most, we find ourselves looking very much in our own direction, with our own view. Or we find ourselves at a place with many views. The poet may have brought us to the brink of a mystery, without visible ter­mination, without further direction. And we don't get to such places without respecting the mystery of contradic­tory views enjoyed simultaneously, the mystery of exter­nal views that are also internal views, the mystery of multiple views out of one word. The epistemological norms in that larger community are hard on contradic­tion, and internality, and multiocularity. We don't want to hear voices insisting on those norms. Those voices don't seem to respect the mystery. They reduce it.

All I can say is that they shouldn't reduce it and that if they do it is our own fault. We are letting them take us

too far in the direction of directed pleasures. We haven't located ourselves properly on the direction-undirection line. We haven't kept things straight. If we do keep things straight (I sound as if this were easy), we get to, and we help our classes get to, the mysterious place so hard to describe to those—including well-meaning helpers in the larger community—who haven't been there. Teachers give directions, and poets give directions, and the lan­guage itself gives directions, and we in the conversation, listening to our helpers directing us to the directions, fol­low them to get to—what? A mystery we can't take our eyes from. To the rest of the community, to the world, we who take this so seriously may be a mystery, like Robert Frost's sea watchers:

They cannot look out far. They cannot look in deep. But when was that ever a bar To any watch they keep?

("Neither Out Far nor In Deep")

To understand why readers are willing to work hard to get to such a place and enjoy such a view, you have to have been there, I suppose.

But how do you get people to want to go there in the first place? The question glaringly exposes my utilitarian position. I can't do anything that doesn't take me into the other kind of teaching and put me up against the axio-logical relativism I couldn't refute. Readers are free to go anyplace and enjoy anything in a poem they want to enjoy. I cannot say that getting to the brink of one of these mysteries of contradiction, subjectivity, and multi­plicity is better than getting to some other pleasure. I know of no guiding propositions, or rationale, or logic that will assuredly get a reader to want to get to this pleasurable place. My practical reason is disqualified. All I have left is that instinct Eeyore and I can't suppress and don't know the dynamics of, though I would like to con­nect it with that sense of solidarity Rorty allows to rela­tivists like him and me. That, at any rate, is what I, standing satisfied at the brink of one of these mysteries, feel for the reader who didn't make it this far. I feel sorry for that person, who, like me, is a pleasure seeker and whom I see over there, off course, missing directions, doing various kinds of pole waggling. I want to be of help.

Those who feel this instinct and feel capable of satisfy­ing it know well the problem they face in poetry class. The help is not mysterious but the thing they help with is a tremendous mystery. They've got to keep the two straight, but there is no theory that will show them how to do this. I certainly don't have such a theory. But I do have a vision, which, in closing, I share with you. I see a house of pleasure, or a room of pleasure, and I know that what exactly goes on in there is a mystery to me—as the

H. R. Swardson • 25

inside of an automobile battery is a mystery to me. I just know vaguely that there is a lot of freedom in that house or room and that people who come out usually have smiles on their faces, as, I am told, I do. What I know more than vaguely is how to get to certain houses or rooms, because I have been trained to read signs and I have been to many of these places before. I can help those who tell me they want to get there—as I might help those who wanted a shock from the battery whose inte­rior is a mystery to me. I have the authority of experience to say, Follow that arrow there, put your hands on these terminals here. My listeners are free of my direction after that, as those are free who did not tell me they wanted my help. I can see some of the latter wandering through the town, enjoying this pleasure or that, as I might see a man taking a battery to bed with him because he is thrilled by its texture. I cannot correct, argue with, or improve those people or lament their pursuit of inferior pleasures. All I can have is faith in the people who pro­vide the pleasure, the furnishers of rooms and makers of batteries, people more expert and creative than 1.1 have faith that some day the wanderers will stumble into the right house, and the battery strokers will touch the right knobs, and that afterward, after the power greater than mine has done its work, after the pleasure seeker has been

pleased and the thrill seeker has been blown out of bed, they will come to me wanting help in getting to those kinds of mysterious pleasure again.

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. "Construing and Deconstructing," with "Ques­tions and Answers." Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. 127-82.

Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, 1967.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. The Collected Poems. New York: Harper, 1956.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Scholes, Robert, Nancy R. Comley, and Gregory L. Ulmer. Text Book: An Introduction to Literary Language. New York: St. Mar­tins, 1988.

Searle, John R. "The Word Turned Upside Down.", New York Review of Books 27 Oct. 1983: 74-79.