Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

Teaching and the Pleasures of PoetryAuthor(s): H. R. SwardsonSource: Profession, (1991), pp. 22-32Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595468 .

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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 argu ments 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 proba

bly got in first, with the classic de gustihus non est dis

putandum, but we still think interesting things can be said

about it. Pleasure comes in such varieties and is so reveal

ing of personality that we, even if we are not psychiatrists

and counselors, enjoy talking about manifestations of it.

"Oh, that's an interesting perver

sion." Pleasure is life, and interest

in pleasure is interest in life. Even

people who show no interest in

pleasure are, for that very aberra

tion, 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 discipline people who

have been deemphasizing or

neglecting pleasure? Are they the _ ones called postmodernists? Do

we think thev 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 enjoy

ing, 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 dif

ferent. 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,"

The author is Professor of English at Ohio University, Athens. A version

of this paper was presented at the 1990 NCTE convention in Atlanta.



H. R. Swardson 23

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 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 bot

tom! 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 some

place 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 reelings, 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. 1 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 demon

stration 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 plea sure 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 exper

iment, 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 plea sure 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 plea sure, 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 practi cal 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 subjective 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 util itarian 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 Nin

tendo, 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 dis tracted ("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.



24 Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry

Before the Fall? Yes. A delightful idea. As a reader of Mil ton 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 the

ology. 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 ambi

guity, 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 per

verted 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 Der

rida'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 every

body 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 expe

rience 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 refer

ence told me that fleas, not an American mate, were what

Adam had. I had to either ignore the directions or recog nize them and say, "I prefer not to follow them"?or, bet

ter here, "It is simply my pleasure not to follow them."

In life, to enjoy undirected pleasures?breathing, tak

ing a walk, finding shapes in the clouds?one does not

usually have to oppose directions. And with some plea

sures, 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-composi

tion 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 plea

sure, 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.



H. R Swardson 25

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 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 ordi

nary sentences in a poem goes. By my experience it some

times reaches into the graduate seminar, if not beyond, and it always reaches well up into the sophomore litera

ture 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 Millay'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 prevarica

tion in "Oh, Sleep Forever in the Latmian 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 con

struction is giving us.

We cannot remain fixed on cases of grammatical direc

tion following though, because these cases are not differ

ent 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 transi tion 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 sur

roundings 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 fol low directions to the bloodhounds and make some infer ences from common experience: bloodhounds eat leftover

food; bloodhounds don't die of disappointment. We, readers, do what any rational person, any detective or sci

entist, 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 seekers

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

You canyt direct

people to undirected

pleasures.

importance of the distinction between directed and undi rected 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 fantasiz

ing 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 utili

tarian language teachers. You can't direct people to undi

rected 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 desig

nated teachers?must at some time or other become util

itarian 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 plea sure 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 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 disci

pline 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) under stand the kind of pleasure he is going for, utilitarian plea sure, 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 chal

lenge?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 imag ination?), 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 poem and textzxt meaning less. 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 quarrel some 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 stu

dents' 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 experi ence 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



H. R. Swardson 27

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 dis

cussion 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 handi

caps 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 direc

tion 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 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 purpose ful 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 every body 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 com

munities. 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 understand

ing" {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 philoso phers, 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 purpose

fully 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 cer

tain 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 "Defec

tively 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

A community can

decide what its

goals are, but it cannot decide what the

obstacles are.

be free. A community can

decide what its goals are,

but it cannot decide what

the obstacles, the resis

tances 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 success

fully than other forms do. "World" is just shorthand for the resistances, and it is

what decides cognitive reliability, not our social or lin

guistic resolutions. "The world may cause us to be

justified in believing a sentence to be true," said Richard

Rorry 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 con

dition, 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 naviga tors 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, wor

ries 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 correc

tion by other members not on substance but on stan

dards, 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 func

tional in another community, organized to different ends,

are in our functionally organized community either irrel

evant 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 conversa

tion what is irrelevant or destructive. Utilitarian teachers

who become differently taught subvert their own enter

prises, 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.



H. R. Swardson 29

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

parricipants 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 com

munity formed, the moment when the individual agrees 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 standards, the ones

that let you reliably distinguish and evaluate the resis

tances 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 stan

dards, 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 expect

ing 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 plea sure-undirected pleasure line and of keeping this straight in the conversation. Things are hard enough in the mid

dle, 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 differ

ent. 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 expe rience 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, Eeyore?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 rela

tivism 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

Appeals to common

experience are

necessary to tell us which

testimony about

individual

experience is

likely to be helpful

where appeals to experi

ence can give their best,

most direct help: in estab

lishing knowledge of

things like reefs and prepo sitions. (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 beat

ing from relativists that we

in English departments can't see how it will ever

stand up. When a philoso

pher 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 expe

rienced by the teacher, whether or not those things are

real, 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 class

rooms? 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 Hol

lywood 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 Ran

dall 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 evi

dently 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 com

mon 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 Heisenberg's uncertainty

principle, or Godel's incompleteness theorem, or Ein

stein'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



H. R Swardson 31

Weekly World News, identified by these headlines: "Califor nia Woman Has Werewolf's Baby," "Passenger Train Van

ishes 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 the 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 pur

porting to answer those questions either is or is not

justified by the world, of which the language we are look

ing 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 experi ence 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 every one 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 some

thing else); that we cannot shut it out; that it gives us, in

its agreements and standards, all the 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 audi

ence 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 under

stand 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 philoso

phies. It is deeper than that, and I feel it, and I think Eey ore, before his departure, felt it. I think that what stops our ears to voices from those departments and that com

munity 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, with

out 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, listen

ing 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 axiolog ical relativism I couldn't refute. Readers are free to go to

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 multi

plicity 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 con

nect it with that sense of solidarity Rorty allows to rela

tivists 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 satisfy

ing 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

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 termi

nals 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. Mor

ris 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: Cam

bridge 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.



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Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry