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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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26 Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry
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
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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
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28 Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry
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.
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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),
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30 Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry
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
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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
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32 Teaching and the Pleasures of Poetry
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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