The Meaning of Life

Every few months, I - and, I suspect, many others - wonder what, precisely, it is that I'm making out of my life. What it is that I really want to do. Do I want to spend the rest of my life devoted to the largely insular world of academia? Not particularly. Devoted to my students? That I could do.

It brings back, again and again, the recognition that I do what I do because of the students. Not because of the texts, not because of Shakespeare, but because of the students. Because it allows me to teach them how to think critically, not about the texts, but about the world. About what they are told - even by me. I simply use literature as the medium.

But my secret heart - well, perhaps not so secret - wants desperately to create that medium. To create something that will do by itself what I struggle to teach. To change not the world, but minds. Because, ultimately, it is the changing of minds that will change the world.

And the thing to which I come back, every time, is the idea that there is no binary. There can be no binary in a world made of color and light and sound and touch. And that those who live with binaries ultimately condemn themselves to exactly that which they hate and fear.

This is not a new point. I do not claim it is. However, it is one that needs revisitation. There are thousands, perhaps millions, of people who do not recognize the hypocrisy inherent in themselves, in their religion, and in the ideologies they purport. I hope, someday, to see a majority of rational, thoughtful people who are able to place their faith in their own logic rather than in something external to themselves. Whether they want to call that part of themselves god or reason is unimportant, but until we as a species stop attributing right and wrong based on illogical and hallucinatory fairy tales, we will not be able to work as a cohesive species.

Nothing More Than Feelings

I've noticed an alarming trend of late in student writings, and, it appears, in our educational system: the permissiveness and even encouragement of treating our "feelings" as though they were valid sources of fact and argument. This is, "I feel," complete crap. As an academic, I view it as a degradation of the art of interpretation.

It is part - or is at least an off-shoot of - the increasing validity of reader-response. Which is itself the bastard child of New Criticism. Both of which, "I feel," should be dragged out back and shot.

We, especially here in the United States of America, want our feelings to be given credence and importance that they do not deserve. This is, of course, not to say that feelings aren't important. They are. In social relationships. Not in my classroom, thank you very much.

I am not one of those teachers who belittles her students. I am respectful of them and I expect them to be the same of one another and of me. I do not try to hurt their feelings and I go out of my way to make sure that any and all criticism I offer them is constructive. But what they "feel" about Shakespeare has no place in their papers.

I'm glad Shakespeare makes them feel something. I'm glad that Eliot was right about the objective correlative. But I don't care. And not only do I not care, I actively do not want to know how they feel about Hamlet and Gertrude or Romeo and Juliet. What I want to know is what they have discovered within the text. And since the entire purpose of education is to encourage thought, I don't think I have unrealistic expectations.

The problem is that they are being encouraged in high school to tell me what they feel. To tell me that they agree with Machiavelli, or that they think Machiavelli is going to Hell. I. Don't. Care. Go right ahead and think it, but it does not belong in any serious treatment of the text. This isn't about what you "feel." Life does not care what you "feel." I don't care. The text doesn't care if it hurt your feelings or if you disagree with it.

The entire purpose of critical thinking, of interpretation, of analysis, is to find things that are intrinsic to the text. If you can link that to its contemporary history, great. If you want to link it to other historical, literary, philosophical, etc. circumstances, great. But don't tell me "I agree with Machiavelli that rulers need to be deceptive." Unless you, sir or madam student, are a political authority, historian, or literary giant, your opinion doesn't count. Show me that Machiavelli is jaded and bitter over the corruption of political office. Show me that he contradicts himself. Show me how idiots in office took him seriously without realizing that they're proving the very things he satirizes. But don't tell me you "agree" or - god forbid - that you don't think rulers can be deceptive anymore because of the internet. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a-whole-nother kettle of fish.

What really drives me crazy - in case you couldn't tell - is our society's penchant for wanting to make everyone's "feelings" important. I don't want to have to pussy-foot around an issue simply because it might "hurt someone's feelings" to have it addressed. I want to be able to say "it drives me crazy when everyone assumes I'm a lesbian" without worrying about offending lesbians. I mean no offense to lesbians. But I'm not one. It's just like saying "it drives me crazy when everyone assumes I'm a man." I'm just not, no matter what the guy who told me I look like Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie thinks.

Have your feelings, kids, but recognize that you'll be a whole heck of a lot better off if you learn that feelings aren't worth a damn (except, as I said, in social relationships). Because, boys and girls, no matter how much you "feel" that Hamlet shouldn't die or Romeo and Juliet was written to you personally, it just isn't true. Feelings can lie to us. They're unreliable, variable, and very often quite stupid. Yes, they can also be wonderful, life-changing, fabulous things. But they belong between you and your family, your friends, your lover. They do not, I repeat, do not belong in the world of facts and critical thought. Maybe I am, as a dear friend so often insists, "dead inside." But, please, relegate your feelings to their proper place and let your brain get a little more exercise.

On the Interpretation of...

We, as a species, often find ourselves in the position of interpreters. It is our nature to interpret - not simply on the most basic level of language, but on so many various sublevels. We read one another - body language, tone, expression, eyes. We interpret these extralinguistic cues on a daily basis - and we believe them, often more readily than we believe the language that accompanies them.

We are accomplished liars, but we are also accomplished interpreters. Often, we seek answers in places other than in language in our day-to-day interactions, reading things other than words.

And we reproduce these signs and symbols, both the linguistic and the extralinguistic, in art. Certainly, literature is the art of language. There is nothing more linguistically pure than literature (drama excepted - it gets its own category). It is composed entirely of words. Words that lie. Words that speak truth. Words that do both at once. Words that delve into the essence of human nature, rife with ambiguity and impossible layers. But these words so often invoke the other aspects of interpretation - descriptions of bodies, of voices, of colors, of all the sources of sensory input upon which we rely. All put into words. Limited. Exploded. Infinite.

No wonder we, as readers, are always interpreters. Even if unconsciously, we must interpret words on a page. Is this serious? Sarcastic? Sad? But, as interpreters, we also skew that which we choose to interpret. Stephen Leo Carr and Peggy A. Knapp write that as we interpret, "We make the text over, rewriting it in our own image so that it seems to anticipate and validate that image" (838).*

For so many, the act of interpretive reading - and all reading is interpretive, whether consciously done or not - is the act of assigning one's own value systems, one's own ideology, to the text. It is an act of penetration, of violation, that attempts to conform characters and themes to the familiar and, often, the agreeable. We grow disturbed by a text when we cannot force it to agree with our views. We choose to dislike it, labeling it as "bad," despite its probable virtues. This is a crime of which teachers are most often accused.

It is something we do not only to books, but to movies, to music, and to people. When a person does not conform to our desires for them, we dislike them.

I do not suppose that there is anything wrong with this. I dislike many things, and many people. But my dislike should not make them inherently "bad." While there are things that are inherently "bad" - murderers and Harlequin romances spring to mind - there are more that we simply dislike for their unwillingness to conform to our "image."

But, as has so often been said, variety is the spice of life. We would not like it - no matter how much we think we would - if everything in the world conformed to our "image." We might like it if everything were "good," we would still desire difference - or, in the Derridian sense, differance. We like conflict. We like the clashing of ideologies. What we do not like is their ultimate destruction.

So pause. Take a moment, the next time you dislike something, to determine whether it really is "bad," or whether it is simply an "image" in which you do not wish to see your own reflection.


*Carr, Stephen Leo and Peggy A. Knapp. "Seeing through Macbeth." Publications of the Modern Language Association 96.5 (1981): 837-847.