The Burthen of the Mystery 16 comments

By Kelly Foster

On my first night of class in doctoral school, our Literary Theory professor asked us to go around the table and introduce ourselves, including our favorite authors and our reasons for continuing our graduate studies in English. Coming from a fairly rigorous theoretical background, I began mentally to run through the answers I knew I was supposed to say—the more obscure and non-canonical, the better off my chances in the shark-infested waters of graduate school.

But before I could do so, an older student across the table unintentionally offered herself up as a scapegoat for us all and made the going much easier. Unlike the rest of us, she had been out of graduate school for many years, and was unaware of the ideological shift that had occurred in the intervening time.

She told us her name. She told us how long it had been since she had been in school. I have forgotten both. What I do remember was that as she began to give her list of favorite authors, we all watched in mute horror like we were watching a helpless victim in a slasher film go into THAT room—the one where the killer is waiting.

“You know, I like all the greats: Shakespeare, Dickens, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Joseph Conrad.”

We all started to look down at the table and shake our heads. Some people tried to make eye contact with her and then gave a slight jerk of the head to dissuade her. Some people mimed cutting gestures across their necks behind the professor’s back.

Then she said something that placed her utterly beyond the reach of our help, “I guess I just like literature because of the way it speaks to universal human experience.”

And then we all turned away, wincing, like we were watching Joe Theisman’s broken tibia pierce the skin and poke into the football field.

For those who have not studied English in a while or ever, saying phrases like “the greats” and then following that with a list of dead white European males is somewhat akin to saying, “I admire and respect Pat Robertson and am about to hand you a wordless bracelet. Also, I eat human babies.”

Needless to say, it was not a good night for the poor woman.

But it was an important night for me, and it began to display the cracks in the path I had chosen for myself. Because the problem was, I loved “the greats” too and forasmuch as the idea of “the Other” resonated with me, I still wasn’t sure I disputed the idea of universal human experience so terribly much. I, too, adored Shakespeare and Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot and had only become an English major because of that love. After several months, I began to just roll my eyes in the back of class as my fellow students played word games with the jargon of English grad school: hegemony + problematize + aestheticization + taxonomic = an insightful point.

Beyond that, I was a Christian, and “no vague believer” as Flannery O’Connor once wrote of herself. There was very little room for either my faith or my love for literature in doctoral school as I encountered it. The disintegration of my marriage coincided quite nicely with the end of my first semester, so I was able to leave school without too much hand-wringing. I turned in grades for my freshman comp class, walked out the door, and have rarely regretted ending my brief career as an English “almost” PhD.

I am pondering these things again because I am about to return to exclusively teaching literature for the first time in several years, and I believe it’s important to be straightforward and consistent with my students about my own critical stance, about the lenses through which I view literature.

But I’m having a hard time doing that. To some degree, I sympathize with New Critics as well as with Deconstructionists (a more thorough explication of either of these would require much more space). Because I think both were in their own ways trying to save language. Although the two are frequently contradictory, I suppose I will always straddle some middle ground between them.

Finally, I’d love it if students left my class better able to engage in the scholarly conversation around them. I’d love it if they became excellent critical thinkers. Ultimately, however, I want them to live more meaningful lives as a result of our reading and writing. Because that’s what English class should be. Because English class has saved and broadened my life more times than I can enumerate. Because sometimes I leave class with the feeling Dickinson once described that the top of my head is on fire. Because I can’t believe how sacred and insightful my students can be when I just shut up in the right way. Because when I was a depressive, lonely teenager in a hard, small town something in those writers I read spoke back to me.

Because in English class you can actually experience moments like this, just as I did at sixteen, sitting in a circle in a cinder-block classroom at Manchester Academy:

                            that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened....
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.