I like applying the word “voracious” to the way I read. I carry my current book with me everywhere. (My mother’s maxim was “Boredom waits in ambush—bring a book.”) Of course, the way I really like to read, like a literary kind of Baptismal total immersion, from first page to last, scarcely coming up for air, is not usually possible. I read over coffee in the morning, flirting dangerously with being late, on the subway, waiting in line, as part of closing my work day after I close the front door, and an essential ingredient in settling down for the night. So while I seldom get to devour a book whole, I do manage the kind of stealthy indulgence that tempts the would-be dieter. Through constant nibbling, I consume a lot.

I read about books too, since The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Literary Review of Canada are almost as much fun to read as the books they consider. And they are great sources. I came upon Helen Humphries through Philip Marchand’s review of her The Re-Invention of Love in the National Post. The Re-Invention of Love took its place in the pile on my bedside table, another talisman against the sound of time’s winged chariot. (“Wait, wait, I still have a lot to read!”) Because it was a book set in Paris, I brought it along with me when I went there over March break. Where I promptly devoured it.

The book is set under the shadow of that great genius and egotist, Victor Hugo, but it is not about him. The two who set about re-inventing love are Hugo’s wife, Adele, and Hugo’s erstwhile champion and friend, the critic Sainte-Beuve. They are reinventing love for a variety of complex reasons, presented with tremendous insight by Humphreys. Adele had married Hugo for love, only to discover the thanklessness of being a great artist’s muse and helpmeet. Hugo’s self-obsession and his boundless neediness are gradually suffocating Adele, and play at least some part in the tenuousness of their daughter’s hold on reality.

Sainte Beuve is a sensitive intellectual, who is not made for the sort of sexual conquest Hugo so relishes, not only temperamentally, but physically. He was born with the condition of hypospadia, a malformation of the urethra and the penis. His is very small, and split. He thinks of himself as a sort of hermaphrodite. So he and Adele have to reinvent the very act of love. And because Adele is a married woman who is very uncertain she wants to abandon her husband, her home, her family, her position, while Sainte-Beuve risks his career in alienating Hugo, they have to reinvent the whole game of courtship. They steal moments in the matrimonial home, send each other not only letters but secret signals, and meet in deserted churches, he dressed as a woman, “Charlotte”. And this confusion of dress and role is itself another reinvention. And of course, in writing about their love, its challenges and its subterfuges, Humphreys is reinventing the love story itself, counterpointing the very deep, if truncated, love affair of Sainte-Beuve and Adele with the doomed and crazy love of her daughter, also Adele, and the soldier she pursues though he has abandoned her, and clearly does not love her.

Humphreys is a masterful writer, a subtle ventriloquist, assuming the voice of Sainte-Beuve. She succeeds in making him loveable to the reader, though he is bitchy and prickly, constantly embroiling himself in literary and political quarrels, and even in actual duels. She has tenderness for Adele’s predicament, the impossibility of leaving a loveless, and ultimately a punishing, marriage because it offers her status and security, for a feckless lover, however devoted and adored. And she explores the tragedy of young Adele’s obsession and descent into madness with tact and understanding. (We all know about this tragic story from Truffaut’s operatic L’Histoire d’Adele H, which splayed Isabel Adjani’s haunted beauty and histrionic talent across the screen.) Humphreys’ version of that story is all the more moving because it is told so quietly.

Beyond the purely writerly pleasures of someone who can write with such elegance, and verisimilitude, The Re-Invention of Love offers all the best of the literary historical. Humphreys has done her homework. She knows what happened in each of the lives she takes up, she knows the geography of Paris and the Channel Islands, where Hugo transplants his family to share in his self-imposed exile. She knows the politics of the times, and the literary politics too, so well that she can incorporate them gracefully into her picture. The reader suffers none of the prosy explanatory passages that mar so many historical novels, where the writer feels obliged to break into Wikipedia mode on behalf of the imagined ignorance of her audience. Or the clumsy cooked conversations that exist only to give us background that must have been so familiar to the actual personages they never needed to talk about it. She resists the temptation to diddle with historical fact in order to streamline a narrative or allow herself a dramatic scene. And she never calls on the authority of history to justify an improbability or jarring revelation. If we suspend disbelief, it is in willing submission to her magic, not because we have been bludgeoned. When I talked about what makes a novel historical with my grade 11 English class, they were very clear that certain rules applied. The author may invent characters, conversations, situations and scenes, but only where history is silent, filling in the lacunae. Where facts are known, they must be respected. The reader should be able to trust the author: this is how it was. This is what we know. Otherwise, it’s just costume drama, historical romance. (They loved the term “bodice-ripper”.) The author has no business writing in an artifical style, trying to sound authentic by sprinkling dialogue with “naytheless” or “zounds” or trying to impress us by going into painstaking description of clothing or furniture or some other window-dressing. “Nobody thinks of their own stuff that way,” they protested. “You look at a curtain and you think, ‘the curtain’, not the ‘Golden-lily patterned heavy buckram fabric of the curtain, designed by the eminent British pre-Raphaelite, William Morris.’” (I hope you’re impressed. I certainly was.)

Humphreys is in such happy command of her knowledge, has so internalized it, that she moves through Hugo’s world like an intelligent and engaged tourist, seamlessly incorporating her extensive research into her observations of character and motive. With her words in my head, I went searching for Hugo’s Paris in the March sunshine, stopping to look at the locations she used, and seeing them with fresh eyes. She displays her historicism as any good novelist displays the pictures in her imagination. She transports us with her.

The Re-invention of Love is a literary historical because it’s also about literature, about the ideas that inform the writing of fiction. Of course, her antagonists are literary men, and very eminent ones, each representing a literary party, the creative artist versus the astute critic. There’s even cleverness in the Freudian play of their respective sexuality: the virile, predatory Hugo, the impotent, skittish Sainte-Beuve. The theme of disguise and gender fluidity is clever too, at once an element in the plot, a reality, and an exploration of the writer’s cultural and sexual appropriation. Here are men writing about women, dressing their consciousness up in woman’s clothing; women writing about men, and about ‘masculine’ subjects, dressing their sensibilities in trousers—George Sand is a minor but important character, and crazy Adele takes to cross-dressing. Humphreys probes the hermaphroditic artistic imagination. And as a woman writer in the twenty-first century, she feels the blocked potential of all the women in her book who are reduced to being hand-maidens, mistresses, the applauding audience for the literary achievements restricted to men. Even Sand is aware she is so exceptional for her time as to be almost an aberration. And then there’s room in the book, in the nuances of Sainte-Beuve’s meditations, his remembrance of conversation and event and dream, for meditation on the meaning of love itself. Here, without violating historical accuracy, she reaches forward to the deconstructionists and semioticians. Her Sainte-Beuve lays the groundwork for Derrida and Barthes. “All I have is this moment of waiting,” he says, “It is so simple and so pure.” His musings on the nature and meaning of love, of art, of criticism, of culture, are teasing, provocative, and brilliant. Really, it’s a very French book.

Marivaux

My theatre-buff friend Beatrice and I went to the Bluma Appel Theatre to see the CanStage production of “The Game of Love and Chance”. It’s an old play, from 1730, and such a classic of the French repertoire that its author, Pierre de Marivaux, gave his name to the style of speech of which he was the master, “marivaudage”, meaning flirtatious banter. In France, he’s a household word. His plays are always in production, they’re enshrined in the baccalaureat curriculum. But unlike the works of Moliere, that other grand homme of French comedy, they’re seldom seen on the English-language stage.

Enter Matthew Jocelyn, the Anglo-Canadian, French trained artistic director of CanStage. Jocelyn believes our city is ready for more sophisticated and challenging fare than we’re usually served: store-bought Broadway hits, reverent revivals of the sort of plays that make it to our high school curriculum, lyrical explorations of coming of age in Canada. CanStage used to give us a little from each of the three columns, but Jocelyn has other ideas.

Watching this manic, stylized, elegant presentation of Marivaux’s classic, I thought about the conversation playwright and director Nina Aquino had with my Dragon Academy students last week about conception and conformity. Aquino reminded us that theatre has its own peculiar magic, a sleight of hand in which the director and the audience collude. This power to astonish us, to make us see the world and ourselves in a new way, is dulled when we try to domesticate theatre, to bring it down to replication of the “real”, the mundane world. “I’ve been called a magic realist,” Aquino said. “There’s a place for kitchen-sink drama, for the kind of stage set where a character can actually wash the dishes in a functional sink, and the language and acting are toned down to the everyday. But I’d rather leave that to television. I’m really interested in doing what only the theatre can do.”

Of course the theatre, especially if it’s richly funded, can offer us spectacular effects. We can recreate the paneled interior of a gentlemen’s club, prompting the audience to burst into applause at the meticulous detail, the sheer architectural naturalism of it all. We can send chandeliers crashing, and superheroes flying through the air. But though theatrical, such technical achievements are not the province of the stage. Movies can part the Red Sea, or regenerate a mummy through computer graphics, or lead us through the foggy streets of 1890s London. The small screen (not so small, anymore, in this day of flatscreen television and home theatres) can self-referentially capture every lampshade and shade of lipstick from the late fifties. Tricking the eye, holding the mirror up to nature, are not what live theatre does best.

A Commedia troupe in performance

Theatre makes the audience work. We have to fill in the details from the attic of our imaginations. We have to get the underlying concept by actively engaging with the play. We have to draw the connections. The best directors know this, demand it. Marivaux was writing in a time, fifty years before the French Revolution, when the class structure seemed as natural and eternal as the Pyrenees. Part of the fun of the play is the game of disguise, the masters ineptly pretending to be servants, the servants making themselves ridiculous by putting on airs. Marivaux could count on his audience to enjoy ridiculing the pretensions of the servants, their clumsiness and ignorance. And perhaps he could only push his sympathy for these characters so far without being labeled seditious. In a modern, democratic context, two hundred years on from the French Revolution, we are not so smug about laughing at working people for their vulgarity.

The challenge for the director in mounting a new production of a classic is to allude to past traditions while carrying them forward, making them relevant to the present moment. The approach to this challenge which is most familiar is one of reverence, the loving recreation of historical set and costume. This can be a treat for the audience of course. We get a glimpse into the past, a taste of period. We are comfortable with it, because we know where we are. Those elements in old works which trouble us, traces of prejudice no longer acceptable to us, caricature, something stilted and dated, are smoothed over. We can feel modern, enlightened, progressive, while allowing ourselves to bathe in nostalgia. It’s soothing for the director too. Assuming the mask of the purist, the persona of the historiographer, the director feels like a connoisseur, an elite insider, generously sharing arcane knowledge with the audience. This is the way Marivaux is most often mounted: corsets and knee-breeches, gilded chairs and paneled rooms, and if the director is really showing off, masked and costumed like the Commedia dell’Arte figurines in the Gardiner’s collection.

But if it’s a classic, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why? What is the same, what is relevant? What still speaks to us now, in our own moment? Can’t we be double-sighted, aware of that relevance and critical of the unexamined assumptions of the past? From this perspective, the director’s task is to remake, to renew the classic, not just recreate it. This production offers us a modern stylization instead of a museum piece. It makes fun, with particular irony, of what is old-fashioned in the play, and of the blind self-love of the characters. It invites us to draw connections between their pretensions and obliviousness and our own, to laugh at their posturing, and know it mirrors ours. With wonderful subtlety, the set itself makes the point. It begins as a flat rendering of an interior, a single red bench against a white wall with sketches of doors. The doors turn out to be functional. There is much coming and going. The flat walls fly upwards, and a mirrored box of a room unfolds. The actors themselves play confusion between their real and reflected selves, mirroring the disguises which mirror how they see themselves, how they see those they have disguised as themselves. A chandelier descends, literalising the light that goes on as each character in turn realizes the layers of deception. At the end, order apparently restored, each person owning his or her “true” identity, the flat white wall descends again.

Despite what you may have read in Richard Ouzounian’s crabby and surprisingly obtuse review, this production was hilarious, rich with that slapstick pleasure of surprise and tense expectancy. We waited for the wrong person to burst through the doors (heralded by an ominous chord), or Zach Fraser’s unending succession of candy wrappers to fall, just as we wait for someone to slip on that banana peel. It was uninhibited—the actors translated traditional Commedia movement into ridiculous postures, contortions, madcap movements. It was touching. Under her scratchy little girl’s voice, Gemma James-Smith suggested a poignant longing for a better life, and made us feel the working girl’s tough realism as she accepted her disappointment. Was Gil Garratt’s Arlecchino really a buffoon? Or was he cynically portraying the master he so resented as the fool? It was political—though they are the hero and the heroine, the couple we want to see pair off, Trish Lindstrom and Harry Judge did not soft-pedal the less lovely side of class, the assumption of the wealthy that they are entitled to their privilege, that even in disguise they have the right to abuse and command. It was rueful and pointed. Doing nothing but standing for a moment in the doorway, Bill Webster as Monsieur Organ gave us pause, silencing an audience eager to clap and show its pleasure. How happy is an ending when everyone has constructed their identities and their relationships on lies? You should go and see this theatrical treat for yourself– it was scrumptious, visually, and intellectually.

I’d start with the word itself. Structure, both as a verb and as a noun, comes of course from the Latin verb struere, to build. So the first, that is, the most common, meaning of the word is “the action, practice or process of building.” (I’m quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary.) Structure can also describe the manner of building, the way in which an edifice is put together, the mutual relation of its constituent parts, and the co-existence in a whole of distinct parts, having a definite manner of arrangement. It’s only with the fifth definition, “that which is built, especially a pile of building of some considerable size and imposing appearance” that we even reach something approximating to what people think they are looking for in the organization of a school, and lurking in that definition is the problem. The imposing appearance is mistaken for the effective process.

An educated person has mastered a considerable body of knowledge, but it is a mistake to confuse the easy display of erudition with a completed structure. It is a mistake to think that at a certain point, marked with a diploma as the completion of a public building is marked with cutting a ribbon, an education is finished. The truly educated person knows that she is never finished with learning. What she has learned is not only a pile of facts and ideas, or even a set of dazzling skills, it is the infinite variety and interest of the world. She has understood her own hunger to know, and how it can be satisfied, and then aroused anew. She has learned that she is possessed of a mind, a living, growing capacity for curiosity, discovery and understanding. She has become an intrepid intellectual explorer.

What are you building, both as a student and as an educator? Maybe the metaphor of a building is misleading. Maybe we should focus less on the arrangement of the bricks and mortar, and more on the skills, tools, and aspirations of the building trades. Because both the student and the teacher are constructing education, not entering a building, or leaving it.

Unfortunately, many schools, and many educators, confuse the bricks, the curriculum content, the assessment of achievement, with education. Take the “three r’s”—reading, writing and arithmetic—as examples. Obviously, these are three key things we need to learn how to do. The assumption is that you learn them in primary school, and then use them to learn more complex facts and ideas. But in fact, simple decoding, knowing how to read, or simple notation, knowing how to write, or simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are just the beginning. I have a doctorate in English Literature, surely an imposing edifice, but my education is not complete. I am still learning how to read, moving from decoding to ever more subtle understanding of text. I am still learning how to write, how to use words to capture and communicate ever more complex ideas with greater precision, economy and elegance. I am still learning to understand numbers, what they can tell us of what is, how they influence our decisions, how they can be manipulated or rigged, how they can be better interpreted.

Similarly, it is all too easy to confuse the material of educational delivery with education. Bells and timetables, marks and detentions, the proliferation of rules and regulation, certainly demonstrate many things, but do they in fact educate? They are only mortar. They hold the school population in straight lines. I’m not suggesting that an excellent school should be a chaotic environment, in which students come and go whenever they feel like it, and study what they like, or not study what they don’t. But you don’t learn to be a good student in any profound or meaningful sense by learning to rely on and follow the rules, or the bells. What you learn from such compliant following is to be obedient, which is to say passive. You are not educated, you are turning yourself into a brick, neatly holding the place given it. Discipline is an internal quality. You acquire it because you understand its value, you exercise it by an act of will. Slathering it on the student to hold him in the desired place is like slathering mortar on bricks. With time it will crumble, the structure will decay. In situations where the external bond is lifted (university, the workplace, real life), someone who has been taught to be dependent on external “discipline” becomes unglued. And frankly, the person who is resistant to discipline is not going to become disciplined because you “discipline” him, that is punish him for failure. At best, he will become compliant, yielding to your discipline, at worst, rebellious and self-destructive.

If we reject an educational model whose structure is external, fixed, material, what should be put in its place? You can in fact structure both teaching and the day to day running of a school to promote skill in wielding the tools of learning, and the internalization of discipline. What are the elements of this structure? Using the metaphor of building, the activity not the monument, recall that many people contribute to the process, calling on their particular strengths and knowledge.

The teachers and administrators of a constructive school are the architects of the program. They determine the best way to meet goals, they draw up the plans, from the details of a day’s individual lesson to the overall elevation of the program, putting support structure in place and drawing connections between each part, integrating the whole of what is studied, how it is studied, what is expected. And like good architects, they know these plans have to be shared, discussed, embraced by everyone involved. This is a far cry from the textbook-centred approach. Of course, if you simply follow, and force your students to follow, textbooks, you will have a certain kind of structure and predictability. You can determine that on a certain day, your students will be covering the material on a certain page. But predictability is inimical to exploration, and to discovery. And it breeds timidity, not confident skill. Is this the right answer? Will that be on the test?

Both teachers and students are in fact like workers in the trades. They have different levels of experience, skill and knowledge, but they do have natural and acquired strengths. A math teacher who loves math will inspire her students to effort, enlist the support of those who have a bent for the subject, and instill confidence in those students who find it a bit of a struggle. A young woman enthusiastically sharing her pleasure in and mastery of math will do more to overturn her students’ assumption that math is a masculine field than any number of programs “structured” to lure timid girls into taking higher level math. The skilled teacher will show her students how to do it, why it’s worth doing, how to help other students share their success.

There is another secret of structuring education. Teachers have to build strong, caring, mentoring relationships with each individual student. You just can’t do this if you have too many students, if your classes are too large, or the pace at which you move through the curriculum material is set too rigidly. The model that looks like a structure, students arranged tidily in rows, facing front, armed with their textbooks, is a way to keep order (mortar again, rows of bricks). But it discourages all the activities that build strong bonds between teachers and students. It intimidates many students from asking questions, raising objections, venturing an opinion. Think about it. How lively would a dinner party be if the guests all sat in rows facing the host, with the various dishes served according to a timetable? And a dinner party is the real model for a constructive classroom—like Plato’s Symposium. Everyone is facing each other, there are not so many guests that anyone is excluded from the conversation, and everyone is occupied in sharing the delights of the feast. Planners and architects, graduate professors, and the executives of large corporations know this. They meet in reasonable numbers, addressing an agenda not a fixed lesson, around a boardroom table. Everyone has a place, and a voice. The leader facilitates, not dictates.

The other part of fostering dialogue, and hence relationship, occurs outside the classroom. Here too we can structure opportunity or lock everyone into a structure. If the school is small, friendly, informal, if the teachers (and the principal!) along with the other students, whether older or younger, are approachable, learning continues outside the class, and everyone within the school feels connected. Everyone feels at home in school. The conventional structure segregates teachers and students, segregates students from anyone not in their grade or even their stream, distances everyone else from the administration. The apparent discipline is the discipline of the parade ground, not the much noisier discipline of intimacy and community.

But what about structure to prevent misbehaviour? I think such punitive structure only drives problems underground, and relieves the individual of responsibility. If you have to come to class on time (the bell rang) because you will get a detention otherwise, you may learn to be there on time in body but not in spirit. Or you may skip class and provide excuses. You won’t learn to want to be on time. But if, when you are late, you miss interesting discussion, disrupt your colleagues, disrespect a teacher with whom you have a bond, you will feel bad about being late. You’ll try not to. If you feel connected to everyone in the school, you will step up to mediate disagreements, to prevent bullying, to do what needs to be done. Going to a teacher or an administrator with a problem doesn’t feel like snitching, or poking your nose where it doesn’t belong, it feels like getting help. There is a purposefulness about just being in school which is different from the perhaps more orderly purpose of following the rules, or even testing them.

If we structure a school through discussion and relationship, through the exploration of thought and knowledge, we create a space of safety, inclusion, discovery, a place where there is room for mistakes and recovery, a medium for limitless growth. Each person who enters such a school has a personal experience of learning. A great school doesn’t hand out “education”, but engages everyone in it, teachers and students, in the adventure of learning. An education is not a completed pile, however imposing. An education is a practice or process of building. It is an action in which you are passionately engaged as long as you are breathing.

I understood Brian’s problem. As an undergraduate in the English Literature program at Trinity College, I had been required to take at least two philosophy courses. My first choice was “Philosophers of the Enlightenment”, a senior level course taught by a Great Eminence, drawing on readings from Bishop Berkeley, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Spinoza and Voltaire. Like my classmates, and my professor, all male. I took copious notes, tried to maintain a humble openness, did all my readings, duly wrote papers on immaterialism and social contract theory, and managed to memorise enough of what my professor had said to do well on the final exam. But the reading nearly did me in. It wasn’t just the long, Latinate, periodic sentences. In my literature classes, I was reading Milton’s prose with passionate attention. It wasn’t just that I was irritated by ideas I found politically repugnant. If I rejected unlimited accumulation of wealth as immoral, it didn’t keep me from admiring novels whose heroes were aristocrats. But it was such drudgery to get through many of the readings, picking argument out of a tangle of dependent clauses, struggling to understand the specific and technical meanings of words that teased my understanding by looking like perfectly ordinary terms whose meaning I thought I knew. Kant was the worst. It didn’t seem to matter if I sat down with the Critique of Pure Reason in the bright light of morning, fortified by a good night’s sleep and with a double espresso at my elbow, I found myself nodding by the end of the first, seemingly endless, paragraph. I read the same passages over and over again without comprehension. It was as baffling to read in English translation as it would have been in Czech.

Rousseau

In class, my august professor teased out the key concepts, wrote them with a firm hand on the green chalk board. In his explication, it all made wonderful sense. Time and space were intellectual constructs, ways in which the human brain maps sensory input, understands it. Our professor wove enlightening connections between the readings, linked Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the modern Western conception of self, to Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum”, the idea that our fundamental self is a thinking being, to Berkeley’s skepticism about the material qualities, the unchanging factuality, of the things we perceive, to Spinoza’s One Reality, and Rousseau’s general will. I still have those notes, in old-fashioned hard-cover leatherette notebooks, the pages yellowing and brittle now. When, in our yearly debate over who would teach what, I lost the arm-wrestling over English 12, and took the consolation of philosophy, I turned back to those notes with the thought that I would organize my own introduction to philosophy along the lines that my professor had organized his. This was an idea I soon abandoned. First of all, I just couldn’t bear the thought of introducing the big questions to my trusting students by offering them a selection of excerpts from the philosophers’ hit parade. I didn’t want to teach works that I had not exactly loved, deeply grasped or re-read since. And I wanted to be honest about my biases and limitations. I didn’t want them to mistake me for a philosopher or even someone very learned in the field. So I warned them I was choosing idiosyncratically. I’ve mixed in liberal amounts of history, anthropology, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, and yes, literary criticism. I tried to share things that I loved reading and thinking about.

They have been very patient, and wonderfully engaged. The discussions are exciting, personal, insightful and wide-ranging. Being adolescents, their understanding is nicely grounded in their own experience of the world. And some of the readings have been great successes: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Dewey’s Democracy and Education, Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Sometimes there’s eye-rolling and snorting. Sometimes I have only one or two allies in my enthusiasm—I think Gabe and Ben and I were the only ones having a good time with Barthes. And with Butler, there’s been a deep level of engagement with the ideas, and an encouraging embrace of feminism (thank you, Olivia), but no one argued with Brian’s evaluation of her literary charms.

What makes some philosophers so hard to read? Density of course, the attempt to deal comprehensively with the details of very complex ideas, can be very daunting. Each sentence has to be read multiple times, the strands carefully separated. Then there is technical language. I tried to explain to my students the truism that philosophers seek precision in words, carefully distinguishing a very specific meaning from the multiplicity of significances and echoes that words carry. But even as I explain this, I am reminded of the ever-sceptical Alice, in argument with Humpty Dumpty. She was objecting to the language of the poem Jabberwocky, pointing out that it was full of made-up words. Humpty Dumpty corrects her, rather superciliously, “You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.” In an effort at precision, the speaker combines parts of two words, both of which convey only part of the meaning, into a new word, like a coat folded into a suitcase. Alice is not convinced.
“’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more not less.’
“The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’”

My students seemed to agree with Alice that this was all most unsatisfactory. They were not convinced either when I tried to argue that while philosophical ideas might inform literature, philosophical argument demanded philosophical writing. Some of them, fresh from reading Paradise Lost in English class, pointed out that Milton makes the argument for free will, and raises the counter-argument too, better in his poem than it could be made in a philosophical essay because instead of trying to pin down words, forcing them to mean just what the philosopher chooses it to mean, he lets them resonate with all the images, allusions, complexities that words have. I waved the white flag.

But days later, I think of examples of philosophers who have the writerly virtues, who revel in the resonance of language, who enliven argument with examples, poetry, even people. Wait a minute, I want to say. Plato wrote dialogues, didn’t he? Socrates, Alcibiades, Aristophanes are presented to us the way a novelist presents characters. Many philosophers reveal themselves, talk directly, freshly and charmingly to us, like Barthes or Irigaray, engage us on a personal level, like a clever friend in a late night conversation. Like Wollstonecraft and Nietzsche, they are passionate, persuasive, not coldly rational at all. Like Voltaire or Kristeva, they are sly, sardonic, charismatic. I suppose I have been selecting philosophers by exacting literary as well as purely intellectual standards. Why didn’t I just ‘fess up? If there is some kind of afterlife, I really would love to find myself at a well-laid dinner table, sitting right next to Michel de Montaigne. It is he, of course, who explained the concept of l’esprit de l’escalier, that strange stumbling faculty of human intelligence that makes us come up with the perfect explanation only after the guest has departed, and we are mounting the stairs towards bed.

Montaigne

I wasn’t driven, as I sometimes am when I discover a writer, or discover at long last what all the fuss is about, to gathering and reading every one of his books one after the other. A year passed, and Phillips’ Angelica crossed my path. In this book, a sort of Victorian ghost story, artfully invoking James’ The Turn of the Screw and Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the same story is told by four different narrators, all biased witnesses, each throwing the others’ accounts into doubt. A book of very different tone, eerie, lyrical, dark, evoking a very different era, it is less a ghost story than an exploration of the specters that haunt our subconscious, the uncertainty of memory, the construction of self. Very psychoanalytical, with a delicate allusion to that fact (one of the narrators is in fact talking to her therapist).

Then, just a few months ago, the great Shakespeare authority and literary critic Stephen Greenblatt gave Phillips’ latest novel, The Tragedy of Arthur (a putative lost Shakespeare play, a kind of poisoned inheritance bequeathed the innocent children of a trickster), a rave review. The novel includes the entire text of the “rediscovered” play, and lots of other literary fun and games.

Now I’m of the party of his admirers, and have acquired his two other novels, and am at present a little overtired because I stayed up until the wee hours last night finishing his first book, Prague. Which is not set in that city, but in Budapest just after the withdrawal of its Soviet masters, and revolves around a crew of young North American expatiates hoping to find their own version of Paris in the twenties. As Phillips follows their dreams and exploits, he weaves in generous dollops of Hungarian history, and the beautiful, poignant stories of two Hungarian survivors of the pre-war generation, who befriend, intrigue, and puzzle the young protagonists.

Phillips, then, defies the accepted wisdom of writerly consistency. In setting, both of time and place, in narrative structure, in genre, in style and tone, each of his novels is quite distinct. In the ordinary course of events, the readers of marked taste, the market for ghost stories, or tales of mummies, or coming of age narratives, or literary ventriloquism, or lyrical explorations of love and loss (The Song Is You, my next Phillips read) are not the same people. You could argue that Phillips is writing for readers who share his eclectic interests, of whom I am an example (a Ph.D. in Renaissance English Literature who has never quite recovered from reading Jane Eyre at an impressionable age, obsessed with Paris in the twenties, the romance of Egyptology, finds the supernatural metaphorically alluring, and psychoanalysis the key to the door of dreams, and thinks the bildungsroman is the ur-form of fiction). Or you could argue that Phillips is a just a gonzo talent, in love with the process and potential of fiction without respect for the boundaries of genre, who doesn’t see any reason to stick to one style, or form, or subject if he doesn’t feel like it.

In this he shares the boundless energy of Pynchon or Mailer. His imagination once seized, he’s off, racing down the page. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, Prague is at times hilarious, full of outrageous verbal hijinks, mimicry, slapstick scenes, crazy games (Phillips’ “Sincerity” is every bit as hysterically funny as Pynchon’s “English Candy Drill”, and just as slyly reveals cultural assumptions, skewering both personal and national vanity). Without ever slowing its pace, or preaching to the reader, Phillips deepens his narrative with considerable academic knowledge. Critical theory and post-structuralist explorations of nostalgia support the influence of nostalgia on his characters. Hungarian and American history explain the cultures clashing in the Gerbeaud coffee house and the A Hazam night club. Political analysis of the events of 1989 through 1991 situates the opportunities, attitudes and actions of his characters. Like Mailer, Phillips has a clear political perspective, a certainty that he is right. He pulls no punches, and includes the reader in his catalogue of human vanities. Eschewing, like Mailer, the easy stoop to sentimental manipulation, Phillips renders loss and misunderstanding poignant and believable. He has been there, you are convinced, he has seen and done these things, brave and foolish.

Phillips is also possessed of, perhaps possessed by, a wild and vivid imagination, and he lavishes it on incidental detail, minor characters, settings briefly glimpsed but lovingly detailed. Every costume at the American ambassador’s Halloween Party, an event entirely opaque to the Hungarian guests, is painted for us.

“Now she was talking to a man whom John did not know, but could identify—from his haircut and bulk—as an embassy marine, despite his sparse Tarzanian wardrobe of a fake leopard-skin bikini bottom, loin cloth, and shoulder strap.”

Every story spun by the irresistible Nadja, a seventy-year old Hungarian jazz pianist, is given room to be told in full, and in her own special way with the English language. Phillips has time, energy, words to conjure the adoring assistant to Imre Horvath, mark and hero of brash American venture capitalists, the abandoned mop that stands in the corner of a hospital room, the woman washing the stairs, Nicky’s photocollages, the listless sex act of a Hungarian reconception of a Las Vegas nightclub, the posters on the wall of A Hazam, “framed photographs of various Soviet and East Bloc leadrs, all autographed to Tamas, though in Hungarian and with the same thick black pen and the same hand. ‘Big Tamas,’ read the Hungarian description on Stalin’s photograph, ‘I will never forget that time with the three Polish girls! You are the best! Joe.’”

Phillips’ descriptions are evocative of emotional truths too, the dreary interior of a government issue apartment which one of the American young men illegally sublets from an anti-Semitic Hungarian in full-throttle senile dementia, the faded glories of a once impossibly chic restaurant, the chaos of an artist’s studio, his views of Budapest, from both sides of the river, through café windows and car windows and the aerial viewpoint from the cable car, from its various bridges and squares.

Phillips makes mincemeat of so many of the maxims of Creative Writing Programs. (He is not a product of any such program, but studied history at Harvard and jazz saxophone at Berklee College of Music.) Write what you know. Choose carefully what you will set before the reader. Show only the tip of the iceberg. Don’t try to show off, or strain after cleverness. Don’t clutter your narrative with too many characters, or too many excursions or irrelevancies. Don’t mock your characters. Don’t mock your readers. His wild energy, his sheer pleasure in writing, his assurance that you will love reading, make such rules seem timid and precious. What generosity. What a great read.

I know you’re going to find this hard to imagine, but Theodore Draper’s The Roots of Communism has a real tease in its Foreword. Professor Draper promises that his book will be the first in a series of studies that will attempt to assess the influence of communism in American life. Ha! Some of the promised studies never got past the stage of accumulating notes (how I wish Daniel Bell had actually written about Labor, or Moshe Decter about Mass Media). Some of them morphed into other subjects, as in the hands of John Roche. And some writers must have irritated Mr. Draper past all bearing, as none of their printed titles bear even a remote resemblance to the topics he so confidently announced they would be addressing (William Goldsmith). I am thankful to report, however, that Daniel Aaron duly published his splendid Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, and I have just finished reading it. Just because I love fiction, reading it, writing it, sharing it, writing about it, don’t assume I don’t read non-fiction. I love research, too.

Michael Gold speaks out

The research in question is background for the novel I’m writing, Acrobats of God, which is about a group of young, passionate, artistic radicals in New York City in the decade between the Great Crash and Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Which is also the territory of Writers on the Left. Aaron’s writers are a collection of committed Communists, Trotskyists, fellow travelers, and political flirts; some of them are literary lions (Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Dos Passos), some of them have drifted into the literary-historical backwater (Floyd Dell, Michael Gold, Max Eastman, Meridel LeSueur, Malcolm Cowley, Claude McKay), and some of them are all but forgotten (Isidore Schneider, Alvah Bessie, Joseph Freeman, Randolph Bourne). Aaron addresses the vexed issue of Soviet control and Party line, the rise and fall of leftist literary magazines (the old Masses, The New Masses, Partisan Review, The Liberator), the vicious infighting of the “United Front”, the glamour of big names, the struggle for individual intellectual freedom and open debate, the lure of bohemianism, the sharp turn to the right of the disillusioned, the real legacy of the literary left.

Aaron’s book sits with a big pile on my writing desk. Beside the desk there is an Ikea Billy bookcase full of other related titles. I have memoirs and biographies and novels and collections of essays by all the persons named above, and many more beside. I have histories of the Spanish Civil War, of dance in the thirties (the three young women at the centre of my novel are all dancers), of the Communist Party in the USA, of the labor movement. Many of these books are used, some rare, and the bindings are comfortingly familiar. These are the books my parents used to have, and that I somehow avoided reading when I was young, still living at home, and could have discussed the books, the ideas, the times with two remarkable people who had lived through them. Now I feel a little like the child of immigrants, who resisted learning her parents’ mother tongue, churlishly insisting on answering in English, and is now, painfully, taking night classes.

They were great readers, my parents, and they were always passing me books, many of which were definitely “proletarian novels”. I loved Dell’s Mooncalf, London’s The Iron Heel, Voynich’s The Gadfly, Gold’s Jews Without Money. But I had my own agenda. I was busy discovering the art of writing. I preferred Fitzgerald to Hemingway. I could tell that Austen’s Persuasion was better written than Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. I was more interested in the artistic experiments of the revolutionary artists than in their politics, the construction of self, a radical personal freedom. Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Beckett made the personal political. I was excited by writing Mike Gold would have called decadent, a product of bourgeois individualism.

When I went off to college, I chose literature over politics. I was not apolitical; I marched and protested and occupied and passed out leaflets, and argued late into the night. Like everyone of my generation, I played a little guitar, and I didn’t just sing old Scots border ballads in imitation of Joan Baez, or harmonise on the chorus of “We Shall Overcome”. I knew every one of the Songs of Work and Freedom in Glazer’s and Fowke’s collection, and I was certainly what my father called me, a lyrical leftist. But I was also constructing myself as a humanist, a scholar, an intellectual, and a would-be bohemian. Without realizing it, I was reproducing in myself the tug of war Aaron so astutely describes, drawn to the lofty elitism of art for art’s sake, but recognizing the strength of what Edmund Wilson called the irrational impulse, the truth to life, that was too unpolished and political to be pure, but which, denied, “shut off the arts at their source.”

There was something a little darker going on than I then realized. Child of the working class, of the Old Left, I was enchanted with the manners, the tastes, the refinements of the world I had entered. The boys I dated, the professors who inspired me, lived by “leisure-class values.” I didn’t see it then, but I put myself to school, imitating and absorbing their habits, rather like Colette’s Gigi under the tutelage of her Aunt Alicia, mastering an effortless and graceful display of connoisseurship. I am not derogating the acquisition of culture. This study, this knowledge, have been a deep and abiding source of pleasure. But something else was also there, a political certainty, the impossibility of turning my back on the things of the world that so need changing, and will not be changed by a glass of wine, however beautiful its colour and perfume, or a novel however gorgeously written.

The activism of my parents was strong, brave, and admirable. I do not think I could follow in their footsteps, make a difference in the world in the way they did. I am certainly not temperamentally suited to party discipline, or ready to abnegate my private literary and artistic pleasures. But my parents’ understanding of the world is there in me. I began to want to understand them, what they had seen and read and done, the experiences which framed their activism. Researching the world of the radical 1930s is also a process of uncovering my roots, of seeing them plain. Suddenly those familiar books I had bypassed in favour of the purely literary began to speak to me.

Aaron’s book lays out the idealism, the proper rage at social injustice, the hunger for activism that moved so many of the best writers of that era as they moved my parents. Writers on the Left is also revelatory because it lays out the contradictions and doubts that plagued the writers of good politics. The domineering orthodoxy that marred the political left, what Wilson, that clear-eyed fellow traveler, called “trying to gauge the value of works of art on the basis of their literal conformity to a body of fixed dogma.” The painful conflict between the individual and the collective good, the difficulty of constructing a utopia that is strong and flexible enough to tolerate dissent, the variety of choices writers made, Aaron analyses and illustrates with clarity and sympathetic fairness. He is also a fine writer. He makes sense of the appeal of communism to the intellectual and the artist, and sense of the ways in which it failed. He gave me a new respect for those who joined the Party with such fervour, and left it with such regret, forsaking the program, but not the vision.

Walt Kelly’s wonderful cartoon strip Pogo had an episode in which Ally the Alligator hooked up a “bellyphone” that allowed him to communicate with those in the great beyond. Ally was particularly, and perhaps salaciously, interested in contacting Cleopatra, but I wish I could lift up a big old black receiver, and talk to my folks. I get it now.

Reading itself, to the aficionado, is magic. “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away,” Robert Louis Stevenson said in his Child’s Garden of Verses. This kind of magic, of course, resides more effectively in great novels than it does in, say, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. There is an even greater magical pleasure in books that take magic for their subject, where magic is freed from the taint of the incredible, the hallucinatory, the surreal, and treated as matter of fact. It may be a slightly guilty pleasure. Magic, after all, is not a serious subject for grown-up intellectuals. It is hardly an issue in the real world. We know better than to believe in it. We have left it behind with the Tooth Fairy. Of course, we accept that children’s books may deal in magic. Children, after all, still have teeth to be left under the pillow. And unless our religious beliefs confuse us about the moral value of magic, we offer children’s authors free range for flights of fancy. Moles and Rats dress like English country clerics, Hobbits go on adventures, Alice slips through the looking glass or down the rabbit hole, Harry Potter goes to a prep school for wizards, and singing dragons and talking polar bears carry intrepid child-heroes off to battle the forces of evil. When magic is entertained in adult fiction, it brings the taint of the “young adult”, from which sex scenes are no longer enough to save the author, or sends it to the genre section of the bookstore, the haunt of readers who have a favourite type.

Of course, gritty realism itself is no guarantee of literary quality (there’s a genre for that too, hard-boiled and bursting with violence). And the ever-whimsical South Americans, with their highly developed capacities for post-colonial play, introduced a strand of “magic realism” into literary fiction, heroines with green hair and second sight, whose cooking produces fugue states. And I had better warn you that the imaginative freedom of those novels charmed me. Indeed, in the interest of full disclosure, I had better admit at once that I find the labels of adult and child difficult to attach to fiction. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. Thank you, Mr. Wilde. I could invoke a week of delicious surrender to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or tell you that it was just as wonderful to read The Hobbit out loud to my children as it was to read it to myself as a child. I regularly teach Carroll’s Alice books, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to serious students of English Literature.

I admit a touch of nervousness about taking up Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. Too much hype perhaps, trying to grab the golden goose of Harry Potter or the Twilight series. Which I have also had to read, because, after all, I teach adolescents. But while I was perfectly happy to suspend my disbelief in order to attend Hogwarts, or admit that glittering teenaged vampires might have their own sort of angst, comparisons with Rowlings and Meyers are not recommendations for me. These books are badly written, Meyers’ egregiously so. Ms. Morgenstern, in contrast, is a true magician. I need not have worried.

In case you’ve been living in a cave in the Outer Hebrides, The Night Circus concerns two young magicians, pawns in the “game” of rivalry played out by their respective masters, whose every move creates another level of illusion in a marvelous, mysterious circus. The general public takes these for sleight of hand, clever tricks, but the reader knows the magic is real. With the kind of inevitability which means an author has gotten it right, the two young contestants fall in love, perform for instead of against each other, and at last find a way to outwit the game, free the circus into reality, and realize their love. This brief account of the plot and its premises sounds like fun, but doesn’t begin to give you a sense of the subtlety and complexity of Morgenstern’s imaginative construction, or the magic of her writing.

The first kind of magic Morgenstern commands is the magic of youth. Why do I know from the book itself and only that she is young? It is filled with the exuberant energy of the young writer. She is willing to experiment, to throw caution to the winds. She travels freely and fearlessly in time and space, wherever her imagination takes her. She is at play. She lingers when an idea captures her, flies over what fails to engage. She imagines a wonderful clock that stands at the entrance of the circus, counting off the hours until it opens. She can see this marvel in her mind’s eye, and she indulges in a leisurely description, until it is as real for us as it for her. The intricacy and artistry of the clock suggest that Thiessen the clockmaker, too, is remarkable, and he becomes a character who is both within the story, a critical gear in the plot, and without, an observer whose musings on the Circus are shared with us, as they are shared with the reveurs, the group of loyal followers he spearheads. As for the backstory of the master magicians, the spectral Mr. A. H. and the flamboyant Hector Bowen, it clearly doesn’t arrest Morgenstern’s imagination. They simply are and were there, one of the many facts of this magical world. The wise reader simply surrenders, relinquishes questions the author does not care to answer, and allows herself to be swept up and carried on. There is an emotional energy which is youthful and magical. Love happens in an instant, experience is revelatory, the quick intuitions and observations reflect the sharp eyes and unerring reflexes of youth.

Then there is the magic of language. Morgenstern is poetic, not in the sort of ghastly, overwritten deep purple style that many would-be poetic writers indulge. She commands rhythmic flexibility, metaphorical and symbolic elevation (think of dancers who can leap straight into the air). And she does so gracefully, so masterfully, that you are not conscious of the mechanism, not distracted by seeing how she does it. Nor does she overreach, so eager to achieve originality that she misses the mark. The story is set in the late nineteenth century, the world of Wilde and Stevenson. Morgenstern does not overdo the London fog. Her characters speak with a courtly formality that carries the fragrance of the period without teetering into pastiche. The reader says yes, of course. The reader laughs out loud in pleasure. The reader is frankly relieved to travel in a closed compartment with a writer who can write, and is not ashamed to do so, who revels in her bravura performance.

There is visual magic too, which is not surprising, as Morgenstern is also a visual artist. What she paints with words is a world as vivid as dream, appropriately, since she has seen every detail of the Cirque des Reves. The black and white striped tents, the ice garden and the cloud-labyrinth, enticing the circus visitor to enter and explore, the wild luxury of Chandresh’s London apartment (Chandresh is the Circus’ financial backer), the transformations of the illusionists are described so pictorially that we see them too, the words transform into mental images.

“…she picks up her jacket from the stage, and flings it out over the seats where, instead of tumbling down, it swoops up, folding into itself. In the blink of an eye folds of silk are glossy black feather, are beating wings, and it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when it is fully raven and o longer cloth.”

And cry out, in turn, to be transformed into filmic images. You want to sit in a darkened theatre, exclaiming over the magic of the special effects. But Morgenstern’s visual magic, her illusionist’s skill, is so strong that they don’t have to make the film (although you know they will). Having read the book, it’s as if you had seen it already.

And then there is the magic of the story itself. There is pain, loss, abandonment, hard bargains and a steep price, but you want to follow every twist and turn, trusting the author. She will not leave you unsatisfied, or despairing. There will be a way for things to work out, for hope to flutter from the chest, you will arrive at the wished-for destination, the goal that lured you into the journey in the first place. The Night Circus works its illusions on the reader. You believe, you are happy, you applaud.

“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Reves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”

Most of us, teaching, have severe limitations on how much we can know about our students, and how much we can do about the things that worry us. These limitations are purely practical—how much time does any teacher have, facing some thirty kids in a course, and responsible for perhaps five or six courses? Others are political—in a litigious climate, boundaries are tight and inflexible. There is real worry about the risks of becoming over-involved, too unprofessional. In such large classes, in such a regulated atmosphere, you do what you can for the kids you see slipping through the cracks, but there is much you can’t do, and even more you can’t know. When the whole school population is hardly as large as two conventional classes, however, you see more, you know more, and you take on a much stronger sense of connection. And with that, a stronger sense of responsibility.

What are the problems we see and fret over? The usual academic signs that something is troubling a kid: lateness and poor attendance, poor performance on assignments and tests, failure to turn in work. Or the more personal signs: poor eating patterns, bad habits, bad company, bad choices. And of course the signs that mark the long term project kids: disorganisation, anxiety, failure of empathy. The ordinary toolkit seems remarkably inept. Can I motivate a child to study for a test, or come to class on time, or catch up with homework by assigning detentions? Call a frustrated parent to the rescue with poor grades and negative report card comments? If I know that Jason’s diet consists of oversized sodas, chips and doughnuts, that Mitzi is smoking at the corner during breaks, that Torek is missing morning classes because he’s up all night playing Warcraft, or Chan and Arthur are smoking up in the park before heading for the subway, is this extracurricular? Not my problem? Not my business? Can I help a child learn the method and value of keeping decent notes, reassure a child who develops a stomach ache on school days, or learn to put herself in someone else’s shoes by shooting off brisk reminders to her mother or entering “unsatisfactory” next to the learning skills categories on her report card?

When we raise such issues in our staff meetings, and struggle to find effective and often innovative ways to address them, it occurs to us that perhaps we have a “special” population of students. Why, after all, would parents elect to pay hefty tuition for a small school without bells and whistles, whose unique offerings are all rooted in the way we teach, unless their children were truly square pegs that no amount of accommodation or support could drive into round holes? But just a minute. The overwhelming majority of our students are academically high-achieving, working hard and to great effect. They do very well indeed on the sort of standardized tests that make me roll my eyes. They go to prestigious universities, in tough programs, and do brilliantly. A Dragon visits Bard College (Bard College!) and finds himself more knowledgeable about Nietzsche than the students in a senior philosophy seminar. A Dragon in first year successfully petitions to take third year courses. Another is short-listed for a Rhodes scholarship. Dragons now in graduate school write to tell us what they’re reading, or to ask us for feedback on an essay or a project.

I have a shrewd suspicion that the signs and symptoms of trouble are evenly distributed throughout the schools of our province (and likely, throughout the known world). Colleagues at schools that skim off the cream of the high-achievers tell me stories that could be told at our staff meetings, wring their hands over the same issues. But here is the difference. They are limited to report card comments (which in other schools are usually standardized), to assigning detentions, to send those regulation notes. And as for the non-academic signs, well, what happens in the park stays in the park. I think about what made a difference for me, swimming in all the turbulence of adolescence, what has helped my own children, what could help each individual child who passes through our doors—the respectful, truthful, personal intervention of a caring teacher.

It’s not a miraculous cure, or a panacea. First of all, it takes a long time to build trust, to get a kid to talk to you, really talk to you, and to listen. Most of these symptoms did not appear overnight. Many of these issues take a long time to correct. Like most destructive behaviours, these are habits. To break them, you need room to try repeatedly, to fail, to learn from your mistakes, to forget what you’ve learned, to try again. And what gives you the strength to confront these habits, to decide to battle them, to pick yourself up and keep going is genuine support. You have to know that your teacher sees the problem, acknowledges the problem, respects you enough to raise the problem and brainstorm solutions, is not going to give up on you, or take the easy way out. Your belief in yourself is immeasureably strengthened by your teachers’ belief in you. “But if you keep giving them another chance,” the common wisdom goes, “they never learn to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.” Or “It’s not like that in university, or the working world. You don’t get extensions, or the opportunity to rewrite tests there.” Or “Those things are not the teacher’s responsibility. They are the purview of the parents. Or the kid’s own problems.” Or, most troubling of all, “But what about the kids who are doing really well? Is it fair to them to give second chances to the kids who mess up?”

Here the common wisdom is not really so wise. The whole process of growing up is a process of trial and error, learning through experience. And while a child is learning, the adults around her are supposed to be protecting her, limiting the potential for harm. Everyone makes mistakes, in university or the working world. Teachers make mistakes too, lots of them. The answer is not to be perfect. The answer is to learn to advocate for yourself, to seek help, and persist. When you allow a child to try again, to do better, you teach that mistakes may be inevitable, but can be redeemed. Another really important shift in adolescence is out from the egocentricity of childhood, the recognition that you are not the centre of the universe, that others have feelings, concerns, rights. You learn this through connection with your peers, but you also learn this through the modeling and mentoring of the adults around you. And part of that move out of the protected and insular world of childhood is fostered by relationships with adults who are not your parents, but whose knowledge of you and care for you is of another order. Less visceral perhaps, but strong and reliable and enduring. And as for fairness, are we really rewarding those high-achieving kids by punishing those who struggle? Encouraging those at the top of the class to compete with, and feel superior to, those at the bottom is not good for anyone. Your achievements should be absolute, and absolutely yours, not shored up by the under-achievements of others.

There are no guarantees. An adolescent can turn away from you, in suspicion, in despair. It can seem easier (and this too may be a bad habit) to avoid trying than to try and fail. The whole point of making all this effort can be too abstract and too distant in the face of immediate gratification. But we are the grown-ups. We should be wiser than to make those same mistakes ourselves.

Oddly, I had the same heated discussion twice in the past month. The first time I found myself the perhaps unlikely champion of contemporary art practises was in the company of three very accomplished intellectuals. The second was in my grade 12 philosophy class on Friday. In both cases, the argument started with a contemptuous description of something seen on the wall of a museum, broadened out into a scathing denunciation of all kinds of contemporary work as unskilled, hasty, not art, laced with a suspicion that some kind of scam was being worked, a sort of Emperor’s new clothes, a criticism based in a certain reverential view of traditional works of art. I’m not sure that I convinced anybody, but I held staunchly to my Frankfurt school critical theory, and to my own experience.

The first time around, it was about three in the morning. Greg, a Toronto literary eminence, famous for his role in making this city and its Writers’ Festival a Mecca for writers, and I were the last men standing (actually we were all sprawled on the couch) at Laura and Martyn’s Christmas party. Laura is a screenwriter and film producer, Martyn a novelist and documentary filmmaker. So besides being brilliant and cultured, all three of these people are actually involved in making and critiquing contemporary art. Martyn had been in London to interview one of the subjects of his latest documentary, a war reporter, and had gone to the Tate Modern. Much of what he saw there irritated him. He did not stay long. “I’m not an art scholar,” he said, “but I’m interested in art. I collect art,” he waved at the paintings around us on the walls, by living artists, some of them really quite fine, and all of them representational. “I really like going through museums and galleries. It’s one of the things I always do when I visit a city. But what’s up with a bunch of photos on a wall, with a park bench in front of them, and you can’t understand it unless you read the artist’s explanation of what she’s doing?” I asked if he were talking about Susan Hiller’s “Monument”.

Greg leapt right into the fray., with dozens of examples of art works whose meaning had to be provided by the artist, works that were nothing in themselves, did not communicate with the viewer, and were certainly not beautiful. What kind of art was a shark cadaver suspended in a tank full of formaldehyde (Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”), or a photograph of a plastic Jesus stuck in a jar of the artist’s urine (Andres Serrrano’s “Piss Christ”), or a gigantic rendering of a balloon animal in metal, which was not even made by the artist, but by hired metal-workers (Jeff Koons’ “Magenta Balloon Dog”)? A painting you couldn’t even see was painted (Kasimir Malevitch’s “White on White”)? Or a big canvas with a single rough brush-stroke of orange pulled across the white surface? (I can’t figure out what painting this might actually be, or by whom, but I can kind of picture it, can’t you?) Greg, Martyn and Laura then gave all kinds of examples of works of art they did like, that were meaningful to them, art that didn’t need explaining, but spoke for itself, that was, that word again, beautiful: Botticelli Madonnas, the Sistine Chapel, Monet water lilies. I love these paintings too, hold them in my mind’s eye. But I tried to explain what I had experienced, had learned, from traipsing through the Power Plant, the Palais de Tokyo, the Whitney Bienniel. We had a lovely talk, as we ate the last few shrimp on the platter, scraped the vestiges of tsatziki from the bowl with broken bits of cracker, and held up various bottles of wine to the light, looking for a few more sips. I’m not sure I’m convinced them of anything but that I was aligned with the camp that will accept anything as art provided it has a label and hangs in a museum. I’m quite sure they didn’t convince me that my broader category of art robbed the concept of art itself of meaning.

Then, last Friday, the same topic, the same polarized perspectives, burst forth in grade twelve philosophy. We were starting a unit on aesthetics, and getting ready to read and discuss Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. We had a lively discussion of what philosophers of aesthetics cogitated: things that presented themselves to the senses, the nature and meaning of beauty, the rules of beauty, and of art. The kids certainly understood the basic tenets of critical theory, the critique of traditional art as an expression of social norms, and a medium for promoting them, the idea that beauty was not limited to the pleasing, the harmonious, that art could be a forum for social critique, for revolutionary action, and that there was a clear distinction between taste (“I know what I like”) and value. But that white canvas with its splash of orange came up again. Miguel had been to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, where he had scratched his head in front of this work. He argued that it wasn’t art because it had not involved effort or skill. The artist had just dipped a big brush in a pot of paint, and pulled it across the canvas. This was something anyone could do, that even a small child could do, or an elephant with a paint brush clutched in its trunk. (Here there was a brief excursus on whether animals had aesthetic perceptions, and made art.)

The class divided into two camps. By far the larger number were of Miguel’s opinion, that a lot of nonsense, pretentious, elitist, conceptually-driven creations, and childishly unskilled work had invaded the world of contemporary art, and infected it. A much smaller number, led by Olivia (who is herself a very talented artist), argued that drawing like Rembrandt was not the only way to manifest skill and vision, that before the orange line was drawn across the canvas, there had been much training, experimentation, thought, that every innovation in the arts was met by incomprehension and ridicule, that the traditional definition of art was too narrow, that art must evolve with society, must respond to the present, show a way to the future, to criticism and change. Praxis informs and is informed by theory, as Benjamin and his colleagues from the Frankfurt School would have put it. Aligned as I was with Olivia and her comrades, I tried to give clarifying and convincing examples, to draw the terms of the argument back to the thinkers we were studying. David countered with the Emperor’s New Clothes argument, that he thought the art insiders had intimidated the public by making them feel they couldn’t understand, and were fooling with our heads by putting pieces of trash on the wall and calling it art. (Duchamps’ “Fountain”?) Lani, who’s not even in philosophy, but was sitting at the cubby in the hall outside our classroom, trying to study (I guess we were rather loud), got so irritated she entered the fray, pulling in performance pieces and installations and Christo’s wrappings. They looked to me for an explanation, an answer. No matter how I try to undermine the authority of the teacher, the assumption that the teacher is not just older and more knowledgeable, a worthy guide, but in possession of the right and wrong, the solution, the answer. I was in the same position I had been in Martyn and Laura’s living room, an unlikely champion of contemporary experimental art practise, without a shrimp to sustain me.

Duchamps' readymade

What can I say? I’m not an art historian or a culture critic either. My academic field is English Literature, tainted with feminism, historicism, left politics, social criticism. Like Martyn, like Miguel (and, I’m proud to say, many of my students), I like to spend time in museums and galleries. I expose myself to art. My own understanding of contemporary practise has been informed by the artists I know and respect, my son Morris Fox, my colleague Sarah Beatty, my friends Pauline Choi, Vera Frankl, and Jurek Denis. In their company, I have gone to exhibits that I might once have bypassed, opened my mind to art that was far from traditional, easily comprehended, or lovely. Sometimes I too have been bored, turned-off, irritated. But there is something there, something authentic, moving, and yes, beautiful, though in a much expanded sense. Beautiful beyond pleasingness, beyond prettiness or harmony or wholeness or radiance, as Aquinas would demand. Rather, such things have beauty because they are true, they are revelatory, they change us.

It is important for the artist to possess a radical freedom. An artist like Cabanel or Leigh Hunt can be very skilled indeed, create works that are beautiful if your standards are limited to harmony, wholeness, radiance, to the smooth stroke and the months of patient effort, the years of technical study. But in offering only what society approves, expressing its values uncritically, they commit a kind of vulgar pornography (Venus on the half shell). They reify narrow social values. Shock is not something valuable in itself. Indeed, I am more shocked by Cabanel’s Venus than I am by Hirst’s pickled shark. I am sure there is some justice in the idea that fraud and manipulation are part of the art market, that the unscrupulous sometimes sell the meretricious to the unwitting by sophistical argument, that some collectors are so eager to seem au courant and daring, they will pay huge prices to own works they neither like nor understand. But the real task of the artist is to tell the truth, and to change what needs changing.

Cabenel

So when I went to MOMA for the Marina Abramovic retrospective and performance recreation, and walked from one room to the next through a narrow space between two utterly naked art students (a recreation of her piece “Imponderability”), trying, vainly, not to bump either, and having to squeeze through sideways, being forced to face one and turn my back on the other, I burst into tears. It was terrible to be forced to treat two people, exposed, vulnerable, individual, like objects, like obstructions. I don’t have to intellectualise or reach for pretentious argument to read this piece as a profound and disturbing commentary on alienation. I’m not strutting my superiority if I tell you it was deeply moving, an experience of art. I don’t know about that white canvas with the splash of orange, but I have stood for a long time in front of paintings by Mark Rothko. And by Jan Vermeer. What do they have in common? I’m looking forward to my next exposure.

http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/190/1974

Art patron in the process

The first idea of museum-based education is that learning doesn’t always have to take place in the classroom. Even when you reconfigure the traditional space, get rid of the rows of desks all facing front, with the teacher in the position of authority (“All eyes front, please, class!”), and sit around tables seminar-style, old habits, old feelings linger. The teacher still feels under pressure to instruct, to place knowledge in the brains of her students like the framework of a high-rise. The students still feel under pressure to perform, to take notes, give the “right” answers, and the sense that they are under compulsion to be there tempts adolescents to balk, to disengage, to dream of being elsewhere. Go out into the world, and another model presents itself, more social, more free-spirited, more relaxed.

The second benefit comes from engaging with actual artifacts, real objects, not words about the objects, whether in a textbook or falling from the teacher’s lips. There is an immediacy that engages our energy, our attention, our imagination. You have an experience instead of a list of key concepts, relevant facts, noteworthy characteristics. You discover what you feel about the object, you analyse your own experience, instead of being told what to feel.

Museum-based education is a process of discovery. What you see and feel is relevant because it is yours, it finds a place in your memory and your imagination. The irony is that museums are not always ready for this process. The objects are there, the setting is inviting, but the guardians of the temple are not always welcoming, or well-prepared. Great energy is expended by most museums to control and limit the educational experience, particularly of students. They are not comfortable with the process. They want to set up tours, on the outworn field trip model. They seem to be worried that students will not prove worthy of admission, that they will disturb the experience of the “patrons”.

Of course museums are under a lot of pressure. Underfunded, criticized, often overlooked by governmental agencies, facing funding cuts and increased overhead, they need to maximize their earnings, which has led to the innovations of blockbuster shows, timed tickets, audioguides, and exiting through the gift shop. If you leave the exhibit, signs warn, you will not be readmitted. The lovely freedom to wander, the call of exploration, that have always so beguiled me about museums has been diminished, bounded.

I have been frustrated in the years since I founded Dragon Academy as a museum-based school by these limitations. What I would really like is to be able to come and go freely with my students. Sometimes there is a special exhibit or a particular part of a collection I would like them to learn about and from in a way that demands preparation. We will want to study the context of the objects we go to experience, perhaps have particular goals or projects in mind. Other times, we might realize that instead of looking at photograph of something, or reading a description of it, we could just take a walk out of the classroom and look at the real thing. And sometimes it is lovely to be in another setting, to do our reading and discussion in the open space and under the influence of the objects. I early realized that museums were not going to find space for a school in the building itself, though what a wonderful partnership that would be. But surely a dozen students and their teacher could walk through the grand doors and into the treasure house?

Chagall in his studio

How was this to be done? The school tour model was clearly inimical to every one of these kinds of visits. We neither need nor want someone else to map out our route, or guide us past the objects during a slotted time. There’s no possibility for spontaneity in a school tour—you can’t just up and go. And there’s certainly no provision for sitting under the dinosaurs and talking about a novel. Well, I thought, museums have student memberships. Museum members are supposed to have “free, unlimited visits”. This was certainly my experience of individual, adult membership. I waltzed up to the admission desk, presented my card, and was waved on in. But try that with a dozen students. Suddenly the presentation of cards becomes time-consuming. Museum staff look askance when you try to exercise your right of access to the Members’ Lounge. Guards hover. Interestingly, at a certain level of support, you can show up with twenty adults and be welcome, but try it with twenty kids.

How often have I come into a room in the Louvre to find a class of students, sometimes very young students, sitting in a semi-circle in front of a painting, while their teacher engages them in knowledgeable discussion. There are some instructive differences here. First of all, there is the assumption that children belong in a museum, that learning belongs in a museum. Of course it is important for them to go, and go frequently. Familiarity with the protocol and physical setup of museums allows students to feel comfortable there, to meet expectations of their behaviour. This is in stark contrast to many Canadian school groups, where the kids drag in a line behind a docent who is delivering a lecture. They are chatting to each other about… well not about art. They are noisy and inattentive, not because they are unworthy, but because they are unaccustomed, and because the passive role assigned them has little to offer. What they will remember of the experience is being led about on a tour, not the objects they encounter.

Then there is the question of the teacher. A number of researchers in the still young field of museum education have found that the average teacher is not herself a museum-goer, has little personal experience or knowledge of the sorts of things museums house. So the teacher, too, is part of the tour group. The cliché of the tourist posing for a photograph in front of the Mona Lisa without having actually looked closely at the painting is a cliché for a reason. Why take their class to a museum? They have been told about the importance of cultural institutions. It’s nice for teachers too to get out of the classroom from time to time. It feels like a holiday. But they too are unaccustomed to what museums are and hold. Hard to model what you have not mastered. Their experience too is bounded and controlled. They receive packages of “educational materials”, homework for teachers, things they must digest and impart. They too receive a lesson instead of an experience.

Double Portrait with Wineglass

Despite all the obstacles placed in the way of true museum-based education, you can still manage it. On last Wednesday, five of my teaching colleagues and I took twenty-seven Dragon students between the ages of 11 and 18 to the Art Gallery of Ontario to experience “Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris.” We had been meaning to go since the exhibit opened in October, but the catalyst for actually getting down there was student interest. I was talking quite casually with a number of my students about what we had done over the holidays. It turned out that several of us had gone to the AGO to see the Chagall exhibit, and agreed it was really wonderful. Why not all go?

We moved through the exhibit in small knots, a teacher with a shifting group of half a dozen students, drawn together because we shared an interest in a particular painting, because those students were already engaged in conversation with that teacher on the way down, or because those students were already particular friends, and enjoyed sharing the experience. We talked in low voices, pointing out details, expressing our opinions, sharing what we knew, steering each other towards particularly informative labels. We tried to put the work into historical context. Some of the teachers were particularly knowledgeable. Students who had just learned something illuminating moved over to other groups, shared what they had just learned. Some of the students were particularly perceptive. Ellen pointed out to me that the tiny building in the lower left-hand corner of “Double Portrait with a Wine Glass” was yet another representation of the synagogue in Vitebsk that figures so prominently in many of Chagall’s evocation of the village where he was born. Dr. Schwarz talked about the importance of the synagogue in village life. Dylan, who was listening to them, moved to my group, pointed out the detail to me, then sought out Ms. Beatty, who explained something of the architecture to him, which he shared with Ellen, and then both of them shared their discovery with several other groups.

Two days later, we are still talking about it. This morning in philosophy class we talked about Lenin and avant-garde art in the first days of Communist Russia. We remember favourites. Ms. Beatty’s print-making class had all spent a lot of time with Goncharova’s series of lithographs, “War”. There has been a little spate of posts on our facebook page. It has enriched our discourse, not just with talk about Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde of the early twentieth century, or expressive images, but our way of relating together. Our relationship to each other has shifted subtly. We have shared an experience. We will share others.

Perhaps the last word should be Rowan’s. “Blue Circus has me baffled and enraptured. The brilliant intertwining foreground and background is mainly why I loved this piece, but that reason also provided me with endless puzzlement. Is it a pool or is it an actual circus?” One could ask the same question about the museum itself.

Blue Circus