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Teaching Melville’s Texts, MelvilleS Texts Teaching

MARTIN BICKMAN University of Colorado, Boulder

Id-timers may remember a questionnaire I sent to instructors for the 1971 volume on teaching Moby-Dick that I prepared for M U . In it I asked a question that was variously applauded, disparaged, and

ignored: “How does your vision of the book affect your classroom teaching of it?” In editing this special issue of Leviathan on Teaching Melville, I have tried to keep this question before us because i continue to believe that the best way to enliven our teaching is to reshape it consciously, deliberately, and imagina- tively in the light of whatever qualities in Melville’s texts initially triggered our own enthusiasms and commitments. Often our ends forget our beginnings, and our first excited responses become dampened and attenuated by the time we confront beginning readers of Melville. We are astonished to find that the very books that were incandescent for us meet with a kind of yeah-whatever apathy of our students. We find an uncomfortable mismatch between the power of the text and our engagement of it with our students. Students often view what we hope will be a life changing experience as just another hurdle to jump over on their way to something else. As student Aaron Zlatkin says in this issue of his peers:

Students are traditionally too busy worrying about “making the grade,” or pleasing the instructor, or just getting by, to be able to recognize the symbolism in a text and apply it to their own lives. For them, the basic necessity is not shelter or food, but rather approval. For instructors, it is often easy to forget that the most important function of literature is to invoke-emotions, memories, and new ways of thinking about the meanings behind these things. You would probably be encouraged to remember some basic symbolism: the coffin set up as a life buoy, the eagle pinned to the mast. But what you have been required to remember and what you really think about these powerful images of life and death, are almost always two different things. Certainly you would not even think about looking for other symbols from the text not included on the quiz review sheet. Ironically, you have to graduate from high school or college, free yourself from the spurious con- fines of requirement and standardization, before you can read the

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text in a fresh way, and maybe even find a connection to your own life therein. Zlatkin is generous in acknowledging that part of the problem lies with

the students themselves, but we have to remember that it is we instructors who structure the class and that more by our actions than anything we explicitly say we convey a sense of priorities. Every time I hear one of my colleagues complaining about that ubiquitous student shooting up a hand to ask “Will this be on the test?” I have to wonder who is giving the test in the first place and what kind of emphasis is put on this activity. Of course, this colleague would reply that the institution compels this behavior, and he or she would have a point. It is not that we are sadistic or dull or insensitive; rather, the very medium through which we work, the basic structures of our educational system, often do as much to block the intellectual and emotional grasping of literature as to foster it. The letter cramps the spirit, the form constrains the process, as when we teach a complex, subversive, fluid writer like Melville in classrooms that are authoritarian and routine, arenas where students are pitted against each other for the best niches in society. While the careful reading of literature is best fostered in a communal, cooperative atmosphere, conducive to responsiveness and divergence, we often find ourselves in classroom spheres formed more in fright than in love, with a stress on convergence, competition, conventionality, and closure. “Teaching Melville” in too many situations has become something of an oxymoron.

What the contributors to this issue share is a willingness to revise the teaching situation in the light of how they read Melville’s texts. If, for example, the texts are knotted, ambiguous, even indeterminate, we need ways of help- ing students live for a while in that state of negative capability without pre- maturely grasping for simplicities to use as test answers or thesis statements. If the texts stress the process of discovery more than any single formulation reached along the way, we need to make the acts of discussion and writing exploratory modes of cognition rather than products to evaluate. If the texts question the very structures of the society we live in, we need to bring these interrogations down to the power relations and complicities of our own classrooms and institutions.

The contributors’ sense of Melville, however, is only one pole in their rethinking of the teaching situation; the other pole is a willingness to take account of what they know about how their students actually learn, how they approach new ideas, how they read texts. It has become a commonplace to observe that most college professors have had less instruction in instructing than the humblest K-12 teacher. And while graduate programs in literature are

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increasingly trying to remedy this deficiency, most of us still need remedial work in basic theories of learning, in the conceptual tools we need to under- stand the dynamics of our own classrooms. Unlike education majors, many professors of literature have not been exposed to hypotheses and studies sug- gesting that students learn by constructing knowledge rather than just assim- ilating it and that methods engaging the students in active, self-directed learning are more effective than imposing standard textbooks and tests. Likewise, generalizations, formulae, definitions are more thoroughly and effectively learned in particular concrete situations similar to those that gave rise to them in the first place; even the most abstract knowledge has to be rooted in personal experience, in our particular case, the experience of reading. Of course, one heartbreaking aspect of our school system is that even the education majors who know these ideas at some level end up unwilling or unable to enact them in their own classrooms. This is partly because in schools and departments of education these ideas, ironically enough, are presented mainly through lectures and partly because the K-12 system is tightly and even insid- iously constrained. While those in college teaching may not have as wide a grasp of educational theories and practices, they usually do have more freedom in deciding what they teach and how they teach it and more opportunity to relate the two. College teachers can have a ripple effect here: if we show the future teachers in our classrooms more creative and effective ways to learn literature, they are more likely to incorporate these in their own teaching.

Each article in this issue takes a step in this direction to create a pro- ductive dialogue between the contributor’s sense of Melville and what that contributor has learned about his or her students’ learning. While the articles speak clearly and often eloquently for themselves, let me underline some of the relations between them and make more explicit some of the assumptions behind their strategies. Such an approach may help us view them more as models of how to think about learning than as just teaching tips.

Elizabeth Renker in “Melville’s Poetic Singe” begins with a powerful sense of Melville’s verse as embodying “a poetics of difficulty” That is, indi- rection, ambivalence, even opacity are not elements we have to work through to get to some underlying meaning but are an intrinsic part of the meaning itself; as in all great poetry, there are intricate ways in which the medium is the message. But instead of delivering this notion from on high to her students, she begins where they are and provides structures for them to move from their relatively unsophisticated and untested views of poetry to ones that will do justice to the difficulties of reading Melville. She asks them, for example, to list what they consider “good” poetry to be, getting them at once to articulate and

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examine their own assumptions, and has them refer back to this list as they proceed. To bring their own expectations and reading abilities closer to her own sense of the poetry, she works with them through close analyses of prosody, syntax, diction in several key poems.

With “Dupont’s Round Fight’ students pick out all the words that could refer both to battle and to the writing of poetry. While some purists might argue that this exercise presupposes Renker’s own interpretation, what is crucial is that she gives students not simply her reading but a sense of where it came from. Too often our interpretations strike our students as pulling rabbits from hats - they can see the result, but have no idea where it came from, and still do not know how to do it themselves. The immersion of students in this kind of close reading demystifies the process of making sense out of poetry by giving them methods and strategies rather than simply interpretations.

I find Renker’s article suggestive for teaching not only Melville’s poetry but also a wider range of issues in literature and writing. Certainly, we might ask our students to consider whether any major romantic or post-romantic poem we put before them is about its own workings as well as its explicit theme. But deeper, the paradox Renker sees at the heart of Melville’s poetry - a search for “the truths of human existence” conflicting with “the epistemo- logical opacity that he believed any truth-seeker would, by definition, have to confront” - applies not only to many other novelists but to the students themselves as writers. Like us, they often experience tensions between a desire for clarity and an obligation to explore whatever might qualify that clarity. A study of Melville’s work in this light will provide no easy solutions but may make students more self-aware and patient, with a greater appreciation of what Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult.”

The interactions between a teacher’s approach to Melville and his students’ learning processes is dramatized in the very structure of the next set of essays in which Robert Wallace’s descriptions and rationales of his courses are juxtaposed with the narratives of two students who took these courses. What is clear from the student essays is how crucial the freedom to structure their own learning was in the light of their own developing knowledge and inter- ests. I would emphasize that Wallace does not give his students this freedom immediately but provides them first with carefully researched and created materials and activities. He is then wise enough to get out of the way when they are ready to strike out on their own. In other words, the teacher must initially structure the learning situation but do so in ways that are provocative, enabling, and ultimately liberating. The students experience a valuable model when they see their own teacher becoming a student, as when Wallace learns

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web page design along with them. If one of the secrets of good sex is that to get pleasure one must give it, then one of the secrets of good teaching is that one ends up learning as much as one teaches.

These three essays also suggest ways of opening up literary texts beyond the conventions of classroom interpretation. Most of us are primarily literary critics ourselves, and too often if one is a hammer everything becomes a nail. But our students bring a wide range of capabilities and learning styles to our classrooms - Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is relevant here - and to not reach out to capitalize on these is needlessly to limit ourselves. A response made in the medium of painting, music, or computer design may be just as sensitive and apprehending as more conventional critical assignments, especially, as Zlatkin points out, when students are then asked to go back and explain their creations verbally.

Similarly, instead of bemoaning the un-literariness of her students at MIT, Wyn Kelley finds that their technological skills and aptitudes can create “considerable advantages for study of a work like Melville’s Billy Budd that, like the electronic media within which my students fearlessly swim, seems endlessly open, assimilative, interactive, and intertextual in its strategies.” Like Renker, she does not begin with large thematic issues, but has the students work with and through details: “I wanted students to grapple with the text as a material challenge, as a collection of verbal details out of which they were invited to construct many readings.” She gives new meaning to that sometimes dreary workhorse, the class report, through her example of using the students’ research on biblical vs. classical allusions to open new interpretive windows on the text and the nature of intertextuality. And while she sees the possibilities of a web site based on this work, she also sees the dangers of it becoming yet another fixed text, another privileged sub-canon. The solution, she suggests, is to foreground the process itself, keeping the site perpetually in a state of “cybertextual fluidity” analogous to her sense of Billy Budd itself.

In “You’ve Got Whale,” Mary Klages also takes advantage of the open, process-oriented aspects of computer technology in teaching the mediatory, also unfinished (“God keep me from ever completing anything”) Moby-Dick. She uses the tools of reader response criticism to analyze her students’ writings as closely as many of us do Melville’s texts, not to evaluate them along a linear scale but to tease out the kinds of reading and thinking practices behind them. While she admits that a more organized, conventional piece of writing might get a higher grade, Klages challenges us to reconsider the purposes of student writing within a course. Are the students to produce always the kind of fin- ished writing we privilege or should some writing be more in the service of engaging themselves and their fellow students more deeply in the interpreta-



tive process? Should we encourage monologues or dialogues? How do we increase the frequency and range of student response?

In setting forth a model of literary cognition, Klages uses a theoretical framework of “dialogic communication within a discourse community” bor- rowed from Bakhtin and Volosinov. While the framework I might have used to analyze the same data would lean more heavily on native sources for democ- ratic knowing in John Dewey’s work, what is really crucial is the act itself of theorizing our teaching. This does not mean forcing our teaching into an a pri- ori model, but rather bringing the two halves of our lives together by trying to read and conceptualize our classes with the same passionate attention and methodological sophistication we bring to interpreting the literature itself.

While Peter Norberg’s approach to teaching “Bartleby” is rooted more in the new historicism, he, too, tries to transcend the model of the student-and the citizen-as an isolato whose very “individualism” often paradoxically serves the interest of an unjust, soul-crushing ideology He shows how one can use divergent student responses to focus on a single, complex crux, as when he asks his students to write on why Bartleby behaves as he does: “The more varied their responses the better because part of the point of this exercise is to demonstrate how the story generates within its readers a certain anxious need to explain Bartleby’s refusals as stemming from his own personal history, not from anything the narrator has said or done to him.” Norberg’s wish to bring out “how Bartleby’s insistence on his preferences disrupts the assumptions of management that govern labor in a corporate capitalist economy” may seem a little abstract at first. But he is able to situate these issues in the concrete real- ity of the classroom itself, both for his students and for us. He discusses students’ responses in terms not just of their personal psychology but also of the positions they occupy in society in accordance with his sense that “by leaving Bartleby’s preferences empty of content, Melville’s text asks its readers to question the principles on which we form our relationships with others, in both our private and professional lives.”

Norberg’s essay raises issues treated in a more confused manner in pop- ular works like The Dead Poet’s Society. How can one encourage questioning and even resistance to our social structures within those structures themselves, such as the institution of the school? How do we sort out the competing claims of fitting students to take positions within that culture as opposed to trans- forming that culture, or, in Kenneth Burke’s formulation, should education be a function of society or society a function of education? And if we encourage iconoclasm and subversion, what kinds of guidance are we obliged to give our students to keep them from self-destruction?

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The shorter pieces in this issue extend our appreciation of the range of teaching possibilities. As with the articles, I offer these notes not just as ideas to steal but also as other ways of thinking outside the box of “education as usual.” For example, I would hope no one would simply duplicate Kenneth Speirs’s complex assignment sequence but rather take it as a way of using assignments to bring divergent and convergent thinking, seeing and reading, analysis and creation together in synergistic ways. One of the reasons I did not simply reprint any of the fine syllabi and handouts I received is that just as students must construct their own readings of the text, teachers ultimately have to create their own teaching materials in ways that make sense to themselves.

For all the innovations found here, however, I need to point out that almost all of the contributors rely at some time on the lecture format. In editing this issue, I have been accused, with some justification, of a prejudice against this kind of traditional teaching, so I want to admit that I have learned a great deal from it myself and use it often in my own classrooms, although rarely for longer than twenty minutes, after which I find a law of diminishing returns setting in. But I felt no need to give this mode of teaching-variously called “chalk talk,” “the sage on the stage,” and “frontal teaching’’-equal time, because it has assumed a kind of default position. That is, it is not only something we do out of conscious, deliberate choice, but also what we tend to fall into automatically under stress or lassitude or creative blockages. When things slow down or become uncomfortable in our classrooms, we frequently resort to it, thus denying our students their own responsibility for the success of the class. Through sheer inertia, lecturing will, I feel, survive and flourish without special pleading.

“In conclusion,” as Ishmael says ending his inconclusive “Cetology,” I hope this issue itself will not be a terminus to but a stage for further discus- sions of teaching. I have enjoyed and benefited from working with not only the contributors but also many more of you, swapping and developing teaching ideas. While we usually share our research and criticism, we still need to work more on reducing the aura of privacy about our teaching, which in many ways is the more public and social act. I know John Bryant is committed to opening the pages of Leviathan and Melville Society Extracts to further articles along these lines and I look forward to pursuing issues raised here further with even more of you, both on Ishmail and in direct correspondence (my Email address is [email protected]). The articles here can provide us momentum in continuing the dialogue on Teaching Melville, but only if we seize the opportunity.


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