Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this addss. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Friday
This is the latest post in my on-going series on “My Life in Literature,” which appears every Friday. Because an informal autobiography written by my great grandmother Eliza Scott means so much to me—she discusses the novels that were important to her as she grew up in Victorian England—I figured I should do something similar for family members who come after me. Of course, the subject is also consistent with the mission of this blog, which is to explore the many ways that literature enhances and sometimes changes our lives.
I want to pause for a moment at this point in my life history to reflect on feelings of inauthenticity that have plagued me for much of my life—up until I was 50 or so. I don’t know if this topic will be of general interest, but I’d like to figure it out for myself. As I’m telling my life through my experiences with literature, I can report that many of the literature essays I’ve written in college and graduate school—as well as some scholarly articles I’ve published–have felt inauthentic. That I received A’s on many of them just makes them appear even more inauthentic, as though I was good as jumping through meaningless hoops.
Authenticity is a big deal with the existentialists, who introduced me to the concept. The authentic individual, they contend, lives in accordance with his or her true self rather than conforming to societal expectations. Sartre’s No Exit, which I read in high school, features a political activist, now dead, who spends the afterlife being haunted by the fact that he hasn’t lived up to the ideal of a political martyr. Whereas he likes to think of himself as a heroic pacifist who was executed for his beliefs, in fact he was a jerk and a coward, one who abused his wife and who was executed for desertion.
Throughout my years in college, I felt like a political coward. I obsessed over my fear that I wasn’t doing enough to stop the war, which I saw as demanding something dangerous and committed. The marches I attended, and even my arrest, didn’t seem to require enough of me, as though I were just cosplaying a resistor. To be real, however, would involve stepping out of my comfort zone (or so I thought), and like Sartre’s anti-hero I worried that I wouldn’t be up to the challenge.
In fact, this proved to be the case. I once tried campaigning for George McGovern in 1972 but was so nervous about knocking on the doors of strangers that I became sick and gave up. Seeking a model for true commitment, I once attended a conference of the Trotskyist Worker’s League, but the members’ fanaticism repelled me. (Looking back, I suspect some of them were cosplaying revolutionaries.) In short, I felt perpetually guilty for not doing enough, even though I wasn’t sure what doing more would look like.
As I look back, I think the source of my anxiety was the conflict between desiring to stay safely ensconced in a world of ideas and books and feeling that I should be out in the world making meaningful change. (Perhaps this a variant of desiring to remain a child while knowing that I had to grow up.) To my eyes, my father appeared the ideal model, and I desperately desired to be just like him. Here he was, establishing himself as a world-class authority on the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire while, at the same time, devoting himself to noble causes (the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement). He could even point to some tangible results, such as the desegregation of Franklin County schools and the University of the South.
And yet not only could I not entirely follow in his footsteps—after all, one must find one’s own way—but I worried that there was something unreal about him. When he was caught up in his theories, he sometimes seemed untethered from earthly concerns. It was my mother who kept the family grounded: she took care of the finances, handled our illnesses, made community organizations work, and ultimately founded and ran for 17 years our town newspaper (which she typed up every Wednesday on mimeographed pages). While I found my father more stimulating and exciting, somehow it was my mother who appeared to engage more effectively with the real world.
My most meaningful college essays were ones dealing with this tension between wanting to remain in the world of books and feeling the need to break out. The Beowulf essay offered a way to bridge the conflict as it showed how a society could use a work of literature to negotiate the deep threats it faced. A satire I wrote for a “Utopian Literature” class showed how a dystopian society I called Notelarc (an anagram for Carleton) kept the population docile by burying them in books and essays. (In other words, I was worried about remaining in this safe realm and blamed college for enabling my desire.) My senior thesis argued that the works of Rousseau and Diderot had more of an impact on the French Revolution than did the “penny pamphlets” that activists wrote and hawked on the streets. In short, in these essays I was trying to find a place in the world for someone with my interests and passions.
By contrast, other essays I wrote felt inauthentic. To provide one example, I remember a paper I wrote in the early British Literature survey where I grappled with the question, “Why is Faustus unable to repent and turn back to God?” I systematically went through the text, came up with answers, weighed them against each other, settled on one, and received an A. The question, however, didn’t speak to anything deep within me. (It does now as I more fully appreciate self-destructive inner struggles.) The same was true for an essay on W.B. Yeats’s Cuchulain plays as I can’t even remember what I wrote. Nor can I remember which novel I chose to analyze in my “Contemporary French Novels” class.
Something similar would happen in graduate school. It seemed like choosing a meaningful topic was a matter of chance, which sometimes I stumbled upon and sometimes didn’t. I was out to please the professor or the academy but not to reflect upon my own soul. I mention this because, as I evolved as a teacher, I decided I wouldn’t let the same thing happen to my students. I determined they would always have something “at stake” in their literature essays, and I devised various means (all of them requiring considerable time and work on my part) for steering them to topics what would mean something to them. Likewise, in this blog I focus on works that help me see more deeply into matters that I consider urgent.
I mention in passing that my commitment to meaningful engagement shaped how I worked with my advisees as well. I listened to them closely, tried to hear what moved and motivated them, and then brainstormed with them about possible careers and people who could advise them further. Our goal, I would tell them, was to find out what excited them and then figure out how they could get paid for doing it. Or as Joseph Campbell puts it, how to follow their bliss.
I don’t know how clear I have been in this introspective romp. Perhaps what I’m saying is that, as long as I was trying to be my father, and as long as I was trying to please the academy so that I could become a professor like him, I wasn’t living in accordance with my true self. Only when I encountered a crisis in my teaching—when inauthentic student essays started draining the life out of me—did I face the issue head-on. As a result, I became a very different kind of teacher than he was.
For too long I believed Athena’s problematic observation to Telemachus in The Odyssey: “It is rare for sons to be like fathers: Only a few are better, most are worse.” Many of us must symbolically kill our fathers if we are to find ourselves. How I finally did so will be the subject of a future post.
