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Friday
In his frequently quoted but often misunderstood “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost predicts that one day in the future he will look back at his life and regret a choice he made. (“I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence…”) While the poem is often read as a triumphant assertion of a choice made—I have heard it quoted in this vein at a couple of valedictory addresses—I read it rather as someone who foresees that he will be so upset at having made that choice that he predicts he will try to rationalize it away: he will convince himself that he took the daring and unconventional path, not the path that most people walk. The fact was, he acknowledges, that there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths, that they were worn more or less the same. (But maybe he’s rationalizing here as well.)
In other words, where he would like to think he will look back with a contented sigh, he fears he will look back with a regretful sigh. The poem, after all, is entitled “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.”
Having reached an age (72) where one looks back, especially after having just attended one’s 50th college reunion, I use today’s post to sort through one of my own career regrets. You’ll have to excuse me if I descend into the weeds of my profession—what has bothered me may seem trivial to those in other walks of life. And it may in fact be trivial. Nevertheless, I still need to work through it.
I begin my ruminations with a professor that I mentioned in a PechaKucha talk I gave at the reunion. PechaKucha, of Japanese origin, allows the speaker 20 slides in just under seven minutes to make the presentation (20 seconds per slide, which change automatically so that the speaker can’t drone on). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my subject, which was how Beowulf helps us negotiate our gun-happy society. If we are to stand up to resentment crazed trolls and to counteract dragon depression, I argued, we need to “be like Beowulf.” The talk outlined the ways how.
The first slide mentioned Phil Niles’s Medieval History I class, which introduced me to the idea that the monsters in Beowulf represented the forces that threatened the stability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society. In the social contract between warrior and king, warriors were to be loyal, giving all their winnings to their king, and kings were to be fair and generous, redistributing those winnings to the warriors. If either side broke that contract—if warriors behaved like resentful trolls or if kings became greedy dragons—society could disintegrate, with death or slavery the end result for all its members.
I vividly remember my essay for the course, which I entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” Understanding came to me at around two or three in the morning in one of Carleton’s all-night study rooms. At that moment I grasped, in a deep way, that literature, including the literary fantasy that I loved, was not just for fun but articulated life and death issues. While I already knew the books I read were of immense importance to me, I now realized they were of immense importance to society as a whole. After all, Beowulf had served as a blueprint to Anglo-Saxon warriors in how to literally survive.
Socially conscious as we all were in those days, what with the Black, Chicano and Indian liberation movements, the anti-war protests, and the feminist revolution all in full sway, this view that my private passion could help change the world hit me with seismic force. I determined that I would become a literature teacher.
Majoring in history rather than in English was not the way to go about this, however. By my junior year, however, I feared that I was too far along in history to make the transition. Furthermore, none of the English courses I was taking spoke to this new-found revelation. Whereas my English professors seemed more interested in confining themselves to the works rather than linking them to anything going on in the world, my history teachers were introducing me to thinkers who argued that ideas could have a transformational impact on the world.
These thinkers included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukacs. In my French courses, meanwhile, I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who thought the same. I wrote my thesis on the absurdly broad topic (but undergraduates are allowed to go big) of whether the French Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. I concluded that works like Rousseau’s On Inequality and Diderot’s Letter on the Blind had changed the framework in which reality itself is seen. This new reality, I argued, undermined traditional monarchical beliefs.
It helped that, as I was writing my thesis, I was also taking Barry Casper’s “Revolutions in Physics” class (I had put off this science requirement to the very last moment). Casper introduced us to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I realized later that my thesis was essentially contending that the French Enlightenment had ushered in a significant paradigm shift.
But while my history major was speaking to issues that concerned me deeply, it wasn’t preparing me for graduate English programs. I was turned down by seven of the nine schools I applied to, and I could understand why when I entered Emory University’s English program. After all, my fellow grad students could detect image patterns in the works we studied, which appeared to me as though they were performing magic. How could they see all these things at work beneath the surface?
So did I choose the wrong path by majoring in history rather than English? Actually, fearing that this was indeed a mistake, at the beginning of my junior year I planned to tell my history advisor Carl Weiner—a brilliant if somewhat obstreperous intellectual—that I wanted to change majors. At the last moment, however, I lost my nerve. So some cowardice entered into my decision making.
Then again, I would not have taken Phil Niles’s Medieval History class if I had changed majors, nor all those intellectual history classes. And I would probably have experienced, in further English classes, the same frustrations that had sent me to the history major in the first place.
And despite having taken only six English courses, I was accepted into a good graduate program. It so happens that my Emory mentor had taken me in part because of my history background. J. Paul Hunter, a giant in the field of 18th century British Literature, liked my interdisciplinary interests, and he and I saw eye to eye about the importance of history.
I was also fortunate that Emory’s Victorianist, Jerome Beaty, was interested in the emerging field of reader response theory. When, my first semester, I heard Beaty talk about how readers in 1847 would have responded to Jane Eyre, I felt a shock of recognition. I tracked him down after the talk and got the names of the theorists he was referencing, including the German theorist Hans Robert Jauss.
Jauss argues that great works of literature expand readers’ “horizon of expectations”—a paradigm shift, if you will—which was exactly what I wanted to believe. I wrote an essay that semester in Beaty’s “Dickens’s Early Novels” class about how Dickens challenged and expanded traditional notions of the family in Martin Chuzzlewit—with the effect that the novel was a flop when it came out (it was ahead of its time) but one of Dickens’s most popular novels by the end of his life (third after David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers). Dickens had expanded his readers’ horizons so that they saw his novel with new eyes.
So if you’re keeping track, my decision to major in history turns out not to have been a mistake after all. It got me into a graduate school where people considered history an important part of literary study—this was before New Historicism and so still unusual—and my Emory PhD helped me find what was for me the perfect job: a state school with a mission to introduce a liberal arts education to (among others) first generation college students.
But wait, I’m not done yet with regrets. When, still in grad school, I was discussing a possible dissertation topic with Hunter, I said something to the effect of wanting to study how novels could change lives. But I narrowed my articulation too much. I thought that I needed to study satire, having the impression that satire was more effective at changing lives than other genres. He, hearing this, suggested that I take on the work of an under-appreciated satiric novelist (and former ship surgeon) Tobias Smollett and I dutifully did so.
This in spite of the fact that I can’t stand Smollett, largely because he is such a cranky writer. In fact, fellow novelist Laurence Sterne referred to him as “Smelfungus” for the way he complains all the time. While I dutifully wrote on Smollett, producing an acceptable dissertation (“Smollett’s Struggle for a New Mode of Expression”), I could never return to him later. And as one’s dissertation often serves as the source of one’s early scholarly articles, I cut myself off from that opportunity.
The path I wish I had taken was choosing a topic specifically focusing on reader response issues. All I needed to have done is follow more closely the kind of research Hunter himself was doing. For instance, he had recently written an article I found brilliant entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distant Reader,” in which he talked about how novels were disrupting social society by introducing a new kind of solitude. Wives, for instance, would sometimes distress their husbands by disappearing for days into Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa.
Had I said, “I want to do the kind of research that you did in that article,” I would have written a very different dissertation. I would have dived into 18th century reading journals, letters in which books are mentioned, and other documents and other forms of evidence as to the impact of works. I would have built a career in reader response theory, then in its infancy, instead of jumping between multiple fields.
I also would have become the kind of scholar my father was. More on this in a moment.
Instead, having written a dissertation more from the intellect than from the heart, I turned away from writing literary scholarship altogether (at least for a while) and instead started analyzing films. After all, I could see vividly the impact that cinema had on audiences—why, for instance (to cite my most widely cited article) Citizen Kane shook 1941 viewers to the core. But I could have been doing the same with literature.
In short, I had committed a scholarly no-no: I left a field where I had considerable expertise to branch into something new.
Mentioning my father points to an Oedipal drama at work. Scott Bates, a French professor at the University of the South, was a world authority on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. During a Fulbright year when I was a year old, he had uncovered source material at France’s national library that upended previous interpretations, and he continued to do so for decades afterward. For 15 years, I considered myself somewhat of an impostor because I wasn’t doing something comparable.
I should add that I worshipped my father, seeing in him everything I wanted to be. I was even proud when, in seventh grade, I had to wear glasses because he wore glasses. You see what I mean.
But instead of becoming a recognized scholar, I became what some will regard as a shallow generalist. As a small liberal arts college, St. Mary’s College of Maryland allowed this so that, at any moment, I could be found teaching one of our three survey courses—everything from Beowulf to Margaret Atwood—or one of a bewildering assortment of theme courses. Over the years these included Minority Lit, African American Lit, Post-Colonial Lit, American Fantasy, British Fantasy, Magical Realism, American Film, Film Genre, Great Directors, Theories of the Reader, and The Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami. Although my two favorite courses were in my field (Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy and Jane Austen), ranging as widely as I did was not a recipe for scholarly success.
Where I went deep was in responding to student essays. Figuring that everyone had the potential to undercover meaningful literary insights, I spent hours helping students choose their topics, develop their proposals, and draft and polish their essays (at which point I assigned a grade). After that I met individually with them and then graded their revisions (with the new grade replacing the first).
Even after 35 years, this never got old. I reached the point where I could detect—sometimes from no more than a phrase—the topic that would yield an essay where the student had “something at stake” (the phrase I used in my syllabus). I’ve shared a number of these student reading stories on this blog.
But while I flourished as a teacher, my traditional scholarship was mostly missing. Although I published twenty academic articles and delivered a score of scholarly presentations—enough to earn tenure at my college—my one book is self-published, and my current project, caught in limbo between popular and scholarly, is having difficulty finding a publisher. Instead, I have this blog.
As I look back at this career, my version of Frost’s regretful sigh is that I didn’t produce the work that I thought I was supposed to. And saying that brings back another memory.
Having just visited my old professor Carl Weiner at the reunion—sadly, he’s having health issues—I recalled something he said to me after awarding me honors (but not highest honors) for my senior thesis. In addition to my studies, I had thrown myself into the student newspaper, which I was proud of having edited but which he regarded as a distraction. “If it had not been for that paper,” he told me, “you could have gone so much further.” At the time, I was more taken aback than offended. I could see what he meant.
Could I have gone as far as those of my stellar Carleton classmates who have had brilliant scholarly careers. One of them, I discovered, heads the Emory Philosophy Department while another received a rave review in The New York Review of Books. Reunions can get us to notice roads we haven’t taken.
And yet, to reverse course once again, I have had students tell me that my teaching impacted them in ways that were life-changing, and this blog has reached a wider readership than I ever could have hoped for from scholarly work. It’s not what my father did nor what various of my professors hoped from me. But in the end I have fulfilled my professional mission, which was to put people in contact with literature that bettered their lives. When my old regrets flair up, I can remind myself of this.
And actually, to do justice to our 50th class reunion, what I carried away was a sense, not of expectations unfulfilled, but of lives lived fully and meaningfully. Professional goals seemed less important now that many of us were retired.
In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges gives us an alternative to Frost’s yellow wood. Whereas the speaker in “Road Not Taken” agonizes over a single choice, Borges describes a garden where the choices are infinite. As a character tells the narrator,
The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.
And further on:
Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.
What this image shows me is that I have been too one-dimensional in thinking about my life trajectory. Life indeed has “innumerable futures,” which are too complex to chart. I’m especially struck by the thought that sometimes a path that seems to diverge will then later converge, and that a path that bifurcates into two will then see those two intersect. A history class that I wouldn’t have taken had I majored in English gave me the literary insight that has guided my life. The history major that kept me out of a number of graduate schools got me into one that gave me the thinkers that I needed and helped me land my dream job.
Frost’s poem, which jumps back and forth in time, tells me the same as well. Don’t fixate on a single narrative about a wrong or right decision—don’t spend time regretting that you took this path rather than that one—because the very story you tell yourself about that choosing will change over time.
Better for me to focus on the rich interactions with people that teaching literature has made possible, which is a far more interesting story than that of a hypothetical path not taken.
Further thought: I didn’t mention one further life choice I made which, while it ran counter the path of a traditional literary scholar, added immeasurably to my life. In 1987, inspired by recent Hungarian films, I applied for a Fulbright to go study them, even though I didn’t know any Hungarian. Although I had experienced early academic success with an article on the Czech New Wave, jumping to another country made no scholarly sense. In any event, the Hungary slot was not available so I ended up in Yugoslavia instead, in Slovenia. There I learned that, while Yugoslavia itself had a robust film industry, Slovenia did not so my research plans fell through. From outer appearance, it appeared a bust.
Except that it wasn’t as I developed deep ties with people in the country that have led to some of the happiest moments of Julia’s and my life. In addition, my teaching and my understanding of literature grew immensely from this immersion in another country. I return regularly to teach there and to refresh our many, many friendships. Would I trade all that for a straight line scholar’s path? On reflection, I don’t think I would.