You Can Never Tell

You try your best as a prof, and you come up with what you think is going to be an innovative, original way to dramatize a point. You think you've done a great job, but then it turns out that some student, somewhere, missed the point and considered you a dope.

When I taught at Center for Creative Studies in Detroit (a college of art and design), I had frequent conversations with Joseph Bernard, a painter who taught a course in twentieth century modernism required for all fine arts majors. We would talk about Joyce, Duchamp, Beckett and Cage. It is to Joseph that I owe the story (which I hope is not apocryphal) about Duchamp dropping a piece of rope from a ladder one day. When the rope touched the ground, Duchamp said, "That's enough art for today," and got down. Joseph is very intelligent, completely involved in 20th century art, and a wonderful, original artist himself who has swum with the whales off the north Atlantic coast.

Anyway, in one of my own classes, I had a student who mentioned that he was taking Joseph's modernism class. I asked how he liked it, expecting that he would brighten up. Instead, the student looked resentful. So far, he informed me, the class had been a waste. "He spent the whole first meeting playing a recording of some woman lying in bed talking about herself and her husband." Pointless.

It took a second, but I realized that Joseph must have played a recording of the last chapter of Ulysses, Molly Bloom's nearly non-stop interior monologue, a lively, funny, revealing stream-of-consciousness review of nearly everything that had transpired in the life of herself and her husband, including (graphically) her own affair with Blazes Boylan, men she had loved before meeting her husband, the death of her 12-year-old son years ago, etc., etc., all this while she and Bloom lie on the bed in opposite directions, his feet near her face and visa-versa. If there is a classic modernist literary passage, this is it. It must have been on the basis of this long, long chapter that Ulysses was banned from the United States for some quarter century after its publication.

I told the student he had experienced one of the great great works of twentieth-century literature. He just shrugged. For him, at that moment, it had been a waste of time. It was too vast, compelling, profound, and humane a piece of writing. Perhaps for me, at that age, the first time through, it would have been a waste of time, too. I can only hope that the student, frustrated as he was, grew to fit the revelation he had been given.

I remember the first time I played a composition of John Cage in a Humanities class. The angriest students were two music majors, who accused Cage of not making music at all, just noise.

Willing or not, receptive or not, students benefit by the enigmas their teachers lob into their midst. As a teacher, you have to move forward, not teach only what you think your students can relate to: that might not teach them anything at all. You have to go for it, jump over the edge and risk getting lost in wilderness.

When I told Joseph about his student's reaction, we both got a kick out of it, but we were both also somewhat sobered. For awhile, anyway. Then we were back to lobbing our enigmas.