From the issue dated October 5, 2001
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The Solace of LiteratureBy CAROLYN FOSTER SEGALMy syllabus for American literature listed the final third of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence for the morning of September 11.
My college closed officially at noon. The campus is 90 miles from Manhattan, and students had already begun to leave, some to seek the comfort of their families, others to begin their vigil. That afternoon and evening, as I listened to and watched the news, I thought about preparing for the next day. If classes ran, I wanted to bring my students some passage, some lines that would comfort them. I wanted to be able to tell them about the solace of literature. My college reopened at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, with a 25-minute informational meeting for faculty members, a brief assessment of the situation on campus, and a listing of the various resources for students. Then a colleague and friend of mine asked my question: What about the content of the classes themselves? The answer was the only answer possible: Test the waters; see if the students can be engaged. I thought about the works that I had taught over the years and the works assigned for the coming weeks. What if, I wanted to ask, you feel you can't teach? But the meeting was over; it was time for classes to begin. That afternoon, I went to the room where I teach my three-hour women's-film course, still not knowing what I would say or do. Twenty-four or so of the 30 registered students were there. We were scheduled to wrap up the discussion of Hitchcock's Rebecca from the previous week, and go on to Now, Voyager, a Bette Davis film that ordinarily allows for a fairly serious discussion of the influence of Freud on popular culture and a fairly frivolous discussion of the symbolism of clothes. I had no desire to teach Now, Voyager, nor had I been able to come up with a replacement. I told the students that I would leave the afternoon up to them: We could cover both films, or we could cover one film, or we could attend the prayer and reflection session being conducted in the auditorium of the student center. Finally, one student raised her hand and said that she would like to go to the prayer session; another student agreed. The rest were silent. I felt tremendous relief. All right, then, I said, we'll go. No one moved. I looked at them -- these young women, some of whom I had had as students other semesters, many of whom I had smiled at or said hello to for weeks, months, years. They needed me to speak to them. I said that I could only tell them what I had told my children the night before: that there is evil in the world, but the world is not evil. All my adult life I had believed that, and I wanted to believe it still; I wanted my children and my students to believe it. Then I told my students something that in fact I did not believe at that moment -- that eventually, literature might once again hold solace for us. And then I let them go. I sat on a bench outside the building where the college's chaplain, Allen Richardson, was speaking, and I wondered how I was going to teach the next day, how I would face my students. I, who had always prided myself on being articulate -- on being an excellent lecturer and writer -- could barely speak. I felt as though I had failed my students not just minutes ago but for much longer. For years, I had told students that literature matters, that it is the record of our humanity. I had sometimes, to be truthful, harangued students on these points. The writing and film classes seemed, with several adjustments, like they eventually would be bearable. I could not -- cannot -- say the same for the American-literature classes. This semester I am teaching works from the modernist period (1914-1945). Title after title on the syllabus seems cruelly ironic: T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men," William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night -- a catalog of glittering (F. Scott Fitzgerald's word) horrors without respite. Frost's "Fire and Ice" seems merely -- coldly -- clever, a verbal parlor trick that ends the world in nine lines. The only works on the syllabus that seem possible are John Hersey's Hiroshima and a single poem by Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry," which opens with "The poem of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice." On Thursday morning, I went ahead with what I had originally planned for the American-lit class: a showing of Martin Scorsese's film version of The Age of Innocence. If the modernism course had to go on, at least it was with Wharton, although the rituals and thwarted longings of her upper-class New York characters Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska seemed very much beside the point. Watching a film also seemed preferable to attempting to conduct a 75-minute lecture and discussion. Two of the five students registered for this upper-level course attended class that morning. While the first student and I waited, I asked her if she had done any reading since Tuesday. Ann, who is a model student, looked alarmed for a moment (was this a homework check?), and I reassured her, explaining that I had been thinking about literature and solace. What did she think, I asked. Could reading bring solace now? She may have thought I was indulging in idle speculation, or maybe she sensed my anxiety, but she answered by saying, "Maybe not reading, but perhaps writing could bring solace. And then later others will be able to read it and look back." The other student joined us, and together we watched Scorsese's adaptation of Wharton's novel. The strangeness of that artistic pairing seemed oddly fitting. Who better than Scorsese to capture the emotional violence beneath the "hieroglyphic world" of Wharton's society? Ordinarily, I might leave after starting the film, but I stayed that day, partly to keep the two students company. As I watched the movie, I thought about the other times I had watched this film and shown it to students. Now the 1993 movie, like the 1920 novel, seemed to be an artifact from another time, another country. For the first half hour or so, we made comments -- on the use of color and flowers, on the camera work, on the narrative overvoice -- then we watched in silence, as the story followed its trajectory of longing to its inevitable ending of loss. When the movie ended, Ann left immediately. The second student, Karen, is what the college refers to as a "lifelong learner." She is 48 and married to a man who runs a very successful engineering firm. Five years ago, one of her sons was killed in a car accident. I've known her for two years now; this is the third course that she has taken with me. I like having Karen in class; she is a perceptive reader, and she has spoken quite movingly -- both outside and in earlier classes -- about why she values literature. She will tap a page in class discussions and say, "It's all here -- everything we need to know about the heart." I knew that she had been crying at one point while the film was running. As I removed the film from the VCR, I heard Karen say from behind me, "I hated this film, and I hated this book." I told her I was sorry. I was sorry that she had felt -- as a good student -- that she couldn't miss class, I was sorry that I had shown the film, I was sorry for her loss of five years ago and the memories that the last days must have stirred up for her. I hate the story, too, I told her. "But," she said, "I won't give up on literature. As painful as it is, I need it." I walked Karen across the nearly empty quad to her car and went on to meet my friend Dolly for lunch in the college's cafeteria. Dolly is a librarian and a marvelous poet, and she has taken several writing courses with me. First, we talked about our children. Then I asked her my question about literature and solace, and we talked in a desultory way about several poets she had been reading, but could come to no conclusion. Later, she sent me an e-mail message telling me to check out a compendium piece by Neil Strauss in The New York Times, which began, "Nothing provokes the artistic sensibility like grief." My syllabuses for 20th-century American literature seem to be lists of griefs and grievances. The words are Frost's again. I want more -- another category beyond those, beyond irony. I turn the pages of my anthology -- mockeries of loss, museums of nothingness, without solace. Lines did begin to surface on the afternoon of the third day: First, Anne Sexton's "Gone, I say" (from "The Truth the Dead Know"), then Emily Dickinson's "This is the Hour of Lead" (from "After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- "), which Strauss also noted, and, from Michael Ondaatje's "Buried 2": What we lost.And again I thought about how the fragments we shore against our ruins now will come from someplace other than Eliot's poems, someplace other than the syllabus I handed out last month. If the world broke apart in 1922, as Willa Cather announced, it broke apart again last month, and the work of writers and teachers will be to find what will suffice for that new stage. What I want now, for my students and myself, is literature that not only acknowledges longing and loss but that offers solace. There will be, as my student Ann said, new writing. In the meantime, looking ahead to the spring, I am scheduled to teach "English Seminar," the department's capstone course. The last time I taught English Sem, I focused on postmodern American works. I do not think that I will ever again teach Don DeLillo's White Noise, with its parody of a parody of an evacuation. I may still use his Underworld, which tempers irony with sympathy and whose cover features André Kertész's photograph of the World Trade Center. I may teach Underworld again, but not next spring. In the last few days, I have been thinking that I will go back to the 19th century for my texts for next semester's English Sem, whose topic and materials are left up to the individual professor. I will go back not to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did not want to acknowledge that there was evil in the world, but to Walt Whitman, who believed that poetry could actually heal a nation, and to Abraham Lincoln, whose Gettysburg address is an example of -- and rises above -- what amounted to a genre of the period: the cemetery dedication. Both Whitman and Lincoln honored the dead and created contexts to comfort and inspire the living. Tomorrow and again next semester, I will read to my students from Whitman's elegy for Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd": Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night, Carolyn Foster Segal is an assistant professor of English at Cedar Crest College. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education