Professionalization
When I joined the Army at the rather crusty age of 24, I was quite surprised to find that it was a lot like the movies. Drill sergeants really did line us up at 3 am, having dragged us from our bunk beds or sleeping bags where we were enjoying our four-hour quota of sleep, to yell at all of us because one soldier had gotten shoe polish on the floor. We really did march around in formation in the rain and do endless rifle drills. We really did run in formation calling cadence, singing songs about Airborne Rangers and the company commander’s grandmother.
And the cadences were hilarious, some of them – or would have been, if we’d been allowed to laugh. “CO ain’t got no socks / I seen him when he took ‘em off / They jumped up on the chair / demanded voting rights and welfare / I hate it / I hate it / I hate hate hate it.” There was precisely one form of criticism allowed, and that was the authorized roasting of the marching or running cadence. In order to earn the privilege of being able to give voice to it, you first had to be able to keep pace with the formation, and you then had to master your breathing so you could sing and run at the same time. You had to set the pace for the group, making sure your rhythm had every left foot of every soldier striking the ground at precisely the same time. Finally, you had to be able to run up a hill and keep from puking while simultaneously thinking of a new verse to an old song, one that could be at the expense of your squad leader without getting you into trouble. Enterprising satirists would stay up at night, composing them in their heads while they shined their boots. Read the rest of this entry »
The Great Wikipedia Debate, or Beowulf goes fishing
Every semester one of my students ask me if they are allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for their final research papers. Every semester I say no, and every semester a comment about my unfairness for not allowing internet sources comes up on ratemyprofessor.com. (It is not true that I don’t allow them, but I require that they be thoroughly evaluated by use of a worksheet, and I limit the number of online-only sources.)
I give them several reasons, deliberately ignoring the ongoing debate about Wikipedia’s role in academia, among them:
Citations are not really about covering your ass for plagiarism, even though we talk about that a lot in freshman comp. They’re really about pointing readers to sources. The dynamic nature of Wikipedia means your source could change drastically, or even disappear, overnight.
Wikipedia is essentially an encyclopedia, and you are in college. Your research needs to extend beyond dictionary and encyclopedia entries when you’re in college.
I had a moment of clarity in class the other day, a moment when I found a better way to say something, when we were talking about evaluation of sources and I asked why a sample essay had cited a rather surprising and biased source of information. One of my students said, “But every source has an angle or a bias or a slant or at *least* a focus.”
Indeed. And picking out what that focus is is one of the essential tasks we’ve been working on all semester, and maybe I could have just come out and said that before now, though I’m ecstatic that some of them are thinking that way. Anyway, I think he just gave me a new way to talk about research and argumentation and warrants. The participant in the conversation — what’s at stake for that participant? Some of them are writing about gun control. What’s at stake in the conversation for the NRA? What about Concerned Mothers for Gun Control? What about the Associated Press? What I won’t say in class, but what I’m thinking, is that this might be one reason why it’s so difficult for some academics, myself included, to wholeheartedly accept Wikipedia as a reliable source. Doubtless there are some very knowledgable contributors on Wikipedia, and the potential for this “new” medium is kind of exciting. But we can’t really answer the “what’s at stake” question when we go to evaluate the reliability of this source. As a wiki contributor, I can personally vouch for the fact that sometimes — not always — “what’s at stake” is an ego or points in a flame war.
I have a thesis chapter to write, so I’ll shut up now and leave you with a recent “find” that I used to illustrate the importance of evaluating internet sources in class the other day.
from the page entitled “Norse Mythology,” available at
http://library.thinkquest.org/25535/Norse.htm
“However, Grendel’s mother heard of her son’s death, and was ready to seek revenge upon his killer. Beowulf agreed to fight her, and he was pulled into her underwater lair one day while he was fishing. He defeated her with the sword of the Giants, and returned again to find rejoicing among the citizens. … Eventually a giant rose against his people, so Beowulf agreed to defeat him. As they fought, Beowulf’s weapons were melted by the creature’s fire…”
Now where can I get an avatar of Beowulf fishing?
Thesis, Friday night. Warning: Whiny
Chapter 2, at least the part I can “see,” is going to be about a sense of shifting borders in Beowulf — the shifting borders, not just between kin-groups and holdings, or between human and monstrous behavior (pretty well covered by my betters), but between human and monstrous bodies. All I can do is point to things and suggest, but I have a lot of things to point to.
This weekend is “get all of these notes hammered into semi-polished prose” weekend, because I need about half of a thesis chapter by Tuesday and it needs to at least manage self-containment as a “paper.” My problem? I can’t see the forest for the trees. I would return to my prospectus but it was all BS, really, anyway. I think I might be insane. I’m not sure I really have anything to connect all this different stuff I’m looking at. And/or it’s a great big, “well, duh” waiting to happen – a rather thoroughly researched “so what,” a non-event.
Tonight: Write ONE MORE PAGE. NO getting up until it’s written.
Tomorrow: Finish sections on Sigmund/Fitela from the Edda and those wolf-skins, Weland from here and there, and Fafnir and the berserkr. Start on Puhvel and heroic rage, Sharma and gebolgen, Body and Soul I and tie into Kabir on interim paradise, or wait? That could very well keep me busy until Tuesday with no consideration for theological conflicts about the nature of the body/soul connection, and relics & sacral kingship and their dark side, contagion and monster cooties, from there. I have bitten off more than I can chew (bat ban-locan, blod edrum dranc, syn-snaedum swealh) and I just can’t digest it all.
All of this ties into The Problems With Consumption, too, but I couldn’t at this point tell you how. I’m going on blind faith.
The Kalevala, Folk Traditions, and Metalepsis
I’m delighted in reading the Kalevala for the first time. I don’t know what to make of it, exactly, but it’s fun. I think one of the reasons that I like it is that I come from a family who tells stories. On my mother’s side, the side that actually gets together and eats food and talks regularly, we circulate stories about Uncle Billy who’s been dead since 1962, and about the erstwhile neighbor in the late 70s who peed on his tomato plants every day out of unshakeable faith that this helped them grow straight, strong, plump, and worm-free. Every time my grandmother is asked a story about her mother, the emphasis changes — it’s almost a compressed sort of folk transmission in action, a lightning-swift assessment of rhetorical context which she then deploys for best effect (in her case, usually didactic). Every time my uncle tells a story about Uncle Billy, the inventory of Uncle Billy’s car’s passenger-side floor shifts slightly to provide the best props for the evening’s focus. It’s as “true” as anything ever was, but the stock phrases are the same.
On my father’s side, where there isn’t as much talking, there’s music. Most of the immediate family plays an instrument or two or three, and when I was a child I learned about twenty of the countless verses to a folk song called Shady Grove.
Shady Grove, my little love
Shady Grove I say
Shady Grove, my little love
I’m bound to go away
Cheeks as red as a blooming rose
And eyes are the prettiest brown
She’s the darling of my heart
Sweetest girl in town
When I was older and figured out that a lot of communication was happening on these music nights and I didn’t want to miss it, I brought along my fiddle and listened to the new verses my father had added to those he’d learned from Doc Watson and whomever else. He changed the story — he put marital unhappiness and willing separation into this song which is traditionally about unwilling separation and all the charm of “first love.” He sang a Shady Grove “ten years later.”
Every day when I get home
My wife I try to please her
There ain’t no sadness when I’m gone
One day I’m going to leave her
Shady Grove, my little love
Shady Grove I say
Shady Grove, my little love
I’m bound to go away
The refrain, formerly “about” the way work-life obligations interfere with the pastoral pleasures of hearth, home, and the good woman waiting, are altered, perhaps forever, once you hear my father’s version. The stock phrases are the same, the chorus is the same, the notes are the same — but he’s put something into the spirit of this song that was never there before, at least in a small circle of his own kin as they sit around the fire, sing, play, and tell true lies. The players work references to their personal lives into impromptu verses that by rights belong to a song about the Audobon Zoo, or Mardi Gras. They’re no longer just about the Audobon Zoo, or Mardi Gras. An entire conversation about someone’s latest girlfriend can happen in the space of three verses. The musician in me is delighted, but the student of folklore and literature is appalled that it is not being recorded.
One of the most striking things to me about the Kalevela, aside from the almost belligerent use of stock phrases, is its use of tense. (I’m reading Bosley’s translation in the Oxford World’s Classic series.) Canto I switches tense within the same verse — within the same sentence, even — frequently. Stock phrases abound, yet there are moments that are almost “modern” in their reach for an essence both referential and original, both dependent on prior knowledge of convention for allusion but demanding a “reach” from their audience for the full impact. This sort of metalepsis is fascinating me as I read.
Instances of narrative “intrusion” or instability are everywhere in the first five Cantos, but two sites got my attention particularly. Canto I opens with one narrative framework, in which the audience, already two steps removed from the oral performance in this case, via transcription and then translation, hears the poets talk about the performance of poetry, as the “words unfreeze” and the “phrases [tumble],” “scramble,” and even “scatter” out of the container of the body via the mouth (I:1-10). The reanimated words leave the storage of the poet’s mind or body and take on an agency of their own after the “word-chest” is unlocked (I:86-87). After the poet makes reference to his own reception of the tales in lines 103-104, he begins the tale of the Air-daughter in the past tense. His switch to present tense in 123 calls attention to the immediacy of the performance and suggests it transcendence over time, its continued existence into the present (a tactic we also tend to employ when writing about recorded narratives in academia).
When the narrative switches from describing the past occurrence of scaup’s eggs breaking to the present-tense statement that “The eggs don’t fall in the mud” (I:228), the narrator and audience are spanning (at least) two levels of narrative at the same time. This perhaps prepares the audience for a more attentive reception of the narrator’s shift from observer of eggs at a moment in time to observer of vast expanses of time in lines 245-249: “The ages go on / the years beyond that / … still the water-mother swims…” There’s some sort of threshold of time and pace here, I think – it’s a delightful instance of audience awareness that, satisfyingly, works on the page too.
The second instance is in “The Drowned Maid,” where a similar sort of temporal playfulness combines with a metacritical comment about the nature of oral transmission. The narrator, telling of the death of Aino, switches to present tense to open the stanza that spans lines 373-410. At this point there are no characters “on stage,” and the perspective must come from the omniscient narrator. The poet says, “Who now will carry the news / will tell it by word of mouth / to the maid’s famous / home, to the fair farm?” Here the news is portrayed as a discrete item or object, to be temporarily contained in the body and related through the opening of the mouth. The following lines underscore the fragility of the message when it’s entrusted to a container, and by a shift from present to past tense within a single line, the poet opens a space for the listener or reader to receive the metacritical possibilities of the message: “But the bear does not: it was / lost among a herd of cows.” As with the wolf lost among the sheep and the fox lost among the geese, the outside forces that threaten the message by means of diverting its container can, in large enough concentrations, threaten oral transmission at large. Even the rabbit, the sly one who manages to carry the message to the farm, risks getting cooked for dinner before he can relay the news. A message contained in a body can be lost to death or otherwise silenced; a message contained in a locked word-chest can be lost if the key is lost, be it language or performative context. And the message committed to the pages of a book can’t ever really reproduce the same sort of narrative immediacy of the oral performance – in the speech act, these tense switches are probably hardly noticeable as such, serving to increase the suspense and immediacy of the story, but on the page they stand out and might draw attention to themselves with unintended consequences for an audience they were never really intended for in the first place.
I think my father’s band of tale-tellers might like it.
Ranting about reading
I’m irate about something unrelated to William Morris, on the surface anyway, having recently read Gillian Overing’s 1993 response to criticism of her self-consciously theoretical work in Anglo-Saxon studies. [1] I have read Language, Sign, and Gender, and I didn’t agree with all of it either, but hearken to a reviewer’s fears: Overing and her ilk, part of a “postmodern craze for indeterminacy and fractured consciousness” and a “conspiracy to ‘re-mould [Beowulf] nearer to the Heart’s desire’” (Olsen 1026; Fitzgerald qtd. in Olsen 1026), could “destroy Beowulf for the next generation of readers” (Olsen 1026). [2] What mighty power lies in the selfish and willful mind and pen of Gillian Overing! Whatever privileges she gained, whatever credibility she garnered through years of study of the Anglo-Saxon language and its extant texts, she has surrendered in the eyes of her tribe through her careless allegiance to new-fangled ways that are not familiar to the kindred and not part of the time-honored traditions of the hall. Gillian Overing is outlaw.
My indignation at Olsen and the unpacked assumptions behind her statement about Overing’s capacity to “destroy Beowulf” make me feel immediately guilty about my dislike of Morris. I find myself in the bizarre position of feeling the need to defend William Morris from myself, despite my extreme annoyance with what I perceive to be his artificial diction and his irritating habit of having his characters lapse into a mishmash of hexameter in anapests and iambs. What, I must ask myself, do I want from Morris? Am I accustomed to Tolkien’s level of self-consciousness in fictionalizing a history that never was? Does Morris annoy because his fiction is not fiction enough, lacks some of the Elves and Orcs and imaginary languages that signal to us, from Tolkien’s pages, that there is a responsible and comfortable distance between the history that the author gestures towards and the head of the author himself, between what little we have in the way of recorded history and the figures that the author has created to populate a vision of it? Am I uneasy that his politics and his fiction seem intertwined? Is it the language of the foreword that bothers me, as it urges me to read on for my fill of “more tales of travel in an unspoiled wilderness” (9), or of the Tolkien-neglected “romance between men and women”? [3] Am I permitted to simply find the poetry bad in a rather painful way? I might be as guilty as Morris’ Fox, a “Markman to fight against the Markmen” (37), in wrinkling my nose at Morris’ prose without clearly articulating just what it is I find troublesome about it. And if it’s the aura of romance he conjures around a mythical past that seems like, but can’t possibly be, a historical past, then I’m a terrible hypocrite indeed, since I seem to believe, on a larger scale, that fiction should be allowed to be read as fiction, whether it’s Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry or a Symbolist poet’s musings on the power of a color; that is to say, it can and should be interpreted and discussed by people who are allowed to admit they are people, and who aren’t required to leave their subjectivity at the door when they embark on a study of Old English grammar.
C. S. Lewis praised Morris’ tales because they seemed true (8), and he considered Morris successful in his efforts to try the “old wine” in “new wineskins” (8); he noted a division in the “modern literary world” between “militant Christians” and “the convinced materialists” (8), but was convinced that both sides of the divide could find something of worth in Morris’ romances. A similar chasm exists between scholars like Overing and her “opponents,” who charge her with ruining perfectly good Anglo-Saxon poetry by either failing to try to interpret it or else by approaching its interpretation wrong-headedly, depending on which sentence you read of her attackers. Die-hard positivists might take a page from materialists in their wariness of the filter of human subjectivity and interpretation; those committed to a Christian or metaphysical view of the world might have something in common with schools of criticism that not only recognize but celebrate humanity’s seeming inability to distance itself and the texts it engages from extra-textual frameworks. As in the contemporary debates over creationism versus evolution, one is pressed to take sides and to see those sides as mutually exclusive. Refusal to do so leaves one little room to stand under any clearly identifiable standard or banner on the Hill of Speech. There is – incredibly — a battle being waged over who “owns” Anglo-Saxon poetry, and I realize that I have something in common with Morris and his socialist vision of the imaginary Wolfings, amongst whom land was held in common and even thralls share ownership in poetry (and indeed, burst into it at incredibly awkward times).
[1] Overing, Gillian. “Recent Writing on Old English: A Response.” Aestel 1 (1993). Available online: http://members.aol.com/mcnelis/AEstel1/Overing1.html
[2] Olsen, Alexandra. “Review, Language Sign and Gender in Beowulf.” Speculum 67 (1992): 1024-1026.
[3] Morris, William. More to William Morris. Michael Perry, ed. Seattle: Inkling Books, 2003.
