one of Rembrandt’s many fascinating sketches

When I have a class that I think can handle it appropriately, and a bit of time at the end of term when the teaching is almost all done, I like to do an exercise in honest peripatetic pedagogy.  I hand out brightly colored note cards, and ask each student to quickly write down one question they’d like me to answer for the whole class–any question, no matter how irrelevant–and then to flip it over and write one statement–any statement, no matter how deep or trivial–they’d like to share with the whole class.  I ask only that their question and statement seem to them to have similar “weight,” and that they be willing to have their statement read in order to get their question answered.

Sometimes it goes flat; sometimes it creates the kind of conversations we all too rarely enjoy with our students, these days.

I fielded questions about “Why don’t we read more poets who are still alive?” (too many of them, too hard to choose, free verse not the best introduction to verse, lack of public domain etexts) and “How do you make poetry matter when people are deaf to it?” (I quoted Dana Gioia on that one, of course).

Then imagine how my mind began to race when I flipped over the card that read “What is the meaning of life?” and “To give glory to Jesus.”  The student, for good measure, had drawn a line from his phrase back to the question, presumably to make sure I couldn’t miss that his sentence fragment would be unintelligible except as answering his question.

Bear in mind that I teach at a state university, and that I have found that state university environment beautifully supportive in more respects than I can name.  Indeed, I am more often blown away by the sheer kindness of my colleagues here even than the Christian institutions I have enjoyed teaching at–and all of them were full of supportive colleagues, too!  Nonetheless, I am keenly aware that to some of my students and many of my colleagues, it is impossible to speak of God in this way without being either hopelessly naive or culpably exclusionary.

And, indeed, it is impossible to practice any religion worthy of the name without making claims that are logically exclusivist and which involve a certain priority of received faith over individualist reasoning.  Either God is one or there are many gods, or none; either God is real, or we merely have a notion miscalled a god; either God is Three Persons, or only one, or many manifestations of ultimate reality interpenetrating the illusion of selfhood, etc. etc.  So, yes, on some level every time I speak truth, I do say that someone’s idea just doesn’t figure in, doesn’t picture reality as it really is.  But reasoning about this means precisely including each other in this give-and-take of reasoned corrections, of questions and challenges and defenses and elucidations.  Quaeritur is only issued to friends of the court!

So I grinned a little, as I read the card, at the way the student was attempting to be bold while also feeling the need to keep a light touch–because of course that was exactly the sort of invitation I was issuing, and exactly how I felt about such conversations.

It was necessary to open with a disclaimer:  “Now, as an English teacher, it’s not my job to insist on just one point of view, here.  That’s not what I’m paid for.  But…”

The important concepts, of course, were all “baked in” when I designed the course.  Aside from various formal and genre ideas, and the sort of practice reading lines and words of prose and verse that every student really needs, I had three guiding concept-clusters for the course.  In everything we read, I asked students to look for “traditionary elements,” which we simplified to mean elements in one piece of literature that required that you first be familiar with some prior art.  I asked them to consider the difference between what the work portrayed as “normal” for its protagonists and what, if anything, the work clearly established as “normative” for those characters (a work featuring a dysfunctional family’s premature sexualization of a young woman establishes a view of “normal” which that work’s depiction of her often self-destructive efforts to find and draw lines to protect herself from her molesting uncle clearly view through a “normative” lens).  And I asked them to always be aware that they had, ultimately, two interpretive tendencies available to them:  they could tend toward allegoresis, or toward nihilism.

Allegoresis, even when misguided, is interpretation based on the conviction that history really does “add up” to something, that our lives really do have a revelatory logic, an unfolding toward an expected end that was already present at our true origin in God’s creative activity.  Even for those who do not acknowledge a Christian conception of God, the intuition that events signify is profound, and leads to a constant effort to construe (or “create”) meaning from the cosmos.

Nihilism, on the other hand, is the state that gives up on this significance–or, worse, which has been convinced almost without effort (so it seems) to cease wondering about it.  It is the borderland between acedia and despair; it is the state Nietzsche rails at in some of the truest moments of his thought:

“We have discovered happiness” — say the Last Men, and they blink.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.
…

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
“Formerly all the world was insane,” — say the subtlest of them, and they blink.
They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled — otherwise it upsets their stomachs.
They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.
“We have discovered happiness,” — say the Last Men, and they blink.

And it is on account of this distinction that, having read Ibsen and Melville early in the semester, and made painfully short shrift of Hamlet in mid-semester, we end on E. A. Robinson and W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, particularly “Cassandra” and “The Unknown Citizen” and “The Hollow Men,” with its obvious references to Nietzsche.

So my reply to my students was to remind them of their choice between allegoresis and nihilism as approaches to poetry–and to life.  No, I could not insist that we go from talking about poetry at one jump, and unmediated, to a call for Christian faith that I should like them to confuse at all with my authority as an English teacher at a state university.  Far too many wobbly signifiers, there; too much potential for bad faith on both sides of the communication.

Rather, I suggested that reading poetry, reading any kind of literature, really should lead them to realize how intuitively we prefer allegoresis; how much we expect things to “add up.”  No writer, no teacher, no television producer can proceed without showing familiar things so as to provoke expectations and elicit responses, and then proceeding to confirm or change those expectations.  And this is either a rats-in-a-maze conditioning effect, merely such, or it works because we all actually do expect significance and we actually care about how each other respond to life’s situations and what drives us toward good ends or bad, and most importantly we know that we should care.

I suggested to my students that it is important, when reading a poem, to see those expectations, and how they’re changed, and to care whether they “add up” to something.  To expect that they should.  I urged them to see that this understanding that it does all “add up” in some way made the difference between reading well and, finally, not bothering to read at all.  And I suggested that expecting things to “add up” in some way was also important when deciding whether to wake on any given day.

Really, now.  If you wake only to be one of Nietzsche’s “Last Men,” then why bother?  As E. A. Robinson says in a poem too long to inflict on my freshmen,

Why pay we such a price, and one we give
So clamoringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought,—
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that,—why live?

But if we bother to wake up in the morning, then either we think it all “adds up” to something, or we merely distract ourselves with this “life” thing.

Which brings me to Jonah.  Without going into all the intertextual details I’ve been laying out, here, and without naming any names, I offered the following explanation of allegoresis to my students drawn–as is the beauty of peripatetic education–from casting my eye about and lighting on a tree as an exemplary object.

Allegoresis, I explained, expects things in life to “add up” to something more than just a succession of things.  Your favorite shade tree is suddenly dead.  You could see that as “adding up” to a lot of things, I suppose:  you might think it has to do with global warming, or you might think it reflects your relationships.  But allegoresis works like this:  you notice, at some point, that because your favorite shade tree was dead, you were cranky all day long.  You realize that the less significant event–you couldn’t relax in the shade–had led to the more significant event–your alienating your friends and colleagues.  You decide that you need to understand life in a way that reflects a right ordering of relationships:  your friends are more important than your trees.  And, if you’re wise, you recognize that it would be profoundly worthwhile for the tree to die, that you could even choose the loss of your favorite shade tree, if it rescued your friendships.  You accept the possibility that the “final cause” of the shade tree’s living and dying might well be, at least in significant part, to give you the opportunity to restore and improve those relationships.

Which is, in significant part, the story of Jonah and the gourd (or “plant”).  Or rather, it is the moral allegory a Christian could derive from the passage.  We should, of course, go one step deeper than this toes-wet allegory.

For my students, however, it was a moment of contact with a higher order of signification than we can manage in daily university education at a secular school.

And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night.  And should not I pity Nin′eveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”