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Tuesday, February 03, 2004
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WINTRY MIX
Sometimes, when you teach, you have these little moments of - I want to call them synesthesia, but I just looked that up and it's wrong. A more accurate word is the less lovely gesamtkunstwerk -- a kind of aesthetic and natural synthesis, a feeling of being wrapped inside a world of art. You're analyzing the opening lines of The Waste Land, and outside the windows of your classroom it's exactly the sort of April Eliot has in mind; or, as is the case with me today, you're discussing James Joyce's story, "The Dead," and snow is general all over the Atlantic seaboard, just as it is general all over Ireland when Gabriel Conroy, during his aunts' annual New Year's party, blunders into some truths about the living and the dead. At moments like these, things are strangely in alignment, the world is your objective correlative, and teaching can be bliss. The "ghastly developments" in American university life to which Kramer refers in the sentence at the top of this page are ghastly by way of contrast. Without wanting to be as fondly nostalgic as Gabriel's Aunt Julia, I do want to suggest that things used to be better, and that University Diaries wants not merely to observe the ghastly but also to recall how glorious teaching and writing used to be - how glorious they can still be. Glorious here doesn't mean mindlessly happy. It means infused with so much dark and light (here the word is lovely: chiaroscuro) as to be intellectually and emotionally exhilarating. For instance - the wintry mix in today's weather lets me mix the cold muddled streets of early twentieth century Dublin with the streets of my city today - in both places, the same morbidity, the same confusion. Instead of suggesting how art - generation after generation - makes the world opulent, professors push their students into little linguistic pissoirs. The "unstable candle" in Gabriel's hotel room is his detumescent tool, of course; and his "snow-stiffened frieze" is also his root, elevated a bit. A psychoanalytic critic writes, in the much-used Bedford/St. Martin's critical edition of Portrait of the Artist, that "the position of the birdlike girl Stephen gazes at, and the noise of gently moving water that issues from her, probably indicate that she is urinating. The stream of her urine could constitute a phallic symbol and so add to the fetishism of the scene." Ick. |