Lectures (3b)—Scholarship

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Lectures à la fleur."
Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

[a] Readin' RF

Beloit College Mortar Board

26 October 2011

Part Two of Five

Many people think that I love to teach, but that is not exactly the case. I had absolutely no interest in teaching until—under contractual obligation in 1994—I was forced to do so. None. Nada. All I cared about was learning, and that was how I saw my work until a day in the autumn of 1994 when I fell in love with teaching—seeing it as a way to learn and share my ideas in new ways. Even to this day, though, teaching is for me an extension of what I see as a life of reading, writing, thinking, teaching, thinking, writing, and reading. It's a little like living the plot line of Cloud Atlas in the world of ideas.

[b] Natural RF

My parents were both brilliant teachers—one "natural" and one "learned," although matters are always more complicated than such easy phrasing. Both taught me tremendously valuable lessons about the what went into that tip-of-the-iceberg called teaching (the only part of a life of learning that most people actually see). I am thinking of summer days spent by the lake in an ordinary Midwestern childhood. We played, swam, talked...and read. My sister and I saw reading in the way that most elementary school children do—deciphering the flow of words across the page and from page-to-page. Still, it was hard not to notice that my parents expressed almost diametrically opposed approaches to "the text," and I have since seen each of these as a foundation for a life of learning.

I distinctly remember a summer when my father was preparing for his graduate exams and sought to spend the family vacation carefully reading forty books in forty days. The Biblical analogies were not lost on me even then, but it was the manner of his reading that captured my imagination. There he sat, carefully underlining his texts in perfectly straight yellow markings enhanced by underlined emphasis of certain terms or phrases guided by pencil and straight edge. It was not until I entered college and saw my first used textbook that I realized how chaotic highlighted books can look. I thought they were all like my father's—elegant little tracts reflecting his engagement with ideas in pencil and yellow ink. To this day, I cannot help but follow his lead, and every room in my house (as well as every bag I carry) has a supply of markers, pens, straight edges, and retractable pencils. It is embarrassing, but it is the truth.

[c] Verbiage RF

[Y'all are kind of sloppy when marking your texts, but I digress.]

I learned a different approach to texts from my mother. An English teacher, she devoured the Western literary tradition year-round, but never more so than during our summer vacations on the water. Floating on a rubber raft in the streaming western Minnesota sun, she cracked open paperback volumes of Jude the Obscure and Buddenbrooks like so many soft-shell lobsters. She worked her way through one, started another, powered through that one, and so on. Then (and this influence from both parents shaped one of the lasting lessons of good reading to this day)...and then they reread many of their books.

They also talked about their reading all of the time...to the point where I, at least, doubt that it is possible to be "scholarly" and compartmentalize your time. Perhaps I have not seen enough examples, but a life of learning seems pretty much to me (for better or worse) to be 24/7 and 365.25. Lunch might be spent discussing Franz Boas and the Kwakiutl potlatch, while dinner was washed down with hearty gulps of Melville, Austen, and Balzac. It seemed natural, and don't even think about pretension if that is somewhere in your mind right now.

Please, give us a break here.

We were from North Dakota, after all, and none of us ever thought of ourselves as scholars. It was just what we did. We kicked the rich, hearty soil of our heartland and talked about crops, weather, local commerce...not to mention chemistry, anthropology, and literature. That this should seem so unusual in our society (even in its vast and misunderstood upper Midwest) is beyond disheartening for me. It was natural.

And yet teaching seemingly had nothing to do with it. It was just another extension of what my parents did as part of all that reading, talking, and thinking. Of course, I eventually learned that teaching had everything to do with it at the same time. That is precisely my circuitous point here. I got into this racket by wanting to learn more and more. Eventually the books I was reading didn't quite address the precise questions I wanted to engage, and...

...that was precisely when it began to come together.

A funny thing happened then. Almost from that instant onward, my life of learning began to take place (and continues to do so) as a kind of multi-chord duet between "information" and "seeing/twisting things in new directions."

***  ***

[d] Three Kingdoms RF

Let me give a real-text example of what I mean. Everyone in China—and everyone who studies China—knows the most famous novel ever written in the vast territory stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the mountains of central Asia, and from the Gobi Desert to the South China Sea. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國志演義) chronicles one of China's great "heroic" periods, and covers historical characters and events from the first serious cracks leading to the Han dynasty's fall (c. CE 180) to the middle of the third century. As temporal sequences go, these eighty-five years can be compared to almost any others in Chinese history (let's say 1010-1095, 1350-1435, or 1890-1975—and if you know Chinese history, each of these examples should give you goosebumps).

Well these eighty-five years (CE 180-265) are at least a little bit different. People "know" them better than almost any such period in all of Chinese history, precisely because (since the events of the time) they have been hearing and reading stories about the people and events from childhood to dotage. I have often been told that history scores on Chinese middle and high school tests tend to go something like this:
A                                                    .
A-                                                  .  .
B+                                                .    .
B                                                 .      .
B-                                               .        .
C               .................................          ..................................................................
C-
     1000 BCE     500 BCE     CE 1     CE 500     CE 1000     CE 1500     CE 2000

[e] Nuanced RF

Although I have my doubts about the reality of profound "test score spikes" in the early third century of the Common Era, I was intrigued. I was beginning my study of history and anthropology by that time, so I looked at one of the only translations I could find that would provide the sources for the novel and its narrative. It was a gem of a text, translated by a scholar with a perfect name, Achilles Fang. The book takes the reader through a very different account of the period, and the characters appear quite changed from the way that they are presented in the novel. The text provided "the same" famous figures, but with a new focus; new clarity.

I was learning that characters such as the "wicked" general Cao Cao (曹操; CE 155-220) was portrayed as a far more nuanced figure in the "historical" text translated by Achilles Fang. The "benevolent" leader Liu Bei (劉備; CE 161-223) often came across as a far weaker and flawed figure than his oversized status in the novel. Above all, the magico-martial high priest Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮; CE 181-234) emerges as a somewhat flaky leader intent on holding together a fading state in increasingly desperate ways.

The experience created its own kind of magic for me. I wasn't doing anything close to "scholarship," but I could see the vague outline of its craggy peaks from where I sat. I was unterwegs...on the path.

Click below for the other sections of this lecture:

Part One                    Part Two                    Part Three                    Part Four                    Part Five

NEXT

Starting up the path and learning what this "scholarly life" thing was all about.