St. Monday and the Ignorants

I quote today from the penultimate lecture delivered by Dr. James Robert McTweedpants in his tenure as J. Ronald Lane Latimer Professor of American Literatures Directly Referencing the Erie Canal at the Corey Hill School for the Developmentally Tangential. His title comes from the then-recent publication of Fernando Pessoa's writings, given the title Always Astonished.

"Today I speak on the work of a Portuguese writer in translation. I know no Portuguese, nor have I read this book; this is, I am fairly sure, the first time I have not lectured on Philip Freneau's 'On the Great Western Canal of the State of New York.' I take the title solely as a point of departure, but also as a terminal point of self-identification. If I could choose the shorthand by which my tenure at Corey Hill would be remembered, I would select precisely the words chosen by those who have edited and translated the prose of Fernando Pessoa: always astonished.

"I do this as I do most things, in a reactionary way. It is no surprise to those few who know me well that I have found myself generally marginalized not only within the academy and the department of English, but also within the small group of academics who specialize in the literature of upstate New York. I have never quite seemed to find a seamless place, and I attribute this fact less to my endless fascination for my admittedly selective subject matter than to my intellectual stance in general: always astonished.

"I work in a field that, whatever its pretensions otherwise, cannot accommodate astonishment. We claim to be cultural arbiters, 'teaching' the art of literature to a largely indifferent public, and in this position we feel such acute anxiety over the presence (or lack thereof) of our own specialized and qualified knowledge that we cannot, for even a minute, allow ourselves to enter the purely negative space of astonishment: never astonished.

"I speak of the kind of astonishment (the only real kind, I suppose) in which one's immediate perception is incommensurable with the history of already-accommodated perceptions. One is speechless and even thoughtless; one is confronted with the new and uncategorizable. One must, of necessity, appear naive and childlike within the grip of such a perception, implicitly recognizing the power of our environment over our ability to subjugate it to our ideas of order: utterly astonished.

"Go to a seminar or job talk or conference at any department of English and observe what happens when a faculty is presented with the new, either in the form of a dramatically inventive reading or an introduction to an art unrecognizable by current standards. Reactions tend to fall one of two ways: observers are either bored and irritated at being subjected to what is clearly nonsense, or; observers nod their heads in varying degrees of enthusiasm. The latter is more generally the case (as outright dismissal is thought vulgar nowadays): faculties observe that this new work fits quite nicely into the paradigms established by trendy professors a, b, and c. And perhaps this new work does; what it does in and of itself is not my concern. My concern is the ubiquitous ability of literature faculties to perform this work of categorization without passing through or giving notice of the experience of astonishment: never astonished.

"I would like to close this lecture by addressing those who have criticized my academic work for my refusal to speak on the work of Walt Whitman, a fault they considered very grave in my second book, entitled Some Thoughts I've Been Having Recently About Walt Whitman and the Erie Canal. Whitman is, I admit, categorically a negative figure in this book: his shadow only moves from page to page. I will chalk up this 'failure,' if one can call it that, to my perpetual astonishment in my reading of Whitman. In my time spent reading the 1855, 1861, and 1892 editions of Leaves of Grass, I have rarely been able to read more than a pair of lines, or the first few items in a catalogue, before experiencing what I have been calling a state of astonishment that leaves me bereft of the hermeneutic confidence with which I might have been able to produce a comment on the work. Whether or not Whitman's poetry defies interpretation is beyond my concern and ability; I speak here only of what I cannot speak, of the unrecognizable that remains insistently unrecognizable. I will confess only to honesty: to being always astonished.

"Please exit at the side doors."