Serving the Market

So opinion was, as I said, divided, on the question of teacher monologues. My impression is that the divide was roughly along generational lines. The under-30's (most of whom were about 20) liked monologue. I'd guess the reason was that most had spent excessive portions of their formative years watching TV. Like Reinhardt, they viewed classroom input from other students as "irrelevant" -- which it admittedly was for them since one could see they completely tuned out whenever fellow students spoke.

Over-30's Jacques and Janine, on the other hand, who shared Barlow's class with me, felt as I did that monologues were a misguided way to conduct these classes. The three of us discussed it one day after a class in which Barlow inflicted a particularly tedious monologue on us. I'd been terribly bored; they too were disgruntled. But it was useless to complain, they both said. Monologue was what the other students wanted.

In a subsequent class, Barlow was discussing a passage in Ian McEwan's Atonement in which Paul Marshall, the evil character, is visiting the protagonist's family home and having a discussion with the people there. At one point, "Marshall [takes] control of the conversation with a ten-minute monologue."

Explaining Marshall's social trespass, Barlow commented to the class:

Ten minutes is a hell of a long time to be talking to people without interruption.

Janine and I exchanged meaningful looks. But the aptness of the comment didn't seem to have struck anyone else.

Barlow spoke well, with a fluid, fluent style. Substance was the problem. He would expatiate on seemingly arbitrary passages from the novel under discussion -- passages which a cynic might suspect he'd selected at random. One day he told us he'd become increasingly convinced that a novel's structure was important, and that the middle of a novel (i.e., the part around page 200, if the novel was 400 pages long) was particularly significant. Several times there were hints that he might not actually have read the full novel. He'd occasionally tell us things that were simply wrong. And once, when he focussed on a line from Shakespeare quoted by a character in Zadie Smith's White Teeth -- "thy black is fairest in my judgment's place" (p. 270) -- and I asked what the line meant, his lengthy response was plainly evasive, and the actual question never answered.

Barlow's middle-of-the-book theory led him to talk to the class about a passage around page 248 of Monica Ali's Brick Lane, reasonably close to the middle of the novel's 492 pages. Two characters, Chanu and Dr. Azad, are having a discussion over dinner. At one point, Chanu delivers a little speech to his friend. This passage immediately follows:

"Good, good," said Dr. Azad. Chanu had strayed too far from the point of their intersection. The rules of the conversation, to the doctor's mind, had been breached.

Unless memory fails, Barlow made no mention to the class of the most noteworthy and amusing element of this conversation: that the two are not in fact communicating at all. They are talking about different things and apparently paying scarcely any attention to each other. Chanu's wife Nazneen sees it clearly, "marvell[ing] at the way this all worked so smoothly: how these two men could find themselves in vehement agreement over their separate topics."

Having neglected the central feature of the passage he'd chosen to discuss, Barlow did inexplicably tell the class that the "Good, good" spoken by Azad to Chanu indicated that Azad was "encouraging him to go on."

In another passage discussed by Barlow, Chanu takes his family to see Buckingham Palace. Though he has lived in London "twenty or thirty years," as he explains to the incredulous bus conductor, they've never seen such sights before because this is their first "family holiday." (Chanu has decided they should do some sightseeing now because he has given up on England and plans to move back to his native Bangladesh soon, with his family.)

Chanu has fully equipped himself with tourist gear, including guidebooks. When they reach the palace, the patient and loving Nazneen deliberately poses a question she knows her husband's resources will enable him to answer: "Which is the biggest room, and what is it used for?"

Chanu, pleased, recites a response that obviously comes straight from the guidebook:

The ballroom ... is used for all sorts of big functions. The Queen, you see, must entertain many people. It is part of her duty to the country. Most British people know someone who has, at one time or another, been a guest at a palace tea party. This is how she maintains the affection and loyalty of her subjects.

Surely the author is presenting the guidebook's benign platitudes, mouthed here without intentional irony by a maladjusted immigrant, as a humorous contrast to the cynicism many British actually feel about the royal family. Yet, though Barlow focussed on the passage, and made the point that, "indeed, it's true that many people know someone who has been to one of these tea parties," the passage's humor seemed not to have occurred to him. When I pointed out in class that the part about "affection and loyalty" might be questionable, he responded with a humorless discussion of how attitudes in Britain vary on the subject of the royal family.

What was missing in Barlow's class was a sense of fun, a sense of pleasure, even as we dwelt on such delightful novels as Atonement and Brick Lane. There seemed to be an inability to enjoy what was interesting, a failure to recognize and appreciate ideas that were fresh and original, an indifference to the satisfaction of properly understanding things rather than merely coping with them adequately for pragmatic purposes.

What Barlow liked was to give students assortments of unconnected facts, and lists of things, that they could then write down in their notes. And many of his mostly under-30 students seemed favorably reassured by this conventional means of fulfilling the duty to acquire knowledge and education.

In his discussion of the novel Nice Work, for example, Barlow told the class of an essay the author, David Lodge, had written, in which Lodge divided the various kinds of literary criticism into four categories. Barlow then enumerated the four categories for us. (Very roughly, since I was making no attempt to be a model stenographer, the categories are: 1, explain literature; 2, something anticreative; 3, crit. as a kind of creative writing; 4, crit. as a part of creative writing.)

Barlow's course accorded a single class, a total of 90 minutes, to the study of Nice Work. Why it was essential to elaborate Lodge's four categories of literary criticism within this allotted timeframe was never explained. The sole impetus seemed to be the satisfaction derived from making and copying another list.

The tediousness of Barlow's course reflected a general deficiency that hung like a permanent cloud over the summer program's under-30's. They seemed never in their lives to have been touched by "sacred draughts" -- it appeared they'd never known, and were unable to imagine, intellectual pleasure.

If we reflect on intellectual inquiry as a social endeavor -- what one might expect a university experience to be about -- it seems practically inseparable from some form of vying of alternative ideas. But if intellectual pleasure was a foreign concept for the under-30's, it is understandable they were content with monologues and the docile registering of dreary items of knowledge into notebooks.

The appreciation of intellectual pleasure was probably not widespread among the young in former times. But I suspect its incidence has plunged among today's young. Given that they are the most marketed-to and pandered-to generation ever seen on our planet, should we be surprised?

In the process of learning, it can occur that one's convictions and outlook get rudely shoved aside by their successors. Is such discombobulation any longer tolerable?

You deserve a break today.

To what extent, for that matter, can this generation appreciate pleasure of any kind? Isn't sex these days largely a matter of performance anxiety and physical self-loathing (as suggested by Naomi Wolf's The Porn Myth)? How does a youngster engage in sex for the first time, when thousands of movie & TV depictions of sex -- mostly unrealistic, often rather violent -- are pressing down upon him or her?

Playing squash is a great way to have pleasure while keeping fit. But according to Richard Loke, a squash professional I met at a Cambridge squash club, squash is in decline in Britain. These days, he told me, people are into shaping their bodies at the gym (with exercise machines and the like).

Today's young are saddled with objectives. Pleasure does not seem to be high on the agenda.

Consider the venomous "grianne" and her friends on the online discussion forum. If you follow my link to the forum, you can see the user statistics displayed by the forum software. They show that grianne has posted 13,908 times since joining in February, 2000. That is an average of 7 posts each and every day for the past five years. And we have seen a sample. grianne, I would submit, is not leading a life filled with pleasure.

I am reminded of an advice column I saw in The Toronto Star:

Q: I've been in an online relationship for two months, but it's taken a turn for the worse.

Recently, my friend confronted her about her trying to cheat on me with him and a guy friend of hers about whom we've already had fights.

I saw the computer log of what happened. I'd suspected she's been doing things. She keeps telling me it wasn't her and asked for a second chance. I don't know if I can ever trust her again. Should I work this out with her or should I give her the cold shoulder?

--Untrusting

---

A: Try human contact. Neither your shoulder nor any other part of your body, especially your heart, can be involved at all, since you two haven't met in person. This isn't a relationship...it's only a series of messages. The one I'm getting is that you need to deal with her in person. This concept isn't "old-fashioned" -- it's the only way to truly know and trust someone. That isn't done with "logs," or friends playing detective and confronting. If you want romance of the see-hear-touch variety, go for it. Arrange to meet, look in her eyes, ask if she's sincere, tell her how you feel. It works for millions.

["If virtual love stops clicking, meet face to face," advice column by Ellie published in The Toronto Star, July 26, 2004.]

(Continued....)