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ON-LINE
ISSUES
V.4
N.1, March 1997
Once Upon a Time
by
David Calhoon
University of Alberta
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The
Yellow Dress
- It is
the first day of school in La Grulla, Texas. The migrant farm worker
families have returned home after following the crop harvests from
state to state for five months. Today the children start back to school.
- Today
is my first day as a primary teacher. I know from my one year of experience
teaching Junior High that control is the most important thing.
I asked for this grade three assignment because my year teaching Junior
High has convinced me that it would be so much easier if only they
were smaller. I am waiting in my room for the morning bell to ring.
In preparation I have decorated the room as I imagine that a grade
three class should look. Actually it looks just like my classroom
when I was in grade three: desks all in rows, the letters of the alphabet
displayed across the top of the chalkboards, bulletin boards featuring
autumn themes, a giant September calendar page, and a big picture
clock with movable hands. On each desk, in order to limit the commotion
of children finding desks, I have placed a sheet of paper with a child's
first name in big colorful print. All is ready.
- My mouth
feels dry and I am a little nauseous. I tell myself, "Relax, they
are children, third graders; you are the teacher; you are in control!"
The bell rings and I jump, surprised, even though I have been nervously
watching the clock for the last half hour. Here they come!
- Children
begin filling the room: filling it with bodies, smells, and, most
of all, sounds. My anxiety builds with the noise level. Some goats
have come in with the children and are eating the papers with the
children's names off the desks. The children laugh and yell and some
with shepherding skills begin chasing the goats out. The 40 desks
become occupied and I realize there are not enough desks. The noise
and confusion continues to increase. I realize it is way too loud.
I yell, "Sit down and be quiet, please." Some of them comply but many
do not. I am not even sure they have heard me. My anxiety is increasing
and I am worried that the principal may come to investigate the noise.
- A little
boy is tugging at my arm and speaking to me in Spanish. I don't understand
him and I ask him to speak more slowly. A little girl wearing a bright
yellow taffeta dress is sitting at her desk with her arm raised. She
says she has to go to the "escusado" (washroom). I tell her she will
have to wait until the class settles down. The little boy is speaking
to me again and I now understand that he is worried because he has
no desk. Three other children are yelling that they have no desks
either. I tell them to sit at the art table in the back of the room.
Other kids begin yelling that they want to sit at the art table too.
The art table has become a scene of chaos.
- I lose
it. "¡Calla te! (Shut up!)," I scream. The effect is dramatic. The
room falls silent. I like it. It feels good. I am the teacher; I am
in control.
- Then,
in the silence, I hear a gentle sobbing. I turn and see a beautiful
little girl sitting with her arm still raised. The sound of her crying
is mixing with the sound of running water. Urine is flowing out around
her bright yellow "first day of school" dress and cascading to the
floor.
- I am
the teacher, I am in control.
Story,
Presence, and Representation
- What
is there about story? We all have experienced its power: when we burst
into tears in a public theatre, laugh out loud while reading in a
quiet room, lose all track of time reading a book that we "can't put
down." The story causes us to lose control, to become separated from
our self-consciousness, to step out of time. Not to a place where
we turn the words of our thought onto what was, but to the place before
time, before the subject/object: the place where the world is born.
Not the place where we create the world with our words but the place
where the world springs itself upon us and catches us without the
words to make it already historical. This is not a place of thoughtful
action, it is a place where our only action is reaction, reaction
to a world which asserts its presence upon us, where presence is all
there is.
- Is it
possible then for the words of a narrative to represent the experiences
and the reality of others? There was a time when I felt that the evidence
of our bodies (the tears, the laughter, the pain, the joy) gave proof
that such a representation occurred. One of the fundamental, even
magical, powers of story is the power to "call to presence." In a
way story allows us to "experience without experiencing." This experiential
aspect of story is testified to by our bodies: the tears we shed while
viewing a sad (or, indeed, happy) scene in a film, our accelerated
heart rate while reading an exciting or suspense-filled passage in
a novel, and the various other story induced physiological responses,
ranging from humorous to terrifying to erotic. However, is this proof,
or even evidence, of "representation"?
- For
the past four years I have told the story which opened this paper
to the student teachers in my university classes. I do this in hope
that they will learn from my experience. In some sense, I am obligated
to do so by the "face" of a little girl named Aida. In any event,
I have now told this story to nearly a thousand student teachers.
Two months ago I ran into one of these (now former) student teachers.
He had sought me out in order to tell me something that had happened
to him early in his first teaching experience. He said that during
a very chaotic morning lesson a child had raised his hand and asked
to go to the washroom. His first reaction was to tell the child he
would have to wait, but before he finished the sentence he "thought
of the little girl in the yellow dress." He reversed his position
and told the boy to go ahead to the washroom. Is it the "representational"
of story which allowed this to happen?
- There
is a lively discussion in progress regarding representation in literary,
educational, anthropological, historical, and sociological critical
discourses. Story and narrative seem to be playing an increasing role
in this discussion. Because of my own identity as "teacher," my involvement
in teacher education, and my ongoing inquiry into issues pertaining
to culture and language, I have found much of this discussion helpful
to me as I strive to find my way in a poststructural, postmodern,
postcolonial landscape.
- (A
parenthetical interruption: While writing the last sentence I was
struck by the image of a landscape of "posts." Three years ago while
travelling in Australia, I visited an aboriginal cultural center.
In this center there was a room filled with vertically placed heavy
timber posts. It had the feel of closely spaced trees of different
diameters, randomly located as in a natural forest. On these posts
were nailed "texts," in the manner of the flyers stapled to telephone
poles on urban streets. The "texts" were historical, dating from the
days of the early colonization of Australia, "posted colonial texts."
One of these texts haunts me; it resurfaces-interrupts-erupts whenever
I encounter the word "colonial." It was/is a reproduction of an article
in a London newspaper advising those who would venture to Australia
seeking land and fortune. The author stated that the best way to acquire
land was to travel into the bush beyond the area already occupied
by colonists. There one could find huge expanses of land waiting to
be claimed. The article went on to caution that the new settlers must
be prepared to "harden" their conscience as they would be required
to kill substantial numbers of "bushmen" inhabiting the land. The
author insisted that this was necessary and should not trouble new
settlers too much, as it had been well documented in the latest scientific
studies that these bushmen were not actually human but in fact a sub-human
species of animal related to the ape. Therefore, this killing should
be viewed much as the extermination of rats or starlings which infest
grain bins and fields.)
Some
Disruptive Voices
- Deborah
Britzman (1995), Johannes Fabian (1994), and Gabriele Schwab (1994)
are among those whose compelling and provocative discussions have
helped me not so much to navigate, as to begin to search for a place
to stand on this shifting quaking terrain, this terra non firma. They
do so by first knocking me off balance, by divesting me of the security
of my stories as representations of experience:
This
returns us to the clashing investments in how stories are told
and of the impossibility of telling everything. There is that
excess, that difference within the story, informing how the
story is told, the imperatives produced within its tellings,
and the subject positions made possible and impossible there.
These signifying "spaces" must be admitted as central to the
structure and regulation of ethnographic work if readers are
to participate in exceeding and informing the meanings ethnography
might offer....Ethnographic narratives should ...question the
belief in representation even as one must practice representation
as a way to intervene critically in the constitutive constraints
of discourses. (Britzman, 1995).
Writing
as re-presentation simply cannot be the fundamental issue. Presence
is, because before there is representation there must be presence;
and in the end the question of ethnographic objectivity still
comes down to the question of what makes it possible to have
access to another culture, or to be in the presence of another
culture--both of which seem to be required if ethnographic knowledge
is to be more than projection or delusion. (Fabian, 1994)
...it is no coincidence that literary texts have become increasingly
sensitive to their different environments. Less concerned with
a mere representation of referential worlds, they have become
more and more interventionist, reflecting social concerns, philosophical
and epistemological premises of their time, other discursive
and aesthetic practices, the dramatic impact of technology and
the media on our way of life, and the increasing globalization
of our culture. (Schwab, 1994)
- I present
these ethnographic and literary voices not because I believe them
to be representative of new ways or "types" of thinking about representation,
but rather because of their particularity. They knock me off balance,
even when re-reading them, by becoming present before my mind always
in a particularly new way.
The
Ongoing Struggle
- Having
lost my balance I am struggling to regain it. As part of that struggle
I return once again to my body and my personal experience of story.
A couple of months ago I watched (on video) a movie titled "My Life,"
starring Michael Keaton. The story is about a "thirty something" year
old man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His wife was
pregnant with their first child and the doctors told him he would
not live to see the birth. In order to leave something of himself
for his unborn son he set about making a "home video" about his life.
The video within the video narrated both the story of his living and
of his dying.
- The
personally shocking thing about my experience of this story was not
that I cried, for I am sure that many, if not most, people who have
seen this film experienced tear filled eyes. No, the shocking thing
was that I sobbed uncontrollably and inconsolably; I completely broke
down in grief in a way no other movie (or story in any form) has ever
caused me to do. This was not a mystery to me because I knew where
the grief originated; I knew that I was not crying for Michael Keaton
or the fictional character he was attempting to represent. My grief
was real and I was powerless to control it.
- Four
years ago I shared presence nearly everyday for nine months with a
close friend as he went through the day by day process of dying, and
trying so very hard not to die, from the effects of, and the
radiation treatment for, an inoperable brain tumor. And although that
is "another story" which happened "once upon a time" I believe that
the relationship between these stories is not simply that the fiction
caused the experience of my grief to be remembered. Nor do I believe
that a representation of experience in the movie evoked the re-experience
of my past grief.
- In a
literal sense, space and time render representation a myth, or even
an oxymoron. If indeed story can bring a presence to us, it is always
a new presence and never a re- presence, always a new presentation
and never a representation, always our own presence and never the
presence of an other.
- What
IS at work/play when story weaves its magic? Story does not have the
power to deliver to us the presence of the other. Rather, it may call
us to our own presence and, most importantly, orient our presence
toward the possibilities inherent in the living (even when dying)
presence of an other. For a teacher in a room full of children, and
in a world where living WITH each other may be our only hope for survival,
this continuing orientation may be crucial.
Return
to Jaws
- To whom
do I turn to help me find a place to stand? Reluctantly (reticently),
I find myself turning/re-turning to Heidegger. This is the person
I once referred to, in my master's thesis (Calhoon, 1989), as "Jaws"
because of his voracious logic and the manner in which he takes our
legs from under us and pulls us into the abyss. I am reluctant (struggling
against) in the sense that I have not previously been able to give
Heidegger a sympathetic reading. Now, I find Heidegger's indeterminacy
of language my only refuge.
- Martin
Heidegger refers to the power of language to both "call" us to speak
and call "to" us from silence, not by giving us the "correct" word
but by enabling us to "hear" that which is unspeakable. Jane Kelly
Rodeheffer explicates:
In
the essay "Language," he (Heidegger) suggests that the voice of
language--it's speaking-- is not an uttering, but stillness. The
stillness at the heart of language calls to mortals through the
poem, which is the only form of speaking in which primal calling
is any longer to be heard. (Rodeheffer, 1990)
Heidegger
views the poet as the only "authentic" speaker, with the poem
being not the poet's words but that to which those words call
and that which calls the poet to speak (Rodeheffer, 1990).
- Heidegger,
in his essay Poetry, Language and Thought, states:
Projective saying is poetry: the saying of the world and earth,
the saying of the arena of their strife and thus of the place
of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry is the saying
of the unconcealdness of beings. Actual language at any given
moment is the happening of this saying, in which a people's world
historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that
which remains closed. Projective saying is saying which, in preparing
the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into
a world. (Heidegger in Krell, 1977)
- From
this perspective my stories become not the words themselves but the
experience/presence to which those words allude/call. My "authenticity"
as a speaker/writer can only be measured by the degree to which the
"experience/presence" alluded to by my story can call forth a re-orientation
of presence in the reader/listener.
- So if
asked, "Where do you stand now?," shall I answer: In the presence
of a little girl in a yellow dress and a dying friend, or in the historicality
of a world created by language? I guess I would have to be like Forest
Gump and say, "both."
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References
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Britzman, D. P. (1995). "The question of belief": Writing poststructural
ethnography. Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(3), 229-238.
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Calhoon, D. (1989). A journey toward a shared horizon. Masters,
University of Alberta.
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Fabian, J. (1994). Ethnographic objectivity revisited: From rigor
to vigor. In A. Megill (Ed.), Rethinking objectivity (pp. 81-108).
Durham: Duke University Press.
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Krell, D. F. (Ed.). (1977). Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings.
New York: Harper & Row.
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Rodeheffer, J. K. (1990). The call of conscience and the call of language:
Reflections on a movement in Heidegger's thinking. In A. B. Dallery
& C. E. Scott (Eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy (pp.
127-134). Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Schwab, G. (1994). Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts
in Modern Fiction. Boston: Harvard University Press.
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