From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Re: Literature students
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 13:07:32 GMT

After lambasting Hemingway (for all I know, Papa H. deserves it)
Michael Wise laments:
>It is a question of bringing them into a world where no one has been 
>willing to give them a straight answer, because many English TEACHERS
>feel they should go with their own feeling. I have the opposite sense
>of the students that the original poster has. To me, they come in with
>nothing: no formula, no original thoughts. I would be pleasantly sur-
>prised to see either a genuine reaction to a work, or even a standard 
>interpretation.

What I noticed in college, though, is that many of my most treasured
"genuine reactions" to literature were difficult to present in the
context of a literature class--because they were usually more related
to real events in my own life, than they were to anything in the text
or to other texts.  How was I to confess to my class on 17th century
French drama, for example, that the monologues of Racine's heroines
(especially Phedre, Andromaque, and Hermione) were awakening my naive
18-yr-old body to the delicious possibilities of being tortured
by lust--to the point where when my first college boyfriend broke up
with me, I wandered the campus in a Hermione-inspired state of "mad"
distraction, crying "Ou suis-je?  Qu'ai-je fait?  Que dois-je faire
encore?  Quel transport me saisit?  Quel chagrin me devore?" to every
puzzled soul who crossed my path? 

My early relationship with Hemingway would be equally difficult to
describe within a college paper: around the age of 12, I learned to
sail, and was enamored of the romance involved in sailing a small
boat (a Sunfish) in winter in the Gulf of Mexico.  While climbing the
huge swells, and then balancing precariously, pelted with cold spindrift,
on their peaks, I used to think of Conrad's _Typhoon_ and of Poe's
"Descent into the Maelstrom."  But most of all, I thought about the
scene in _Old_Man_and_the_Sea_, when the old man's hand on the line
has grown so cramped and rigid, he has to beat it against the gunwale
of the boat to get his fingers to release the line.  I found this
image so compelling, I would purposely sail on one tack for so long
a time, in the cold, that my hand would cramp up on the mainsheet--
and indeed! just like Hemingway said! I could only get it free by
banging it, like a recalcitrant tool, against the surface of the
boat.  If I returned from a sailing venture with my hands reddened
and bleeding from these trials, I really felt glorious.  If only
I'd had a shark-ravaged carcass to tow home, I would have been in
seventh heaven.

By the time I was a senior in college, I had enough confidence
about these things that I indulged myself by writing a paper about
Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" that was
based almost entirely on a dream I'd had *before* reading the poem.
It was really more of a personal essay, in form, than a lit paper,
and my grade reflected that fact.  So...I don't know quite what I'm
saying here, except that it's hard to be uninhibited in your expression,
even in the presence of very good teachers.

							--Fiona