David Guyott 11/4/11 Dr. Franey ENGL-4900-01 Core 10 Essay “Porque se tenga entera noticia de mi persona”: A Picaresque Journey through the Liberal Arts I have read enough past Core 10 essays to know that they almost invariably begin with an anecdote or story about writing this essay; even as I recognize that commonplace, though, I find myself resorting to it. Perhaps the reason behind that commonality is that such an anecdote provides a necessary entrance into the topic; certainly I needed to get something on paper, having stared at my blank computer screen for hours while holed up in the Writing Center library study room before actually being able to start on the first draft. But as I revise I find myself needing to keep the anecdote; it begs to be cut, but I think it important to note the difficulty in beginning this essay. As a double language and literature major with a creative writing focus, such prolonged writer’s block is not something I often experience. It is especially surprising given my training in creative non-fiction and personal essay with Dr. Kistulentz. Summing up these four years at Millsaps has proven a challenge, however, and the reason behind that is likely how multifaceted the experience has been. My time here was not a series of quantum leaps in understanding and it did not follow a linear, objective set of developmental steps. Every semester, every week, and every class saw some small, incremental change in my understanding of the world and my outlook on life. To describe such fundamental and intrinsic changes, I find myself in the position of the pícaro Lazarillo de Tormes, needing to start at the beginning para que se tengan entera noticia de mi persona 1 . But what is the beginning? Is it move-in day, when I spent most of my time texting friends in Texas and wishing I hadn’t left my comfort zone? Perhaps it is Fourth Night, when I
1
In English, a rough, literal translation is “so that you all have full notice of my person.”
Guyott 2 wrote a depressing letter to future-David, wanted nothing more than to go back to my room and be alone, and was barely able to speak my name in front of the microphone. Or maybe it was when I, the freshman accounting major, read Dr. Griffin’s comment on my Heritage Fall Project: “Dude, you really have a talent for this Arts & Letters thing. No pressure, but you could have a future in this if you wanted to.” All things considered, though, I suppose the real beginning would have to be the first Heritage lecture. “Leprechauns make bread rise,” Dr. Ammon proclaimed. “You can’t disprove it, so it must be a fact.” That was when the shock really set in. The administrators of the Texas public schools I attended had lowered the bar, not raised it; their only concern was getting as many of us to pass the state mandated tests as possible. I had never been challenged to think about anything other than the simple four-step process of 1) scholarship to a good school, 2) college degree, 3) sixfigure job, 4) rich retirement, and here was this bearded Socrates in a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt telling me that facts weren’t real. I guess I didn’t take that lesson to heart, though, because I still cranked out that first Heritage essay in less than an hour and was shocked and appalled when Dr. Griffin gave it a B minus. Though my motivation was flawed⎯my only thought was “oh no, I need to get an A!”⎯I did finally begin to think openly in a true Liberal Arts fashion. Debating the ethicality of Wal-Mart in discussion-based Core 1 and trying to write an essay explaining “how we know what we know” for Heritage really stirred my passions. But while I was increasingly excited and moved by my classes, I was incredibly depressed by life at Millsaps. I was uninterested in Greek life and alcohol and felt that Millsaps had little else to offer in terms of social life. I fell back into old habits of playing massivelymultiplayer online (MMO) games in my room and seriously considered transferring to another school. Lazarillo only stayed with the cleric who starved and abused him because he feared that
Guyott 3 his next master would feed him even less; similarly, I only stayed at Millsaps due to the fear that any school to which I transferred might actually be worse and that I wouldn’t be able to come back. I knew I had to find some things to do if I wasn’t going to transfer, so in the late fall and spring I ran out and joined several widely different activities. I took an Enrichment Introduction to Playwriting class, joined the Fencing Club and Stylus staff, and auditioned for the Beckett plays being co-directed by Dr. Ammon. Though I had never even acted before, I won the Millsaps Players’ Best Actor award for that year, and though I had never written creatively before coming to college, I had three poems published in that year’s edition of Stylus. Looking back, this is Millsaps’s greatest strength: its lack of exclusivity. Students can participate in nearly anything on campus, whether they have experience or not. While some of my theatre-major friends at University of Texas at Austin weren’t going to get to act in a play until senior year, I was able to audition for and get a leading role in a major play as a freshman with no previous experience. As with most narratives, the significance of my time in the theater did not reveal itself until senior year, the end of the story, and in a metatextual breaking of the fourth wall I am informing you that it won’t make much sense until the end of this essay, either. As Lázaro does in narrating his time with the indulgence seller, though, I’ll sum up theater with one representative experience and let you all do the work of figuring it out. I auditioned for Jeannie-Marie and Dr. Ammon’s Evening of Samuel Beckett plays on a whim; my only previous acting experience was a few skits with the Heritage Players. I got in, as I said earlier, but perhaps I was deceptive in not mentioning that there were only three males auditioning for a total of five male roles, and that the only necessary qualification for the part I
Guyott 4 ended up playing was the ability to talk really fast and completely emotionlessly and expressionlessly without pausing for breath at all ever just continuing to talk with no punctuation on and on and on for about nine minutes until the play started over again at which point I would have to do it for another nine minutes although granted every time the stupid spotlight left my face I could stop talking for a brief moment and pause to panic and hope I remembered my lines. I was M, a dead guy whose head stuck out of an urn, and along with Casey Holloway and Ellen Burke, who played Woman 1 and Woman 2, I was granted the privilege to pretend my existence consisted of being dead, but also being unaware of being dead, and talking endlessly about the past at the command of a rather impersonal light source. All of that was great; the only small problem was my overwhelming stage fright. I almost threw up on Fourth Night when I had to go up and say my name in front of EVERYONE, and each Heritage Players skit was accompanied by a good amount of shaking, nervousness, and sheer terror over the prospect of forgetting lines⎯even though we read from the book most of the time. And now I had to go up on stage with three hours worth of stony, scab-like moss makeup on my face, stand in a papier-mâché urn, and babble incoherently⎯and yet also clearly at the same time, that was the real trick, you see⎯for twenty minutes or so. Needless to say, I seriously questioned what I had gotten myself into. But the show went on without any vomiting or nervous breakdowns. Sure, the Heritage kids texted the whole time, but not paying attention to the required events is just an innate characteristic of Heritage kids, and, sure, most everyone else left wondering what on Earth had just happened and why they had paid five dollars to see it, but that’s what Beckett is really all about anyway. Lázaro stayed with the indulgence seller for four months, but I stayed with the theater for two years, gradually playing more and more offensive roles. After dead-guy-in-urn, I
Guyott 5 played a sexist literary critic, the homosexual, teenage version of Charlie Brown, Cussin’ Jesus, and the arrogant, self-absorbed, chauvinist, 70s-and-80s-magazine-and-influence-tycoon Scoop Rosenbaum. As with all great theatre, people either laughed really hard or walked out of the room completely offended. But that is jumping ahead a little in the chronology of the narrative; by the end of my first semester at Millsaps, I had found the courage to abandon the middle-class dreams of my hometown which had embodied themselves in the perceived “safety” of my planned accounting major. I took the aforementioned advice Dr. Griffin gave me and declared my major in English, having discovered that my love for reading could find a place in my career and not just my leisure time. In addition to this change and to the new experiences of writing and acting outside the classroom, I was forced to think in new ways in my Contemporary Hispanic Culture class with Dr. Caballero. When I came to Millsaps, I saw a Spanish major as little more than a means to learn a language, a skill that would make me a more marketable candidate for jobs after graduation. However, in this class I learned that the study of Spanish is about learning a language as a means to understanding another culture, history, and body of literature. But even though I enjoyed that class, it took me until sophomore year to declare a major in Spanish. Quite honestly, I only did so because Dr. Caballero had given me the Intermediate Spanish Award and a look of the most sincere disappointment when I mentioned that 2110 was my last Spanish class. Yes, my second major began as the guilt trip of a lifetime, but that little push in the right direction was a necessity. I had been afraid to declare that second major because it conflicted with a business minor I had planned which would still enable me to participate in the five-year MBA program. Though I had declared English, I hadn’t taken a risk and made a serious change to my life plans until I took on Spanish as well.
Guyott 6 At that point⎯sophomore year⎯things were idyllic. I had settled on my majors, was taking my first official creative writing classes with Dr. Kistulentz, was working on the Stylus 2010 staff, continued with the theater, and even presented at an undergraduate British Studies Symposium at Rhodes College. Though I was disappointed by some of the classes I was forced to take for the Core and for my major requirements, all through sophomore year I was excited to learn and remained passionate about most classes. By junior year, though, the shiny new luster of Millsaps had begun to wear off and I started to grow beyond the wide-eyed dazzlement of the first two years. That isn’t to say the year was all bad; I did have Dr. Kistulentz’s Fiction class, which was generally good except for the lack of motivation in many of my peers, and being editor-in-chief of Stylus was a very worthwhile experience. However, I began to question the value of my upper-divisional literature classes. In Dr. Griffin’s British and American Literature 1 class, we read a chapter from Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English. As the title implies, he mostly discusses the origins and rise of the field of study most colleges and universities call “English” today. He says, however, that this “is a rise that contains within it the seeds and signs of a fall⎯a fall now discernible in college and university English departments across the country, and in the field of study as a whole” (1). My group was assigned to lead the class in a discussion of this chapter. I kept coming back again and again to a very simple question: “Why do we do literary criticism?” I could not find an answer then, and my view of several subsequent classes was tainted by pessimism. In my other English and Spanish literature classes, we were simply reading books and discussing different possible interpretations of them. Occasionally we discussed some theory about how to go about literary criticism, but never again did anyone bring up the questions raised
Guyott 7 by the Scholes article. While I loved many of the books we read, especially James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I had trouble seeing the value in criticizing these texts as we were doing. Millsaps had taught me early to analyze everything, but I felt that this value had been abandoned or forgotten by the time I got into my upper-divisional classes. We were so focused on a single text or historical period that we ignored the larger, more general questions like “why do literary criticism in the first place?” I continued to wonder about the “fall” which Scholes suggested was soon to come. I applied for a Ford Fellowship with Dr. Miller near the end of junior year to try to answer these questions and get the freshmen thinking about them in Introduction to Interpretation. Our research project, which I began the summer after junior year, focused on the theory of literary criticism. The most convincing argument I found at first is by Frederick Crews, an English professor famous for two satirical books, The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, both of which apply literary criticism to A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories in order to mock the whole field of study. He closes Postmodern Pooh with an essay written by a persona named “N. Mack Hobbs,” who is “America’s highest-paid humanities professor” (163). This persona makes the argument that “we’re in this criticism racket together, not for the sake of ‘truth’ but just to earn a meal ticket by tooting our little horns” (170). I remained convinced by this argument for some time because of my experience interning at University Press of Mississippi in the summer after my junior year. Many of the books they publish are scholarly in nature, including literary criticism focused on Southern writers and the Caribbean. However interesting or unique the research in these books is, though, they are often published as a “typical scholarly monograph,” meaning only about 400 copies are ever printed. A few professors will use the book in their classes, a few libraries will buy a copy, and copies are
Guyott 8 generally given out to friends, family, and colleagues of the author. The general public, though, has little to no interest in reading these books of literary criticism. They would rather read Welty’s stories and novels than read a book about those stories and novels. I continued to ask questions: “Why do we continue to study and perform literary criticism if no one even reads it? What are we contributing to humanity? Does it matter, as Faulkner scholar Noel Polk has recently, radically argued, if the character Quentin in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury actually commits suicide because he is a closeted homosexual?” Lázaro’s journey ends about here; at the end of the novel, he is a morally depraved cynic satisfied because he has achieved what he thinks of as the good life⎯relative material prosperity and enough food to eat. My story, however, goes on; though I still have difficulty answering these questions, researching critical theory itself during my Ford Fellowship mellowed my pessimism into something more like skepticism. Two theorists in particular⎯Alan Bray and Northrop Frye⎯had a significant role in this shift. Bray’s book Homosexuality in Renaissance England was a landmark work in the literary field of Queer Studies, but it also utilizes the principles of New Historicism, a critical school I particularly respect and value. In his introduction, Bray somewhat self-consciously delineates the purpose of his book: This book should be judged, firstly, by its capacity to explain the many fragments from the past bearing on homosexuality which are now coming to light, and secondly, by its ability to illuminate the world around us as history has given us it and⎯this above all else⎯to play a part in changing it. These are demanding criteria to judge any book by; but in so far as this book fails to meet any of them it should, without hesitation, be put aside. (11) Though Bray is talking specifically about his own book, his principles are good ones for any humanities scholar to live by, not just a literary critic or a historian. The role of the humanities, and the answer to my earlier question of “Why do literary criticism?,” is, according to these
Guyott 9 standards, to help achieve an understanding of our historical moment and our place in the world in order to change it for the better. What I most admire about Bray, though, is his at least superficial concession that his book is a step in the process to knowledge and might eventually lose its value. In the introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, Frye explains a similar idea about the value of scholarship. He says of his own book: “much of it, I expect, and in fact hope, may be mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better shape” (29). I still agree with Scholes that the field of literary studies needs to be reimagined, but the cynicism has gone. There are answers out there, if we strive hard enough to find them. The research, of course, is only half of the Ford Fellowship⎯the other half being teaching. The timid freshman accounting major with stage fright would never have imagined himself leading a 75minute lecture/discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Cult of Elizabeth in Dr. Miller’s Shakespeare class, but that, among other things, is just what I did in the fall of senior year. Much of senior year, like junior year, seemed like little more than the necessary jumping through hoops of comps and term papers, but the deep thought and engagement of the Ford Fellowship brought those last months together. The Ford Fellowship is, more or less, the end of the story. Like Lázaro, I left out countless details and there are likely several gaps in the narrative. My intention, however, is not to deceive but to synthesize and summarize in a timely manner. So, what did come of these four years? Well, I know how to write coherently and artfully. I know how to form an argument. I know how to think critically about accepted knowledge and beliefs. I can speak Spanish fluently and am more fully aware of the linguistic nuances of Spanish, English, and, more recently, French. I have learned how to teach from being a Writing Center tutor and a Ford Fellow. I have developed my storytelling and creative writing abilities through my creative writing minor.
Guyott 10 Thanks to theater, I am as comfortable with speaking in front of large groups of people as I was uncomfortable doing so on Fourth Night. The ideas of great authors like Shakespeare, Milton, James Joyce, Denis Johnson, Steve Almond, and Richard Bausch have all changed the way in which I view the world. I am more than ready to move on to the next phase of my life, and I look upon the ending of this one without regret. Millsaps gave me confidence and instilled in me the compulsion to ask why things are the way they are rather than simply accept the status quo. I remember learning from Dr. Ammon in Heritage a saying of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He said “nothing is constant except change.” Though we have a business school and practical science programs, I believe the ultimate point of a Liberal Arts-based college like Millsaps, even for students in these disciplines, is not only to teach job-specific skills but to inculcate the value of this philosophy. A good Liberal Arts education will change or challenge the worldview of its students and show them the importance of keeping an open mind and questioning everything with which they come into contact. Perhaps Dr. Ammon’s suggestion that leprechauns make bread rise is taking skepticism about received knowledge to an extreme, but the belief behind such a statement, the belief that nothing should be taken for granted or at face value, is one worth living by. I close with one last quote from Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism on the value of a Liberal Arts education and of art in general. He says in his conclusion: The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination. The imaginative element in works of art, again, lifts them clear of the bondage of history. (347) If this is the purpose of the Liberal Arts, then Millsaps succeeded with me. Without a doubt, I have been liberated from the bonds of my personal history. As I graduate, I hope to receive news
Guyott 11 of being accepted for an English Teaching Assistantship Fulbright scholarship in Argentina; whether I get the award or not, though, applying for such a program is a possibility of which I would never have conceived prior to attending Millsaps. Unlike Lázaro, my buen puerto 2 will not be purchased at the price of spiritual degeneracy and cynical resignation; all the world has been opened up before me.
2
Literally, “good port.” Lázaro uses this phrase to indicate that, at the end of his life, he has reached a safe harbor, a place in which he can finally rest easy. Ironically, of course, his “safe harbor” was bought at the price of his morality and spiritual well-being.
Guyott 12 Works Cited Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print. Crews, Frederick. Postmodern Pooh. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006. Print. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Print. Lazarillo de Tormes. Ed. Robert L. Fiore. Asheville: Pegasus Press (2000). Impreso. Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Print.
