Emily Dickinson and telling truth slant

‘There are more things in heaven and earth’ said Hamlet to Horatio, ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ I’ve just read an article (Frankham and Smears 2012) that plays with this idea by weaving thoughts about Emily Dickinson’s poetry through a discussion of what educational research can and can’t reveal. It is, in some ways, an article in praise of ethnography and its willingness to dwell in uncertainty and incompleteness and to be surprised and even unsettled by what emerges.

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

The authors of the article contrast this circuitous research methodology (Jung called it ‘circumambulation’) with the way

our approach to and intentions for educational research become distorted by a focus on outputs (361)… This paper argues for the dangers and possibilities of ethnography in order that the discourse about our purposes and practices might exceed the limits of our performative educational and research culture.(362)

Dickinson used poetic language to lure us into a more complicated and nuanced landscape than the one described by outputs and outcomes. The authors suggest that ethnography – especially ethnography that finds space for ambiguity, conflicting stories and unexpected surprises – can take us to a similar place. They quote Polanyi as follows:

We make sense of experience by relying on clues of which we are often aware only as pointers to their hidden meaning; this meaning is an aspect of a reality which as such can yet reveal itself in an indeterminate range of future discoveries. (366)

And they remind us of what Geertz wrote:

The strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described, that its very nature demands we talk about it without fuss – a spade is a spade, a rose is a rose –  on pain of illusion, trumpery, and self-bewitchment, leads onto the even stranger idea that, if literalism is lost, so is fact. (369)

*****

Frankham, J. and E. Smears ( 2012). “Choosing not choosing: the indirections of ethnography and educational research, .” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(3): 361-375.

Converting the outrage of the years

Jorge Luis Borges

In one of Borges’s poems (The Art of Poetry), the following lines appear:

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

I’ve been aware, this year more than for a while, of my outrage. It’s a lovely word (as so many words are, when you look closely at them), ‘outrage’. Outrage: something building up internally and wanting to be released outwards [my definition!).

Poetry, says Borges, offers us the hope that this outrage might be converted into something powerful, constructive and even beautiful.

Two events during this last couple of days have reminded me strongly of this.

The first was watching, with my family, the final of ‘Got to Dance’. It was won by Prodijig, the Irish group. Now I know nothing about their personal histories, but I do know a bit about the troubled history of their country. I wondered, as I watched their quite thrilling performance, to what extent some kind of collective outrage  had been converted into music and movement.

Then there was my colleague’s blog post, The end of face-to-face lectures, written after the chilly gloom of lecturing to an empty theatre a couple of weeks ago. It’s a great blog post, and another example of how outrage can be converted into something constructive and powerful.

Here, by the way, is the full text of Borges’s wonderful poem:

The Art of Poetry

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
… and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadnesssuch is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

Jorge Luis Borges

A conversation about Tovani

Tovani’s book

Last week, Rachel and I tested out the new Podcast room at the Inspire Centre by having a conversation about the textbook for ELPC G2/LAD, Cris Tovani’s ‘Do I really have to teach reading?’

The recording is a bit rough (we haven’t yet worked out how to edit) and the sound quality is uneven (but certainly clear enough).

A conversation about Tovani’s ‘Do I really have to teach reading?’

Making time and space for thoughts

I’m an academic and I get paid to be a thinker. I get paid to perform other identities as well, and as I type this I can see, sitting at the edges of the page, shadows from these others, which I try to block out.

While I’m down here at the coast (for three days this week and then three days again next week), I manage to ignore the shadows for long stretches of time, and I just think. I write, read, walk and cook, and all the while I watch thoughts rise to the surface, or make new connections between thoughts and projects, or write to colleagues so that I can fix these thoughts in my increasingly leaky mind.

Yesterday morning, I planned my reading for the day. Orange post-it notes, each with the title of an article or a book chapter, sat next to my computer. There were six of them.

I opened the first article on my computer. Understanding it was a struggle, and after a while I could feel my eyelids getting heavy. I had a nap, then went for a walk wondering what the point of the article had been. When I got back to the house, I wrote an email to a colleague about the struggle, and then scrunched up the corresponding post-it. I didn’t think it was an article for me, but then saw in my inbox a response from my colleague about how stimulated she had been by it. I went back to the beach and, as I walked, I found myself thinking more about the article’s central idea.

Suddenly, a number of untethered drifty thoughts began to move into relationship. I read some more of Maxine Green’s Releasing the imagination and typed up passages. I picked up William Pinar’s What is Curriculum Theory and discovered new thoughts and connections. I remembered an image that had come to me last week, an image that seemed in some enticing way to be unconsciously making links between different research projects.

The five remaining orange post-it notes sit next to the computer, the articles unread; my thoughts have led elsewhere. This afternoon I’m going to re-read the article that gave me such trouble yesterday.

This kind of work is so pleasurable, and so necessary. It doesn’t happen except when I give myself lots of time just to think.

Are a writer’s characters just the author in fancy dress?

In a chapter called ‘Truth and culture’ in her book on Foucault, Clare O’Farrell writes

Foucault notes early on in his career, following Nietzsche, that the ‘fact’ is already an interpretation. In other words, his writings are based on elements which are already ‘fictions’, things that have already been selected, fabricated and organised in certain ways. There are no primary sources or even physical artefacts that one can accept without question. Everything is already a secondary source, an interpretation. (p84)

I was thinking about this as I drove down to Melbourne a couple of weeks ago, listening to a Late Night Live interviewwith Mark McKenna, the biographer of Manning Clark.

Part of Heidi Smith’s Portrait of Manning and Dymphna Clark, taken at “Ness,” Wapengo, NSW in 1989.

I’ve always loved the history writing of Manning Clark; Australian history came alive for me when I read his History of Australia. I felt the presence of real people in his accounts, whereas in other histories I’d been made to study at school and at university, there was something bloodless about the way the past was described. (I’m reading War and Peace at the moment, and am similarly thrilled by the way Tolstoy helps us understand that what happened in the past was experienced and shaped by people just like us.)

So I’ve never had much sympathy for Clark’s critics who have taken him to task for not having all his ‘facts’ right. It has seemed to me, as it apparently seemed to Foucault, that ‘everything is already a secondary source, an interpretation’. Clark’s history didn’t have to be always literally ‘true’ in order to be stimulating and important.

But when I got to Melbourne, I went online and read ‘On reading Mark McKenna’s biography of Manning Clark’, by Nick Gruen. Gruen makes the following claim:

 But the ultimate shame is not that Manning got some facts wrong about his characters. Rather, the problem is that his archetypes – whether it is Alfred Deakin, John Curtin or Henry Lawson – never really expand into well-rounded characters who are uniquely themselves. The archetypes are a side of Manning in fancy dress. Hell in the heart, uproar in the trousers, wondering what went on in the mind of a woman, wondering what it was all for. Clark cannibalised the material for scenes that he could transform into stories he wanted to tell.

Gruen suggests that Clark’s characters are just versions of Clark himself, ‘Manning in fancy dress’.

Is this what I do in some of my writing?

Last year I had an article published which began with a piece of fiction (based, I claimed, on a student and teacher I knew). Here are the opening paragraphs:

Alison sat in the pale green vinyl-covered 1970s armchair outside her lecturer’s office, drumming her fingers impatiently on the thin wooden arm rest. ‘This was such a stupid idea,’ she thought bitterly to herself. Everything about this was stupid. The decision to email Alec to ask for an appointment. The risky admission that she found the idea of having to write an essay terrifying. Allowing herself to feel vulnerable.

The door opened and Alec invited her in.

He was a portly man in his sixties, squinting, but not coldly, from behind thick glasses. The word around the campus was that he had an eye disease and was going blind. Certainly, in the one lecture they’d already had, it was clear that he couldn’t read the screen easily, and held his notes so close they almost touched his nose. Alison murmured an awkward ‘thanks for agreeing to see me’, then sat at the small round table opposite Alec.

‘How can I help?’ he asked.

I’m wanting to use this kind of fiction-based-on-what-I’ve-experienced-and-known more in my academic writing.

But are these characters just Steve in fancy dress?

Ethnographic opera

Deborah Britzman

In Chapter 7 of the 2003 edition of Practice Makes Practice, Deborah Britzman asks questions of her own ethnographic studies.

… the ethnographic promise of a holistic account  is betrayed by the slippage born from the partiality of language .. .From the unruly perspective of poststructuralism, ethnography can only summon, in James Clifford’s terms, ‘partial truths and ‘fictions.’ …These positions undermine the ethnographic belief that reality is somehow out there waiting to be captured by language. (244)

Her solution is to

borrow discourses and tack them onto other discourses …  my narrative was to write a Rashomon of student teaching, an ethnographic opera where voices argued, disrupted, and pleaded with one another; where the high drama of misunderstanding, deceit, and the conflicting desires made present and absent through language and through practice confound what is typically taken as the familiar story of learning to teach. I tried to write against the discourses that bind the disagreements, the embarrassments, the unsaid, and the odd moments of uncertainty in contexts overburdened with certain imperatives. I tried to do this by provoking and contradicting multiple voices: the ethnographic voice that promises to narrate experience as it unfolds, the hesitant voices of participants who kept refashioning their identities and investments as they were lived and rearranged in language, and the poststructuralist voices that challenge a unitary and coherent narrative about experience. 247

And her rationale for this approach is to remind us of the purpose of this kind of research, which is not to authenticate a particular truth but to trace ‘but not without argument, the circulation of competing truths’ (251).

The reason we might read and do ethnography, then, is to think the unthought in more complex ways, to trouble confidence in being able to observe behavior, apply the correct technique, and correct what is taken as a mistake. Ethnographic narratives should trace how power circulates and surprises, theorize how subjects spring from the discourses that incite them, and question the belief in representation even as one must practice representation as a way to intervene critically in the constitutive constraints of discourses. 253

Writing ethnography as a practice of narration is not about capturing the real already out there. It is about constructing particular versions of truth, questioning how regimes of truth become neutralized as knowledge, and thus pushing the sensibilities of readers in new directions. 254

 

I find this both reassuring and unsettling.

It’s reassuring because I think this is what I’ve done in my own writing, though without the sharp self-awareness and introspection that Britzman is so good at. I’ve written case studies with competing viewpoints from different perspectives, ethnographic opera.

But it’s also unsettling. Isn’t there something in all of this that is unsaid? When we write this kind of ‘ethnographic opera’, we make decisions about which voices to include, how to present them, and we make judgments about structure and balance and tone. Britzman says all this; ‘It is about constructing particular versions of truth’.

But what she doesn’t say is how this differs from writing fiction. Presumably she is using her records of actual conversations and actual observations, and she is not consciously editing these to present a particular point of view … yet she must be. I do. I can’t see how you can do a piece of ethnographic research without doing this.

And once you’ve started down that (very useful) track, where is the line between, on the one hand,  making decisions about (say) form and, on the other,  inventing dialogue, especially when in the end one’s purpose is to ‘think the unthought in more complex ways’ or ‘push the sensibilities of the readers in new directions’?

I think in all this I’m wanting to make the case for fiction, rather than wanting to cast doubt on Britzman’s approach, which I find stimulating and liberating. Perhaps I’m just wanting to go a bit further than she seems to be wanting to go. If all poststructuralist ethnographic research can be seen as ‘degrees of fiction’, what stops us from creating composite characters and inventing scenes?

 

I’d welcome comments from researchers or writers more experienced than I.

Bleak House with footnotes: fiction and academic writing

I’ve recently returned from two weeks in America, and spent some of that time at places like the Arts Institute in Chicago and the Piermont Morgan Library and Museum in New York. I’ve seen lots of very, very beautiful things.

One of the effects of all of this has been to prod my thinking about the arts, and their relationship to research. I keep seeing things that move the viewer or listener, and I keep thinking about the limited readership and impact of the world of academic writing. It’s not true for the established academics, of course – the Britzmans, Shulmans, Darling-Hammonds – but for people like me, it can be a bit of a game, where you get published to rack up the points but it doesn’t have much impact on anything real.

Perhaps the moment that made the biggest impression on me in America was when I visited an exhibition dedicated to my favourite author, Charles Dickens. At the entrance there was a large poster with an introductory overview, part of which quoted T. S. Eliot roughly along the following lines:

Dickens created characters of greater intensity than human beings, characters who belong to poetry like figures of Dante or Shakespeare.

As I read these words, shivers started to run along my spine. I had to sit down for while, before going through the door.

Why such a strong reaction, I wondered? What was it about those specific words? I think I located at least one part of the explanation.

Dickens created characters ‘of greater intensity than human beings’. He exaggerated virtues and foibles, traits and mannerisms, in order to explore and expose tensions and issues that were not seen clearly by Victorian England. He created vivid, complex worlds. His readers were moved. His novels had an immediate and powerful effect.

The contrast with the much of the academic writing that researchers publish in journals is stark.

Is there, I’ve been wondering, any chance of a researcher writing a piece of fiction – a short story or even a novel, or some poetry, or a film, or a photo story – which is footnoted and has an extensive annotated bibliography? A kind of Bleak House with footnotes? Is this kind of thing being done anywhere within academic circles?

I think this is where this American experience has been leading me, to thinking about the possibilities of an academic fiction, different from New Journalism (in that it requires a kind of explicit academic rigour not expected of a Truman Capote or Norman Mailer) but also different from more traditional narrative inquiry (because it’s wanting to go beyond using narrative techniques in reporting real events; it’s wanting to write fiction with composite characters and invented dialogues and scenes).

Degrees of fiction

Earlier this week, I read on Clare O’Farrell’s blog a post (called ‘Foucault: truth, language and philosophy’) which talked about ‘degrees of fiction,’ and I’ve pilfered the phrase as the title of my new blog.

I’ve always been interested in stories, their effect, function and relationship to the real world, ever since I discovered as an unhappy 11 year old, separated from my parents and at boarding school, that a story could be both a consolation and a lifebuoy. Then, as a young teacher, I soon realized that a story could both settle a difficult class and be a teaching tool. In my Masters thesis, written during a period in my professional life when I was a psychotherapist, I argued that story can ‘transform the leaden sense of fruitless struggle’, and my PhD was about the ways in which the sharing of stories links both teller and listener to desired and animating worlds. A central idea, through all of this, has been John Holt’s suggesting that the imagination is more a reaching out towards reality, rather than an attempt to escape from it.

Clare’s post explores this connection between words and phrases and their relationship with truth or reality. She writes: ‘We are always faced with degrees of fiction: human culture, language and thought are fabrications from the very outset’.

I’m imagining that I’ll be using this blog to continue my exploration of these ‘fabrications’.

Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653

As I write this, I’m suddenly reminded of a painting I saw recently. It’s by Rembrandt, and shows the philosopher Aristotle deep in thought as he rests his hand on a bust of Homer, the story-teller, the inventor of fabrications. I like to imagine that Aristotle’s deep thoughts are born out of his respect for, or love of, the mythopoetic.