I owe some posts, so this post concerns the first half of Clueless in Academe. The second will be posted tomorrow morning. It’s also long, so…sorry. 

On my first day as a high school senior, my English teacher passed out a poem and asked us to respond to it. All I remember about the poem itself is that I kind of liked it. My response to it, however, I have never forgotten.

I formulated a proof: incomprehensible poetry, by and large, is afforded a place of reverence in the canon of literary studies by virtue of the Emperor’s Clothes singularity. Nobody understands it; therefore, everyone affects a suitable level of comprehension/adulation for fear of being exposed as a fraud. Comprehensible poetry, however–and here I referred to the pleasant though forgettable poem assigned–is, to a large extent, marginalized for not living up to the standards of a hypothetically “brilliant” poem. Namely, not making sense.

(I was a bit cruder in my verbiage).

I thought this assertion was exceedingly clever. Brilliant poetry is chosen via mob mentality! Damn the accessible! While a bit smug, it did place the poem in a larger cultural context. At the very least, it was better than saying “I liked it. It was pretty.”

But since my contention was averred with a younger man’s conceit, my teacher thought I was derisively referring to the poem as an example of the “incomprehensible” poetry he was supposedly under fire for worshipping. I tried to reassure him otherwise–I had liked the poem, I had understood it; and, as per my argument, this was why I had never heard of it before, and probably never would again–but he ignored me in favor of demanding evidence as to why I found it incomprehensible.

There’s nothing worse than being asked to defend a claim you haven’t made by a man who’s not listening to the substance of your answers in the first place.

I changed tactics, pointing to the poetry of Emily Dickinson–which I had never been able to understand–as something that “sucked” but was beloved because of its incomprehensibility. At this he almost wept with triumph. Grinning from ear to ear, he told me “Au contraire. I find her poetry to be wonderful,” and then he launched into a rehearsed speech about why poetry was wonderful, and why idiots who didn’t understand it were idiots. Not that he called me an idiot; he just gave me an artificial, condescending smile which made him look like a bloated puppet.

Personally, I would’ve preferred being called an idiot.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I’d been played for a patsy. My teacher had laid out a path for discussion, but in order to segue to the next movement he needed a foil, a dupe, someone to play the straw man. He put words in my mouth the very same way that I–and many other students–have often taken sources out of context to support our own contentions in research papers. He was trying to fit me into the exemplary mold of the boy who didn’t like poetry because he didn’t “get” it.

It was a preemptive strike against Graff’s “problem problem,” the phenomenon by which academics seem to cultivate–or even invent–problems for the simple sake of argument. The student resists this syndrome, opting to disregard subtext–the invention if which is “profoundly counterintuitive,” since it is a needless complication–in favor of what the perfectly self-explanatory text has to say (45-46).

Or, in my case, what it failed to say.

To extend Graff’s contention, I would argue that, for many students, the very existence of certain texts–especially poetry–seems to be a needless complication. If the student is reluctant to read past the most obvious meaning of the text, it stands to reason that, if their superficial reading finds the text to be meaningless, they will presume the act of reading it to be a cultural prank on a worldwide scale. The student does not wonder “why can’t the teacher agree with my straightforward reading?” so much as they look at the text and say, “They can’t be serious.”

In my case, I wasn’t just saying that the meaning of “incomprehensible” poetry was being lost in a sea of specious reasoning; I was insisting that all interpretations were nothing more than water in that same sea. In short, difficult poetry was worthless.

But then, I was also being facetious. I was making a slightly tongue-in-cheek observation that most brilliant poetry seemed to be incomprehensible, and therefore was automatically deemed “brilliant!’ as a result, not because of its inherent value. I wasn’t attacking the text, merely the culture which taught it.

Which begs a question: how much of what students resist is the artificiality of rubric as opposed to the artificiality of subtext? I would argue that the student is not entirely rebelling against the need to dress the text up in meaning, but more that they are chafing against the methods by which they are directed to do so. A teacher can play devil’s advocate to a discussion about the “obvious” conflict of a text, and in so doing challenge what the student is saying and by proxy what they think.

But, like my senior English teacher, they aren’t interested in interacting, so much as playing the role they’ve already decided to play. The “problem problem” is as much a result of teachers wanting to maintain momentum in the lesson plan as it is an inherent natural desire of the student to maintain simplicity in the text.

Graff acknowledges that, “from a certain commonsense point of view, academia’s cultivation of problems looks manufactured, perverse, and silly,” so much so that it seems “tedious and pointless, an infinite regress that goes nowhere” (46-47). For students and for casual observers, it would be funny if it weren’t so frustrating. But my point concerns something different than the intrinsic need of academia–specifically within the arts–to justify its own existence. Consider an examples of this frustration that Graff offers; it’s almost droll: “the only thing overanalyzing leads to is boredom” (44).

If that particular sentiment couldn’t serve as a straight line, I don’t know what could.

To take the metaphor further, the student becomes the straight man, the feed, the stooge, the guy serving up softballs for the other comic/pundit to hit out of the park. They serve as a kind of collective Bud Abbot, continually trying to assure the professor “Who’s on first.” But they’re not doing so in order to be part of a joke. They’re making a self-consciously facetious statement in anticipation of being informed otherwise. Unfortunately, the teacher seems intent on fulfilling the other side of this vaudeville act, acting so deliberately obtuse that they have no choice other than to reply “that’s what I’m asking you!”

It’s a verbal dance that, once identified, can be better understood. I’d try and make it make more sense, but I’ve gone on way to long already.

 – Matt