Thoughts on the last blog entries

First, Jen, am I right that you haven't posted?

Second, think of this as conversation, not as debate, and of you having the reponsibility of representing both sides. That is, rather than saying, Campbell is wrong or disagree with Campbell, first try to explain in your own words as clearly as you can what he means and what he is saying. That's not easy. Not for me, anyway. I think this is interesting and complicated stuff and whenever I try to explain it in my own words--that's called teaching, or one part of it--I find I haven't quite done it in a way that gets through very well to my students. In fact, I think I spend about 90% of time just trying to explain the ideas of others rather than agreeing or disagreeing. So I'd suggest you all spend at least 50% of your time doing that. Just summarize.

Then, rather than disagreeing the other 50% of the time, explain what you think and why you think it, where it comes from. Your part of the conversation.

Third, I have to confess my impatience with literary theory and all that kind of language. This is in a way a purely personal limitation. It really is. I'm just so tired of it in general, its pomposity and its irrelevance, and that's not fair to those of you using that kind of theory, because there's also something valuable in it that I fail to see because of this limitation. I see the phrase "post-colonial" and my heart sinks. I want to leave the room. And yet the ideas of "post-colonial" theory are valuable and good and need to be talked about, and for me to practice what I preach, I need for that kind of discourse to be OK, too.

I guess what I resist isn't the content of the theory but just that it's theoretical rather than engaged in the real world and taking real risks. (False distinction.) I don't think everything should be personal either, autobiographical, but I do think, with Campbell, that the head is a much overestimated organ and that the key is to dive back into the sea of feeling and ideas and fear and hope and so on that we all swim around and can't name--that mystery in us, the mystery that's always in us, whether we name it God or something else, even something purely biological. I want second-naivete. Why? Because that's where I'm at in my own life and where the real pay off is.

It's ironic, then, right, that some of you respond to Campbell's invitation to story by engaging in exactly the sort of head work that he believes is screwing everything up? And I agree with him, by the way. I'm not being neutral at all. I'm trying to sell you something here, and I see it being acted out in a certain method or way of writing.

And I'm being very contradictory, since Campbell is a theorist, too, of a pretty high order, and today in class I'm going to be sharing another theorist who is every bit as theoretical and abstract as any post-colonialist ever was. I just agree with him. I just like the theory better. So I'm a big hypocrite on this.

Notice, though, what I did in class. (I'm writing before class, on the assumption that I won't be hit by bus and not make it to class, or that I'll get to class and actually do what I'm planning to do. But on the assumption that I do do what I'm planning to do:) I spent a whole period simply trying to explain John Shea's ideas, in detail, in my own words (and his), something that I regard as intellectually tricky and intellectually difficult and intellectually worthwhile. So the thing I do that I want to model isn't that I agree or disagree but just that I summarize.

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So, a strong suggestion, a strong invitation for the blog. A topic:

--write a paragraph or two describing your earliest memory, the earliest thing you can remember. Just put yourself there. Describe it as clearly and concretely as you possibly can. Don't analyze it. Just describe.

--Now, step back and analyze the story. Interpet what it says about you: for example, your economic class, your social class, your gender, your race, your religious background. Your identity. Do this in a paragraph.

--Finally, now step back even further and write a paragraph from John Shea's point of view explaining the difference, in terms of his theory, in terms of his notion of story and story, between the story and your analysis of it. In other words: explain in a paragraph, in your own words, his general theory and then apply it to the first part of the exercise (the story) and the second part (the analysis of the story: the "thought"). The key here is Shea's conviction, and Campbell's, and mine, and everybody's, that the analysis is always less than the story, that there's something in the story that can never be translated out. Stories are better. Movies are better than reviews. Dreams better than psychoanalysis (though we need the psychoanalysis).