Thoughts on First Papers

Although I can not hand the papers back until next Monday, I hope I can put everyone's mind at rest by saying that this batch of papers was quite good: most everyone exhibited clear engagement with the ideas we've been working over in class. I wanted this first assignment to give you a kind of experimental space to "play" with the theory we've been discussing, to bring it into the space of reading fiction and perhaps discover new ways to think about narrative and its place in our lives.

I know some students felt flustered by the lack of conventional essay guidelines. Clearly, I didn't want students to simply reproduce the ideas they'd read or the discussion we've had. That can be a tall order when much of your education has focused precisely on those skills: mastery of a formula and its accurate reproduction are useful processes for some areas of academic study. And that kind of "learning" is pretty much where we all begin our earliest lessons: mimicking the sounds cooed to us by parents, following their instructions help us become a "big boy" or a "big girl."

But, necessary as this kind of mastery of social convention is for the infant, it is a far cry from learning to be able to critically reflect on those conventions, on our lives and on our adult selves. Learning how to consciously use ideas is the empowering conceptual break common to both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. Thus, I will continue to push you towards this in our class and in assignments. In other words, I treat you somewhat as a Freudian analyst treats his patients.

Freud once wrote that "The discovery of the unconscious and the introduction of it into consciousness is performed in the face of a continuous resistance on the part of the patient. The process of bringing this unconscious material to light is associated with pain, and because of this pain the patient again and again rejects it...[however] if you succeed in persuading him to accept, by virtue of a better understanding, something that up to now, in consequence of this automatic regulation by pain, he has rejected, you will then have accomplished something towards his education."

Though all of your papers had varying strengths, it was clear to me that there was still resistance, a great deal of it probably unconscious, to push beyond the usual English paper assignment. Many papers began by rehearsing information about Freud or about psychoanalysis or about Henry James that was completely unnecessary for this paper. I think we can take it as a given that Freud and Henry James are "famous writers" and other such generalities. Likewise, many students exhibited a great deal of anxiety about the assignment both before and after. I'm not so much interested in this in terms of "correcting" "problems;" I am interested, though, in the roots of such fear, anxiety and false starts and where and how they can obstruct learning. Kevin recently wrote an interesting log about the issues of "performance anxiety" among other things---you can find it here. I'm still thinking about the relation of the "fear of being seen" (which is kind of how Kevin talks about this in relation to classroom culture) and the Uncanny, but I think that our discussions of the repression trauma that produces the infant as functioning subject certainly has a clear analogy in our current educational structures. I would invite students to read Kevin's log and think about continuing the discussion he inaugurated there.

But, back to the papers. Here are a few interesting and useful bits from the papers on "The Turn of the Screw:" I think there are some useful ideas here for further work in both the logs and future papers. I particularly want to turn your attention to the way these students touched on the role of the reader: that the novel was not just a story about the Uncanny, but an experience of it.

Christina framed her discussion by talking about the frustrations of "not knowing." She discussed how children are often put in a frustrating position by adults who don't explain everything to them (like death) and so they have to puzzle things out for themselves and this "lack" of knowing itself stays with them as a repressed frustration. She brought that insight into the experience of reading "The Turn of the Screw," which over and over again plays on that frustration by not answering anything directly. Although she didn't make this connection explicitly, it seemed to me that Christina was almost saying that the reader is in a kind of child's position in this text, with the adults like the Governess seeming to know more than us, and yet refusing to tell us! The anxiety of not knowing when it seems like everyone else knows something, might be one of the "uncanny" triggers of the novel: it reaches back to our first experiences with withheld information.

Kristine posed the question of who exactly is haunted and by what? Are the children haunted by events they were too innocent to comprehend? Is the Governess haunted by her own desires, desires which run counter to the social conventions she is pledged to uphold (her "unsuitable" desire for the Master, for example). Though she doesn't phrase it this way, I think by the end of the paper, Kristine was thinking that the reader herself is the one who is most truly haunted---haunted by the maddening "ghosts" of answers that seem to be sufficient but then disappear on closer examination. For Kristine, the novel created an unsettling readerly experience, one in which our judgment of events is constantly being challenged or overturned, an uneasy inability to ever feel assured that we have the "right" conclusions.

Sarah found many analogies to the haunting effects of the story in both popular culture horror films and folklore. She compared some of the effects of the novel to films like "The Exorcist" where many ambiguities are initially offered, though later "solved" in a much more direct way than in "The Turn of the Screw." Nevertheless, she pointed out that the more disturbing parts of films like those are when the audience doesn't know the answer or have a final solution to their questions. She also pointed out the many instances one can find of possessed objects, especially dolls, in both literature and folklore and frightening effect of that which seems human, but isn't.

Lindsay drafted a very ambitious paper titled "Robbing of the Human Eye" where she traces the motif of seeing/not seeing throughout Freud's essay, "The Sandman," and "The Turn of the Screw." Her paper takes the fear of loss of eyes in a different direction than Freud does; she's not interested in the eye/testicle symbolism and its link to a threatening father figure. Lindsay connects this fear to the anxiety produced by not being about to "see" something in the sense of "understanding" or "explaining" or even "possessing" it. She also links it to its obverse: the anxiety over not being seen. The Governess would like to be "seen" by the Master. The ghosts seem to only want to be "seen," their presence to be recognized. For Lindsay, all the issues of ambiguity and anxiety in the narrative seem to revolve over issues of "seeing" including the readers: what do we really see? Especially in the novel's climactic ending?

In her paper, Taylor turned the question of the Uncanny away from the ghosts and only the Governess. She was interested in the way in which the ghost's motives may be unclear, but also do not seem to constitute much of a direct threat And yet they are instantly perceived as threatening ghastly presences by the Governess for reasons that are never made entirely clear. For Taylor the ghosts are much less threatening and disturbing than the Governess, a woman who acts with a deliberate surety based on ---well, based on what? An interesting followup to Taylor's paper would be to ask how this affects the reader. I think we are initially set up to read from the Governess's point of view, to be on her team, in a sense. But when so much of the Governess's motivation and knowledge is left unstated, does that undercut our confidence and leave us hanging? And who else is there to identify with in the story? The ghosts? The children? Mrs. Grose? I think none of those seem viable options and the reader is left without a "home" in the story: a place of comfort from which to view events and "safely" deal with them.

Kevin adds another layer of obscurity to the story by reminding us that we are reading a version of a version of a version (the Narrator's memories of Douglas/Douglas's memories of the Governess/The Governess's memories of her experience) all of which are dependent on memory. Though it seems we are getting a direct story from the Governess, we are actually getting a story layered by different time frames and different points of view and ultimately refracted through memory. Nothing is directly presented to the reader, though it often seems to be! This places the reader in a remote and distant position from everything in the text and establishes at the very beginning that we need to be vigilant observers of a complicated and obscure series of events even though much of the rest of the story works to erase our memory of that.