Can't relate

Many years ago, I was teaching The Tempest to some freshmen.  A few of them complained that they couldn't "relate" to the play.  At which point, I wanted to jump on the nearest desk and yell that THERE WAS NO POSSIBLE REASON ON THIS GREEN EARTH THAT THEY SHOULD "RELATE" TO THE TEMPEST.  It's The Tempest, for crying out loud, not a docudrama about being a college student in upstate NY.  Which brings me around to the novelist David Gilmour, who doesn't teach women writers because "I’m very keen on people’s lives who resemble mine because I understand those lives and I can feel passionately about them – and I teach best when I teach subjects that I’m passionate about."  Indeed, when asked if he needs to "relate" to the works on his syllabus, he explains that "I believe that if you want to teach the way I want to teach, you have to be able to feel this stuff in your bones. Other teachers don’t, but I don’t think other teachers necessarily teach with the same degree of commitment and passion that I do – I don’t know." Putting aside the not so passive-aggressive critique of those "other teachers" out there, the ones who don't "feel this stuff," this account of what it means to invest in "people's lives who resemble mine" seems to skip a few steps.

So, as those of you who have been putting up with this here blog for nearly a decade know well, I write about Christians.  Thanks to demographics, I also teach Christians.  (Because it's pretty hard to be a Victorianist and get away from Christians.  Even the agnostics and atheists are still thinking in Christian terms.)  Even this semester, when I'm teaching a course about Judaism in the 19th-c. novel, I've still got a whole lot of Christians going on.   Now, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm Jewish (the name does tend to be a giveaway, I find).  And yet, I get all excited and intense about "my" Christian novelists (despite their frequent lack of, er, aesthetic flair), and I suspect that one of my colleagues may have regretted asking why I thought Bleak House was one of the great English novels of the nineteenth century (let's just say "expounded at some length and with much gesticulation").  But my life most emphatically does not "resemble" that of any Victorian novelist I can think of--in fact, my life doesn't resemble that of any nineteenth-century Jews, male or female.   

"Relate" and "resemble" posit that the objects of relation or resemblance are static, objective categories.  Take, for example, "I relate to George Eliot," or  "my life resembles George Eliot's."  What does that mean? That you have a longterm liaison with a man who cannot divorce his wife? That you are a successful intellectual with no "respectable" female friends, a moral arbiter considered immoral by much of the genteel world at large? That you write great novels? That you're actually kind of conservative? That you read everything in sight? All of the above? What?  Or have you imagined a relation or resemblance into being, a spark of connection that has something, perhaps, to do with Eliot, but just as much with what you needed to find in Eliot? And if you grant that, then perhaps you can grant that there are other ways of thinking about one's "relation" to a work or author that do not rely on mental mirrors in order to work?

For many academics,much of the "passion" is about the non-resemblance, the non-relation.  Even those who may be like me are not, necessarily, like me.  (I don't think I have much in common with Amy Levy, let alone Grace Aguilar.)  Even recovery work still derives from an awareness of the strange: I can enter into figurative dialogue with that "lost" Jewish woman novelist, now found again, but I cannot flatten her circumstances and mine together into an indistinguishable pulp.   Historical continuity does not necessarily encompass identity or more than token resemblance.  I have nothing in common with Charles Dickens, and could really do without his antisemitism.  But I could go on all day about Bleak House...and teach it all day, too.  The space between myself and a work has just as much passion and promise, it seems to me, as does any comforting relation.  

Comments

[nicoleandmaggie]

I love you for saying this-- much better than I could. NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU, students.

[Sonetka]

When I was in undergrad, "I can relate to X" often seemed to be shorthand for "If X lived now, he/she would resemble me strongly, if not actually be me." Personally, I find people and characters who *aren't* like me to be more interesting -- one reason why as a child I could never get into grim YA novels about ostracized middle-schoolers and their depressing lives. I knew what that was like already, why would I want to read about it more?

[Patrick Murtha]

Students may be excused for these attitudes to some extent because they are still learning (one hopes). But I truly cannot "relate" to what Professor Gilmour is saying. I am a white homosexual male, and one of the authors I feel closest to is a black heterosexual woman, Zora Neale Hurston. "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is one of my very favorite books to teach, and I wish I had the opportunity to do so more often. Can I relate to Hurston along exactly the same lines as, say, Alice Walker can? I surely cannot. But can I still respond to her work in a profound, strong, meaningful way? I believe that I surely can. Both the writing itself, and Valerie Boyd's wonderful account of Hurston's life in "Wrapped in Rainbows," offer me guidance on a continuous basis. I would not wish to "feel...stuff" within such narrow boundaries as Professor Gilmour suggests are apt.

[Dame Eleanor Hull]

Thank you for this. I love researching and teaching the Middle Ages. Do I want to live then? Emphatically no (let me start with modern dentistry and go on to antibiotics, birth control, and chocolate; I will leave other advantages of the modern world as an exercise for the reader). And I know well that anyone I research would probably be baffled and hostile if they met me. Nonetheless, the medieval period and its literature caught my imagination long ago and continue to hold it.

[roger]

I was teaching The Tempest to some freshmen. A few of them complained that they couldn't "relate" to the play.

Vladimir Nabokov said that is someone identified with the characters in a book they'd better be careful about which books they read. The same applies to those who relate to books.

[Z]

Yes. The difference, the non-relatability, or non-easy relatability, that is what is of interest.

[Kaleberg]

David Gilmour describes himself as a narrow minded bigot. It's no surprise that he's a misogynist. He probably can't even deal with people whose last names start with the latter 13 letters of the alphabet.

(P.S. How anyone could not relate to The Tempest is beyond me. I always think of it as Shakespeare's Twilight Zone episode, but that's just me.)