Oldsarge, I intend to print your message (#24 above) and put it in my copy of the Complete Stories.
Is there and rough-and-ready distinction one can make between "noticing" and "dissecting"? "Noticing" means that sometimes discussing a literary work, or even writing about it, could help us to see better what's there and, thus, probably enhance our enjoyment and understanding. In my case, an analogy might be with what happened when I learned to identify many of the northern-latitude constellations. My experience of the night sky changed, for the better it seems to me. I became more aware, for example, of differences in color between some of the stars, differences visible to the naked eye here in my rural town. I became more aware of seasonal variations in what is to be seen. For example, I now anticipate the return in a few weeks or so of Boötes, which will appear to be "lying on its side" in the northeast. "Dissecting" would suggest a rather cold treatment of a literary work that interferes with a warm receptivity to it in our imaginations, intellects, and senses (this last referring to the way the sounds affect us).
In actual practice no doubt occasionally a reader may drift from "noticing" into mere "dissecting," especially in an academic setting, but perhaps that's a risk involved in trying to "notice."
This is something I've struggled with a bit in the context of being an English teacher. Today there's endless chatter about "skills" as opposed to "content knowledge," and a dreary emphasis on "measurable learning outcomes." I have had a mildly heated exchange with another teacher in which, as I recall, I was saying that I don't think we should try to make students articulate, prematurely, the value of a literary experience, and he responded with a little irritation about not being interested in what a literary work might mean to someone twenty years from now. In my practice, I try to encourage "noticing." When I have the students write, often it's largely a matter of noticing some aspect of a literary work that's interesting but that they might not have noticed till they were asked to write about it. Most recently, I gave a 30-minute short in-class writing task in which the reader was asked to identify "paranormal experiences" in the assigned reading in Anna Karenina. I had in mind the uncanny way in which Anna and Vronsky, separately, have an eerie dream about a peasant muttering in French and doing something with a bag, or the scene in which Levin and Kitty seem to have a telepathic bond enabling them to understand what a message of multiple words means when the other has only the initial letters to go by.
After an English faculty meeting, I wrote the email below. It received no comment, as I recall...
Poetic Knowledge in an Age of Quantification
A character in one of Arthur Machen’s stories quotes a saying: “‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.’”
The saying isn’t expounded and doesn’t contribute in an obvious way to the resolution of the story’s plot, but I think that it is worth considering, by itself, in terms of possible reader responses.
It will immediately impress itself on some readers as a true statement, which is not to say it is “factual.” Something true is indicated by it, hinted at by it, even though the “soul of a star” probably doesn’t lie hidden in “every grain of wheat” -- and if it does, science will never observe it. It doesn’t strike this first group of readers as a day-dreamy, sentimental, unreal notion, but as something pointing to a genuine category of real knowledge that may be called poetic knowledge. Such readers probably will desire to possess, to a growing degree, whatever faculty it is that is able to apprehend such statements as meaningful.
For some readers the saying will contribute, in context, to a quality of quaint but vague charm. The saying will have aesthetic significance, but many of these readers may adhere to the common view that aesthetics and ideas of the beautiful are matters of fashion, personal taste, and so on – pleasant, perhaps, but not a matter of authentic importance except when associated with more obvious public goods such as relaxation.
For some readers the saying is nonsensical, essentially no different from a statement such as “In every carburetor the wings of a moth are calculating taxation increments.”
Other responses to the statement may be possible, and the same reader might take the quoted statement differently at different times.
I have read the story in which the saying appears many times, and it is my favorite thing in the story. If I included the story in one of my classes, I would hope that at least some of my students would belong to the first group of readers. I would not feel that it was my business to try to find out who of them did belong to that group. I would not feel it was my business to try to coax people in the second and third groups into responding to the grain/soul/star statement as people in the first group do. And I would not feel it was appropriate for me to penalize members of the third group. Yet, if I assigned the story for a class session, I might, privately, feel that the best thing that might happen that day (or, to speak more strictly, prior to that day, when the students presumably read the story) would be a “connection” to the statement.
It must be acknowledged that this kind of situation is nothing unusual for the Humanities. Some of the most valuable things about literature, music, and visual art relate to poetic knowledge.* And pressure on students to articulate “what this passage means to me” – publicly, on the spot, no less! -- seems likely to kill a student’s ability to receive this knowledge.
I don’t think it is yet widely recognized at MSU that a university, which presumably is interested, in theory, to the whole “universe” of human knowledge, should not impose on all disciplines in all circumstances the same devices/methodologies. How would one design a lesson with measurable, specified, articulated outcomes that would deal with the grain/soul/star sentence? But if an elusive quality with regard to the Machen sentence be granted, then it must be granted that much of Keats’s poetry, Botticelli’s art, and Mozart’s music similarly eludes the type of quantified assessment that is perfectly appropriate when it comes to establishing whether and how well students have learned how to type blood, create a spreadsheet, or solve algebraic equations.
As a professor, I constantly assess student performance. Quizzes monitor whether students have done the reading. Perhaps this is not to my credit, but I would be quite capable of having a quiz item like this: Early in the story, Jones quotes a statement: and including the grain/soul/star sentence as one of four options, hoping the students will circle the right one. Open-book Focus Writes also assess student performance. In this case, I might ask the students: Throughout the story, Machen’s narrator and characters in the story make paradoxical statements. In the next thirty minutes, list as many of these as you can, with page references to our text, and feel free to conclude with a brief statement giving your view of how these statements contribute to the atmosphere of the story. Longer in-class essays provide additional opportunities for assessment of student learning. But in every case, I want to leave the student untroubled by obtrusive, busybody inquiries. If the sentence, poem, story, or novel does not (as we casually say) “do much” for a given student this time, perhaps it will mean more if and when the student returns to it (as has been my own experience at times). As teacher, I cannot control this and I certainly cannot measure it.
A Humanities teacher who is chronically insensitive to the dimension of the arts that I have tried to suggest, and to students’ right to privacy with regard to the reception of that dimension, may do much harm. From such teachers (however well-meaning) may our students be preserved, until these teachers learn better the art of teaching!
[signed] 22 March 2011
*Poetic knowledge is, from the point of view of Enlightenment-based educational theory, a fugitive and (let’s admit it) an unreal thing. Perhaps adherents of the Enlightenment and people like me can agree to disagree about whether there is such a thing as poetic knowledge. Perhaps we can furthermore agree this much: response to a statement like the grain/soul/star one doesn’t lend itself to measurement.
