The tragedy and horror that Cho chose to impose on the world are getting responses all over. One is on The Valve, a community blog sponsored by The Association of Literary Scholars. One of my favorite regulars there, Scott, posted this about VT, and then got back to the discussion of the book event (which is related):
Like everyone else this week, I’ve lost more than a little sleep thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech. I fret over the university context one minute, the comparative one the next—two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq yesterday—but more than anything else, it is the professional context that dogs my mind. Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them. His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic: literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in us. Put mildly, Cho’s work was not cathartic. He fell prey to the vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described.I want to work out a response to Scott here. I'll take it to Valve later, when the book event won't be our central focus. We do want to believe that studying the Arts and Lits will make "better people", by which I think we generally mean "increase the capacity for curiosity about and sympathy with other people" as well as "a historically contextual understanding of the world." Or something. I know that my profs, both the New Critical and the Post-________ sorts, believed this to the soles of their feet. I also know that they believed in teaching part-to-whole reading, a keen sense of aesthetics, and a plethora of methods of critique, questioning, contextualizing. What they assumed was that the "being a better person" part would kind of infuse me, rub off, transfer by osmosis. And in many ways it did.
As a senior English major at Virginia Tech, he could have taken courses that appeal to the most hardened culture warrior—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Augustan Literature, Romantic Literature, Renaissance Literature, &c.—or those the cultural studies side considers morally edifying—Ethnic Children’s Literature, Introduction to Women’s Literature, Introduction to African-American Literature, Literature and Ecology, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Contemporary Horror, Women in Sport, &c. My intention is not to declare a pox on both houses, but to point to how thin this justification of our work is. One course in postcolonial literature does not a progressive make, nor will reading Shakespeare transform a troubled soul into a humanist. On one level, we know this—witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on desk, reading Goethe—but on another, our professional identity intertwines with the notion that good books make good people, so long as someone teaches them how to read.
But, I'm not a hot coil of selfish, resentful, seething anger.
There probably is Nothing the Humanities can do for one so coiled, so close to striking. Professors of the Humanities are not trained psychologists, and our powers of healing the soul are limited to those of other lay persons with good intentions. Salon has a nice piece about this and the difficulties of telling the difference between a student who writes violence because our media culture is glorifying that kind of imagination right now, the student who writes it because they're off the grid. The personality type that goes into being a writer/teacher, or a Hum's Prof, is one oriented toward generosity and kindness and pushing youngin's to be more of their best and smartest selves. But, we are not Magic Healing Fairies from Utopia. The failures of Uni Admins to act on the reports of Hums Profs, especially women profs, who are threatened by disgruntled students with alarming regularity (I know four such women personally), is clearly at issue, and will get its day here soon.
Scott reads Cho as sign of the failure of the Hums to make good people, and he acknowledges in the comments that Cho was off the grid, but has a larger point in mind. I want to take up that larger point:
How to make the Hums really make better people, especially we Lit Types.
First, remember the limits of our discipline. The study of literature can enhance and amplify the caring, curiosity, and intellectual acumen, political savvy, and creative capacity, and sparkling cocktail conversation of our students. It Can NOT instill such qualities ex nihilo.
Second, (and I'm working on a paper to this effect), Whether we are Old School or New School, Pre- or Post-Modern, traditional or interdisciplinary, or whatever our period specialty and critical approach: We need to start highlighting how reading lets us discover others. We need to stop assuming that the goodness is going to rub off and start letting the conversations about what we are discovering, learning, beginning to question about Life In General right into the middle of our pedagogy. Not just in the content of our texts, but their form, and our modes of engagement with them.
Why don't we? Because Literature must justify itself as a discipline supported by universities, state taxes, so forth. And what The People want is measurable outcomes like increasing critical thinking skills. Which discussion of the near infinite complexity of literary aesthetics Does help to meet. Intangibles, like amplifying the richness of the human soul and enabling students to deal with the complex ambiguities of real life, these are not the objectives and outcomes tax payers want to see, not being all that objectively measurable. A few really stellar teachers can do both. So, because we want our jobs, and because the lenses of gender, race, class, the subaltern, and post-structuralism are Very Interesting and involve Lots of Critical Thinking, we teach that.
Now, Cho was a good critical thinker. He executed a complex, premeditated, plan that involved a distraction event, a media package (because he knew the media), a historical context (his admiration of the broken killers at Columbine), the purchase and familiarization with the required firearms, and cetera. He was good at complex problem solving and higher order thinking. But like the SS officer reading Goethe, the ends to which his coiled soul put those abilities were evil, selfish, wounded. Critical thinking is a morally neutral undertaking.
Nietzsche warned to watch out for the resentful.
But a moral imagination is not neutral. (Moral, not religious.)
What happens is that in those wounds and self-interest, one forgets that other people are also alive. While the Humanities cannot save the mad and the utterly shattered, it can teach complexity, ambiguity, care. We can look at difficult texts, extremely complex situations in history, and not only teach how they bear out the traces and intricacies of our pet theories, or of aesthetics itself, but how learning to pay such close attention to such complex material is a mode of practice for the ethical attention we owe each other. That was owed to Cho and denied him in his youth, and that Cho owed to his peers at VT, old wounds or no. We need to remember that while the community at VT tried to care for and about Cho, the community he lived in before that had not. And, there were more of them, and they need to learn compassion and care and Being Good Humans, too.
Teaching the part to the whole, and the text to the context, and the context to its larger context, and reading those Hard Books, and Hard Poems, and Hard Novels that don't just ease their way into our minds but which actually make us read with out whole intellectual and intuitional apparatus in fifth gear, and talking about that too with our students, that, Scott whom I admire, if we highlight it instead of just assume it's happening by virtue of opening books, then we might get somewhere with the humanizing effects of the humanities.
Because the world we inhabit, and the other people in it, are all as rich and complex, more so, than these texts and these ideas. We owe this to our students. And it will be hard for us to do. And that's another reason we should do it.
Some quick references in this direction, just off top of head: Joan Retallack's Poethics, Jorie Graham's interviews with Thomas Gardner, Lyn Hejinan's The Language of Inquiry, and Carole Maso's Break Every Rule, as well as good dose of remembering that the purpose of Post-Struct and PoMo theory was to describe the conditions that dehumanize us, and to imagine responses to glopping historical ick. Not just to dither about non-closure in the novel, but what that gesture means, asks of us, teaches us about being here together. That would be Why The Author Would Work with Strategies of Non-Closure --- because they're meant to Do Something To Us.
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