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ON-LINE
ISSUES
V.3
N.1, October 1995
Written
on the Body: Autobiography, Phenomenology and the Language of Teaching
by
Rishma Dunlop
Department
of Language Education
University of British Columbia
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Bone of my bone. Flesh of my flesh. To remember you its my own body
I touch. Thus she was, here and here. The physical memory blunders
through the doors the mind has tried to seal...Wisdom says forget,
the body howls. The bolts of your collarbone undo me. Thus she was,
here and here.
--Jeannette Winterson, Written on the Body
If we ask women who teach to talk about their work in the language
that dominates the discourse of schooling, we invite language that
celebrates system and denies doubt, that touts objectives and denies
ambivalence, that confesses frustration but withholds love.
--Madeleine Grumet, Bittermilk
All
my writing--and yours--is autobiographical.
--Donald M. Murray
- Sex.
Birth. Death. I suspect that the text of the body, with its multiple
discourses, is our most expressive and powerful canon as it reflects
lived experience. As I acknowledge the fundamental truths that are
embodied in the commonalities and differences of human experience,
I am struck by the fact that our academic institutions suppress the
language of the body in educational life. As Mary Catherine Bateson
(1994) states:
Of all the texts that must be read to understand the human condition,
the body is the most eloquent, for we read in all its stages and
transitions a pattern that connects all human communities as well
as differences that divide. People in different eras and places
have read it differently, or made every effort to deny access to
parts of the story, to its alternate readings, or to the wider learning
that flows from it so it becomes the justification for mutual suspicion
and for alienation from the natural world (p.172).
- As
an alternative to our institutional perceptions of schooling that
sanctify this disembodiment from the natural world, Madeleine Grumet
(1992) proposes in "Existential and Phenomenological Foundations of
Autobiographical Writing" that autobiography may be a way to reconceptualize
the ways in which we know the world, asserting Sartre's conviction
that to name something is to change the world. In this sense, the
use of language to reconceptualize curriculum becomes an act of reforming
the world, a return to the body as life-text and source of knowledge.
- I
acknowledge the constructedness of our stories. As I construct my
own narratives, the moments stopped are lifted from multiple lives,
enacted in the roles of woman: mother, lover, wife, daughter, sister,
friend and teacher/scholar. Like Grumet, phenomenology takes me home,
extending the "horizons of educational theory" to embrace the passion,
politics, and labour of human reproduction" (p.63). I turn to the
body, as the site of passion, of richness and significance, and of
understanding, as I struggle to make sense of educational experience
and teaching life. It is primal intimacy that informs my writing,
threaded through my body, inextricably intertwined, tangled through
the systems of public experience. I envision writing as evoked by
Anaïs Nin:
...writing should become music and penetrate the senses directly.
For this poetry is necessary...it is not the writing of emotion
and the senses, which I seek. I want meaning to enter the body by
some other route, not the mind.... (Nin, 1971, pp. 40-41).
- I
return to the familiar. The conflicts of the inner self are reflected
in the struggles between creation and maternal love; between realism
and romanticism; between past, present and future; in the Socratic
dialogues and tensions between teacher and students; between educators
and colleagues, and through the attempt to find significance through
the articulation and reconstruction of the writer's world. It is an
attempt to voice Barthes' comparisons of "teaching to play, reading
to eros, writing to seduction" (quoted in Sontag, 1982, pp. xvi-xvii).
BODYREADING:
THE SKIN OF THE EARTH
- I
write about the text of the body, contextualizing teaching and living:
Bodyreading
Your hands are a gift to me.
They have mapped me,
explored in terrains
of luminous manuscripts,
honeyed narratives,
pages turned in my lap.
- "Bodyreading."
My body as story. Envisioned as book. Text of lived experience. During
the history of human experience, we search for a geography of the
soul, an internal landscape that will slip us into place in its contours.
- "Bodyreading"
is my expression of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body subject: all
the elements of historical, social, political influences contained
in the self are brought together into the body, a country or place
where we live in felt experience. These metaphors express the acquisition
of knowledge in all its multi-hued facets as pages of the book are
turned, an experience of pleasure, felt through the body. Sex. Birth.
Death.
Isolde
She is scripted, aloof,
composed
in a properly bridled score,
but the aria begins and
he kisses the nape
of her neck,
the hollow of her back,
the inner curves of her knees
and she is undone.
- The
metaphor of adultery is analogous to the seductive power of newness
of experience, the acquisition of new knowledge. It is the excitement
of the unfamiliar that can weaken us at the knees, stunning us with
the recognition of the paradoxes of desire. This is the sensation
of étonnement that Barthes seeks. Acknowledged here is the strength
of eros as desire that has an astonishing power to appear to the self
with urgency and force. Often, it has the fearsome power to remain
beyond the reach of social order and conventional morality.
- In
"Isolde," I explore the idea of the social roles of women, their scripted,
written score, metaphorically placed notes set into place on the musical
manuscript. Ultimately, the music of seduction, the promise of new
knowledge of the opera, provides the "undoing" in a departure from
the written life. The bolts of your collarbone undo me, here and here.
- The
perspectives of three major French feminist writers, Irigaray, Cixous,
and Kristeva, differ widely in specific theoretical approaches to
the body and the notion of desire. However, their shared intellectual
bonds lie in their exploration of the psychoanalytic basis in Lacan's
rewriting of Freud and their interest in the work of Derrida. All
three writers agree that l'écriture féminine is closely connected
to the body, its rhythms and drives. In the emancipatory process that
is writing, the body ceases to remain purely biological; it is written
and socially constructed from an early age:
[Kristeva and Irigaray] have shown that some concept of the body
is essential to understanding social production, oppression and
resistance; and that the body need not, indeed must not be considered
merely a biological entity, but can be seen as a socially inscribed,
historically marked, psychically and interpersonally significant
product. (Gross, 1986a, p. 140)
Lunar Eros
Her heart
jolts against
the bony cage of her ribs
on the long nights
wet with the moon.
Her locked soul
is keyed in his mouth
in the cadence of breath.
- A
metaphor. The sexual, sensual body. Acquisition of knowledge. The
ribcage becomes prison, imprisoning the heart... the mind. The search
for the internal geography to house the soul Satisfied by the imprint
of another. The speaker is released. By the lover. Or teacher. Finding
the key to new knowledge. Learning is erotic. Seductive. Capturing
the breath in the unlocking. Slipping into place. Here and here...
L'ENFANT
Aubade to a Newborn
I hold you close,
trying to inhale the pink gleam of dawn
in your sweet flesh.
You are tender-grasped, yet bruised
by my intensity.
I strain to absorb you.
Where is the link
of the twist of sheets,
mouth-kissed skin,
to this glimmer of genes?
Through chasms of pain
the unseeing eye has laboured
to whole sight.
You are sensuous, strange,
cradled in the shining
golden embrace of new morning.
- "Aubade
to a Newborn." For my daughter Cara. Firstborn. I play with the traditional
aubade. Morning song to a lover. Bittersweet mystery. Paradox of childbirth.
Contradictions. Sex. Conception. Birth. Tenderness. Yet fierceness.
Motherhood. Child of mine. Separate and strange. Yet inseparable from
my flesh. A multiplicity of tensions and voices. Sex. Birth. Bittermilk,
fluid of our contradictions.
- Echoes
of Kristeva. In "Stabat Mater; The Paradox: Mother or Primary Narcissism,"
Kristeva's text acknowledges the experience of the mother. Kristeva
reflects the continuing exploration with forms and representations
of language in text, exposing new kinds of discourse and possibilities
for articulation of the women's experiences. Kristeva writes her text
in columns, with personal, associative writing on one side, and more
traditional academic discourse on the other, creating an interplay
of texts that accepts the paradoxes of the mother's felt experiences:
...formless, unnamable embryo. Epiphanies. Photos of what is not
yet visible, and that language necessarily skims over from afar,
allusively. Words that are always too distant, too abstract for
this underground swarming of sec- onds, folding in unimaginable
spaces. Writing them down is an ordeal of discourse, like love.
What is loving for a woman, the same thing as writing. (Kristeva,
1987a, pp. 234-235)
Bodies
of Knowledge
- Phenomenological
reflection leads me continually back to the notion of the body as
ideological construction, as reflected and constrained by our schooling,
our curriculums, yet, I am constantly struck by its irrevocable presence
that cannot be denied in our teaching worlds. Our carefully ordered
classrooms, logical plans and systems collapse with the inevitably
human "eruptions of the body, intimacy into public space" (Grumet,
1988, p.70). I am reminded of Grumet's reflections on the autobiographical
text of a teacher in a first grade classroom undergoing a formal observation
by an evaluator. The teacher is at first pleased with herself--"The
lessons were going well." Her place behind the new half-round table
establishes the separateness between teacher and children. Grumet
writes that the children are seen only as expectant faces "sans bodies,
sans belches, sans sound, sans everything." This false vision comes
to a sudden end when Paul vomits all over and his false teeth land
at the teacher's feet. The space between them is closed as she cleans
his shoes and she finds shelter in using the euphemism "special child."
The evaluator leaves: "her exit was graceful." However, the teacher
cannot remain distanced by the language of the governing paradigms
of her teaching world. She cannot name Paul as "other;" they are linked,
her slacks damp, reeking of sickness. In the acknowledgement of the
body, of human truth, she is comfortable with teaching for the first
time.
Entry from my journal, November, 23, 1994.
These reminders of the body surface in our recent doctoral seminar,
a course in curriculum theory. We have been engaged in discussions
about theory and philosophical stances in relation to curriculum--Rousseau,
Tyler, Dewey, Grumet. Students were engaged in a heated debate over
the notions of class and privilege and oppression. We bandied terms
about as has been our intellectual habit. Suddenly, we are brought
back into the realities of lived experience as one of the students
interrupts the light-hearted banter with an emotional outburst.
She states that in this room sits much privilege and class. She
speaks about how she lives and what "her people" live with everyday.
She speaks of oppression and violence. She speaks of language that
obliterates meaning in its theoretical, political correctness. Racism
is, afterall, racism. The pain and anger of her body fills the air
of the classroom; it is palpable, touching us. We cannot avoid it
and we cannot fill the silence with words and constructions of language.
Where is our curriculum now, if it fails to acknowledge the reality
and the depth of this woman's experience, of our experiences? Where
is wisdom? The body howls. It is impossible to move or to speak.
We are held in place, held inside our bodies. We are salted by the
bitterness of her tears. Finally, one woman moves across the room
to hold the other's hand. The only language possible, eloquent enough,
is that of the flesh. Bittermilk, fluid of our contradictions. Thus
she was, here and here.
A
Matter of Language: Pleasures of Text
Route 97
Early morning.
Driving
the winding twists
of Highway 97,
the daily journey.
Echoes
the voices of children,
clatter of breakfast dishes,
chaotic disorders
of family.
I sip on my coffee
mind soothed
by the melodic voice,
the silver brain of radio.
I am lulled
by the blue-green
of Lake Okanagan, glass-smooth,
my bones infused
with warmth through
the sun-glossed
curve
of windshield
I prepare my lecture,
conversing
with imaginary students,
expounding
on the virtues
of post-structural critical
approaches
in the close reading
of poetry.
Foot on the accelerator,
my route is embraceable,
knowable.
Reaching campus,
the air chills
as gold sky
fades
into gray
concrete hallways, classrooms and offices.
Stuffed under my office door,
notes, crumpled missives,
inarticulate scribblings,
multiple excuses
for late term papers.
My body is estranged
from my tailored flesh;
the skin freezes,
icy bumps rising on the surface.
As I enter the classroom, I am crisp,
my voice staccato
against the walls.
I focus on my students,
listening to the rustling and shuffling
of papers.
The Basketball Boys sprawl,
endless limbs spilling out
of their desks,
their giant sneakers
constantly fidgeting.
There is an audible groan
when I mention poetry.
The woman in the second row says
"I can't do poetry."
I take a long drag
of my coffee,
feel it flow warm,
deep into my throat,
filling the hollows of my body.
And I begin.
Teaching, I am calm,
my voice soothed into lyric hum
as I speak of the slants of language,
passion, sorrow, love,
moments keenly remembered
and recorded.
I search for the breathing tissue,
embedding hooks into
their flesh.
I rivet them with my eyes,
wrap them in my voice,
imagine them in
violet evenings,
smoky dusks filled with
twilight scents of green,
ripe foliage,
poets' voices floating
a slow music of sorcery,
flutes and lyres at the gates,
echoing through the groves
of olive trees
and almond blossoms.
I will them
to peel back their skins,
with fingers streaming light
into the river
of rhythms and meters
of transcribed heartbeats.
Pour yourselves skinless,
liquid through the glass of language
into the irises of eyes.
My body thaws
and in its heat
the Basketball Boys are still,
their restless noises hushed
in the infinite pleats of skin.
And we begin,
my students and I,
the route of mystery,
unfolding in the
cadence of breath,
iridescent poems
housed beneath the flesh.
- I
move from the place of the familiar, the family, to the oppression
of the institution and the notion of curriculum as something to be
delivered in the classroom, back to a reclamation of the body in the
desire to encourage students to find the poetic, the aesthetically
beautiful in their own worlds of experience, under their own human
skins and in their hearts. A reclamation of teaching. Recovery of
the world through poetic text.
- Ultimately,
like Grumet, I consider what teaching means to women. Grumet (1988)
discusses the essential bonds of women, first to their own mothers,
then to their children and to other womens' children, underscoring
the contradictions inherent between our experiences of childhood,
mothering and the curriculum we offer as teachers:
Convinced that we are too emotional, too sensitive, and that our
work as mothers or housewives is valued only by our immediate families,
we hide it, and like Eve, forbidden to know and teach what she has
directly experienced, we keep that knowledge to ourselves as we
dispense the curriculum to the children of other women (p.28).
- Grumet
claims that we must interpret our reproductive experience (procreation
and nurturance) and our productive experience (curriculum and teaching)
each through the other's terms, not by negating the differences between
them but by naming and accepting their contradictions. By this means
we can reconceive our commitment to education (p.29). In searching
to find the words and language to express my experiences as a woman,
I realize that in the classroom and in the home, I encounter others
in ways that move back and forth in the multiple tensions inherent
to life: between public and private self, familial life, sensual and
sexual life, and between social, political and pedagogic discourses.
As I write, I know that what enriches my exploration of self is the
conscious seeking out of language that is deeply centred in the sensual
and the familial self. Primal intimacy seems inherent to the woman's
voice and it informs my dialogues with others, colouring my teaching
world. This voice, for me, does not encourage or imply sentimentality;
rather, it is grounded in rigorous scholarship, the quest for increased
understanding of the constant dialectic between public and private
experience.
- Much
of the criticism of the French feminist poststructuralists has been
aimed at the charges that the "focus on language as the foundation
of woman's oppression...is not sufficiently grounded in material reality"
and the claim that l'écriture féminine is essentialist. However, as
Rebecca Martusewicz asserts, this criticism fails to acknowledge the
neglect of the material reality of discursive systems and disregards
the consideration of women's bodies as a "source of metaphor for multiplicity
and difference"(1992, p. 145). Martusewicz concludes her essay with
a question that has been explored in my research through autobiography
and the reconstruction of self: What does it mean to be an educated
woman?
[T]o live as feminist educators is to live a tension between a critical
theoretical space and an affirmative political space. It is within
this in-between, this 'elsewhere,' that we must seek the educated
woman. (Martusewicz, 1992, p. 155)
- My
paradoxes are plentiful. I bring this constantly changing self to
the classroom. My students bring their selves. My colleagues bring
other selves to their classrooms. Their paradoxes are plentiful. We
must all situate ourselves in relation to our realities and our texts,
our world/words, attempting to find a country or an imaginary homeland
of common dialogue.
- My
narratives are also texts that move through autobiography towards
literacy that acknowledges the pleasures of texts and of human experience.
John Willinsky, in his book The Triumph of Literature/The Fate
of Literacy, eloquently calls for a movement in our energies as
teachers to explore how literacy (as intimately connected with literature)
reaches out to the world, rather than regarding the notion of literacy
simply as a testable cognitive skill to be practised. Rather, Willinsky
defines this new literacy as one that approaches literary work as
inherently contained within language," a representation intent on
re-constituting some part of the world in its own images, and a source
of pleasure in, and power over, the world." The word "pleasure" is
a refreshing one. It is conspicuously absent from most post-secondary
course outlines. Willinsky states:
This approach to literacy and literature calls for teaching students
not only the specific skills of reading and writing but instructing
them, as well, about how the social context of literacy operates,
about how it continues to write a good part of the world we live
in. We exist in a sea of texts that inform and govern our lives...
The social formation of our world/word is a matter of who writes
and who is written, what counts as graffiti and what as a paid political
message, whose voices are heard and how the scripts of a postliterate
workplace and media are fashioned. The fate of literacy is still
our future, our text, our life (1991, p.4).
- Despite
the sense of different realities which may exist in texts, as a teacher,
it remains my conviction that it is an identification with and a recognition
of self in the story of the "other" that makes a student's experience
with literature one that touches, grips, resonates, holds tight to
the sensory consciousness, urging a return, a re-reading, offering
a multiplicity of ways of seeing and knowing and feeling through language.
Despite the differences in texts, in realities, and in the multitude
of "imaginary homelands," our universal must still be within the realm
of the human body, its rhythms and its capacity for feeling. Sex,
birth, death. Herein lies the commonality of human experience that
informs us, educates, shapes us. This is the dialogue of teaching
life, one that promises us a curriculum of compassion.
- This
quest for scholarship that embraces the heart in an understanding
of the world and selves is eloquently expressed by Christ:
...at the root of our scholarship is eros, a passion to connect,
the desire to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our world,
the passion to transform or preserve the world as we understand
it deeply. At its best, scholarship becomes a way of loving ourselves,
others, and our world more deeply.
(1987, p. 58)
- I seek language to express lived and felt experience, trying to
come close to Anaïs Nin's idea of writing that enters not through
the mind but the senses. The words of this language are tasted, lingering
on the tongue, touched by flesh and bone, echoed resounding and whispered,
scented, language of the body. Nin writes: "We write to heighten our
awareness of life... We write to taste life twice, in the moment and
in the retrospection (1966, p.13). This to me is fundamental to human
experience, recovering the "unsaid" shining through the "said" that
Ted Aoki speaks of, the shining through of felt experience (1992,
p.27). In the effort to find the language, through phenomenological
and autobiographical approaches in teaching, as well as through diverse
forms of discourse, we may be able to come closer to the worlds of
our teaching classrooms in meaningful ways. We may relate to students
by seeking to find a dialogue that reclaims the body, that inspires,
reaches into the heart and the senses to form connections in our minds
and our written words. And we are undone, here and here.
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