ON-LINE ISSUES

V.4 N.1, March 1997

Once Upon a Time

by David Calhoon

University of Alberta

1. It is the first day of school in La Grulla, Texas. The migrant farm worker families have returned home after following the crop harvests from state to state for five months. Today the children start back to school.

2. Today is my first day as a primary teacher. I know from my one year of experience teaching Junior High that control is the most important thing. I asked for this grade three assignment because my year teaching Junior High has convinced me that it would be so much easier if only they were smaller. I am waiting in my room for the morning bell to ring. In preparation I have decorated the room as I imagine that a grade three class should look. Actually it looks just like my classroom when I was in grade three: desks all in rows, the letters of the alphabet displayed across the top of the chalkboards, bulletin boards featuring autumn themes, a giant September calendar page, and a big picture clock with movable hands. On each desk, in order to limit the commotion of children finding desks, I have placed a sheet of paper with a child's first name in big colorful print. All is ready.

3. My mouth feels dry and I am a little nauseous. I tell myself, "Relax, they are children, third graders; you are the teacher; you are in control!" The bell rings and I jump, surprised, even though I have been nervously watching the clock for the last half hour. Here they come!

4. Children begin filling the room: filling it with bodies, smells, and, most of all, sounds. My anxiety builds with the noise level. Some goats have come in with the children and are eating the papers with the children's names off the desks. The children laugh and yell and some with shepherding skills begin chasing the goats out. The 40 desks become occupied and I realize there are not enough desks. The noise and confusion continues to increase. I realize it is way too loud. I yell, "Sit down and be quiet, please." Some of them comply but many do not. I am not even sure they have heard me. My anxiety is increasing and I am worried that the principal may come to investigate the noise.

5. A little boy is tugging at my arm and speaking to me in Spanish. I don't understand him and I ask him to speak more slowly. A little girl wearing a bright yellow taffeta dress is sitting at her desk with her arm raised. She says she has to go to the "escusado" (washroom). I tell her she will have to wait until the class settles down. The little boy is speaking to me again and I now understand that he is worried because he has no desk. Three other children are yelling that they have no desks either. I tell them to sit at the art table in the back of the room. Other kids begin yelling that they want to sit at the art table too. The art table has become a scene of chaos.

6. I lose it. "¡Calla te! (Shut up!)," I scream. The effect is dramatic. The room falls silent. I like it. It feels good. I am the teacher; I am in control.

7. Then, in the silence, I hear a gentle sobbing. I turn and see a beautiful little girl sitting with her arm still raised. The sound of her crying is mixing with the sound of running water. Urine is flowing out around her bright yellow "first day of school" dress and cascading to the floor.

8. I am the teacher, I am in control.

   Story, Presence, and Representation

9. What is there about story? We all have experienced its power: when we burst into tears in a public theatre, laugh out loud while reading in a quiet room, lose all track of time reading a book that we "can't put down." The story causes us to lose control, to become separated from our self-consciousness, to step out of time. Not to a place where we turn the words of our thought onto what was, but to the place before time, before the subject/object: the place where the world is born. Not the place where we create the world with our words but the place where the world springs itself upon us and catches us without the words to make it already historical. This is not a place of thoughtful action, it is a place where our only action is reaction, reaction to a world which asserts its presence upon us, where presence is all there is.

10. Is it possible then for the words of a narrative to represent the experiences and the reality of others? There was a time when I felt that the evidence of our bodies (the tears, the laughter, the pain, the joy) gave proof that such a representation occurred. One of the fundamental, even magical, powers of story is the power to "call to presence." In a way story allows us to "experience without experiencing." This experiential aspect of story is testified to by our bodies: the tears we shed while viewing a sad (or, indeed, happy) scene in a film, our accelerated heart rate while reading an exciting or suspense-filled passage in a novel, and the various other story induced physiological responses, ranging from humorous to terrifying to erotic. However, is this proof, or even evidence, of "representation"?

11. For the past four years I have told the story which opened this paper to the student teachers in my university classes. I do this in hope that they will learn from my experience. In some sense, I am obligated to do so by the "face" of a little girl named Aida. In any event, I have now told this story to nearly a thousand student teachers. Two months ago I ran into one of these (now former) student teachers. He had sought me out in order to tell me something that had happened to him early in his first teaching experience. He said that during a very chaotic morning lesson a child had raised his hand and asked to go to the washroom. His first reaction was to tell the child he would have to wait, but before he finished the sentence he "thought of the little girl in the yellow dress." He reversed his position and told the boy to go ahead to the washroom. Is it the "representational" of story which allowed this to happen?

12. There is a lively discussion in progress regarding representation in literary, educational, anthropological, historical, and sociological critical discourses. Story and narrative seem to be playing an increasing role in this discussion. Because of my own identity as "teacher," my involvement in teacher education, and my ongoing inquiry into issues pertaining to culture and language, I have found much of this discussion helpful to me as I strive to find my way in a poststructural, postmodern, postcolonial landscape.
13. (A parenthetical interruption: While writing the last sentence I was struck by the image of a landscape of "posts." Three years ago while travelling in Australia, I visited an aboriginal cultural center. In this center there was a room filled with vertically placed heavy timber posts. It had the feel of closely spaced trees of different diameters, randomly located as in a natural forest. On these posts were nailed "texts," in the manner of the flyers stapled to telephone poles on urban streets. The "texts" were historical, dating from the days of the early colonization of Australia, "posted colonial texts." One of these texts haunts me; it resurfaces-interrupts-erupts whenever I encounter the word "colonial." It was/is a reproduction of an article in a London newspaper advising those who would venture to Australia seeking land and fortune. The author stated that the best way to acquire land was to travel into the bush beyond the area already occupied by colonists. There one could find huge expanses of land waiting to be claimed. The article went on to caution that the new settlers must be prepared to "harden" their conscience as they would be required to kill substantial numbers of "bushmen" inhabiting the land. The author insisted that this was necessary and should not trouble new settlers too much, as it had been well documented in the latest scientific studies that these bushmen were not actually human but in fact a sub-human species of animal related to the ape. Therefore, this killing should be viewed much as the extermination of rats or starlings which infest grain bins and fields.)

    Some Disruptive Voices

14. Deborah Britzman (1995), Johannes Fabian (1994), and Gabriele Schwab (1994) are among those whose compelling and provocative discussions have helped me not so much to navigate, as to begin to search for a place to stand on this shifting quaking terrain, this terra non firma. They do so by first knocking me off balance, by divesting me of the security of my stories as representations of experience:

    This returns us to the clashing investments in how stories are told and of the impossibility of telling everything. There is that excess, that difference within the story, informing how the story is told, the imperatives produced within its tellings, and the subject positions made possible and impossible there. These signifying "spaces" must be admitted as central to the structure and regulation of ethnographic work if readers are to participate in exceeding and informing the meanings ethnography might offer....Ethnographic narratives should ...question the belief in representation even as one must practice representation as a way to intervene critically in the constitutive constraints of discourses. (Britzman, 1995).

    Writing as re-presentation simply cannot be the fundamental issue. Presence is, because before there is representation there must be presence; and in the end the question of ethnographic objectivity still comes down to the question of what makes it possible to have access to another culture, or to be in the presence of another culture--both of which seem to be required if ethnographic knowledge is to be more than projection or delusion. (Fabian, 1994)

    ...it is no coincidence that literary texts have become increasingly sensitive to their different environments. Less concerned with a mere representation of referential worlds, they have become more and more interventionist, reflecting social concerns, philosophical and epistemological premises of their time, other discursive and aesthetic practices, the dramatic impact of technology and the media on our way of life, and the increasing globalization of our culture. (Schwab, 1994)

15. I present these ethnographic and literary voices not because I believe them to be representative of new ways or "types" of thinking about representation, but rather because of their particularity. They knock me off balance, even when re-reading them, by becoming present before my mind always in a particularly new way.

    The Ongoing Struggle

16. Having lost my balance I am struggling to regain it. As part of that struggle I return once again to my body and my personal experience of story. A couple of months ago I watched (on video) a movie titled "My Life," starring Michael Keaton. The story is about a "thirty something" year old man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His wife was pregnant with their first child and the doctors told him he would not live to see the birth. In order to leave something of himself for his unborn son he set about making a "home video" about his life. The video within the video narrated both the story of his living and of his dying.

17. The personally shocking thing about my experience of this story was not that I cried, for I am sure that many, if not most, people who have seen this film experienced tear filled eyes. No, the shocking thing was that I sobbed uncontrollably and inconsolably; I completely broke down in grief in a way no other movie (or story in any form) has ever caused me to do. This was not a mystery to me because I knew where the grief originated; I knew that I was not crying for Michael Keaton or the fictional character he was attempting to represent. My grief was real and I was powerless to control it.

18. Four years ago I shared presence nearly everyday for nine months with a close friend as he went through the day by day process of dying, and trying so very hard not to die, from the effects of, and the radiation treatment for, an inoperable brain tumor. And although that is "another story" which happened "once upon a time" I believe that the relationship between these stories is not simply that the fiction caused the experience of my grief to be remembered. Nor do I believe that a representation of experience in the movie evoked the re-experience of my past grief.

19. In a literal sense, space and time render representation a myth, or even an oxymoron. If indeed story can bring a presence to us, it is always a new presence and never a re- presence, always a new presentation and never a representation, always our own presence and never the presence of an other.

20. What IS at work/play when story weaves its magic? Story does not have the power to deliver to us the presence of the other. Rather, it may call us to our own presence and, most importantly, orient our presence toward the possibilities inherent in the living (even when dying) presence of an other. For a teacher in a room full of children, and in a world where living WITH each other may be our only hope for survival, this continuing orientation may be crucial.

    Return to Jaws

21. To whom do I turn to help me find a place to stand? Reluctantly (reticently), I find myself turning/re-turning to Heidegger. This is the person I once referred to, in my master's thesis (Calhoon, 1989), as "Jaws" because of his voracious logic and the manner in which he takes our legs from under us and pulls us into the abyss. I am reluctant (struggling against) in the sense that I have not previously been able to give Heidegger a sympathetic reading. Now, I find Heidegger's indeterminacy of language my only refuge.

22. Martin Heidegger refers to the power of language to both "call" us to speak and call "to" us from silence, not by giving us the "correct" word but by enabling us to "hear" that which is unspeakable. Jane Kelly Rodeheffer explicates:

    In the essay "Language," he (Heidegger) suggests that the voice of language--it's speaking-- is not an uttering, but stillness. The stillness at the heart of language calls to mortals through the poem, which is the only form of speaking in which primal calling is any longer to be heard. (Rodeheffer, 1990)

    Heidegger views the poet as the only "authentic" speaker, with the poem being not the poet's words but that to which those words call and that which calls the poet to speak (Rodeheffer, 1990).

23. Heidegger, in his essay Poetry, Language and Thought, states:

    Projective saying is poetry: the saying of the world and earth, the saying of the arena of their strife and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry is the saying of the unconcealdness of beings. Actual language at any given moment is the happening of this saying, in which a people's world historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed. Projective saying is saying which, in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into a world. (Heidegger in Krell, 1977)

24. From this perspective my stories become not the words themselves but the experience/presence to which those words allude/call. My "authenticity" as a speaker/writer can only be measured by the degree to which the "experience/presence" alluded to by my story can call forth a re-orientation of presence in the reader/listener.

25. So if asked, "Where do you stand now?," shall I answer: In the presence of a little girl in a yellow dress and a dying friend, or in the historicality of a world created by language? I guess I would have to be like Forest Gump and say, "both."

References

• Britzman, D. P. (1995). "The question of belief": Writing poststructural ethnography. Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(3), 229-238.
• Calhoon, D. (1989). A journey toward a shared horizon. Masters, University of Alberta.
• Fabian, J. (1994). Ethnographic objectivity revisited: From rigor to vigor. In A. Megill (Ed.), Rethinking objectivity (pp. 81-108). Durham: Duke University Press.
• Krell, D. F. (Ed.). (1977). Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row.
• Rodeheffer, J. K. (1990). The call of conscience and the call of language: Reflections on a movement in Heidegger's thinking. In A. B. Dallery & C. E. Scott (Eds.), Crises in Continental Philosophy (pp. 127-134). Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Schwab, G. (1994). Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction. Boston: Harvard University Press.