In the room the men come and go talking of prostitutes and saunas?
August 20, 2018 8:26 AM   Subscribe

 
Honestly, I thought that it was going to end with the other professor being a stuck-up MRA dude who had convinced himself of one interpretation of the poem and that the male students were all fawning acolytes. Pleasantly surprised it didn't.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:14 AM on August 20, 2018


I appreciate that the structure of the article was: "I was cocky and dumb and screwed up, and then I tried multiple strategies to recover, and help my students recover from my mistake." It seems like so much of our cultural conversation now is about unforgivable acts and irredeemable opinions. That can make it hard for cis hetero white men (or whatever fraction of privilege you have) to see a way forward--after all, we didn't have a choice in the matter, we were born into a bad system like everyone. Narratives that involve screw-ups that were avoidable but are still fixable give me hope.
posted by rikschell at 9:45 AM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I appreciate that the structure of the article was: "I was cocky and dumb and screwed up, and then I tried multiple strategies to recover, and help my students recover from my mistake."

I am not seeing that structure. For one thing, where does she say that she was "dumb?" And you have to be cocky to do Prufrock. She did not make an avoidable mistake, unless teaching Prufrock at all is a mistake. If you avoid making the mistake of teaching the poem, then you make the worse mistake of not teaching the poem.

(She should've kept on them about "etherized," though. There's no way after they all looked it up on their phones that nobody had it figured out. Somebody knew but didn't say, probably because "Whit" was bellowing about oysters and nobody could get a word in.)
posted by Don Pepino at 11:27 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


I can't quite figure out what this article is about, except maybe what it says it's about, that it's good that they snatch fiercely at an interpretation and bad that they can't then let go of it, or some part of it, to consider others. The supposition that the speaker is with a prostitute is odd, because there is no indication that he is with a woman, and the opening, "Let us go then, you and I," seems addressed to the reader, who is in most cases not a prostitute. However, if you don't know the Italian epigraph is about being dead and in Hell, reading the first part of the poem as sordid and sexual is easy enough:

evening spread out against the sky

restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening

Eliot's elderly, starved, fearful, insectile speaker is as put off by sex as he is scared of love, and sees sex in everything sordid and sordidness in everything sexual. Prostitutes weren't too terribly far off the mark as a first hypothesis, given the milieu.

By my reading, though, that sordidness stays outside on the street, and the women who come and go are the mermaids, and a different, better order of being, one away from which the speaker has fallen. Eliot, is, I think, a conservative, and holds that there was some former state in which one could speak one's heart and live. This is very late Romanticism in Modernist clothes, and I can understand why the other professor would want to identify the mermaids with the earlier sordid, outdoor scene by making them prostitutes. It would break one out of a dichotomy between a dead modern world and a former living world now lost, a dichotomy which is on a straight road to Eliot's Anglo-Catholicism, royalism, and cultural conservatism. However, under that reading, many other parts of the poem become incomprehensible.
posted by ckridge at 11:33 AM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


I appreciate that the structure of the article was: "I was cocky and dumb and screwed up, and then I tried multiple strategies to recover, and help my students recover from my mistake."

I find it interesting that an essay that was about people arriving at vastly and dramatically different interpretations of a work based on close readings of only a couple of details has led you to vastly and dramatically different interpretation of her essay based on what appears to be a close reading of only a couple of lines.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:41 AM on August 20, 2018 [6 favorites]


This article taught me one thing. I have to read Prufrock again. And Eliot in general.
posted by Splunge at 1:19 PM on August 20, 2018 [3 favorites]


Well, her friend warns her about starting with that particular poem, even saying "I’ve had some real disasters with Prufrock.” The author ignores the advice about guiding the class through a close reading before opening up the poem to group discussion.

“Thanks,” I say, but inside I’m all swagger. She’s exaggerating, I tell myself.

I feel like the rest of the piece basically supports my reading that she thinks she should have taken her friend's advice from the start, that she was overconfident and foolish to jump in without really preparing. Her discussion with Prof Dickinson shows that he didn't realize the consequences of his own offhand detail until Whit started obsession about prostitutes.

I mean, I guess you can read it as a sort of "haha undergrads are too dumb to get Modernist poetry," but I think she clearly comes to the conclusion that the poem is worth wrestling with but that it's easy to get the wrong end of the stick with, especially in an environment that typically values "right answers" and she hadn't really accounted for that when she started teaching it.
posted by rikschell at 1:46 PM on August 20, 2018 [4 favorites]


Don't get them going on "Prufrock's Pervigilium"
posted by chavenet at 1:49 PM on August 20, 2018 [5 favorites]


I had a (very) brief stint as an English major, and Prufrock was always my favorite poem. I can see a little of where the student's interpretation is coming from, but I was gobsmacked by what happened when the professor suggested there could be other ones:

"Whit stands up so suddenly that his desk slams into Joey’s. He strides out of the room, slamming the door behind him."

If I'd done that in college...well, I'd at least have assumed there would be no point in ever returning to that class again.
posted by bitmage at 4:32 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


I love how you are arguing about how to interpret the article.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:25 PM on August 20, 2018 [1 favorite]


For what it's worth, the reason I posted the essay was, in part, because I found its look at interpretation interesting for capturing the dynamic of it amusingly, I really enjoyed the exchange about the mermaid with Professor Dickinson and the way the class members are captured, for example, for fitting well some experiences of my own and for finding some of her direct points quite apt.

But I also found it interesting because there is something a bit open about the essay for reaching towards a number of different and useful ideas, but leaving the interpretation of the poem less complete instead of trying to tie the Whit's initial idea to the physicality in the poems imagery and using that to move the discussion towards more fruitful ground. The author leaves out describing the greater success in the same vein she describes the more awkward experience. This struck me as leaving the essay open to interpretation in much the way its been given here.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:04 AM on August 21, 2018 [2 favorites]


This illustrates perfectly a common problem with human cognition: our tendency to discard whatever information doesn't fit into a desired pattern, theory, or interpretation. I mean, sure, your interpretation of a poem is subjective, but it should be able to account for everything presented in the poem. Otherwise, you're just cherry-picking to support a predetermined outcome.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 9:46 AM on August 21, 2018


But on the other, I’m dismayed at how they were so willing to follow someone else’s interpretation of the text: Whit, his (interpretation of) his other professor’s interpretation, and many of the other (male) students following Whit. When certain lines of the poem (“taking of a toast and tea”) didn’t fit their view, they simply disregarded them, or didn’t even acknowledge their presence.

I thought this part was fascinating because it's taking a poem that tries to question the male gaze, (albeit through an isolated, inverted, anti-heroic perspective that still prioritizes maleness) and imposing a less-complicated, strangely less-anxious, more straightforward male gaze when it reduces the female figures in the poem further to their market function in relation to the narrator. Eliot's work indulges in plenty of Madonna-Whore dichotomies, but a reading of the poem in which all the female figures are prostitutes tears down even the objectifying pedestal that imbues these figures with some power and fearsomeness. It's like the student was seeking his own way to resist admitting the narrator's feelings of powerlessness and thwarted desire when it comes to his failures with women.

This is also a story of a man literally mansplaining a poem about a guy who can't understand how he's alienated so many women.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:01 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


This illustrates perfectly a common problem with human cognition: our tendency to discard whatever information doesn't fit into a desired pattern, theory, or interpretation.

Yes, I think the piece really does well on illustrating, or just flat out declaring many common biases people have in trying to interpret something. The long paragraph speaking of the desire for concordance, yielding to authority, seeking one "right" answer and so on are things I've often seen.

Beyond that, there are some other avenues not stated directly but which also caught my attention. Like Professor Dickinson "discovering" some possible avenue of meaning and wanting to share his observation, even as it may not fit the whole too is familiar from even my own readings at times, where the excitement of some "new" possibility can overshadow the work as a whole for a spell. Or wondering how Whit would have reacted to having Lago's class before Dickinson's. How much of his insistence was based on the primacy of Dickinson's idea and how much was based on his, or their, shared maleness? Clearly the latter seems the more prominent, but there too can be real difficulty just in changing someone's mind once they decide on something, so the order in which people come to ideas matters too.

The part where she quotes Billy Collins is interesting, she frames it as: During the drive home, I think about how on the one hand, I’m proud of my students. They twisted and wrung their interpretation out of poor Prufrock. In the words of Billy Collins, and then quotes the last lines of his Introduction to Poetry, which read in whole gives "proud of" perhaps a slightly different context.

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


Which really goes to the heart of the essay and the attempt to teach interpretation for me, where the desire is to get the reader to experience the poem as it is, as a poem, as that is the essence of art, but the impulse is so often to forgo that experience for a summary answer of "meaning" as if what the poem is "about" is something other, and more important, than simply what it is. But Lago isn't just speaking of art for art's sake alone and this bit from the long paragraph perhaps gives a different spin on the lines quoted from Collins:

Isn’t it easier to lock that target on “the answer” than to dig a little deeper? For all of us? I’m talking here beyond poetry, beyond literature, to issues that plague society, of intolerance and exploitation, of brutality. One could argue that the study of “liberal arts” encourages the development of critical thinking. One would hope that being able to apply this skill to “Prufrock” might result in a populace that could apply it to, for example, the issue of excessive force by those in a position of power.

Thinking about social injustice and brutality and speaking of excessive force by those in power matched against those last lines of Collins.

From there the author does go on to give something of a summary of the ideas of the poem, via her daughter, to give some grounding to what makes the "prostitute" reading wrong, but then comes back and muddies that summary by saying:
“You won’t find only one right answer,” I tell them, “Understanding comes through reading and then rereading, discussion, and writing. Every time I read a poem like Prufrock I make a new discovery.” Some of them look blankly at me, but Amina is nodding. So is Joey. (Heh. I can totally picture both Anima and Joey from their few mentions.)

And then Lago mentions Woolf, further making questioning of the poem as necessary as the summary. The essay as a whole seems to raise lots of different ideas on this first student encounter with interpretation without fully summing up any of them, even the poem itself, leaving all that to the reader and their sense of curiosity.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:09 AM on August 21, 2018 [1 favorite]


In the words of Billy Collins, and then quotes the last lines of his Introduction to Poetry, which read in whole gives "proud of" perhaps a slightly different context.

Right. Collins is critiquing the reader's demand for a clear message when they read a poem. the image describes an urge to lay claim (through force or violence, if necessary) to authority in mediating the poem and deciding what message other readers should take away from it. Lago doesn't make this connection, but I saw Whit's violent storming off as of a piece with the way domestic abusers enact demonstrative violence on objects in order to intimidate their targets. Denied the power to set the parameters of meaning for the class, Whit lashed out in an attempt to reassert his power to do violence unless his views are upheld. I'm left unsure if Lago sees Whit's actions as another manifestation of "the issue of excessive force by those in a position of power" and it leaving it to the reader to make the connection, or if she thinks his actions are just reasonable expressions of frustration. She seems to let him off pretty easily for really inappropriate behavior. If I were one of her students, I'd worry about seeing Whit next class meeting.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:01 PM on August 21, 2018


My take was more that she was perhaps linking Whit actions more to intolerance coming from lax authority on Dickinson's part for not approaching his teaching of the poem with more care. The emphasis to me felt more on how to better equip students with critical thinking skills to avoid such outcomes.

The violence of Whit's actions did stand out though and I took that as a sort of implication of what such attitudes can lead to, but the way she and Dickinson talked about him didn't lead me to feel Lago wanted to underline that point as much regarding Whit as set a tone she'd pick up again later in the piece to give added weight to importance of the issue. But then again I grew up as someone unlikely to ever be specifically targeted for violence and was schooled in a different era than one where school shootings and the like are common, so my take on Whit may be too mild.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:14 PM on August 21, 2018


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