This is a good time to mention a criticism that I’ve received not
once, not twice, but several times on teaching evaluations: “The
problem with Professor Barden is that he acts like he knows so much
more about writing than we do.”
That could be the whole essay right there, don’t you think?
Part of the problem is a populist idea of democracy, a sacred cow in
the academy, as elsewhere: We are all equals in our pursuit of
literature; everyone has something to offer. One teacher friend of mine
whose opinion I solicited on this topic said of his students, “They
still teach me as much as I teach them.” What do they teach you,
exactly? How to fall in love stupidly or that you should drink a lot of
water during a rave?
In one memorable workshop, I spent a fair amount of time teasing out
from my students the difference between a “master,” which was the
degree that I had, and a “bachelor,” which was the degree that they
didn’t yet have. Oddly enough, several students have expressed
gratitude for that particular rant.
Unless I strenuously disabuse them of the notion, most students think
of a workshop as a democracy. This is not an entirely misguided idea,
since most workshop instructors (including me) encourage the feeling
that “we’re all in this together.” And, frankly, what else would a
workshop be if it weren’t a democracy? Everyone sitting around a table,
the instructor soliciting opinions, the attempt to reach consensus? I
usually say something like, “This is a democracy, but I always have 51
percent of the vote,” which is just a silly way to describe a process
that is, essentially, impossible to articulate. It reminds me of how
Churchill described democracy itself: the worst possible system, except
for all the others.
Too often, workshops are conducted as though providence will do the
magic of improving a student’s writing. There’s an idea, maybe, that
the middle way between all the suggestions made in class must be the
right way. I’m all in favor of providence, but what happens too often
is that workshops become Ouija board games where only the most
ham-fisted participants get to spell out their grandmothers’ names.
Even in a political system as bizarre as democracy, there still needs
to be leaders and followers. Some voices should count more than others.
And if you don’t want these leaders to be only the richest or the
loudest or the most venal, then you have to build a system that’s less
democratic in some places than others. I’m just going to come out and
say it: The workshop instructor should be a dictator. Humble and
self-effacing, sure, but also absolutely convinced of her expertise.
This is so often not the case: The instructor is, rather, an arbiter of
disputes, a conveyor, anything but an expert. My own undergraduate
students are often shocked to find that I write too (“that’s so cool,
Professor Barden”), and if you think the situation is better in grad
school, think again: MFA candidates are more likely to know who their
instructors hang with than what they actually write (“she’s in that
McSweeney’s crowd, I think”).
When I was weathering graduate courses at Columbia University in the
late ’80s, a rather undistinguished tour through a war zone of
political correctness, I was hammered in one poetry workshop because I
wrote angry poems about sex. One young woman said, and I quote
verbatim, “It seems to me that the question is not whether this is a
good poem, but whether Dan should be allowed to write this kind of
poetry.” Now, what was remarkable about that moment in my life was not
the bland viciousness of her attack, nor the fact that I seemed to be
living in some bizarre cultural revolution in which the word fuck got
you sent to the provinces. No, the truly remarkable thing was that when
I looked to the head of the table at our workshop leader (I shouldn’t
tell you his name, but I’m still pissed—it was the poet Paul Muldoon)
and begged him with my eyes to enforce some kind of artistic or
intellectual sanity in the room, he just shrugged as if to say, “It’s
out of my hands, dude.”
In my life as a teacher, the thing that I’m most afraid of is cynicism.
My own, that is. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if my day job
consisted of pretending that graduate students actually know what
they’re doing. I would feel like a whore—there’s just no other good
word for it.
Come to think of it, whores are very democratic. They welcome everyone. But that’s also the problem with whores.
“What happens too often is that workshops become Ouija board games where only the most ham-fisted participants get to spell out their grandmothers’ names.”