Literacy Narrative

My literacy is a wall. It is the constant and overwhelming desire to be understood on one side and myself on the other. My language, my ability to read and write, is always attempting to make it over the wall while knowing that the task is impossible. Language is both inadequate to the task and the only tool at my disposal. My own literacy developed to its current state when I realized this – something that I was only able to achieve when faced with a text which stripped me of my former ways of practicing literacy[1], Samuel Beckett’s Watt.

Language is a wall. I came across Beckett cold. I was young and thought I understood the way we tell stories and the reasons why. I started reading Beckett and was immediately unmoored from all reference points[2]. His work actively undermines his readers expectations, deconstructing character, plot, setting, and even time. Without the clear reference points of traditional forms, I was lost. I could hardly keep the novel’s form in my head let alone articulate my own thoughts about it. His work challenges the reader to even put into words descriptions of its most basic elements.

I could now see the wall. Forced, in a class, to continue to engage - over and over again[3] - I had no choice but to completely rebuild my own literacy. How I speak about the text, how I read the text, how I write about the text, all these things changed in the course of a few months. In this time, I began to take notes in my books (directly on the text itself), I revised my paper on Watt (itself a novel about the way we construct knowledge) more times than I could count. Working again and again to scale the wall in front of me. Writing on Beckett doesn’t feel like any other writing I do[4]. The words don’t come easily no matter how much work is done before-hand. Each sentence is a knowing exercise in futility and feels more like a fight with the text than a conversation or an analysis.

I know I can’t scale the wall, but I also know that getting higher up is all I have. I finished my class on Beckett barely understanding what I had read. But I knew that it had changed everything and I had been taught by a professor who stressed quality of composition as much as quality of argument. In a situation where I had trouble even forming sentences about the text, his insistence on quality work and willingness to work one-on-one with me pushed my writing to a new level. But still, I was only barely beginning to understand the effect that Beckett would have. I had not written enough. I had not revised enough. I had not read enough. I had not scaled the wall. I still haven’t. But I’m closer. I will never be done.

Beckett is a wall. As I continued my studies Beckett seemed to fade a bit into the background but the experience of the class stuck with me. Then I started my Masters program and suddenly Beckett was everywhere. He became a touchstone not only for my own work but for my own literacy. I began to read other texts through Beckett, consider how my development as a writer and reader around Beckett was coming to define my relationship to my own work and my own reading. The metatextual nature of Beckett’s work led me to research and read the writers who worked with and around him. But more than that, it has begun to seep into my own pedagogy and the way that I talk to and teach others about writing.

I can’t scale the wall, but from farther up I can see where I came from. The most direct influence that this reflective position and metatextual influence has had on me is to re-orient the way I work and how I teach around constant reflection. My pedagogy has evolved to focus on revision and drafting in composition and stresses a critical evaluation of my own point of view[5] even as I use that point of view to create my more analytical work. I try to teach, and practice, that there is a need to critique your own methods and points of view while you employ them.

Critical Theory became another plank in the wall. I quickly realized that my own lack of knowledge in this area did nothing but create more limits. I set out again to climb the wall, and discovered again that the wall was never ending. However, during the climb I found work that seemed compatible with my own focus on reflection. I was introduced to Foucault’s constant investigation of preexisting systems[6] and considered if I could turn it in on myself. I was challenged by the work of Fredrick Jameson and discovered a theory which stressed self-critical though so much that it included the idea of thought to the second power[7].

When language is a wall then using it to teach can seem impossible. How can I be expected to fully help my students understand what I cannot accurately express for myself? Again, through revision and reflection. Not only by assigning work based around those ideas but by practicing it myself. In our coursework, I have spent quite a bit of time discussing the power dynamics that exist in the classroom. For me, this is how I am choosing to take a self-critical look at my own actions and philosophies as an instructor. The more I think about it the way I act and choose to exercise my authority in the classroom via the power relationships that are pre-built in the system the more I have become focused on critical reflection and the more I, again, feel the limitations of my own ability to convey my experience to my students. Each article we have read seems to contain advice that is invaluable. However, if I attempt to include all their suggested techniques and perspectives then I will clearly end up with a class that fails to even come close to what communication is actually possible.

All this may seem rather fatalistic, but developing my literacy and climbing higher has become the end unto itself. The failure of language has become the means through which everything is possible. In his masterwork The Unnamable Samuel Beckett ends his complete deconstruction of the Novel by saying “I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me[8]. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it is done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.) It will be I? It will be silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” (Beckett ). Language itself has failed the novel’s nameless narrator but he does not end by giving up. Failure is itself no reason to give up. I must continue to climb the wall.

Failure itself has become my literacy, and it has become indivisible from my role as a teacher. Students will fail. They will come up against their own walls. As their instructor I am not only responsible for helping them grow but also in helping them understand that failure is what we learn from[9], it is in many ways more valuable to the student than any success. I must, more than almost anything, help my students to understand that they must go on. That failure is not an end, it is a starting point.