Guru Clown, or Pedagogy of the Carnivalesque
Mady Schutzman
In 1998, Lee Breuer, theatre director and founder of New York-based Mabou Mines, was awarded an honorary degree from California Institute of the Arts, where I had been employed as full time faculty for eight years. His speech was a resounding warning to the 313 graduates at convocation ceremonies--BFAs and MFAs from the Schools of Dance, Film/Video, Theatre, Writing, Music, and Art--to retain their artistic playfulness and refuse to compromise vision or voice when hazarding the marketplace. He concluded his address with his own playful take on Descartes: "I am entertained," he declared, "therefore I am! I entertain," he continued, "therefore you are!" As the crowd cheered and the business of a rollicking CalArts graduation proceeded, I found myself distracted. Breuer's evocation of entertainment suddenly had provided me with a sorely needed paradigm for understanding what had been a difficult, albeit amusing,experience in a class I had just finished teaching. This paper is a performative attempt to share my experience in that classroom. It is subjective, mischievous, and self-conscious; it is a re-creation that privileges, or at least allows the distortions, fears, and humor that pervade the pedagogical encounter, whether we attend to them or not.
The class was entitled Testimony, Magical Realism, and the Carnivalesque. 1 My desire to teach this class was a continuation of my abiding interest in "cultures of silence" (from institutionalized hysterics of late 19th century
Students would be asked to select a story from their own lives that they needed to tell, an occasion when they felt unheard, dismissed, shamed, or [End Page 63] violated, an occasion that had not yet been rendered from their perspective. They would be required to tell their story, the same story, in three different versions--as testimony, magical realism, and carnivalesque--by the end of the fourteen sessions of the semester. The stories needn't be written: dance students might choreograph three different dances representing each genre, art students might make photos, objects, or drawings for each. 2 In this way students might understand how differently the same story could be represented as well as why one form would be chosen over another in any given circumstance of its telling.
First, let me briefly introduce readers to CalArts. The
Sitting there on the lawn amid the applause and merriment, I got from Breuer a frame through which to appreciate my overwhelming exhaustion. What had been a great challenge for me upon arrival at CalArts in 1993--to teach performance theory, anthropology, and gender studies to young artists--was now requiring that I assume the mode of tireless cheerleading. To share my passion for intellectual rigor I found I had to make theory dance, sing, and perform; to keep students' attention I had to "entertain." I saw myself entering the classroom as if it were a stage, playing to an audience that demanded wit, dramatic character, anecdotal interventions, slides, videos, bite-size-vignette-theories, hit-and-run revelations, and instant, preferably comic answers to off-the-cuff questions regardless of their relevance to the course material. I had unwittingly obliged students' apparent need for entertainment: I had jumped through rhetorical hoops, swung through netless arguments, waltzed on theories' backs, and juggled controversial polemics. Most of all, I had become a guru clown, 4 a ringmaster who simulates countless pratfalls to keep education amusing at all costs.
How had the classroom come to invoke the clown in me? Questions buzzed through my head in search of answers. What do my students want? How do they learn? Did the Reagan administration fashion my students' notions of self-identity, education, ambition, ethics, pleasure, and accountability in ways that my
When I sat down to write this essay, I didn't know the answers. I wrote to find out. At the time, all I knew was that every day as I prepared to communicate my love for de Certeauvian tactics, Bakhtinian utterances, and Boalian dialectics, I found myself rehearsing for a performance, running my lines, deciding, as I entered the classroom to teach, whether to go for psychological realism, farce, or Greek tragedy. But I've gotten ahead of myself. Let me go back. Let me set the scene. What follows is the story of a classroom experience offered as a performative collage of factual details and fantasy, lecture notes and class exercises, testimonial earnestness, magical images, and carnivalesque mockery. I hope to convey the lessons of the class--Testimony, Magical Realism, and the Carnivalesque--by employing the very aesthetic languages we were studying.
Ladies and gentleman, students of all ages, this afternoon, under the lofty rafters of enlightenment, through the hallowed halls of the social imagination, we bring you, once again, for your delight and distraction, as you prepare yourself for the spectacle of capitalism, the sorry state of organized labor, and the rising obfuscation of meaning in our globally mediated culture, The Pedagogy Show!
I walk into the classroom on the first day of classes, January 1998, and I notice, with fear and dread, that they are back. A handful of students dressed head-to-toe in crackling silver mylar are scattered evenly throughout the room, luxurious smirks brimming from the folds of their lips. It isn't their faces that are particularly familiar but their demeanor, radiant but impervious, suave and unapproachable. They are the Human Reflectors, champions of the surface, reproducing appearances with such finesse that all in range drown in a shallow sea of glassy refraction. Immediately, they begin to mimic their surroundings. They bounce everything back, arms crossed over their chests, eyes glazed with impermeability. Everything said is resaid, everything done is redone. Other students, swallowed up in a wave of contagion, begin to take on the disposition of the Reflectors. No one wants to stand out, to appear too eager or too vulnerable. As I attempt and fail to provoke a conversation amidst the spectacle of mirrors, I experience a strange sense of vertigo. All that anticipation, the planning, the thinking that led up to this day are being returned to me, backing up in me, swelling up in dizzying proportions. The semester had begun with a strange sort of disorientation--an odyssey of flashy sameness that threatened to dull all our senses. [End Page 65]
Nonetheless, the students and I begin the exploration of testimony. We discuss testimony as an imperative to redress conditions of trauma and violence. In the face of unthinkable circumstances, or crises of truth, how do people remember? How then do they transpose those memories into words? We read the testimonial texts I, Rigoberta Menchú and Ernesto Cardenal's Gospel at Solentiname (from literacy workshops in
The resistance, or discomfort, in the classroom is palpable and manifests itself in many ways: one student dismisses all the testimonial narratives we are reading as "bad writing"; several insist I provide a checklist of elements that constitute a typical testimonial narrative; several fall uncharacteristically quiet or seem frustrated. Almost all resist selecting a story to tell: "I can't think of any story of oppression." "I'll be damned if I'm going to confess anything about my private life publicly in the classroom." "None of my experiences compare to Rigoberta Menchú's. If that's testimonial literature, I have no right to testify." "Can I testify against myself?" I am honestly confused by the difficulty they are having identifying a person, or group of persons, against whom to unleash in words their unexpressed anger. Don't we all harbor rage against some power figure? Don't we all harbor a testimony dying for a sympathetic audience?
After explaining that testimonial narratives take many forms--poetry, prose, manifesto--I offer the checklist they ask for. Testimonies foreground: 1) facts and details, including the names of specific people and places; 2) repetition; 3) a representative individual speaking for many; 4) accountability to the dead; 5) conventional language structure; 6) absence of dialectics; 7) dualistic and oppositional thinking with discrete boundaries between right and wrong, fact and fiction, oppressor and oppressed; 8) justification of traditional notions of identity. I profess and celebrate the directness, clarity, and bravery that these testimonial texts exhibit. But to really learn testimony, to recognize its aesthetic and cultural value, they are obliged to write one--to tell their stories employing these characteristic components.
I pause and search the crowd for signs of excitement, reminiscences, even rustling, but my eyes meander across the room unmet. While students are gleaning the component traits of testimony from the texts we are reading for class (I can tell this from discussions), they hesitate and retreat when it comes to identifying and writing their own stories. Perhaps it is difficult for middle class North Americans--not to mention young, mostly white students in the economically inflated 1990s attending an expensive private art institute--to locate themselves as oppressed. But this relatively levelheaded and historically sympathetic thought did not cross my mind at the moment. My college education, situated in an era of protest and consciousness-raising, was disabling my cross-generational understanding. In the moment, my thoughts remained frustrated and solipsistic: Am I not providing a gift in requiring that they simulate an aesthetic strategy in [End Page 66] which they are expected to blame someone else for some perceived injury done to them? I strain for a cognitive AHA! from the students, any student, but hear only my own mind screaming with possibilities. I wonder if the doctrinaire, newspeak tone of testimony is numbing, tedious, untrustworthy to their ears, no matter how atrocious the particulars. I stress the desperation and conviction of those who make testimony until I recognize a desperation in my own voice. Quickly I modulate the desperation with a touch of cynicism and a clever joke. Perhaps I am inferring, unwittingly, a right and wrong version of testimony, and the students are distracted, worrying if they will be able to produce a text that I would approve. I counter this with a too upbeat encouragement, the register of my voice assuming a shrill and precious warble. I continue, noticing now a tone of reproach in my voice, though I am unsure to whom or what it is directed. Myself perhaps. As I panic for grounding, all I know for sure is I am losing them, if I ever had them. Why? Why do Menchú and Cardenal not inspire an exuberant wave of the students' own storytelling? I tell them that while testimonies are often generated as acts of personal and collective survival against powers that threaten to annihilate entire cultures, the aesthetic strategies employed resemble those of propaganda. Testimonies are provocative yet totalizing in tone; in the effort to express an irrefutable abuse against many, they often blur differences and promote reductive notions of unity. Pause. Silence. I continue, I repeat myself. I am getting loud, dismissive, maybe sarcastic. I think I am taking dramatically long pauses and assuming self-conscious poses. I am performing reactions to my own spoken words. And then without warning I am prostrate on the floor in one of those
Boys and girls, adults of all ages, surrender to the dark caverns of oblivion, wrench yourselves from the cool streams of amnesia and enter the River Lethe of your mind. Here, in the center ring as we bring you The Loud, The Hot, The Deep, the Not-Always-Melodic, the Not-So-Crowd-Pleasing, Chorus of Reminiscences!" Seekers and cynics, doers of great deeds and couch potatoes alike, Sing! Sing Along!
Let me jump forward for a moment. After writing the first draft of this essay about two weeks after the semester ended, I asked several of the MFA writing students who had attended the class to write a short piece portraying me as instructor for inclusion in this essay. I asked them to employ a circus metaphor. I told myself that this was only fair as that was my bent in representing them; I thought that including their impressions of me would enhance the carnivalesque spirit of the piece. I should be democratic, I thought. I admit I was guided, as well, by a fear that my characterizations of the students would read as ridicule or scorn rather than my own honest process of critical analysis and self-evaluation. I admit that I was desperately curious how these students perceived me, given how ambiguously I perceived myself. [End Page 67]
Student account of instructor
In comparing the administrator of the classroom to the administrator of a circus, the easiest analogy would be "ringleader," but that's somehow wrong, too obvious. A clown, maybe? At times, perhaps. But pedagogy is no laughing matter, at least not to pedagogues. While it may be tempting to envision the stately professor in whiteface and big red shoes, riding to work with seventeen colleagues in one small Volkswagen, it is not the accurate comparison, at least not in the case of an effective educator.
More like a lion tamer. Because sometimes the whip is necessary. It is not natural behavior for a lion to leap through rings of fire, any more than it is natural for a beleaguered art student to follow a particularly circuitous or unfamiliar line of logic. Skillful encouragement and guidance are required, a professional's touch, slick enough to look like no touch at all. Reward for compliance is dangled, admonishment for resistance is threatened. All in the name of good fun and adventurous living. All to convince the skeptical lions that good things await on the other side of the flaming hoops.
(Steven Kandell)
For the next class I choose to do a physical exercise to generate more contact, dialogue, and candor within the group. Perhaps their reticence to participate in the writing and sharing of testimonies reflected a lack of safety and intimacy in the classroom; perhaps I had not created an atmosphere that would allow these stories to emerge. While Critical Studies classes privilege intellectual dialogue, reading, and writing, the inclusion of practical exercises in classes is encouraged by the Dean with whom I work. And students are usually willing to get up on their feet and explore an idea experientially in spite of their displayed reserve. I ask the students to clear the space and begin moving around the room. After a brief warm-up to sensitize everyone to their own bodies, the space, and each other, I introduce an exercise that I adapted from the sociometric techniques of Jakob Moreno, founder of psychodrama and sociometry.
Put your hand on the shoulder of the person:
you know the longest.
whose work you are most familiar with.
you feel very comfortable with but don't know well.
you would cast as yourself in a play about you.
who has power over you. (I do this twice, the second time excluding myself.)
who said something that you had a strong emotional response to.
you would like to hear from more often.
you feel intimidated by.
you have had least contact with thus far in the semester.
you have disagreed with about something but didn't say anything about.
you would like to spend the next ten minutes with discussing a personal problem you are currently struggling with in your life.
you have unresolved business with that you would like to resolve at this moment. (Directly afterwards I give time for those people who "answered" this question to talk it through.)
One of the invaluable aspects of this exercise is that implicit relations in a group become explicit. Students literally see the affinities and/or conflicts amongst each other that were before only felt, thus providing information about perceived cliques and codes, feelings of exclusion, and/or power dynamics. They see themselves as part of a community and recognize the structures that define it. With this information made evident, they find themselves more equipped and more confident to critique these structures. They feel more empowered. The classroom becomes more theirs. They also recognize (particularly with the questions that deal with power) that much of what they had previously interpreted as their own weaknesses or faults is a function of the community at large, a symptom of the social or institutional (in this case, CalArts) body.
By the end of the exercise, the Human Reflectors were destabilized and we were all happier for it. Even they were, in spite of the requisite resistance they initially offered. Bits of once secured and concealed information were scattered about in the form of mutable images, thoughts, gestures, and sounds. Making the invisible visible had inspired new connections, revised older ones. We were laughing, joking, touching, and discussing the various constellations of authority and desire that affected our lives within the CalArts community. The lure to exchange had been greater than the feared exposure; a longing for dialogue had caught the Reflectors off guard. It was a breakthrough in every sense of the word. I thought all would go easier now.
Feel the rumble erupting from the depths of your unconscious, peek beneath your mylar screens and encounter memories and details as they burn beautiful holes in your once cozy facades. Close your Eyes, Hold on Tight, and surrender to the Lurid Flashbacks as they sputter and spew, loquacious and contagious, making their debut in every crack and crevice of your confabulous Consciousness. [End Page 69]
Excerpt from student testimony paper
I'm telling you this story because enough time has passed.
I'm telling you this story because I no longer live in my parent's house. I can tell you this story because I no longer sneak around at night into my parent's bedroom to make sure my mother's there.
I'm telling you this story because I no longer check her sleeping body to make sure she's breathing.
It was fall and we lived in the South, so I didn't have a jacket on. So I didn't get hot or uncomfortable as I stood there and argued with my mother. I was sluggish from the rum but still managed to be smart-mouthed. I had already learned well to use my words as a weapon and hit exactly where it hurt my mother the most. I don't remember what I said exactly, but I remember my usual routine--about how strict and stupid she was, about how she could never understand the complexities of my thirteen-year-old life. I knew that I had said enough when Mom pulled a knife out from the wooden butcher block on the countertop beside her. I didn't move from the doorway. She said for me to listen. There was no one else to listen. She said she wanted to die. She said I was killing her. The knife was in her hand and directed towards her wrist. It was my fault. She told me it was my fault. I was killing my mother. I shut up.
(Andrea Richards)
The assignment to write a testimonial narrative was an invitation for students to testify directly against an unjust authority, and to decipher, eventually, how this mode of telling compared to the others. What was accomplished? Who did it serve? Did this kind of telling foster a change in one's status? Who needed to hear the testimony for it to have any efficacy for self or community? What was at stake? While it was perhaps still difficult for students to fully abandon responsibility for mistreatment ("It was my fault"; "I was killing my mother"), I was impressed by the narratives students wrote. And while very few students volunteered to present their work in class (especially the writing students whose testimonies could not obfuscate meaning as easily as danced testimonies could), all did produce a testimony, as best as they understood it.
We were moving from Testimony into Magical Realism, from an aesthetic that underscored notions of accusation and guilt, to one that indulged the impossibility of fixing blame or identity. I introduce the students to the ideological shift from testimony to magical realism through theories of dialectics and mimesis.
In The Republic, Plato posits a truthful relation between world and word, model and copy, nature and image, referent and sign. Potential differences are subsumed by sameness. Aristotle, in the Poetics, focuses on the more ambiguous semiotic action of mimesis, heuristics that benefit from imitation because of the very difference that can be discerned in imitation. Following Aristotle, contemporary critics from Luce Irigaray to Homi Bhabha, Michael Taussig to Elin Diamond, advance a notion of mimesis that suggests difference, a trickmirror that doubles and distorts in the act of reflection. In the copy, an object [End Page 70] exceeds itself, spills into a mimicry that undermines the original's authority, oversteps truth, creates fake offspring. Bhabha calls it "double articulation" (126); Taussiglikens it to "sympathetic magic" (47-51). But through the act of mimesis, not only is another's authority recast and borrowed, but also the ambivalent aspects of that authority are disclosed. A "partial presence," as Bhabha puts it, articulates the disturbances, the fears, and the fantasies that haunt whatever is being mimicked (127). As an act of subterfuge, mimicry enters the power of another by finding that power in one's self. In this way, mimicry both camouflages and indicts. Testimony is more oppositional than mimetic; mimicry points more to the techniques of magical realism.
I want students to have an experience that might embody the literary strategies of mimesis that we are discussing. I divide the class into two groups. Everyone writes his or her name on a piece of paper, which they fold and collect into two respective piles, one for each group. Students from each group select a name from the other group, remaining quiet about whom they chose. One group watches as the other group imitates the attitudes, gestures, postures, movements, temperament, and general disposition, as they understand them, of the person whose name they picked. Those watching must guess who is impersonating them. The performers have at least two minutes to get into character and move around the room before the guessing begins. When the laughter, disavowals, and lamenting subside, the next group gets their chance. I do this exercise when I feel there is adequate familiarity and trust in the room. I sometimes judge this wrong. I always try to find the courage to be a participant in this exercise. I occasionally succeed.
Transfixed and alarmed, they observe themselves ensnared in another's body. They laugh along with the unintentional mockery while simultaneously struggling to process it, to make sense of what is being said about them. The burlesque is unquestionably entertaining but the message is critical, personal, and sometimes disturbing. Safe boundaries between one another are challenged as students mistake their very own impersonators as impersonators of students they don't particularly admire. We all have to negotiate this slippery boundary between our image of ourselves and others' images of us. I share in the curious conjunction of embarrassment and recognition, laughter and humiliation. Someone performs her impression of me as a person who takes herself so seriously that every move and every pose reek of preciousness and self-importance. In this exercise imitation serves as critique: as we observe ourselves being performed by others we must negotiate the fine line between identification (I see myself there) and commentary (I see myself differently there). 6 Magical realism also works along this fine line, telling stories of protestation by actually immersing readers in the world that is being protested, by copying it and critiquing it at the same time. It imitates authority to evoke a kind of surreal, magical world--an impossible or "false" one that points to the truth all the same. Magical realism is a non-direct, non-testimonial way of telling stories; its very style refuses the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. [End Page 71]
Ladies and Gentlemen, today, once again, off to the side and barely in sight, hovering on the edge of reason and good sense, we bring you the remarkable, the inexplicable, the Paradoxical Double-Binds! Watch closely as inside and outside change places right before your eyes! Watch closely for that Sublime Moment when opposites dissolve, when ground becomes air and Breath Becomes Bone. Find it! Feel it! And when you know it is yours, Behold how in a blink, in a blur, in the sudden swoosh of horse's tail, it Disappears!
I made up my mind to deliver a straight scholarly lecture on magical realism. I wanted to keep my delivery steady, concise, and accessible. My goal for the day was to avoid under any circumstances becoming frantic or droll, the two extremes that had marked my pedagogical persona during our study of testimony. I would not be dismissive or overbearing. I would not crack jokes, take dramatically long pauses, assume mannered poses, or mutter self-consciously to myself. I wanted instead to convey mastery over both the subject matter and my own demeanor. Of course, my desperation to display anything but desperation engendered its own twisted urgency.
I talk about the ways authors of magical realism often play with the structures of language and narrative to make authorship mysterious, to force readers to experience the instability of character and identity, to grow fearful of everyone and everything no matter how deeply one needs to believe in something. A magical realist world is full of incompetent guides, intangible powers and laws, partial gazes, camouflages and disguises, endless exile, processual identities, inexplicable terror, lies, spies, metaphors, decay. People are never just themselves, they are composites; there are no essentialist categories, only hybrids. We are far from the polarities of testimony.
I describe the roots of the genre of magical realism in
When teaching, one can't move too far away from the present. As I lecture, C.M., a talented writer who addresses shamanism, insanity, violence, and spirituality in his work, is falling asleep right before my eyes. T.A., a typically attentive and astute cultural theorist, is flipping through an art history journal poorly hidden behind the required reading for the day. The feared moment of disconnection returns, and in no time at all I betray my contract of composure. The voice inside my head is loud, frantic. Why are they not excited to learn that magical realist texts, like testimonial narratives, are a form of resistance, but ones that engage very different aesthetic strategies? I had imagined that where testimony might seem absolute and dogmatic, magical realism would allure. Here is a form of artistic protest where incongruities abound, knowledge is provisional, memory is elastic, miracles are real, and reality exceeds the space allotted to it by its own history. Are they not in thrall? I ask the students to write, to think, to compose from the subject position these ideas suggest. "Take your metaphors literally!" I command, bordering on the hysteria I so wanted to avoid. "A girl who spits tadpoles! A deaf mute who stops a watch by looking at it! (Allende). Amphibious men who sleep in the bottoms of lakes! Cactus that causes certain metals to rust! (Carpentier). A man whose tears could be heard bubbling inside his heart! (García Márquez)." 8 I think my voice is at high pitch. My face feels red and bloated. My feet are unsteady beneath me. "In the effort to survive," I shout, as if begging for converts, "magical realists choose to tell the truth as fiction!" I am writhing like a slapstick comedienne who has lost her timing, like a cheerleader run amok. I have morphed, once again, into a spectacle of preposterousness.
M.G., an insightful playwright whose work tackles issues of race, war, and homophobia in Nubia, Brazil, and Angola, waits for me after the other students have left to tell me that he was trying but he just didn't get it. Several other students ask me over the next few days if I am all right. That I seemed distracted, upset.
Student account of instructor
The Ringmaster tells you, as you stand in the shadow of the tent wearing, for the first time, big shoes, a rubber nose, and a flower that squirts, the Ringmaster tells you that there are three rings to this circus. Within each ring, an empty space from which to perform. Outside the rings, the laughing, screaming, crying crowd. It sounds simple and symmetrical. But why do you think of rings as perfect circles? (We are being admonished.) The rings are overlapping and mysteriously formed, twisting around one another, rising high and then dipping down beneath the hard sand floor. The circles more resemble the rings of an ancient tree trunk, or the frantic, uneven path drawn by a game of ring-around-the-rosy. It's difficult to tell where you stand, whether you are in one ring or another, under the spotlight or out in the crowd. This is not the show you imagined, but the show the Ringmaster wants to see.
(Malik Gaines) [End Page 73]
I introduce an exercise that I learned from New York-based dancer and activist, Ishmael Houston Jones. I am hoping that the paradoxical nature of magical realist texts will become more palpable, meaningful, if students have an opportunity to embody a kind of paradox.
"Please answer the following questions by standing in one of two parallel lines facing one another."
I start off with questions based on seemingly factual data. "If you are married stand on this line, unmarried on the other." As I proceed, the questions are more subjective and I pose the question differently. "If you identify yourself as atheist stand here, as religious over here." I always participate in this exercise. The pairs of choices are as follows:
| English is 1st language/not 1st language | theorist/practitioner |
After approximately ten questions have been asked, some students begin to linger in the space between the two lines, uncomfortable about making a choice. I say, "You must stand on one line or the other. Make a choice. No one may stand in the middle." Sometimes they follow my instructions. One student gets frustrated and demands that I define my terms, which I do not do. Often, in real life, I say, we are asked to respond to categories of identification without knowing what the terms mean or how they are being used. The whole idea of the exercise is to simulate, for purposes of analysis, the contradictions--in language, in identity, in meaning--that we embody frequently in everyday life.
By the end of the exercise it is evident that the definitional terms that we are frequently obliged to adopt mean very different things to different people in different circumstances at different historical moments. They are meaningless when decontextualized. Students are stimulated and engage in animated debate. We discuss the significance of contextualization. For instance, someone may identify herself as radical in her artwork but conservative in her politics, a leader in her family but a follower among her friends. We recognize, as well, that in order to be part of a named group, we are often obliged to assume language that totalizes, reduces, and ultimately erases the complexity of our affiliations and beliefs. [End Page 74]
Magical realism, as an aesthetic strategy, attempts to embrace these complexities without diluting political agendas; it reveals the ever shifting positions between powerful and disempowered by exposing the slippery boundary between real and not-real. We discuss terms and concepts that were not understood earlier. Several students want to continue the exercise by offering other pairs of choices for their classmates and themselves to respond to. The exercise goes on until all suggestions are exhausted. And then we write concrete responses to the exercise, about the relationship between the exercise and magical realism, and random images and thoughts. Some even begin writing their magical realist stories, fashioning the "facts" in close proximity to the mutable and marvelous.
Excerpt from student magical realism paper
It was futile. Her yellowish soul began slowly to form into two hands above her corpse. The police came and the paramedics, then my sisters and brother, but they could not see the yellow hands coming into shape and floating above her. They saw only her body carried on a bed out of our house. The wheels of the rolling bed crushed blades of grass, and her hand, like a brusque wave, spoke one last time, "Look. This is the last of my hand on skin on bone on life." And then her hand fell. "This you see is surrender." The yellow hands with their long fingers were now fully formed above her and the metal of their syringed points sparkled in the late December morning.
I can feel the needle now pierce a single pore on my arm and I don't want to write.
(Aida Salazar)
We move into the carnivalesque segment of the semester. I introduce the students to Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), a Russian scholar who brought Marxism into the more formalistic study of language in Russia. According to Bakhtin, words are inhabited with social significance; they do not belong to the speaker alone. Subsequently, understanding is a complex interplay of signs; often what is said is not what is heard, what is intended is not what is comprehended. Communication, for Bakhtin, happens in, and around, and in spite of, what our rational and practical selves intend. He posits two forces in language--the centripetal and the centrifugal--that intersect in all speech and written language. The centripetal forces in language (evidenced in advertising copy, testimony, manifesto) are most interested in insuring maximum mutual understanding and in fighting against diversity. They tend, in style, toward unification and coherence. The centrifugal forces (evidenced in street language, anecdotes, novels) are more ubiquitous and powerful; they seek to decentralize and diffuse, generating heterology, polyphony, and the carnivalesque. The centrifugal maximizes overtones and nuances, and resists understanding derived from common denominators. We read selections from Rabelais and from Bakhtin on Rabelais to better understand the carnivalesque tendencies in literature. Students easily relate to Rabelais's grotesque realism, the endless proliferation of ridiculous [End Page 75] dismemberments and merry abuses. They express a sense of liberation reading Rabelais's chain-like writing style, in which the end of one sentence is indistinguishable from the beginning of the next.
Our discussion of the carnivalesque in language moves into a discussion of carnival itself. Students immediately identify with this popular festive form characterized by derision and metamorphosis, regeneration and mockery, ambivalence and hysteria. They seem to lighten up, as if their kind of rebellion has finally been recognized. They talk about drugs and raves and the infamous, circus-like, all-night Thursday art openings at CalArts.
Men and women, queers and straights, children, magicians, zealots and pantywaists of all ages, races, ethnicities, mental conditions, and unmentionable proclivities. Untether your grasp on the known, Swing Cockeyed over the top and shameless into the embrace of another mind, Crackpot or Persnickety, Bladderbrain or Poptop. Suspend belief and disbelief alike and somersault into another dimension, with the amazing, polydynamic, kinesthetic wizards of the imagination, the Great Flying Discourses.
We sit in a circle facing one another. I instruct everyone to think about the film we saw the week before, A Question of Silence. The film features a disturbing outburst of carnivalesque laughter by three declaredly sane women on trial for mutilating a male boutique owner with clothes hangers and shopping carts. I ask the students to come up with one declarative statement about the film. This directive is the only centripetal ground for the carnivalesque colloquy we are about to generate, an exercise intended to explore what is implied in giving up a more conventional notion of communication. Whenever they are ready to, students make their statements aloud. Others respond whenever and however they want to each other's comments. Several people can (are encouraged to) speak at once; interruptions, cross talk, repetition, distractions, fragmentation are all welcome. Making (common) sense is not important. Understanding one another, in the traditional sense, is not important. Keeping directly focused on the film per se is not important--not to experience the power of the carnivalesque. Speaking often and as freely as possible is recommended.
This is not as easy as it might seem. The idea is to maximize the layered, associative, non-linear forces of the centrifugal aspect of language and to minimize the centripetal force. It becomes apparent that even when encouraged to break loose from the linguistic constraints of comprehension, we don't know how--we hold onto and repeat the habituated. We do not tend to speak our thoughts and images unless they have been sanctioned within a known code of intentional meaning. Allowing the unpredictable centrifugal forces of language to be expressed publicly takes practice.
As we begin, it becomes evident that students are ready and willing, they jump in as if determined to overcome inhibitions that keep them somber and cautious. The Human Reflectors are nowhere to be seen. After just a short while [End Page 76] to warm up, what emerges is a kind of surreal cocktail party cacophony that generates high-powered concentration and awareness. So much is going on at once and there are countless provocations to respond to. We engage the non-sense and inversion of the carnivalesque mode, foregoing the effort to know precisely how or what we are communicating and indulging an unstable, restless, irresolute kind of interaction. Easy meaning is, for the time being, eluded; that which is unfinished and irrational is encouraged. Bakhtin, after Rabelais, recognizes the transformative and transgressive power of ambivalence, excess, disturbances of measured time, and lapses of thought. It appears that CalArts students do, too.
Perhaps the lure of the carnivalesque for students is that it is wilder, less earnest, and ultimately more in line with their cultural gestalt than the other forms we have been studying. The enemy for Bakhtin is called the agelast--one who does not know how to laugh, how to mock his or her monologic seriousness. Clownish disrespect for the agelasts marks the overthrow of conventional, hierarchical power. This does not need much explaining for my students to understand. And while the carnivalesque condones grotesquery and immoderate display, there is also ample room for camouflage: it is a mode of the crowd, not the individual, and it is rife with masks and disguises. There's a place for everyone at the carnival.
We follow up the cacophony exercise with an exquisite corpse writing exercise. Still sitting in a large circle, each student writes one line on a piece of paper in response to the film and passes it on to the next person, who reads just the last line and then adds his or her own. There are as many papers moving around the circle as there are students in the room.
Group carnivalesque text (transcript of one exquisite corpse piece, after A Question of Silence)
I'm glad they gutted that bastard. Just didn't like the look in his eye was all. So I stabbed them, both eyes, poked the motherfuckers out until they bled gray goo and white gelatinous fluid. Seeping into the cement, bleeding into the sewers, mixing with all sorts of memories. It runs in a turgid river under the busy streets, like some collective unconscious of bacteria. That's where I lived for months by the stinking river of dusk and slime that runs under the streets downtown, the sounds of hacking and coughs hitting my eardrums like rocks against windows as I tried to sleep. Yeah, when I lived there, no joke, there were prostitutes in pink sweats down my block, alcoholics threatening to take me over the bridge, gangsters trying to cut each others' throats with glass in the back alley. And I would call the cops and they never came. So I turn to these freaks and ask them if they knew the smell of their own faces? The word "freak" comes from "capricious prank" which has little to do with faces or smells. A woopie cushion is an acceptable prank while blowing off chickens' beaks is not. Chickens? Did someone mention chickens? There's a chicken in the Main Gallery named Klucky, but I don't [End Page 77] know if that's her real name. I know a guy who got caught fucking chickens in his back yard. In Utopia, it's okay to sleep with animals. It's okay to sleep with animals here, fucking them is only forbidden socially, and that is only in certain conservative cultures. Every culture is conservative, you annoying granola love child. So get ready, I'm stabbing you in the eyes!
To further explore the centrifugal possibilities of language, I present another exercise. This one does not require the input of others' voices but, rather, proposes a way to explode the monologic tendencies in our individually authored texts. I ask students to take one sentence from their testimonial texts and look up every word in an etymological dictionary. Substituting these new meanings, I have them reformulate the sentence, editing it so that the original meaning is somewhat preserved while simultaneously expanded into multiple meanings and inflections. One student selects the following sentence from her testimonial text: "Slowly I came to consciousness and realized someone was in bed with me" (Joy Gregory). Her etymological rewrite: "Like a blunt, weak dullness from the left hand, I drew near to home where I came to know what lived, created a city, a dwelling place in me that remains. It was situated in place, time, and circumstance. It was near me, among me, and against me" (Joy Gregory). While the original sentence conveys a strong singular image within a conventional sentence, the rewrite explodes that singular image into a complex of images, forces, tones, places, tenses, meanings. The exercise lets loose the bundles of associations embedded in every word (and subsequently in every sequence of words) and suggests the carnivalesque strategy of maximizing perspectives, voices, and ideological positions within a text.
Student account of instructor
She is center stage
juggling the carcasses
of a chicken, a pig, and an apple
and they've begun to come undone.
She's center stage and she's juggling
basic and obscure knowledge with language
on her unicycle
swaying back and forth
and she's about to come undone.
And me
I'm swaying in the midst of a large loud man
whose voice thunders like an apprenticed god
in the midst of the yapping and howling of hungry pups
and the bird-like gypsy children
whispering and giggling as they stretch and bend
in graceful arcs of muscle and tendon
in the midst of monkeys just looking and listening
picking and poking.
And Lady Mady
knows she's surrounded by hungry puppies [End Page 78]
and gypsies and loud men
with bits and pieces of chicken and apple and pig
spiraling off into the room
and she's sweating
as she spins and spins
the juggle juice starting to come together
slowly, at her feet
but I have to pee
like a monkey pees
but I feel if I leave I'll miss the best part of the show
the part where it all comes together
but that man's voice is too loud
and the motion of those balls is too fast
and the little whispers and sounds
and dead monkey eyes
it's all getting too much for me
so I stand up to bow
to take my leave
and I realize it's silent
and that I've become the center of the stage
the maestro, if you will
of this spiraling play.
(Chris Muniz)
Everything appears deranged. The classroom is empty of its usual paraphernalia of desks and chairs and is now full of pop-up books, magnifying glasses, camouflage gear, rubber-cast body parts, and several kiddie pools filled with shallow water. Someone is standing in one of these plastic pools with arms tightly crossed, her head tilted upwards toward the ceiling, and her lips puckered with disgust. Her mylar suit hangs from her torso like wrinkles hang from an old woman's chin. She seems to be admonishing the gods for some wrongdoing, and thankfully she never looks my way. C.M., the would-be shaman, has brought a gun to class and is playing with it. He speaks out loud as he scrupulously works the space, maneuvering, dodging, and then stopping as if suddenly crippled in the crosswinds of a devastating memory.
There's this kid who's tripping out because he can't quite figure what's real. There's this television tube that keeps swallowing up all the catastrophe and violence of the world and ships it out to him in this nice two-dimensional package of image and sound, bite-size snacks of cultural disaster--a screen that's monitoring the collapse of civilization somewhere "out there," flattened into the security cam view of high speed pursuits, bank robberies, reporters on the scene, bodies under the sheets, the homes of the victims just beyond the floodlights of the live shot, curtains closed, silent. 9
(Chris Muniz)
He goes on and on, several students listen mesmerized. Then he snaps out of it and fields the space again like a rabid hunter. Others hide from him beneath the biggest chairs or inside the pop-up books. M.G., the one who just didn't get [End Page 79] it earlier, is singing to a plastic heart delicately placed between two gargantuan rubber ears. The music he is playing is an uncanny combo of a tango beat, a Kurt Weill melody, and slave narrative lyrics. I wonder, is he getting it now? He seems quite entranced. I hear someone say over and over in discordant tones, "If you wish to drown, don't torture yourself with shallow water." I don't understand what this means, not exactly, but I know that in all this apparent chaos meaning hovers all around waiting to be invented and reinvented.
Excerpt from student carnivalesque paper
Oh look at her she's got that gown I saw at Kimball's doesn't he realize what an ass he's become we need one more seat why am I here oh god here we are again why did he bring that child such a sweet little girl this jacket smells like two aisles down I wonder what we'll do tomorrow at the staff meeting one seat over that Benderson really needs to check his what do you call those things I can't believe she actually showed up we must be in the front row can't read this what are we going to see this time all those people are going to have to get five seats in ten seats in four seats over look she has a row all to herself the little dear.
(Arianne MacBean)
Student account of instructor
And again the searching eye of the spotlight picks out the tiny, sequined Lady Professor, impossibly suspended above us in the airy upper reaches of the big top tent. She's really concentrating. Certainly the details of facial expressions are indiscernible at this distance, but her body is rigid and stark against all that sways: the rope, the tent, even the unruly mass of dark hair.
One knee-high motorcycle boot steps out.
What we're articulating is the slippage in propagandistic discourse!" she yells. "You know?"
We, huddled in the stands below, look up in silence. I hear someone say, "Uh huh."
"It's hard to explain!" she yells down. Taking another step, she slips! We gasp, but she rights herself by twisting in a new direction and articulating vague grasping gestures in the air. We wait.
"It's like if you replace all the nouns with nouns from a medical textbook!" she bellows.
Behind me someone whispers, "So, would that be magical realism or carnivalesque?"
"NOOO!" comes the wrenching cry as she plunges (did she throw herself?) off the rope onto our heads.
But the net--some of us didn't even know it was there--catches her, cradling her in its buoyant sway.
"Hey, is she stuck in the text again?" She's moving, though, and her two hands stick out of the net above us, making the same grasping gestures. [End Page 80] Then they hang limply.
"That must be the slippage," someone says.
I'm getting a neck-ache.
(Joy Gregory)
After receiving all the portraits of my performance as instructor (while I was still working on this essay), an ulterior motive behind my directive--to employ a circus metaphor--became transparent. Why had I not asked them to use a metaphor from testimony or magical realism? Why did I want to read myself portrayed in a carnivalesque way? Suddenly, it dawned on me that I do not fear being a joker in my students' eyes nearly as much as I fear being an agelast, embodying (archaic) ideas of learning, labor, and play that ensue from 1950s Cold War, Judeo-Christian, moralistic, pre-Nixon, suburbia-bred, opportunity-deranged baby-boomers. I fear representing their parents: older, doctrinal, historically fixed. My unwitting adoption of foolish antics has been, perhaps, a rebellion against this internalized conception of self. The more I play the entertaining jester, the more I feel inexperienced, insecure, and innocent. The more I feel like them, the students. My being clownish and vulnerable, and having students portray me that way in their writing, was an ironic attempt at intimacy, a way to bridge the perceived divide between us.
For many, it may be difficult to perceive clownery as anything but unpreparedness or petty entertainment. For myself, the lack of sophistication, the awkward demeanor and crudeness, the openness, all suggest vulnerabilities and flaws that I would rather disguise and disown. But I am warming up to the buffoon in myself, making peace with a kind of entertainment that is as irresistible as it is disturbing. I am beginning to embrace the part of my pedagogical identity that seems destined to be a clown, to function from the dictates of unstable terrain within myself and, similarly, to surrender to the messy, explosive, and mysterious realm of the classroom. Clowns are cultural metasemioticians who use irrationality and perversion to comment on how illogical and depraved much of our day-to-day thought is. They represent a part of ourselves that has never really belonged to us.
I cannot deny that I teach from all sides of my mouth. Most of the time, in spite of self-doubt and confounded looks from students, learning seems to happen. Students write potent texts and express complex ideas. Maybe the learning that happens is not easily nameable or repeatable; sometimes there's nothing precise about it. Clearly, what is learned is not what is taught. Education is, in large part, the unquantifiable outcome of different people recuperating different meanings from a mess of unruly intentions, unconscious performances, and endless mistakes and misreadings. Studying these various genres and, especially, finding communion with students in the carnivalesque, revealed clownery, nonsense, indirectness, and disorder to be invaluable vehicles not only of critical expression but of teaching and learning as well.I had discovered pedagogy of the carnivalesque.
Mady Schutzman is a writer and scholar currently teaching in the School of Critical Studies and the MFA Writing Program at California Institute of the Arts. She has published essays and fiction in several journals and anthologies and is co-editor of Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism (Routledge 1994). Her most recent book The Real Thing: Performance, Hysteria, and Advertising (Wesleyan 1999) investigates the iconography of the female body in advertising.
Notes
1. This course was offered as an upper division elective within the Cultural Studies category of the Critical Studies curriculum. It was attended by twenty 3rd and 4th year BFA students from all the schools at CalArts and eight MFA students from the Critical Studies MFA Writing Program.
2. All students, regardless of the art form they chose, were required to write a paper that explicated their choices in relation to the critical readings and discussions during the semester.
3. I would like to note that many students, especially outside of the classroom (i.e., in one-on-one consultations or studio reviews), do not necessarily display this suspicion. Also, while most faculty members in the other schools are advocates of the Critical Studies agenda and its invaluable contribution to the education of artists, those who are less enthusiastic promote, however unconsciously, the resistant attitudes exhibited by students.
4. I have used the term "guru" for alliteration purposes only: guru-clown sounds so much better than teacher-clown.
5. I tend to ask the first five questions early in the semester. At the end of the semester I repeat these five and add the others. I do not do this exercise in every class I teach. I often use it as an introductory exercise when I conduct workshops in Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, and in my classes Ritual and Performance Theory and Practice.
6. While the exercise does run the risk of hurting feelings--that is, of students missing the pedagogical point in lieu of a more personal response--this has not been my experience, at large.
7. The term magical realism is attributed to Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980). His book The Lost Steps, first published in 1953, is regarded as magical realism's ur text. Other well-known writers who are identified as magical realists include Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina) and Gabriel Garciá Márquez (Colombia).
8. See Danow for a thorough review of the genre of magical realism and an in-depth discussion of the themes and strategies of Allende, Carpentier, García Márquez, and other magical realist writers.
9. This is a segment of Chris Muniz's final paper written in carnivalesque style. Unlike the classroom experience with the testimonial texts, students were anxious to present their carnivalesque texts publicly.
Works Cited
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