Teaching Is Underway

The break between handing in spring final grades and beginning summer intensives was an awfully brief one this year, so taking up and taking to the pace of teaching hasn't been so very jarring this time, not yet at least. Though I've read most of the texts I teach countless times for years and some I've looked up yet again recently while putting my syllabus together weighing alternatives and so on, I do still re-read the texts I assign as close to the time when most of the students are reading them so they will be fresh and so that the connective thread of a proximate engagement with just these words -- whatever the differences in knowledge, commitment, situation stratify us -- provides a shared context for discussion and lecture with the community of the classroom. Of course, the downside of this is that I never read the same text the same way twice, at least not completely, and sometimes I am seized by some tangential fancy that undermines familiar lines of thought and deranges my potted lecture notes a bit. Anyway, today at Berkeley we're talking about Gorgias' "Encomium to Helen" which was two and a half thousand years ago what it remains, a set-piece calling such attention to itself as it does what it does that it practically teaches itself through its exemplarity as once its exemplarity was meant to advertize the skills (and services) of Gorgias. I was struck as usual by the ugliness of the piece, "praise" of Helen of Troy that strips her so completely of agency it manages in exonerating her nearly to enact or possibly re-enact her rape and abduction. The self-congratulatory meta-discourse of the piece is also a bit hard to take sometimes -- discourse is like a magic spell, like a drug -- are you enchanted yet? are you intoxicated yet? eh? eh? We're also tackling three books from the Iliad, which this time around struck me forcefully as a companion piece to Job: petty divinities unworthy of the world they made find the resulting meaninglessness invigorated into significance through the meaning found by the sufferers in that world of their suffering in their own terms. Job's gambit seems to me an essentially private one, Achilles' essentially public, but both are asserting aesthetic judgments with what turns out to be profoundly political consequences (without expectation of divine reward Job settles for righteousness as an end in itself in rather Socratic terms -- ie, it is better to suffer harm than to do harm for to do harm means you have to live the rest of your life with/as the sort of person who does harm -- without expectation of a literal homecoming Achilles settles for a coming into the home of collective history, conferring on him immortal fame on narrative terms).