Failure in the Canon
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Londo: There, you see! I’m going to live.
G’Kar: So it would seem. Well, it’s an imperfect universe.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 3 My usual scholarly work consists of case studies, empirical research, and the occasional commentary on critical theory. My chosen field, Composition and TESOL doesn’t have a “canon” per se; most of what’s considered essential knowledge is continually changing. In some ways I wish there was a canon, because most of my classmates come from different points of reference and only come together when we are reading the same texts in class. It would help if we all had read Derrida or Chomsky or Matsuda, but we haven’t. We stumble across seminal works through our own research or when labeled by a professor. What could constitute a canon is far from clear cut, and it leads me to question where or how a “canon” fits into my scholarly work at all.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Perhaps it is through the construction of a personal canon. Ultimately, this personal canon only works because my professional and personal lives seem unavoidably (and often annoyingly) intertwined. I teach out of the person I am and I am largely a product of all I interact with through my teaching profession. My scholarly work will always come from this.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 I have objects which form my personal canon, objects which I’ve sanctioned as acceptable and necessary to my scholarly work. Objects which I’ve given authority to act as guides, examples, and representations of truth. They don’t explicitly appear in the “scholarly” works I write, but they are always there – themes which underlie so much of what I do. At certain times of my life, often times of loneliness, depression, and uncertainty, I cling to objects that speak truth to me, even if I don’t recognize what exactly that “truth” is at the time. Once I experience those truths, even in ambiguous form, they never leave. They disappear and reappear. They are reinterpreted by my filtered memory. They moan and drag their chains to get my attention. Avery Gordon describes this haunting, “Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into a structure of feeling we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). These personal canonical objects teach me, remind me, move me, and drive my scholarly endeavors.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 One such object that speaks to me is the television science fiction series Babylon 5. The pilot originally aired in 1993, in the midst of the Bosnian War, and the remainder of the series began a year later. Babylon 5 is a space station, run by Earth, which acts as an United Nations of sorts. Citizens from various and often hostile races live together in an attempt to keep peace between them. At one time the series represented hope and redemption to me. While those themes are still important, in recent days it has also come to exemplify failure. Set in the mid 2200’s, Babylon 5 is functioning as “the last, best hope for peace” and is itself a picture of failure. Four previous attempts were destroyed. Even this station fails in its attempt to create a third space for intercultural dialogue by the third season.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 Today it’s not the triumphant revolution and overcoming of the big bad enemy that haunts me, it is the troubled and somewhat failed relationship between two of the main characters, Londo and G’Kar. Enemies due to a history filled with racial conflict and shifting dominance, Londo and G’Kar spend much of their lives despising the other – not only due to the society they represent, but also because of personal characteristics. Their hatred runs deep and so should it. Londo’s Centauris have recently conquered G’Kar’s Narn (though once the tables were turned) and the Narn have become again enslaved to their centuries old enemies. As leaders in their societies Londo and G’Kar must co-exist in this third space while containing (or not containing) their utter loathing of the other. As any “good” television series, a friendship ensues and culminates in a relationship closer than kin. What haunts me is not the ultimate “success” of their friendship, but the moments of weakness, vulnerability, irony, and failure in their tie to each other and to their own selves. They fail their societies by not leading either group to real “victory”. They each fail themselves by not living up to the life they aspired to live. Their eventual friendship is seen by their respective cultures as a failure because such a friendship breaks all convention of acceptable practice. In that failure, each goes on.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 The ghosts of Londo and G’Kar haunt me, but as Gordon conveys, “If you let it, the ghost can lead you toward what has been missing, which is sometimes everything” (57). My recent reinterpretation of this object, the relationship between two characters in a television sci-fi series, in conjunction with Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, has led me to “what has been missing” in my own life – my own acceptance of failure. Society programs standards into all its members. Families reinforce the expectations. Consciously or not, most actively pursue the fulfillment of those standards (or for the few – intentionally seek their subversion). The pursuit of my place in scholarly work and my production within it may always be classified as “failed” according to society’s standards. Like the awkward, aggressive dance between Londo and G’Kar which plays out in Babylon 5, I dance with the expectations of society and Academy. I knowingly accept, then reject, then catch myself accepting again, then subverting.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 4 Aside from its inclusion in my personal canon, one would assume works such as Babylon 5 have no place in a scholarly canon. It might be easier to argue that such works might fit into a canon for cultural studies, film studies, or literature, but not the pedagogy-laden field of Composition and TESOL. Yet it is these types of works that are spoken of in our classrooms – sometimes jokingly, sometimes as models of individuals. Works like these matter because they reanimate the human condition. For many, pop psychology’s control of the dominant culture (or the opposite) leads to interpretations of success in every situation. Once we look past the levels of “success” which can avert our attention, we can see the reality of pain, rejection, oppression, and failure that belong to all humanity (though arguably much more to some than others). Failure, if not in this work than another, should be part of the canon.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 4 Struggling to find my own feet in the Academy, I get a small taste of personal failure. I also see it in my classrooms. Everyday I view students who are living through and hoping to escape painful realities, moving on to fulfill societal expectations. I see students who won’t pass the class and most likely will not graduate university. They know failure, or will soon enough. What if ideas such as failure, haunting, and personal canons were used in my classrooms? What if students left with Halberstam’s mantra, “To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint, and ultimately to die; rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable and fantastic failures” (Loc 2449)?
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Works Cited
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. New University of Minnesota Press ed.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. eBook.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. eBook.
I have to admit to doing a bit of head tilting here, because I totally thought that there was a bit of a Comp/TESOL canon. I don’t think it’s, like, as strict, and the term might be confusing me (I have readily admitted to “confused” being my default scholarly state), but I have encountered some of the stuff. It’s not usually as sexy as the literary canon, lacking in Shakespeare, but I seem to recall having certain texts brought up regularly in the Comp courses I took as a Master’s student (I took a handful of courses and taught/tutored comp).
Still, I think that the direction you went feels a little more personal to me. There’s something about owning whatever it is we teach or that nudged us or granted experience, and I can’t help but feel like you owned that moment in Bablyon 5 (I has more comment later). I just wanted to air some of my confusion, and possibly be like “I totes know some comp, for reals!”
(I have no idea why I randomly talked like a teenage girl in there. Again: confused)
Maybe it’s better to say that the canon for Comp/TESOL is a bit ambiguous in that certain institutions would focus on particular areas so it’s hard to say that “THIS is part of the Comp/TESOL canon”. I appreciate the challenge because I guess the comment may not be essentially true, but comes out of some of my frustration with the I** program. A “Foundational Texts” course was added the cohort after mine because my cohort must have shown no knowledge of said canon. If I didn’t have a particular aversion to canons in general, I think I could construct what some would consider a traditional TESOL canon or a traditional Comp canon.
These are constant points of contention in Literature departments too, in my experience, Janelle. I got my PhD from a department that had no distribution requirements and allowed up to half of our coursework to be taken outside the department (I did half mine in American Studies and Film), and faculty and some students often complained that we were not learning enough of the English literature canon. Perhaps the main role of canons is to provoke arguments…