Winging It

I love the old academic joke that goes:
One academic meets another and asks “Have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses?  “Read it?” replies the other, “I haven’t even taught it.”
My teaching career began in earnest when I was first hired as an instructor at Wheaton College where my principal obligation was to lecture to sixty five young women on the subject of ancient Greece from the arrival of the Myceneans into the mainland of present day Greece down to the death of Alexander in 323 BCE.  That was a lot of centuries for me to cover, not to mention melding all into “the big picture.”  Trouble was I knew next to nothing about ancient history, and faked a knowledge of it because I needed the job. I stayed up nights reading James Bagnall Bury’s history of ancient Greece,  jotting down names and dates which I desperately tried to stitch into some kind of quilt that made a picture.  I was very unsuccessful; at least half the class dropped it at the end of the term.  Problem was I could not loosen my grip on the facts, like a climber scaling the face of a cliff and hanging on desperately to any rock outcropping available.  I was a bore.  A few years later I was teaching one of the sections of a freshman honors course at Yale University where I was leading my ten lads through some of the masterpieces of western literature, again way out of my depth, since I had been studying ancient Greek and Latin literature exclusively for as long as I could remember, and really knew nothing else. I had consulted the reading list before the term began, and noted that every title was familiar to me, and indeed most of them I had read in either school or college so I was confident that if I had to wing it at all, then what could go wrong since we never spent more than a couple of sessions on any one work. But when we got to Moby Dick I was stymied by the author’s verbosity, could not bring myself to read beyond the first half of narrative, lost as I was like a swimmer in the roiling turmoil of the waves of a storm tossed sea.  Oh, those sentences, they never came to an end, oh, those endless facts, detail upon detail, where was Ernest Hemingway when you needed him?  The director of Directed Studies was the famous Maynard Mack, a very august presence in the English department who chaired a meeting of all us instructors once a week to suggest the direction we might be taking in the course.  The ease with which my colleagues in the English department tossed off observations about whatever author we were discussing filled me with terror and self-loathing.  I was having such a hard time faking it.  And Professor Mack had a kind of subtext for the course which he hinted at, but firmly, as senior faculty members have a habit of doing.  Everything somehow had to suggest Christ Crucified.  Easy enough with Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, an approach I thought nonsensical but still doable, and of course you could slot any Christian work into that world view, but Moby Dick?  I mean I knew somebody got it in the end; was it the whale or Ahab?  Was it man who was Christ crucified in his fight with nature, or was it Nature which stood in for Christ crucified the victim of humankind’s rape of the natural world? You see my dilemma, and how it was like dancing on eggs somehow to suggest either possibility without denying that it might be the other.  It was a relief to read the boys’ papers and learn what happened at the end.  Dumb of me not to think to get a plot summary.  Shortly before I retired I was asked to direct a dissertation for a student in Comparative Literature whose supervising professor had gone on emergency sick leave.  Because my field was epic poetry, and I was supposed to be so learned, endowed chair and all, it did not seem to anyone a stretch that the dissertation subject was Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  Egad,I'd never read the blasted thing.  Well, here we go again. . . . .