What's Love Got to Do With It?

What this pair does together is less important than the fact that they do whatever it is together, that they know how to spend time together, even that they would rather waste time together than do anything else—except that no time they are together could be wasted.

They simply appreciate one another more than either of them appreciates anyone else, and they would rather be appreciated by one another than by anyone else. They just are at home with one another, whether or not they can live together under the same roof.

This man, in words of Emerson’s, carries the holiday in his eye; he is fit to stand in the gaze of millions. ¹

—Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness

Remarks in View of Henry James

Trying to pull these thoughts together, I’ve found myself struggling with two particular obstacles. The first arises from my recurrent and evidently indefeasible sense that talk of “teaching” is a form of shop or craft talk. This is not meant as a way of rejecting it but simply as a way of describing such talk and pointing to its limits, particularly its relative independence from any particular object. That such talk can be—and has been—elevated into a discipline of its own disturbs me, as does its multiplication into a series of such disciplines that in some sense claim for “education” the methodological and substantive terrain of the humanities. That “theory”—a particular set of construals of a vaguely bounded body of primarily continental materials—should be playing, at least at times, an active role in enabling this transformation is likewise disturbing to me. All of this then to point toward the ways in which I have not wanted to write an essay on “teaching” or “approaches to . . .” or anything of that sort but to write something in which the teaching is inseparable from its object.

But—and this is the second obstacle—the more strongly my drafts moved in this other direction, the less clear it became that they were not simply drafts for an essay on James or James-and-Cavell, holding themselves to the topic of teaching only by a mixture of arbitrary imposition and verbal sleight. ²

Against both of these I have tried to cling to the intuitions that there is a specific topic “Teaching James” in which each term finds its necessary weight, and, still more problematically, that there is some proper form into which to cast it. I have come to think of this as a question about attachments—my attachments, certainly, to James and to teaching but also an attachment of James and teaching, all of which are in this essay filtered through a presiding sense of the mutual attachment of Henry James and Stanley Cavell. The various remarks offered and glossed in what follows are attempts to make out some of the dimensions of this field in ways I hope will be sensible and interesting, but before attempting to pick my way through them a general remark is perhaps in order.

Some years ago, at the very beginning of the Syracuse English Department’s curricular struggles, I wrote a (for me anyway) fairly savage response to a colleague who had proposed that we describe the purpose of a particular honors course as making our students love literature. I said that while it made sense for us to claim to be able to teach students how to think about literature, it was absurd to imagine that our competence extended to the imposition of love—however much we might hope for that. In many ways I would continue to stand by that statement, but it seems to me now overwhelmingly obvious that I was wrong to attempt to get “love” out of our talk about what we are doing. The cost of extirpating it completely is that we are left able to imagine ourselves only as purveyors of method and so may just as well turn our departments over to the educators and the various social scientific foundations they hold out to us. The humanities have, I suggest, no foundation...