Visiting Sherman Alexie's website is a real treat, and I recommend that you do so. In a list of favorite poems he's posted on that site, he has included Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz," one of my favorites as well. Here it is:
My Papa's Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
but I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
A couple of years ago my colleague, Lynne Nolan, and I gave a presentation at the Washington Community and Technical Colleges Humanities Association (WCTCHA, now WCCHA), on the uses (and, in my view
misuses) of literary theory in the introduction to literature course. We each presented a paper outlining our point of view and read them as counterpoints. The conference is always a lot of fun--if for no other reason than we get to spend a weekend geeking out about our profession (as I've always maintained, teaching is the only profession where I can see someone actually paying me to stand in front of other people and talk about books!). At any rate, the following is the longer, rambling version of the paper I read there--the first few memoirish paragraphs were cut to make it more audience friendly. I'm including the whole enchilada here for purely indulgent reasons, and for the fact that Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" plays a major role in the paper. Although I can't say I know precisely why Sherman Alexie admires the poem as he does, I have a feeling it may be due to the same sorts of reasons my former student did (he too was a Native American who lived on a reservation and knew the hardships of alcoholism). I recount all of this near the end of the essay. So here is piece I read from:
Education, Critical Theory, and Me:
Notes on the Development of a Critical Awareness
My public high school, by most American standards, was well above average—even if my education was middling. My teachers were more than competent—all of them—the liberal sixties refugees working to inspire, the conservative science teachers with their rigid structures, even the lazy coaches masquerading as history teachers. I suppose some of them were inspirational to certain students; they never were to me, particularly. But then again, I wasn’t the kind of student to get inspired. I was the kind of student who did more than adequate though not memorable work. Mostly I was clocking time.
Except in my English classes. For some reason or another, even as a youngster, I was fond of dreaming up stories (more than actually reading those of others) and because I was naturally interested in written expression and good at mimicking what writers I did read (chiefly [cringe] Kerouac, Vonnegut, Hemingway), I soon had “a way with words”. I always received good scores on my papers and because of these successes I developed an image of myself as a writer. By the time I was ready for college, about the only thing I was really sure of was that I would go into some field involving writing—probably journalism, magazine writing, or creative writing.
What happened then in college was a little odd. I declared myself an English major. After two years of continuous success in my literature and writing classes, I decided—still with a notion of being a “writer”—to study writing itself. I grew to love English poetry and 20th century American fiction. My professors were interesting and exciting—tweedy, older men and women who seemed to me, on average, to be about the age of sixty. I didn’t know it at the time—being as bowled over as I was by the wonderful works I was, for the first time, being exposed to—but my profs were not especially up with (or at least didn’t feel the need to expose undergrads to) the current movements in literary studies. As I said, they seemed, most of them, to be about the age of sixty, and that made them children of the 1920’s, perhaps even earlier. They had earned their degrees in the 1940’s and 1950’s—a time well before postmodernism had its toe-hold in American universities. Frankly, my profs were mostly of the “generalist” temperament and, if I had to guess, probably schooled in New Critic and structuralist approaches to criticism. I don’t remember a one of them championing any particular critical theory (though I was only dimly aware of such things at the time anyway). If anything, they focussed on “close reading,” reader response methodology, mythcrit, and some Marxism and Freudianism. But these were ideas which were plainly appropriate to the texts we were studying. (i.e., How can you not discuss Marx when reading Gatsby, USA, or Sinclair Lewis? How do you avoid Freud when reading Shakespeare?) However, “theory,” as such, was something rather foreign to me and my few brushes with it left me feeling as though it were something esoteric, unnecessarily complicated, and often downright silly.
Not until graduate school did I really begin to grasp the depth and breadth of critical theory in academe. By that time I was deeply interested in English as a discipline itself, not just as some supposed training ground for a writer (it’s a rather poor one, if you ask me). But complicating matters was my motivation for going to grad school in the first place: I now wanted to become a professor, and I wanted to “spend time with the texts”; that was the mantra phrase that I repeated to myself—representing both my bookish passion for language art and my desire to create in myself a new sensitivity to the artistry itself. I wanted to drink deep, for I had a feeling that, though my undergrad years had been an important time for me to develop as a careful reader, I still had squandered much of my college time with immature distractions of every kind; I had never been a very disciplined student even though my grades in most of my English classes were quite strong. No, by the time I was enrolling in EWU’s program in Traditional Stdies in Language and Lterature, I was ready for just that: traditional studies.
However, as I began to survey the landscape of criticism in academe in the 90’s, I became confounded by what I perceived as the iconoclastic nature of that criticism. While I was in the mode of close reading and was gaining a deep appreciation of the artistry and complexity of the texts I was reading (now mostly 19th and 20th century Brits—Blake to Larkin), the popular criticism of the time was arguing that those texts were instruments (or by-products) of oppression against the poor, women, or people of color; that their value as works of art was entirely relative to the culture in which they were produced; that their “authors” were only the matrix from which they grew; and that (most bizarrely to me) the languages in which they were written were so threaded through with linguistical fault-lines, ambiguities, and inconstancies that they were, in reality, uninterpretable, meaningless—even unreadable. My gut-reaction to these schools of thought—Lacanian, Foucaultian, Derridaean, Cristevan etc.—was to reject them and bury myself in the criticism of those whom the pomo’s had themselves reacted against—the new critics and the structuralists. My critical idols became people like David Daiches, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and Helen Gardner (among many others); at least, I said to myself (and I continue to believe this), these folks could write without oppressing the reader with their horrible jargon.
As I became a college English teacher, taking the helm of introduction to literature courses and, later, Shakespeare and British literature courses, I continued to view “theory” with a measure of distrust. Certainly, I saw little in it that would help me introduce literature to first and second year college students. To this day, though I read (and often enjoy) contemporary critical essays by critics from every conceivable camp: Marxist, Neo-Freudian, reader-response, feminist, post-colonial, mythocritical, new-historical, intertextual, etc., I am loathe to bring them into the introductory classroom. The few times I have made the attempt (in freshman and sophmore community college environments, mind you) I have been met with profound resistance on the part of students. Their negative reaction to a critical essay from, say, the feminist point of view to a text such as Frankenstein, wasn’t so much based in some disagreement over the content of the essay (i.e. a viewpoint, for instance, that the novel is a critique of the misfiring male impulse to create life), but over whether such an essay should ever be written in the first place. Often enough, the entire concept of a college professor sitting down to write such a piece and seek out an audience of colleagues (who would waste their time reading such a piece!) was preposterous to them. The situation seemed to reinforce their own prejudices and stereotypes about “ivory tower” professors playing intellectual parlor games at tax-payers’ (and students’ parents’) expense.
And even if I managed to convince them that the production and perusal of such critical essays were warranted, I’d then have a devil of a time convincing them that the ideas contained therein were legitimate. The most common refrain was, “The critic is reading in to the work too deeply,” a statement every literature teacher has heard and which really means, “The author of the work never intended for us to get that from the work—the critic is just seeing what he or she wants to see.” Despite follow-up discussions on the suggestive power of language, the openness of a text, and the “intentional fallacy”, students have a difficult time truly embracing the notion of a text having multiple interpretations, subtexts, and inherent structural ambiguities.
In the end, I have always found it more productive (and enjoyable, for me) to focus class time on the fundamentals of careful (not synonymous with “close”) reading. This means equipping students with the vocabulary of literary studies and asking them to apply it in their writings (journals, essays) and in class discussion. For instance, it is far more important to me that students understand the concept of “slant rhyme” and its deft, subtle use in a poem such as Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” than whether or not the poem contributes to the oppression of women by valorizing the drunken “romping” of the narrator’s father at the expense of an exploration of the psyche of the rather marginalized figure of the mother. (And for the record, I think no such valorization is occurring—quite the opposite, in fact.) The priority, for me, is to train students to become sensitive readers, give them the tools through which they can unpack works and explore their aesthetics—indeed, through which they can sometimes achieve an aesthetic experience in the first place. For, though at our far remove as professors, we often forget the hard work we ourselves went through to gain a working literary vocabulary, we had to do it—we had to build that foundation before we could begin to construct on its top the more baroque edifice we call “theory”.
The obvious counterpoit to my argument here is this: Aren’t the ideas of building a “literary vocabulary,” of “careful” and “sensitive” reading, of “building a structure” to receive aesthetic experience—aren’t all of these ideas themselves indicative of a theoretical approach? Is there not implicit in the very idea of “careful reading” an agenda which presupposes the stability of a text itself? Well, the deconstructionist would certainly think so, and therefore feel that my “cart before the horse” argument is itself a cart before the horse fallacy (false analogy?). Why, the deconstructionist might ask, should one train readers to understand the “basic” literary elements when the study of those elements does nothing but reinforce the fallacy of textual stability? For example, consider again Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and the stanza in question, which reads, “We romped until the pans / slid from the kitchen shelf / my mother’s countenance / could not unfrown itself.” Rather than focus, as I did, on the “deft” use of slant rhyme between the first and third lines, the deconstructionist/feminist might choose to focus on the binary opposition of “father / mother” in order to isolate a sub-current of alienation: the mother’s domain has been invaded by the happy male pair who see her unhappy face as an emblem of female rigidity and resistance to play and transgressive behavior; in other words, she is villified as an emblem of order and the rigors of household civility while the males are valorized as heroic, Dionysian free-men, whose natural inclination is to violate rules as they celebrate. The poem then hinges on male / female opposition and cultural codes which dictate an understanding of the male way or the female way of being and doing: to be the mother of the house is to be a clenched, locked down, layer down of rules and thus “no fun”; to be the father is to be the open, freedom-loving, breaker of the rules (his presumed authority allows him this), and thus a barrel of laughs. The poem (or at least this stanza) is therefore reduced to another instance of patriarchal propoganda—a lyric that defines the “male way” against the “female way”, expressing adoration for the former and ridiculing the latter.
Now, I suppose I have run the risk of committing the straw man fallacy; is the example above, invented by me, a fair one to use? There are probably countless other deconstructionist approaches to this poem, but I do believe what I’ve written is a fair example of the kind of claim a deconstructionist/feminist critic might make. The claim, in my opinion, is fairly made, and I do believe that the poem relies heavily on the gender codes mentioned; I do not happen to agree that the sub-theme identified dominates the poem or is especially important to understanding the poem’s whole meaning. In other words, that the poem may contain language, imagery, binaries (etc.) that bespeak social conventions that we may or may not find unpalatable isn’t the most important thing about the work. We can recognize the social and cultural matrices from which the poem sprang and the embedded fault lines (if you will) within the poem without needing to dwell on them—at least right away. What’s more important, to my mind, is to survey the landscape of the poem, find inroads into its artistry, and consdier its aesthetics first.
Allow me to refer back to the use of meter and rhyme in the stanza in question. A simple examination of the rhyme between the words “pans” and “countenance” coupled with an awareness of the awkwardness in trying to make the word “countenance” fit the iambic trimeter of its line (interestingly: 3 beat lines + 4 stanzas of 4 lines = a waltz’s ¾ time?) produces a wonderfully humorous effect—the preposterous rhyme and the awkward fit echo the situation itself, the spontaneous waltz, the mismatched partners, and the stolen moment of joy in the midst of rigid structures. I feel it’s far more important for a student to learn first to recognize and appreciate the artistry in such a line than for him or her to impose a critical approach on the poem without a careful reading. From the careful reading (even anatomization of the text) we can gather more ideas that will help us in a total accounting of the poem later—even in the construction of a critical approach. I think, for example, that the analysis of the lines in question made above would prove invaluable to a reading of the poem which explored its working class family dynamics—after all, the father has returned drunk from the tavern, he is a laborer whose hands are “caked hard by dirt,” and it’s painfully obvious that the man’s lumbering mass and bodily strength are being kept barely in check—his partner son is in danger of being seriously hurt! Again, the idea that this is a stolen moment of joy has farther reaching implications: tonight the boy is the object of his father’s affections and awkward love—is it that way every night that he comes home drunk? Are those hard hands, that battered knuckle, that belt belt-buckle, that whiskey breath as likely to be emblems of domestic violence as they are emblems of the rollicking waltz? Is the reason the mother’s countenance cannot “unfrown itself” because it has been so firmly set in a frown that she can hardly recognize a joyful moment anymore? Careful attention to the connotative power of the poem’s language and to the subtextual suggestions in the imagery will reveal the raw power of the poem; we don’t need to overlay the poem with a web of theories to catch its meanings (or lack of).
A Native-American student of mine approached me one day after a class in which this Roethke poem had been discussed. The student, who had lived on a reservation and had known the tragedy of alcoholism in his own family, told me how much he enjoyed and identified with the poem. He said he knew first hand the unpredictablity of the alcoholic, the mood swings, the mind games, the hard luck, the hardships. But then he said, “You know, there were good times too.” He said the alcoholism didn’t define the whole person—that love and care and a notion of family still lived on despite it. There were fun times next to the hard times. I can’t imagine a greater testimony to the stability of Roethke’s text than that student’s aesthetic experience of it, derived by nothing more than his sensitive reading and his willingness to trust that the poem could mean.
More to come!
