(1) Desiring Democracy

Stories of possibility, of change, risk dislocating a person's relationship to authority and the certainty granted by its order and orientation. And so throughout history those in dominant cultural positions have silenced narratives of transformation constructed by their "inferiors." For imagining and asserting one's own agency necessarily disturbs the interests of some hierarchy already in place.

Democracy, however, insists upon a new line of vision. Democracy awakens our potential to hold dominion over our own lives. It suggests that each of us owns a unique perspective that others are bound to honor. But, in unleashing the promise of the individual, democracy also uncovered its characteristic social dilemma: How might we learn to recognize and respect the perspectives of others without betraying our own interests?

It is, of course, too simple to say that one important answer to this democratic dilemma might originate in the consciousness that is provoked when two or more people come together to share the multiple meanings they make of a "poem." Still, imagine that as a possibility.

Germaine, Robin, Whitney, Leslie, and Morgan gather to talk about Peter's poem. After reading it aloud to the group several times, Morgan offers his response, "Ah--a love poem. It makes me feel contented: swans graceful in their passage across the sky, two people mirrored in unison, reflected in a spiritual circle of water. Restful, peaceful--the word 'alive' for me evokes a sense of calm, of inner harmony--I like to imagine life being more than a jumbled, frenetic rat race. With those swans, and the river, and the lovers, suddenly I'm back with 'The Wild Swans at Coole.' Where is the Kuskokwim, the Kusk-aw-kwim, the Kus-kawk-wim? My mind drifts slowly back to nature. . . ."

Exploding with impatience, Whitney interrupts this reverie, "Rubbish! Morgan, can't you see the poet working his magic to well up our sentiments. These aren't genuine tears in our eyes: just another retreat from the real world. Everywhere people suffering daily, and this guy's privileged enough to be fishing somewhere out in the wilderness. Come on--it's precisely these fake feelings that give poetry a bad name. Now, if we read this poem in a history, a sociology class, we'd get the real picture. Next this poet'll be leading us into some kind of occult trance--being at one with nature or being reborn with his medicine man friend. . . ."

Robin intervenes, slightly exasperated, "You two always argue this way, but I'm not sure where it gets us. Must we reduce everything to love and nature versus economics and politics? Can't we agree to suspend judgment a moment and just ask some questions? Yes, the poem made me feel good, but it's really quite slippery: who's in love with whom? I see one of those doubling gestalt figures in my mind's eye--you know old hag/beautiful woman or rabbit/duck. It's moving in and out between love for the opposite sex and love for the same sex. Peter is a man, and thus I presume he's the "I" of the poem, so I'd want to know: is this a seduction lament or an affirmation of male bonding? I can just feel what you're going to say, but it drives me crazy having to hold both these interpretations in suspension at once. If Peter were here, his simple intention might clear up the ambiguity. . . ."

Silently pondering the conversation so far, Germaine at last enters the speaker's circle, "Now that I read it again, after what the three of you've said, I suddenly see that the poem calls for a political interpretation. Everything depends upon what's not said directly--we must look at the margins. The poet's making a plea for the unity of world peace--'a wish toward a single star.' If only people would stop warring against each other, then we might all come within the same circle. . . ."

Leslie, however, will have nothing to do with Germaine's suppositions, "I don't believe I'm hearing this. A political reading is both too easy and outrageous. I will acknowledge that this is a cross-cultural poem: If the poet belonged naturally in this wilderness, he wouldn't be making a point of the restriction against shooting swallows. So a kind of bridging is occurring. I see the poet connecting with someone in another culture, but more than that--another time and space within the sweep of history, as though the 20th century was fleeing back to an earlier, more coherent order. . . ."

Meanwhile, Whitney can barely stay contained, wanting to remain focused on the rights issue, "But what right does this 'white man' have intruding on, penetrating, the inner circles of this aboriginal people. This is a really blind and insensitive noble savage poem, and we need to alert ourselves to our own dangerously narrow, ethnocentric feelings here. . . ."

Then once again the mediating voice of Robin tries to encourage a more encompassing perspective: "Doesn't anyone think we need to take into account the fact that Peter recently spent some time teaching in Alaska? Perhaps we need to see the images in the poem in the context of ice and snow. I like the reverberations here, that people exist apart, but deeply need the 'other', need 'each other.' The poem feels very personal, and so, while I have to imagine referents for the pronouns, they don't feel obscure. Just as the swallows are sacred, so this poem creates for me a sacred moment of connection, of communion . . . ." And so the five companions continue their dance of response and interpretation.

Feelings, emotions, ideas, perspectives--conjecture, contradiction, argument, mediation, negotiation--the pleasures of staying together in relationship. To read Peter's poem alone is not to get the half of it. When as readers we openly collide with the readings of others, we begin to see beyond our original boundaries. In listening to each other, we discover how much more we might become than had we remained in isolation. But seeing reading this way--as a social act of "becoming"--involves committing ourselves to the unique paradoxes of the ongoing democratic experiment. In this experiment, we seek ways of living with each other that encourage openness and tolerance--as difficult as this may be--since our ideal is to value the person, not the particular group or hierarchical status of the person.

The Tensions of Democracy

Everyone will have their own sense of what democracy means--of how it relates to freedom and equality, liberty and justice, rights and responsibilities. However defined, democracy is certain to disturb existing arrangements. In decrying power and privilege, it proposed that most persons are quite capable of determining what is best for themselves. Thus, not surprisingly, elites, regardless of their persuasion, have generally viewed democracy with suspicion, even alarm. The spread of democracy summons the rise of individual autonomy, and there are those who view this as unraveling the very fabric of society.

Many philosophers have scoffed at the people's competence to manage their own affairs. Plato, one of the first to observe the unsettling reality of democratic decision making, concluded that the mass of citizens did not possess the proper understanding to choose either the best rulers or the wisest course of action. Caught in the clutches of pure appetite and self gratification, the people could not refrain from personal gain or corruption, nor could they aspire to what is truly beautiful and divine. Much later, as democracy gradually replaced oligarchical forms of government in the West, those in power continued to fear progressive developments, convinced that they were witnessing the downfall of civilization itself. Judged from their "superior" vantage point, democracy seems to promote aimless drift by sanctioning every strata of society to do just what it pleases. Enthroning liberty invites chaos and perhaps even anarchy. Freedom of expression spells a lapse in coherence and mutual interdependence.

But a deeper complaint is that democracy promotes mediocrity and abandons standards. In a democracy, life supposedly descends to the lowest common denominator--everyone comes to resemble everyone else. Much of this thinking, however, represents the defensive posturing of cultural elites. Despising "the chaos and indecent haste of modern life," George Santayana, the Harvard philosopher, represented succinctly this elitist position almost a century ago when he wondered if people wouldn't find more happiness "in the old aristocratic doctrine that the good is not liberty, but wisdom, and contentment with one's natural restrictions; the classical tradition knew that only a few can win" (Durant, 549). The problem, as Santayana saw it, was that democracy initiates "the great free-for-all, catch-as catch-can wrestling match of laissez-faire industrialism" and, as there is always more to compete for, people always remain dissatisfied.

Such complaints suggest a rejection of what is perhaps democracy's central characteristic: access. Individuals should be able to exert some control over their own destinies, and for this to happen, opportunities must everywhere be manifest. Indeed, in a democracy, no matter how egregiously this principle may be violated, its hope and energy persists. Democracy invites citizens to see life as self-determined, and democracy waits to record the lives of those who traditionally have remained in obscurity. Everyone becomes entitled to a useable past and a possible future.

In America the idea of access, of respect for multiple perspectives, has developed slowly, grudgingly. There has been much to overcome. In his study of our long road to democracy, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood shows the successive transformations that have occurred in the American world view. Beginning with monarchical traditions--with their emphasis on hierarchy, authority, and certainty--the American mind could not just magically become democratic. There had to be a gradual social revolution so that endless patterns of subordination might be supplanted by an egalitarianism based on merit. Republicanism served as a transitional stage in which the old ties of thought and association were initially broken. And while our greatest political thinkers, from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, set the stage for a massive infusion of liberty and self-government, they too remained wedded to systems of privilege and the notion that "disinterested" elites were all that prevented the mob from plunging society into chaos and anarchy.

Working toward Democratic Relationships

Perhaps democracy isn't for everyone. But who gets to decide? The point is that democracy never appears spontaneously, naturally; people work toward it, educate for it. Living together in diversity forces us to consider what constitutes our common culture, how we arrive at shared meanings, and what differences need to be mediated. How fragile democracy becomes when we forget the other person, and he or she forgets us. Yet this is a problem we struggle with every day in our democracy: what do we do with individuals and groups who practice beliefs that allow no room for the free existence of their "competitors"?

Trying to grant a free existence to others in the space that we're also occupying causes much stress. It's more than just suspending aggression and hostility. It requires getting beyond our initial ignorance of the other person. But this often changes precisely those conditions that people most fear changing. Committing ourselves to reciprocity and mediation inevitably alters both who we are and who we might become.

Like most, I will never be completely predisposed to democracy; someone is always playing their music too loudly and I go mad. Faced with the demands and adjustments of social living, I often want it all to go away. I want to live in the present, with my bearings fixed and secure. I want to stop worrying about the latest problem waiting to be solved. I don't want to be forever changing. I want an ordered place, knowing where I fit in relation to the next person in the hierarchy. I want to exclude all that is different from what I am and what I know to be true. I get tired of arguing with everyone who disagrees with me. Can't we just do it my way? . . . Then democracy whispers in my ear, telling me to be patient--or the story of the other will be lost.

Yet, even while many individuals clash, trying to prove the superiority of their specific group affiliations, there are those citizens who seem comfortable negotiating and staying with the messiness of democracy. They remain centered despite the conflicts, the bad feelings, of human relationships. Such persons entertain the perspective of the other without losing their own volition. By resisting a cultural tendency to pursue one's own selfish interests, such citizens keep striving to bring the outsider inside. They understand that the cult of the individual, however appealing, finally ends by transforming our grievances and complaints into quarrels and estrangements, rather than conversations and reconciliations. For them, self-other reciprocity is the basis for social living.

Democracy, John Dewey said, "is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience." Citizens, he continued, "participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own." This results in a "breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory [and today we would add gender] which kept men [and women] from perceiving the full import of their activity." And most importantly, "since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest." These, Dewey concluded, "can be created only by education" (Democracy 87).

By seeking to replace the static term "interaction" with the concept of transaction in the area of human affairs, Dewey highlighted the importance of casting a critical eye on all privileged hierarchies--whether of people, institutions, practices, or ideas. Because democracy is always looking to the future, it depends dynamically upon the kind of change that hierarchies constantly work against. They prefer control over transformation. In contrast, Dewey was committed to a society where citizens try to solve the problems of living through the experimental method, without resorting to pre-determined and dogmatic structures. Observing that democratic social life is characterized by mutuality and permeation, Dewey showed us that all parties thrive by being in some way altered in the course of cooperative play, dialogue, and work. No participant is the same after a social transaction.

Individuals develop democratically when things are not fixed in advance, but are open to negotiation and mediation. While democracy inspires us to see all plans as beginning with separate individuals and their responses and interpretations, very quickly one person is in conversation with another. By encouraging the growth of individual citizens, democracy does so, not to sanction the excesses of liberty--of staying apart in competition--but to set human relationships on a new footing. This new footing represents an attempt to remain engaged with the conflicts and paradoxes of human relationship through stories of negotiation. When the dignity of the individual is valued, freedom should serve to move people together, not apart, as relationship proceeds tentatively across previously restricted boundaries. In a democracy, individuals gain a future by creatively imagining spaces for others.

In describing "open-mindedness" as "the keystone" of a democratic culture, Jerome Bruner rightly enumerates the precarious checks and balances that this view entails. An open quality of mind, Bruner says, constitutes "a willingness to construe knowledge and values from multiple perspectives without loss of commitment to one's own values." The promise, however, never obviates the attendant dilemmas:

We have learned with much pain, that democratic culture is neither divinely ordained nor is it to be taken for granted as perennially durable. Like all cultures, it is premised upon values that generate distinctive ways of life and corresponding conceptions of reality. Though it values the refreshments of surprise, it is not always proof against the shocks that open-mindedness sometimes inflicts. Its very open-mindedness generates its own enemies, for there is surely a biological constraint on appetites for novelty.

Continuing, Bruner sees "constructivism" as "a profound expression of democratic culture." This is because such an intellectual approach "demands that we be conscious of how we come to our knowledge and as conscious as we can be about the values that lead us to our perspectives." Accountability and responsibility are crucial here, but this does not mean that "there is only one way of constructing meaning, or one right way." Bruner advocates open-mindedness, and its corollary, constructivism, because he sees these values as best able to cope "with the changes and disruptions that have become so much a feature of modern life" (30). And importantly, this way of relating democratically one to another must forever be earned and revitalized.

The selfhood that democracy makes possible brings with it a never-ending spiral of problems, contradictions, paradoxes. For instance, acknowledging our deep-seated propensity for hierarchy, authority, and certainty--our lack of trust in our inferiors--reveals the kind of social effort required if we truly desire democracy. As John Burnheim notes in Is Democracy Possible?:

Revolution does not create new relationships. They emerge out of gradual social change, especially the emergence and diffusion of new practices. New practices can be introduced deliberately only when they can be clearly described and taught. Even then they will not endure unless they become interwoven with the fabric of social practices and social motivations. (155)

Thus when we come to consider the kinds of talk about literature that might happen in school, it will be important to consider the patterns of exchange that are enacted and how self-determination is encouraged for individual readers even as they are testing their responses and interpretations on each other. If the tensions of democracy are not openly on display in the literature classroom, students will continue to learn that their meanings are more properly controlled by others.

Reading and Democracy

Textual interpretation lies at the heart of democratic relationships--the creation and mediation of a rich cacophony of narratives. Forms of literature, from canonical tomes to back-fence gossip, have always constituted both group and personal identity in the world. Democracy, however, alters one's approaches to literary texts. Reversed is the ancient stance of blind reverence; thus, in important aspects, democratic readers begin addressing texts with a new sense of critical and interpretive responsibility. Indeed, it's a quite recent development historically for people to admit openly that a "personal" connection may exist between them and the texts they are reading, let alone that this may have consequences for the social scheme of things.

If people in a democracy are to reach their full potential, then they must not defeat themselves in advance. Unfortunately, schooling in numerous ways sends quite undemocratic messages about who can soar and who must remain grounded--not everyone is allowed to become who they wish. In contrast, when we commit ourselves to democratic relationships, we seek to create protective, mutual spaces out of which self-expression may grow. When their responses are respected by teachers in a democratic setting, students develop confidence in raising their voices, but this does not fool them into thinking that their efforts are adequate for merely being efforts. The path to individual agency, to self-determination, inevitably involves social testing. Thus self-expression is never merely idiosyncratic. Whether in harmony or dissonance, it derives from a democratic procession of voices. Having questioned traditional hierarchical arrangements in society, democracy allows a new kind of social dialogue to supersede accidents of birth as the means to self-fulfillment.

Sharing literary readings can inspire democratic satisfactions. In a democracy, literary response is not a search for final meaning; rather, it enacts the collaborative mediation necessary for readers to share and evolve their interpretations. Each new "poem"--just as each new person--has the potential for speaking to our imagination and thereby defining anew some understanding we have of the world. All imaginative literature thus can be seen as challenging or rearranging our preconceived notions. To begin with, there exists a certain amount of common ground in the texts we're reading, enough so that we can talk with others and be understood. From this point, if we are willing, we join as active participants a conversation composed of many voices, but no final word. As we attune ourselves to these reading exchanges, our social selves continue to evolve.

Democratic enterprises begin with citizens having the convictions of their own responses. No one finally can escape their own initial construction of the "poem." But even as these individual readings emerge, readers understand the importance of remaining open to conflicting points of view; the alternative is to slip back into the isolated venues of one's original responses. Openness requires constant negotiation so that meanings respect both individual diversity and group solidarity. By emphasizing reading as a "social activity," we stay alert to how important the interpersonal is to our understanding and appreciation of texts.

In undemocratic classrooms, driven as they tend to be by facts and tests, reading poems or novels is often reduced to the mere transfer of information. In contrast, democratic teaching fosters multifaceted readings, built upon layers of agreement and disagreement. A literacy that promotes transformation always entails some significant change in perspective. How consequential this can be is persuasively underscored by Toni Morrison's commentary on slave narratives:

The prohibition against teaching a slave to read and write (which in many Southern states carried severe punishment) and against a slave's learning to read and write had to be scuttled at all costs. These writers knew that literacy was power. Voting, after all, was inextricably connected to the ability to read; literacy was a way of assuming and proving the "humanity" that the Constitution denied them. That is why the narratives carry the subtitle "written by himself," or "herself," and include introductions and prefaces by white sympathizers to authenticate them. . . .A literate slave was supposed to be a contradiction in terms.

When a mind collides with a text in open conversation, prepare for the unexpected. Often students will take off in directions I had not anticipated as teacher and this threatens my control. If a student rejects the interpretation of the text being featured in my "lesson" and instead invents a new one, both the previous interpretation and the authority that had precariously sustained it become open to question. Given that all "hypotheses" and "beliefs" need exposure to criticism in a democracy--implying they might eventually fail and have to be replaced--we might imagine every literature classroom littered with collapsing textual interpretations, where earlier readings are resisted by the next gathering of readers.

In the midst of these alternate readings, I stand nervously as teacher, sometimes on the "wrong" side of the interpretation. With traditions to keep, and hierarchies to uphold before I sleep, I would certainly find it easier to back away from these endless reversals. For this highlights my struggle with teaching literature: How can I contain my monologic tendencies and not disrupt the pluralistic conversation of response and interpretation that furthers the values of democracy? Teaching involves staying with the mess that is democracy rather than being seduced by the efficiencies of unquestioned authority.

In exploring how reading literature as a social act contributes to democratic relationships, I find it important to keep my own educational story constantly in mind. I can't just make pronouncements about democracy for others without considering my contradictions and reversals. Too often, I remain unaware of how I too resist democracy. Theories and beliefs about the world reside finally in people's stories. Thus, the explorations on the pages that follow are my attempt to understand the dilemmas I've faced as a teacher of English--to explain why I have struggled with the problems of access, perspective, and confidence.

Democratic teaching/learning, despite its difficulties, releases the widest range of possibilities within the social individual. By fostering human relationships that acknowledge the other's point of view and place value on the multi-sided nature of human experience, democratic ways of being in the classroom stay grounded in conversations to which we all feel comfortable contributing. In questioning the role of authority in the literature classroom and recognizing how listening might enrich our sense of the other, I find the lines of Peter's poem again resounding, "we are alive in each other." What might we all become as learners and teachers if we persisted in desiring democracy?