the minnesota review n.s. 61-62 (2004)Carolyn WhitsonWhy Does the Lance Bleed? Whom Does the Grail Serve? Unasked Questions from a Working-Class EducationI didn't come from a romantic world, but I was educated in one. In the chaotic, nerve-wracking environs of a working-class family coming apart at the end of the Viet Nam War, I started school, and it was a place that at first seemed as unlike my own home as any book of legends or fairy tales. There were no princesses and no castles, but there was the idea that rules made things better for everyone, that order and quiet were normal, and that hard work was appreciated and actually got you somewhere you wanted to go. I embraced school, because it seemed to embrace me. It treated me like Jack in that beanstalk story—where my mother might scold me for selling her out for magic beans, school told me that I was clever to do so, and that if I climbed and climbed and climbed (and didn't get killed by the giant), I would get the goose that laid the golden eggs, and that would win me the admiration of everyone. While education teaches "critical thinking," it didn't teach me to be critical of the education itself. Some things had to be believed in. I didn't come to ask whom I was really serving in my education until my education had almost put its finishing touches on me. And I am indeed a finished product: I teach other working-class kids (and adults) in what is code-phrased as an "urban university," and one might well ask whom I serve now with the holy lance of privilege and the grail of betterment I am supposed to uphold. Not everyone had the working-class childhood that I did. Sociologist Lillian Rubin has eloquently documented the differences in working-class culture between "settled living" and "hard living." Hard living is what happens when all the effort your family can collectively muster can't save you from poverty and despair. It would be unfair to use my life as the representative of typical working-class culture—more likely, my experience would be seen as representing a Dickensian melodrama of cruelty, hopelessness, and perhaps pitiable weakness. There was violence, there was want, there was disease and the threat of being orphaned, there was constant moving in hopes of a better job, a better life. I remain amazed at the array of "poor plucky kid" stories that abound which would allow me to reject where I came from and congratulate myself for leaving it for my own sake. I was raised on those stories, but my parents were not the ones who told them. These were the stories assigned in class, encouraged at the library, put forward on television. Ingesting these stories won me praise at school, kept me "out of trouble" at home, and alienated me utterly from any kids or people I lived around. I didn't do anything practical or social; reading and studying, which my parents understood was supposed to give me a chance at succeeding, were solitary activities. It was great that I wasn't out doing anything dangerous or getting hurt, or "worse" (there was always an ominous "worse" that my mother wanted to keep me inside to protect me from), and it was great that I wasn't demanding attention, since everyone was very busy trying to solve insoluble problems. But I liked it too much, and it gave me funny ideas about what and who were important—it didn't make me a better daughter, sister, neighbor, or friend. I would be twenty-two years old before I encountered a story that more accurately described my education, and some years beyond that before I would be able to read it as such. That story was the Arthurian romance, Perceval, or, The Story of the Grail, by Chrétien de Troyes. Most people have heard some sort of Grail story, or seen a version on television or at the movies. You think you know how it goes: it's a quest story; it's a pious story; it's about pursuing the highest ideals for the ultimate reward. That's the way we've used that story for the past couple of centuries, anyway. Surprisingly, the first non-Celtic version of this story is not a quest story (not for the Grail, anyway), not pious (the Grail is not explicitly holy), and exposes the shame of selfish advancement and the community failures it produces. The character of Perceval, as created in the late 1170s or so, is a failure and a fool; he doesn't get his makeover for over a hundred years. What could de Troyes' Perceval teach a working-class kid who had been striving since age six to get the crowning validation of education (eventually understood as a PhD and a professorship) and the smooth, quiet life it promised? Perceval was a smart kid, though not a good kid. In my neighborhood he might have been known as a smart-ass or a kiss-up, as I was. The thing was, once he saw something exciting to him and that could give him power to do what he wanted, he went after it single-mindedly, and cared little whom he abandoned or hurt in the process.1 In pursuing my education, I cost my family a lot of money (even though they wanted to give it). I received scholarships and worked during graduate school, but I could have been much sooner working a well-paying job that would have helped my family when it needed help. Or, I could have been living closer to home and working a job that allowed me the free time and community values to spend time with my family, helping them or just loving them, instead of reading in my distant ivory tower. I could have done things that would have been understandable and of value to them—like getting married and having children. I would have been bad and miserable at both of these, but, hell, so were they. Being a member of and having a family were not graded on a curve in the working-class towns where I grew up. They were givens. I have no regrets that I didn't do these things, but that doesn't mean that there was no cost to my community and family because I didn't. My education gave me attitudes, language, and opportunities to leave people behind, and to feel superior about doing it. That was a disservice that middle-class education routinely does to working-class families. My parents had hoped that I would use my education to do something they felt useful, or of service to others; something practical. There was despair and puzzlement when I announced I was going to be an English major. Still more when I said I was going to be a medievalist (what on earth was that?). All that time and money, and all it seemed I was doing was reading fairy tales. Teaching, they knew, was supposed to be respected, but the teachers that they knew had made them feel small and stupid, and those teachers had taught their own daughter to, however unintentionally, do the same. When I read Perceval, it was clear that he was, like me, a hick. He lived out in the countryside, protected by his widowed mother from the world of the courts and their games of chivalry. The nobility made great show of their leisure and spent great amounts of money and time on pageantry and tournaments. Perceval's mother, who unlike mine was of the noble class, was trying to keep her son from the fate that met his father and her older sons—the boys became knights to please their father, a famous knight (though ruined by Uther-Pendragon's bid for rulership), but they died in combat on the way home to show him their new status. Instead of giving him pride, the sons gave him cause to die of grief. The mother kept Perceval from knowing his true identity—she groomed him to be a gentleman farmer. She tried to give him a moral education. When some knights cross through the estate intent on fighting with some other knights, all her efforts go out the window. Here is Perceval's thought process on first encountering this other class of men: The lad hears but does not see the men. . . . In his astonishment, he exclaimed: "By my soul, my lady mother spoke the truth when she told me that devils are the most hideous things in the world; and she taught me the lesson that you should cross yourself as a protection against them. But I'll ignore this advice, and indeed I'll not cross myself, but instead I'll catch the very strongest of them with one of these javelins I'm carrying so that I'll sure none of the others will ever come near me." That is what the youth said to himself before he saw them. Then, when he had a clear view of them... and when he saw the glittering hauberks and the bright, gleaming helmets and the lances and shields that he had never seen before, and saw the white and the scarlet shining in the sunlight and all that gold, sky-blue and silver, he was charmed and delighted and exclaimed: "Ah, God have mercy on me! These are angels I see here. Now I've really committed a great sin. . . . My mother wasn't telling stories when she told me angels were the most beautiful creatures there are, apart from God, who is the most beautiful of all. I think I can see the Lord God here, because I can pick out one of them who is so fair that the others... don't have a tenth of his beauty. Mother herself told me that we should worship God above all others and do Him reverence and honor him, so I'll worship this one and then all the angels after him." (375-376) Perceval doesn't have a way to read these men, they are so far out of the orbit of his daily life. Fear at first tells him to brand them on the only scale of alien absolutes given him (his mother's religious training)—they are devils. But seeing them, brighter, higher, more colorful than anything on the farm, he has to read his awe on the other end of that scale: they are angels, and the most beautiful must be God himself. I had only a slightly more subdued response to my own teachers as a child: they were mostly women, but unlike any women I knew. They were dressed nicely—indeed, more beautifully and expensively than my mother—every day. They told us to do things, but unlike the case of my mother, no man showed up to tell them what to do. They were generally calm. They smiled a lot. They expressed praise at my doing things that my own family would find irresponsible—daydreaming, doodling, talking about my own opinions. I remember that at age six I literally did not think that teachers were human beings. I thought that they walked into lockers at night and then assembled themselves anew each school day—seeing a teacher in the grocery store once was stunning. My seventh grade teacher, Mrs. Freeman (!), wore outrageously glamorous clothes to class everyday, and she was always heavily made up. She looked like a soap opera star. I found out eventually that her husband was a clothing designer and made all her clothes for her. In my world, women sewed, and they did it from Butterick patterns we got at the fabric store. And no one ever came out looking that good. I have no doubt that what I learned from Mrs. Freeman about the possibility of men who loved you enough to sew for you and that you could look fabulous and be in control of a bunch of people everyday changed my expectations and desires in this life forever. It is only slight exaggeration to say that I worshipped her. But how alarming that all that one's loving parents taught you can be wiped away so quickly! But bringing up a child in the working-class world often involves giving her some very unloving lessons in limits, self-control, and endurance. Nothing my family could teach me promised anything glamorous. Their own dreams were totally disappointed. The vague promises of having a man who loved me someday if I was "good," were demonstrably false in a world where the idea of divorce was becoming prevalent even in the working-class. Religion promised glory only after you were dead. So, life was truly a vale of tears, as presented to me, but one was still obligated to work hard and be helpful. School was committed to saying something else on a daily basis. Even Mr. Rogers, between moral teachings about sharing, took me vicariously to see people doing interesting things—piloting planes, healing people in clean, white buildings. Nothing in my early education explained why my family didn't have the options I was shown. My later education led me to believe that if one was poor, it was because one was lazy, stupid, evil, or unlucky. And the option of "unlucky" was presented as less credible over time. The knights who meet up with a worshipful Perceval on his knees understandably think him a fool, but he's a fool that validates them in their privilege, finery and sense of entitlement. As Perceval comes to realize that they are men, he then makes that hungry leap that I did: what do they do with their cool stuff, and how can I get to be like them? He quickly develops his own agenda, and does not answer the lord's question about the men they are pursuing. When the men ask their lord what he's learned in interrogating the Welshman, he responds: "So help me God, he's a real ignoramus; for he never gives me a straight answer to anything I ask him, but instead he himself asks about everything he sees: what it's called and what it's for.". . . Perceval], in his rather naïve way, said to him: "Were you born like that?"—"No lad: that's impossible, for no one can be born that way."—"Who rigged you up like this, then?"—"I'll tell you who, lad. . . . [I]t's still less than full five years since I was given all this equipment by King Arthur, who dubbed me knight." (377-378) It is in some ways a lie to say that no one can be born a knight, or a professor, for that matter. Being born into an environment where one has the resources, value system, encouragement, and even perhaps expectation of privileged work is a precondition that, while not mandatory, is certainly helpful and more easily guarantees success. I have students who are very curious about how I became a professor and how a professor lives—I am like a zebra passing through their streets. Because the students most curious about me, like Perceval, are often motivated by some aspect of my life that appeals to them, they want to know my formula, the secret for my success, if indeed (and they are skeptical) I came from real folks like them. Whenever I say that luck was a large part of it, they tend to scoff. Luck and a lot of discomfort with where I was. Luck, and no viable options for a sane life in that environment. Luck, and learning to affirm a lot of people who had more privilege and power than I did. They want to hear that hard work will do it. Or even that being really smart will do it. They want to believe that deserving a life of clean, glamorous work will get it for you. When I tell them that a number of people in graduate school who worked just as hard, were just as smart or smarter, and were even nicer human beings didn't get to be professors, that is too frightening for them to admit. So, it remains a mystified process. The knights, as they finish up interrogating Perceval, notice that he is deferred to by the harrowers who come to work in the fields. This suggests to them that Perceval may be of some status. They ask him his name, but they don't get the individualized answer they expect: "Sir," says he, "I'll tell you: my name's 'dear son.'"—"So you're 'dear son'? I'm sure you have another name too."mdash;"Indeed, sir, I'm called 'dear brother.'"—"I can well believe you. But if you're prepared to tell me the truth, I should like to know your real name."—"Sir," he says, "I can tell you that by my proper name I'm called 'dear master.'"—"So help me God, that's a fine name. Have you any more?"—"Not I, sir; and I've certainly never had any more." (378-379) Throughout most of the tale Perceval is referred to as "the lad," "the Welshman," or "the knight." His discovery of his individual name is a significant, if not the significant, impetus of the story. To be historically accurate, it must be said that the knights of the late twelfth century did not ask for names as markers of individuality as we might. They probably wanted to know who his father was, and, indeed, if Perceval knew the answer to that he would have been treated by them in a vastly different manner. But de Troyes is calling attention to something that the nobility—and the modern middle-class—strive to do: make a name for yourself. Every part of that phrase carries weight: the name isn't a given, it's a mark of achievement; you want a name—one thing that defines you for yourself and others; the mark of achievement is social identity—a name—being called something; it is "for"—i.e., it has a purpose, it gets you something; and the beneficiary is your self, not the community, not the family, even, as the centuries wear on. The working class, the poor, and the established upper class do not tend to think this way—whether they want to or not, individuals in those places are better privately known than publicly. But the middle-class strives, and the individual is held essentially important. It would be fair to say that in the story that Perceval's quest to become a knight—a famous knight known by his own name, as the climax of the story asserts—is of disastrous effect to his community, his family, and even to himself. My own family would joke about me wanting "to put a bunch of letters" after my name. My brother teasingly referred to me as "Doc" after my final graduation. My mother asked me what I would happen to my degree after I got married and changed my name (which surely I would do someday). I smirked to my friends that I would now be able to insist, "To you, that's Doctor Whitetrash." (I would not make this joke to my family, because it would pain them to be implicated as whitetrash, but that was certainly the way I was viewed by some in graduate school.) All the names that Perceval says are his bespeak his belonging to where he lives and how he is important to others. He is "dear" as a son and a brother (the dearness of a "master" strikes me as somewhat compulsory among his servants and workers, however). The interrogating lord meets this with derisive condescension—to him, Perceval isn't even just a nobody, he's a fool who doesn't know who he is, or that he should be anything other than what he is already. But that dearness is utterly disposable to Perceval as he decides that being a knight is what he wants to do. When he tells his mother of his discovery of "God," she understands that her worst fears have been realized. She says to him: "I do believe you've seen those angels folk complain of that kill everything they come across." She points out to her son how destructive these creatures are, hoping to dissuade him, but he replies to her, "Not at all, Mother, truly I haven't [seen destructive angels]! They say they're called knights" (de Troyes 379). All of her love, bitterly acquired knowledge, and fears cannot turn Perceval from the grandeur of knighthood. That knighthood has been the tragedy and destruction of his family counts for nothing. He will have his desire. She tries at the end to give him some guidance in how to behave ethically as a knight—indicating that her experience has been that knights are licentious and irreligious (not exactly the way that they are hyped by themselves). But if Perceval has one key individual flaw, it is that he is a lousy listener. He leaves, and she drops into a dead faint that eventually becomes actual death—already, knighthood has claimed another victim in his family. In drawing these parallels between the quest for knightly fame and achieving an education that moves one from the working class to the middle one, it is fair to ask: am I saying that this is an inevitability? Am I anti-intellectual? Anti-education? Or just anti-middle class? That conventional education asserts middle-class values as superior to working-class ones I think is clear. That working-class students who earn good grades are invited to think of themselves as special, exceptional, and are encouraged to pursue a "better" life is pretty universal as an experience among those I know with such backgrounds. The problem may not be with the encouragement, so much as the implications in the way that encouragement is delivered: I was encouraged to think of myself as good because I was smart, as better than others because my grades were better, as more deserving of a secure and fun life than the hard-working and self-sacrificing people in my family and my community because I was a good writer and took tests well. My "potential" was more valued than many other people's actuality. Because I was an exceptional student, I was to expect exceptions to be made for me in life—I wouldn't have the lives or problems my family had, I would be invited into middle-class institutions like college because I might be useful to the middle-class. And I would be rewarded for that usefulness with money, leisure, and relative security. This system does not encourage social responsibility, social justice, nor respect for those who perform vital and unglamorous tasks. It invites one to have one's desire—or at least to strive for it, and to leave others to their own struggles as individuals themselves, or as lumped into a fated, pitiable group distantly referred to as "the poor." This aspect of education is unworthy and unnecessary. The stated ideals of education—that one improve things, that one learn critical inquiry, that one develop a coherent voice and participate in democracy—could be better served by privileging more than solitary pursuits, solitary advancement and hierarchy based on abstractions. But even though the feminist, multicultural, and labor movements have worked hard to create social justice, it seems that in the institution of education, the most that has been planted is a certain empty rhetoric of "tolerance": no real respect or appreciation of difference, no sense of responsibility to see that where there is abundance there be generosity, that where there is work done that the work be visible and valued. When students come into the college classroom, regardless of their class origin, they are there for first, last, and always their own desires—and for many, to hell with everyone else. As Perceval sets off on his mission to become a knight, he makes attempts at what he thinks that means—he happens upon a lady waiting for her lover in a tent in the woods, and declares her his courtly love. He violently demands a kiss, takes a ring off of her as a token, eats the meal. He doesn't listen to her pleas about her jealous lover or her desires; he is acting out his dream. This leads to the lady being hacked about the forest by her knight for what must be at least months because he doesn't believe she gave favors to Perceval against her will—she is beaten and driven to the point that her clothes fall off her back in shreds. Perceval doesn't make amends for this until quite some time later, and even then, it is in a combat that asserts his virtue as a knight, not a correction of his shameful behavior. In order to be knighted by Arthur, Perceval kills the Red Knight, who has been terrorizing and humiliating the court of Camelot. Perceval is sent because he's seen as an expendable simpleton—it's actually a joke a knight plays on him to tell him that if he kills the Red Knight he will get his armor and be knighted. Perceval does kill the knight—by beating him to death. He doesn't follow the chivalric rules of ritualized fighting, so he aims for the goal, not the points for style. De Troyes makes this a dig at the nobility: their vaunted honor and bravery is mostly about looking good more than doing good. Perceval may be a naïf in the story, but he is the "wise fool" shows the shallowness of his "betters." He puts a stop to a bully that other knights who are too cowardly and self-interested to challenge. One moment in the story that comes back to haunt me over the years is when Perceval, having killed the Red Knight, claims his prize: the armor of his opponent. He has no idea how to remove armor, much less put it on, so he ends up gracelessly looting the body. Yvonet, the knight (described as "a very courtly man," [ 386] just before he sends Perceval out to what he thinks will be slaughter by the Red Knight) who promised Perceval the armor and a chance at knighthood, comes out to advise him in how to remove everything from the dead man's body. You could say that Yvonet is Perceval's second teacher in the ways of chivalry (after his mother). He wonders why Perceval keeps his own clothes as he claims the armor, since the dead knight's clothes are of silk and other expensive materials: [T]he youth was unwilling to give up his own clothes or, whatever Yvonet might say, take a superbly made tunic of silk cloth, which the knight wore under his hauberk when he was alive. Nor can Yvonet take off [Perceval's] feet the hide shoes he wore. He said instead: "Damn it! Are you joking? Would I change my good clothes that my mother made for me the other day for those of that knight? My stout hempen shirt for his soft thin one? Would you want me to give up my waterproof tunic for this one that would never keep a drop out? May a man be throttled who will exchange at any time his own good clothes for other, bad ones!" Teaching a fool is a very painful business: despite every plea, he was determined to take nothing but the arms. (389-390) The interrogation that the working-class always makes of the middle-class is use-value versus symbolic value. Perceval is termed a fool here because he clings to clothes that have practical value and are new—why take a used, thin garment that won't keep you warm or dry and won't last? Because looking good is more important, even if you're in the business of fighting to the death. The superbly made tunic, the shoes that are finer than Perceval's hide ones, are status symbols, and two short-cuts up the social ladder are looking the part and affirming the values. This moment in the story pains me because it brings together all the veiled brutalities that happen as one passes from one class into another: even though Perceval has saved Camelot from a dangerous and offensive enemy, he is to be shamed for the very practicalities that allowed him to do the job where others failed. You could say quite literally that Perceval was willing to get his hands dirty, where the knights of the famed Round Table would not risk failure, even to save the honor of their king and queen. Yvonet feels superior to Perceval because of his manners and tastes—scarcely significant virtues in my book, nor in de Troyes' book, since de Troyes himself was not a member of the nobility, but a privileged servant as court poet. De Troyes had to witness the superficialities and banalities everyday as the court of Marie de Champagne focused on etiquette and games while the people they ruled had real problems. The Story of the Grail is a sly critique of the shortcomings of the courtly set. Perceval claims the right to take up arms because he held to his end of the agreement, but he now has to build a reputation that will earn him respect. Working-class graduate students often face this problem—they can perform well, they are smart and do the work, but they do not have the right clothes, mannerisms, or values. They ask "irrelevant" questions in class about class issues, they take their assistant teaching work "too seriously," and they don't treat as invisible the secretaries, custodians, or physical plant workers that are kept to the periphery of the academic world. The working-class student must assimilate and give up working-class values in order to be welcome in the academic world. She must renounce or at least ignore/hide her class of origin. To do otherwise is to make middle-class students and professors uncomfortably aware of their sense of privilege and their assumptions of the centrality of their desires and opinions. This is unwelcome behavior. In the story, Perceval is taken under the wing of a great knight who will train him to assimilate perfectly—the beginning of doom in the story for all concerned. The man is Gornemant of Gohort. He gives Perceval a cultural makeover—taking his rural behaviors and values away, but keeping the boy's natural strength, prowess, vitality. Every time Perceval does something right, or very often, wrong, he states that "My mother taught me that." Or he begins sentences with "My mother told me" (de Troyes 394-396 and passim.) Perceval asks questions and tries to reconcile what he is told with what he has been told—good qualities in a student. But these blow his cover as a respectworthy knight. Gornemant advises him: "[D]on't be too ready to speak: no one can be too talkative without often saying something that makes him look foolish, for the wise man's saying goes: "Whoever talks too much does himself a bad turn" (396). And, more chillingly: "[N]ever say that your mother has taught you something; just say I have" (397, emphasis mine). One never entertains the idea that somehow the working-class family or environment can produce excellent students, teachers, professionals—this is the rhetoric of exceptionalism. If one shows up to a middle-class institution with any admirable trait (one a middle-class person would wish to possess himself, not just want in someone serving his interests), it is written off as a fluke, an accident, or due to some individual quality or circumstance of the working-class person before him. This phenomenon is documented repeatedly in working-class novels of education by Richard Rodriguez, Dorothy Allison, Anzia Yezierska, Jack London, Alice Walker, Paul Monette, Richard Wright, Cheri Register, and others. The educational process for such a gifted student would include acculturation, and erasure of working-class markers (diction, posture, dress, eating habits, etiquette). This can be achieved through shaming, or through flattery (offering special opportunities for exposure to middle class arts, homes, dining, music). I learned how to eat brie, paté, and escargots, and how to pair wines with certain foods by attending prestigious lectures on campus. I came for the opportunity to meet people I was told were "great," and I wanted to save on my food budget. Brie with wafers was better than macaroni and cheese. But, as well, I was encouraged and warned to learn to blend in such situations, as they were a part of my future life, if I got a degree and a job. Soon, I learned to feel failed or deprived if I was eating macaroni and cheese, or any of the foods of my childhood. This act of erasure may be taught with what the teacher thinks are the best of intentions, or even thoughtlessly ("don't say 'ain't'"), but it is not innocent. The student goes home and sounds different to her family, doesn't seem to enjoy the food that was cooked for her, dresses like people who are usually seen as a problem to the family (bureaucrats, bill-collectors, radicals). Rather than having learned to communicate better with a variety of audiences, she has been taught to talk "better," so she uses words that no one understands. A rift starts to drive in between the educated, exceptional working-class child and her family. She won't feel at home when at home, her family will misunderstand her as arrogant, and the only place that will look inviting will be with the middle-class, which promises much, but exacts a chilly price. In the middle class, one must "find" oneself, and then find others to love and befriend. One must also keep "trading up" to make sure that one's friends, neighborhood and lovers reflect one's personal achievements—or at least to the status aspired to. Perceval seems like a success story until he comes to the pivotal test in the story. Up 'til now, he has learned to lend his muscle to the right rulers and save the right damsels, but he hasn't developed a name of his own. But one day, he finds himself lost in a wood and surprised to come upon a beautiful castle. He's treated with the greatest hospitality, and he's introduced to the Fisher King, who is grievously wounded in the thighs and can only demonstrate that he provides for his people by fishing every day. The gracious man invites him to stay to dinner, and while they are at table, a mysterious thing happens: While they were talking of this and that, out of a room came a youth holding a white lance grasped by the middle; and he passed by between the fire and those seated on the couch. And everyone present could see the white lance with its shining head; and from the tip of the lance-head oozed a drop of blood, a crimson drop that ran down right to the lad's hand. The young man [Perceval] who had arrived there that night saw this marvel, but refrained from asking how this thing happened, since he remembered that warning given him by the man who knighted him and taught and instructed to beware of talking too much. He feared that, had he asked, it would have been thought impolite; and so he did not enquire. . . . A damsel, who came with the youth . . . held in both hands a grail. . . . Exactly as the lance had done, [she] passed by in front of the couch, going from one room into another. The young man saw them pass, but did not dare ask who was served from the grail, for he kept continually in his heart the words of that wise gentleman. I fear he may suffer for this, because I have heard it said on occasion that one may just as easily keep too silent as speak too much. (416-417) De Troyes here in this last quoted sentence ventures to contradict what the character Gornemant taught Perceval so emphatically. Maybe silence and self-suppression to adhere to a certain appearance are not always good things to do. Something momentous, supernatural and very important has just happened, and Perceval, who could open up the mystery, follows the orders he's been given. In reading this moment I think of the times as a student when something said in class was more genuine than the general run of intellectual observances, or when a book or poem made a scathing or moving point about human problems, but it was clear that keeping silent and focusing on the "objective" (in both senses of the word) was what was expected. Should a novel dealing with racism be discussed mainly in terms of its mythological imagery (as happened in a class discussion of John Edgar Wideman's Reuben I once participated in)? Should a discussion of Eliot's "The Waste Land" refer to despair as a "theme," but keep the historical reasons for that theme submerged in terms of the "literary achievement" of the poem? (Been through that, too.) Or, should the historical realities in The Story of the Grail keep one from bringing up that the contempt for the "bumpkin" is very much alive today? These examples may seem like straw men in an argument, but I have read notes from numerous working-class students who felt humiliated in a class by the contempt with which other students referred to blue-collar or no-collar characters, or who were bored and puzzled by swooning enthusiasm over a Henry James drawing-room scene, or who wondered what the point was at all in discussing meter for half an hour. I don't imagine that most authors write in the way that figure-skating competitions are staged; generally, things are being said that are vitally important to the author, vitally important to humanity coming to terms with itself, and while aesthetics and clever stylistics may be lovely and impressive, style was not employed by these authors to supplant attention to content and message. In my own education, the literary theories that I was taught were conveyed in such a way to show how they could be used to make the analyst seem clever and intimidating. The political and social power of some of these theories was played down—sounding dauntingly smart was more important than discovering insights that might obligate one to be a different person in the world. During the course of the fancy dinner, the grail and lance pass by the company several times, and Perceval holds his peace, thinking he'll privately ask one of the low-ranking court lads the why and whom of the lance and grail. He dismisses his authentic self and his instincts to enquire about what he doesn't know. It is more important to be silent than to perhaps expose ignorance. The consequence of his silence is that the chance to lift the curse on the wasted land of the Fisher King is lost—when Perceval wakes up the next day, all the people are gone, and as he rides off, the castle vanishes into the desolate forest. He has no idea that he did anything wrong, or, more importantly, that he could have done something that would have been to the benefit of all—it just would have entailed not acting like a macho knight for a moment. Perceval is informed of his folly when he soon happens upon a devastated maiden, who is keening over the body of her murdered knight. Quite improbably, she stops this to ask Perceval where he's been and what he did. She knows the legend of the Fisher King and his court vanished in the waste land. When Perceval tells her that he saw the bleeding lance and the grail that is transported to another room, she asks him if he inquired why does the lance bleed, and whom is served by the grail (presumably in that next room)2 He tells her that he did not. Suddenly, simultaneously, his mistake and his identity are revealed: [The maiden cries:] "So much the worse, then, so help me God! What's your name my friend?" Then he, who did not know his name, intuitively answered that he was called Perceval the Welshman, not knowing whether he spoke the truth or not. But what he said was true, though he did not know. And when the damsel heard it, she stood up in front of him and said to him: "Your name is changed, my good friend!"—"In what way?"—"Perceval the wretched! Ah, unhappy Perceval, how unfortunate you are now not to have asked all this! For you would have brought such benefit to the good king who is crippled that he would have completely regained the use of his limbs and governed his land, and from that you would have reaped such profit! But now you may be sure that many misfortunes will befall both you and others. You may know that this happened to you because of the wrong you did your mother, for she died of grief on your account." (de Troyes 421-422) In trying to become the perfect knight, in trying to name himself, he arrives at an answer that he himself can't believe, even when it's true. Moreover, that name is taken and tainted with the blood of his mother (and with the torment of the Fisher King and his people) immediately upon his taking claim of it: Perceval the wretched. Here is someone who had needed abilities who shaped them for his desire to attain a self that others warped him to want. I don't think the message here is that Perceval should never have become a knight, but that he should have improved what being a knight meant. His early lending of his strength and no-nonsense help to others in need in the story decreased the more he started subtracting from his uniqueness in order to better conform to what others told him to become. In The Story of the Grail, neglecting to ask questions of authorities is not just bad for the learner, his family, and the people in general; it's bad for the authorities as well. The enigmas of the bleeding lance and of the grail that isn't for oneself, but for some invisible other who is more important, strike me as analogs to issues I myself now ask in examining my education and the education I am paid to give to others: is anyone wounded, victimized, or combated by what I was taught and how I choose to teach? Who is being served from the uses I put my education to and the educating of others I perform? Can anything be done to bring all involved into the answers, into the discussion, into the actions I take? I am no Perceval the wretched. There is no one in this story whom I want to be. But it would be nice to help others see that the world education presents is not as romantic as it seems, and yet, to find a way to link the good and the real of both working-class and middle-class worlds into an education that is more whole, more true, more fair, and more useful. Notes
Works Cited
Carolyn Whitson teaches at Metropolitan State University. She has written on working-class culture, education, and literature. |