Books

Teaching Abroad, with James Joyce

Summer is here, marked in all her glory by humidity and evening thunderstorms, baseball’s pennant-altering trades , a boost in sales for the makers of those tiny drink umbrellas, and weddings in downeast Maine and the Jersey shore. Once again, Spring has abandoned us - not for another year will we have snow peas or sticky spring leaves, the rushing torments of spring thaws or the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” echoing through football stadiums. Yet each season, when leaving, gracefully leaves behind a few distinct gifts. One of spring’s finest, and certainly most regular, gifts is a new batch of college graduates.

This article is briefly addressed to such new graduates, to young people, to people young at heart, and to really anyone who keeps a few of Spring’s gifts throughout the seasons of their life. We at the OV see a new world opening for these ex-students, many of whom will leave behind libraries to move to new cities, continue to drink their faces off on a casual Tuesday night, and pack themselves into tiny apartments to save on rent. Many of them will forgo making loads of money and opt for the grand searches of experience, the idealistic, if fuzzy, calls for change. Needless to say, we like such people as we like all those who tilt at windmills. In this article, we are addressing one option that many of our compatriots choose to embrace: deciding to teach abroad.

By all appearances, it is a relatively new phenomenon that a great number of young graduates journey to foreign lands to teach English, committing to spending a year in China, Japan, Costa Rica, or some such place. The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET), the granddaddy of such institutions, began in 1987, nearly within the average graduate’s lifetime. Such work has echoes and a lineage in the past and colonialism (think missionaries, say), but is also indisputably a mark and celebration of our modern, global-village view.

Yet there are significant, less atavistic models available for the young ex-student traveling abroad that have nothing to do with old tales of missionaries and their zealous ilk. Take as an example a young man in his mid-twenties who moved to a new city, taught English to foreigners, drank his face off nightly, and packed himself and his young family into shared apartments to save on rent. Take, as an example, the young James Joyce.

In his mid-twenties Joyce left Ireland and moved to the continent with Nora, his bride, and attempted to support her and their young child by teaching English while trying (and trying, and trying) to get a collection of short stories (Dubliners), or perhaps a book of poems (Chamber Music), published. They lived in Trieste, and Joyce took advantage of his time in this city to perfect his Italian. Fittingly, he taught English to a baroness, but most of his efforts were spent on teaching young men who needed the language for business. Trieste was a city also lived in by Stendhal, and somewhat regretted by both authors. It was a city that drove both men to drink, though that may have had more to do with their genetics and dispositions than with any inherent fault in the city.

To these people, Joyce was a symbol of Ireland, a strange, melancholy, wild shamrock of a place, and Joyce lived up some of this reputation by routinely waking up in the gutter and drinking his paycheck. He was so wild that his brother, who lived and taught with him for a short period, would resort to beating him in a desperate attempt to keep him from ruin. Night after night, however, Joyce would have to be hunted down, and one supposes that you could hear his beautiful tenor echoing down alleyways, singing stitches of Italian drinking songs.

The young graduate teaching in foreign lands can learn from Joyce and know that, willing or not, they are representatives of America at a time when our country is viewed as suspect, if not evil, by much of the world. In some cases, the young English teachers that local communities see will be the people’s only tangible contact with America. This, needless to say, is a big responsibility, and a great opportunity. One doesn’t expect to single-handedly vanquish the many poor decisions made by our government on a global scale, but the questions must arise: What will you teach? What seeds will you sow? And how will you represent a country?

A daunting task, surely, and one that James Joyce faced a little over a century ago. In his characteristically odd manner, Joyce embraced this task, composing his teaching lessons to mirror his mind.

These lessons are largely misogynistic and rife with bitterness and humor, with religion and apotheism. Joyce’s views on Ireland are painted in broad strokes, and his central philosophies are certainly not meant to make his home island proud. However, his students learned an invaluable brand of English: if they ever find themselves in a cathouse being proposed to by a whore after sopping up fourteen shots of absinthe, they know that they should be wary of syphilis. Or they could become confused and imagine that they’re inside a Catholic church.

A friend and fellow teacher wisely wrote down a few of Joyce’s lessons for posterity. We will leave our young travelers with a parcel of quotes found in Richard Ellmann’s classic Joyce biography, culled from the lessons he gave on Ireland, religion, women, relationships, money, literature, and most anything else prominent to his thoughts. Young travelers, we hope these lessons help.

“A husband is usually an ox with horns. His wife is brainless. Together they make a four-legged animal.”

“A stuffed bun – the Virgin with the infant Jesus.”

“What is a pachyderm? See that man there with a trumpet for a nose and that sizeable belly – there’s a pachyderm.”

“Signor Berlitz is an insatiable sponge. His teachers have had their brains sopped up. And their flesh? We’ve been crucified on the pole till we’re skin and bones. I present myself to my pupils as an example of the giraffe species in order to teach zoology objectively according to the gospel of my master, Signor Berlitz.”

“That woman has a nice small breast, but her conscience is as wide as a sewer. Her husband is happy because her boyfriends are helping to develop her good points. I am developing myself too. Go you and do likewise. Sop up fourteen shots of absinthe on an empty stomach and you’ll see. If this cure doesn’t develop you, why, you’re hopeless. You may as well give up trying to learn English according to this method.”

“Ireland is a great country. It is called the Emerald Isle. The metropolitan government, after centuries of strangling it, has laid it waste. It’s now an untilled field. The government sowed hunger, syphilis, superstition, and alcoholism there; puritans, Jesuits, and bigots have sprung up.”

“Proverbially and by nature our peasants walk in their sleep, closely resembling fakirs in their froglike and renunciatory sterility. I think they are the one people who, when they are hungry, eat symbolically. Do you know what it means to eat symbolically? I’ll clear it up for you in no time: the peasant family, a big roomful of them, sit round a rustic table as if it were an altar. In the middle of the table, suspended on a string from the ceiling, is a herring which could feed the lot of them. The headman arms himself with a potato. Then with it he makes the sign of the cross (my Tuscan friends say, “He makes the big cross”) high up on the back of the fish instead of just rubbing it as any hypocrite would do. This is the signal, and after him, hieratically, each member of the family performs the same trick so that at the end the members, that is to say the diners, find themselves contemplating a potato in their hands, and the herring, if it doesn’t get eaten by the cat, or rot, is destined to be mummified for posterity, this dish is called the indicated herring. The peasants are gluttons for it, and stuff their bellies full.”

“Dubliners, strictly speaking, are my fellow-countrymen, but I don’t care to speak of our “dear, dirty Dublin” as they do. Dubliners are the most hopeless, useless, and inconsistent race of charlatans I have ever come across, on the island or the continent. This is why the English Parliament is full of the greatest windbags in the world. The Dubliner passes his time gabbing and making the rounds in bars or taverns or cathouses, without ever getting ‘fed up’ with the double doses of whiskey and Home Rule, and at night, when he can hold no more and is swollen up with poison like a toad, he staggers from the side-door and, guided by an instinctive desire for stability along the straight line of the houses, he goes slithering his backside against all walls and corners. He goes ‘arsing along’ as we say in English. There’s the Dubliner for you.”

“This morning – strange to say, for it never happens to me – I hadn’t a cent. I went to the director and told him how things were. I asked him for an advance on my pay. This time the keys of the safe weren’t rusted (as they usually are), but the director refused, calling me a bottomless well. I told him to go and drown himself in it, and took myself off. Now what am I to do? Wretch that I am. My wife is not good at anything except producing babies and blowing bubbles. Fine then, we’ll never die of hunger; the Italian proverb says, “Children constitute wealth.” That’s all very well, but Giorgio’s feet are bursting through his shoes, and my wife goes on blowing bubbles. If I’m not careful, she’ll follow up George the First by unloading a second male successor for the dynasty. No, no, Nora, this game doesn’t suit me. So long as there are bistros in Trieste, I’m afraid your man will have to pass his nights away from home, flapping around like a rag in the breeze.”

“Italian literature begins with Dante and finishes with Dante. That’s more than a little. In Dante dwells the whole spirit of the Renaissance. I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast. I don’t like Italian literature because the mentality of the degenerate Italian writer is dominated entirely by these four elementary themes: beggared orphans and hungry people (will these Italians never stop being hungry?), battlefields, cattle, and patriotism. Italians have a strange way of going through the gymnastics of patriotic ambition. They want to impose, by their fists, the recognition of their intellectual superiority to other peoples. Humanism, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leonardo, Titian, Michelangelo, Galileo: quite so, all very fine people. But I’ve yet to find an Italian who was able to silence me by saying, “Shut up, you fool! The one immortal work for which the Italians are responsible is the foundation of the Roman church.” Why, even I declare that the Roman church is manifold in its bigness – big as a church and as . . . shall we say . . . a whore. You could say no less of a hussy who offers herself among perfumes, songs, flowers, and music, sadly mourning in the silken robes on a throne.”

For more reading, the author would recommend Ellmann’s extensive biography on Joyce. And, of course, Dubliners and Ulysses and such.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Pp. 215-218

© 2008 Obsolete Vernacular.