Pedagogic encounters: Master and disciple in the American novel after the 1980’s

Pedagogic encounters: Master and disciple in the American novel after the 1980’s. Aristi Trendel. Lexington Books, 2021.

Biographies of the legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow tell of a college professor at Washington State University not much older than he named Ida Lou Anderson. This woman, solitary and crippled with polio, nevertheless exuded such strength of spirit and clarity of mind that the popular young man formed a lasting bond with her, as her prize protégé. He squired her to social events on campus and later stayed in touch. For many years after graduation, blind and bed-ridden, she continued to coach him about his diction while he was reporting the firebombs from a London rooftop. Here was a man who literally crawled through broken glass one night to reach the BBC studio, who flew multiple bombing missions over Berlin through curtains of flak, who was the first reporter to tour the death camp known as Buchenwald. When he was told after the war that his mentor had finally died, this man’s-man, who had seen the worst the world could offer, turned aside unapologetically to weep at her passing, such was their bond.

As the etymology of the term implies, education literally entails leadership (from the Latin “ducere”). Not surprisingly, schools of education across the United States have invested resources into studying leadership. Furthermore, scholars in the field of Leadership Studies have investigated the tutelary role of leaders in other settings such as the military, the workplace, and politics. Teaching can be thought of as a species of leadership.

Aristi Trendel has conducted a series of investigations into a subspecies of teaching that goes all the way back to antiquity, namely the relationship between a master and his or her disciple. The word mentor, of course, is based on a character from Homer’s Odyssey. The Hebrew people nurtured the office of rabbi. Often in anthropology, one comes across the role of elder or shaman to conduct the young toward adulthood. Archetypal psychology, for example, provides that the lifelong quest requires a companion, a wise guide. In his last years, Michel Foucault was reading about the methods in Hellenic culture by which one generation would instruct the next, usually by means of submission to a trusted advisor. What we know is that, throughout the ages, education is plainly more than a transfer of knowledge. It is an embodied, intimate relationship of mutual orientation, exemplified best by the historical figures of Confucius, Jesus of Nazareth, and Socrates.

At one point in her book, Trendel writes that the instructor offers more than knowledge. He or she offers one’s self, at tremendous risk – more so in an era when an aggrieved disciple can ruin an instructor’s reputation and career, with little more than allegations of impropriety. Nevertheless, higher education often includes such a disquieting type of leadership beyond the formal classroom.

Stories about these relationships tell us much about the way they work – or go wrong. They also inform listeners beforehand about what to expect from one another. Fiction has populated the imagination of scholars with anecdotes, cautionary tales, legends, and what we might even refer to as an ideal type (Weber) or a sociological form (Simmel), ranging from Merlin to Yoda. Trendel has narrowed the aperture for us, however, to fiction since 1980, as it pertains to these relationships after the teenage years, more often than not as they arise in the context of American academe. Even within these bounds, the author finds ten stories to talk about by such writers as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and John DeLillo.

The master-disciple relationship depends upon a power difference. Coupled with the unusual intimacy such a relationship entails, parents and administrators often worry about what goes on outside the classroom. In our own time, they certainly try to regulate or even criminalize what may occur, hoping to define what constitutes an appropriate intimacy, yet as Trendel repeatedly illustrates, at the center of the experience is what she calls pedagogical Eros, with all of its attendant temptations and confusion. The stories she analyzes frequently circle back to this inherent feature, perhaps in part because the turbulence of Eros trails drama of one kind or another. These are stories infused with great emotion, among them hope, gratitude, pride, resentment, contempt, and curiosity, but the prospects of sex become a recurring theme in Pedagogic Encounters.

Most folks do associate Eros with sexual attraction, so the author pores over a variety of these predicaments:

• hetero-, homo-, and bi-;
• initiated by either the professor or the student;
• to the edification or detriment of either party (or to both).

In fact, she often notices the extent to which the master-figure also learns and grows from the experience. The master is held up frequently as a wounded healer, with his or her own hang-ups, who stands in need of something that a promising acolyte can offer. And that something exceeds the sexual, even if the characters are not always clear about what it is. Even so, Trendel seems more tolerant of the possibility that just as lives become strangely entangled, so will bodies.

In the book’s conclusion, the author summarizes her findings about the rapport that is, as it turns out, both reversible and fluid. Citing Koskela and Siljander (2014), she calls these “existential educative encounters” that promise “awakening” and “collisions”, even as they threaten the norms of society. By their very nature, these relationships alter lives. Trendel clearly suspects that in our present context of political correctness, cancel culture, and the #MeToo movement, outsiders will misconstrue what is going on. Yet there is no question of an abiding mystery, almost as though fate chose two people to find one another, very much like falling in love. Because they do fall in love.

Two lessons the book reinforces. First, participants in such a relationship bear an ethical responsibility to speak the truth and not use one another for selfish purposes. Without trust, the association can deteriorate and defeat its intended purpose, a disorder at the level of both psyche and polis. Second, participants caught up in one another can put themselves at risk of ignoring the encompassing context – the culture, the institutional regime (with its lawyers), the needs of a broken world beyond, where they must ultimately go. Mentorship never takes place in a vacuum, because there will always be spouses, witnesses, rivals, and competing loyalties. Master and disciple must remember the wider world, or what the phenomenologist would refer to as paramount reality. Students of Eric Voegelin will recognize here his interpretation of Plato’s Republic that when the discourse ends, the participants must go back down to the polis in order to resume their daily lives. The dialogue was never intended as an escape from the mundane.

Another way to look at this phenomenon is to remember that, despite an age of remote education intended to cope with a pandemic, teaching at its best is an embodied experience by fallible humans, with all of the attendant shocks that flesh is heir to. Education takes place somewhere between the detached or immaterial content listed in a syllabus, on the one hand, and bodily liaisons, on the other. That is, education belongs to us as a distinctly human enterprise where we struggle to find meaning together, requiring a state or condition of ecstasy, standing outside of ourselves and our variable times.

The studies in this book rely heavily on the social sciences and specifically on research into gender, sex, and identity. Who knew that so much was already written about the erotics of mentorship? At times, the casual reader might be forgiven wondering whether the dominant theme of the book is more about education or sex, so intricate is the relationship between them in these pages. Yet anyone familiar with the works of Plato will recognize what the novelists are struggling to understand. Plato had suggested the therapeutic value of an apt mentor, as a young person transitions toward a healthier sense of self and toward a deeper soul, in the circumstance of desire. In Pedagogic Encounters, Trendel exhibits in a series of ten separable studies how the Master-Disciple relationship can contribute to a greater sense of order, like two halves of the same being who finally find one another again. Or it can spiral out of control.

In either case, these pedagogical encounters are by their nature disruptive, hearkening back to the findings of Plato about love (Symposium) and about the public wariness of such intimate bonds (Hipparchus). This book analyzes multiple attempts to make sense of these life-altering attractions – attractions to one another and to a comprehending truth – especially in an epoch of ideological suspicions.

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