Perhaps a recent development in advertising may give us a glimpse into some of the underlying relations. According to the motivational ad men, advertisement should present not so much the objective merits of the product as the feelings the customer should have in using it. Although “Custer’s Last Fight” has no visible relations to beer as a product, it may give general expression to the feelings of the consumer of the product—heroic, on a high eminence, free of family and full of pro patria, ready to fight through all encirclements or, just as good or even better, to be carried out in the attempt.
The attitude of the D’Arcy Agency, which handles the Budweiser advertising account, is perhaps the most illuminating of all. They do not like to get very analytical about the success of “Custer’s Last Fight,” and about such success it does seem more decent to be reverential than analytical. Reverence itself, however, can be slightly analyzed and divided into at least two elements—a reverence of the holy origins of the mystery and a reverence of its continuing practical efficacy. When asked for an explanation of the success of “Custer’s Last Fight,” those who should know best are likely to say, “Mr. Busch did it for the 7th Cavalry—and it sells beer.”
4.
In attempting to make some rough estimate of the size of the after-image of Gen. Custer and his Last Stand, we may have come across some of the secular although none of the spectral answers to the question of what are the necessary conditions for enduring life in the world as we know it. Although the question is directed only to the lower world, it has overtones that suggest it should be asked in catechetical form.
Question:
How can a man lose his own life and gain immortality, at least in this world?
Answer:
History can temporarily elevate this or that man above others, but when the history of the moment floats from under him he will be secure only if he has mingled with our enduring dreams, “dreams” here being used in a modern sense as images not only of romantic desires and longings but of fears, resentments and perversities as well. And it further appears that the living do not remain deeply involved with the dead unless the living imagine that they see in the dead parts of their own lives—and deaths.
To this should be added, not cynically on the whole, that the dead increase their security here by making good business connections. Immortality on earth, then, seems to depend on three factors: history, our private lives, and business.
LAST CHAPTER
Shrine to Defeat
Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies. . . . There are perhaps three of these means: powerful diversions of interest, which lead us to care little about our misery; substitutive gratifications, which lessen it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of this kind is indispensable.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Sometime fairly long ago we turned from the puzzle of the Battle as one that probably could never be solved to the mystery of why it has meant so much to us, hoping that, though the Battle remains classified forever as a military secret, it might reveal something about our civilian lives. But the study of the Battle and the exploration of our images of it have many parallels. At first there is an even greater confusion of artifacts, for the remains of these few soldiers, described by Benteen as so many seeds of white corn scattered over the Hill, have been scattered by us through history, art, literature, painting, song, and casual speech, and have been preserved throughout the world in museums, public libraries, private collections, barroom windows, juke boxes and rumpus rooms. In both studies, too, abstractions eventually emerge from the artifacts: bodies fall into lines of white markers and their histories assume certain strategies, paintings of them encircle a pattern, and stories of them follow well-marked plots.
The final question seems naturally to be whether there is any convergence of the lines we have exposed of ourselves to explain what has been the center of our interest in this sandy stretch of ground; and the answer was intimated much earlier by our linear images of the Battle, which despite individual differences and the changes in artistic conventions of different times, have been drawn around an encircled circle at the top of a hill. The convergence repeats itself in our other images.
This internal convergence suggests that, in turning from the mystery of the Battle, we have ventured into the larger mystery of defeat. If the Battle has a secret to reveal, it is of the power that defeat has over us and we perhaps have over it. Our images of it, of course, do not reveal how in fact we will meet defeat, but they show us in the act of preparing to meet it, irrespective of whether our preparations fail us in the crisis. And they tell something of one of our closely guarded domestic secrets—namely, that much of seemingly ordinary and uneventful life is spent in marching and counter-marching over the scenes of previous defeats and in fortifying ourselves against those to come. Great writers from the beginning of our drama have made no secret of the fact that defeat is the issue of our great moments, but the only commanding figure who tried to make a science of defeat found it everywhere inherent in the organism, even in sleep; and, although science, no more than poetry, will never completely discover us, it is a tool of this age, and, like the metal-finders on the Battlefield, may expose artifacts hitherto missed because buried underground.
1.
How hidden we keep certain aspects of defeat from ourselves is suggested even by the fact that many people, including Freudians, think of Freud only as the scientist of sex and suffer something like a Freudian “black-out” in failing to see the role he assigned to defeat. Yet the personal tragedy he observed in life went deeper than his own cancer; it is in the blood-stream of his writing, more extensive than any operable passage such as the one removed for the heading of this chapter.
Private defeat is built in the Freudian mechanics of being. The machinery of the Oedipus complex will not run with sex alone, for with only desire there can be no complex or, for that matter, no outer reality. The complex begins with the defeat of desire, with the first repudiations of the organism which until then is the whole cosmos; even the mother has no separate existence to the child until she is not there when he desires her. Thus, through frustration, rejection and defeat the organism becomes aware of the presence of a thing other than itself, which when multiplied by countless rejections becomes the cosmos, and with defeat life’s strategies begin—the maneuverings, diversionary movements and retreats to hold off life which is “too hard for us.”
The Freudian strategies mount in complexity, and only partly because defeat is outside waiting for the organism to encounter it; it is also internal to the organism, which is driven by two polar instincts—eros, the life instinct, and thanatos, “the death wish,” that craves defeat and destruction. So we maneuver both to avert defeat and to bring it about, and the child, playing “King of the Hill,” struggles at first to gain the eminent position and to maintain himself there, but, when it looks as if he cannot be pulled down, he cooperates clumsily in his own downfall.
It would seem, then, that Freud would have approved of the joke we have made of Custer’s Last Stand and would have thought that more than its literary form deserved analysis. Probably to him its ultimate success would depend upon its penetration of the obscurities of history to the true causes of defeat, internal and external, and to its compression of them into a single exclamation of discovery: “Holy cow! Too many fucking Indians!”
Of course, we must not start off committed to anyone else’s theory of ourselves or of the Battle, or we shall miss all the trails not going our way. For many reasons it seems much better to be always in hope of being surprised by what we find, especially by the surprises that keep repeating themselves and still remain surprising. Of these, fundamentally just two have taken this study beyond the afternoon of June 25, 1876. The first is that officially we have made a National Monument out of a small historical
event; the second is that this odd magnification of almost lost reality would lack general significance except for the much larger but related fact that as a people we make shrines of many of our defeats.
2.
The common people of England, says George Orwell, “do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory.” Moreover, he adds, English literature is distinct in that its popular battle poems “are always a tale of disasters and retreats” such as Dunkirk and Sir John Moore at Corunna—not even Trafalgar or Waterloo is poetically memorable. “The most stirring battle poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.”1
Like the English, Americans have the freedom, security and predisposition to memorialize defeat. For Dunkirk, we have Corregidor and Bataan and a shattering retreat from the Philippines to the British commonwealth of Australia. We remember Pearl Harbor, although probably not the name of one of the great battles in which we finally defeated the Japanese. And, as the English, we have not forgotten some 600 of our own cavalry who rode into the jaws of death, and we still argue about whether they were charging in the wrong direction.
Orwell attributes the tendency of the English to make Nikes out of their defeats to “English hatred of war and militarism,” and undoubtedly there is something to this explanation, which also accounts for a part of our tendency to memorialize some of our disasters. But Orwell, to whom all knowledge was a branch of political propaganda, takes us down only one trail and not very far down it. For one thing, neither the English nor other people memorialize any or all of their defeats. The English do not commemorate, for instance, their “disasters and retreats” during the American Revolution, and we do not enshrine our retreat from the Yalu River in our un-victorious war in Korea. Furthermore, Orwell’s explanation of the private needs that impel us to build public shrines to our defeats took him only where he wanted to go—to the conclusion that we need places of sacrifice to atone for our guilt feelings about war and aggression. Now, it is clearly true that certain of our defeats at certain times are used by many of us for this purpose, Custer’s defeat itself being a good example, for, as will be seen later, in recent times it is often depicted as an atonement for the crimes committed by our ancestors (and ourselves?) against Indians and minority groups in general. But it is much clearer that these public defeats, including Custer’s and all those mentioned by Orwell, were first political calls to arms to arouse a nation from the illusion that war was not likely (“Remember Pearl Harbor”) or that an expeditionary force “could restore the situation” on the frontier or on foreign soil without disturbing the homefolk (Dunkirk). Initially, therefore, they were not endorsements but condemnations of a people’s hatred of war, love of peace and preference for beer and darts. But both Orwell’s explanation and its opposite, which is at least equally true, seem inadequate and fairly close to the surface, unless public enactments are expressive of nothing deeper than public needs.
Acting on the assumption that more than the surface is involved, let us look carefully at the structure the public made of Custer’s Last Stand to see which of its elements are highly distinctive and which are the more common elements of the defeats we enshrine. Two questions are really being raised, the nature of the structure and the need for it—but the two can be treated together, since our structures are both signs of our needs and in some ways, the needs themselves [. . .]
A Maclean Sampler
“This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon”*
A FEW REMARKS ON THE ART OF TEACHING
In his forty-five years (1928–73) as a member of the University of Chicago’s English department, Maclean became a legendary teacher for his courses on Shakespeare and the British Romantic poets, and won the university’s Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching three times (1932, 1940, 1973). In “‘This Quarter I Am Taking McKeon’” (1974), he defines, as much as he ever attempted to, the art of teaching. With typical humor and self-deprecation, he summarizes a career and sketches a self-portrait. He elaborates the theme that “a great teacher is a tough guy who cares deeply about something that is hard to understand.”
It has been predetermined that I should talk today on the impossible subject, teaching, in almost impossible circumstances. Anyone here could and probably should get up and give this talk, and all of us would say fundamentally the same few things, even if somewhat differently.
For instance, I am sure that any of us would start off by saying that he never read or heard anything that helped him much with his own teaching. I am retired now, and in looking back I can think of only one such thing that helped me, and I’m not sure it helped, but I admit using it.
I started teaching at Dartmouth College immediately after my graduation there, and, also immediately, one of my classes was inspected by a senior member of the faculty. The same thing was done to one of my classes when I started teaching here, but here instead of saying they were “inspecting” my class they said they were visiting, and sent a woman. But at Dartmouth they sent a man. His name was McCallum and he was tall, red-headed and Scotch, with a long sardonic moustache. He would have resembled Mephistopheles, if Mephistopheles had been Scotch, as he well might have been.
Like most Scotchmen, he took religion very seriously, only he happened to be an atheist, and would not allow the word God to be mentioned in his classes. He was the first great teacher I ever had, but naturally my feelings were mixed about being inspected by someone who did not think very much even of God. Still, I regarded him so highly as a teacher that I was sure he would tell me something about teaching when my class was over that, however harsh, would let me in on the secret to the mystery.
I discovered later that he himself had had no mixed feelings about the coming prospect. He thought the whole business was beneath him—and beneath me, for that matter. But it was some years later when I found out these feelings. In the meantime some hours had passed after he inspected my class and he hadn’t called me into his office; and then some days, and finally several weeks.
At times in life unexpected silence is a momentary relief, but it can go on until you can’t bear it any longer and finally you have to hear something, no matter what. So finally I made an appointment with him at his office and when I came in he asked, “Yes?” as if he didn’t know why I came. I couldn’t think of any way to approach the subject gradually, so I asked, “What did you think of the class?” And he asked, “What class?” I said, “My class, the one you inspected.” Then he said, “It was all right.” We had suddenly run out of conversation, but still I couldn’t leave. I was still hoping for the secret that would clear up the life that was to come. Finally I asked, “Don’t you have something to tell me that would help me be a good teacher?”
SARTORIAL PEDAGOGY
He thought for a while and then said, “Wear a different suit every day of the week.” He had come from Princeton.
I said, “I can’t afford that.”
“Well, then,” he said, “wear a different necktie.”
I had been brought up to believe that you made the most in life of what little you had, and, since this is all that has ever been told me about my teaching, I must confess that I wore a different necktie every day of the week until I retired. I never did get up into the daily suit class.
So, as we all know, teaching is something like physics or music. It is mostly biological. It is something you can do—or not do—when you are fairly young. If you can do it, experience will make you a little better. Then toward retirement you will get a little worse. I have just given a complete log of a teacher. I feel that I have slipped now to where I am about as good as when I started teaching at twenty. In between, there were times when I was a little better. That’s it.
If, though, I have heard only one thing that has been directly useful to me as a teacher, I have had the opportunity to watch unusually gifted teachers through the years. I don’t know whether this results in anything one can incorporate directly into his
own teaching, teaching being such a highly individualized art, but it does make one a better teacher by lifting up the spirit and making one feel elevated about what he has chosen to do in life. Though I retired after teaching in only two colleges, Dartmouth and here, they are two colleges that put great premium upon fine teaching. When I went as a student to Dartmouth in 1920, I was told that a great tradition had only recently died and might at any moment be revived. The tradition was called “horning.” Presumably Dartmouth students for generations had rented a barn and stored hundreds of horns in it, and when a teacher was hired who was something less than pleasing, the students would assemble at night at the barn, arm themselves with horns and march around the teacher’s house, for all practical purposes terminating his contract irrespective of whether, according to the American Association of University Professors, the contract still had three years to go.
In later years, I came to doubt whether in fact there had ever been such a custom, because when I was a junior I acquired a couple of teachers who I thought might be improved by musical accompaniment, but the barn where the horns were stored could not be found, either in daylight or literally by lantern. But even if it was only a legend, it worked. I even came to suspect it was a legend started and nurtured by the administration, as an effective and cheap device to get some very creative teaching.
At the University of Chicago, of course, one of our chief devices to spur the teacher on to higher effort is the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. It has also proved to be a very effective device for encouraging teachers to put forth their best efforts, but it is more costly than the Dartmouth method. Whereas the Dartmouth method works by trepidation and musical chairs and mythical horns, the University of Chicago method works by showers of solid blessings amounting to four and sometimes five awards each year of $1,000 each. Although admittedly the Dartmouth method of improving pedagogy was effective, I am sure that those of us who have received the $1,000 tax exempt award think of the University of Chicago’s method as the more humane.
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 10