The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Teaching as friendship
Work in progress

Barker’s aim in Regeneration is to explore the psychic effects of war on different sorts of men, and Owen and Sassoon are but two of many characters in the novel. So her insights into writing and its teaching form only a small part of her larger purpose as a novelist. In contrast, Antonio Skármeta’s The Postman (1985/1995) centers on the relationship between an older writer and his protégé.⁶ Most of the events of the novel occur between 1970 and 1973. Its protagonist is Mario Jiménez, the young postman of Isla Negra, a remote fishing village on Chile’s southern coastline. Mario has only one customer on his route, the renowned poet Pablo Neruda. Mario asks Neruda for his help in winning the heart (and loins) of the beautiful Beatriz, a barmaid in the village. Not very reluctantly, Neruda agrees, giving Mario copies of his poems and explaining how metaphors function in them. Mario seduces Beatriz with metaphors borrowed from Neruda. Smiles stretch across her face like butterflies, her laugh is a sudden silvery wave, and so on. Mario also begins to carry around a notebook in which to compose his own poems and metaphors, although it never becomes clear just how much writing he actually does in it.

Mario’s new interests in poetry also involve him in politics. Neruda briefly runs for the presidency of Chile before withdrawing in support of the Marxist Salvador Allende. His friend Mario thus becomes known not only as an aspiring poet but a socialist. This has tragic consequences at the end of the novel when bloody reprisals follow Allende’s overthrow by a right-wing coup.

The Postman is filled with Neruda’s poetry. Mario is a kind of literary magpie, picking out bright images and metaphors from Neruda’s verse for his own use. When he begins to court Beatriz, he speaks to her “first with vehemence and then as if he were a puppet and Neruda the ventriloquist,” soon gaining “such fluency that images flowed out of him magically” (35). This has led some readers to criticize the politics of the novel, arguing that it never allows Mario to form his own voice.

But Neruda is not simply a Cyrano; he is also a teacher and friend. And Mario does form a voice of his own. This becomes clear midway through the novel when Neruda is called away from Isla Negra to serve as Allende’s ambassador to France. Homesick, Neruda mails Mario a letter (which he jokes Mario will have to deliver to himself) and a tape recorder. Neruda tells Mario:

It is a present for you. But I also want to ask of you a favor that only you, Mario, can do . . . I want you to take this tape recorder around Isla Negra with you and tape all the sounds and noises you can find. I desperately need something, even if it is only a shadow, from my home. (75)

Neruda goes on to list the kinds of sounds Mario might record—the bells in his garden, the waves crashing on the rocks, the gulls. “And if you hear the silence of the stars, tape it” (76). Mario sets himself to this task with gusto, spending weeks recording tides, birds, bees, barks, and bells before sending Neruda a sound collage that ends, unexpectedly, with the cries of his and Beatriz’s newborn son (85—86). It is a poem made not of metaphors but things, of sounds and events.

But that’s not all. For Mario also uses this assignment as a kind of pre-writing exercise, composing a brief and lovely poem, “Ode to the Snow over Neruda in Paris,” which he sends along with the audiotape (84). The point is not that Mario thus becomes the poetic equal of Neruda. Far from it. But he is someone who, through a kind of sound-writing, can do a favor for Neruda, much as the poet once did a favor for him. Their correspondence is founded on a mutual respect. And that inspires Mario to write, perhaps for the first time, in his own voice.

The novel ends on a bitter note. Mario writes at least one more poem, a sketch of his son, which he submits to a contest run by a left-wing literary journal. But events intervene. Allende’s government is overthrown. The presses are shut down. Neruda is called back to Isla Negra and dies a few days after. The next morning two unidentified men take Mario away for questioning. He is disappeared. His poem is lost. The point seems to be that while poetry may fire the hearts of ordinary men and women, it has little effect on those of generals and politicians.

Still, I am struck by what Neruda and Mario achieve together. For if Mario is postman to the poet, Neruda hopes to be the poet of workers, of postmen. The two need each other. They find a way to communicate, to teach and learn, through a kind of gift economy. Neruda offers Mario his metaphors; Mario repays the favor with the sounds of Isla Negra and his own poem. What an extraordinary way to think about teaching, not as work for hire but as a series of favors and requests, of time and attention freely given!

Unfortunately, the relationship between writer and reader, student and teacher, is often far more complex and fraught—even and perhaps especially when the two admire each other. In chapter 4, I turn to several stories of writerly deception and plagiarism.