“Starting with that ambiguous title, Here We Are is a novel about the interplay of stage magic and life’s tricks. Like Anne Enright’s Actress, which was published earlier this year, Swift explores the tension between persona and character, the strain of maintaining public and private personalities. Actors, at least, have a professional excuse; the rest of us, he suggests, perform free, donning one costume and role after another. The trouble is we rarely admit it.”
This from a book review earlier this week by Ron Charles of The Washington Post of British author Graham Swift’s new brief novel about magicians in the English resort town Brighton. I haven’t read Swift’s work but enjoyed the movie version of his novel Last Orders about a group of World War II veterans travelling across southern England to fulfill the wishes of a deceased colleague that his ashes be spread in the sea.
The quotation from Charles’ review made me think about how teaching often made me uncomfortable. While speaking to colleagues, I joked that I might feel better using a ventriloquist’s dummy to teach an entire course. One of the others remarked seriously that what I was talking about was having a teaching persona. It is an example of the sometimes fraught line between public and private that most, if not all, people have to negotiate. This can be a problem for some. Wikipedia defines imposter syndrome as ” a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments or talents and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a ‘fraud’.”
Persona can seem a nuanced and sometimes acceptable version of the normally wrong phenomenon of lying. As T.S. Eliot put it, “there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” My hunch is that women often make better teachers because they are more comfortable generally presenting public images that differ from private reality, simply for example in the use of make-up. In “Among School Children,” W.B. Yeats’ poem inspired by a visit to nuns who taught, he questions at the end: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Third-wave feminist thinker Judith Butler’s concept of performative acts holds that “given the social nature of human beings, most actions are witnessed, reproduced, and internalized and thus take on a performative or theatric quality,” according to Wikipedia.