The Tragedy of Mr. Morn by Vladimir Nabokov

  William Shakespeare is often held as the paragon of literature, and he may well be, but in my view Vladimir Nabokov deserves a seat at that table. Indeed, Shakespeare’s influence is felt throughout The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, a Nabokov play written in verse.

Before I begin, though, I should note the peculiarity of this text. I’m a Nabokov enthusiast and have read all of his published novels, and when I stumbled across The Tragedy of Mr. Morn in the bookstore, I was taken aback—I’d never heard of this work. As a historical note, this play was written in 1923 or 1924 and was unpublished during Nabokov’s life, only resurfacing in 1997 in a Russian literary journal. This translated English edition is as recent as 2013 and is touted as Nabokov’s only completed play. I would put a bit of an asterisk on that, though, because a few passages in Act V with missing lines, so it’s maybe the only “basically complete” play Nabokov wrote. In any case, it was a surprising find.

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn is set across the backdrop of a revolution. The play is surprisingly conservative in nature in that there’s a king who is depicted as doing a generally good job of keeping the population happy—and his identity is a secret to all, never to be unmasked. Even the revolutionaries recognize it:

For the sorrows of my heart, for the tears
of my Midia, I will never forgive the King.
But, consider: while we were declaiming
grand words—on the oppressed, on poverty
and the suffering of the people—the King
himself was already acting in our stead. (16)

Meanwhile, there’s a group of revolutionaries that form the central cast, introducing us first to Tremens, an elderly revolutionary seemingly on the verge of a death that won’t arrive. The play begins with him waxing poetic on the glory of destruction, a longing for collapse. Tremens has remained free while his revolutionary comrades have been sent into exile. That is, until one of his champions, Ganus, returns in secret.

Like Shakespeare, Nabokov employs iambic pentameter to weave together multiple threads within a five-act structure. Nabokov also draws directly from Othello—required to return home in secret, Ganus, with the help of Ella, is disguised as the titular character. Some characters parrot lines directly from Shakespeare’s work, and certainly there’s a thematic connection: when Ganus enters (as Othello), he finds his wife Midia hosting a party and openly gallivanting with Mr. Morn. There’s a great tension to the scene where Midia is entertaining her guests and everyone is getting the hint to leave and Ganus is being wilfully obtuse to try to outlast Mr. Morn so that he can reveal himself. It’s awkward. It’s painful to watch.

From there, Morn and Ganus commit to a duel without Midia’s knowledge. Tremens is stacking the deck, so to speak, and being an agent of chaos. I’m not entirely clear on the specifics of his plan, but I think he has a lust for destruction in general. Unfortunately, Morn is the secret king that everyone loves and his death will lead to the dissolution of the joy everyone is feeling. Such is the central tension of the play.

Nabokov’s use of language is of course playful and inventive, though clearly in its infancy here. The translators’ introduction offers insight into the distinct oddities of the characters’ speech mannerisms, which I would not have picked up on. They also speak to the challenges of transliteration, and offer a really cool insight into the process. They discuss Nabokov’s own commentary on the practice of translation and the models he himself created for Pushkin. It was fascinating to me to hear about this as a common practice: translators using authors’ translations of others’ works as models for their own translation practices.

Within Nabokov’s verse, there are some lines that stand out as quotable aphorisms. Tell me this wouldn’t be in place in a Hamlet or Macbeth soliloquy:

What are passions?
Mistakes in translation. What is love?
A rhyme lost in transmission to our discordant
language. (84).

Nabokov’s concern with how language frames our experience emerges clearly. Feelings become translations and rhymes. There’s a mournful quality here, too, that feels to me like Hamlet’s quintessence of dust or Macbeth’s sound and fury signifying nothing.

There’s a troubled connection between joy and sorrow—creation and destruction. Tremens explores the ecstasy of death and destruction. Klian, Ella’s fiancé, gives voice to these tensions in the final stage of the play:

That’s where the horror lies—
not in death, no,—but in the fact that some
sort of whimpering feeling has inhabited
my blood, a mixture of untold jealousy
and shunned desire, and such tenderness
that all sunsets are but puddles of paint
beside it—such is my tenderness! (119-120)

The horror of a “whimpering feeling” and “shunned desire” points to a sensibility guided by joy and happiness, but within that there is an “untold jealousy.” I also like the idea of sunsets being puddles of paint beside Klian’s tenderness. All the same, there’s a conflicted tension between this tenderness and horror.

Before I conclude, I wanted to comment on just one more image from the play. Nabokov always has a knack for a surprising, evocative image and early on Ella tells Ganus that Midia “told [his] fortune by looking at the moon through a glass of wine” (13). Just stunning.

Overall, I can’t say that The Tragedy of Mr. Morn is in my top 5 Nabokov books. Even in the top 10. I’m really glad, though, that I was able to come across a “new” work by one of my old favourites. The play serves as a really interesting entry into Nabokov’s oeuvre that shows an emerging great before he hit his stride.

Happy reading!

Curtain.

Lamb by Christopher Moore

In the opening of Christopher Moore’s Lamb offers a warning and defence. This is an apocryphal book of the Bible being written by Jesus’ childhood pal Biff to cover the years underrepresented in the other books of the Bible—essentially from Jesus at 5 years old until thirty three. While Moore, I think, stays true to the spirit of Jesus’ personality, the situations he’s placed in are absurd and I think the more seriously religious might find it borders on the blasphemous.

The book’s frame narrative takes place in a motel room to which Biff, recently resurrected, has been confined by the angel Raziel. He’s been granted the gift of modern language and instructed to write this apocryphal text. Throughout the book, he has a few zany escape attempts and Raziel is lampooned as being obsessed with (but not fully comprehending) the soap operas on TV.

The core narrative, though, works through the various stages of Jesus’ life and operates somewhat like a Bildungsroman as Jesus (Joshua in this text) grapples with the idea of being the messiah. The childhood friendship between Joshua, Biff, and Mary is an endearing journey peppered with conflict with their local authorities. Joshua discovers his capacity for miracles, including resurrecting the dead (it’s not always perfect to start…), and when the conflict escalates, Biff and Joshua go on a journey to discover whether Joshua is indeed the messiah.

What follows is a mix of a Bildungsroman, humour novel, and fantasy adventure. The absurdity of some of the episodes would, I’m sure, upset people, but it’s delivered in such a tongue-in-cheek way that it’s hard to be too hurt by it. Biff plays opposite to Joshua; while Joshua is increasingly self-serious, pious, and compassionate, Biff is much more fast and loose with morals and decorum. One of the most memorable episodes, for instance, is that Joshua needs to understand sex (while remaining strictly celibate) and so Biff acts as a ‘tutor’ by bedding sex workers every night while Joshua listens through the wall or has Biff explain the experience afterward. It’s a reasonably lengthy section, a drawn out ‘bit.’

Biff as narrator is unselfserious and Moore draws on different kinds of humour. Some of the stories he tells, like the aforementioned tutelage, demonstrate Moore’s commitment to the long-form joke. In other moments, Moore operates via irony and sarcasm (indeed, Biff claims to have invented sarcasm). Some of the funnier moments are when Josh uses Biff’s own (sarcasm) weapon against him or operates with a bit of mischievousness (like compulsively poking everybody who gets referred to as ‘untouchable’). There’s some allusive humour that draws on Bible stories; Moore reworks moments like turning water into wine and jokes around being lost in the desert. One of my favourite ‘bits’ is that Biff continually justifies his actions with wisdom from nonexistent books of the Bible. He tells Josh one of his aphorisms: “for it is written: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to be a fish and his friends eat for a week” (293). When Josh asks him where that is written, they have the following exchange:

“That is not written. Where is that written?”

“Amphibians five-seven.”

“There’s no friggin’ Amphibians in the Bible.”

“Plague of frogs. Ha! Gotcha!” (293)

Those fun exchanges are just cheeky enough in their wordplay to spark a smile. Sometimes it’s the restraint that pays off, whereas the more excessive gags don’t have, for me, a comedic payoff.

Lamb is also more plot-driven than most of the books I read. There are distinct phases of the story that each could serve as standalone episodes. In particular, Joshua and Biff meet up with the three wise men. In the first, they stay at Balthasar’s palace, which takes on a Bluebeardesque mystery: there are Chinese concubines all around and a door that must never be opened. Amidst the debauchery, Biff opens the door and unleashes a demon—it becomes a fantastical adventure where the demon murders the women and then Joshua, Balthasar, Biff, and Joy are fighting back to control the creature. Then, they journey to see Gaspar in India. This part of the book is, in my view, the most controversial. Moore’s depiction of India plays into some harmful stereotypes; the men are depicted as both overly sexualized and effeminate, and Hinduism is presented as barbaric, with brutal human sacrifices. Melchior’s section is probably the most tame and least distinctive in its depiction. The final phase of the book revolves first around gathering the apostles, delivering the sermon on the mount, and his subsequent crucifixion (is this whole book a cruci-fiction?). The section wherein we’re recruiting apostles really drags, but the drama of writing the sermon on the mount is pretty strong. I also liked the tension leading up to the crucifixion where Joshua is committed to his sacrifice and tricks Biff and Maggie (Mary Magdalene) into not saving him.

The ending of the book is a surprise, which is odd given that we know the Bible story. Biff’s narrative ends with Jesus on the cross and we return to the present timeline, where Biff is released from his responsibility and reunites with Maggie, who tells him that Jesus came back. Biff says he had heard but that he couldn’t bring himself to see him, which established a nice pathos for Biff. The book, though, ends pretty abruptly.

Overall, Lamb was reasonably engaging and somewhat funny, but it didn’t fully grip me. The tone of the book was pretty consistent and Biff’s sarcastic and ironic tone is consistent and well-delivered. The book may be a little overlong, in my opinion, and a tad repetitive. While the book’s excesses are important to its vision, it does at times wear a little thin. The book has some philosophical bits, like Joshua’s reflections on Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism—he also learns kung-fu—but mainly it feels like a book geared towards entertainment.

I hope you enjoy it; happy reading!

Unearthing Joy by Gholdy Muhammad

    It’s a common phrase in professional learning contexts to “recognize your learning edge and push it.” As a follow up to her Cultivating Genius, Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy offers a somewhat more comprehensive framework for schools to focus on the pursuits she outlined in her previous text: identity, intellect, skills, criticality, and joy. For many, this will be a challenge to conventional ways of engaging in curriculum, specifically in centering joy as a fundamental component of education.

    For many, I suspect this book may be a little bit…light(?) given the context of where education has been over the last fifteen years. It’s somewhat of a shift away from promoting educational standards (more on that momentarily) towards a more humanized approach. You won’t find discussion of Bloom’s Taxonomy or the zone of proximal development in any kind of depth here, but you will see a reconceptualization of the connection between students and their teachers. The design of the book itself aims to ‘slow’ us and help us find joy; each chapter has a colouring book page and a playlist of joyful songs to get us in the right mindset. Heck, the foreword is written by Pharrell Williams (the quintessentially “Happy” guy!). In the foreword, he discusses how teachers can be constellations and sources of light to help students become aware of their genius, recognize their limitlessness, and experience joy at school. This is largely rooted in becoming their best selves. He presents the thesis of the book as follows: “Schools must not only create a joyful ethos, but also sustain it to activate the human spirit” (10). He gives a cosmic flare to the preamble that puts joy as the guiding force of the universe that helps to awaken the genius of each student’s spirit: “if you want to see and believe in the infinite possibilities of education, just look up at the sky, look at nature, look at the goodwill inhumanity, and you will know” (10).

    The conception of joy that Muhammad offers, however, is more complex than you might be picturing. It goes beyond simple happiness. In a sidebar, she identifies 10 lessons of joy from historical examples, where joy is “defined by one’s truths, justice, problem-solving, anti-racism, and anti-oppression” (69). Joy is also when we “define abolition as education and education as abolition” or “liberty for all” (69). It is about centering love, music, and art, but also about connecting to justice and criticality (69). Joy is “collective and collaborative” (69). Joy is not a passive feeling; joy is an action—a choice that we can cultivate together. Like other pursuits, joy can change over time (72). 

    Muhammad’s approach in this text mimics that of Cultivating Genius. She is always in the process of historicizing. For example, she looks back to documents like the New England Primer and challenges their usefulness in schools as a white supremacist document, evaluating it based around the five pursuits. I have to admit, sometimes the historicizing feels like it detracts from what we’re trying to accomplish now. Having a few case studies can be helpful for showing how educational frameworks need to shift, but dwelling in the particulars of what wasn’t working makes it difficult to advance in our actual practice. I have a bit of a bias when it comes to professional learning books; I think they need to offer something tangible and applicable. To be fair, none of this work can be done without reflection, but I wanted to see more praxis: how does this new framework actually look in classrooms today? Providing tools and models, in my opinion, deserved more balance in the text. 

    That being said, the text is partially rooted in classroom teaching but also has a broader applicability. I could see the value of the text for program leads at the level of the school board or curriculum writers at the board. In one chapter, Muhammad offers a list of problems with curricula and some suggestions for curriculum and instruction that would be well worth exploring at various levels of the educational edifice. She offers suggestions like creating a rubric for curriculum writers to follow, asking publishing companies to conduct random focus groups to test curriculum’s effectiveness, and other large-scale actions that could create a significant difference in the types of instruction that are being done.

    One of the common refrains in Unearthing Joy is that we are too focused on skill development and standards, which I think is a hard conception to grapple with when so much of our education system is rooted in that which is measurable. I take some issue with abandoning the notion of ‘standards,’ but Muhammad’s framework successfully reorients towards pursuits. In her words, “Standards have a ceiling or stopping point, while pursuits continue throughout one’s life” (17). In reframing the conversation around educational pursuits, it allows us that flexibility to continue growing, to recognize that we are imperfect, and to allow ourselves to shape and reshape our priorities. The pursuits that she identifies are essentially a repetition of her work from Cultivating Genius: identity development, skills development, intellectual development, criticality, and joy. In practice, I find it somewhat challenging to differentiate between these; specifically, “intellectual development” is about “gaining knowledge that connects to the context of the world where they can apply the skills and standards” (17). To me, if the knowledge connects to the world, we’re into the realm of criticality (“helping students to name, understand, question, and disrupt oppression in the world and within the self, and to make the world a better place” (17). If we’re looking at intellect as opportunities to apply the skills and standards, that fits more into “skills development” in my mind. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that there’s ambiguity between the pursuits if you can embrace a sense of interconnectedness, but I think other instructional frameworks are more intuitive.

    I’m not entirely sold, either, on Muhammad’s de-emphasis of skills—though I think we have different conceptions of what skills look like in the classroom. I think back to John Dewey’s educational philosophy in which (I’m paraphrasing) teaching children to use a chainsaw is less helpful than teaching them how a chainsaw operates. Muhammad seems to suggest skills are happening in isolation and its their decontextualization that means they should be de-emphasized. For example, learning phonemes with a text that doesn’t promote other thinking is useless; learning calculation skills is useless when not applied to anything practical or real. I agree that teaching skills abstracted from applicability is not ideal—but that’s also not what I see in classrooms. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I think students are learning valuable skills that aren’t separate from criticality. Students learn reading strategies, for example, as a way of challenging harmful messages in the media. So, with that in mind, I think learning transferable skills (the mechanics of a chainsaw) actually has a rightful place as central to our work as teachers, though I grant that we need to help students to make those connections to the real world and center their applicability.

    Conversely, I find the framework liberatory in a sense. If you’re in the world of teaching, you know you’re supposed to be everything to everyone all the time. You need to be promoting literacy but also numeracy but also you have to be a mental health professional while also an expert in special education and don’t forget that career pathway planning needs to be brought in. The real benefit of the ‘pursuits’ that Muhammad emphasizes for me is that she explicitly says they’re not going to be present in every lesson. She encourages staff to think about the broader unit and ensure that the pursuits are all present in some capacity somewhere, and that, I think is a real benefit of this framework: you are free to emphasize different things at different types responsively to students.

    I alluded earlier to my difficulty with removing our emphasis on ‘standards’. I understand why: “standards are stagnant. They are not created for individual learners, whereas pursuits come from and are designed for the learner” (72). I can appreciate that mindset, but it does pose a serious challenge to our education system: how are we to gather data or measure our effectiveness if standards are no longer the aim? Within this framework, we still hold high expectations for students and we promote rigor, but I’m not yet clear on how to measure whether we’re actually rigorous. At the same time, I think it’s Muhammad that expressed how “rigour without relevance isn’t rigorous” and I really like that conception of what it means to be a strong teacher and student. If we’re not doing things that are meaningful and are just doing hard tasks because they’re hard, then it’s a challenge to justify doing that work at all.

    Another framework Muhammad applies is helpful for structuring classes. In talking about culturally responsive and relevant teaching, there are different phases that teachers move through. One is to merely highlight contributions—celeberating a holiday here and there at a surface level. Additive means that there’s supplementary material that speaks to the diversity of our world but it’s an after thought or framed as being a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessary. Transformation is when diverse cultural perspectives and voices reshape our curriculum and ultimately we want to move towards a stage of authentic problem solving in our curricula. That, to me, is a great rubric for thinking about how well teachers are doing in their own work as agents of social change and as cultivators of student genius. 

    I also appreciate that Muhammad has no patience for the idea of teachers ‘buying in’ to the work. It is not her responsibility to ‘sell’ us the vision of CRRP. If it were, though, I think she offers an incisive commentary for why we should be centering (for example) anti-Black racism. When challenged on the idea of why we should be focusing on Black students, she essentially uses them as a barometer for the success of the system: “if you want to transform a system for everyone, start with the group for which we have not gotten it right the most” (78). She suggests that if we can get it right for the most historically marginalized, it advances education for all, and to me that is a perfectly distilled philosophy for how and why we go about educational reform.

    Alongside instruction, assessment needs to change to better align with the identities of students and be responsive to their needs. Again, Muhammad offers a step-by-step process of what we should be doing—getting to know students comes first. Much of what she says in the realm of assessment, in my view, is not completely revolutionary. It involves things like giving students choice to show their understanding in different ways or doing a variety of assessments (diagnostic, formative, etc.) to cultivate skills. All of that has been firmly entrenched in Ontario for decades through the Growing Success document and differentiated instruction. Granted, I’m sure it’s not leveraged as much as it could be (is it ever?), but it makes me curious about what’s happening in the states that this is a revolutionary kind of approach. One thing that I think we still need to work on, which Muhammad would I’m sure agree, is that we need more authentic kinds of assessments with authentic audiences. For example, having students engage in a project to make the school more wheelchair accessible or having students develop a policy idea for ending a racist practice at the municipal level—these would be really meaningful learning experiences that could be assessed in conjunction with community organizations or community members. That’s the kind of action I really want to see grow.

    As I mentioned, the ‘practical’ side of things is somewhat lacking. There are a few sample lesson plans, but I don’t think of them as nearly as thorough as they would be in my context. There are unit plans presented as half-pages that give key questions or point-form topics that will address each of the five pursuits, but I wish there was a supplement that had more fleshed-out unit plans than those. One of the common complaints about professional development is that its providers are ‘out of touch.’ My fear in providing such cursory lessons and unit plans is that Unearthing Joy opens itself to that attack. To really see how the framework operates, I think we need to see how it connects with other aspects of lesson planning (connecting to specific expectations in curriculum documents, showing the accommodations that might be needed or the ‘plan B’ lesson for when kids don’t understand yet; I wish I could see some assignment sheets and get a timeline for how these parts all flow into one another). The learning goals and success criteria used as examples, I feel, don’t really match what we’re supposed to do in Ontario. For example, when the success criteria starts “I can learn _____”, to me, that sounds like a learning goal. Success criteria would need to be more precise in how the student knows or demonstrates that they’ve learned it. If the goal is to learn about the underground railroad, for example, perhaps the success criteria is that students can give five examples of significant secret codes and explain why the code system contributed to liberation. It’s a minor gripe, to be sure, but one that felt a little undercooked in the example lessons.

    Overall, Unearthing Joy offers a meaningful liberatory philosophy for education, and I really appreciate that about it. I think Muhammad and I are aligned in many ways, but have some differences of opinion of how this looks in practice. As a text, Unearthing Joy could probably restore a bit more balance between the historical / theoretical and the practical application of the framework. There is indeed a lot to unearth here, and it motivates me to be the kind of educator that builds connection with students, transforms education in response to their identities, helps them to find meaningful, authentic joy through social action, and beyond—I just hope that more specific examples of lesson plans and units will emerge to clarify some of the stickier points of the book and show its viability in practice. And if not? Well, then, maybe it’s up to me and my students to make and share those resources.

Joyful reading!