Pongo aquí un trocito del principio de la novela de J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace (Secker & Warburg, 1999), que ganó el premio
Booker a finales del siglo pasado. Aquí aún estamos por llegar
a esa fase, pero no tardará. O, en todo caso, me gusta ponerlo aquí.
Yo solía tener la superstición de creer que si pensabas con
detalle en cómo iba a ser el futuro, reducías las posibilidades
de que fuese por allí la cosa. Es la superstición más
intelectualmente consistente que conozco.
About his own job he says little, not wanting
to
bore her. He earns his living at the Cape Technical University,
formerly
Cape Town University College. Once a professor of modern languages, he
has
been, since Classics and Modern Languages were closed down as part of
the
great rationalization, adjunct professor of communications. Like all
rationalized
personnel, he is allowed to offer one special-field course a year,
irrespective
of enrolment, because that is good for morale. This year he is offering
a course in the Romantic poets. For the rest he teaches Commmunications
101, 'Communication Skills', and Communications 201, 'Advanced
Communication
Skills'.
Although he devotes hours of each day to his
own
discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the
Communications
101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in
order
that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each
other.'
his own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech
lie
in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the
overlarge and rather empty human soul.
In the course of a career stretching back a
quarter
of a century he has published three books, none of which has caused a
stir
or even a ripple: the first on opera (Boito and the Faust Legend:
The
Genesis of Mefistofele), the second on vision as eros (The
Vision
of Richard of St Victor), the third on Wordsworth and history (Wordsworth
and the Burden of the Past).
In the past few years he has been playing with
the idea of a work on Byron. At first he had thought it would be
another
book, another critical opus. But all his sallies at writing it have
bogged
down in tedium. The truth is, he is tired of criticism, tired of prose
measured
by the yard. What he wants to write is music: Byron in Italy, a
meditation
on love between the sexes in the form of a chamber opera.
Through his mind, while he faces his
Communications
classes, flit phrases, tunes, fragments of song from the unwritten
work.
He has never been much of a teacher; in this transformed and, to his
mind,
emasculated institution of learning he is more out of place than ever.
But
then, so are other of his colleagues from the old days, burdened with
upbringings
inappropriate to the tasks they are set to perform; clerks in a
post-religious
age.
Because he has no respect for the material he
teaches,
he makes no impression on his students. They look through him when he
speaks,
forget his name. Their indifference galls him more than he will admit.
Nevertheless
he fulfils to the letter his obligations toward them, their parents,
and
the state. Month after month he sets, collects, reads, and annotates
their
assignments, correcting lapses in punctuation, spelling and usage,
interrogating
weak arguments, appending to each paper a brief, considered critique.
He continues to teach because it provides him
with
a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to
him
who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who
comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to
learn
learn nothing. It is a feature of his profession on which he does not
remark
to Soraya. He doubts there is an irony to match it in hers.
(La reforma de aquí, por su parte, pasito a pasito sigue. La
Comunidad
de Madrid ha aprobado un Programa de Postgrado que incluye el
Máster en
Lingüística
Inglesa: Nuevas Aplicaciones y Comunicación Internacional. Aquí
en Zaragoza tendremos, al parecer, máster en "Estudios Textuales
y Culturales en Lengua Inglesa". Pues que sea enhorabuena: lo malo
no es lo que se añade, claro, sino lo que se quita. Ha habido algunos
mensajes de respuesta al que envié ayer a la lista de AEDEAN (y que
me volvieron a colgar en
Fírgoa ; sobre todo mensajes privados,
felicitándome o manifestando sorpresa o intercambiando opiniones;
creo captar que hay mucha marea de fondo, e intereses muy encontrados
debajo
de la supuesta unanimidad de la profesión; pero la gente no es tan
dada como yo a manifestarse en sitios visibles, con lo cual el panorama
sigue confuso).
—oOo—
