Facts to Fiction

First there is the fact, but facts are empty units and possess no meaning by themselves. For example, in John Updike’s The Centaur, George Caldwell, the science teacher, steps back from the chalkboard on which he has written the weight of the earth (6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons) and the weight of the sun (1,998,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons). These are just numbers and they require context to mean anything. Caldwell stepped back from the blackboard, looked at the numbers he had written and experienced feelings that those facts had stirred. Emotions are basically the name we assign to feelings. Caldwell stared at the board—the facts he had written there—and “shuddered in fear . . . The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word ‘poison.’” He confessed, “They remind me of death.” Indeed, everything about his subject matter and his vocation inspired only feelings of pain and loss. He suffered anxiety, hopelessness, despair. Caldwell stood before the classroom and looked out “at those dumb blank faces every day,” and they, too, reminded him of death. “You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace.” The empty zeros on the board have been replicated in the faces of his students. George Caldwell felt dread. 

Caldwell bemoaned the futility of his academic position and the ineffectiveness of his struggle. He conceded his powerlessness and what he understood as his incompetence and irrelevance with a certain irony and regret. Preparing to leave for school, Caldwell announced to his father-in-law, Pop Kramer, “I love lies, I tell ‘em all day. I’m paid to tell them.” Caldwell’s despair originated in his overwhelming existential doubt to which his experience and knowledge had led him and from which he cannot escape. Death awaits all alike, and all his knowledge cannot save them. Caldwell’s student moaned to him, “I get so sort of sick and dizzy just trying to keep it straight . . .” and Caldwell responds, “We all do. Knowledge is a sickening thing.” To his wife’s comment that it must be terrible to know so much, Caldwell responds, “It is . . . it’s Hell.” And what is hellish is that all of his knowledge offers him no sense of purpose or comfort. He experiences no reprieve from his self-described ignorance and consequent uselessness. What purpose could the teacher be to himself and to these unfortunates, Caldwell wondered of what value is knowledge to them? Unlike Chiron, his mythological counterpart, Caldwell does not believe that he has the capacity or the skill to bring these children out of darkness, not only as a result of his assumed ineffectiveness, but because there may be nothing out there but the darkness. This is no Golden Age and what besets the school is true for the world in which the school is embedded. 

Caldwell, the teacher, is the contemporary counterpart to Chiron the mythical centaur.  Chiron had taught the children of the gods—Jason, Achilles, Asclepios, his own daughter, Ocyrhoe, and the dozen other princely children of Olympus abandoned to his care. There, in that bucolic classroom the subject was ‘Love,’ which Chiron says, “set the Universe in motion.” The teacher continued: “All things that exist are her children—sun, moon, stars, the earth with the mountains and rives, its trees, herbs, and living creatures” (78). There, in that pastoral site during that Golden Age, the teacher, Chiron, walked “a little late, down the corridors of tamarisk, yew, bay and kermes oak. Beneath the cedars and silver firs, whose hushed heads were shadows permeated with Olympian blue, a vigorous underwood of arbutus, wild pear, cornel, box and andrachne filled with scents of flower and sap and new twig the middle air of the forest.” Chiron’s classroom is paradisiacal, his students bright and eager, and the teacher made whole in his pedagogical encounters: “[Chiron’s] students,” Updike wrote, “completed the Centaur.” Chiron’s is a classroom filled with light, warmth and meaning; images of circles abound everywhere in that idyllic classroom. But during that fabled Golden Age, “Love’s scepter has passed to Uranus . . . who it is said, arrived under the cover of the starless night sky to copulate with his mother, Gaia.” It is in this world dominated by darkness, death and dubious moral balance that Chiron’s contemporary counterpart, George Caldwell, functions; it is this darkness that obscures the meaning for Caldwell of which Chiron is certain. And yet it is knowledge—answers— that Caldwell despairingly doubts and which he yet desperately seeks. If Chiron’s students complete him, Caldwell’s students tear him apart. In this contemporary classroom, a tenuous truce is all that Caldwell desires: “I don’t want you to like me,” Caldwell exclaims resignedly.  “All I want from you is to sit still under me for fifty-five minutes a day five days a week.” And if in Chiron’s class the polyphony of voices formed a rainbow, in Caldwell’s room the cacophony of sound produces only storm. Resigned to almost inevitable disappointment and defeat, Caldwell acknowledges that this is no Golden Age, and yet obsessed with Death, the ultimate meaninglessness, he struggles on. Underlying Caldwell’s work in the class is his gnawing doubt about purpose and meaning in the universe. 

Nevertheless, Caldwell is constrained to keep on keeping on. Puzzled by the word book carved into the walls above the urinal in the boy’s bathroom, Caldwell suddenly understands that the original carving has been altered. “Willing to learn, even by the last flash of light before annihilation, he absorbs the fact totally new to him, that every FUCK could be made into a BOOK.” The novel wonders, what is a teacher but one who daily makes that effort to turn every FUCK into a BOOK knowing painfully that there is no end to the FUCKS in the world. And that reminded me of Holden Caulfield who found the word ‘fuck’ scratched on the stair where Phoebe and other children would see it. Holden acknowledges that it is impossible to erase all the ‘fucks’ in the world! Schools seethe with the immanent potency and danger of colliding tectonic plates. In the halls of schools echoes whisper, and in the classrooms the steadfast, steady sound of the teacher’s commanding voice seasoned with despairing notes of warning pin students to their seats with questions and imprecations, demands and disapprovals. In Caldwell’s classrooms, a palpable tension charges the air that arises out of the antagonism between he and his students and teachers, a tension borne out of the clash of conflicting desires and seething resentments. Crumbled paper and pencil shavings, candy wrappers and sheets ripped out of notebooks litter the surface; gum and snot coat the underside of chairs and desks. Everyone knows—because they have been contributors to such detritus—not to reach under except to add to the array; even custodians avoid this onerous task until year’s end.  The desks and chairs, sometimes rooted and sometimes free standing, held in place only by the severity of the teacher’s compulsion, scrape and grate painfully on the floors; tipped back chairs fall heavily backwards to the alarm of the one seated and the delight of everyone else but the terrified, exasperated teacher who foresaw this event and stood powerless to prevent it. Shoes chafe noisily on the floors. Atop the desktops books, papers and pens are arrayed, underneath it all  are concealed signs written and carved for rebellious purposes and signs of some presence: “I❤️ Paul; Mr. Billings is a dork; π=450 calories. Fuck everyone!”  In the science rooms the pungent odors of sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde hang aloft oppressively and then ooze out of the doorways to mix obscenely in the halls with the unappetizing aromas of food preparation emanating from cafeteria kitchens. The unsavory smells hang suspended in the air, and then they settle, like ice-nine, on everything, threatening to freeze all movement. In sum, the mingling of odors produces a potent dankness particular only to schools, places of worship, and mortuary crypts, such as that where Romeo and Juliet ended their lives. But those smells also stem from environmental pollution that now threatens human existence even though remedy exists to mitigate and even eliminate the threat of extinction. There are those, however, who deny the danger and offer plans that only exasperate it. Despite the fact that he cannot cease to pursuit it, knowledge offers Caldwell little ease. It seems to be useless and suggests to him only death. In The Centaur the school becomes the world.

For Caldwell, the school seems rife with animosity, hostility and futility. Heading out with his son to school each morning, Caldwell cries out, only half-humorously, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels . . . Off to the hate factory” (49). Caldwell is even terrified of the principal, Mr. Zimmerman, during whose evaluation visit to Caldwell’s classroom he sees what seems to be chaos, and Caldwell worries that he will be fired. The difficult and apparently futile effort in which he daily engages overwhelms him and he beholds his failures everywhere. At the school basketball game, plagued by his own doubt, Caldwell observed in attendance his former students whom he imagines as the products of his failure: “Living corpses, they didn’t even have the sense to stay out once they got out . . . What in hell are you supposed to do to keep them from ending like that?” These students make Caldwell anxious representing as they do evidence of his uselessness. “He shies away from these old students, [t]he hunch in their shoulders reminding him of the great whole skinned carcasses hung on hooks in the freezer of a big Atlantic City hotel he once worked for.” Wherever he looked, Caldwell confronted death, failure, and futility, and he painfully suffers from his inability to relieve either his own dread or what he imagines to be the despairing fate of his students. But none of those feelings were inherent in the numbers he has written on the board. They needed translation.

But it is not merely those students who cannot leave the school that causes Caldwell to consider his ineffectiveness: even for those who have become active citizens does Caldwell assume the consequences of his failure as a teacher. Suffering from a toothache, Caldwell visits the dental office of one of his former students who proceeds to extract the tooth. “The kid had wanted to become an M.D. but hadn’t the I.Q. so he had settled on being a butcher.”  Caldwell recognized the pain branching from the tooth extraction in his head as a “consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such.” This is the pain that echoes from the first pages of the novel when Caldwell’s ankle receives the arrow: his suffering is passively received and actively enacted. His frustrations confront him everywhere; his seems an irrelevant existence. This is no Golden Age, he states, though I think that there might be gold to be found. Updike portrays Caldwell as a forsaken saint in this modern tarnished world.  He says to his son, “I’m a dime a dozen,” but Peter responds, almost exasperatedly but in admiration, “But there’s nobody else like you, Daddy. There’s nobody else like you in the world.” And the student that has caused Caldwell the most difficulty, Diefendorf, becomes a teacher because of his love and respect for his teacher, George Caldwell, and writes in the obituary for this teacher, “To sit under Mr. Caldwell was to lift up one’s head in aspiration  . . . there was never any confusion that indeed ‘Here was a man’” This self-sacrificing, questing teacher, functioning seemingly without effect and purpose, one whose character and efficacy remains unquestioned by the novel. This is the transcendence of feeling! Though he never would recognize this status, Caldwell is the hero of this novel that is embedded in mythology. George Caldwell is a hero in a fallen world, the contemporary guardian of knowledge and virtue. The novel’s naked facts have thus become a transcendent truth. Neither is ours a Golden Age. As the Talking Heads sing, “This ain’t no party, This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around/No time for dancing, no lovey-dovey/I ain’t got time for that now!” The Centaur (1962) portrays poignantly the anguish and triumph of George Caldwell, the teacher, struggling to discover and to communicate some order and ultimate meaning to life, but whose purposes seem forever frustrated by the world in which he functions. Overwhelmed by the nature of his task, Caldwell confesses to Hester Appleton, the language teacher at Olinger High School, “There’ve been times in my years here when the kids have got me so down I’ve stepped out of the classroom and come here by the drinking fountain just to hear you in there pronouncing French . . . .”. As for myself, in those despondent moments, I sometimes head to the nearest cinema or I take to my bed! Like Caldwell I seek solidity, certainty, beauty, even faith, but all around experience doubt and ambiguity, ugliness, and spite; Caldwell stands in a classroom scene replete with tension, conflict, and frustration. There, in that space assigned to learning, menace, chaos, dissatisfaction and failure seem to reign.  In that classroom, “Fists, claws, cocked elbows blurred in patch-colored panic above the scarred and varnished desk-tops . . .” Ah, I have read the newspapers and I know where I am!