C O M P A R A T I V E A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D U C AT I O N : A D I V E R S I T Y O F V O I C E S C O M P A R A T I V E A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L E D U C AT I O N : A D I V E R S I T Y O F V O I C E S

The Teacher, Literature and the

The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean

Mediterranean The Teacher,
Simone Galea
University of Malta
Literature and the
and

Adrian Grima (Eds.)

Mediterranean
University of Malta

At a time when the Mediterranean has rediscovered its own vitality, seven academics Simone Galea and Adrian Grima (Eds.)
from the fields of education and literature look at how fictions set in the region narrate
the role of the teacher from the point of view of the students and from that of the
teachers themselves. While an increasingly technocratic approach to the performance
of teachers focuses on competences, these often highly subjective narratives tell
stories of practitioners who refuse to fit into the mould imposed on them by patriarchy
or the educational institutions. The writers dealt with in this volume are aware that
teachers cannot be solely defined in terms of what they are expected to do within
schools and classrooms. This reductively conceives them as simply needing the skills
to teach without having the ability to contextualise their teaching within wider
historical, social and cultural realities. With its migration flows and intricate web of
social and cultural politics, the Mediterranean of the 21st century is an ideal space for
reflections on the role of the teacher in an ever-changing society.

Simone Galea and Adrian Grima (Eds.)

Cover photo by Elizabeth Grech

ISBN 978-94-6209-870-1

Euro-Mediterranean Centre
for Educational Research Euro-Mediterranean Centre
for Educational Research

SensePublishers CAIE 34

Spine
6.934 mm
The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean
COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION:
A Diversity of Voices
Volume 34

Series Editors

Allan Pitman
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Miguel A. Pereyra
University of Granada, Spain

Editorial Board

Ali Abdi, University of Alberta, Canada

Clementina Acedo, UNESCO International Bureau of Education
Mark Bray, University of Hong Kong, China
Christina Fox, University of Wollongong, Australia
Steven Klees, University of Maryland, USA
Nagwa Megahed, Ain Shams University, Egypt
Crain Soudain, University of Cape Town, South Africa
David Turner, University of Glamorgan, England
Medardo Tapia Uribe, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico

Scope

Comparative and International Education: A Diversity of Voices aims to provide a

comprehensive range of titles, making available to readers work from across the
comparative and international education research community. Authors will represent
as broad a range of voices as possible, from geographic, cultural and ideological
standpoints. The editors are making a conscious effort to disseminate the work of
newer scholars as well as that of well-established writers.
The series includes
authored books and edited works focusing upon current issues and controversies in
a field that is undergoing changes as profound as the geopolitical and economic
forces that are reshaping our worlds.
The series aims to provide books which
present new work, in which the range of methodologies associated with comparative
education and international education are both exemplified and opened up for
debate. As the series develops, it is intended that new writers from settings and
locations not frequently part of the English language discourse will find a place in
the list.
The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean

Edited by

Simone Galea
Adrian Grima
University of Malta

Euro-MEditErranEan CEntrE
for EduCational rEsEarCh

SENSE PUBLISHERS
ROTTERDAM / BOSTON / TAIPEI
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-94-6209-870-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-94-6209-871-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-94-6209-872-5 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers,

P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands
https://www.sensepublishers.com/

Cover photo by Elizabeth Grech

Printed on acid-free paper

All rights reserved © 2014 Sense Publishers

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1
Simone Galea & Adrian Grima

1. The Strasbourg Stop: The Challenges of Unity and Diversity in 9

Theory and Fiction
Ivan Callus

2. Francis Ebejer’s Struggle with Education: Teachers and Their

Students in Postcolonial Literature 29
Marco Galea & Simone Galea

3. Mediterranean Memoirists: Revelations of True Teachers 41

Laila Suleiman Dahan

4. The Italian School as Seen by Teacher Writers 61

Antonietta Censi

5. This Is Why I Started Teaching: To Remove the Cloud from My 79

Students’ Eyes
Anna Marina Mariani

6. Critical Mediterranean Voices 101

Adrian Grima

About the Contributors 121

v
 SIMONE GALEA & ADRIAN GRIMA

INTRODUCTION

The idea of the teacher today is heavily influenced by performance-based

approaches in teacher education and professional development (NCATE, 2008;
European Commission, 2005; Darling Hammond & Bransford, 2005). This
approach is generally driven by the need to set standards for teacher performance
and establish specific competences that a good teacher should have. The trend
towards a competence approach in fixing characteristics for the teacher has been
criticised for its underlying technocratic rationality. Teachers cannot be solely
defined in terms of what they are expected to do within schools and classrooms.
This reductively conceives them as simply needing the skills to teach without
having the ability to contextualise their teaching within wider historical, social and
cultural realities. Furthermore, setting fixed predetermined teacher competences as
templates for measuring their ability to teach seriously undermines teachers’
participation in the development of their profession. This approach conceives them
only in terms of what they are rather than who they are or can be.

CONCEIVING THE UNAUTHORISED

Considering these contexts it is important to look into possibilities of conceiving

the teacher in ways beyond those rigidly established by the competences approach.
Several educational theorists (Biesta, 2010; Sultana, 2009; Blake et al., 1988) have
argued for the importance of reflecting on the complexities of being and becoming
a teacher and for bringing together theory and practice in thinking about the
teacher. Teachers do not have one essential identity that can be easily deciphered
by the identification of basic competences. Teachers can be conceptualised in
various ways and a reinvention of how they are conceived challenges the language
of competency and performativity.
In this volume we look at the teacher in literature as yet another way of opening
up processes of thought about the teacher. The aims of our explorations of the
teacher in literature revolve around the possibility of literature’s contribution
towards a conceptualisation of teachers that is not engineered by the very
educational systems that they experience. The teacher in literature has rarely been
considered relevant to discussions about the teacher and even less so in teacher
education programmes. It is not the aim of this volume to look into literary texts to
take up exemplary ways for teachers’ actions. To do so would entail taking up the
technocratic language which has reduced processes of becoming a teacher into
rigidly planned linear courses of action towards pre-established ends. This special

S. Galea & A. Grima (eds.), The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean, 1–8.
© 2014 Sense Publishers and Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies. All rights reserved.
GALEA & GRIMA

edition presents a number of readings of literary texts written by various authors in

the Mediterranean to explore the complex issues in thinking about the teacher and
to generate thoughts that contribute to alternative ways of envisioning teachers.
One of the authors in this volume is sceptical of the possibilities for literature to
offer constructive ideas about the teacher. For Dahan, fictive texts rarely re-
conceptualise the teacher in positive ways. This position itself makes one even
more intrigued about the question of literature and its position in socio-democratic
and educational spheres. Why look into literary texts to explore ideas about the
teacher? Can literature be used for educational purposes? If the literary texts as
commonly understood are highly productive of fiction, does literature contribute to
the fictionalisation of the teacher? Why go beyond the conventional methods of
educational research to inquire about the teacher?
Research methodology in education has long grappled with notions of objective
truth in its production of knowledge and about the teacher in particular. The
readings in this book are presented as new sources of knowledge that question
given truths about the teacher to contribute to a process of reinvention of the
teacher. Literature itself, as Derrida (1992) states, has this possibility of invention.
It makes it possible to play with language, to imagine oneself as other, to imagine
other than what is presented in standard form. What happens in literature may or
may not correspond to a given interpretation of reality. In literature lies the
freedom to say anything and this renders the interrogation of that which is accepted
as truth possible.
This does not mean that the inventions of literature do not refer to what is
already there (Miller, 2001). Literary texts are embedded within socio-cultural and
historical contexts; texts are regarded as literature through institutional cultural
rules that consider them as such. Literature paradoxically reflects that which has
institutionalised it as such. In reflecting what is and has been there, it belongs to an
‘economy of the same’. But literature is also recognised for its potential to open
and destabilise the language of the same.
In this manner the language of literature does not necessarily perform what is
already there. It is possible that literary texts exceed institutionalised ideas and
concepts because its utterances are not merely performative of that which is
considered as the norm. As Derrida (1992) puts it, literature uses words in such a
manner that allows the ‘other to come’. It gives space to the presentation of other
than that which is authorised.
This book proposes this play with literature in making the invention of the
‘other’ teacher possible and to explore the teacher, other than the standard possible.
We are impassioned by this quest to look into the secret that the literary text holds.
Literature does not hold some essence about the teacher. Its secret lies in the act of
reading and writing that detaches ‘language from its firm embeddedness in a social
or biographical context’ and allows it ‘to play freely as fiction’ (Miller, 2001, p.
60).
The study by Ivan Callus draws on the many issues related to the politics of
literature in the light of European contexts that are politically and educationally
interested in establishing a vision of Europe that wants to be perceived as unified in

2
 INTRODUCTION

its diversity. His reading of Tim Parks’s Europa draws on the texts of Valéry and
Derrida to raise ethical and political questions related to teaching, the curriculum,
teachers, and their inevitable connections to what is termed as ‘European’. Callus’s
reading appeals to those familiar with the literature about education and namely
notions of the European teacher and her journeys towards a European centre that
establishes standards and values presented as ‘European’.
Callus uses a fictional text to make readers think about the different facets of
this problematic and especially where teachers in higher education are concerned.
Derrida explains that what marks the literary text is the fact that it makes readers
ponder on whether they really happened. As narrators, authors do not have the
obligation to tell the truth and they are not responsible to respond to what is said in
their text. In this sense the literary text that they create is conducive to democratic
opportunities in freely making various voices heard and different readings emerge.
Nevertheless Ivan Callus’s critical insights on Tim Parks’s Europa do not shy
away from their responsibility to respond to what is said in the literary text. He
does this without stifling other possible readings of Parks’s story. One important
question posed by Callus and which is highly relevant to the teacher in literature is
the very teaching of literature and setting up a literary curriculum. This question
instigates readers who would be more interested in the educational dimensions of
the issues, to a more open reading of the paper and towards perhaps the more direct
questions about the Euro-Mediterranean teacher of literature. If the Mediterranean,
as Valéry presents it, is the great basin where cultures are sifted to become
assimilated as European, what would the osmotic functions of the teacher of
literature within Euro-Mediterranean contexts be? Considering her in-between
positions with respect to the literary, the educational and the ethico-political what
are her possibilities and responsibilities in addressing and indeed creating the
unique and the different within European contexts that are even more inclined to
unifying diversities? This continues to raise further questions that are crucial to this
volume: to what extent can literature become a subversive practice in making
Europe a culture which is different to itself and in making possible for the ‘other to
come’ as Derrida would have it? What is particularly interesting in Callus’s chapter
is that it makes the reader work. It allows an open reading and makes one think
within one’s own academic field and about specific situations in context, which
ironically reflects what the author starts with: context is everything! And wouldn’t
this writer be an educator, a representation of the teacher in literature whose
writing methods have a particular pedagogical stance against the teacher who
would want to dictate ways of reading?
The relation between the writer and the teacher is further discussed in the
reading of Francis Ebejer’s literary texts by Marco Galea and Simone Galea. This
Maltese playwright and novelist had keen interest in education and especially the
challenges of the teacher in loosening the social and historical chains that tie him to
an educational system that reproduces a colonial mentality. Francis Ebejer’s
literature grapples with this problematic of an education that claims to liberate
whoever goes through it, but at the same time constrains one to stipulated ways of
being and to negate one’s own roots and culture. The analysis argues that teachers

3
GALEA & GRIMA

and students inherit this colonial legacy and their attempts to move out of
educational reproducing machines place them in a risky in-between position of not
belonging to either culture. Ebejer does not believe that teachers in schools can
help students go beyond this double bind. In several instances in his biography and
literary texts he implies that books and literature themselves can be a good source
of self-education. Marco Galea and Simone Galea conclude that it is the writer
himself and the hybrid literature that he produces that have the educational
potential of making human beings free and this goes beyond the educational aims
of the project of the Enlightenment.
On the other hand, for Laila Suleiman Dahan some fictional texts about the
teacher are simply a ‘flight of fancy’ that portray teaching as an exotic practice and
these have damaging repercussions on the teaching profession and its public image.
Dahan claims that these texts are far removed from the real experiences of good
teachers and teachers themselves have the responsibility of writing their own
memoirs to provide more realistic accounts of the lives of teachers. Dahan’s
chapter speaks of teachers’ souls in exile, seeking to do justice to teachers who feel
similarly exiled. For her, the memoir literally becomes the location that
compensates for the metaphoric loss of place that many teachers experience. She
explains that as opposed to fictional texts the memoir does not generate non truths.
A close reading of Dahan’s chapter reveals, however, that she is not arguing that
the memoir holds the Truth. For her the memoir renders the possibilities of many
truths and gives possibilities for teachers to produce their own truths about
teaching. In this sense she considers teachers’ writing as essential to understanding
who the teacher is.
One also realises that Dahan’s plea for the importance of teachers’ own writing
is based on the concept that realistic accounts do not merely reflect the real world
but that they themselves construct it. Her committed stance towards the teacher’s
writing of her own self is based on her convictions of the power of the written text
in constructing the teacher. This recalls the idea that writing performs actions
rather than simply reflects them (Culler, 2000). It is because of this that Dahan is
not willing to relinquish her position as an author of her own teaching self through
the writing of the memoir.

THE POLITICAL PROMISE OF LITERATURE

The contribution by Antonietta Censi about the literary work of five Italian teacher
writers that deals with the relationship between teachers and students seems to
respond to Dahan’s plea for teachers themselves to tell their story. Censi focuses
on the importance of the context when one assesses the role of the teacher and
takes into account the social background of the students, the location of the school,
the conflicts that exist both within the communities of teachers and students and
between them, and the expectations of the parents. The author looks beyond
discourse about what she calls traditional professional competences in the process
of education and socialisation to consider factors such as empathy and charisma
which allow the teacher to engage with individual students in ways that address

4
 INTRODUCTION

their specific needs. Censi also considers the importance in teacher training of
introspection on attitudes and passions, an engagement that is often inspired by the
teachers’ interaction with students and their social context.
Literature is seen as a ‘possible conveyer of values, expressing the wishes and
aspirations of an innovative vanguard that represents the prevailing ideology’. It is
a social fact both because of the genesis of the text and because it is perceived by a
broad social assembly of readers. The author refers to Martha Nussbaum’s
argument about ‘the political promise of literature’ and how ‘it can transport us’
into the life of another while still allowing us to remain ourselves. In her analysis
of the literary accounts of various Italian teacher writers, Censi considers teacher
attitudes characterised by conformism, anomie or innovation, ritualism, and
rebellion. She notes that teachers who fully embrace the system conceive their role
as ‘a mechanical application of procedures’, while those who choose ‘a mix of
emotionality and devotion’ invest in a successful educational strategy that allows
students to transform themselves. Censi considers the literary narratives of teacher
writers, based on their own experiences and those of a wide spectrum of teachers
they create, or recreate in their fiction, that reflect on the school in which they
teach and the new kind of school that they imagine in which, for example, self-
management helps the actors to understand needs and urges them to discover new
sources of knowledge.
While she takes note, with Domenico Starnone, of the inability of the
educational institution to deal with the demands arising from the social context,
Censi also considers, with Paola Mastrocola, the more recent ideology of school
policies to mix egalitarian planning with market mythologies, ‘a free-trade
economy based on the absolute supremacy of interest, effectiveness, competition,
and the machine’. The fading Marxist myth of equal redistribution is seen as being
replaced and enhanced by the technological myth, leaving everybody in the school
deprived. In what she calls ‘the global society of disenchantment’, Censi believes
that the personal responsibilities of an educator still include the attempt ‘to
translate the richness of education into new shapes which are seen as the transition
to the new generations’. Like the ‘re-created’ school of Marco Rossi Doria, Censi
deals with literary narratives that are the result of and offer space for encounter,
dialogue and discovery.
Anna Marina Mariani sees narrative fiction as a ‘mental laboratory’ that allows
us to analyse the dynamic representations of the ‘real life reality’ of individual
teachers and schools. Even though other people’s experience is not necessarily
always good for training, Mariani sees the novel as a powerful tool in the education
of teachers and in a treatment of pedagogical issues that attracts a wider, non-
specialist audience with the creative, emotional force of its narrative. She believes
that the use of literature can be ‘both positive and risky to structure a profession
that is in search of models, of points of reference and ideals’ that are not merely
scientific. No two teachers are the same and every person is in a constant process
of change.
The representation of the teacher in film or literature as some kind of
superhuman who can transform an uninspired class of students into active and

5
GALEA & GRIMA

enthusiastic citizens willing to learn culture and values is what Starnone calls ‘the
catharsis of the fake teacher’. Mariani argues that one can only talk about
education in a partial way. School is creative, but it is also repetitive: ‘one can
allude, exemplify, synthesise but there is always something missing or something
in excess’. Ultimately, in the narratives she examines, the story starts when
teaching stops, when the committed teacher enters into crisis. But while it suspends
reality, literary narrative allows us to detach ourselves from direct experience and
reflect on what actions to take. It also functions, writes Mariani, as an exchange of
experiences, even about the distant future, and allows us to ‘reduce’ the complexity
of the function of education and teaching. Written experiences about the school
have a formative value when they are read against the background of theories and
conceptual mechanisms that ‘promote continuity in the individual’s professional
experience by building bridges between the theoretical and the practical’. The best
teachers are those who have given their students an education that lives on and that
gives some sense to mortality. In what Mariani describes as the most important
tribute of all times to the profession, Dante describes the teacher as the awakener of
the desire for knowledge, he or she who can teach students how a human being can
become eternal.
The space for encounter, dialogue and discovery that Antonietta Censi and Anna
Marina Mariani talk about is provided by some of the teachers drawn from literary
narratives that Adrian Grima focuses on in his contribution. Unlike those teachers
who are happy to maintain and reproduce the values of the patriarchal educational
system, with its partner hierarchies in the family and the state portrayed by Walid
Nabhan and Alex Vella Gera in their semiautobiographical narratives, these
enlightened teachers actively undermine patriarchalism because they believe, like
Paulo Freire, that the very nature of men and women is that of ‘makers and
dreamers of history and not simply as casualties of an a priori vision of the world’
(2001, p. 41). This is what Freire calls ‘humanity’s ontological vocation, which
calls us out of and beyond ourselves’ (2001, p. 25). The ideal teachers of the
semiautobiographical novel by Najat El Hachmi and the novel by former teacher
Lou Drofenik seem to believe, like Freire, that our being is something that is
‘constructed socially and historically’ (2001, p. 26), not something that is shaped
for us and before us, and therefore these are teachers who actively reject the
impositions of the patriarchy.
Adrian Grima uses literary narratives to consider challenging ‘Mediterranean’
situations in schools brought about both by emigration from the Mediterranean,
and by immigration on the European coast of the Mediterranean in what Carmel
Borg and Peter Mayo call the ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘Euro-Mediterranean school’.
Lou Drofenik deals with the differences between Australian students and
immigrant children from the Mediterranean lands in post-World War II classes in
Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne. A retired teacher remembers that the Maltese,
Italian and Greek female students would come up with all kinds of excuses to miss
school outings like going to the pool because of the pressures of their patriarchal
families.

6
 INTRODUCTION

On the other hand, much of Walid Nabhan’s narrative about Arabs and the Arab
world, inspired by his experiences as a boy in Amman, deals with how authority is
imposed, unilaterally and arbitrarily, from above. In his novel, the flawed
educational system is seen as a clearing house for the neutralisation of independent
thinking and dissent in Jordanian society and to strengthen the stranglehold of the
autocratic King over his hapless subjects. Despite the long-term effects of Ms.
Ġinan’s threatening and homogenising stick, Nabhan the author refuses to toe the
line and his novel is an act of defiance and liberation in itself. This narrative and
those of the other writers he refers to prompt Adrian Grima to argue that there are
similarities between the act of writing literature, the critical reading of literary
narratives, and critical pedagogy, similarities that are rooted in the ‘unfinishedness’
of the human person inserted into ‘a permanent process of searching’ (Freire, 2001,
p. 21). These texts about Arab teachers invite us to consider what long-term effects
the Arab revolutions may have on the liberatory potential of education in the
Mediterranean and inevitably on the reading of literary texts that deal with
education in the region even before the events of 2011.

NARRATIVE CONTEXT

Narration in novels and films, writes Mariani, has the potential to organise ‘the
process of providing meaning to a series of events, transforming the factual aspects
of existence into a significant experience’. Narratives can be a formative tool for
teachers because ‘they provide motivation by facilitating the process of change in
the professional routine and contribute to build up shared values and objectives’.
Like literary texts, teaching situations are embedded in socio-cultural and
historical contexts; they require contextualisation within the wider historical, social
and cultural realities on which and into which they feed. Nevertheless such
contextualisation does not limit the possibilities of the readers in moving beyond
their own realities. This volume raises important issues related to the teacher and
her representation in the literary texts from various regions in the Mediterranean. It
also discusses the value of literature and particularly its educational, political and
ethical endeavour in opening up spaces for other conceptions of the teacher. One
other important aspect this volume invites us to consider is literature’s comparative
potential and how literature and questions related to the teacher in literature may be
relevant to more than one country in the Mediterranean region. What happens
when one assesses the profile of the teacher in various parts of the region against
the background of the various narratives referred to in this volume?

REFERENCES

Biesta, G. (2010). Good education in the age of measurement. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Blake, N. et al. (1998). Thinking again. Education after postmodernism. Westport, CT: Bergin &
Garvey.
Borg, C., & Mayo, P. (2006). Learning and social difference. Challenges for public education and
critical pedagogy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

7
GALEA & GRIMA

Culler, J. (2000). Philosophy and literature: The fortunes of the performative. Poetics Today, 21(3),
503-519.
Darling Hammond, L., & Bransford, J. (Eds.). (2005). Preparing teachers for a changing world. What
teachers should know and be able to do. California: Jossey Bass.
Derrida, J. (1992). Acts of literature (D. Attridge, Ed.). London & New York: Routledge.
European Commission Directorate General for Education and Culture. (2005). Common European
principles for teacher competences and qualifications. Brussels: European Commission.
Freire, P. (2001). Pedagogy of freedom: Ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Maryland, USA:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Miller, J. H. (2001). Derrida and literature. In T. Cohen (Ed.), Jacques Derrida and the humanities. A
critical reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
NCATE. (2008). Professional standards for the accreditation of teacher education. Washington:
National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Preparation Institution.
Sultana, R. (2009). ‘Competence’ and ‘competence frameworks’ in career guidance: Complex and
contested concepts. International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance, 9, 15-30.

8
 IVAN CALLUS

1. THE STRASBOURG STOP

The Challenges of Unity and Diversity in Theory and Fiction

[T]he whole Mediterranean littoral must be counted in Europe.

– Paul Valéry

INTRODUCTION: ‘CONTEXT IS ALL’

‘Context is all’, as the phrase that becomes a refrain in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale has it. Let us by all means ‘look at the context’, as our teachers
of literature, at all levels, have always enjoined us to do: a tendency they share with
politicians everywhere, who insist that ‘taking things in context’ will help us
appreciate their decisions better. Teachers and politicians, context and
interpretation, shared attributes and varying natures, vision and reality: these will
all feature in this chapter’s consideration of the representation in specific works of
theory and fiction of the ideality of Europe. Indeed, the context – almost absurdly –
will be as broad as Europe and as deep as the Mediterranean, and the methodology
approaches that generality through texts that both anticipate and allegorise the
difficulties surrounding ‘unity in diversity’, that precept of European union which
remains patchily synchronised with perceptions of the project.
We could do worse than to start with examining the extraordinary epigraph from
Paul Valéry. To our contemporary sensibility the statement will seem gauchely
tendentious. It is not reconcilable with one of the most sublime, precise and
prescient of twentieth-century littérateurs. We are reminded that Valéry is sublime
when recalling him as the author of ‘La Jeune Parque’. We are reminded of his
interest in precision by his notes on science and mathematics in his Cahiers. We
are reminded of his prescience when rereading Walter Benjamin’s doubts about the
auratic dimensions of art, which are essentially an elaboration of Valéry’s quoted
intuition that ‘profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful’
(Benjamin, 1973, p. 211). A prophetic quality is evident too when encountering
the essays in History and Politics, the tenth volume of the English-language
translation of Valéry’s Collected Works. Certain developments in political and
cultural history are there anticipated with jadedness and not infrequently with what
Matthew Arnold or Jürgen Habermas might have recognised as a further pitch for
‘sweetness and light’ or for continued life in the project of Enlightenment and
modernity. Such wistfulness in regard to a passing age in culture is understandable
and can be respected. But as has been amply argued, not least within post-Marxist
and postcolonialist commentaries, the cultural politics guided by such a pitch is not

S. Galea & A. Grima (eds.), The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean, 9–27.
© 2014 Sense Publishers and Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies. All rights reserved.
CALLUS

above criticism. We are not unused to certain penseurs or literary figures being
seen as misguided in their unwitting or deliberate disregard of difference, respect of
which is a key value in the ethico-politics of post-modernity from which the idea of
Europe, as a political project, springs, but the intractability of which that idea also
strives to manage. However Valéry, who represented France on cultural affairs at
the League of Nations and who suffered the resentments of the Vichy government,
does not appear associable with unconscionable political sentiment. His politics
cannot be said to have featured the kind of dubious episodes that characterised
those of, say, Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis or Giovanni Gentile or Martin
Heidegger. So what ought to be read into this declaration of Valéry? How could it
be so lacking in sensitiveness to difference, so blasé about Europe’s capacity to
corral within its centralities what may be, all too literally, on its margins? What is
at stake in the idea that the Mediterranean littoral delimits the very space of what is
integral to Europe?
Reproduced in the next section, therefore – since we are agreed that ‘context is
all’ – is the paragraph from which the statement is taken. It is followed by some
considerations on the fuller essay, as well as by a presentation of associated ideas
in other texts by Valéry on the same themes. This is in turn followed, in the third
section, by some reflections on a key commentary by Jacques Derrida on Valéry’s
thoughts on Europe. Derrida’s The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe
revisits Valéry to focus, inter alia, on the synecdochal relationships between
Europe and other territories, including those bordering the Mediterranean. Those
relationships, and how their ideality is detached from diversity’s contexts, are
explored in a fourth section that discusses Tim Parks’s Europa. This is a novel
about breakdown in personal understandings but also, very centrally for our
contexts, about grounded relations of unity and diversity as these find themselves
reflected in a fictional higher education environment that sorely tests the
suppleness of Europe’s political values and machineries. Finally, in the conclusion,
the implications of these very diverse texts for thinking through the relation
between Europe, the Mediterranean and higher education are assessed.

VALÉRY AND THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN MIND

In the original text where the sentence that provides the epigraph appeared, the
embedding paragraph runs as follows:
A single example of that spirit, an example of the highest order and of the
very first importance, is Greece – since the whole Mediterranean littoral must
be counted in Europe. Smyrna and Alexandria are as much part of Europe as
Athens and Marseilles. Greece founded geometry. It was a mad undertaking:
we are still arguing about the possibility of such a folly. (Valéry, 1963b,
p. 33)
This curious paragraph is, at least in the most direct sense, original. It was in this
form that it first appeared, for the essay was published first in English, not in
French. ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ was published at the request of John Middleton

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Murry in the Athenaeum (London), in two parts, ‘The Spiritual Crisis’ on 11 April
1919 and ‘The Intellectual Crisis’ on 2 May 1919. It later appeared in French in
Nouvelle Revue Française on 1 August 1919, where in a prefatory note the English
original was announced as a translation. What the essay broaches is therefore
marked not only by the Hegelian overtones of the title, but also by the reach
conferred through the essay’s quasi-simultaneous English-language and French-
language appearance and by the cultural capital of the two journals in which it
separately appeared (not to mention that of its author). It is marked too by the
weight of its historical time, the Armistice having been signed exactly five months
before the first of the two parts appeared in the Athenaeum. The devastation of the
First World War is the background to the essay’s famous incipit, which is ‘the most
famous and influential of all Valéry’s pronouncements, one of the great instances
of modern rhetoric’ (Valéry, 1963i, p. 576n). Here it is:
We later civilizations … we too now know that we are mortal. (Valéry
1963b, p. 23)
The context, then, is announced. It involves the mortality of the European mind in
a moment of cultural apocalypse. At stake is the genius of Europe. Indeed, Valéry
has just sought to characterise ‘the European psyche’ through reference to its
‘driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of
imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic scepticism, an unresigned
mysticism’, all of which ensure, in conjunction with ‘the quality of her men’,
‘Europe’s superiority’ (pp. 32-33). Disturbingly, this will seem almost on the track
of Arthur de Gobineau’s An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races,
published between 1853 and 1855. Valéry’s motives, however, are Spenglerian. He
is worried about the decline of the West but is not, by that token, fascistically
inclined. Admittedly, Edward Said in The World, the Text, and the Critic is less
than sympathetic:
If we believe that Kipling’s jingoistic White Man was simply an aberration,
then we cannot see the extent to which the White Man was merely one
expression of a science … whose goal was to understand and to confine non-
Whites in their status as non-Whites, in order to make the notion of
Whiteness, clearer, purer, and stronger. If we cannot see this, then we will be
seeing a good deal less than every major European intellectual and cultural
figure of the nineteenth century saw, from Chateaubriand, Hugo, and the
other early romantics, to Arnold, Newman, Mill, T. E. Lawrence, Forster,
Barrés, William Robertson Smith, Valéry, and countless others. (Said, 1991b,
p. 224; italics added)
This echoes Said’s assessment in Orientalism. There Valéry is regarded as
‘analyzing the Orient’s threat away’ through treating the Orient as ‘a superseded
origin’ (Said, 1991a, p. 251).
Undoubtedly there is much in Valéry that corroborates Said’s reading. Here is a
statement, taken from ‘Europe’s Power to Choose’, that suggests not only that

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Said’s reading is not unjustified but also that our epigraph is not atypical of
Valéry’s perception of the Mediterranean:
[T]he only question is one of assimilation. But that has been precisely the
main business and indeed the specialty of the European mind through the
ages. Our role is to maintain this power to choose, to take in everything and
transform it to our own substance, for this has made us what we are. The
Greeks and Romans showed us how to deal with the monsters of Asia, how to
treat them by analysis, what to extract from them. … For me, the
Mediterranean basin is like a retort in which the essences of the vast Orient
have, from the beginning of time, come to be condensed. (Valéry, 1963c, p.
325; italics in original)
Civilisation, humanity, universality: in this lexicon, these become near-synonyms
to Europe. The Mediterranean, to this perception, is the substance that in a
chemical image distils difference to an essence fortifying the self-same. But before
we rush to chastise Valéry, it is well to recall the mantra of literature teachers:
‘Look at the context’. If Valéry is a partisan of European culture, civilisation and
manners in the fraught years between the Armistice of 1911 and the invasion of
Poland on 1st September 1939, when everything that he trusts and cherishes
appears precarious and where he is moved to uphold it, to what degree is that
utterly terrible? The question is interesting, since it asks whether context might
render sentiment and action excusable. It places us in the ethics of the relativism of
context. Let us therefore examine certain contexts further, recalling that Valéry was
in fact wary of politics, especially that practice of it ‘amounting necessarily and
wretchedly to nothing but expedients, … to be party to a “party”, which means
consummating every day the sacrifice of the intellect …’ (Valery, 1963c, p. 274).i
For him, ‘politics and freedom of the mind are mutually exclusive’ (Valéry, 1963d,
p. 206). These are not the words of someone bent on an absolutist political
programme. The assimilation that Valéry envisages is cultural. He is after all of a
generation largely untutored in the insight – otherwise self-evident to our post-
Althusserian, Frankfurt School-mentored minds – that such cultural absorption
services political enfolding too. And while it is not credible that Valéry is unaware
of that link, his reference to the sacrifice of the intellect indicates that, like Robert
Musil’s Ulrich, he is desperate for European man not to conclude that in the
circumstances prevailing after the war there is no recourse other than to be ohne
Eigenschaften. The intellect and its qualities, for Valéry, are key. And we know,
from his own argument and also well beyond, that the cultural unconscious of
intellectuality tendentially approaches Ideas as Western (to use another near-
synonym to European). The instincts springing from that unconscious remain
irrepressible, as indicated by Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, or by courses
that include the qualifier Western in their title, or by everything that induces Toni
Morrison to expose the whiteness of the literary imagination (Morrison, 1993, p.
xiv). It is through a sensibility consistent with all this that what Valéry honours
about Europe is in the end a tradition recognisable to the T. S. Eliot of Notes
towards the Definition of Culture, for instance, or to the Hegel who less than a

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century earlier had asserted, in a statement uncannily reminiscent of the epigraph,

that ‘[t]he northern part of Africa, which may be specially called that of the coast-
territory … must be attached to Europe’ (Hegel, 1956, pp. 92-93). Valéry’s
proposal to ‘consider as European all those peoples who in the course of history
have undergone the three influences’ of Rome, Christianity and Greece coheres
with that tradition (Valéry, 1963d, p. 316). And, positioned on that line, it is hard
not to feel keenly Valéry’s apprehensiveness when he writes that ‘a civilization has
the same fragility as a life’, or his poetic wistfulness in a famously evocative
passage where he imagines ‘our Hamlet of Europe … watching millions of ghosts’
in the act of turning over the skulls of various luminaries, among them those of
Leonardo and Leibniz and Kant (1963a, pp. 23 and 29). Indeed, three years later, in
1922 – the year of Eliot’s The Waste Land – Valéry is still despondent about
Europe’s fortunes. ‘The storm is over, and yet we are still uneasy … anxious … as
though it were just now going to break’, he writes, adding, ‘We hope vaguely, but
dread precisely’ (Valéry, 1963g, p. 307). The dread, here, is tradition’s as much as
it is his. And it will not take us very far – only, perhaps, to a Lyotardian differend –
to object that the cultural cataclysm that Valéry surveys was after all European in
its origins, and might not be entirely dissociable from liberal humanism’s project.
For that comes up against the realisation that it is not everyone that thinks that
liberal humanism is politically suspect, or that those exceptions share at least an
unconscious culpability in regard to the inequities of the world.
Matters then are vexed indeed. ‘Look at the context’: this enjoins us to have re-
imaginative empathy. ‘Always historicise’: the Jamesonian mantra pushes us there
too. The texts and circumstances we are interpreting, however, stretch those
maxims. The challenge is to judge whether the reimaginative empathy that has us
remember and understand context can mitigate the dismay occasioned by
sentiments that we know were not sinister in their intentions but that otherwise
prompt stern appraisal. It forces us to assess the extent to which context,
historicising and our keener sense of ‘difference’ in fact require us to consider
these various statements on Euro-Mediterranean visions more sensitively by, so to
speak, numbing our sensitiveness on these issues momentarily. We are urged to ask
whether such statements might prompt anything beyond the distaste compelled by
the orthodoxies of contemporary imperatives. The objective here is to explore their
bearing on the relations between political ideality and higher education and on
literary constructions of those relations.
With that in view, the obligatory context for quotation and paraphrase is to be
found in Valéry’s essay ‘The European’. Defining Europe as ‘a kind of cape of the
old continent, a western appendix to Asia’, Valéry sees this appendage that would
become hegemonic as having been shaped by the Mediterranean:
Even before present-day Europe took on the appearance familiar to us, the
Mediterranean had witnessed the establishment, in its eastern basin, of a sort
of pre-Europe. (Valéry, 1963d, p. 312)

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According to this reading, the origin of the European genius is Mediterranean. It

explains why the whole of the Mediterranean littoral might be counted as
European:
Egypt and Phoenicia somehow pre-figured the civilization we founded; then
came the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Iberian peoples. …
… The Celts, the Slavs, the Germanic peoples all have felt the enchantment
of that noblest of seas; a kind of irresistible tropism acting through the
centuries has made of this admirably shaped basin the object of the world’s
desire and the site of the greatest human activity. Economic, intellectual,
political, religious, artistic activity, everything has happened, or seems at
least to have begun, around this inner sea. (pp. 312-313; italics in original)
This is a little more than the platitude of the Mediterranean as cradle of civilisation.
It props up the idea of European enterprise and pre-eminence:
Soon the difference between this portion of humanity and the rest of the
world, as regards positive knowledge and power, became so great that it
upset the equilibrium. Europe burst out of its borders, went out to conquer
other lands. Civilization renewed the early invasions, but this time in the
opposite direction. At home, Europe reached the maximum of vitality,
intellectual fruitfulness, riches, and ambition. (p. 313)
Consequently Europe, ‘which began as a Mediterranean market’, is ‘a vast factory,
a factory in the literal sense – that is, machinery for transforming – but an
incomparable intellectual factory as well’ (pp. 313-314). As we shall see, this
machinery for transforming becomes a machinery for responsibility. Hence to be
European is to not be overdetermined by geographical space. It is, rather, to have a
particular temper of mind, shaped by a well-circumstanced, productive restlessness
of intellect:
[Europe] is masterpiece of temperament, combining all the conditions
favourable to man. And here man has become the European. You will forgive
me using the words “Europe” and “European” in a somewhat more than
geographical or historical … rather in a functional sense. I would almost say
(allowing my thought to abuse my language) that a Europe is a kind of
system composed of human variety and a particularly favourable locality,
and, lastly, fashioned by a singularly vivid and eventful history. The product
of this conjunction of circumstances is a European. (p. 315)
The disclaimer on language abused will have been registered: there is much here
that is excessive. Yet to be privileged with Europeanness is to be burdened, too.
Here is why, in language that recalls Max Weber’s rather more studied thesis on
the elective affinities that tie together the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of
capitalism:
If we examine this personality in relation to the simpler types of humanity,
he is a kind of monster. His memory is too full and continuous. He

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 THE STRASBOURG STOP

has extravagant ambitions, an unlimited greed for knowledge and wealth.

(p. 315, italics added)
It is from this point on that Valéry will go on to consider as European all those
peoples who have undergone Greek, Roman or Christian influences (pp. 316ff.).
The picture of the monstrous development of the assimilative and readaptive
genius of the European mind away from the ‘simplicity’ of those who, ‘occupying
the greater part of the globe, remained as though immobile in its customs, its
knowledge, its practical power, making only imperceptible progress, or none’ (p.
313), is enough to try a Said.
There is more. In those closing paragraphs of ‘The European’, the otherwise
rather puzzling reference to geometry in the paragraph incorporating the epigraph
becomes clearer. Geometry is seen as an endowment of a principle of ‘perfection’
informing the European intellect and spirit:
Greek geometry was the incorruptible model, not only for every kind of
knowledge that aims at the state of perfection, but also and above all for those
virtues most typical of the European intellect. I never think of classical art
without seeing as its ineluctable example the monument of Greek geometry.
The men who built it were hard and astute workmen, profound thinkers, but
also artists of great subtlety and an exquisite sense of perfection. (p. 321)
It is hard not to approach this in the light of what has been written on the rather
different extensions of this theme phenomenology, notably in Derrida’s Husserl
and the Origin of Geometry, but also in Husserl’s own The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. In terms closely reminiscent of
Valéry’s, Husserl speaks of a ‘crisis’ of rationalism that risks diminishing Europe,
which is constructed as ‘the historical teleology of the infinite goals of reason’
(Husserl, 1970, p. 299; italics added). This idea of Europe becomes
interchangeable with the concept of the West. Readily and imperceptibly, Husserl
resorts to the synonym when he speaks of ‘the West’s mission for humanity’. And,
like Valéry, Husserl is worried. ‘Europe’s greatest danger is weariness’, he writes.
For him, ‘“The crisis of European existence” … is not an obscure fate, an
impenetrable destiny’. A certain Hegelian dynamic is implicit here: ‘[R]ather, it
becomes understandable and transparent against the background of the teleology of
European history that can be discovered philosophically’, for ‘the European
“world” was born out of ideas of reason, i.e., out of the spirit of philosophy’ (p.
299). Consequently, what happens to Europe now? For Husserl, the choice is stark.
It can involve ‘the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational
sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity’. Or it can
amount to ‘the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of
reason’, in what will become – and note again the synonymousness across ‘spirit’,
‘Europe’ and ‘man’ – ‘the pledge of a great and distant future for man: for the
spirit alone is immortal’ (p. 299). For Valéry, meanwhile, the hope may need to
locate itself in a Europe without Europe, for ‘it is not so much Europe that excels,
but the European mind, and America is its formidable creation’ (Valéry, 1963e, p.

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CALLUS

323). In an essay written a year ahead of the Second World War, Valéry develops
the point further.
Whenever my thoughts turn too black and I despair of Europe, I can find
some hope only in thinking of the New Continent, for there in the New World
there will be minds to give a second life to some of the marvelous creations
of unhappy Europe. (Valéry, 1963a, p. 330)
At this point there are various predictable and not so predictable things to say.
They could include the critique of a trend within the History of Ideas for a
construction of Europe and ‘the West’ that fears decline; the reassertion of Said’s
perceptions of Orientalism; counter-perceptions involving what has been called
‘Occidentalism’ (Buruma & Margalit, 2004); the present contexts of contemporary
global politics, economics and international trade and relations; the exploration of
at least four contrary hegemonies related to Anglo-American stances and sundry
forms of expansionism in Russia, China and South-East Asia; and, interestingly,
what Derrida has called mondialatinisation (or, in a neat if not necessarily quite
precise translation, globalatinization – see Derrida, 1998, p. 67n7). All of this
makes the ideas of Europe and the Mediterranean projected in Valéry and others as
relevant to scrutiny as ever. That is because they continue to underpin the cultural
unconscious behind Europe’s self-image and the idea of a certain universality of
mind. It is not possible here to address all of these issues, or to critique that cultural
unconscious. But it is pertinent to raise the question of how that ideality can be
overcome by tawdriness: by the mundane demands of the negotiations in various
fora over competing visions and outlooks, by the contrast between what is idealised
and the meaner contexts of ‘realities on the ground’. Within the context of this
chapter, the way in which all of these values and visions are scaled down to
scrabbling European and non-European existence will be a main focus in what
follows. And here it becomes useful to study the contrasts between what is
professed liberally (in all senses of that adverb) and what can be set to the
constraints of university curricula. This is where Tim Parks’s Europa becomes
pertinent. First, however, some further necessary points relating to critique of what
is broached in Valéry will be made in the next section, which addresses the linked
problematics of European exceptionalism and the university.

DERRIDA’S THE OTHER HEADING: EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND

MEDITERRANEAN EDUCATION

The Other Heading is among other things a critique of Valéry’s ideas on Europe
and the Mediterranean. I have attempted an appraisal of that elsewhere (Callus,
2006) and shall not repeat myself other than to underline certain affinities between
the ideality of Europe, the challenge of the Mediterranean, and their co-implicated
fortunes in higher education.
Derrida asks ‘to what concept, to what singular entity should this name [Europe]
be assigned today?’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 5), when the oxymoronic entity known as
‘the international community’ finds no lead ‘in Europe or the European community

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such as it exists or announces itself de facto’ (Derrida, 2003, p. 118). This is hardly
auspicious for Valéry’s or Husserl’s hope that Europe might renew itself and guide
the other. The hope in any case contributes to ‘the very old subject of European
identity’ that has ‘the venerable air of an old, exhausted theme’ (Derrida, 1992, p.
5). In a move that instead powerfully re-inscribes the theme of difference, Derrida
argues that ‘what is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself’. European
identity would thereby rather involve a ‘non-identity to itself … the difference with
itself’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 9). Playing productively on the word cap, borrowed from
Valéry’s reference to Europe being a cape or headland to Asia but also cap, head,
in relation to leadership, Derrida goes against Valéry’s emphasis on assimilation to
put in the foreground, instead, alterity: ‘[T]he heading of the other [is] perhaps the
first condition of an identity or identification that is not an egocentrism destructive
of oneself and the other’ (pp. 13-15). Hence, The Other Heading. Hence, a call for
European responsibility in regard to otherness – to everything that is, so to speak,
on littorals that are within-without:
And what if Europe were this: the opening onto a history for which the
changing of the heading, the relation to the other heading or to the other of
the heading, is experienced as always possible? An opening and a non-
exclusion for which Europe would be in some way responsible? (Derrida,
1992, p. 37)
That envisages a new politics, where ‘what would be singular to Europe might be
its very singular capacity to resist its own very unique potential to exert a
universalizing energy, and hence to leave open and unintegrated, unassimilated to
itself or to its politics, the singularity of what is very peculiarly and particularly
non-European’ (Callus, 2006, p. 38). And yet, this could be criticised for re-
instigating, only in a more acceptable form, the dubious ethics of ‘specializ[ing] in
the sense of the universal’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 74). Derrida himself recognises the
irony here. He recounts instances of the French tendency to claim ‘for Paris, for the
capital of all revolutions … the role of the avant-garde, for example, in the idea of
the democratic culture’, and for ‘teaching others to look to France as creative
country that is helping to build modernity’ (Derrida, 1992, pp. 49 and 54). In this,
he picks up on Valéry’s own honest take on Gallocentrism, and on the idea that the
‘special quality’ of the French ‘is to believe that [they] are universal, men of
universality’.
This sets up the second point. It bears on the Mediterranean as topos and trope
of difference. For Derrida, born a Sephardic Jew in Algeria, is himself from the
other heading, from the littoral:
[I am] someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the
southern coast of the Mediterranean …
This Mediterranean shore also interests me – coming as I do from the other
shore if not from the other heading (from a shore that is principally neither
French, nor European, nor Latin, nor Christian) … (Derrida, 1992, pp. 35-36)

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This makes Derrida vigilant over the ‘fable of a planetarization of the European
model’ (Derrida, 1992, pp. 36-37) and mindful of the deconstructive dynamics in
the relation between universality, exemplarity, and politics (see Naas, 1992,
passim). In those dynamics the Mediterranean, ever Europe’s littoral, opens ‘onto
the other shore of another heading’ (Derrida, 1992, p. 76), exemplifying and
localising particularities which unnerve the rhetoric of European (or Gallic)
universality. In question, indeed, is nothing less than the general relation between
the ideality of Europe and its various projects and the ‘sensible empiricity’ which
force any ideality to ‘get real’. The latter principle is embodied in the
Mediterranean and its very diverse specificities and contexts. That diversity will be
intractable to any value of unity or universality. The Mediterranean’s pluralities are
in fact suggestive of its resistance rather than its amenability to the universal. The
Mediterranean consequently brings to the fore the absolutely critical question of
the disparities between ideality, which absolutises, and context, which relativises.
For the curious point about ideality is that it tends to not have context. Or not quite.
Ideality is never quite admeasured to meet or respond to the individualities and
particularities of those who might wish to be guided by it, who may be moved to
petition it, who will feel some defeatism in approximating to its mark. Ideality,
with ‘the structure of a promise’ and ‘the memory of that which carries the future,
the to-come, here and now’ (Derrida, 1992, p .78), is in fact by definition not in the
mix, not in the current. Europe, as the name of an ideality congruent in Valéry and
others with ‘ideal universality’, finds itself put out of countenance by the
Mediterranean, the littoral from which it sprung but which shores up topoi and
tropes of difference.
Which is where the university comes in. Where ideality becomes aware of its
precariousness, education is entrusted with conferring upon it the appearance of
trenchancy. It is highly significant that Valéry had a programme for a University of
the Mediterranean, based in Nice. In ‘Le Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen’,
Valéry sets out the structure and curriculum for just such an institution of higher
learning. It is at least as much a Franco-Mediterranean as a Euro-Mediterranean
enterprise, being put together ‘pour la gloire de Nice et de la Nation’ but having as
its focus ‘une enterprise d’études mediterranéennes’, sustained by ‘la notion
infinement riche de la Mediterranée’ (Valéry, 1960, p. 1133). On the
Mediterranean’s littoral, on its rivages, it is the very concept of Homme that is
born, which is why this entreprise seems perennially renewable and worthy of
study (Valéry, 1960, p. 1136). The University will retain its awareness of the
exceptionalism of the Mediterranean: ‘Rien de plus admirable que de voir en
quelques siècles naître de quelques peoples riverains de cette mer, les inventions
intellectuelles les plus précieuses, et, parmi elles, les plus pures …’ (p. 1137).
Valéry, who served as the Centre’s director, is credited on its website with having
imparted to it the ethos of being universal from the beginning (http://www.cum-
nice.org/; accessed 27 December 2010). The Centre is nowadays an evolved entity,
of course, but it is interesting to see how Mediterranean difference and
exceptionalism are here involved in a French project that coheres with the study of
(European) universality, of ‘Man’. It is, in effect, an antecedent of the Barcelona

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Declaration of 1995, of the process of Euro-Mediterranean Partnership that is now

channelled into the project for the Union of the Mediterranean and of the founding
on 9 June 2008 of the Euro-Mediterranean University in Piran, Slovenia.
Whatever one might think of the well-documented difficulties with the project
of a Union of the Mediterranean, the point here is rather to note how the ideality of
these various projects – for ‘Man’, for ‘Spirit’, for universality, for Europe, for the
Mediterranean – can snag on context, if we take this to mean the specificities of
history, situation, contingency and all the tensions and pressures that force projects
to scale themselves down to decrees and constitutions and the machineries of
institutions. In such scenarios, the grandeur of the vision remains retransmissible
through various educational initiatives, ranging from exchange programmes and
university courses that re-inscribe the idea of Europe to, at more rarefied levels, the
renewal of the vision in studies like Habermas’s Europe: The Faltering Project.
The ideality, then, will not go away. Nor will contextual resistances to it. It is
opportune, therefore, to look at what is perhaps the most sustained literary
rendering of the relation between that ideality and context, Tim Parks’s Europa.

LECTURING IN EUROPE, IN PRACTICE AND LITERATURE: THE EXAMPLE OF

TIM PARKS’S EUROPA

Parks’s Europa features a very international group of lecturers based in a College

in Milan. They find themselves trapped between their reasonable demands for
better conditions, their belief that they might take their case to the European
Parliament in Strasbourg and be vindicated, and their encounter with the
compromised ideality of a Europe which may be unable to offer them redress.
How, indeed, can faith in ideality be retained, if ideality’s practice falls short
when petitioned? This is the theme of Parks’s Europa. To witness the practical
working out of the European idea is to find a model (or failed) example of how
Europe’s potential for the universal administers and ministers to the particular. We
inevitably find ourselves, therefore, encountering the difficulties of cross-
intelligibility between the idioms of institutionalised ideality and those of
‘empirical sensibility’. Europa in fact dramatises the clash between the ideality of
Europe and a sceptical sensibility wary of the bureaucracy of ideality. It turns on
the important concern, for European citizenry, of the right to be heard. This right to
be heard in Europe must however always turn on a synecdoche. A whole continent
will never hear an individual. If one wants to be heard in Europe, by Europe, one
must go to part of it, and ideally to that part that represents the whole. To the
capital, then, where Europe sits, and where a certain idea of Europe resides. One
must go to Strasbourg, to the seat of the European Parliament.
This – the odyssey to the Strasbourg Stop, as it were – is the journey described
in Parks’s novel. The novel contains elements of the picaresque, so that it reads
like a reworking of a narrative form popular in the Enlightenment. Perhaps not
coincidentally, the narrator is called Jerry Marlow, in a nod to Joseph Conrad’s
first-person (and Modernist) narrator. The novel’s first sentence reads, ‘I am sitting
slightly off-centre on the long back seat of a modern coach crossing Europe’ (p. 3).

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Modernity, the distance from the centre (both geographical and political), Europe:
all are foreshadowed in this journeying undertaken by a community of lecturers
who, unhappy with their conditions, decide to take their case to Strasbourg. There
are comic elements here, though the novel has more than a degree of tragedy about
it, as will become apparent. Yet perhaps the bleakest point lies in Marlow’s sense
of the futility of his journey to the heart of Europe. ‘Coming on this trip was one of
those mistakes I was made to make’, he says darkly. What emerges clearly is his
disaffiliation in regard to Europe’s promise. And yet he is on a journey to petition
Europe. Petition, it should be recalled, comes from Latin petere, ‘to seek’. If the
singular quest of which he forms part does not succeed, the drift of the novel
suggests, the failure occurs in allegorical representation of the fact that Europe, in
one sense at least, cannot be found.
Interestingly, Marlow speaks of Europe’s origins in terms that strikingly recall
the heading, the headland, invoked by Valéry and Derrida:
[I]f I recall correctly, then the first mention of Europe as a geographical entity
(was it Theocritus?) referred only to the Peloponnese from Asia, and only to
distinguish the Peloponnese from Asia, only to demonstrate that the small
peninsula had not been swallowed up into the amorphous mass of an ever-
invasive Asia. (p. 13)
Not headed in the other’s direction, Europe finds its own heading, recalls itself to
its own cap. Meanwhile, the coach party is a passing ‘modern’ rendition of a mini-
Europe, containing ‘colleagues, liked and disliked, but mostly the latter, from
France and Germany and Spain and Greece and God bless us even Ireland’ (p. 20),
but most singularly a character called Vikram Griffiths, half-Welsh and half-
Indian, half-European and half-Oriental, intent on declaring ‘his incongruous
Welshness, which of course draws attention to his Indianness, his un-Welshness’
(p. 10). One can clearly try too hard to be European: Griffiths’s voice may be
pitched to be ‘deeply Welsh’ when he says to the party, ‘Welcome t’y all …
benvenuti, bienvenus, wilkommen, croeso, good t’see ya!’ but it is also comically
over-inclusive.
This zeal in being European is not confined to Griffiths. Marlow keeps thinking
of another character to whom he is attracted. She happens to be French, as French
as the French genius for the universal noted by Valéry, and appears to embody that
genius in ‘the reflections she is gathering … for her research into a possible
constitution for a United Europe which is part of a competition she has enrolled in
to win a Euro scholarship’ (p. 20: emphasis in original). Europe beguiles, then. Yet
Marlow resists. His most overpowering sense is of being ‘lost’: ‘this is the truth
about my colleagues and myself in this coach, we are lost in this foreign country
that isn’t ours, this Europe that may or may not exist, and we wouldn’t know what
to do if we had to go home’ (p. 26). One does not, then, go home to Europe. If it
struggles to accommodate the encounter between the ideality of universality and
the context of particularity, it is not a home in which one can feel oneself diversely
participating. It is, then, an unheimlich institution (two pages later, Marlow reports
his thoughts on reading Freud’s Das Unheimlich). Marlow acknowledges, too,

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 THE STRASBOURG STOP

what the object of his attraction calls his ‘mulish Anglo-Saxon Protestant
absolutism’, which would resolve itself ‘if only I would loosen up and become
more European’ (pp. 46-47; emphasis in original). Europe, to the sensibilities of an
Englishman like Marlow, is perhaps too much of a ‘myth’ (p. 49). He gets caught
in a slanging match on Europe with an Italian lawyer whose surname, significantly,
is Malerba, and who accuses him of having ‘a very cynical, typically Anglo-Saxon,
and above all un-European way of viewing the world’, to which Marlow angrily
responds that his views had been most eloquently expressed by Niccolò
Macchiavelli and before that, and even more eloquently perhaps, by the ancient
Greeks, whose culture surely lay at the heart of European identity and whose
alliance of city states had quite probably been the first example of a European joint
venture … of the kind that led the great Thucydides to say …
We believe, out of tradition so far as the gods are concerned, and from
experience when it comes to men, that as a dictate of nature every being
always exercises all the power he has at his disposal. (pp. 72-73; emphasis in
original)
There is enough here not only for a critique of Europe, but for a critique of ‘The
Other Heading’ too. There is, perhaps, a drawing of some lines here: on the one
hand, Anglo-Saxon and Greek and the being of individuality and distrust of power,
on the other Europe and its Latin heritage and the call to integration within a
Europe that in the contrary invocation of Macchiavelli finds that its political
heritage could be set against itself.
Marlow can therefore only laugh, hollowly, at the situation in which he finds
himself: ‘I am laughing my head off’, he says, ‘because I am to be the Foreign
Language Lectors’ Official Spokesman at the European Parliament … and I am to
address an assembly of the European Petitions Committee in English and another
of Italian Euro MPs in Italian’ (p. 99). He becomes an embodiment of the
individual misplaced at the heart of Europe, in the home of European unity.
‘Beyond the glass and concrete’, where ‘the flags flapped bravely in alphabetical
order’ (p. 262), he notices that Griffiths himself starts to lose hope. ‘Rather the Raj,
he laughed …’ (p. 104). Bemusedly, Marlow reflects on the object of his attraction
saying, very much on lines encountered in Valéry, that ‘Man should be the
incarnation of an idea rather than himself. Man should be a European’ (p. 138;
emphasis in original). In a cautionary take on that idea, Marlow quotes Benjamin
Constant’s De l’ésprit de conquête et de l’usurpation: ‘The mania of all men is to
appear greater than they are; the mania of all writers is to appear to be men of
State’ (p. 117; emphasis in original).
Statelessness, which is the objective, it could be suggested, of Europe’s coming
together in union, would paradoxically also be the objective of the singular
individual, or writer, sanely opposed to the idea of Europe (in the sense of being,
uncharacteristically of writers generally, free of the mania identified by Constant).
A counter-reading of Europa is however possible that would focus on the strange
compulsion which makes Marlow, despite himself, go to the heart of Europe to
petition it. Why does he go there, if when looking at the European flag he describes

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it as ‘twelve identical yellow nebulae encircling a void’? (p. 134). Perhaps it is

because he understands that while there is inestimable value in the singular, it is
also true that ‘one realizes that one’s banality lies precisely in uniqueness’ (p. 157).
It is this that helps him to think a little less cynically about ‘pooled sovereignty’
and ‘negotiated identity’ (p. 195), and to tell himself, after all, ‘I might join in’.
‘You have nothing against Europe’, he tells himself ‘with some surprise’ (pp. 196,
198; emphasis in original). Yet he is shaken out of that reconsideration of Europe
by a number of other factors. He finds the whole idea of Europe chimerical, on a
par with ‘fantasy utopias …, or the ecology movement, or happy monogamous
marriages, or even the United Colours of Benetton’. And what shakes him most
profoundly, in the end, is the unique banality and theatrical tragedy of Vikram
Griffiths, ‘who had moulded his identity around an accident of birth that made him
a minority of one’ (italics added), and who hangs himself within the building of the
European Parliament. Absolute singularity, then, self-immolated before the
grandest of communities. The Oriental European: a suicide at the heart of Europe.
And Europe takes the death in its stride. It clears it. It is the smaller community,
that of the coach party, that draws back upon itself in the wake of the absent
individual, and faces up to ‘collective guilt with regard to Vikram Griffiths’
suicide’. Marlow himself, meanwhile, cannot suppress reflections on the relation
between the singular and the larger unit. ‘Every man is an island, I told myself, …
That he is not entire unto himself does not make him part of the main’ (p. 246).
And this, of course, is the crux of the problem between the particular and the
universal. The fact that no singularity can be complete within itself compels
community, but that is not sufficient to ensure affiliation and belonging.
Whereupon a tempting consolation is to erect communal structures that could be
responsible for the one, that could tell themselves the tale of their own
responsibility for the other. As Derrida, reading Valéry, explains, that happens
under some kind of lead or heading, like Europe’s. Marlow understands that too. In
a sentence that dramatically amplifies the echoes of Valéry’s points on the Euro-
Mediterranean as a machinery of transformation, he writes:
We establish elaborate machineries as if we were responsible, I tell myself.
Why else the European Community? (p. 256: emphasis in original)
Marlow’s journey to the heart of Europe’s machinery reveals the fraught relation
between the one and the many, the particular and the general, the singular and
community, diversity and unity. Machineries, he discovers, tend to abet the second
of each of these pairs. As Derrida indicates in The Other Heading, this underlies
the tension between universality and exemplarity. Europa therefore has an agnostic
relation to Europe’s ideality, the novel’s power lying in its sobering reminder that
the machinery of the general can neglect the particular even when this machinery is
constituted for responsibility. Context is indeed all, and literature can be surgically
vivid in portrayal of the circumstances of the individual, the littoral, the other.

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CONCLUSION: LITERATURE, THE LITTORAL AND THE

EURO-MEDITERRANEAN CURRICULUM

Why should a literary work inform discussions of the ideality of Europe? One
reason is that literature, this discourse in which it is possible to say everything
(Derrida, 2000a, p. 29), must be listened to if ethics is our business, not least if
other discourses shy away from representing what it portrays. Parks’s Europa, for
all its comedy and its other themes, which have not been reviewed here, is a novel
that deconstructs the ideality of unity in diversity. It allegorises tensions
experienced by republican universalism and the way this ideality finds certain
contexts inconvenient to its security in its own high-mindedness. In the process,
pieties and orthodoxies concerning difference are problematised too. It is well to
ask, therefore, what an ethical education in this regard would be. Can it be open to
why a formation in the institutions and machineries of responsibility is both
desirable and resistible?
Europa may be a satire, an extreme portrayal of an eccentric episode, but these
remain irrepressible questions in the face of any disinclination to form or educate
oneself in the narratives and rhetoric surrounding Europe and the West. They cue
consideration of how the abstract values of ideality find themselves relativised by
‘looking at the context’ – which literary studies does do, more searchingly than
teachers and politicians and quite possibly with an equal power to help shape the
cultural imaginary. Admittedly, an argument that routes itself through literature
may cause some bemusement. ‘This is not evidence!’ it might be objected. ‘Trust
me, I’m telling you stories’, as the famous sentence from Jeanette Winterson’s The
Passion goes: this is what literature says, ever ambivalently. Here we would do
well to remember, then, Derrida’s ‘Demeure’. In that essay, which offers an
interpretation of Maurice Blanchot’s récit ‘The Instant of My Death’, a tale of
European as well as individual death-in-life in which Hegel plays a bit part,
Derrida explores the connections between passions de la littérature, literature’s
relation to evidence and testimony, and an originary Euro-Latinity within literature.
Because of space I cannot analyse those congruencies here, except to point out that
in Derrida’s unflinchingly close reading of Blanchot’s harrowing
autothanatographical narrative what emerges is literature’s unparalleled and
passionate capacity to express what is absolutely differentiating, absolutely
other(ing), absolutely outside the accepted order and complacencies of regulated
discourse. If the littoral, like the liminal, is a virtual non-place amenable to
marginally authentic expression only through the literary and its fictions, then the
Euro-Mediterranean relation that is spoken of by Valéry might be more
authentically rendered, for all the counter-intuitiveness of this view, by the genres
of literature rather than those of the rather more exhortatory discourses – political
and educational among them – to which he also contributed. And Valéry’s poetry,
whose littoral-literary imagination is of an order all of its own – let us recall one of
his greatest masterpieces, ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’ [‘Le Cimitiere Marin’] – has
shown us how the truest, extremest writing on the brink – littoraliterarity, so to
speak – puts out of countenance that which insists on integrality in the face of

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CALLUS

difference, on centre from periphery, on unity through diversity. Literature can

problematise, nuance, relativise what is professed non-literarily, and his poem does
this in its awareness of ‘le changement des rives en rumeur’ (or, in C. Day Lewis’s
stirring rendering, of ‘all bounds transfigured into a boundless air’).
Of course all this can seem quite fanciful. Let us therefore be rather more
pragmatic. We know that Valéry’s poetry is rather less essentialising about
littorality than his essays on Europe and the Mediterranean littoral. We know that
novels like Europa critique the pieties and orthodoxies of unity and diversity. We
know that such works figure, in effect, a ‘Strasbourg stop’. A Strasbourg stop
might be defined as a test of professed values – of values in their institutional and
constitutional form – when it comes to the suppleness of empathetic response, in
procedural practice, towards difference and alterity the moment that these appear
opaque or recalcitrant to the fine-minded discourse composed to contain them. For
we know that difference comes in many forms, including that which is not only
abstractly and unthreateningly other, but also that which is singular and/or
overtaken by ‘the banality of the unique’, and thereby stubborn to unity’s way with
diversity. And we know that the European or Mediterranean or Euro-
Mediterranean university, if it is to be catholic, must educate its students in the
suggestion that the rhetoric of unity in diversity may in practice sustain the former
a little more readily than the latter. We know too that the inconvenient fictions of
literature can dramatise inconvenient truths. Therefore the pragmatic question,
hyperbolically worded, becomes the following. Can the Euro-curriculum risk the
character of literature?
The issue is pragmatic indeed. Played out more broadly the debate could
become an example of how managing literature is managing an outlet for radical or
anarchic discourse. The matter is not unrelated to Plato’s way with the poets, but it
goes a little further. If reference to Europa need not seem incongruous – not in this
context, where the point is context itself – it is because Parks’s novel underlines the
fact that contexts relativise. To look at what is on Europe’s littoral – whether the
littoral be geographically defined, as with the Mediterranean’s or Britain’s, or more
figurally viewed, as with what is represented by Vikram Griffiths – is to
countenance what is non-generalisable and recalcitrant to mainstreaming and
assimilation. This is the context and principle of the singular, of difference itself.
And in works like Europa, or José Saramago’s The Stone Raft, or Florian Zeller’s
The Fascination of Evil, literature depicts what is really at the littoral and the
periphery in ways demonstrating that its reaches into the diverse are not always
kind to the sweetness and light of the liberal humanist curriculum. Literature can
be as divisive as it can be wholesome. It can portray context a little too rawly. And
in the specific context of this chapter, Europa bears a deconstructive potential upon
the world-view of the European project. At which point it becomes interesting to
note that Derrida’s own deconstructive take on the ideality of Europe was, if not
exactly abjured, then made more partialin ‘Autoimmunity’ (Derrida, 2003, pp.
114ff). The reasons for that are many, and would need to be read back against his
late work on friendship, cosmopolitanism, hospitality and états voyous. Derrida’s
later work in fact suggests that a position that knows itself to be deconstructible

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 THE STRASBOURG STOP

and liable to the relativising challenges of context and singularity might in fact
need to be embraced, because it is less deconstituting on Mind that it be so. It is a
position apparent in the text he wrote, with Habermas, ‘February 15, or, What
Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core
Europe’. We may not be entirely reconciled to Europe’s ideality or to its
machineries, this suggests, and we may be well able to deconstruct or satire them –
but the alternatives are not bracing. ‘Core Europe’, whether from its centres and its
littorals, is where we are urged to begin.
For any venture in a Euro-Mediterranean curriculum and consciousness, this
prompts difficult choices on what, within literature, to transmit. ‘This is not a story
to pass on’, Morrison writes in one of the most telling puns in literature (Morrison,
1997, p. 275). It is a pun that turns on the deadly seriousness of the stakes of what
literature is capable of (re)telling and hence on the question of whether or not to
actually tell. Giving space to difference and retelling its various stories (or not)
through literature, and being selective about the difference represented and the
literary narratives retold, helps shape cultural imaginaries. What stories come to be
taught or not taught to the ‘European Mind’ in this present, in our present, when
Europe is rethinking its centres and margins? We know this rethinking is ongoing:
it is present in the recent, symptomatic statement of Germany’s President, Angela
Merkel, that multiculturalism is a failed project in her country. Unfortunately I do
not have the full context of the statement, but then – and this has always been the
point – does anyone have it, about anything, ever? Isn’t the injunction to ‘look at
the context’ an exercise in discovering how much difference we can really sustain?
And is the sustaining not ever a process towards containment, in the best and worst
senses of this term? Literature, which communicates the contexts and specificities
of singularity and their less than cohering or containable causes as powerfully as
any discourse and perhaps more so, then presents a key challenge for a curriculum
of difference. It can, of course, be selectively deployed to teach ‘just’ what is
wholesome, what is ‘educational’. At certain levels of education, that is not
impracticable. Valéry himself thought that it might secure the writer’s political
vocation. But in the higher education curriculum, where ideas will tend to take on
lives beyond their histories and where literature’s capacity to say anything will
thrive if the University lives up to its own ideality, that may be not be so
straightforward. The key question on which we must conclude – and one which it
would be evasive to respond to with ‘it depends’ – therefore becomes the
following, to which our answer will indicate how much difference we can really
bear, and how much of all the context’s retelling, in stories we may not always
trust, we can pass on.
Do we teach literature, and what do we (not) teach when we don’t?

NOTES
i
Unless otherwise stated, all italics in the passages quoted are present in the original.

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REFERENCES
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indicated, where appropriate, in square brackets within the parentheses that indicate the date of the
edition used.

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Illuminations. London: Fontana.
Bloom, H. (1994). The western canon. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company.
Buruma, I., & Margalit, A. (2004). Occidentalism: A short history of anti-Westernism. London: Atlantic
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Callus, I. (2006). Theorising Europe from the other shore: Derrida, community, and the exemplarity of
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political practice of the communal. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Derrida, J. (1992 [1991]). The other heading: Reflections on today’s Europe. Trans. P.-A. Brault and M.
Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Derrida, J. (1998). Faith and knowledge: The two sources of “religion” at the limits of reason alone. In
J. Derrida & G. Vattimo, Religion. Cambridge: Polity.
Derrida, J. (2000a). Demeure. In M. Blanchot & J. Derrida, The instant of my death/Demeure: Fiction
and testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2000b [1998]). Intellectual courage: An interview by Thomas Assheuer. Culture
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Derrida, J. (2003). Autoimmunity: Real and symbolic suicides. In G. Borradori, Philosophy in a time of
terror: Dialogues with Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Eliot, T. S. (1962). Notes towards the definition of culture. London: Faber and Faber.
Habermas, J. (1981). Modernity versus postmodernity, trans. S. Ben Habib. New German Critique, 22,
3-14.
Habermas, J. (2009 [2008]). Europe: The faltering project. London: Polity.
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Europe, new Europe, core Europe: Transatlantic relations after the Iraq War. London: Verso.
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Jameson, F. (1981). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988 [1983]). The differend: Phrases in dispute, trans. G. Van den Abbeele.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Morrison, T. (1993 [1992]). Playing in the dark. London: Picador.
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Parks, T. (1998 [1997]). Europa. London: Vintage.
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Saramago, J. (1996 [1986]). The stone raft, trans. G. Pontiero. Orlando, FL: Harvest.
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Vol 2. Paris: Gallimard.
Valéry, P. (1963a [1938]). America: A project of the European mind. In History and politics. The
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 MARCO GALEA & SIMONE GALEA

2. FRANCIS EBEJER’S STRUGGLE WITH EDUCATION

Teachers and Their Students in Postcolonial Literature

I saw history through the sea-washed eyes

Of our choleric, ginger-haired headmaster
– Derek Walcott, ‘Homage to Gregorias’

INTRODUCTION

Modern colonial rulers used a variety of methods to control the communities they
dominated. Force of arms and missionary work were usually at the forefront, but
education was always closely behind. As late as 1929, the Jesuit H.M. Dubois
wrote in the Journal of the International African Institute that colonised societies
were made up of ‘inferior races’ and that the choice educators had was either to
assimilate the indigenous people into Europeans (the irony of which escapes the
writer) or else to adapt their pedagogy to the limits of the indigenous culture. The
missionary/pedagogue/ethnologist was convinced not only of the superiority of
European culture, but also of the conviction on the part of indigenous peoples that
their culture was inferior and their willingness to accept that Europeanness which
the European benefactors were willing to impart to them (Dubois, 1929a). His
theory of adaptation was benevolently hoping to eventually permit ‘our blacks’ to
become complete human beings (Dubois, 1929b). Although attitudes to education
in the colonies varied widely from colony to colony and from coloniser to coloniser
(British educators, for example, were less likely to make arguments for
assimilation than their French counterparts) Dubois’s attitude is quite typical.
Education in the colonies was very often left in the hands of missionaries, and
governments were generally reluctant to part with their money to finance large-
scale education efforts. However, measures were often taken to ensure that enough
indigenous people got the type of education deemed necessary so that they could
assist in keeping the colonial system running.

FRANCIS EBEJER AND OTHER COLONIAL LEGACIES

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2012, p. 36) reflects that these colonialist perceptions, which
pervade even the mentality of the most well-meaning contemporary westerners
today, can be attributed to the way knowledge started to be conceived during the
Enlightenment, and especially through Hegel’s philosophy and his discussion of
the relationship between master and slave. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge

S. Galea & A. Grima (eds.), The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean, 29–39.
© 2014 Sense Publishers and Mediterranean Journal of Educational Studies. All rights reserved.
GALEA & GALEA

came to be seen not only as of paramount importance, but more crucially to be

situated in the West. Europeans, having come to what was seen as this modern
knowledge, usurped the right to rule over non-Europeans in this master/slave
binary opposition. Colonial education, as we saw in the writing of Henri Marie
Dubois, was based on the concept of taking civilisation to the natives. It was a part
of what was often referred to as ‘white man’s burden’, a mission that Europeans
felt obliged to accomplish as a moral obligation in return for being endowed with a
superior civilisation. However, this civilising mission was hardly ever intended to
give the colonised an equal standing, even in colonised territory, because
colonialism as a system depended on the maintenance of racial superiority by
Europeans over their non-European subjects.
Most educational systems developed in the colonies had as their aim ‘extending
the regulation and usefulness of the colonized’ (Willinsky, 1998, p. 89). Access to
education was limited and selective. The natives were given that type of education
that enabled them to communicate with their colonisers that made them ‘almost the
same but not white’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 89). Such systems then gave a specialised
education or training to students earmarked for leadership within their community.
Very often those selected were lifted out of their environment and sent to study in
the metropolitan centre, where they would be in awe of the superior civilisation of
their master and return home utterly ashamed of their culture of origin (Fanon,
1986, pp. 37-39). These were the elites necessary to prop the institutions in the
colonies, be it as head teachers or academics, top civil servants or judges, if these
tops jobs became available to the indigenous population.
Francis Ebejer was a product of just such a colonial education system. He had
two teachers as parents, his mother one of the first teachers at the Central School
for girls, his father a headmaster trusted enough by the Director of Education to be
asked to draft what would end up as the only grammar of the Maltese language
recognised by law (Felice Pace, 2009, p. 34, footnote 36). Yet, Ebejer’s
relationship with education and the teaching profession was ambiguous. The career
he attempted first was medicine, but he gave up his studies after a few months. It
was only after working as interpreter for the British Army in the latter part of the
Second World War that he took up a career in teaching and was fast-tracked for
leadership in the profession. He was awarded a scholarship to study at St Mary’s
College in Twickenham and when he completed the course he was appointed
headmaster in state schools, a post he retained until he retired at around 52 years of
age. In spite of his training he would declare, towards the end of his life, that he
was ‘largely self-taught’, just like his parents (Ebejer, 1989, p. 19). Teaching was
not his first love, and similarly ambiguous was Ebejer’s relationship with
colonialism itself. On the dust jacket of one of his first novels published in London,
this statement stands out:
Ebejer says he finds the English language the best vehicle for his ideas and he
intends to combine writing novels with his present job of teaching. He now
lives in London, is married to an English girl from Southampton and they
have two children, both at school in England. (Ebejer, 1958, dust jacket)

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Given that the text was prepared for a predominantly British public, it can be
assumed that Ebejer is emphasising qualities that he thinks might appeal to them.
However, the picture that is being painted is of someone who has accepted the gifts
of his coloniser: his women, his language and his education. As Fanon stated ‘A
man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied
by that language’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 18). It is a measure of colonialism’s success
when its subjects accept its values as their own. There is of course the issue, first
highlighted by Fanon himself, of the colonial subject trying to behave as similarly
to his colonial master as possible to gain the respect that is refused to colonial
subjects who are perceived to be lower down in the hierarchy of civilised races.
The wearing of European clothes, whether rags or the most up-to-date style;
using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse; adorning
the Native language with European expressions; using bombastic phrases in
speaking or writing a European language; all these contribute to a feeling of
equality with the European and his achievements. (D. Westerman, quoted in
Fanon, 1986, p. 25)
Education was a subject that Ebejer discussed continuously in his works. It is
difficult to find a work of any considerable length that does not make references to
teaching or education. On the other hand, there is not a single play, novel or short
story in which a discussion of teaching is the sole or main interest of the author. If
we were to take the title story of his collection of short stories For Rożina a
Husband and other stories, the schoolmaster is depicted as one of the village
authorities. His position in society is on a par with that of the priest, the doctor and
the notary. Likewise, education is one of the institutions that Ebejer very often
chooses to target, in fact much more frequently than any other agency in society.

THE TEACHER AND COLONIAL AGENCY

Although his attitude towards education differs from one work to another, he
generally regards the institution of education as a negative influence on people.
Perhaps his harshest condemnation is found in L-Imnarja Żmien il-Qtil, a play from
1973, when a university student, speaking about her professor says, ‘Kultant
l-iskola hekk tagħmillek. Trabbilek il-qarnita f’għajnejk’ (Ebejer, 1997, p. 54). The
phrase cannot be properly translated, as it literally means that it makes an octopus
grow in your eyes, implying that it does not let you see properly. However the
reference is really to a disease that needs surgery to cure (Serracino Inglott, 1981,
p. 197). The university professor referred to is included in the play as an example
of all that is wrong with education. He is introduced in one brief scene as a drunken
reveller, unable to act rationally. When he is sober enough to hold a conversation,
we realise that he is the exact opposite of what we expect an academic to be. He is
certainly not intelligent, and Ebejer makes it clear that he wants us to regard him as
a useless member of society, a parasite almost. To make the issue absolutely clear,
Ebejer compares the Professor to his illiterate brother, who is portrayed as an
intelligent, caring individual. It is in this context that education is blamed for

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making the professor the incomplete human being that he is. Set in the context of a
play about the sense of direction young people of the post-Independence period
need, it is a strong accusation of the educational system and its representatives. Not
only is education irrelevant, but the persons tasked with delivering it are actually a
burden on society.
In another play of the 1970s, Meta Morna tal-Mellieħa, there is a longer
exposition of this problem. The main character in the play, an elderly matriarch
whose conservatism Ebejer takes very seriously, claims that all the ills in her
family stemmed from her husband’s insistence on giving their offspring an
education, as this severed them from their agricultural roots, but did not substitute
this with a useful philosophy of life. In fact her son, who had taken an office job, is
in early retirement and is stuck in his room, contemplating what he considers
humanity’s failings. Other members of the family are likewise unstable and the
direction they seek does not come from learning, or at least not from formal
education:
L-iskola weħidha weħidha u maqtugħa għal rasha fit-triqat tal-bliet x’tiswa?
Deni … deni kbir. U ħsara kbira. L-art hi ommna, minn ġufha ġejna u lura
għal ġufha għad irridu mmorru. Ma nwarrbuhiex għax gwaj għalina …
What is learning on its own and left alone in the cities worth? It’s harmful.
The land is our mother, out of her womb we’re born and to her womb we
shall return. We must not distance ourselves … (Ebejer, 1977, p. 100)
These two examples show that Ebejer considered education as a defective system.
However it is only in his last play, Il-Ġaħan ta’ Binġemma that he explains clearly
why he had so little faith in the educational system. The play is an attempt at
analysing contemporary Maltese society’s failings, which Ebejer attributed mainly
to a rapid rise in materialism. However, in an outstanding scene from the play, he
creates a nightmare scenario where a female teacher tries to teach a non-English
speaking pupil to sing ‘Ba ba black sheep’, only managing to reduce him to tears
and herself to desperation. The scene is interspersed with statements and questions
from unnamed and unspecified characters who behave as if they are interrogating
the pupil without waiting for replies. The atmosphere created in the scene leads to
an insistent accusation of the system, but with many statements leading us to think
of the colonial past as the main culprit. The emphasis on language takes this scene
right into one of the most hotly debated issues in postcolonial studies. In a way this
is a variant on the Prospero/Caliban syndrome. The teacher is behaving like a
colonial master, assuming that the colonial subject is unable to speak because he
does not possess the master’s language, and is therefore trying to teach the young
student English. Her failure to do so leaves the child silent, or at best babbling
noises which sound very similar to Caliban’s cursing (Ebejer, 1985, pp. 71-73).
The teacher in this context is an agent of colonialism, trying to impose a culture
that will only serve the coloniser himself. Ironically, it is only when the same
young boy accepts to make the most of his education that he can become a
complete human being. Tellingly, Ebejer does not explain how the student

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reconciles himself to his teachers. It is only his books that seem to save him from
being a failure of the educational system. In the end he graduates as an engineer, a
profession Ebejer seemed to think highly of in his last years, but the most
interesting twist is that he turns himself into a sort of informal teacher, giving
lectures to groups of young people and conducing cultural tours, apparently in an
attempt to make up for the lacunae left by formal education (Ebejer, 1985, p. 111).
The scenario that one can pick out from this late play is that Ebejer, while still
convinced that the Maltese educational system was tied down by its colonial
origins and its Eurocentric practices, was a necessary tool available to the
previously colonised population to emancipate itself.
In the same year as Il-Ġaħan ta’ Binġemma was first performed and published,
Ebejer also published his only Maltese language novel, Storja: Il-Ħarsa ta’
Rużann. It is the story of the emancipation of a Maltese rural family from its very
humble beginnings in the mid-19th century to a family of professionals and artists
in the late 20th century. Unlike what he implies or declares in most of his other
works, here emancipation can only be achieved through education. In fact many
characters in the novel insist on giving their children the best education they can
afford, even if it goes against what is expected of people in their social class
(Ebejer, 2011, pp. 42-44, 48). Education is the only solution when all other
agencies have failed you. In fact, the first lengthy mention of the need for
education comes just after the family of farmers had been attacked by a band of
thieves and their appeal to the authorities to help them out had gone unheeded. It is
clear that the agents of the colonial state, in this case the police and the local
authorities are not interested in protecting people who are too distant from colonial
interests, who neither produce anything that matters nor pose any threat to the
stability of the colonial state. At the time (1874) public schooling had not yet
reached many of the rural communities, and the missionary schools common in
many other colonies were never available. Therefore, families like the one in the
novel had to use the services of privately organised classes run by ladies who
themselves generally only had a very basic education. Later generations of the
same family accepted the schooling that was then offered by the colonial state,
even though it was not necessary for them to participate. Education is their way out
of being passive colonial subjects. The importance of education within the colonial
context is made clearest in an argument between a village sacristan and a mother
about the Boer Wars. While the sacristan claims that the Boer is a race of black
savages, the mother corrects him, stating that they are both white and educated.
Race, civilisation and education go hand in hand. If you’re white you’re civilised
and you deserve (or already have) an education. It suddenly dawns on the Maltese
woman that the only way for her son to grow up to be different from his fellow
countrymen, content in their meaningless existence, is to accept that the coloniser’s
civilisation is superior to his own and that he needs to try to absorb as much of this
civilisation as he can to stand a chance. Education, therefore, is a way for the
colonised subject to acquire a voice that can speak to his colonial master. Not only
is education important for the emancipation of this family, but in a particular point
in their family’s, and their country’s history, its members join the teaching

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profession and become its worthy representatives. It is certainly not a coincidence

that Ebejer chooses the first decades of the twentieth century to promote his
characters to the teaching profession. It is a period when the country is passing
through important political changes, and the two married teachers in the novel
appear to be particularly insightful of the changes taking place, and even more
practical than politicians themselves. It would not be an exaggeration to say that
Ebejer sees them as independent intellectuals who can see beyond the limitations
of local politicians (Ebejer, 2011, p. 100).
In this work education replaces working the land as a means to remaining a
complete human being. In his earlier works Ebejer seemed to believe that the clock
could somehow be turned back to the time before modernism and before
colonialism when the Maltese population was at peace with itself. However, it is
clear that at some point Ebejer realised that the pre-colonial condition can never be
recovered. It is ironic that the land that Ebejer credited in many of his works to
being the only hope that Maltese people had against the annihilation resulting from
the evils of modernity, which included education (see also Fanon, 1967, p. 34), is
no longer there to be tilled but to be admired from afar and painted (Ebejer, 2011,
p. 118). This may be one of the reasons for a relatively passive attitude towards
education in some of his later works. At the same time, it is important to underline
the fact that one of the objectives of colonialism was always to create a situation
where the colonised would come to accept colonialism as the natural order of
things.

EBEJER’S TEXTS AND THE EDUCATIONAL PROJECT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Here again Ebejer’s passionate engagement with the issue of emancipatory

possibilities of education is marked by his critical perspectives of the teacher as
one who has not yet understood her reproductive role in sustaining dominant
cultures that alienate rather than educate her people. The teacher has been lifted out
of the darkness by being enticed to follow the paths of the Enlightenment, or at
least that version of the Enlightenment that was made available to colonised
subjects. The Enlightenment is itself a project of education that promises
autonomous living. Kant describes it as ‘man’s exit from his self-incurred
immaturity’ which ‘is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the
guidance of another’. Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding is
thus the motto of enlightenment (Kant, 1996, p. 58).
Ebejer’s teachers, themselves members of the colonised community, are not so
guilty of being immature because of their lack of understanding of this educational
project of the Enlightenment but rather because ironically they have not been able
to be critical of it, and to free themselves of the culture of Enlightenment that, as
explained earlier on, has rendered them slaves. This points to the contradictory
aspects of Enlightenment’s rationality and particularly to the fact that the
Enlightenment has constructed ideal models of being human that render those who
do not fit them, inhuman. The teachers’ awareness of the importance of this
educational project to indigenous people leads them towards a relatively simple

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adoption of its rationale without taking account of their own cultures and
knowledges. The teachers may successfully adapt to this foreign way of life or as
we have argued, they may even reject their own culture but their students
frequently suffer from acute alienation and the feeling of not belonging to the
culture of the school, as Ebejer showed in the scene from Il-Ġaħan ta’ Binġemma
discussed above.
Ironically we can use the very explanations given by Kant to describe Ebejer’s
teachers’ inability to take other educational pathways that are meaningful to their
own people. ‘This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of
understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of
another’ (Kant, 1996, p. 58).
The trouble does not end when one has become critical of the rigid oppressive
workings of the educational trajectories of the Enlightenment itself or when one
has become enlightened enough to realise that his educational experiences have
just rendered him a slave to its rationality. Neither does a simple resolution to
become independent of this borrowed sense of freedom release him from the grasp
of a dominant mainstream culture.
This is the experience of ambivalence and contradiction experienced in the
novel In the Eye of the Sun (Ebejer, 1969) by Joseph, whose education has
estranged him from his indigenous Maltese identity. One might argue that the very
education that has taught him to critically think in living an autonomous life has
made him conscious of its colonising effects. Nevertheless this has thrown him into
the abyss of a hybridised existence that has led him to the painful struggle to
retrieve an obscured Maltese identity.
In the novel, Ebejer gives an account of the metamorphosis of a young man,
Joseph, on abandoning his medical studies at the very end of the course to live a
simpler life in the countryside of his birth. The novel lays down the authoritarian
modes of an educational system that assumes to know the right ways of living,
imposing rigid truths through a systematic belittling of whoever has not
experienced it. Ebejer’s writing points to the ways that colonisers continue to exert
their influence on developing ones through systems of teaching (Altbach, 1995).
Education is presented as the cure by which distressed people move out of savage
states of being. Joseph’s refusal to become a doctor in spite of the fact that he only
has a few months left to graduate can be read as his mode of resisting the
coloniser’s mentality that medicalises nations thought to be in need of a cure.
Ebejer’s postcolonial critiques of an overwhelmingly Westernised educational
system are effectively metaphorised through Joseph’s rejection of the books that
were a very important part of his life. Joseph’s enlightenment is ironically marked
by this refusal of a colonial education and by his critical awareness that foreign text
books metaphorically and literally do not speak his language. Joseph learns to
autonomously make decisions without the advice of other doctors, priests and even
his own teachers yet this does not make him the self-realised human being as
claimed by the Enlightenment. The trajectories that Joseph follows lead him to a
loss of self rather than self-improvement. So much so that he ends up losing his
own life.

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Ebejer presents the regressive mental, emotional, and physical changes of

Joseph’s self-destructive paths as ambiguous and makes us inquire into the risks of
opting not to take up certain educational opportunities in spite of their limiting
colonial influences. As readers we ponder on the contradictions inherent in the
educational project of the Enlightenment. If autonomy is the outcome of an
educational experience that makes one think with his own mind why did Joseph
have to pay such a high price for attempting to live freely and move out of a
colonising educational system? If Joseph is so aware of the dangers of a colonised
education why does he give his medicine books to Karla, the love of his life?
Joseph himself explains that ‘the process of freeing the bird out of his cage after
being caught may be fearful and painful’ (Ebejer, 1969, p. 98).

THE TEACHER OF WHITE LITERATURE

The postcolonial tones in this novel reverberate mostly through the issue of
whiteness that Ebejer makes good use of in critically analysing the way it pervades
the lives of the main characters and especially that of Joseph. Ebejer presents the
problems of white privilege in relation to education and issues of affect and as we
shall explain later on with literature and the teaching of literature itself. Joseph’s
disgust with the whiteness of the skin of some characters in this novel directly
points to his awareness of the way his life has been dominated by whiteness. Bailey
and Zita (2007) describe whiteness as a cultural disposition and ideology held in
place by specific political, social, moral, aesthetic, epistemic, metaphysical,
economic, legal, and historical conditions, crafted to preserve white identity and
relations of white supremacy’ (p. vii).
Even if writing decades before the onset of whiteness studies, Ebejer discusses
the problem of whiteness and the function of education that hegemonises it, in
relation to the professor of medicine and his daughter, Joseph’s first love. The
professor of medicine embodies whiteness. His whiteness stands for its
institutionalisation and the dominance of the white curriculum that has alienated
him from his native colour. Joseph has a perverse affective relation with this
whiteness. He has grown to love his white teacher, he even came around to love his
daughter but he finds that he can never make love to anyone who is white. This is
not so much a racist attitude by Joseph but a result of his awareness that he cannot
intimately relate to that which has not respected his colour and which has even
sought to change it.
Ebejer’s description of the professor’s white skin as a metaphor of the white
supremacy that dominates the educational structures and practices reminds one of
Fanon’s explanation of the schizophrenic experiences of black people in a white
world. The white intellectual orientation of the professor has invaded Joseph’s
ways of being. Fanon describes this as a white mask, a new identity that has been
placed on a man to conceal his black skin in an attempt to make him forget and
repudiate his origins (1986, pp. 20-21). However, Ebejer’s understanding of the
pervasiveness of whiteness is even stronger than what Fanon’s metaphor of the
white mask implies. Whiteness has become essential to his being and he cannot get

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rid of it. ‘Cut into the rigid flesh, white flesh; it remains white even as he acts
deeper. Within the decomposing precincts however deep he goes, the white
remains. Unto putrefaction, he knows, the white will be there’ (Ebejer, 1969, p.
24).
Fanon explains that the coloured customs have been ‘wiped out because they
were in conflict with a civilisation that he did not know and that imposed itself on
him (Fanon, 1986, p. 110). In realising this, Joseph’s painful and deadly
trajectories are not only instigated by a hybridised split existence which Fanon
explains as trying to live two different cultures and identities at once but by his
decision to eradicate all that is white from his life. Ebejer here, like Fanon, wants
to highlight the impossibilities of recuperating from the pervasive effects of a
white, colonial educational experience.
Ebejer’s account of the white teacher and her collaboration in this colonial
project becomes even more relevant to the issue of the teacher in literature. The
novel describes the village schoolmaster’s attempts to convert Joseph back to his
studies, by reminding him of ‘the great white women of the world’s greatest
works’ (Ebejer, 1969, p. 73) that they had read when Joseph was younger. For the
schoolmaster the white women in the works of Dante and Petrarch represented
mankind’s transcendence from that which is considered to be primitive and related
to earth. The white women manifest a white literature which is an emblem of
modern civilisation.
The great mesdames, harken, qalbi, the magnificent creatures whose walk is
a poem, whose every sigh is an ode, whole breath, texture of limb and colour
of skin by virtue of a high intelligence and the purest of spirits, inspire great
minds and lift humanity ever upwards towards a great destiny. (Ebejer, 1969,
p. 74)
Here again Joseph’s critical awareness of the distance between him and the white
women he had read about in the literary texts, but that he had never managed to
find are indicative of a literary experience that was removed from his culture; its
‘brown spirit, the earth’. Joseph’s critical awareness of the whiteness of the
literature that dominated his childhood leads him to a re-reading of the canonical
texts and to a reinterpretation of the ‘educational’ function of literature. He departs
from his schoolmaster’s notion of literature as that associated with all that is
civilised. For Joseph, the great poets were not drawn to writing by some civilising
mission but by opening their hearts to earth, nature and the ‘brown spirits’ of the
women underlying their white skin (p. 75). It is the teacher that has drawn upon
literature in the educational project of colonisation. Ebejer’s cheeky description of
‘the bottle of creme-de-menthe that had been separating The Complete works of
Byron from A Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers’ (Ebejer, 1969, p. 119) points
to the use of literature by the teacher in imposing a culture on students that has the
same alienating effect as that of an alcoholic drink.

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EDUCATIONAL POSSIBILITIES IN EBEJER’S HYBRID LITERATURE

As argued earlier on in this chapter Ebejer as a teacher and writer was a product of
a white colonial educational project. Nevertheless Ebejer, conscious of the
difficulties in shedding the white skin that he has developed, seeks the free space of
literature to speak about the impossibility of writing outside the literary and/or
educational machinery. Ebejer therefore makes use of literature which is frequently
used as the master’s tools in an attempt to dismantle the master’s house and to
make his readers critically reflect on the double binds of the very literary text that
they are reading. This points to an understanding of resistance as that which is
complexly related to ideas of human freedom and liberty drawn from the culture of
the colonisers as we explained earlier. This ambivalent experience of drawing upon
an acquired language to critique its very colonising effects reflects the double
position of the writer and his coming to terms with the hybrid possibilities of
literature. This hybrid experience need not necessarily lead to the schizophrenic
split existence that Fanon describes. Neither does it need to follow the steps of
Joseph who loses his life in oscillating between colonised and colonising cultures.
The possibilities of the experiences of hybridity are realised by Ebejer, the
writer himself who creates a hybrid literature that reflects its colonial legacies
through the very critique of its colonising effects. Ebejer’s writing may not defy
the aesthetic norms of western literature but it can be considered as hybrid in that it
makes the reader read into the text in a deconstructive manner. In this way Ebejer’s
writings are not simply reflective of a colonising culture but are critically engaged
with it to produce hybrid works of literatures. As Bhabha (1994) explains, hybrid
literatures bring together the cultures of the colonisers and the colonised in an
attempt to go beyond the deadly effects of an alienating literature. They do this by
bringing in indigenous signs and drawing on native understandings to give new
meanings to imposed oppressive cultures.
Ebejer, especially through his English language novels, attempts exactly this.
His novels are formally very English, using story-telling that is at home in Western
literature. The novels, however, are also rooted in the colonised culture that begot
them and this continues to contribute to a critical reading of the coloniser’s and
colonising aspects of literature. Not only are most of the narratives about the
struggle of the Maltese to come to terms with their colonisation and decolonisation,
but the language itself is no longer the language acquired from the colonial rulers,
but a different form of english (see Ashcroft, 2009). There is also that part of his
ouvre which consciously refuses to communicate through English and addresses
his fellow countrymen through a language that has remained alien to the colonisers.
This language is intentionally used to generate a literature that can be termed
postcolonial. In challenging colonial impositions in this manner, Ebejer as a writer
himself can be considered as an educator who has become engaged in educational
trajectories that go beyond the double binds of the colonial experiences of teachers
and their students.

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