QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR RICHARD E. MILLER’S “THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL”

QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING

1. “The Dark Night of the Soul” is the first chapter in Richard Miller’s book Writing at the End of the World. The chapter, which we are inviting you to read as an essay, is organized by subheadings. You might think of these as a way of punctuating the essay, and you might think of this technique as a tool for your own toolkit.

Question 26.1

2. In the final chapter of Writing at the End of the World, Miller says the following about his own writing:

While the assessments, evaluations, proposals, reports, commentaries, and critiques I produce help to keep the bureaucracy of higher education going, there is another kind of writing I turn to in order to sustain the ongoing search for meaning in a world no one controls. This writing asks the reader to make imaginative connections between disparate elements; it tracks one path among many possible ones across the glistening water. (p. 196 of the print book)

We can assume that this is the kind of writing present in “The Dark Night of the Soul.” And he says this about English and the humanities:

The practice of the humanities . . . is not about admiration or greatness or appreciation or depth of knowledge or scholarly achievement; it’s about the movement between worlds, arms out, balancing; it’s about making the connections that count. (p. 198 of the print book)

This latter is a pretty bold statement, since English departments have traditionally defined their job as teaching students to read deeply, to conduct scholarly research, and to appreciate great works of literature. What Miller has to offer, rather, is “movement between worlds, arms out, balancing” or “making the connections that count.”

Question 26.2

3. For the sake of argument, let’s say that Jon Krakauer and Mary Karr are the key figures in this essay — Krakauer as a reader, Karr as a writer. As you reread, pay particular attention to these two sections. What are the appropriate goals and methods for reading, if Krakauer is to serve as a model? What are the appropriate goals and methods for writing, if Karr is to serve as a model? And do you agree with the initial assumption, that Krakauer and Karr are the key figures in this essay?

Question 26.3

4.

Question 26.4

5.

Question 26.5

ASSIGNMENTS FOR WRITING

1. Miller’s essay opens with a list of fatal shootings in school — troublingly, an incomplete list. As the essay builds to questions — questions for educators and for students — the specters of violence and alienation remain, changing how we think about the reading and writing school endeavors to teach us. “I have these doubts, you see,” Miller writes of academic work, “doubts silently shared by many who spend their days teaching others the literate arts. Aside from gathering and organizing information, aside from generating critiques and analyses that forever fall on deaf ears, what might the literate arts be said to be good for?” (para. 14).

Question 26.6

2. In the final chapter of Writing at the End of the World, Miller says the following about English and the humanities:

The practice of the humanities . . . is not about admiration or greatness or appreciation or depth of knowledge or scholarly achievement; it’s about the movement between worlds, arms out, balancing; it’s about making the connections that count. (p. 198 of the print book)

This latter is a pretty bold statement, since English departments have traditionally defined their job as teaching students to read deeply, to conduct scholarly research, and to appreciate great works of literature. What Miller has to offer, rather, is “movement between worlds, arms out, balancing” or “making the connections that count.”

Question 26.7

3. In the final chapter of Writing at the End of the World, Miller says the following about his own writing:

While the assessments, evaluations, proposals, reports, commentaries, and critiques I produce help to keep the bureaucracy of higher education going, there is another kind of writing I turn to in order to sustain the ongoing search for meaning in a world no one controls. This writing asks the reader to make imaginative connections between disparate elements; it tracks one path among many possible ones across the glistening water. (p. 196 of the print book)

We can assume that this is the kind of writing present in “The Dark Night of the Soul.”

Question 26.8

4. Consider the following passage from Miller’s “The Dark Night of the Soul”:

What makes Into the Wild remarkable is Krakauer’s ability to get some purchase on McCandless’s actual reading practice, which, in turn, enables him to get inside McCandless’s head and speculate with considerable authority about what ultimately led the young man to abandon the comforts of home and purposefully seek out mortal danger. Krakauer is able to do this, in part, because he has access to the books that McCandless read, with all their underlinings and marginalia, as well as to his journals and the postcards and letters McCandless sent to friends during his journey. Working with these materials and his interviews with McCandless’s family and friends, Krakauer develops a sense of McCandless’s inner life and eventually comes to some understanding of why the young man was so susceptible to being seduced by the writings of London, Thoreau, Muir, and Tolstoy. Who McCandless is and what becomes of him are, it turns out, intimately connected to the young man’s approach to reading — both what he chose to read and how he chose to read it. (para. 26)

When Miller is writing about Krakauer’s Into the Wild, he seems to suggest that what we read, and how we read, can say something about who we are and about what we might become. This is a very bold claim.

Question 26.9

MAKING CONNECTIONS

1.

After years spent unwilling to admit its attractions, I gestured nostalgically toward the past. I yearned for that time when I had not been so alone. I became impatient with books. I wanted experience more immediate. I feared the library’s silence. I silently scorned the gray, timid faces around me. I grew to hate the growing pages of my dissertation on genre and Renaissance literature. (In my mind I heard relatives laughing as they tried to make sense of its title.) I wanted something — I couldn’t say exactly what. (p. 354 of the print book)

— RICHARD RODRIGUEZ
The Achievement of Desire

For some, it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that reading and writing have no magically transformative powers. But for those of us who have been raised into the teaching and publishing professions, it can be quite a shock to confront the possibility that reading and writing and talking exercise almost none of the powers we regularly attribute to them in our favorite stories. The dark night of the soul for literacy workers comes with the realization that training students to read, write, and talk in more critical and self-reflective ways cannot protect them from the violent changes our culture is undergoing. (para. 11)

— RICHARD E. MILLER
The Dark Night of the Soul

Both Richard E. Miller and Richard Rodriguez are concerned with the limits (and the failures) of education, with particular attention to the humanities and to the supposed benefits to be found in reading and writing. “I have these doubts, you see,” Miller writes of academic work, “doubts silently shared by many who spend their days teaching others the literate arts. Aside from gathering and organizing information, aside from generating critiques and analyses that forever fall on deaf ears, what might the literate arts be said to be good for?” (para. 13).

Question 26.10

2.

After years spent unwilling to admit its attractions, I gestured nostalgically toward the past. I yearned for that time when I had not been so alone. I became impatient with books. I wanted experiences more immediate. I feared the library’s silence. I silently scorned the gray, timid faces around me. I grew to hate the growing pages of my dissertation on genre and Renaissance literature. (In my mind I heard relatives laughing as they tried to make sense of its title.) I wanted something — I couldn’t say exactly what. (p. 354 of the print book)

— RICHARD RODRIGUEZ
The Achievement of Desire

I could not, in the end, for some blessed reason, turn away from myself. Not at least in this place. The place of desire. I think now of the small lines etching themselves near the eyes of a woman’s face I loved. And how, seeing these lines, I wanted to stroke her face. To lean myself, my body, my skin into her. A part of me unravels as I think of this, and I am taken toward longing, and beyond, into another region, past the walls of this house, or all I can see, stretching farther than the horizon where right now sea and sky blend. It is as if my cells are moving in a larger wave, a wave that takes in every history, every story. (p. 000 of the print book)

— SUSAN GRIFFIN
Our Secret

We typically think of desire as something that leads us toward something, not as an achievement in and of itself, but as a process. Both Rodriguez and Griffin embody desire in different ways in their essays. If Richard Miller were to read these writers for their desires, what do you think he would notice?

Question 26.11

3. One way to imagine Susan Griffin’s project in “Our Secret” (p. 231 of the print book) is to think of her study of Heinrich Himmler as a journey through texts. She spends a significant amount of time attending to Himmler’s journals and writings, looking at the way he stood in photographs, closely reading the words he chose as a child and later as a Nazi soldier. Griffin says that she has been “searching” through these documents. She writes:

Now as I sit here I read once again the fragments from Heinrich’s boyhood diary that exist in English. I have begun to think of these words as ciphers. Repeat them to myself, hoping to find a door into the mind of this man, even as his character first forms so that I might learn how it is he becomes himself. (p. 236 of the print book)

Considering the journals and memoirs he consults, one might think of Richard Miller as having a similar project to Griffin’s, one of sifting through texts in order to uncover their relationships to the human beings who read and wrote these texts. Miller writes:

Asking why a Steve Cousins or an Eric Harris or a Dylan Klebold is violent is itself a meaningless act, not because the motivation is too deeply buried or obscurely articulated to ever be known, but because we no longer live in a world where human action can be explained. We have plenty of information; it just doesn’t amount to anything. This is the logic of the history of increasing humiliation working itself out over time. (para. 18)

Question 26.12

4. In his essay “Our Time” (p. 420 of the print book) John Edgar Wideman worries over the problems of representation, of telling his brother’s story. He speaks directly to the fundamental problem writers face when they try to represent the lives of others: “I’d slip unaware out of his story and into one of my own. I’d be following him, an obedient shadow, then a cloud would blot the sun and I’d be gone, unchained, a dark form still skulking behind him but no longer in tow” (p. 000 of the print book). Wideman goes on to say:

The hardest habit to break . . . would be listening to myself listen to him. That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms; and seeing him in his terms, learning his terms, seemed the whole point of learning his story. . . . I had to teach myself to listen. Start fresh, clear the pipes, resist too facile an identification, tame the urge to take off with Robby’s story and make it my own. (p. 437 of the print book)

Question 26.13

5. Both Richard Miller, in “The Dark Night of the Soul,” and Judith Butler, in “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy” (p. 112 of the print book), are concerned with the fundamental question of what, in Butler’s terms, “makes for a livable world.” How would Miller read, appropriate, and understand Butler’s essay?

Question 26.14