Education and the Boarding School Novel: Examining the Work of José Régio
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Education and the Boarding School Novel: Examining the Work of José Régio ____________________________________________ A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at the University of Canterbury by Filipe D. Santos ____________________________________________ University of Canterbury Christchurch 2014 2 MEMORIÆCLARISSIMI ATQVECARISSIMI PATRIS OPTIMI SACRVM 3 Between childhood, boyhood, adolescence & manhood (maturity) there should be sharp lines drawn w/ Tests, deaths, feats, rites stories, songs, & judgements James (Jim) Morrison (1988) Wilderness, London: Penguin, 22 4 Abstract This thesis is an inquiry located at the crossroads of philosophy, education and literature. Its aim is to illustrate the possible contribution of the last of these domains of study to the linking of the other two, demonstrating that a philosophical perspective enriches an educational reading of literary works. It starts by affirming the potential benefits of studying novels in educational research. Particular reference is made to the promise of school novel studies, when narratives of this subgenre convey autobiographical school experiences. There follows a survey of the various types of novel centred on adolescence: the Youth novel, the Bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman, the Internatsgeschichte, and Non-School and De- School novels. Foucault’s enquiry into the nature of ‘special places’ is an important contribution to the philosophical exploration of boarding schools as ideological constructs and historic institutions; a critical discussion of Foucault’s assessment of qualitative spatialities is engaged, to challenge some of the examples he chose and to make new terminological proposals, whilst highlighting the sort of power relations that are at the core of these spatialities and reinforcing the centrality of the power question found in the thinking of Nietzsche. The analysis of Foucault’s virtual journey through special places is complemented by contributions from Leach’s structuralist anthropology and Goffman’s sociology. An overview of the presence of the boarding school in literature allows for a depiction of the cultural ambience of the early 20th century novel and the masculinist 5 ideology then prevailing, and since these novels were both a product of their time and a reaction against it, it is made reference to why and how some criticisms of the institution were voiced, in many cases due to personal experiences of the authors. The core argument is based on the work of Portuguese writer José Régio (1901- 1969). He was a teacher-writer and, arguably, among the more philosophical of Portuguese school novel authors. Inspired by Dostoyevsky and Gide, he was to sustain a lifelong dispute with Nietzsche’s oeuvre that was centred on metaphysical and cultural problems. Since both writers were educators, this debate had pedagogical implications. Nietzsche was a critic of mass education, which had lost purpose and meaning, in line with Xenophon’s criticism of late classical Greek education; to him the real formation of a personality involved the undoing of education in order to reconnect with the most creative and authentic grounds of one’s personality. Likewise, Régio, in his novel A Drop of Blood (1945), shows interest in the formation of the artist as the special object of education – the ‘marked man’ –, whose sensitivity distances him irremediably from the crowd. He adopted the radical individualism of Nietzsche not in order to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ this or that schooling model but to exemplify the perpetual clash, inherent in mankind, between the individual and the group, the artist and the non-artistic person, the young and the adult, the son and the father and the self and the world. The thesis also discusses a number of aspects of Régio’s oeuvre and his times. At the end, a canon of the Bildungsromane and the Schulromane is included. 6 Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisors, Professor Peter Roberts and Dr Kathleen Quinlivan, for their fundamental backing and support. Without them I would not have arrived at the conclusion of this research project. I was motivated to start this venture by Professor Peter Roberts’ work on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus and others. His inspiring approach to the philosophy of education through literature opened up for me, as well as for others, the line of research I wanted to pursue. I am also obliged to Dr. Quinlivan, for her good will and for also having inspired me with her stimulating undoing of many a misconception about Education. No less important for the outcome of my research was being granted a scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, (Portugal); and being the recipient of the 2013 PESA Scholarship, a prestigious award bestowed on my project by the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. These two entities recognised the potential of this project and provided me with essential support. I am also thankful to Professor Janinka Greenwood, Associate Professor Nesta Devine and my colleagues and academic friends Christoph Teschers, John Calvert, David Liu, Odile De Comarmond and others from the now disbanded Te Pourewa 4th floor community, and Haifeng Zhang from Auckland. They have kindly supported my efforts in various ways and through the pleasant as well as hard and difficult times we all had to face. I wish to extend my appreciation to others outside the Academy, especially to my Mother, who also shared with me in the past some of her direct knowledge of the presença generation and implanted in my soul a veneration for Régio and for Portuguese literature; to the helpful assistance of José C. Santos; to Judge and writer Enéas Atanázio, from Brazil; 7 and to those, and they were many, who have helped me to arrive at this outcome. To all of them I want to express my sincere gratitude. 8 Preface My motivation to undertake this research grew out of a long-standing admiration for José Régio, which I inherited from my Father who was one of his companions in the presença venture, and from my mother as well, who was an enthusiastic reader and commenter of Régio’s work. Through this work I was willing to pay homage to that great writer and to my adored parents at the same time. I recall, during my youthful years, to laid down many times on a chaise long that still stands prominently in my parent’s house dining room, next to a bookstand, and to be intrigued, day after day, year after year, by those two mysterious spines of Régio’s The Old House editions, one reading A Drop of Blood (vol. 1) and the other The Ordinary Monstrosities (vol. 4). I was intrigued by those titles, their meanings and what they concealed. But it was not until adulthood that I was to make my way to the powerful texts themselves, hidden behind those magical spines that stood out from all the books in those shelves. Then I heard many times the narrative of my mother’s personal acquaintance with Régio, the way she was introduced to him by my Father in that same dining room in 1961, when the Poet was awarded the Diário de Notícias’ prize for ‘the most outstanding Portuguese writer’. My Father was a member of the jury that so rightly distinguished him and acted as his host in Lisbon. Both were coming from the public session where Régio had received the cheque from the hands of Augusto de Castro, Director of the newspaper, and Régio was already eager to leave the Portuguese capital, when my Father insisted in taking him to meet his wife. And my mother forever kept the vision of that man, his short height, his strong Portuguese Northern accent and his fiery eyes. She knew already the many stories my Father had told her about those distant and magical years in Coimbra back in 9 1931-33, where he had been studying the pedagogical subjects required to become a high school teacher, while at the same time he was then directing the famous Oporto based A Águia magazine (in which Pessoa had published his maid article); Régio, six years his elder, was already directing presença since 1927 and, having finished his own pedagogical subjects, was by then constantly travelling between his beloved Coimbra, where so many of his companions and friends remained, and Portalegre, where he was inaugurating his long teaching career of over 30 years. Around 1961 my Father was especially close to the other presença Director, Gaspar Simões, another member of the Coimbra group and the most prominent of Régio’s friends, whom he was to invite to become my godfather when I was to be born. So my personal story became, right from my birth, strongly related to that mythical Coimbra group and to the magazine presença they founded: by inviting Simões to godfathering his last son, my Father was surely willing to reconnect symbolically with his student years of three decades before. As for the boarding school settings of A Drop of Blood, it is important to notice that, with the single exception of a guided tour around Christ College in Christchurch before the quakes, I had never in my all life entered any boarding school at all, let alone boarded. My goal was to understand the impact of the boarding experience upon Régio’s complex personality, and to take his own autofictional testimony as a broad questioning of schooling; and finally to research about boyhood issues, in order to better come to terms with my own school experience, so distant from Régio’s one, but so unsatisfactory as well. I let the reader judge if this work will stand for any significant progress within the growing Régio’s scholarship. But it is surely unworthy of fitting the homage deserved by those I intended to honour.