The teacher is a figure with whom we are all familiar. They are those who sacrifice, those who love, those who endure. In fact, we may say the teacher is precisely the vessel into which we pour our moral commitments for the world as we wish it to be, even as we increasingly fail to agree on what that future world should look like or whether there is a future for us at all. Teachers are not the children who are our future, but the ones who are instrumental in realizing those children and that future. This teacher figure is easy to find in news stories, education policy and research, films and literature, and indeed so is the teacher narrative perpetuating such fantasmatic individuals: an individual with a passion for education enters into some underprivileged (often racialized) classroom to enlighten the students on the ways of living the good life, often through literature, art, or history. As the narrator of Goddard’s novel says at one point in reference to a class of skinheads, “It was almost impossible for him to teach these children,” and yet, of course, he must. Though we often find the teacher in these archetypal narratives is a troubled individual themselves (and so too is Goddard’s narrator, especially in his spates of philandering and violence), and is initially met with resistance from the class, the successful teacher, so the story goes, overcomes these interior and exterior forces to save the students they hold so dear. This fantasy erases the idiosyncratic, circumstantial, and irreducible characteristics embodied by each teacher who arrives and remains incommensurate with the savior they’re supposed to be.
Indeed, if teachers are those who are central to realizing the future through teaching children, then teacher educators are in a similar relation to those who wish to be teachers. Teacher education grapples with the fantasies of “the teacher” in every course and from all sides. Students arrive with ideas of being a teacher drawn from family members who were teachers. Prospective teachers anticipate the mortification of teaching as the noble profession, ready and willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the child, the world, and their future. The expectations are already too high for teacher educators when the demand from students is to reduce them to their piety. Moreover, teacher educators face education policies and research with the aims of making teachers more effective as a way to remedy poverty, infuse life skills, produce a globally competitive and job-ready workforce, and develop a citizenry capable of critical thinking within the limits of problem solving and employability.
Across all these domains, it seems the obvious mission would be to locate and mass produce this saintly teacher. And it is with great delight to read in Roy Goddard’s Morant how ridiculous a mission this is that animates so much of teachers’ and teacher educators’ lives. Such narratives of teachers and their educators are overripe for problematization, both in its literary sense, and in its perpetuation in educational thinking. Morant does both.
Goddard’s novel follows the interior monologue of its eponymous teacher through an often fragmentary and temporally scattered narrative over the course of his teaching career into eventual (and equally unfulfilling) academia. Dialogue is sparse, with most speech reported by the narrator, perhaps something unexpected considering the regular claims made about teaching that “it’s the conversations with the students that make it.” Goddard’s style generally forecloses the voices and hubbub of the classroom, another challenge to expectations of the teacher narrative. So too does its loose chronology and moments of non-linearity reflect the “arbitrariness and frailty of the ways in which human beings organised time and imposed it upon themselves,” something that education’s concerns with progress, futures, and ages often disavow.
This book is achingly singular in its biographical detail as the central character, David Morant, recounts the details that can only comprise one life, a life which happens to reflect, always partially, an irreducible time as a teacher and select remembrances of teacher education. And perhaps most importantly, these times and recollections are seamlessly interwoven into the life of Morant as a reluctant fighter, a mordant thinker, a despondent teacher, the list can go on, and this seamlessness leaps from the writing into the form of the novel, which has no chapters and interjects with occasional breaks in text that signal nothing of an order or reason. The prose mirrors the form as neither offer reasons for beginnings and endings, yet there they are stopping and starting while always in the middle of something else. For example, the narrator describes one of the many conflicts that make up Morant’s looming sense of having failed according to some vague and unsourced expectation: “He should have given his career, its progress, more thought, but he was too busy for that, dividing his energies, he was later to think, between a commitment to Dionysian excess or, the same thing put differently, behaving disgracefully, and, through his teaching, working towards the downfall of capitalism and an era of love and social justice.” This is followed by an empty space to the bottom of the page and picks back up with “[o]ne of the things that Morant liked about Alison was how much she enjoyed sex.”
The non sequitur from shame to sex, with all the details and breaks peculiar to Morant, withholds a universal story about a teacher’s triumphs and failure. Instead, we skip disjointedly from the attention Morant pays to his memories, many of which recall moments from his own education and teaching, to grappling existentially with those haunting questions that make the memories return. Could I have behaved less disgracefully? Why did I leave Alison who seemed to enjoy sex? How did she know I would leave her so early in our relationship? As a memoir, the text is pensive, repetitional, and in search of chronically unavailable meaning. As an exemplar, the text is redeemingly useless.
And yet, beyond the personal, Goddard’s novel challenges the fantasy of education (in its broadest possible sense, not just in the school) asking if it can serve as the shining tool of social justice as so often posed. In a rare moment of illumination, Morant describes a “few small mountains” spied on a journey to Cornwall, reflecting education’s obsession with ever rising standards and achievement, climbing pathways to success, overcoming uphill journeys, and so forth. But soon he realizes that they are in fact “china clay spoil pits, the residue of mining.” In an image reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, the peaks become a heap of waste, a monument to expired consumption. Goddard’s novel challenges us with the question: what extinguished pyre are we so keen to traverse in our educational journey?
Morant, by Roy Goddard. Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England: Erratum Press, September 2022. 284 pages. $15.99, paper.
Nick Stock is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His research is currently exploring Lacanian psychoanalysis as an approach to unravelling the desires of teachers. He has other interests in poststructuralist philosophy and radical political theory. He tweets @89stock.
F. Tony Carusi is a Senior Lecturer of Educational Studies in Massey University’s Institute of Education. He writes on the representations of education and teachers in education policy and theory and has an ongoing interest in proliferating figures of the educator against the hope for their terminal form.
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