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Let me make it clear that I hold no brief for James Joyce. There was a period of my intellectual life when I would set myself the task, each summer, of re-reading Ulysses, if not with anything like full comprehension, at least with some measure of enjoyment. But along about 100 pages or so into that behemoth, I would find myself baffled. I couldn't tell who was talking, or about what. And the truth is, I just didn't care.
That said, the man seems to me to have put his finger on the truth, every so often. Once, and with typical arrogance, he remarked "[E]rrors . . . are the portals of discovery." Putting aside the invocation of genius, I think he is preaching a gospel we might all listen to. Or perhaps we should opt for that other Irishman, Samuel Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
One of the accepted truths at the Institute (a byproduct, of course, of our staunch faith in the grading curve as part of what Moses brought down from the mountain) is that, in any group of undergraduates enrolled in a class (a group that will, inevitably, comprise the brightest young people of their age anywhere in the world), some must fail. It would seem to me that that belief is an horrific condemnation of our pedagogy – do you mean we cannot bring such a talented crew up to some minimally acceptable standard? Maybe, if we are going to hold to that creed, we need to start acknowledging the benefits of failure.
I don't mean to offer cheap consolation, of the sort favored by inept football coaches (a group I have been part of, in my time): "Learn from your mistakes, even if they cost you the exam or the game or . . .." But the real fact of the matter may be that what looks like error might just be the path to new discovery, which would make "failure" a prediction of remarkable success, in due time.
I sometimes thank my lucky stars that my own field of scholarship is largely without "right answer," in the strict sense. Of course, there are laughable misconceptions (not all of them produced by adolescents; consider the conviction that Shakespeare's plays were not in fact written by William Shakespeare, or that the title character of The Great Gatsby is in fact African-American), anachronisms (especially changes in the denotative and connotative meanings of words), and failures to see appropriate and necessary context (which leads to much of the "political correctness" trashing of dead writers). But pure error is so rare as to be nonexistent, in the study of literature.
Which isn't to say that seemingly wild and improbable ideas do not, and should not, arise. I once had a student write an essay proving (to her satisfaction, at least) that a detective story by Dashiell Hammett and a tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne were in fact "the same story." She badly over-stated her case, and took such a general approach that almost any pair of narratives could be made to coincide. But in the process she moved well into both narratives, and hit upon a way in which the hard-boiled detective story arises from Romantic notions of the human mind and the work of human comprehension.
I fear I digress. I invite my colleagues to reflect on their own fields of specialty, and see if there are not perhaps more than a handful of cases in which "error" (especially when it meant flying in the face of received knowledge, and even intuition) proved the necessary first step in discovery. It is in fact a myth that Einstein as a schoolboy failed mathematics; but (if we can believe Werner Heisenberg, at least) it is fair to say that, as for physics, he started out on a distinctly wrong foot:
. . . it was among the self-evident presuppositions of science that space and time were two quantitatively different schemes of order, forms of intuition, under which the world is presented to us. . . . The whole of physics had been conducted since Newton's day upon these self-evident assumptions . . . Einstein had the uncommon courage to cast all these assumptions into question.
That may be brave and even seductive enough, if one is a physicist. But I dare say it would not have gotten the poor extravagantly-haired lad very far on a problem set in whatever version of 8.01 enrolled him, in days of yore.
To which one might add Copernicus, Galileo, Roentgen. Of course, there are those, still, who insist that Darwin was wholly wrong.
I rest my case on the shoulders of my colleagues. And I remind us – all of us – to be a bit more appreciative of the student who gets the wrong answers. Especially if she or he gets there for what might be the right reasons. Another way to think of it is (to return to the theme-tune of one of my prior homilies in these pages) we would do well to have less certainty that we are fully in possession of all the right answers, all the time.
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