More on Tim Gautreaux and Education

In the previous post, I wrote about education in Tim Gautreaux's short story "Welding With Children." Today, I want to write about education as it appears in two of his stories from Welding With Children: "Misuse of Light" and "Resistance." Lengthy discussions of education do not appear in either one of these stories, but the mention does serve some importance. When asked about whether or not he thought education separates Cajuns from a traditional way of life, thus homogenizing them, Gautreaux responded:

Yeah, I think so. Because, and that’s the way with just about anybody who is raised [among] the lower-middle class or blue-collar people and becomes educated, begins making money, begins to prosper, begins to move in the popular culture. [You] begin to feel that your plainer beginnings are something you should leave behind. And I think that’s sad. You begin to lose all sense of history and all sense of the past, and then you lose the sense of the importance of present things. (69)

The separation from the values and practices of the past can be seen in Gaines's works, as I have stated multiple times. In "Misuse of Light" and "Resistance" "formal" education at the university level becomes something unobtainable and honestly not needed. Again, I wrote about this with "Welding With Children."

In "Misuse of Light," Mel DeSoto works in a camera store in New Orleans and develops film. One day, a young woman comes in trying to sell her grandfather's photography equipment. Mel purchases the equipment and eventually develops the film. He discovers images on the film that appear to be a mystery, and the story traces Mel's search for the true meaning behind the photographs.

At the beginning of the story, as Mel cleans the newly acquired camera, the narrator informs us that Mel attended Tulane for a short time, much like the grandfather did at LSU for a semester in "Welding With Children." Like the grandfather, Mel experienced resistance at Tulane: "his work was not promising, and his professor would write on his project, sometimes on the photographs themselves, 'Misuse of light'" (22). Mel's professor at Tulane did not see his potential, and even his boss, Mr. Weinstein, views Mel's predilection to develop old photos from cameras the shop buys as ludicrous and nosy. Mel, on the other hand, sees the photos as art. Eventually, the continual disapproval of him viewing the photos as art, or as a mystery that needs to be solved, gets to him and whenever Mel buys a camera at the shop that contains film he dumps the film in the trash without developing it.

In regards to education, the story presents arguments about what constitutes art. For Mel, the images that he develops can be viewed as "artistic," but Mr. Weinstein sees the smudged, blurry prints as Mel being nosy. Like his professor at Tulane, Mr. Weinstein questions whether or not Mel actually knows what he is talking about and whether or not he can actually learn anything about true "art." There is no resolution to this quandary in the story; instead, the focus becomes the story behind the photograph. In this instance, the "art" of the photo tells a true, realistic story. For me, this reminds me of the comment, I believe by Sterling Brown, that fiction (or art) is based in 98-99% reality. The photograph, even though it is a facsimile of reality, becomes an "artistic" representation of the reality and the story being portrayed. Mel recognizes the "artistic" quality of the picture he discovers, unlike Mr. Weinstein, and I would argue, his professor at Tulane. While he could have learned about "art" in an institutionalized university setting, he learns about "art" and what it means to him on his own.

Like Mel in "Misuse of Light," Alvin Boudreaux in "Resistance" can be seen as an example of education in the workforce instead of in the "hallowed" halls of academia. The story sees Alvin helping his next door neighbor's daughter Carmine with her science fair project. The girl's father rejects the assistance and provides resistance to Alvin's attempts to help. When Carmine begins to explain her idea for a project to Alvin, she starts to worry that Alvin, a retired factory worker, doesn't know anything that can be helpful to her. Alvin tells her that he started his working life as a "millwright at LeBlanc Sugar Mill" and ended up retiring as the "foreman over all the maintenance people" (125). After hearing this, Carmine asks Alvin, "Does that mean you don't know anything about electricity?" (126). Alvin tells her that he worked on motors, and Carmine moves closer and begins to explain in detail how her project will work, telling him about the electrons running through a big cylinder and how resistors will control the flow of electrons. When she is done, Alvin astonishes her by asking her if they have to basically do the "scientific method" to show how the project works.

We do not know how far Alvin went in school, and we do not know if he went to college like Mel either. We can assume that he did not go to college and that he learned what he knows about electricity and resistors at LeBlanc Sugar Mill. Carmine appears amazed that Alvin knows these things, especially considering he did not learn them in school. Unlike Mel, we do not get the impression that others detracted Alvin from his pursuits, and like Mel, we see that Alvin is astute and intelligent even though he did not attend a university.

Doctors and lawyers do not provide the only source of educated individuals in the world, an Gautreaux shows this through his descriptions of characters like Mel, Alvin, and the grandfather in "Welding With Children." The stories do not show the gaps that education produces between the characters and the community, but they do show that "formal" education is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to showing how much knowledge someone maintains in his or her head.

For more of Tim, Gautreaux, check out Margaret Bauer's interview with him at Southern Spaces. Again, what are your thoughts on this topic? Where else do you see education being portrayed in Gautreaux's work? What does that portrayal say about the community and the individual?

Gautreaux, Tim. "Misuse of Light." Welding With Children: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. 21-38. Print. 
Gautreaux, Tim. "Resistance." Welding With Children: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. 121-139. Print.
Hebert-Leiter, Maria. "An Interview With Tim Gautreaux." Carolina Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 66-74. Print. 

Tim Gautreaux's "Welding With Children" and Education

Maria Hebert-Leiter begins her 2005 interview with Louisiana writer Tim Gautreaux with a question about his influences, specifically how William Faulkner and Ernest Gaines, who both write about their very particular "postage stamp of land," inspired him and his construction of Tiger island (Morgan City, LA). Gautreaux responds not by linking himself to Faulkner but by drawing his connections to Gaines, particularly in regards to the way that Gaines writes his dialogue and represents the language of the people he writes about. Gautreaux continues by discussing the fact that when Gaines left Louisiana for California he tried to write about things other than Louisiana, but he kept getting drawn back to Pointe Coupee. Likewise, Gautreaux speaks about every writer having "a certain literary territory. It's the place of his birth, where he grew up, the language that he listened to, the values that were implied, and the everyday commerce of his life" (66-67). Today, I want to talk about a thematic similarity between Gautreaux and Gaines that I saw while reading Welding With Children (1999), a collection of short stories by Gautreaux.

When asked about why he does not write about educated Cajuns such as doctors and lawyers, Gautreaux simply responds in a similar way that Gaines does. He says, "[It goes] back to my raising again, and my territory, because the people I knew were blue-collar people. They were rural people. They were fisherman. They were mechanics. They were dredge-boat operators and tug-boat captains and railroad engineers" (69). Like Gaines, Gautreaux writes about the people he knew growing up, the ones he encountered on a day to day basis. Even though he doesn't write about "educated" Cajun doctors and lawyers, education does appear in his works, and on initially reading Welding With Children, his treatment of education struck me. While reading the collection, I continually saw the role that education plays in the community. Gautreaux highlights the distance of education in relation to the lower-middle-class and/or blue-collar community that a person comes from. In Gaines, that distance is explored between those who go away for an education and return only to find themselves alienated from the community. In Gautreaux's stories, the achievable, yet unachievable, aspects of education take center stage.

The opening story, "Welding With Children," follows a man who takes care of his grandchildren on a Tuesday afternoon. Throughout, the narrator wonders about the children of his four daughters while watching them almost kill themselves by playing with an motor in the yard while he tries to weld. As he looks at his grandchildren in the yard. that narrator begins to think about his educational experiences at Louisiana State University (LSU). He attended LSU for a whole semester while "work[ing] overtime at a sawmill for a year to afford the tuition and show[ing] up in [his] work boots to be taught" (2-3). He thinks about the English 101 class where teachers would sit behind the desk and have the students write for their portfolios, never teaching them anything. He thinks about the algebra teacher who lectured to the ceiling, appearing to not even notice the students in the room. He thinks about the drunken chemistry professor who used a Bunsen burner to warm up a can of Campbell's soup and eat it in class. He thinks about his history professor, who he kind of liked, that dies half-way through the semester "and was replaced by a little porch lizard" (3). He thinks about the other students in the back of a class that him "Uncle Jed." He flunked out, but, as he says, "I got my money's worth learning about people that don't have hearts no bigger than bird shot" (3).

The narrator's experiences at LSU did not teach him anything, and while there, he became the object of ridicule because of his appearance and his social background. Flunking out of college, the narrator became a welder and worked in the community. Later, as his grandkids watch TV, the narrator begins to contemplate running away with them, "away from their mamas, TVs, mildew, their casino-mad grandmother, and Louisiana in general" (12). If he did this, he "could get a job, raise them right, send them to college so they could own sawmills and run car dealerships" like the Fordlysons (12). At that moment, a drop of sweat from a class falls on the narrator's twenty-year-old shoes and he realizes he hasn't had a steady job for a while. He then begins to think if his wife ever had the fantasy of taking his daughters away and starting a new life so she could send them to college. Did the grandkids' mamas have the same fantasy?

Through these reflections, the narrator works through showing that what he, his children, and his grandchildren inhabit is a cycle that cannot be escaped easily. He tried to attend college, but the classes, ridicule, and possibly even the long hours at the sawmill hindered him from completing more than one semester.  The narrator eventually starts to think about other avenues of education, including the Methodist church. At one point, he ponders the fact that his four daughters do not have much religion to speak of. He thought that his wife, LaNelle, would instill religion in them, but she "always worked so much, she just had time to cook, clean, transport, and fuss" (7). The continual need to work to survive not only affected the narrator during his semester at LSU, but it affected his children as well.  

In the next post, I will talk about other instances of education in Gautreaux's collection. For now, what are your thoughts? Who are some other authors who talk about education in a similar manner?

Gautreaux, Tim. "Welding With Children." Welding With Children: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. 1-19. Print. 
Hebert-Leiter, Maria. "An Interview With Tim Gautreaux." Carolina Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 66-74. Print.