This week, I thought I’d join the legions before me who have written about the Susan Boyle phenomenon. (If you have been on top of the Himalayas or down checking out the Titanic for the past two weeks and so are the last person alive who has not yet seen the Susan Boyle audition for Britain’s Got Talent—as of Friday afternoon, not quite two weeks after the original audition, there had been more 88 million plays of the several videos of the audition on YouTube[1]—then you can see it here.)
I got to thinking in more detail about the current media wonder because one of my students asked me the other day, “What’s the big deal about Susan Boyle? Why is everyone so excited?” My first reaction was to ask her if she had seen it, as the excitement seemed intuitively obvious to me, but she had, and so a less cavalier answer was called for. I expound here on the short version I gave her. The answer that I was able to produce on the spot is that the reaction is archetypal: Susan Boyle is the living breathing embodiment of one of the most emotionally attractive of all narratives: the Cinderella Story.[2] She went from utter hopelessness to absolute victory in the space of four minutes—less, actually: as my sister pointed out, the audience was on its feet before she got through the third line. The hopelessness, furthermore, turned out to exist only in the eyes of the beholder, which meant that as audience members, we unexpectedly and abruptly found ourselves in the position of having our own cynicism shattered by incontrovertible evidence that there is, in fact, hope even when hopelessness seems the only possible rational position. While Susan Boyle herself won the full joyful force of transformation, everyone watching also got to experience something of the effect of an emotional slingshot.
Most of my students had no trouble responding to the rags to riches story at least to some degree. It was a student, in fact, who first brought the video to my attention: she used it in our IB Philosophy class to exemplify some of the features of chapter 5 of Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity. The student (rightly) thought that the video served to exemplify Taylor’s claim that in our effort to realize our potential selves as fully as possible, it is necessary both that we have the recognition of others as a form of validating that our opinion of ourselves is not mere delusion, and that we simultaneously consider the validity of that recognition so that we do not make the mistake of allowing the opinions and values of others to distort reality and thus keep us from something essentially ours. My student could hardly have chosen better. Susan Boyle was all about recognition: the dowdy, unattractive almost-48-year-old never-been-kissed spinster presented the perfect vision of completely self-delusional visions of grandeur. The audience had NO trouble recognizing in her all the American Idol contestants who had come before and who had made complete fools of themselves during widely televised (and perhaps even more widely ridiculed!) auditions. William Hung and his infamous rendition of “She Bangs” positively leapt to mind.[3] Before she started singing, Susan Boyle had already been recognized as a failure.
The expectation of impending humiliation was heightened by Miss Boyle's proclamation that she wished to be as successful as Elaine Paige, an apparently outrageous aspiration which my students were universally unable to appreciate, as, though they are universally familiar with the musical oeuvre of Mr. Hung, none of them had ever heard of Elaine Paige. I, however, have been fortunate enough to have encountered Ms. Paige before (particularly in the original cast recording of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Whistle Down the Wind). Elaine Paige is a giant of the musical stage and a household name in
The thing that’s too bad about our failure to arrive at a meeting of the minds over effective exemplars is that those who don’t know who Elaine Page is lack the ability to appreciate in a visceral way the true extent of the audacity with which Miss Boyle approached her audition. The judges got it, of course (as did the British audience), and the television editors, sensing an impending bloodbath, took care to leverage for all it was worth the eye-rolling and eye-brow raising and sidelong glances and general expressions of incredulity (lip reading helps!) in the moments preceding the audition. Worldly and cynical recognition positively leaps off the screen.
That kind of recognition, however, would not be the kind of recognition that Charles Taylor wishes for us all to experience as a means of helping us become fully-realized, successful human beings. Miss Boyle however, and rampant cynicism notwithstanding, went on to demonstrate the second part of
Susan Boyle knew what to do with the eye-rolling skepticism of the judges and the audience: she ignored it altogether and proclaimed, in fact, that she was going to “…make that audience rock!” This confidence, ironically one of the many factors that actually contributed to the viewers’ sardonic and scornful expectation, was in fact a quintessential demonstration of
In fact, it was in part because her judgment was hard-nosed and completely justified that Miss Boyle has commanded so much admiration. A lot of the commentary online (and there is a TON—between the blogs, mine included, the news pages, and the fan club sites, the web is crawling with Susan Boyle references) focuses on how “brave” Susan Boyle was. Part of the answer for my student, then, is that we can all relate, on some level and to varying degrees, with the feeling that some part of us is too ugly to be overlooked by others, and most of us go to great lengths to hide those aspects of ourselves in fear of what we know must be inevitable rejection. Few of us have the nerve to stand up in public and proclaim to the world that those bits absolutely don’t matter in the face of other bits of great value, and fewer still, having found that nerve, turn out to be right. Susan Boyle’s triumph is, in a way, a triumph on behalf of everyone who has ever been laughed at or picked on, or been chosen last for softball in 5th grade PE. Susan Boyle revealed that she is endowed with the fortitude not to care what the naysayers will think; she showed that she has mastered a way of valuing herself grounded in solid, rational awareness of her own nature and abilities, rather than in hubristic, stubborn delusion—and I never met anyone who wouldn’t be glad to have that ability.
But courage in the face of universal incredulity wasn't the whole story and, I think, wasn't even the main story. The real reason for the widespread adulation of Susan Boyle, the reason I would have given my student had I had time to think it over and to explain in detail in the three minutes before class started, is that in four minutes Susan Boyle went from laughingstock to human being. Before she sang the audition, Miss Boyle was not a person, but rather a stock character, an abstraction, a type: "self-delusional loser," but almost the moment she started singing, a cog shifted inside the brains of all the listeners, they traded one perceived reality for another, utterly different one, and by about six bars in, they cared what happened to this person they had never seen before. In the space of those six bars, the audience went from wanting Susan Boyle to fail, because that failure would provide a satisfying, if mean-spirited, sense of superiority, to wanting Susan Boyle to succeed, because success is vastly more satisfying than failure. Once success became a real possibility on the stage of Britain's Got Talent, everyone started hoping. Hoping meant risking being let down, and when Miss Boyle didn't let anyone down and, in fact, surpassed the wildest possible expectations, the ensuing joy was the reaction to a promise fulfilled. That's the archetype I was trying to tell my student about: in a world littered with disappointments, the universe came through with a massively fulfilling surprise. The hero, against all odds, negotiated the road of trials and came home with the ultimate boon.
The nice thing that this suggests is that, cynical armor notwithstanding, people are mostly more generous than our day-to-day interactions sometimes suggest.
My students can understand that, because, as they have demonstrated to me through their discussion of the literature we have studied this year, they know how to empathize. They might perhaps best understand the Susan Boyle phenomenon in terms of Cyrano de Bergerac, which we recently finished studying. Un-Susan-like, Cyrano compensated for his ugliness in the eyes of others not by raising himself up on a deep assurance of the true worth of his real talent with words, but rather by developing a persona--the swashbuckling hero--in whose essential truth he didn't believe, but the appearance of which, he believed, would fool the world into according him a measure of respect that allowed him to function in society. The value of that persona, in other words, was not intrinsic to itself, and Cyrano didn't value himself the more or feel himself more successful and more human because he could manifest it. The value of that persona lay solely in its instrumental capacity: he was able to get what he wanted from others because they valued it. The commitment to the persona came with a very high price, however: to keep it up, he sacrificed any chance he might have had of a life with the woman he professed to love, and to whom he devoted himself, Lancelot-like, in the role of platonic champion for more than 15 years. My students understood in nuanced ways what those choices meant, and they recognized that Cyrano’s deep suffering over the ridicule he reaped as a result of his monstrosity of a nose kept him from becoming the person he might otherwise have been.
Cyrano died before he found a way to transcend people's attitude toward his nose. Susan Boyle didn't have to die before people looked past her hideous, if metaphorical, nose, but for whatever reason, something kept her, too, from becoming the person she might have been for nearly 48 years. The opportunity provided Miss Boyle by Britain's Got Talent, then, is that much more poignant. Most of us are a good deal more like Cyrano than we are like Susan Boyle, and so a great deal of the wonder over Susan Boyle arose from encountering the rare exception: someone becoming, despite the odds and long after all expectation would seem to be past, the person she might have been. That the world can experience such pleasure in that simple fact speaks better for human nature than our behavior often suggests we deserve: in this case the widespread furor suggests that in great numbers we believe that nobody should have to die without ever casting off the Ugly Duckling.
The general public at large, lacking the technical vocabulary, wouldn't express that desire in terms of a belief in an ethic of Authenticity, but my Philosophy students could. Whether the public at large is familiar with the formal terminology of Charles Taylor's ethical theory or not, I think Taylor is right in his claim that the underpinnings of Western culture in general and American culture specifically lie in just such a belief. The ideal of opportunity for all, which formed the basis of the American constitution and the framework of the American dream, toward which generations of immigrants have traveled, inheres the idea that every individual deserves equal chance to discover and create a unique self. Taylor argues further that our social institutions--governmental and legal systems in particular--have been designed to accommodate that belief. Taylor does not mention schools, but it seems to me that just as the government and the judicial systems ought to support and protect the ability of each member of our society to work on becoming his or her best self, so should the schools promote authenticity. My objection to No Child Left Behind and its consequent state programs of testing (about which I have written in detail in past posts on this blog) arises from the fact that those structures are designed to steer schools away from the service of the individual and toward a herd mentality.
The title "No Child Left Behind" is rather painfully ironic, as, though it appeals directly to that same desire for individual self-realization that sparked the Susan Boyle revolution, it actually works against any ability to attend to the true nature of each individual child. No Child Left Behind leaves all children behind, because it forces schools and educators into a gristmill of testing, bureaucratic record keeping and bean counting that discounts entirely any question of individual student's gifts might be. No Child Left Behind leaves all individual children behind, because it requires that all children be forced into the same mold and mandates a system in which all students are shaped to know the same things, posses the same skills, and think the same thoughts as all others. No Child Left Behind proscribes an anti-authenticity, anti-individualistic program better designed to churn out unthinking clones than it is designed to generate diverse minds. Students who are mandated by law to spend all their energies on the four core subjects, who are schooled in places which have to eliminate the arts (and a slew of other elective subjects) in favor of double-blocked remediation periods will find that their opportunities to explore options, and thus discover whatever it is that speaks uniquely to their most essential selves, have been greatly curtailed. Given that lack, it is to be hoped that my students, and all students, will be able to find some other path to their Susan Boyle moment, and that that moment won't be delayed until they are nearly 48. As much joy as the world found in Susan Boyle's eleventh-hour rescue from obscurity, I would trade the community pleasure for the longer-lived individual pleasure of finding recognition for one's essential talents at an early age, that that recognition might serve better and last longer. I find it a terrible contemplation to consider the possibility that we have cast our lot behind a school system which, in its subjugation of individual development to the fulfillment of societal needs is essentially instrumental, leads, ultimately, to a generation comprising many more Cyrano de Bergeracs than Susan Boyles.
[1] I added the numbers up myself from the totals posted for the dozen or so videos, so if the estimate is wrong, it is my math skill and not simple unchecked hyperbole which is to blame. Note that this does not count the myriad video responses, video biographies, Susan Boyle fan club websites, and so on. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the total hits on all video sharing sites, as tracked by some company that tracks these things, was greater than 116 million. At that pace, she's probably over 200 million now. I Googled "Susan Boyle" at the same time as I did the adding up, and I got more than 19 million hits. She qualifies as a bona fide phenomenon.
[2] Online access to this article requires membership in http://www.questia.com. The reference is:
Waters, Jen. "Cinderella: Biography of an Archetype; Enchantment of Fairytale Spans Centuries." The Washington Times. 31 May 2003.
Posts
