9 Unavoidable Middles: Dilatory Methods of

Reading and Comics Creation in Teacher

Education

DAVID LEWKOWICH

In her experimental autobiography of childhood, Nathalie Sarraute (1984)

recounts a scene of being read to by her parents, where fear and anxiety para-
lyzed her in the face of unsettling imagery. “I have been given a big bound
book,” Sarraute recalls, “I enjoy listening when they read me what is written
opposite the pictures ... but careful! – we’re getting to that picture, it fright-
ens me, it’s horrible” (p. 37). Describing her dread as a young reader, Sarra-
ute remembers encountering “a very thin man with a long, pointed nose …
brandishing a pair of open scissors.” “[H]e’s going to cut into the !esh,” she
tells us, “blood is going to !ow.” As a young reader, not yet able to distinguish
between the liquid world of thoughts and things, the threatening nature of
this children’s fable remains dangerously close to life as lived outside the text.
As a response to their daughter’s fear, Sarraute’s parents playfully suggest
a number of possible solutions: “Would you like us to tear out the page?”
they ask. “That would be a pity, it’s such a beautiful book.” “Well, then,” they
decide, “we’ll hide that picture ... We’ll stick the pages together” (pp. 37–8),
as if their daughter’s knowledge of this fearful image would then suddenly
subside.
Unsurprisingly, this creative solution does little to dispel the young reader’s
fears, for even if she no longer sees it, she cannot help but remember and an-
ticipate the terrifying character now hidden within the page’s folds, and though
her parents may hope to rid the story of a middle that causes fear, the reader
knows the middle is there, and perhaps even more threatening now that it is no
longer visible: “I know that it’s still there, shut in ... approaching, hidden here,
where the page gets thicker” (p. 38). As most experienced readers know, when it
comes to the work of narrative, “conditioned expectations of development,” as
Barthes (1985, p. 141) puts it, require more than a pasted page to be frustrated
or seriously thrown into question. Most of the time, it seems, we read without
actually reading at all, moving swiftly towards the end, reading what we expect
rather than what we do.
 Unavoidable Middles 167

In this chapter, I explore what it means to slow such forward movement

down, discussing the presence of unavoidable – and at times unwanted,
unsettling – middles in the narrative life of teacher education. I will also look
at how turning to dilatory, digressive spaces may invite future teachers to play
with speculative forms of articulation. For Brooks (1984), the “dilatory space”
of narrative is “the space of retard, postponement, error, … partial revelation …
[and] the place of transformation: where the problems posed to and by initi-
atory desire are worked out and worked through” (p. 92). Approaching some-
thing similar to Vasudevan’s (2011) concept of “unknowing,” as “an act of
dwelling in the imaginative space between declarative acts of knowing and not
knowing” (p. 1157), such speculative articulation may encourage imagination
outside of the habitual language otherwise used to discipline lived experience.
In reading, as in life, my conviction in this chapter is that it is up to us to shift
our gaze to see the dilatory, desiring movements of what may otherwise remain
unexpressed, “what is omitted yet exists in gestures between the words” (Taus-
sig, 2011, p. 100).
In what follows, borrowing from Sarraute, I will first discuss an example of
where “the page gets thicker” in teacher education, referring to a particularly
ambiguous and evocative moment from Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s young
adult graphic novel, Skim. While considering the questions posed by this tab-
leau, I refer to conversations I had with preservice teachers about the intimate
qualities of this scene, as well as what it means when intimacy – as a dilatory
and digressive force – brushes closely against the life of students and teachers
in school. As a way to foreground the uses of narrative pause and postpone-
ment in teacher education, I then describe a number of short comics created by
preservice teachers, in which they narrate the enduring presence of adolescent
emotional con!ict. Thinking in terms of narrative meaning, which “concerns
ends in relation to beginnings and the forces that animate the middle” (Brooks,
1984, p. 112), I understand such con!ict as one of the permanent, unavoidable
middles in the larger narrative plot of teacher education.

Intimacies, Partial and Incomprehensible

In my work with preservice ELA teachers, we sometimes deal with texts that of-
fer a similar kind of anticipatory dread to that which Sarraute encountered as a
young reader, where something untold and stubborn seems to bother, unsettle,
and resist interpretive resolution. At times we may feel this resistance in rela-
tion to personal accounts of teaching; for example, in Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s
(1986) Teacher, we happen upon a story whose account in words feels painfully
partial and incomprehensible. “I burnt most of my infant-room material on
Friday,” Ashton-Warner writes. “I say that the more material there is for a child,
the less pull there is on his resources” (p. 118). And yet, as readers who are also
168 David Lewkowich

teachers, we cannot help but sense that there is more to this act of burning
than simple expediency and pedagogical design. There is also purification, hate,
and violence, which leads to the question of how these desires, along with the
author’s frequent mention of love and student instinct, somehow inform the
teacher’s classroom life (in Ashton-Warner’s case, we needn’t look very far to
see such desires intertwined). As most of my students are nearing the end of
their undergraduate degrees, I find it important to consider how, when they
read, they “address the work according to what [they] need” (Birkerts, 2007,
p. 21), and that their desires and resistances tend to operate according to certain
conjectured ends, “seeking the imaginative equivalents of closure that will con-
fer significance on experience” (Brooks, 1984, p. 95). In the narrative structure
of teacher education, such ends are typically presumed to be in the form of
gainful employment, working as a classroom teacher, and given this, I consider
desires and resistances in reading with this particular end in mind, recognizing
that as desires shift, so may the reader’s position towards the text. An interpre-
tively open text may therefore offer readers a place to explore their own desires,
and to pose questions that may have no final answers.
In particular, I have found that comics and graphic novels often appear to
use methods of interpretive uncertainty as a means of amplifying the differ-
ent kinds of readings that readers may pursue: “to allow for, encourage,” as
Baldwin (2016) argues in the context of dilatory experience, “multiple narratives
and interpretations that bump up against each other, generating a continually
changing narrative vitality” (p. 542). By pursuing a focus on “the movement,
the slidings, the errors and partial recognitions of the middle” (Brooks, 1977,
p. 282), we may note that comics work to trigger meaning through what is frag-
mentary and incomplete, where different layers of symbolization, including a
“dance … between words and pictures” (Mackey & McClay, 2005, p. 193), lead
to values that do not always correspond or cohere. As Chute (2011) articulates
this tendency of comics to amplify rather than simply reproduce, “The gaps in
the story across which we are provoked to make connections are as much a part
of the story as the frames themselves” (p. 285), including the knowledge of an
unseen middle, perhaps frightening the reader in the face of what resists being
understood. And on this point, I will turn my discussion to Mariko and Jillian
Tamaki’s (2008) Skim.

Defensive Positions in Dilatory Reading

As this graphic novel opens, 16-year-old Skim explores the spiritual practices
of Wicca, tarot cards, and astrology, though the story soon takes a dark turn
as we discover that one of Skim’s peers has committed suicide. It is against this
tragic backdrop that Skim develops a passionate crush on her English teacher,
Ms. Archer. After being suspected of depression by her guidance counsellor, Skim
 Unavoidable Middles 169

heads down to a wooded area behind her school, and it is here that she first
encounters Ms. Archer outside of the classroom environment. As they smoke
cigarettes together and discuss Romeo and Juliet, bridging classroom activities
with those that are not, Skim acknowledges that there is something undeniably
peculiar about the way she feels around her teacher: “And suddenly,” she nar-
rates, “I’m talking like there’s no tomorrow, which is weird, because I’m not a
talker” (p. 26). As if to answer Skim’s unasked question, Ms. Archer describes
the story of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers as one “of rebellion”: “Maybe it’s a
story about two people who fall in love,” she tells Skim, “when falling in love …
is the one thing you’re not supposed to do” (p. 27). While Ms. Archer’s moti-
vations remain unclear, since much of this novel is drawn and written to re-
semble Skim’s diary, it is clear that she is falling deeply in love with her teacher,
and soon enough we encounter a compelling limit-case of what may happen
when spaces of dreaming and schooling, fantasy and reality, sexuality and ped-
agogy, collide.
Over a two-page spread, Skim and Ms. Archer share a kiss (figure 9.1) in the
wooded area behind the school where they first discussed the prospect of love
as a form of rebellion. Drawn as if in the foreground, this kiss appears as a re-
jection of what the faint and faded background image of the structure of school
stands for, including a rejection of the expectations of distance between student
and teacher that school habitually requires. In the context of this graphic novel
as a whole, however, this scene is more than a straightforward repudiation of
the norms governing student teacher relations, since nowhere else in the story
is explicit mention made of this erotic encounter. As such, and as a dilatory
moment outside of narrative’s temporal !ow, the question of whether this kiss
should be read as reality or fantasy is actually left unclear. It is, as Chiu (2015)
puts it, one of the novel’s “curious moments out of time” (p. 35), where forward
narrative movement is interrupted and the reader themselves steps momentar-
ily out of plot to consider whether or not this episode is actually taking place.
With a tension between the seen and unseen, the reader is asked to inhabit
the story in a way that makes them curious and complicit; and as Kahn (2014)
notes, any reading of this scene remains necessarily and productively unre-
solved: “Just as the linear progression of the reading is interrupted,” she writes,
“so is any definitive ‘reading’ of this encounter” (p. 341).
As such, while the uncertain boundaries of foreground and background may
make the reader a culpable subject, we may also note that such culpability may
be felt as a form of subversive pleasure, whose primary source is the fact that
contexts and positions previously thought immovable and detached are soon
shown to be in surprising states of relation and !exibility. For instance, even
though the image appears to foreground the wooded area behind the school,
the fact of the school is not forgotten, and as such, the image has no definitive
centre. In philosophical terms, as Chambers (1999) argues, such ambivalent
170 David Lewkowich

9.1. Skim and Ms. Archer share a kiss. Pages 40–1 of Skim reproduced with permission
from Groundwood Books Limited, Toronto. Text copyright © 2008 by Mariko Tamaki,
illustrations copyright © 2008 by Jillian Tamaki. [Link]

borders illustrate an inescapable “permeability of contexts” (p. 12), whereby

foreground and background (and the divergent cultural norms that such en-
vironments represent) cannot help but be part of the same picture, “neither
fully discontinuous nor wholly continuous with each other” (p. 12). In this
digressive framework, the image of a student and teacher kissing is invariably
interconnected with that of school, and any attempt to separate these contexts
prematurely represents a cultural effect of how we define the boundaries of
pedagogical relations, as interactive or immobile.
In teacher education (and education writ large), such discursive order –
governing what can and cannot be talked about, what is and is not thinkable – is
often maintained at the expense of the kinds of curiosity that distraction,
dilatoriness, and dreaming inevitably encourage. As Britzman (2009) tells
 Unavoidable Middles 171

us, “Straying dream thoughts hold no currency in daily classroom life” (p. x),
where much of what happens is antithetical to unrestrained thought; on this
point Britzman (1998) further speculates, “Education has that peculiar talent
for rendering banal the uncertainties of the lived” (p. 55). For Taubman (2009),
such tendencies to foreclosed and unremarkable enquiry is especially well es-
tablished in the learning sciences, whose contemporary in!uence is felt across
educational sites, including teacher education. “Learning,” in this perspective,
“assumes a naïve correspondence between words and things, and intention
and meaning,” and where an “answer or response is equivalent only to itself ”
(p. 193). In this point of view, and thinking back to Sarraute’s terrifying vision
of childhood reading, pasting a page shut is clearly su&cient enough to ensure
a disavowal of its contents. What cannot be seen – or rather, what is not de-
sired to be seen – does not exist. Taubman, however, questions this impossibly
acquiescent logic: “[W]hat if,” he asks, “real education happens when some-
thing doesn’t work? … What if there is no aim to education other than the brief
coming together of teachers and students to question, explore, study, compose,
create, and experience a kind of life that most will rarely experience again in
our market-driven world?” (p. 195). What if, we may add – on the subjects of
narrative, desire, and pleasure – education becomes a place to explore the un-
certain detours of the middle, rather than a predetermined requirement to shut
such exploration down?
As I now describe the various responses that preservice teachers offered to
Skim and Ms. Archer’s kiss, I will emphasize the dilatory effects of reading be-
tween the permeable line of tolerable and intolerable, and how these readers
articulated their trouble reconciling what they took as an ethical transgression
with Ms. Archer’s status as teacher. Though these conversations emerged as
part of a larger study, I will here focus only on how these readers (split into two
groups) responded to this particular scene. I should also note that while I met
most of these students in undergraduate-level classes, these group discussions
were voluntary and not bound to any kind of formal curriculum, assessment
practices, or disciplinary expectations. The first discussion group included four
ELA students (Suzanne, Maria, Steve, and Simon, all pseudonyms) who were
in the final year of their undergraduate degrees. They had each completed a
five-week placement as student teachers, and often turned to this experience as
a means of addressing the text.
As the first person to explicitly address the scene in question, Suzanne dis-
cussed the di&culty of reading about Skim and Ms. Archer’s relationship. As
she noted, “It’s a complicated relationship to talk about since we’re preservice
teachers.” Maria agreed, stating, “It made me pretty uncomfortable,” and “see-
ing it visualized was very shocking.” She then proceeded to discuss her dis-
comfort in terms of an earlier conversation she remembered having with her
mother. “I brought up a question to my mother,” Maria told us:
172 David Lewkowich

… do you think that teachers have crushes on students? And before I could even
clarify what I meant by that, she said: Don’t even say that, don’t even think it, do not
verbalize it, do not write it down. And I was like, Why? I’m not meaning it sexually.

Maria then tried to clarify to her mother why she was asking this question:
“Because,” she continued:

I experienced a child having a crush on me … and I was like that’s fine, whatever.
But I asked her if … it was the other way around sometimes, like I mean, academ-
ically. And she’s like: No, I don’t want to hear it. Don’t speak about it, nothing. Not
even academically, not any way.

There are two things here that I think especially worthy of conversation. First
is the fact that Maria wonders whether attraction, or a “crush” – in this case,
intergenerational and pedagogical – needs to be necessarily framed as sexual in
nature, or whether there is also the possibility of a different kind of attraction, a
cerebral and intellectual one that sidesteps sexuality altogether. In many ways,
this is what Skim’s relationship with her teacher looked like before they kiss,
as they circle in the backwoods between a space of love and !ora and one of
institutional education. To think about this question in the context of Skim’s
story, it appears that Maria is actually wondering whether the characters were
fated to kiss, or if it may have been possible to maintain their relationship as
intellectual, more as friends and colleagues than lovers. Her mother, however,
has absolutely no interest in entertaining this question, and even as a purely
theoretical speculation, senses the very thought as a dangerous prospect. In this
point of view, there is no such thing as ambivalence or curiosity when it comes
to the notion of attraction in the classroom.
Following Maria’s concern, Steve describes the story of Skim and Ms. Archer
as “a cautionary tale of being a teacher,” and a lesson regarding the necessity of
“keeping a friendly but professional distance.” In Steve’s view, Ms. Archer’s fault
as a teacher is that she “lets her … whims guide her,” rather than keeping the
importance of professional distance “in mind.” However, over the course of his
group’s conversation, Steve decides that this scene must actually be a fiction,
that it’s “imagined,” that it’s “a daydream,” that “it’s something [Skim’s] fanta-
sizing about.” Given how Steve later admits, “I would like to teach it in schools,
except for the whole teacher relationship thing,” it seems that more so than
his initial reading as “a cautionary tale,” he actually needs to read this scene as
Skim’s fictional creation. In doing so, the transgression ends up being the stu-
dent’s in fantasy, rather than the teacher’s in reality.
For these four readers, then, the fact of this scene is a tragedy, which is nowhere
clearer than when Simon states, “I don’t think I would teach it to a class, because
of the teacher/student relationship.” “It’s a shame,” he continues, hardly able to
 Unavoidable Middles 173

describe this shame at all, “that there’s that one scene with the thing.” The thing.
Not even nameable as a taboo attraction or fiction, this dilatory image has been
relegated to the status of an object that, according to the OED, “one need not,
cannot, or does not wish to give a specific name to.” The thing. Sensing Simon’s
struggle, and a wish to protect his future students (which, if we take projection se-
riously, is a wish to protect himself), Suzanne makes the following suggestion, un-
cannily reminiscent to that of Sarraute’s parents: “Just tape the pictures together.”
Even if taped up, however, we should recall the insights of a young Sarra-
ute, that the middle which is interfered with does not actually go away, but
continues to bother and unsettle, even more so if it is ignored. To turn again
to Taubman (2009), “Although teaching can be exhilarating, fulfilling, and en-
lightening, it is also terrifying,” and no matter whether our fears are about the
sexual nature of student/teacher attraction, the meaningless of teaching, or an
out-of-control class, such fears “will always be with us” (p. 129). The question
is what we do with our fears and whether or not we allow them to constitute a
paranoid text. Nonetheless, and even if their only desire is to avoid this pasted
page, these future teachers have here articulated some pretty complex ideas
about what they value in educational spaces, values that will certainly continue
to shift and mutate. More clearly, and as evidence of what can happen in a dila-
tory space, the above conversation illuminates the fear that preservice teachers
have regarding appropriate pedagogical relationships, and the defensive im-
pulses that the possibility of such relationships inspire.
In the second reading group, two readers in particular (Nicole and Ryan), felt
drawn to this scene as an especially compelling example of the competing psy-
chic demands placed on teachers (including themselves as future teachers). In
his reading, Ryan focused explicitly on the interplay between foreground and
background, seeing the image of the school as an intrusive and persistent force,
impeding on the romantic feelings otherwise expressed in the foreground:
“they can never actually be together,” he said of Skim and Ms. Archer, “because
the school is always looming there.” Contrary to the first group, Ryan examines
this scene without any hint of judgment or shame regarding Ms. Archer’s be-
haviour, which is not to say that he approves of student/teacher relationships,
but that he seems to suspend judgment, as an important value of interpretation.
Since he reads the scene as “happening in Skim’s mind,” rather than as an ac-
tual encounter, Ryan also doesn’t seem to draw a firm line between reality and
fantasy, recognizing that what we experience in fantasy invariably forms a part
of our reality – that the two are often in !ux and conversation, and one does
not always have to immediately decide which is one and which is the other.
“Whether it actually happens or not,” he noted, “it’s real to Skim, [and that’s]
the most important thing.” Rather than feeling the need to paste this page shut,
Ryan senses the importance of the inessential and tangential, and that who we
are is made up of so much more than only what we can see and transcribe.
174 David Lewkowich

In her reading of this scene, Nicole noted the di&culty of separating her
interpretation from her developing teacher identity, that – as Ryan would prob-
ably also agree – our fantasy life informs our interpretation of reality (textual
and otherwise), and since we are not typically in control of where our fantasy
life leads, we may experience some con!ict when reading a dilatory text, espe-
cially one whose meaning is ethically ambiguous. As Nicole described her first
encounter with this scene, it “really messed me up.” “There were,” she said, “two
halves of me in that moment,” as an “internal struggle” compelled her to split
her interpretive impulses into competing readers: one that was “personal and
more emotional,” and one that was “trying to be a professional.” In the voice of
her first reader, who she associated with herself at “fifteen or sixteen,” Nicole
argued, “you can’t just say, oh no, it’s horrible, because it’s obviously really beau-
tiful. … I was like, yeah. I was like, they’re really cute … You definitely want it
to be okay, because it’s so romantic.” Nicole’s second reader, however, is closely
aligned with how she imagines herself as a future teacher: “Almost graduating,”
she told us, “almost being a teacher … that’s where the red !ags come from.” As
this reader, concerned with “all the practical stuff,” Nicole finds herself think-
ing, “No, Ms. Archer should know better. Why are they in this situation?” And
though she actually finds it distracting, Nicole is unable to cancel out this sec-
ond, more judgmental voice: “I can’t,” she noted, as if with a sense of regret,
“back through my last four years. I can’t unmake myself as a teacher.”
Even when reading as a teacher, though, Nicole experiences a sense of deep
confusion about Ms. Archer’s status, and whether she should be read as “good”
or “bad.” “In a pedagogical sense,” Nicole noted, “Ms. Archer seems to be the
best teacher … [since] none of the other teachers seem to try and help [Skim]
and engage her.” “But,” she continued, “when you think about it, no, she’s not
the best teacher. You’re not allowed to kiss your students. That would make her
the worst teacher in a way, too.” Just as Nicole experiences a split in herself as
reader, she also identifies a similar split in Ms. Archer, as an educator who may
serve her students well, while at the same time, one who acts in a way that no
“good” educator should. “I was left really confused by this,” Nicole lamented.
“Like, she’s the best but the worst teacher. What does that mean?” she asked out
loud, before responding with the only answer appropriate to this question: “I
don’t know what that means.”
As an admission of ignorance in the face of a contradictory teacher, and a
willingness to leave the question of this teacher’s value unresolved, Nicole’s ap-
proach to this scene stands in contrast to the earlier suggestion of pasting the
pages shut. As a response to a dilatory text, however – which, we may recall,
is characterized by delay, partial revelation, and error – both approaches seem
to share a quality of frustration, since even if the graphic novel’s central plot
eventually ends, the digressive qualities of this scene ensure that something
about Skim’s story will always remain open and permanently in question. For
 Unavoidable Middles 175

the reader, it is certainly understandable that such a lack of resolve may lead
to a feeling of frustration, especially if the story in question is one with which
they personally identify. As Cixous (1993) states, “A text that presents itself but
doesn’t end questions the identity of what we are doing” (p. 99). However, what
may first appear as frustration may also be read as a form of play, that in the
face of a perpetually open text, one of “permanent deferral,” as Brooks (1984)
notes, the reader is “condemned to playing: to concocting endgames, play-
ing in anticipation of a terminal structuring moment of revelation that never
comes, creating the space of an as-if, a fiction of finality” (p. 313). For preser-
vice teachers, this inclination to play in the face of indeterminacy might be a
way to transform the anxieties of frustration into something more productive,
even if such productivity paradoxically seems to resemble ine&ciency. Similar
to Manning’s (2019) “pragmatics of the useless,” such dilatory play is “skeptical
of the very idea that we should know in advance where learning will take us”
(p. 46), treating education as the indefinite structure that it is. Though we may
wish it otherwise, lived experiences of education (Aoki, 2004) are unavoidably
indeterminate and inconclusive, and while the school day may end, the time
of learning is interminable, often belated, prone to revision, and despite the
teacher’s best efforts, sometimes never experienced at all. As such, learning to
linger in the dilatory may be seen as an important way for preservice teachers
to reckon with the emotional challenges of education itself. In the next section,
I discuss the ways in which a teacher’s adolescent past may serve as a dilatory
text, as well as a prompt to alternative forms of speculative articulation.

Adolescence and Comics of Catastrophic Change

As “the conjugator of childhood and adulthood” (Kaplan, 1984, p. 14), adoles-

cence is often defined as a space in between, a borderland connecting before and
after, and in this way it functions as the principal dilatory period of the human
life cycle. For preservice teachers, their position as not-yet-teachers is psychi-
cally similar to the adolescent’s position as not-yet-adult, and in their teacher
education their adolescence is often exposed in a number of unintended ways,
including a defensive inclination to split things in terms of good and bad. If we
recall Nicole’s response to Skim, her idealization of teacher as professional is set
against the more emotionally fraught and uncontrollable qualities of the ado-
lescent, as if “only the adolescent has psychology and the teacher must manage
that” (Britzman, 2012, p. 273).
As a reminder that adolescence and all it represents is not just something that
exists in other people, I often ask my students to engage in autobiographical
work that helps to reacquaint them with the emotional qualities of these years,
while also recognizing that, as a series of psychic relations, adolescence never
actually disappears. As a means of acknowledging the fallible nature of memory,
176 David Lewkowich

I also invite them to experiment with the kinds of stories they tell, using forms
of expression that they may not initially feel that experienced or comfortable
with. Especially when working with ELA teachers, a deliberate turn to relative
incompetence helps to ensure that stories of self are made vulnerable, lacking
the rhetorical consolations and orderly dispositions of scholarly expertise. For
example, I recently asked my students to create a short comic about their ad-
olescence, focusing on a particular di&culty – we called them “demons,” after
Barry (2017) – that like a spectre, continues to linger into adulthood. Turning
to an especially dilatory period of life, I therefore asked my students to create
dilatory texts, whose purpose was to amplify, symbolize, and illustrate, letting
mysteries remain mysterious, rather than reproduce, explain, or overcome. In
what follows, I refer to the work of four students, here named pseudonymously
as Samantha, Meghan, Thalia, and Claire, turning to some especially curious
moments of speculative narrative-making, which demonstrate the economy of
pause and postponement that I try to encourage in teacher education. In my
descriptions of these short comics, I attempt to provide enough detail for the
reader to su&ciently visualize what is happening on the page.
At times, more important than the stories themselves are the minor details
that students use in their comics, which often seem accidental in their capac-
ity to reveal the emotional qualities of past experience, while simultaneously
gesturing towards the author’s current concerns, fears, and desires as pre-
service teachers. While perhaps unnecessary to the larger plot, it is precisely
the inconsequential nature of such gestures that allows them to “[make] felt
the unsayable in the said” (Manning, 2016, p. 7), and to intuitively transport
the reader back into the midst of dilatory adolescence.
For instance, in Samantha’s comic about test anxiety, anxiety is illustrated
as an actual demon, accompanying numerous other images where patterns
of resemblance suggest the presence of unspoken relationships. As an exam-
ple, the motion lines around a student’s heart in one panel, indicating a racing
heartbeat, are echoed in the next, in which her teeth are described as “get[ting]
itchy,” an itchiness indicated by motion lines emanating from the mouth. If we
read these images as interconnected, the student’s heart appears to be beating
in her mouth, which she subsequently stops up with her hand. If the heart is a
symbol for what the student loves and values, then one effect of anxiety expe-
rienced in school may be that the student is forced to silence this valuable part
of themselves. As another example, in the story’s frontispiece (an introductory
page, announcing the story’s theme through collage), Samantha has drawn two
similarly shaped and similarly sized cracked objects: a chemistry test tube and
a pencil. If we read these fractured objects as emotionally related, it seems that
the demon of teenage test anxiety works to sabotage not only knowledge’s ex-
pression (the pencil), but also knowledge itself (the test tube), while the stu-
dent’s anxiety is heightened by the fact that the test appears as the only place
 Unavoidable Middles 177

in school where knowledge is treated as legitimate and valuable. Though this

story leaves such pedagogical implications unaddressed, the question that I see
posed by these dilatory connections is how teachers may work to create spaces,
outside the test, for students to express themselves and what they value, and
how they may also share a variety of forms of knowledge, perhaps unrelated to
what the test tube and the pencil represent.
In Meghan’s comic, she shares a series of scenes from high school life, in
which she felt compromised to change herself in the face of social pressure.
There are two aesthetic choices that I find especially curious in these panels.
First is the fact that the characters are drawn with absolutely blank faces, and
while this may re!ect Meghan’s skillset as an illustrator, this choice also speaks
to the feelings of anonymity that many secondary students experience, as
well as the archetypal con!ict between wanting to stand out and wanting to
fit in. However, since this description points both backward and forward – to
Meghan’s adolescence and to her future classrooms – such blank faces may also
describe Meghan’s anxieties about teaching: perhaps, that she may not be able
to “read” her students; perhaps, that her students may not be able to read her,
and that across this divide of missed communication, that her pedagogy will
fail. Curiously, there is also a dividing, jagged line that separates the panels on
Meghan’s page, which I interpret as not simply a temporal division, but also a
metaphor for how ideas can never be fully or adequately communicated. In
this sense, it is no coincidence that the speech and thought bubbles are just as
blank as the character’s faces. Faceless people and empty speech – as a series
of nightmarish images, Meghan’s comic communicates something about what
keeps teachers up at night, similar to Taubman’s (2009) recognition of “deadly
silence” as one of the “fears [that] inhere in teaching” (p. 129).
After the first two pages of her comic, in which she shows herself as a young
girl with a ball and chain attached to her feet, being told to “act like a lady,” Thalia
offers a heartbreaking description of resignation that, at the same time, is a rec-
ognition that things could and should be otherwise. Thalia’s comic is a series of
five simple panels. The first displays the upper torso of a human figure pictured
from the back, facing down a long road, with an indiscernible object approach-
ing in the distance. In the second panel, the approaching object (which now
resembles a boulder) is larger, and thus threateningly closer to the motionless
human figure. Attached to these two first panels are the words: “Just because it’s
normal, doesn’t mean it’s right.” In the third panel, the figure appears as if shaded
by a dark circle, indicating that they are likely now at risk of being smothered
by the boulder. In the fourth panel, the figure’s body is !ipped and completely
shaded, now expressing a pair of closed eyes and mouth. Accompanying the
third and fourth panel are the words: “But what choice do we have.” In the final
panel, the figure is splayed out on the road, with the boulder on top of them, with
the word “resilience,” in quotation marks, appearing on the boulder itself.
178 David Lewkowich

The first conspicuous detail in Thalia’s comic is the fact that, unlike the rest
of the words on these pages, “BUT WHAT CHOICE” is written on a separate
piece of paper pasted over the first. Though we are here far removed from
Sarraute’s story, as well as Skim’s illustration of student/teacher romance, Thalia’s
choice of including a pasted text cannot help but remind me of “where the page
gets thicker.” And, just as with the desire to paste over a controversial scene,
we should recall that a pasted page always indicates the presence of something
underneath, perhaps an alternative to the scene otherwise described. Are there
other choices, I’m led to ask, held in reserve, living in the shadows? Can the
pasted page be removed?
Though a little hard to make out, the boulder rolling towards Thalia’s name-
less character casts a long shadow, indicating a darkness eventually named “re-
silience.” Though typically thought of as a sign of strength, as with Barry’s (2017)
story of the same name, resilience is here configured as a weight and burden,
which runs the risk of crushing those who suffer under its pressure. However,
we may also note that Thalia’s version of resilience is in quotation marks, which
compels the question: How actually resilient is this boulder of “resilience”? Is
it hollow? Is it made of papier-mâché? Is it an expectation that can be thrown
off, much like the pasted page? Does the word “resilience” mask another, with
which it might nonetheless rhyme? Taking Thalia’s act of comics creation as a
dilatory gesture that brings the reader to an adolescent and emotional middle,
“where the event is still welling” (Manning, 2016, p. 15), I suspect that her story
is one that she will actively resist seeing reprised in her future role as teacher.
To this end, I read “resilience” as rhyming with “resistance” and “recreance,” the
latter which indicates an unfaithfulness to duty.
In Claire’s evocative comic, in which she struggles to pull the pasted pages
of the past apart, while meditating on the in!uence of minutes and memories,
she poses a question that frames the piece as a whole: “They said it only takes a
minute to change your life … I guess my question is … how do you know which
minutes are the ones that changed you? If there was a minute that changed me …
I hope it changed me for the better.” Over eight interconnected panels, we read
a variety of distressing scenes of alienation, uncertainty, and retreat, some of
which seem directly pulled from life, and others that read metaphorically, as
hallucinations inspired by dreams and things half-seen. Both cases, though,
describe moments of “catastrophic change” (Bion, 1977, p. 106), which Ogden
(2010) sees as “a change in nothing less than everything” (p. 332). The issue
here, however, is not the change itself, but whether or not we can see it, and
whether or not we can even recognize that such changes have occurred. As
we are living them, occupied in the present, we simply cannot know which
thoughts and experiences will leave a lasting effect; it is only in retrospect, via
the imperfect methods of memory, that we can hope to access and assess the
cumulative impacts of past experience.
 Unavoidable Middles 179

What I find especially intriguing about Claire’s comic is her use of abstraction
and dilatory perspective, whereby – as a reader – we only get an extremely limited
view of these scenes, forced to invent our own order, to reach our own conclusions
about the various relationships and representations on the page. I see a great white
shark baring its teeth, and then what looks like human teeth on a dinner plate; and
though I only see half her face, a woman is staring forward (perhaps into a mir-
ror), next to a moment of crisis with words that literally drip, touched by a figure
eaten by snakes, eyes hollowed out from the inside; a person lies alone in bed, still
life plant life. The fact that Claire’s stories are told in pieces re!ects an overwhelm-
ingly frustrating aspect of what it feels like to remember. However, while this
limited perspective operates as a lack – like an overheard conversation between
strangers, we never get the full story – such lacks are also gaps in which we may
begin to tolerate the anxiety of not-knowing, and to recognize that certain stories,
other’s as well as our own, may fall forever outside our grasp. Admittedly, this is a
di&cult and undesirable task – it is a lot harder to accept and rest with narrative
incoherence than to quickly fill a gap with our own stories, desires, and relations.
Both for the subject of memory, as well as the reader of partial stories, Claire’s
comic therefore offers an aesthetic challenge: to not rush to judgment in the face
of what we do not, and perhaps never will, know. Even though we may insert our
own attempts at resolution, there will always be a surplus to the story that cannot
be told, and which, as our expectations of completion are disappointed, brings us
back repeatedly to the story’s (any and every story’s) unavoidable middle.

Conclusion – Middling as a Verb

Elsewhere, I have written about adolescence as “the non-place of human develop-

ment” (Lewkowich, 2021, p. 45), borrowing from Augé’s (1995) description of the
“non-places” that travellers find themselves in when shuttling between more iden-
tifiable and governable locations. For such travellers, the psychic effect of being in
a non-place encourages something different from life before and after, including a
sense of momentary reprieve from the identities of everyday life: “a person enter-
ing the space of non-place,” Augé writes, “is relieved of his usual determinants. …
he tastes for a while … the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleas-
ure of role-playing” (p. 103). The experience of the non-place traveller is thus sim-
ilar to Erikson’s “psychosocial moratorium,” where a space of developmental pause
invites experimentation with different selves and social roles that need not nec-
essarily be bound to lasting, real-world consequences. If understood as a piece of
fantasy life, for instance, Skim’s encounter with Ms. Archer may be read as a devel-
opmental experiment, and a dilatory moment, both for the reader and character
alike. For readers, however, the di&culty arises in failing to grasp the ambivalent
status of fantasy life, how this scene both could and could not be, at the same time,
just as adolescence persists as a series of psychic relations into adulthood.
180 David Lewkowich

Building on the idea of adolescence and teacher education as non-places,

where life is often lived in close relation to a different world (adulthood and
the classroom, respectively) that is simultaneously ultra-real and theoretical,
my concern in this chapter has been with the use and creation of literary non-
places, as synthetic experiments that slow the forward movement of learning
down, focusing less on teleological, satisfactory conclusions, than on what is
speculative, fragmentary, and incomplete. In this chapter’s illustrations of dila-
tory experience, where reading and comics creation appear to encourage mid-
dling as a verb, students learning to teach have been able to explore the defences
and anxieties of being in a place where knowledge, both of self and others, is
not always secure and dependable. As a preparation for classroom life, such
digressive techniques insert an element of wonder in teacher education, which,
as Burnett and Merchant (2016) note, “evokes an uncertainty or unknowing
that is an important counterpoint to the certainties that undergird the rigid and
unitary accounts” (p. 274) of knowledge creation and sense making in schools.
Such acts of wonder also allow students to explore the artificiality of social con-
ventions typically taken for granted as given in education; by making the real
synthetic, we may thus work together to touch what is more transient and elu-
sive about the inner worlds of teachers and students.
And yet … the question of the pasted page persists, where readers and teach-
ers alike are often made to choose between ignoring the parts of a story that do
not immediately satisfy, and continually labouring under the allied signs of fear
and anxiety. Countering the knowledge of a young Sarraute, and adopting a dil-
atory position of wonder and unknowing, I will here speak counterintuitively,
and propose that when the page is pasted shut, the middle continues to grow,
in ways that we will always, necessarily, fail to comprehend. Teaching with the
middle is thus equivalent to teaching with and through mystery – excessive,
everchanging, persistent, invisible, unavoidable, and if we can bear being hon-
est about not knowing, an important part of what seems to make us human.
Speaking about dreams, Cixous (2006) describes this sense of mystery well,
which also seems an appropriate place to – at least for a moment – suspend my
thoughts: “Is that me? That’s me. But maybe it is you as well. It is certainly an
extremely inventive hell” (p. 5).

REFERENCES

Aoki, T. T. (2004). Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki
(W. F. Pinar & R. L. Irwin, Eds.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ashton-Warner, S. (1986). Teacher. Simon & Schuster.
Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity.
Verso.
 Unavoidable Middles 181

Baldwin, C. (2016). Ethics and the tyranny of narrative. In I. Goodson (Ed.), The
Routledge international handbook of narrative and life history (pp. 536–49). Routledge.
Barry, L. (2017). One hundred demons. Drawn and Quarterly.
Barthes, R. (1985). The grain of the voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (L. Coverdale Trans.).
Hill and Wang.
Bion, W.R. (1977). Seven servants. Aronson.
Birkerts, S. (2007). Reading life: Books for the ages. Graywolf Press.
Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry
of learning. State University of New York Press.
– (2009). Preface. In M. O’Loughlin (Ed.), The subject of childhood (pp. ix–xii). Peter
Lang.
– (2012). The adolescent teacher: A psychoanalytic note on regression in the
professions. Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, 11(3), 272–83.
[Link]
Brooks, P. (1977). Freud’s masterplot. Yale French Studies, No. 55/56, 280–300. https://
[Link]/10.2307/2930440
– (1984). Reading for the plot: Design and intention in narrative. Harvard University
Press.
Burnett, C., & Merchant, G. (2016). Boxes of poison: Baroque technique as antidote
to simple views of literacy. Journal of Literacy Research, 48(3), 258–79. [Link]
.org/10.1177/1086296X16668625
Chambers, R. (1999). Loiterature. University of Nebraska Press.
Chiu, M. (2015). A moment outside of time: The visual life of homosexuality and
race in Tamaki and Tamaki’s Skim. In. M. Chiu (Ed.), Drawing in color lines:
Transnational Asian American graphic narratives (pp. 27–48). Hong Kong UP.
Chute, H. L. (2011). Materializing memory: Lynda Barry’s one hundred demons. In
M. A. Chaney (Ed.), Graphic subjects: Critical essays on autobiography and graphic
novels (pp. 282–309). University of Wisconsin Press.
Cixous, H. (1993). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.).
Columbia University Press.
– (2006). Dream I tell you. Columbia University Press.
Kahn, A. (2014). On being unique: Gender subversion in two graphic novels for young
adults. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(3), 336–43. [Link]
/21504857.2014.908403
Kaplan, L. J. (1984). Adolescence: The farewell to childhood. Simon & Schuster.
Lewkowich, D. (2021). Adolescent memory beyond re!ection: Hulu’s PEN15 and the
emotional recapitulations of teacher education. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and
Cultural Studies, 43(1), 27–48. [Link]
MacKey, M. & McClay, J. K. (2000). Graphic routes to electronic literacy: Polysemy and
picture books. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 7(2), 191–201.
[Link]
Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.
182 David Lewkowich

– (2019). Propositions for a radical pedagogy, or how to rethink value. In K. Leander

and C. Ehret (Eds.), Affect in literacy learning and teaching: Pedagogies, politics and
coming to know (pp. 43–9). Routledge.
Ogden, T. (2010). On three forms of thinking: Magical thinking, dream thinking, and
transformative thinking. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 79(2), 317–47. [Link]
.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2010.tb00450.x. PMid:20496835
Sarraute, N. (1984). Childhood. (B. Wright, Trans.). George Braziller.
Tamaki, M., & Tamaki, J. (2008). Skim. Groundwood.
Taubman, P. M. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards
and accountability in education. Routledge.
Taussig, M. (2011). I swear I saw this: Drawings in fieldwork notebooks, namely my own.
University of Chicago Press.
Vasudevan, L. (2011). An invitation to unknowing. Teachers College Record, 113(6),
1154–74. [Link]