When Dumbness, or Unbehagen before the Master, Becomes “Shakespeak,” Comradery and Joy in Shared Lack

I taught Shakespeare's Coriolanus this summer in an Introduction to Literature course at a community college. Students from Azerbaijan, Albania, Japan, Israel, Italy, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Mexico, the south Bronx, and even two heavily tattooed Iraq war veterans still in their twenties wrestled with this late Shakespearean masterpiece. The jumble of accents, cultural ideologies, life experiences, and even ages-one student was in her midsixties and going to college for the first time, one African American working mother of two was doing the same-would prove magical; a kind of nonmeaning and missed meaning that was always present and served paradoxically like a witch's brew to buoy up the text, allowing the class to embark together on the journey of Shakespeare's ravaging, violent, and disarmingly poignant drama with communal enthusiasm and pathos.

Community college students struggle in an introductory literature course with reading and writing, and especially struggle while reading Shakespeare's tragedy aloud. One student in particular, Arpad, a 30-year-old accountant from Bangladesh, always in a dress shirt and tie, was utterly not understandable. His accent was so thick and his syntax so obscure that no one in the class, including me, ever understood him. However, Arpad raised his hand eagerly to respond to almost every question. He came to class passionately engaged, his text marked up, prepared to contribute to any discussion. The problem, of course, was that no one had any idea what he was talking about.

Our in-class discussions focused on the problem of speech for Coriolanus, and of the impossibility of his symbolic place, despite his magnificent achievements as a military hero. We spoke of his role as his mother's phallus, of Volumnia's power and certainty, and of Coriolanus's love-hate relation with Aufidius, a passionate lover/antagonist he meets in a mirror he cannot see. Despite Arpad's incomprehensibility, he regularly volunteered to read aloud