Hospitality and Authoring

An Essay for the English Profession

Richard Haswell, Janis Haswell

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780874219876
• eBook ISBN: 9780874219883
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Hospitality and Authoring, a sequel to the Haswells' 2010 volume Authoring, attempts to open the path for hospitality practice in the classroom, making a strong argument for educational use and offering an initial map of the territory for teachers and authors.

Hospitality is a social and ethical relationship not only between host and guest but also between writer and reader or teacher and student. Hospitality initiates, maintains, and completes acts of authoring. This extended essay explores the ways that a true hospitable classroom community can be transformed through assigned reading, one-on-one conferencing, interpretation, syllabus, reading journals, topic choice, literacy narrative, writing centers, program administration, teacher training, and many other passing habitations.

Hospitality and Authoring strives to offer a few possibilities of change to help make college an institution where singular students and singular teachers create a room to learn with room to learn.

1
Modes of Hospitality in History

---

Responsibilité aliene; hospitalité allege.

—Edmond Jabès

A hospitable site with room to learn is neither alchemy nor futuristic vision. It is a reality of the past still alive. For millennia, in every country around the world, hospitality customs have taken root. Over and over in every culture’s literature, the customs have supplied staple, central scenes. This chapter would have been superfluous for any but the last three generations of the Western world. In redrawing the professionally established dynamic between student and teacher according to an ethic of hospitality, we turn to a long and rich tradition that, today, happens to need retelling.

The definition of hospitality in the Oxford English Dictionary (1971) dons a beatific face: “the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers with liberality and good will.” But scholars such as Emile Benveniste (1973), who have traced the roots of the English word, draw an etymological history of intrinsic conflict, of both fear and attraction, repulsion and union. The Indo-European ghostis meant a stranger to be welcomed or feared, the Greek xenos a home host or alien guest, the Latin hostis a stranger or enemy and hospes a stranger or foreigner. To this day in French “host” and “guest” are conveyed by the same word, hôte.

The foundational English word host is also polysemous and fractious. Does it mean a host with open arms or a host with leveled arms? As we will see, the contradictions persist in social practices of hospitality. For the moment, however, we will focus on host as “one who receives or entertains another.” The word entertain comes from inter and tenere, to hold together. Rather than offering the guest diversion or merriment, the host offers attention, empathy, welcome, and then understanding. With the reception of the guest into the host’s home, two worlds meet and hold together: the world of the insider and the world of the outsider. Derrida (1993, 10) calls the guest the arrivant, a useful term since it combines a sense of both showing up (elle arrivera demain, she will arrive tomorrow) and occurring by chance (il est arrivé que, it happened that). The host is at home and in possession, while the guest—the chance appearer, the outsider, the traveler, the refugee, the immigrant, the homeless, the pilgrim—is dispossessed. Dispossessed but not empty-handed. For the guest opens up the host’s world with the unfamiliar, the unknown, the unexpected, the new, the informative—often with stories.

But make no mistake. Hospitality’s face may be one of liberality and goodwill, but the hospitable gesture aligns along the edge of a knife. Because the host is on home territory, he or she might fear to welcome an arrivant who, as the linguistic roots of guest remind us, could be an innocent stranger but might be a hostile intruder intending to take the host hostage or, in one of the earliest recorded possibilities, a god in disguise testing the host’s hospitality. To limit the possibilities, the host might demand that the guest reveal his or her name, but that is a step running contrary to the customs of hospitality because it hints at some degree of mastery or violence (Kearney 1999).

The risk is not solely on the part of the host. The needy guest must cross the threshold and trust the host’s good intentions (Rosello 2001, 75). Prolonged or forced stay might turn guest into servant or slave. Hospitality, this temporary shared residence of insider and outsider, is “à la fois menace et don” (Montandon 1999, 11), a simultaneous threat and gift applying to both welcomer and welcomed. The challenge, as Julia Kristeva (1991) reminds us, is to realize that the “foreigner” arrives “when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners” (1). As in Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, knowing that the foreigner is already within, the host will not distrust the guest but instead risk meeting and communion.

Three Historic Modes

The central moral axis of traditional hospitality—equality in dignity, privilege, and value of stranger-host and stranger-guest—is complex and can turn like a double-edged knife. Therefore our rhetoric framing of it must be precise. We begin by clarifying modes and reviewing history.

One primary mode is Homeric, or warrior, hospitality. In the Iliad hospitality revolves around feasting. Equitable sharing of meat marks a celebration of victory, an act of thanksgiving to the gods, and an acknowledgment of the role and prestige of each warrior. Of course, other bounty is distributed—or, in the case of the female war trophies Chryseis and Briseis, disastrously redistributed. But underneath, two dynamics shape the politically loaded social interactions of hospitality in the Iliad: prestige and equality (Rundin 1996, 192, 194). Agamemnon wields control over the distribution of bounty because he commands the most men; he is the most privileged among the privileged and, as host, the sole gift giver (Reece 1993, 35). Yet equity in enjoying the spoils of war is crucial, for not only is bounty a measure of glory and fame, it also solidifies bonds of loyalty among independent bands of warriors and between warriors and kings. Feasting, as John Rundin (1996, 193) notes, is a “dominant element in the network of exchange” and strengthens pledges of service in the Greek camp, thereby assuring the continued commitment to their shared goal of victory over Troy.

Clearly, Homeric or warrior hospitality functions in a closed circle. It is conservative in the sense of solidifying and perpetuating the power of those already privileged. Gift giving happens only between relative equals. Anyone marginal to the warrior class—women, the poor, the nonmilitary, and the powerless—have no place at the feast: “The feast is an occasion for men in the realm of men” (Rundin 1996, 190). Perhaps it is not surprising that this militaristic mode best fits the current notion of hospitality as entertaining and rewarding one’s friends, relatives, and allies rather than welcoming strangers.

In the biblical tradition of hospitality, we find a less exclusionary mode of host-guest relations. In the Old Testament story of Abraham and his angelic visitors at Mamre (Genesis 18), entertainment means providing strangers with food, water, and shelter to cleanse the body and refresh the spirit, then fellowship and community by widening the family or social circle to include them. The strangers, however, may be disguised, only appearing to be ragged and weary. Once revitalized under the terebinth trees of Mamre, the three guests reveal themselves in a truer guise—angels who can give Abraham a gift in turn: the promise of a son. The Jewish lesson persisted, and the New Testament is careful to warn, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

In a larger Christian sense, moreover, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick is undertaken not in hopes of entertaining angels in disguise but in service to Christ himself (Matthew 25:34–46). The guest, the stranger, even the enemy, is now wreathed with an ethos of utmost dignity. Those who respect and protect that dignity will be welcomed into their eternal home by the original Host: “‘Come unto me all you who labor . . . My Father has many mansions’” (John 14:2). “Where knock is open wide” is both an image and an action of caritas, the core Christian virtue. Thus believers are charged not with simply welcoming the arrivant but with loving him or her as “neighbor,” as the parable of the Good Samaritan makes clear. In this tradition, the host who supplies shelter and kindness is the initial giver of gifts, but the guest or stranger reciprocates with gifts of her or his own. Whether in the form of shelter, feasting, useful knowledge, or granted wishes, gift exchange expresses the soul of biblical hospitality.

Unfortunately, over time, as religious institutional practices came to dominate behavior and motives, the mutual and often unforeseen trading of gifts gradually devolved into a one-sided beneficence. Caritas became charity. The church feeds the poor, the pastor folds the sheep, and neither expects anything in return except for devotion. The traditional biblical mode of hospitality provides a crucial point throughout this book: that hospitality, in teaching or literacy, is not commensurate with the kind of charitable display that in modern enactments maintains a hierarchic barrier between the moneyed and the needy.

Study of the Homeric and biblical traditions unearths the bones of Western culture, a framework around which centuries of social interactions took shape. But hospitality has functioned outside the West as well, and so we turn to our third mode, nomadic hospitality. This is the sort that held sway for millennia throughout much of Africa, Central Asia, and eastern Europe and that is still practiced, for instance, by the Bedouin of the Middle East. Here a nomadic host offers tent and food to persons who are wandering, for whatever reason, away from their own tent. Or perhaps they are just tentless. Both host and guest are on the move. But the guest is treated with extreme respect. Traditionally, it is forbidden for the host to ask any questions about the guest.

As in other early traditions of hospitality, there is an exchange of gifts. Along with food, drink, and shelter, the host offers information about his region useful to the wanderer. The guest offers a gift in return, in the form of communication: gossip, political news, information about the movement of other nomadic groups, land-boundaries, and even market conditions and business deals—potentially gifts that the host can use when he is traveling outside his own nomadic range. In short, there is an exchange of information, a kind of intellectual hospitality, helpful to both for their future wanderings. The essential difference with Homeric and biblical hospitalities is that with two nomads the status of host and guest is impermanent and reversible. When their migratory paths may again intersect, the earlier host can easily be the guest, the guest the host.

All three modes continue into the twentieth century, roughly aligning with what Jacques Derrida has called “political” and “ethical” hospitality. Political hospitality involves a limited, guarded, and strategic exchange between host and guest, much like the Homeric warrior model. Ethical hospitality, at least in its pre-Roman form, encompasses an unconditional, decentered, and transformative experience for both guest and host, as in biblical and nomadic models. Political hospitality and ethical hospitality mark clearly conflicting practices, and it will be productive to explore the pitfalls of these modes before exploring their applicability to the English classroom.

Hospitality Corrupted

When first considering hospitality as an expression of the spiritual life, it is easy to romanticize how it has historically functioned. We might envision the kind of monastic hospitality Kathleen Norris (1993) describes in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. The Benedictine monks are model hosts because they are totally unprepossessing. Excluding no one, asking nothing, they welcome all people who have set out on life’s journey and in transit arrive at the monastery walls. In this light, hospitality isn’t something you do or achieve, but “something you enter . . . someone you become” (Pratt and Homan 2002, 38). For Catholic priest Henri J. M. Nouwen, who shares his life with mentally disabled persons, the ideal of hospitality renews his sense of vocation. “The minister as host heals, sustains, and guides.” This is possible only when the host dares to renounce any desire for maintaining control, for having all the answers. Only then do “you have nothing to lose but all to give” (1972, 51). In short, the host takes on the vulnerability of the arrivant.

But it is a mistake to relegate hospitality to more simple, trusting, or naïve times.¹ There may have been no historical period when ethical hospitality was natural or easy or common, and examples abound of hospitable practices, understood and affirmed within a society or culture, being violated by the members of those same communities.

For example, evidence suggests that nomadic hospitality has not atrophied as much as has Homeric and biblical hospitality traditions in the West. But catastrophic events in the Middle East are helping it to catch up. Even before the Gulf Wars, Lois Beck, who studied the nomadic Qashqa’i of southwest Iran in 1977, describes urban incursions into the old cultural ways. For one instance, she narrates how the Bedouin family of Habib Aqa were unexpectedly visited by twelve near strangers. Although Aqa was in the middle of threshing and winnowing his wheat crop, work was stopped, a goat was slaughtered an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Modes of Hospitality in History
• 2 The Totality of War, the Infinity of Hospitality
• 3 Hospitality in the Classroom
• 4 Inhospitable Reception: The Critic as Host
• 5 Hospitable Reception: Reading in Student Writing
• 6 Ten Students Reflect on Their Independent Authoring
• 7 The Novel as Moral Dialogue
• 8 Outside Hospitality: The Desire to Not Write (by Richard Haswell)
• 9 Beyond Hospitality: The Desire to Reread (by Janis Haswell)
• 10 Tropes of Learning Change
• 11 The Multiple Common Space Classroom
• References
• About the Authors
• Index