It is remarkable, ironic thing, though, that entering said land involved passing through some of the most picturesque literary territory in western literature. In the figurative sense, this meant my reading some of the "greats" that somehow had very made their way onto my undergraduate syllabi: Henry James, Virginia Woolf (her novels, as opposed to criticism), James Joyce, Willa Cather, Herman Melville (extracts, I admit), Alan Ginsberg, Lord Byron, John Dryden, William Congreve. Some of these I liked. Those (few) of you who may troll through my facebook posts may recall my open-mouthed admiration of James' Portrait of a Lady. None of you, on the other hand, will recall the same sentiments expressed about Joyce.
Yet the afore-mentioned literary territory was also crossed in a literal sense. The GRE-literature in English subject test is only offered two places in the entire United Kingdom: Leeds and Canterbury. Considering Leeds is practically at the North Pole, I went to the latter, weaving through the maze of London Underground construction (get ready for 2012!) to cross the hundred miles or so to Canterbury.
But, really, what could be more fitting? What could be more a propos than answering a question about Chaucer while looking out the window at the gothic spires of Canterbury Cathedral?
Of course, I did miss the question on the pardoner's tale (really, was I supposed to read ALL of them?!). Nevertheless, the setting did make the entire experience more enjoyable. The stage 4-Kohlberg guy running the test center did seem much more comical than irritating by the contrast between his inane fastidiousness and the flying buttresses looming out the window.And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blessed martyr for to seke
In his defense, though, I did add to his test administering woes: I was a prime mover in the neglect of "exam conditions." Yes, I was the one who kept starting up, or at least propagating, the conversation that pervaded Room 2, the room designated for the "Literature in English" people. We tend to be by nature, I believe, a more social bunch than the physics and psychology people across the hall. So we thought it not unreasonable to discover eachother's backgrounds while waiting endlessly for the administrator to quarrel with the guy who was registered for the wrong test, the other guy who didn't inform him until late that he had medical grounds for time extension, and the girl who didn't bring any pencils (really...). This discovery, though, meant talking, even--heavens!--laughing: "Exam conditions, please. Get to know eachother later. Get to know eachother after the test. Exam conditions, please" (imagine this spoken in a slightly Indian-intoned British accent). But there was so much to talk about! The strange (for me) ineptitude of ETS in contracting out to a company that would misdirect all the test-takers to the wrong building, our relative educational backgrounds, the new financial incentives for British students to apply to American grad schools, our subversion of "exam conditions"....
So not only was my Canterbury pilgrimage a self-conscious reflection on the scene's literariness, but it also maintained the text's implicit understanding of the community-forming power of the Canterbury narrative. I arrived in the town alone. The moment I arrived at the hostel, I met an Israeli girl who would be traveling to the same test center the next morning for the TOEFL test (ahh...TOEFL...how I know thee). We shared a few awkward glances and shy smiles while waiting at the reception desk, while the poor hostel worker desperately tried to give driving instructions to some directionally challenged (and none-too-incandescent) clone-looking teenagers over the phone. A few hours later, I met a different girl, Caroline, who would be taking the same exam as I; we recognized eachother by our identical Princeton Review books. After agreeing to wake the other up if our alarms failed to sound, we crawled under as many duvets as we could scrounge from the hostel bunk beds and tried to sleep off the local frigidity. In my case, this proved unsuccessful (of course, I never sleep well before tests), but soon it was morning and we headed down to breakfast to meet up with the Israeli girl. The traditional English breakfast of ham, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, and beans provided the aromatic setting for a lovely, if somewhat anxious, conversation about what lay ahead for us at the testing site.
By the time I left said site, my fellowship had grown even wider, as Caroline and I became acquainted with Stephany, another Cambridge MPhil student who was equally dismissive of "exam conditions". We exchanged contact info after the exam was over and promised to get in touch when we were in eachother's Oxbridge location. Then, after a quick lunch, Stephany and I left Claire at Pret to enjoy the free wifi while we meandered over to Canterbury West train station. From there it was back to London, considerably more relieved, and considerably less solitary than when we arrived.
*Except for pleasure reading. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment