The Afterlife of Surprise

By Peter Antelyes, Associate Professor of English

Hello everyone. I want to thank President Bradley for inviting me to give this speech. I also want to welcome everyone here today, especially first-year students and seniors, to that most curious of events: a late orientation ceremony.

You know, my original topic for today was dis-orientation. Certainly Convocation is itself a disorienting moment: it’s the end of the beginning for some of you (the first-years in the crowd), and the beginning of the end for others (the seniors). And this year it comes after a year and a half of profound, and apparently continuing, disorientations in the wake of Covid. But rather than talk about disorientation in general terms, I have decided to focus on one of its manifestations, surprise, and in particular what I’m calling the afterlife of surprise, the gathering of meanings that come later.

But before I explain that decision, I want to address one of the challenges it poses. How can one talk about surprise without being boring, a sin in any Convocation talk but an especially egregious one with this subject? Back in middle school I had a teacher who used to jump up on a desk and bellow and lunge like a generic dinosaur. He said he did it to get our attention, though some of us suspected that it was more likely some teacher-malady we hadn’t yet been exposed to. At any rate, it was surprising at first, but it lost its effectiveness after the third or fourth time. Enchantment became annoyance, then resentment, then sadness, then boredom, then finally existential dread.

Far more entertaining was the teacher who sat in front of the room and periodically fell asleep for varying lengths of time. That remained surprising, even though repeated endlessly. We were fascinated each time—first with our sudden glimpse of freedom, then with the realization that it wasn’t freedom after all but only hushed and highly alert confinement. Then finally existential dread.

So how do I engage this subject, make it interesting, without passing that dread on to you? Well, for one thing I can promise to resist trying to create surprise. Instead I’ll be focusing on what it is and how it works, especially as a vehicle of learning. More precisely I’ll be addressing what comes after the moment of surprise itself, in how you can use the lever of surprise to access and keep alive and learn from what brought it about in the first place, namely the disorientation that comes with an encounter with the unexpected. In addition to making you receptive to something new, that disorientation can help you recognize the systems that had been orienting you, that had constituted and confined you, and your position within them. What I learned in that middle school, for instance—beyond fearing existence itself—was something very specific about the peculiarities of power and powerlessness, of institutional life. Those recognitions came as a result not just of the events but of my surprise at those events, and of my efforts to extract something meaningful from them.

Speaking of extracting something meaningful, perhaps I should say a few words about why I thought surprise would make an especially timely subject for today’s speech.

I’m hardly the only one thinking lately about our capacity for surprise. How often have we heard people describe those years of the Trump administration as a sort of collective daze? For four years, each new day brought any number of surprises, and many people began to feel their ability to be surprised eroded, as indeed, some might argue, was the tactical function of those surprises, to turn outrage into listlessness.

But I don’t wish to link this effect to the Trump administration alone. In many ways this undercutting of surprise had been coming for some time, a by-product of our access to vast swaths of previously unfamiliar information and perspectives via the internet. Here too saturation has debilitated surprise.

But the problem, as I see it, is not just that some people have become desensitized. It’s that surprise has also been reshaped and repurposed. So, for instance, one might add into the mix the simultaneously numbing and stimulating effects of what has been called the society of the spectacle, or late capitalism. Every innovation in image, sound, language, in delivery systems like phones, is designed to give us a jolt of realness, a more satisfying jolt than the jolt felt from the prior innovation. Such surprises don’t really disorient us, though, which is the effect that I am valuing in surprise; in fact, they do the opposite. Each jolt serves to re-orient us, to align our needs and desires, our expectations, for instance, with the structures of consumerism.

Now I don’t want to sound like an anti-technology alarmist. Media are just tools, and they can educate as well as indoctrinate us. But I do think we need to look more closely at our current relation to surprise, especially in the context of how much we seem to both need and fear it.

On the one hand, how much of our lives are spent trying to discover or rediscover the thrill of surprise, of being taken out of our ruts, and ourselves, if only momentarily and into some more intense presence in what feels like reality? On the other hand, how much of our lives are spent doing everything in our power to avoid those moments and the vulnerability they seem to depend on or represent? To be surprised, and especially to show surprise, is to be revealed as ignorant, inexperienced, unimaginative. Surprise is, in this sense, antithetical to being what used to be called cool. Who would say, for instance, I really want to be like that person who gets surprised a lot?

But let me stop a moment. As you may have noticed, already a third of my talk is over and I, an English teacher, still haven’t defined my key term. Well, there’s a good reason for that.

There have been as many definitions of surprise as there are sorts of surprise to be defined. There can be good surprises and bad, short and long, surprises that undercut our confidence and that build it up again, surprises that we repress even before we recognize them as such and surprises that lead us to change in fundamental ways. As surprise’s related terms indicate—terms like “shocked,” ”astonished,” “taken aback”—surprise has been variously associated with pleasure, anxiety, and edification. All of these definitions, I would argue, are pertinent to the kind of surprise I’m focusing on here.

But to tell you the truth, I’m more interested in the mechanics, in the way surprise works as a social and psychological mechanism, for that is where the clues to its afterlife must be sought. As I mentioned before, surprise is essentially a response to an abrupt disruption in expectation, a disruption that momentarily undermines our sense of alignment with our circumstances and our sense of the ways things work. It is also itself unexpected; that is, it can’t be summoned but is rather visited upon us—or at least that’s how we experience it. One might even call it a partially autonomic response, which is how it was characterized in early affect theory. According to that theory, there were nine innate biological response mechanisms connected to emotions, such as “interest/excitement” and “anger/rage.” “Surprise/startle” was one of those nine. This version of surprise appeals to me in part because it’s rooted in the body. Each of these mechanisms, for instance, was associated with physical markers. In the case of the surprise/startle response, these included the widening of the eyes, the raising of the eyebrows, and the opening of the mouth.

To agree with this premise isn’t to argue that surprise is anterior to or divorced from one’s state of mind, only that what we call body and mind are not, in the case of these mechanisms, separable. Further, the fact that surprise happens, by definition, without our foreknowledge doesn’t mean that the mind hasn’t played a central role in its instigation, only that the conscious part of our mind was unprepared for the information or perspective the surprise had to signal us to recognize. And that signal, in turn, was registered in a bodily response not regulated by that conscious part. Learning how to recognize and read that signal is vital.

For this reason I see surprise as a place to start rather than end. For in itself surprise isn’t a state of enlightenment but a state of potential, hovering somewhere between not knowing and coming-into-knowing. It’s not an emotion in itself but an intensity, and what it has going for itself is precisely that intensity, its capacity to lift one off the rails. What we do with those moments is up to us.

But this is all very abstract. As I’ve been suggesting, the real meaning of surprise lies in its concreteness—its embodied nature, its multiple levels of experience and perception, its animating social contexts. So what I’d like to do now is turn to my own concrete experience on three different occasions.

Early on in my teaching career I frequently led book discussions at local public libraries. At one session, I was talking about the poetry of Emily Dickinson. About halfway through I offered a reading of one of her more famous poems, “There’s a certain Slant of Light.” Without going into detail, the poem is about a time of day and year—what it calls “Winter Afternoons”—that evokes in the poet a sense of despair. The poem ends, though, contemplating not that despair but its departure: “When it goes,” Dickinson writes, ‘tis like the Distance/ On the look of Death—.” Now I have a lot to say about this ending, which is exactly what I felt back at that library discussion. So I started in, offering what I thought were elegant insights into the meanings of distance for Dickinson—as a person with a Calvinist background, a woman, a poet.

Then someone interrupted, a young woman up front. “You’re wrong,” she said. Now that wasn’t the surprise. Teachers get disagreed with all the time, which is, I have to say, one of the great things about teaching at Vassar, though here those disagreements tend to be a little less bluntly put. No, the surprise came just after, when she explained what she meant.

She said that I was talking in abstractions while Dickinson was being very concrete. She asked if I had ever seen a person die. At that point in my life I hadn’t, and said so. She said that that’s what happens to a person’s gaze when they die, they look away to an impossible distance.

So here was the real surprise, and it came in three waves: first that I hadn’t known this about the poem, as obvious as it now seems; second, and more radically, that this ignorance seemed to call into question how I read and thought and taught; and, third, more radically still, that I had yet to truly encounter death, up close, to recognize that distance.

I didn’t realize all this at the moment. At the time, I felt threatened, so I stumbled through with one of those necessary teacher phrases—“interesting point,” I said. I took me a while to process; in fact, I’m still processing it, and have made that processing part of the way I think and talk about literature, as well as about life and death. I went back to Dickinson’s work; I started to become aware of the extent to which her poetry emerged from actual observation, and was indelibly linked to the body of the world. I have also since been up close to death, seen that distance, at which moment that person’s comment came back to me, and was invaluable.

In short, I had begun to see the potential in surprise, enough to keep my eye out for it as an opportunity for growth.

And it wasn’t long before I had a similar experience.

It was a few years later, and still very early in my career at Vassar. I was teaching a class for the first time in what was then called ethnic American literature.

About a month in, the group was discussing a passage in one of the books, and I said something along the lines of “We can all relate to the situation being represented here.” Yeah, I know. A student named Emily Polachek raised her hand. Her question was simple and direct:

“Who is we?”

Whatever I had learned from the earlier challenge did not prevent me from being once again surprised, or from freezing up. I no longer remember for how long, though I recall it was long enough to be awkward. Then, predictably, I went back to my cache of necessary teacher remarks and came up with this variation: “Good point.” This time, of course, the comment was much more transparently an evasion.

This surprise also hit me in a slightly different way. I couldn’t at first latch on to why I felt threatened. What was the question asking? What expectation of mine was denied, and why did it make me feel so stressed that I couldn’t, in this class of all classes, rise to the challenge?

It’s no doubt obvious enough now what the question was asking, at least the basics: Whose voice or voices is the class being asked to listen to, and on what terms? And who gets to determine who is in and who is out?

The question was also—and rightly—challenging my authority as teacher. What perspective was I speaking from? What assumptions was I making about the literature, about my students and myself?

And it was questioning the institutional setting in which those assumptions were embedded: institutions like the protocols and perspectives of literary study, of English courses, of Vassar’s English department, and the academy more generally.

Let me focus on the issue of race in particular. Today the idea that racism is institutional and systemic is finally beginning to take hold within some provinces of whiteness. Within communities of color, of course, this idea has long been un-surprising, a given and a condition of mind and body. (Which is to say that surprise, among other things, is an excellent indicator of one’s social positioning.) But me, I’m white, was white. And though I’d certainly been thinking about race and difference for that course, I clearly had not been thinking about it deeply enough to recognize my own position. And so I was surprised. Perhaps for this same reason, that awareness proved to be no simple thing, no switch that was flipped, no one-anddone and move on. For me at least it has unfolded in time, in that afterlife of surprise, as I went back again and again to reconsider what I thought it might mean. I’m still thinking about it, and my thoughts have changed as I have learned some things and unlearned others. By the way, while I’ve focused on the context of race here, Emily was, I think, also asking about gender. As a member of Vassar’s Feminist Union, she once co-signed a letter to the Miscellany News which started with these words: “Living in a society which teaches that silence equals consent, we will not remain silent.” (Note the particular and insistent use of her own “we” there.) She was also likely asking about social class, as I discovered just recently. Or, more accurately, she was speaking from the intersections among these categories, and in this sense her question has resonated with me in many different ways.

I can’t overplay the extent to which that comment changed me. It also added to my understanding of that incident at the public library. I had considered that earlier moment to be an entry into what we used to call the “universal.” And, at least on one level, death is universal; it encompasses perhaps the biggest “we” of all. We all face it, regardless of our assigned or chosen identities, our backgrounds and positions. Yet those identities and backgrounds and positions also shape or even determine our relation to death, both what we experience and how we experience and explain it. I realize now, for instance, that my remoteness from death at the time was linked to my middle-class, white, and even my California, American life.

I have also wondered about the closeness to death that the young woman at the library had been drawing upon. And indeed, this receptivity not to just my own position but to others’ was perhaps the most significant effect of both of the surprises I’ve described.

That point was brought home to me especially poignantly when, in the case of Emily’s comment, I discovered that I was not the only person affected by the afterlife of that moment. A few years after Emily graduated, she called me to ask if I would write her a recommendation. I took the opportunity to thank her. I tried to explain what her comment had meant to me. Now it was her turn to be surprised, as she told me on the phone. I can’t say what that surprise meant to her, though I wish I could

Which brings me to one more part to this story. About two years after that call I was reading the Vassar Quarterly. It had a section near the back called “In Memorium,” a list of Vassar alums who had recently died. Emily’s name was on that list.

This surprise—the shock, really—has had its own afterlife, not unconnected to the first story I told. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, I discovered a picture of Emily’s headstone on the internet, along with a newspaper article that told more than I’d known about her and her family. What these meant to me we needn’t talk about. Suffice it to say that these afterlives—admittedly a loaded term in this context—continued, and so, as I’ve indicated, surprises often resonate with and expand upon each other.

With that thought in mind, I’ll move on here to my last anecdote, which entails still another engagement with my understanding of “we.”

Around the time that Emily graduated, I had an odd encounter with one of my former colleagues outside the English building. We had run into each other and were having the standard empty-greeting conversation—how classes were going, what we were reading. They said they had been reading a book by Henry James and were struck by James’s description of his visit to New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, the neighborhood of many immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe. And then, seemingly out of nowhere—at least so it felt to me at the time—they said they realized that, “James was right: Jews were vulgar.” By the way, my colleague knew I was Jewish, so this was not meant as some secret verbal handshake between anti-Semites.

OK. So, first my surprise, then its afterlife. Now my Jewishness is very particular to my background. I grew up in Southern California in the 1950s and 60s within a largely assimilated Jewish community and rarely encountered anti-Semitism. I was certainly aware of it—I vividly remember my parents talking about Jewish quotas at colleges and universities, about country clubs that excluded Jews, and so on. But the few experiences I myself faced directly seemed so out-of-nowhere as to be confusing. For instance, a few years after I graduated from college, a co-worker at a publishing house asked me how I hid my horns. That sort of thing. In my limited view, then, I saw anti-Semitism as not so widespread in America, and more likely to be a view held by specific individuals than systemic or institutional. But this comment felt different to me, as did my surprise. I was still confused, but now I was angry, just as Emily had been angry, though it took me some time to fully access and examine that anger. No, at the time my initial response was predictable enough. I was frozen, and said something like “Huh.” not necessarily surprising in itself. After all, the mark of such disorienting surprise is often the sense of being, in the clichéd phrase, dumbfounded, that is left without the language that had promised clarity and stability in the first place. At any rate, in this case, as in the others, I’ve had plenty of time to imagine better replies. I have also taken that time to think about why I hadn’t reacted better and quicker, and just what I thought it meant to be a Jew, not just in relation to anti-Semitism but beyond. I have thought about how, at that moment, I was suddenly just a Jew, and neither the individual nor the Jew I thought I was. In short, I have been thinking through Emily’s question from another perspective, from the other side of the fence: it was my colleague who was using “we,” and I was meant to understand that I was not included.

One of the unintended effects of my colleague’s gesture, in other words, was to offer me another, but differently illuminating, peek at the larger system. As personal and directed as the comment was, it was also offered in an oddly impersonal way, which is partly what angered me. My colleague was not just someone who had said something anti-Semitic to a specific Jew; they were speaking for and from a system of belief that they felt was not just supportable but tacitly supported, and that system was embedded all around me—in a faculty with very few

Jews, a curriculum that included very few Jewish materials. The history of art meant largely Christian art, the history of literature, Christian literature. There was no Jewish Studies program. This was 30 years ago, and things have changed, but as we’ve all been made aware by recent events, prejudice and the antagonistic ignorance that accompanies it are still very much with us, as are many of their institutions and structuring mechanisms.

I want to be precise here. As I indicated earlier, surprise can reveal to us our social positioning, our relation to power; but power is more complicated than just who is in and who is out. The afterlife to this surprise added a new dimension to my understanding not just of anti-Semitism but, complicating my encounter with Emily, its relation to racism. All these afterlives exist in a sort of uneasy relation in my mind to this day. In all I was white, yet in the last I wasn’t, or not quite.

For me these recognitions led once again to a shift in my teaching and scholarship, as I focused more on Jewish materials, alone and in relation to those linked to other groups. It goes without saying, too, that I still have a lot to learn.

So let me offer just a few words in conclusion.

What I’m defining as the afterlife of surprise in these encounters is hardly a new concept. The underlying premise is indeed a very old one: that we spend most of our lives asleep, and need to find ways to wake ourselves up. What I’m adding here is that we should see surprise as one of the available wake-up calls, and that we should pursue it with a honed receptivity and a willingness to plumb its afterlife, to turn its disorientation into an engine of reckoning. For the capacity for and alertness to surprise is also the capacity for learning and for change.