Lit Up Page 26
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Proust described his childhood reading of novels as “a dream more lucid and abiding than those that come to us in sleep,” but none of us can compare to Proust—or to Nabokov—as a reader. My reporting suggests, however, that certain passionate commitments in teachers (and certain temperamental gifts) can arouse tenth-graders, pull them away from screens and social networking and the other obsessions of teenage life—at least for a while—pull them into enjoyment of reading, maybe into complicated literary texts, and possibly drive them into asking serious questions about their lives. All of which lays the groundwork for a lifetime interest in reading, in bookishness, even in literature as one of the great pleasures. The groundwork, not the certainty. As I have said before, you have to begin somewhere.
Teens are entering a media-Internet world of infinite choices, manifold but chaotic, decentered, even incoherent. But if there’s little or no authority anywhere in the public atmosphere of assertion and counter-assertion, they can at least try to gain a little authority of their own. They can hope for the dignity of knowing something, understanding something. They can know math and the sciences; and they can also know things that, by their very nature, are unquantifiable but help create three-dimensional human beings. Children, elementary reason would suggest, need that chance more than anyone, and to abandon children and teenagers to the tumult of screens and to lessen the value of literature and the humanities in favor of the STEM subjects, as many powerful men reforming education now want to do, is almost certainly a mistake and very possibly a disastrous mistake. Again: Did we need so many STEM graduates? Many of them entering a glutted market can’t find jobs or, if they do find them, are quickly replaced in midcareer by younger men and women willing to work at lower pay. For this dubious end we were changing the nature of education, downplaying the humanities, shunting to the side literature, the arts, and much else.
Perhaps no one can say definitively how much teenagers gain or lose by obsessively playing games, obsessively using social media and the Internet (evidence exists on both sides of the case), but we can be sure they lose an enormous amount by not reading very seriously. The ability to understand the world and other people can’t be created on screens alone. The ability to recognize lies and stupidity can’t be created there either. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa said this: “We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist.” That’s a witty negative claim: We would be “worse” than we are. Thinking back on your life as an adult, you might remember when you became a little less worse than before.
But here’s the practical question: How do you build the appetite Mario Vargas Llosa is talking about? Through books, in one form or another, in hard copy or on an e-reader. But teens rarely have any idea what books they’re looking for. Sure, students could go to websites that tell them about the books most relevant to them, the good books, the best books, the super-great books. But how many kids do that? And whom should they trust—some impersonal authority? What everyone else is reading? Such guides on the Internet may simply register what’s popular. My loving parents read three or four newspapers every night and all through the weekends. Initially, before I had any taste of my own, teachers, librarians, and friends pushed me toward good things. Teachers, especially. Most of us need teachers immersed in literature, history, and science to get us going anywhere worth going to.
At Mamaroneck, the administration and the English Department were trying to create hunger for books—and then better books—as a value in itself. In their gently insistent way, they had declared war on student laziness, evasiveness, ignorance. They wanted students to perform in school and on standardized tests; they also wanted to turn them into vibrant men and women. Mamaroneck’s goals were both practical and utopian at once. And at Beacon, Sean Leon was building and saving souls, though not with improving lessons and heroic stories (at least not conventionally heroic), but in the modern way, with a demand for intellectual bravery and boldness, candor, authenticity, and clarity. At the same time, he insisted on family and religion (whatever his own faith or loss of faith) and love of friends. He was a radical in spirit, a conservative in values. Both he and the Mamaroneck teachers were trying to create students with enough internal authority to make their way in a dangerous world.
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Lionel Trilling, in his essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature” (written in 1961, initially collected in Beyond Culture), noted that formalism as a practice—the study of literature as a structure of words—is illuminating and powerful, but it’s not enough for him or for us. (This essay was written well before deconstruction and theory replaced the “New Criticism” that Trilling was reacting to.) We have to ask, Trilling said, the modern question: “Is it true? Is it true for me?” In other words, we have to pose moral and spiritual as well as formal questions and try to arrive at some sort of answers. But can students now ask “Is it true? Is it true for me?” in college courses, where the study of literature is often conducted by professionals immersed in the New Historicism, in post-deconstruction, in one arcane method or another of criticism and interpretation? In any case, many literature professors would insist that “Is it true?” has little meaning as a question, “truth” having bitten the dust as a delusion or at best as unknowable.
In high school, you can ask such questions with a directness, a fierceness even—certainly with a lack of embarrassment—that would be impossible in university courses. “Is it true for me?” is particularly a question that adolescents—at least the serious-minded ones—love to ask. Obviously Sean Leon knows that. His own preoccupations link up with the turmoil that fifteen-year-old students are going through. Literature is his obsession, and he wants it to be their obsession. What he values most is the students’ emotional connection to whatever they read. Later, in college or on their own, they might learn to love literature as art, the structural freedom and power of poetry and fiction, the sound of language—they might enjoy what Nabokov has called “aesthetic bliss.” Enjoyment is the goal and reward that trumps all others. But to get to that moment the ability to read seriously at all must be created.
If teenagers’ bliss at fifteen is Facebook or texting or gaming; if reading seriously goes against their inclination; if the “deep reading” circuits have to be replanted, or planted for the first time, then becoming serious readers at all is something of a triumph for them and their teachers, perhaps as much a victory as learning to read in the first place.
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Both Sean Leon at Beacon and Jessica Zelenski at Hillhouse hit their students where they lived. They didn’t shy away from adolescent obsessions; they didn’t try to turn students into adults by assigning “improving” work in the Victorian style. They found them where they were as fifteen-year-olds, which did not mean underestimating them. Anything but. American teenagers are preoccupied with justice—not in the legal sense, necessarily, but in the sense of fairness, especially fair treatment of them as still powerless members of the society. They also want to find some purpose in life. Challenge a mumbling or ironically self-deprecating American fifteen-year-old, and you will find someone looking for answers or at least ready to ask questions.
Yes, they want a way of earning a living, of fitting in and having a good life, but they want a way of being, too. Basic ethical and philosophical questions of right and wrong, acting and doing, belief and skepticism, acquiescence and critical thinking fascinate them, and nothing is more effective than reading literature for churning up such questions. Zadie Smith, one of the most exciting contemporary novelists and essayists, put it this way: “It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actio
ns. Narrative itself is the performance of that very procedure” (Guardian, October 3, 2003). In other words, one of contemporary literature’s actual makers, disputing advanced literary theory of the last forty years, believes that fiction has some vital and complicated relation to reality, a relation that makes ethical issues inescapable. Conversations that uncover the moral issues lodged in narrative have a good chance of meaning something special to fifteen-year-olds. My apocalyptic tremblings at the end of the digital fast at Beacon had long subsided. Fifteen-year-olds will read seriously when inspired by charismatic teachers alert to what moves adolescents.
If teachers initially accommodate student interests and emotions, the ambitious ones move them up and out. For instance, the dark side runs right through pop culture—as spectacle, as wonder, as the thrill of the forbidden. In evil, there is vitality, or at least gaudy self-assurance, and American teenagers know that and wonder over it. Instead of fighting their absorption, Mr. Leon and Miss Zelenski nurtured and deepened student fascination by turning it toward art. They assigned fictions and memoirs chronicling extreme experience, the loss of identity, the exhilarations and tragedies of living out at the edge. They gently broke down protective narcissism, launching the students into the grown-up world of moral difficulty, contingency, money, family love, loss, and death. They did not emphasize craft, technique, the historical circumstances in which the books were composed. That was for later. Instead, they wanted students to have an actual experience when they read. And the students, for the most part, weren’t offended by work that was hard for them. On the contrary, they were flattered.
Curious and ambitious teens always read things that are too hard for them and fail to understand half of what they read. But frustration only makes them eager to find out more. The acceptance of initial failure is built into avid natures. But ordinary kids may also feel haunted by what they don’t quite understand—haunted if it moves them in some way. Even in a classroom assignment, they don’t have to understand everything in a book in order to be excited by it, awed by it. They will enjoy the ego boost of having read something difficult. Overmastered at first, they will move toward mastery of themselves.
I saw this at Beacon when an eleventh-grade class, taught by Daniel Guralnick, read one of the great books of American literature, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The novel dramatizes the situation of a young black man in the twentieth century as a binary pair of impossible choices: if you fight all the time, you destroy yourself physically; if you give in all the time, you destroy yourself spiritually. Could the narrator (he has no name) find a way out of this double choke hold? Born in the South, he gets tossed out of a black college, struggles to get a job in New York, undergoes shock therapy in which he comes close to losing his identity altogether. He recovers, and begins a tumultuous time in Harlem as an organizer and soapboxer for the authoritarian “Brotherhood” (Ellison’s mocking version of the Communist Party). He gets razzed by black nationalists, vamped by wealthy white women, caught up in a bizarre and spectacular riot. He undergoes one jolting encounter after another as he looks for himself among the ambitious, the mad, the defeated. Invisible Man, published in 1952, moves back and forth between stern realism and fantasia, between the vernacular traditions of black America (slave songs, blues, street put-ons) and the most advanced literary techniques. It was exhausting and exhilarating—almost baffling at times, and also an American masterpiece.
At one level, it was a “social novel” about race and identity, and Mr. Guralnick and his class certainly didn’t duck the racial issue. But if you read it just for what it says about race, you were only half reading it. “There’s something much bigger here than any message,” Daniel Guralnick said. “It’s art.” Again and again, Guralnick, a marathon runner in a T-shirt, informal yet stringent in his demands on students, convinced his class that by studying a work of art, they would find out things they needed to know, both about literature and themselves, something that had likely eluded them up until then. They were primed. Earlier in the year, they had read stories by Poe, Twain, and Melville, novels by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and much else—it was an eleventh-grade course in American literature. Yet Invisible Man was complex and many-voiced, and at times the students had trouble understanding what Ellison was up to. Mr. Guralnick eased them into the difficulties, taking them through strange passages in which the narrator slips into dreams and fantasies and bluesy speculation. They read the book for structure, image, and language, tracing the life of the text through its surging metaphors and descriptive and rhetorical abundance. As they drew near the end, the students were surging themselves, in time with the book, seeing the hero’s struggle for selfhood as a series of lost illusions—and possible illuminations.
The benefits of interpreting a difficult book were literary and more than literary. A structural reading of Invisible Man necessarily traced the hero’s fortunes. In his early twenties, Ellison’s hero has the recurring experience of being thrown into some task without even rudimentary explanation of what in the world he is supposed to do. He can’t read the codes—the way to succeed in one situation after another—and most strangers seem eager to see him fail. That hostility was a young person’s common fear—the fear that no one in the world would make room for his ego, his right to succeed. The students got close to the hero as he struggled, for in their own lives they needed to read the codes, too. By seeing how the narrative was put together, and what the structural elements actually meant, they would be forced, willy-nilly, to understand their own experience—linking the different parts of their lives together by linking the different parts of the novel together.
You make a self by matching yourself against the text. When you respond to the text fully, understanding how it is constructed, and what the parts mean, you come into being. This was hardly a narcissistic exercise; the students couldn’t do what they did without the provocation of an exceedingly complicated work of literature and an ardent teacher who believed in the book as art. Pop literature, skillfully composed by formula, wouldn’t offer as rich a field of reference and action.
Difficult books are one kind of challenge that students can meet if they’re pushed. And reading a long book, too, if it goes like a shot. Reading a long narrative makes teenagers proud. It gives them the full span of a life, a family, a war, whatever it is the book is devoted to. It develops reading stamina in the way that track practice builds lung power and muscle.
In Mary Beth Jordan’s tenth-grade section at Mamaroneck High School, the class read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952), an epic family novel (640 pages), burly in its heavy-limbed movements yet also delicate in its innumerable notations of weather, terrain, trees, plants, rocks, and bushes. (Steinbeck had written, among other things, an agronomist’s four-season handbook to his beloved Salinas Valley in California—much about eucalyptus and gum, lupins and poppies.) At Mamaroneck, East of Eden was a core reading, not an independent choice, and a lot of it, in truth, made me wince. A Cain and Abel fable, constructed with Old Testament clay, it gorged on such things as land, inheritance, sex, violence; it featured a ludicrous female creation, Kate, a cross between Jezebel and the Whore of Babylon. Was the book loam or depleted soil? Both, perhaps. It was old-fashioned and literary in many of the wrong ways—portentous and Bible-haunted and full of Steinbeck’s sagacity, much of it a wheeze.
But Steinbeck’s narrative power pulled me along, and it pulled a lot of the students along, too. Much of it was about young people growing up, making choices (often bad ones). Miss Jordan, working on it for over a month, discussed theme and plot and metaphor; she required papers as part of a complicated project; she got the students to write speeches in the voice of one of Steinbeck’s characters; and she broke the class into groups, made students become experts in one aspect or another of the novel which honored the Mamaroneck ideal of reading as a social culture, not just a solitary experience. They read East of Eden, and they acted upon it, as medium as well as a text. They mixed their labor with
it, and many of them conquered the length with a little burst of self-esteem.
In all the classes I attended, teachers put themselves out in order to get students to put themselves out. This meant more than the obvious things—that a teacher has to be intellectually serious, responsive to everyone, and also in her person the spirit of justice. I repeat: For many kids, a good teacher may be the most palpable form of honor they will ever experience. For the moment, the students have an authority in their lives that they can depend on. All familiar enough—it’s the heart of teaching—but even more than that is required to sustain a fifteen-year-old’s absorption in literature. At Beacon, Sean Leon was there for his students—between classes and after school, when he camped in an empty basement room and saw kids who had problems or questions. The eleventh-grade teacher Mary Whittemore turned herself into a version of Hester Prynne. Margaret Groninger, at Mamaroneck, read above and beyond the course load in order to produce the “book talks” that lay at the center of the independent reading initiative. At Hillhouse, Jessica Zelenski stood up for the kids within the school and coaxed and teased and shouted in class, even storming out when her students weren’t trying hard enough, only to come back and apologize. She loved them, and by the end of the year they started reading, they performed for her.
Teenagers, distracted, busy, self-obsessed, are not easy to engage—not by their teachers or by their parents. To keep them in the game, the teachers I watched experimented, altered the routine, changing the physical dimensions of the class. They kept kids off balance in order to put them back in balance. They demanded more of students than the students expected to give. They talked candidly, acknowledging that they were neither perfect nor invulnerable. They were more experienced, certainly, than students; they were guides, leaders, dispensers of knowledge and justice, but also people subject to the ups and downs, the happiness and mishaps, that the students were subject to. They demonstrated that it was possible to do that without losing authority. In fact, in media-sozzled America, where skepticism is the prevailing mode of thought, candor may be a way of gaining authority. Teaching is about building trust. Acknowledgment of one’s own humanity is one powerful way of building it.