ISSN 1935-7699
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ISSN 1935-7699 |
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ARTICLE
Can
Literature Really Make a Difference? Toward a
Chastened
View of the Role of Fiction in Democratic Education
The role of literature in democratic education has
always been a subject of paramount importance to Maxine Greene.
Sprinkled throughout her work are thoughtful accounts of the myriad ways
that the reading of fiction can significantly contribute to an
understanding of what it means to teach and learn. She has continually
insisted that thoughtful engagements with poetry and prose can offer new
perspectives from which to see, and thereby potentially remake, the
world. Even while insisting that the embracing of complexity and
possibility is central to such an aesthetic reading practice, she has
never wavered in her deeply felt conviction that it can profitably
enhance both the personal attempt to fashion meaning, and the related
social experience of shared democratic life. In her first book, an
edited collection of essays on existentialism that she selected for
their potential value to teachers, Greene (1967) could not resist
slipping in a line about one of her favorite authors at the time, Ralph
Ellison. While discussing the potential dangers of reductive categories
of thinking, she makes the point that “to identify an individual by
means of a category (‘Negro,’ ‘disadvantaged,’ ‘upper class’) is to give
a certain amount of information; but it makes the individual,
qua individual, ‘invisible’—to
use Ralph Ellison’s term” (p. 7). In all her books that followed, Greene
would help deepen our understanding of how the reading of literature
might help people become more
visible to each other, and why as a pedagogical goal this is so
vital to the maintenance and expansion of democracy.
In her very next effort, for example,
Teacher as Stranger: Educational
Philosophy for the Modern Age (1973), she says right up front that
“the interest dominating this book is in the possibility of arousing
individuals to wide-awakeness” (p. 6). Grounded in a combination of
awareness and reflection, “wide-awakeness” achieves its greatest
potential, Greene continues, when readers focus on “their own
commitments and actions wherever they work and make their lives” (p. 6).
Citing Joseph Conrad’s claim that the purpose of the arts is nothing
less than “to make people see” (p. 16), she insists that forging
relationships with “realms of imaginative possibility” (emphasis Greene, p. 16) are essential to
this project, since they have such tremendous potential to “heighten
perceptiveness and sensitivity” (p. 291).
To help her readers maintain such an intense
relationship with literature, Greene (1978) would offer in her next book
a couple of important suggestions. She reminds her readers that they
should begin where they are in the moment with their own local and even
personal concerns, with what she now calls their “landscapes,” since
“persons are more likely to ask their own questions and seek their own
transcendence when they feel themselves to be grounded in their personal
histories, their lived lives” (p. 2). She also describes those writers
who best speak to our
“landscapes” as “adversary artists,” the greatest gift they offer their
readers being the opportunity “to find ourselves breaking with
submergence, posing our own critical questions to reality” (p. 38).
Almost two decades later, Greene (1995) was still making her case that
it is essential to take imaginative writing seriously. “One of the
reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through
which we can assemble a coherent world,” she writes, “is that
imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible” (p. 3). And, of
course, for Greene it is precisely this
empathy that can inform what
she calls “the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what
might be in our deficient society” (p. 5).
I must confess that I find this expansive role for
reading literature in democratic education
not only poignant, but also
fundamentally correct. I am convinced of the fundamental soundness of
this view not only on a theoretical level, but also because it so
directly resonates with my own lived experience. In my teaching, both in
high schools with adolescents, and now with teacher candidates in a
university program, I have witnessed the tremendous impact that fiction
can have on the learning of my students. Most recently, for example, in
my “Models of Education” classes over the past few years, I have been
assigning May Sarton’s novel The
Small Room (1961), the plot of which revolves around the experience
of a new teacher, Lucy Winter. Her existential dilemma begins when she
discovers that Jane, an exceptional student, who is admired by her
teachers as much as she is envied by her classmates, has plagiarized an
essay. Jane’s mentor, Carryl Cope, a brilliant and excessively demanding
teacher, argues that for the sake of Jane’s future, she and Lucy should
suppress the incident and deal with it quietly. Winter is thereby
abruptly confronted with some of the most challenging themes that so
many teachers face on a regular basis – the importance of academic
honesty, sensitivity to the needs of others, and the real value of an
education. As the plot unfolds, the entire teaching and learning
community is thrown into disorientation as news of the cover-up leaks
and spreads, and it is only after intense personal soul searching and
open discussion that the characters are able to come to terms with what
has happened and move forward together.
In my education courses it has been personally very
rewarding and revealing to watch my students utilize this novel to sort
out their own difficult questions and strive to articulate their
reasoned yet tentative stands on various educational problems. As my
teacher candidates balance their sympathy for Jane in terms of the
academic pressures to excel that she surely felt, with the needs of the
student government and school administration for transparency and
fairness, I believe that they are potentially deepening their sense of
what is possible and important about the often conflicted human endeavor
called teaching and learning. Even further, I would like to believe that
the reading of fiction can indeed provide the occasion for such
meaningful learning experiences in other educational contexts.
And yet I
somewhat anxiously confess that it is just at this point that my
optimism deserts me. Over the last few years in particular, I have too
often felt discouraged about how rare and delicate such pedagogical
experiences seem to be on a wider scale. When a friend of mine, aware of
my passion for the writing of Maxine Greene, argued that I surely had to
submit a manuscript to a journal with the “dilemma” or “tension” of
“Art, Social Imagination, and Democratic Education,” I heartily agreed
and even felt enthusiastic about the possibilities that I might explore.
However, my initial composition efforts were awkward and unconvincing.
My heart simply was not in it, and a different, hopefully more honest
and thereby authentic voice, kept trying to break through.
Luckily, given Greene’s commitment to pluralism in
the form of respect and even affection for the different lived realities
of others, which is perhaps the ethical tenor of her work that I
appreciate the most, I decided to value my intuition. The result was
that I became determined to clearly articulate just what I felt needed
to be said about the misleading and perhaps even dangerous
presupposition that fiction can enhance dimensions of imagination that
can in turn support democracy. I want to be clear that I still largely
value imaginative writing exactly for this possibility. Yet the truth is
that I also keep coming back to the idea that it is absolutely vital to
somehow be more chastened or
moderate about it. I cannot shake the conviction that while remaining
supportive of fiction’s place in democratic education, a serious
consideration of its limitations would constitute a useful pedagogical
contribution.
My approach here is perhaps best described by Annie
Dillard (1999) in For the Time
Being: “For the world is as glorious as ever, and exalting,” she
writes, “but for credibility’s sake let’s start with the bad news” (p.
8). The following analyses should be seen as contributing in this spirit
to a more “credible” view of the role of literature in education for
democracy. My hope is that by providing “the bad news” with the
strongest possible hearing, that others might be encouraged to add their
own distinctive contributions through further reflection and discussion.
Although I am well aware that my argument at certain points may seem
provocative, since I confront some pretty widely held assumptions about
the relationship between the reading of fiction and the quality of
democratic life, I would argue that it is important to come to terms
with the issues I raise here in thoughtful ways.
By calling the main section of this essay “The
Bad News from the Inside Out,” I am signaling the organizational
strategy I have adopted in developing my argument. I want to start with
the very act of reading itself and then spiral outward to consider
broader contextual issues. Thus I begin with attentiveness to fiction
itself as a problem, and then move out a little to consider whether
fiction actually can enhance some version of empathy. I then address the
disturbing claim that reading literature can even make people crueler. I
then move further outward still by looking at how public rhetoric about
the suffering of others creates pedagogical problems, and then reveal
that many teachers in post-secondary institutions have largely abandoned
utilizing literature in support of democratic ends. I conclude by
considering how a consumer culture frustrates attempts to take
literature’s role in democracy seriously. I am keenly aware of how
ambitious it may seem to tackle so many points in such a short essay. I
would defend my broad approach by reiterating that my primary purpose
here is to make the best suggestive argument I can
against fiction’s role in democratic education so that as many
people as possible might find a point of interest with which to take
issue and respond. The Bad
News
from the Inside Out
Why is being
attentive to narrative forms so difficult? What is it about the very act
of noticing that can make such extraordinary demands upon us? Consider
the following excerpt from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (1997):
See, I am one
whom all have deserted
Under the
heading The Voices, the German
poet placed nine poems, all of their titles taking the form of “The Song
of the ______,” with a different socially marginalized persona filling
in the blank each time. The stanza above, for example, is from “The Song
of the Leper,” and the rest of the poems portray such identities as the
“Beggar,” the “Orphan,” and even the “Idiot.” In this short collection,
Rilke provides us with glimpses into what he imagines sincere and
articulate exemplars would say to those who are much better off. The
predominant theme of The Voices is that when we notice other people giving expression to
their pain, the common tendency is to shift our attention elsewhere,
failing to further notice them. The next line of the poem above, for
instance, referring to how people were affected by the sound of the
Leper’s rattle, reads “And those who suddenly hear it, look not this
way at all.” Rilke’s concern was thus not only with the quality of
response to instances of human suffering already recognized as such and
therefore deemed to be morally worthy of our concern, but he also alerts
us to a depressingly common failure of attentiveness that can make
ignoring the experiences of others so alarmingly possible.
Rilke (a poet that Greene, incidentally, is also
rather fond of and whose writing she has drawn upon in support of her
own work) was so dismayed by the capacity of people to remain
indifferent to others that he took up the problem again in prose form.
In Letters to a Young Poet (1993), which contains his correspondence
with a troubled student, Rilke urges in the fourth letter that in our
relations with others that we ought to “cling” to “the little things
that hardly anyone sees” (p. 34), and he adds some pages later that by
doing this we might learn to “love in them life in an unfamiliar form”
(p. 39). He believed that this practice of attending to small details
could help in the creation of a more generous world. Rilke was very
aware, however, of how hard it was to sustain and that it demanded a
great deal. In the eighth letter, for instance, he is emphatic on how
much “courage” it required: “That is at bottom the only courage that is
demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular
and the most inexplicable that we may encounter” (p. 67).
Rilke chose the
word courage because he wanted
to imply by contrast that it is
cowardly never to look around, to notice how other people are doing,
to remain narrow and fixated on our own concerns. Yet while Rilke would
never cease to be shocked at how common such cowardice was in social
life, he was also reservedly confident that the courage to be attentive
could be cultivated. As educators we need to remember that a very large
part of our job, if we are committed to utilizing narrative to support
democratic aims, must be devoted to helping our students persist in
their efforts to notice, to pay attention, if they are going to get the
most out of their reading experiences. Rilke shows us that the
willingness to even try to be attentive to literature should not be
taken for granted.
However, if our
students press us about why
exactly we should focus on fiction so carefully and diligently, we
should also be careful about the response we give. It would be a mistake
to blurt out “because it builds empathy,” for example, without carefully
considering the theoretical wrinkles involved. For as André Comte-Sponville
(2001) convincingly illustrates in
A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in
Everyday Life, philosophers have struggled for a long time to
describe just how we ought to relate to the pain of other people.
Compassion,
love, charity,
sympathy, and
empathy, among others, have all been well discussed and advanced as
serious candidates. However, as Comte-Sponville continues, “From the
Stoics to Hannah Arendt (by way of Spinoza and Nietzsche), legions of
thinkers have criticized compassion, or pity, to use the word most often
employed by its detractors,” and he goes on to summarize what he takes
to be their strongest case this way:
Their
criticisms are nearly always made in good faith and are quite often
legitimate. Pity is the sadness one feels in response to the sadness of
another: it does not spare the other person his own sadness but rather
tends to add to it. Pity only increases the quantity of suffering in the
world, and that is what damns it. What good is there in heaping sadness
onto sadness, misfortune onto misfortune? (p. 107).
Since the role
of empathy, or what the
critics call pity, is so
central to Greene’s view of fiction’s role in democratic education, I
want to make sure that I address detailed and important objections
thoroughly. Turning to section 338 of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
The Gay Science (1974), which
in a footnote translator Walter Kaufmann describes as “one of
Nietzsche’s best statements of his case against pity” (p. 271), reveals
several sharp and important concerns. Nietzsche opens his short yet
powerful discussion with the questions “Is it good for you yourselves to
be above all full of pity? And is it good for those who suffer?” (p.
269). He then proceeds to advance a number of reasons why both questions
should be answered in the negative. His first target is the assumption
that it is even possible to share our genuine pain with others: “Our
personal and profoundest suffering is incomprehensible and inaccessible
to almost everyone” (p. 269). The result of this experiential solipsism
is that “whenever people notice
that we suffer, they interpret our suffering superficially” (emphasis
Nietzsche, p. 269). In contrast to this facile reading of pain,
Nietzsche offers us what he regards as a more realistic and accurate
description of the nature of human suffering:
The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected
by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in
which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are
shred—all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern
to our dear pitying friends: they wish to
help and have no thought of
the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations,
impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as
necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. (emphasis
Nietzsche, p. 269)
The idea that
forms of personal distress are not only inevitable in life but are even
necessary in order to achieve the highest ranks of happiness, was one
that Nietzsche never doubted or even qualified. We could even say that
his oft-quoted line from Twilight
of the Idols (1968) that “What does not kill me makes me stronger”
(p. 33), succinctly conveys his deeply held faith in the power of the
human spirit to not just endure the trials of life, but also grow
through them to become something better. On Nietzsche’s view the failure
to appreciate this role for life’s frustrations results in people not
just wanting to help others, but also in maintaining the mistaken belief
that “they have helped most when they have helped most quickly” (p.
269). Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for this eagerness to soothe
the feelings of others, and in addressing those who most keenly embodied
this quality, he confronted them with the observation that “you also
harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the
religion of pity: the religion of comfortableness” (emphasis Nietzsche, p. 270). This
demand for comfort, in turn, was the result of not having the strength
to follow through on our unique vision of what mattered most to us as
individuals: “for our ‘own way’ is too hard and demanding and too remote
from the love and gratitude of others” (p. 270).
So for
Nietzsche it is bad enough that we misread the suffering of others, fail
to appreciate the central role it occupies in making us better people,
and try to mistakenly rush in to help others too quickly; but when the
roots of such thought and behavior are shown to be our own dependence on
approval and our own pathetic dedication to having things easy, then
empathy begins to look very suspicious as a moral virtue indeed.
Especially given the organized violence and moral horror of the last
century in particular, it is hard for many people today to believe that
literature can increase empathy at all. It may be an old point by now,
but it bears repeating, that the most infamous mass murderers of the
last century, the Nazis, were patrons of the arts generally, and many of
them, being quite well educated, had read the key novels and poems of
the very best European writers of the past.
If we have to
grudgingly admit that reading imaginative fiction is in no way a
guaranteed route to increasing empathy, the vastly more disturbing
possibility is that it is possible for a heightening of sensitivity to
the details of other people’s lives to be
too successful and to actually
enhance the capacity for greater cruelty. The best fiction, after all,
provides probing details of the most tender vulnerabilities of others,
and such knowledge can become conscripted into serving all sorts of
reprehensible purposes.
The novel which
demonstrates this superbly is George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949/1987). The story is widely known now, but surely the character of
O’Brien, the senior Party member, remains one of the most frightening
anyone will ever encounter in their reading. For O’Brien, it must be
admitted honestly, is not really insane. He is actually brilliant and
methodical and deliberate. He gathers intelligence on Winston for seven
years for one expressed purpose – to cause Winston as much pain and
humiliation as possible. At one particularly awful moment late in the
story O’Brien says to Winston, “But always – do not forget this Winston,
– always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing
and constantly growing subtler” (p. 280). After all, O’Brien and the
Party have little to fear from people like Winston. The police in such
an authoritarian state can dispatch anyone they please at any time. No,
Winston has his mind torn apart to give O’Brien and other Party members
pleasure. Once Winston is made to say “Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!”
(p. 300), the destruction of Winston’s personality is complete. Winston
will never be able to reconstitute himself after that. Here is knowledge
of another person’s life put to the most brutal of purposes. The members
of the Party, like O’Brien, are not
just sadistic – the sad truth
is that they are also very smart and patient and actually very attentive
to the smallest aspects of other people’s lives.
Even though we
do not live in a totalitarian state like the characters in Orwell’s
novel, the story is still relevant to those of us who live within a
liberal democracy, since it reminds us that the stories our students are
reading are highly prone to being warped by widely different social and
political discourses, each with its own distinct interpretive interests.
My illustration of this point comes from Elizabeth Spelman’s
Fruits of Sorrow (1997), which
looks at the politicized questions one faces when talking about human
suffering: “whose pain counts, what such pain means, and who gets to
provide answers to those questions” (p. 88). For Spelman our attention
to suffering is uneven and conflicted in that some stories of pain are
celebrated, others ignored; some achieve an impact that points beyond
their own specific context, while others are not interpreted so widely;
and often it seems that what matters most is not who has or is suffering
but who has the authority to speak about it.
To demonstrate
the cogency of this argument, Spelman discusses Harriot Jacobs’
Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl, Written by Herself, first published in 1861. “One important
function of slave narratives,” writes Spelman, “was to generate
compassion in their audiences, provoke the kind of feeling that would
incline readers to help relieve suffering and oppose evil” (p. 59).
In the preface to Incidents (1861/1973), Jacobs herself confirms the centrality of
this purpose when she explains what she was primarily hoping to achieve
by telling her story:
But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the
North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at
the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them
far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince
the people of the Free States what slavery really is. Only by experience
can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of
abominations. (p. xiv)
Notice how
Jacobs’ “desire to arouse the women of the North” was to be achieved by
her “testimony,” or the telling of her experience of profound suffering
caused by the Southern practice of slavery. I think Greene would agree
that Jacobs’ novel is exactly the sort of book that has the potential to
help make people and the institutions of society less cruel. But Spelman
points out the numerous tensions and contradictions that accompany such
a reading. A key theme here, for example, is the delicate relationship between black and white women in the context of slavery that inexorably finds its way into both the construction and reading of the text. On the surface it looks like just a plain fact that Jacobs wrote under the pseudonym “Linda Brent.” But looking deeper reveals that she did so on the advice, according to Spelman, of the white abolitionist, Amy Post (p. 69). Spelman continues that Incidents ends with the “self-contradictory moment” where “her freedom is purchased by the northern white woman by whom she was employed” (p. 69). So while wanting to describe hers and others suffering as slaves and thereby move people to feel compassion and, hopefully, work for political and social change, there was the danger for Jacobs that her white readers would pity her in the bad sense and not see slaves as equals, but as people “not like one of us,” who just need to have their freedom bought by others. Spelman goes so far as to contend that: Incidents is a lesson in how to assert your status as moral agent, and maintain authorship of your experiences, even as you urge your audience to focus on the devastating suffering to which you have been subjected against your will. Brent/Jacobs is well aware that in the process of getting her audience to feel for her and other slaves as crushed victims of an evil institution supported by cruel people, she may simply provoke hostile disapproval of her actions and character, or an anemic kindliness, mistakenly understood by those who feel it to be proof of their Christian virtue. (p. 70)
Spelman is
right to call our attention to Jacobs’ dual message that slaves needed
both to be seen as equal moral agents with the right to tell their own
stories, and as victims of an oppressive and cruel institution that
required whites to take notice if it was going to be changed. Spelman is
also correct when she astutely observes that many whites would be made
only uncomfortable by Jacobs’ book, and would otherwise do nothing.
Equally unsettling is the thought that even those readers who were
sympathetic may have been so for the wrong reasons. Instead of seeing
slaves as “people like us” who feel pain and humiliation “like we
would,” many surely interpreted Jacob’s message within their own moral
vocabulary, even gaining a sense of being “virtuous” by what they saw as
their moral allegiance with Jacobs’ message.
I read Spelman
as warning us that the stories that people tell about their lives,
stories which try to give shape and meaning to their pain and suffering,
are prone to being manipulated and even knowingly conscripted into the
narratives and interests of others. This raises a concern regarding the
extent to which literature generally is even well placed to communicate
the stories of others so that “empathy’ is increased. Perhaps a
significant portion of literature actually encourages the opposite
effect by reinforcing sexist, racist, and other prejudicial attitudes.
It is revealing
to consider how teachers in post-secondary institutions have felt about
many of these problems in their own life and work and utilize literature
today in their teaching and research. Philosopher Richard Rorty (1999),
for example, in a book entitled
Philosophy and Social Hope, warns us about what he saw as the most
prevalent interest of literary scholars, the production of what he calls
“methodical readings”:
Methodical readings are typically produced by those
who lack what Kermode, following Valéry, calls “an appetite for poetry.”
They are the sort of thing you get, for example, in an anthology of
readings on Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness which I recently slogged through—one psychoanalytic
reading, one reader-response reading, one feminist reading, one
deconstructionist reading, and one new historicist reading. None of the
readers had, as far as I could see, been enraptured or destabilized by
Heart of Darkness. (p. 145)
What is
primarily at stake here are two very different views on how we ought to
relate to literature. The
methodical approach, according to Rorty, is specialist and
technical, drawing on a refined vocabulary to produce a
reading or perspective of a
given text. By contrast, a poetic
reading is about being enraptured
or destabilized by a text,
having the sort of profound experience, he continues, “which has made a
difference to the critic’s conception of who she is, what she is good
for, what she wants to do with herself” (p. 145). While it might be
unfair to conclusively say that none of the writers who contributed to
the anthology in question were moved by
Heart of Darkness in this way,
it is fair to say, as Rorty does, that none of their readings provide
any indication that they were. What those interpretative essays lack, in
other words, is evidence of what Rorty bluntly calls “a great love or a
great loathing,” the sort of reaction, on a personally seismic scale,
that “changes us by changing our purposes, changing the uses to which we
shall put people and things and texts we encounter later” (p. 145).
What Rorty’s
analysis suggests is that the tendency in academic circles to read
“methodically” is deep and pervasive. It turns out that it is also older
than we might expect. Thirty years ago, for example, John Gardner (1978)
complained in On Moral Fiction that
The language of critics, and of artists of the kind
who pay attention to critics, has become exceedingly odd: not talk about
feelings or intellectual affirmations—not talk about moving and
surprising twists of plot or wonderful characters and ideas—but
sentences full of large words like
hermaneutic, heuristic,
structuralism, formalism,
or opaque language, and full
of fine distinctions—for instance those between
modernist and
post-modernist—that would make
even an intelligent cow suspicious. Though more difficult than ever
before to read, criticism has become trivial. (emphasis Gardner, p. 4)
Of course
producing methodical literary interpretations and thereby trivializing
fiction might be one thing, and we should certainly expect better from
the people paid to teach it, but what is even more disheartening is when
even thoughtful readers who approach it in the right way no longer hold
out any hope that literature can make any difference to democracy. In
How to Read and Why (2000) the
enormously popular literary theorist Harold Bloom explicitly warns, “Do
not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how
you read” (p. 24). This is Bloom’s second principle of reading, and the
reason he gives for it is that in his limited view “self-improvement is
a large enough project for your mind and spirit” (p. 24). How exactly
people are supposed to improve themselves without it having at least an
indirect impact on social life, Bloom never tells us, but his point is
abundantly clear – reading fiction does not contribute to democracy, and
it is therefore wrong to even assume it might.
But even if we
ignore the literary professionals and try to stay true to Greene’s
pedagogical vision by focusing on our own classrooms where we work and
make our lives, the threat from the wider capitalist culture is both
unavoidable and a complete onslaught. Perhaps the best account of how
reading generally has been dampened due to the impact of the pervasive
and monolithic entertainment industry, can be found in Neil Postman’s
Amusing Ourselves to Death
(1985), a book that predicts with frightening accuracy just how dumbed-down
and feeble-minded technology could make us. While in Postman’s case the
culprit is primarily television, the explosion of the internet since he
wrote the book has only made his insights all the more tragic in their
force. Cultural life, apparently, is not without a sense of irony, given
that Postman offered warnings--in a book--about how books were going to
be even further neglected in the face of a growing techno-culture.
To give a personal anecdote that reveals what Postman
was driving at, in the mid 1990’s, when I first started teaching in high
schools, a new video game had just appeared on the market and was all
the latest craze. One day three boys in grade nine tried to explain to
me how in the virtual world of the game, if you stole the right cars and
hit just the right people while speeding through the city, and killed
enough police officers, you could build up enough points and money to
have sex with prostitutes. The way to double your point score, however,
was to then murder the prostitutes and take the money back. The giggling
boys were clearly enjoying telling me how the game worked. When I became
visibly annoyed and told them that I found what they were describing
quite disgusting, the vice-principal overheard me and asked me to join
her in her office. She then told me to tone down such responses in the
future and reminded me that it was not the school’s place to tell
parents how to spend their own money. When I went back to the staffroom
my colleagues reacted with some combination of “you are so naïve!” and
“you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Despite tired arguments to the contrary,
many aspects of so-called “youth culture,” which, it should be noted,
are not actually made by youth
as they are marketed at youth
by large corporations, are grossly hyper-violent, demeaning to women,
casual in their cruelty, and, most charmingly of all, obnoxious beyond
belief.
A
Chastened View of the Role of Fiction in
Democratic Education
I would like to
believe nothing else with more certainty than that on a regular basis,
eager students and passionate teachers really are reading works of
fiction together that are making a difference to how they live together
democratically. But the question remains, given the bad news I have
outlined, how exactly are
educators supposed to encourage Greene’s “wide-awakeness” through the
reading of fiction? More
specifically, I am left wondering how thoughtful teachers handle the
complex realities of textual interpretation, given the necessity of
Rilkian courage to pay attention, while facing the lack of assurance
that empathy, however defined, is easily secured, and can even
degenerate into enhancing various forms of subtle cruelty. I am also
left unsure what the right response is to the political rhetoric of
suffering that any class of students will inevitably encounter, the lack
of support from teachers at the post-secondary level, plus the larger
cultural ethos that while being so detrimental to literary values such
as listening and caring, seems to celebrate random violence, promiscuous
sexuality, and the making of money at whatever the social cost.
I know that I have not done justice to these problems
here, and there are no doubt others that I have not even considered. But
the one thing that I believe I have shown is that being
chastened about what exactly
the reading of literature contributes to democratic education is a
stance worthy of consideration. To continue to teach literature in
schools, despite the problems I have surveyed, is an act of genuine
dedication and love on the part of teachers everywhere. From my own
experience I know how hard it is, and I respect those teachers who
conclude that for them it is simply too daunting and who decide to
explore job opportunities elsewhere. But it seems to me that our
teachers deserve better for their efforts, on every level. The
depressing reality is that to the extent that the “bad news” persists,
Greene’s vision of what fiction can do for democracy through the best
possible democratic education, shall remain just that, a vision.
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