The number of things that occur in the early years of high school without reason or forethought is long, but the readings I had, in the late 1970's ("the summer of drugs" as Victoria Williams named the ten year anniversary of the Summer of Love) in English class were more mysterious than most because they seemed to be dumb. Most irrational stuff had the flavor of medicine or aggression, but reading thirty pages of the five hundred page Don Quixote made no sense at all.
I once said that I became a teacher of private high schools (yeah, that's not what I am, but don't interrupt) because I wanted to make sure no one ever suffered through my 10th grade English class again. The year was summed up by that dip into Cervantes. On the first day of the week dedicated to it, I said "maybe he (the Don) isn't mad." The answer I got was, "Shh!" On day five, the teacher returned to the question and revealed that, perhaps, maybe, the Don isn't insane -- that he is a sane man in a mad world. I snapped a pencil in frustration (1).
No reading got me angrier, though, than Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape. We had a unit, at least, on Naturalism, and it made me think that people in the 19th century and turn of the 20th were morons.
In truth, I had a very good curriculum by today's standards, although it was mostly ruined. We read Kafka, O'Neill, Dreiser (yech), as well as Hardy, Shaw, and Flaubert. Today's students are lucky to get 20:1 scale excerpts of any of these authors.
I grumbled a lot as a kid, and I'd like to apologize, but it wasn't entirely my fault. Reading plays in high school is dubious (2). Naturalism, though, seemed dumb and obvious to me in 1977-8 because it was 1977-8, and I doubt it would have seemed so any other time. Of course, the presentation I received also helped kill the appeal of the work.
The high school English curriculum is, has been, and ever will be weird. Let us take that as a given. First, no one ever designed it. It seems as if every generation is reacting against the permanently "bad" design of the last generation, but no one ever admits to ever having been the designer.
Despite this, the model behind the curriculum I got was shaped, as best I can tell, by two ideologies: historical exposition and relevance. By 1978, cultural conservatives and liberals were both satirizing "relevance" as a criterion of high school classes, but that didn't mean that texts weren't chosen for their "relevance to the lives of kids today" (3). The historical mandate was, I think, a watered down version of formalism -- the idea that each innovation in literary form embeds a history of forms, and all art works must be considered as choices of forms with implied rhetorical situations.
The problem was that the two impulses were in overt conflict. Our teachers were not very prepared. They had degrees, by and large, in Education, and only the A.P. teacher had a degree in English. Consequently, they leaned on the apparatus in their guides, and the historicism (4), instead of putting the world in context, allowed us students to view everything we read as something from a museum. "Oh, that stuff was from back then," we'd think, "and it was written to show the tensions in England over the French Revolution" (A Tale of Two Cities).
So, there I was, in a class with a teacher who really liked a genre I call The Depressing Novel. She had us with Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Madame Bovary, and we read O'Neill after that. All three came at us with one explanation: 'Realism and Naturalism emphasize economic determinism, which is the idea that a person has few if any choices in life. Naturalism maintained that every character is doomed by his or her economic class to remain in one economic niche, without any hope for rise.' I read the books, but I glowered red. I believed in free will, and I did not believe that the only reality to human life was economically foredoomed. There was, I smoldered in my notebook, spirit, which allows for thinking outside of the lines we were born into. The teacher thought I wasn't getting the point. 'No,' she answered, 'in Naturalism everything is determined by class.'
When it came to O'Neill, I was already angry, and then the lead character keeps saying the title of the play! Well, come on, I thought, this isn't any good. He has a walloping big inferiority complex and keeps calling himself a hairy ape, and he pulls a Casey Jones (5).
I was too hard on the play. First, modern drama tends to be a bit obvious with its statement of theme. Audiences get to hear the words exactly once, and so playwrights, if they have something to
say, make sure that they say it more than once. The really powerful plays are ambiguous with their
attitudes or create situations that don't have a single solution. In the case of O'Neill, the play was more ambivalent than the teacher.
My complaint at the time -- that the character wasn't doomed by his economic class, but by his belief that everyone else thought in those terms -- was surely something the author intended, even if my teacher did not. Secondly, though, Naturalism and Realism were important because of what they were replying to. This is a play with a Marxist character who isn't correct but isn't wrong. The title character is "Yank," and he is not alienated from the product of his work, so long as he is isolated within his class. However, he cannot move, cannot think, and is not allowed to aspire. The limitations he faces are repression rather than oppression, because he internalizes the voice of the oppressor and performs the savage business of the bosses himself. The play is didactic and melodramatic, but it is a front for a deeper set of issues that the very stiffness of the fable force us to view.
The reason I could not even begin to tolerate, much less enjoy, Naturalism, was that I was given it as if it were the product of a bunch of gloomy Guses sitting about and deciding, "Hey, I feel mopey. I want to get rich talking about how poor people are given the shaft." In 1978, and in high school, it was impossible for any teacher to point out the ideological context against which Hardy, Flaubert, and O'Neill were reacting.
Capitalism has a few lies. One is that "the free market" is capitalism. That, obviously, is not capitalism, and limiting or even abandoning capitalism does not mean shuttering marketplaces. Another, and it is especially dear, is the lie that all winners merit winning -- that the wealthy "earn" their money by their toil. That we can keep hearing this idea from apparently sane individuals is shocking, since I doubt anyone believes that Jamie Dimon has more toil than a single mother fast food worker or a Wal*Mart worker. To think that money comes from toil requires ignorance or fantasy. The third lie is that one good idea or hard work is all that stands between any person and success.
The last of these -- the Ragged Dick myth (6) -- has persisted despite the evidence of our senses and our scholarly studies. Supposing that each person had an equal access to means of production and equal access to the marketplace (i.e. that there were no ethnic or sexual discrimination, for example), and supposing a lack of crime, and supposing freely available education, and supposing a lack of artificial market restrictions in the form of collusion, then each person should succeed -- provided there is no oversupply of the product or labor.
Well.
You know as well as I do that entry to the market is dependent upon capital for most ventures. Where it isn't, education is unequal. Where that is no impediment, an unregulated capitalist society rewards the rare worker, not the valuable one. (This is why Miley Cyrus is better paid than an EMT (7).) Even when workers are not oversupplied, we have endured a new age, where industry hops oceans like mud puddles to create oversupplies of labor, and then reports back that the workers "need to learn to compete in a global marketplace" (8).
In 1977-8, things seemed dark and dire. We had had the oil shock, and we had "stagflation." Interest rates and inflation were supposed to be high. However, the big news was the closing of US Steel. That was the first major loss, but the world to come was unimaginable. We were still expecting revolutionary technology "by the year 2000," after all, and "leisure would be the top problem" for workers then. Research into alternative fuel sources was underway (almost to the point it's at now, oddly enough), and it was pretty clear that we'd be out of oil or off of it before 2000. The U.S.'s financiers were a very small segment of the economy, and a very, very quiet one. No one had heard of a "CEO" back then. It was only then that the mustache-twirling Moneybags capitalists of the Gilded Age seemed like museum exhibits.
Today, we have every apology and every lie of the Gilded Age repeated, and exaggerated. We have politicians comparing Food Stamp recipients to stray dogs. We have a Congress cutting relief to children by 30%, without a riot breaking out. We have radio blasting daily that each poor person chooses to be poor. Naturalism and Realism were not written for the poor to learn from. They were written to challenge the wealthy, to shock the bourgeoisie.
The time has come again.
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1 The "Man of La Mancha" reading of Don Quixote is dumb. The Don is nuts. The fact that the servile and corrupt world around him fails to live up to ideal behavior does not make him right: it makes him doubly crazy. Cervantes as a satirist can hold more than one object in his sights. The Don is a fool, but so are the people who accept daily corruptions.
2 No one reads a play. A play is an event. Therefore, in all English classes, we read scripts with footnotes. The apparatus that explains the play actually takes the text away from its active and eventful nature. There are such radical differences between the rhetorical circumstances of the stage and the page that there is virtually no way to prepare a high school or college class for what they're doing when they read scripts. A poet can rely on multiple connotations, and a fiction writer can demand readers recall each adjective habit to spot a motif, but a dramatist has one pass with words. Plays "read" as obvious in comparison, therefore. (With the usual exceptions of Shakespeare, of course.)
3 "Relevance" is still a criterion, and yet it is just as embarrassing now as it was then. Why put Bruce Springsteen in one's poetry collection? Relevance. Why put Chuck D in there? Relevance. The problem is that students will always say that what they read is not "relevant" to their lives, but there is no imaginable selection that could satisfy the criterion. Relevance is something the teacher has to bring out and the reader must discover -- or not. Choosing Ruby Fruit Jungle because it has externalities similar to an imagined student's life will leave the teacher unprepared to justify the work on other grounds when the inevitable objections come.
4 "Historicism" is the literary theory that all works of literature are responses to their historical moment. Therefore each work can be understood only by or as a reflection upon the political, religious, and cultural changes underway at the time of its composition.
5 He was a steel driving man, Lord, Lord.
6 Horatio Alger got rich by writing about American Dick Whittingtons. Where the English story involves magic, Alger just leans on divine providence. Those who would take Alger's stories to foster the belief that "hard work redeems any man" missed out on a very, very, very powerful theme of divine reward in the novels. Alger relied on a naive sense of grace, where God would never allow the innocent and faithful to fall and where faithfulness would be rewarded. Therefore, the miraculous luck of Ragged Dick and others is, indeed, miraculous.
7 An EMT may remove your clothes. Miley Cyrus. . . probably her own.
8 Notably, employers do not have to compete in a global marketplace. Only workers do.
9 That's my dog up there. She got to go without a leash, so she ran for :45 straight. I think she found a portal to Narnia, too, because she came back to me with some exotic fur in her teeth.