Professor X (23 page)

Britt is a marketing genius, in her small way, but there is another writer I can think of who makes her look like a piker. An extraterrestrial trying to get a handle on our literature using English texts as a guide might rank Shakespeare first and Judith Ortiz Cofer second. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” comes and goes in new editions; “The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales,” once a staple of college texts in simplified language or not, seems to have disappeared for good; “The Secret Sharer” is wavering, wavering, blinking on and off like a distant lighthouse glimpsed through the fog. But the works of Cofer live on, poems and stories and essays in every college edition. I find her poetry pretty teachable. I have a soft spot for “My Father in the Navy: A Childhood Memory,” which my students respond to with enthusiasm; in its use of connotative meaning, the meaning that swirls above and around the language, it is an absolutely perfect vehicle for showing them the way poetry works.

The collections of nonfiction writing that we read for English 101, supposedly models for the student's work, seem oddly and haphazardly assembled. There are nice pieces, of course. I've used “The Chase” by Annie Dillard in several classes. An excerpt from her full-length memoir
An American Childhood
, “The Chase” finds large thematic significance in a simple anecdote from childhood, and though the language is quite poetic in places, the essay serves as a model for something that could be done, on some basic level, by a student. Ditto the work of Sarah Vowell: as famous as she is, as much the darling of National Public Radio as she has become, and as amusing and moving as her writing can be, there is often much of the college composition about it, theses and topic sentences and supporting details and tidy conclusions that, even when they shock, comfort the reader on some level.

But often I don't have a clue why certain pieces of writing just keep on appearing.

Is any student in 2011 going to write anything that remotely resembles “I Want a Wife,” Judy Brady's protofeminist screed that first appeared in
Ms.
in 1972? And yet there it is, reprinted year after year.

Are any of my students going to write anything nearly as complex, leisurely, and reflective as E. B. White's “Once More to the Lake,” which first appeared in
Harper's
in 1941? It's never a bad thing to read White, of course. The prose both invigorates and relaxes. Reading White is like drinking a milk shake. When the speaker of “Once More to the Lake” watches his son put on the wet bathing suit and feels the chill of death in his own groin, I feel it too. But White, mastermind of
The Elements of Style,
one of the great prose rulebooks, ironically follows a whole different set of rules in “Once More to the Lake.” We need our student writers to be direct: to paint the chair as an object, the seat and the back and legs. White works indirectly, as only a genius can, painting the space around the chair.

Is any student helped by reading “The Plot Against People,” a cry against technology, which could have been written by no one other than Russell Baker and seems very much a fortytwo-year-old piece of work? Can my young students even understand the concept of being ambivalent about technology? I think they embrace technology wholeheartedly.

I keep waiting for William F. Buckley Jr.'s “Why Don't We Complain?” to quietly disappear from nonfiction sections of our literature textbooks, but there it is, year after year, edition after edition, though the world Buckley portrays, the buttoned-down and repressed world of 1961, no longer exists; my students, who hail from a place where everyone complains, loudly, about the smallest injustice, can't make head or tail of what he's saying.

Examples of nonfiction writing work best when they are current. Nora Ephron's “A Few Words About Breasts” is a great essay, a seminal work, but the world has changed so much since she wrote it that its effect for students is blunted. Pamela Anderson, Madonna's conical brassiere, TV shows such as
Nip/ Tuck,
Sharon Osbourne saying she's planning to have her implants removed so that she can give them to her husband, Ozzy, to use as paperweights—all have unfortunately drowned out Ephron's comedy.

On the other hand, I am partial to teaching fiction that is old, burnished, and disconnected from my students' experiences. Does that sound odd? Students learning the mechanisms of literature sometimes find reminders of their own lives a distraction. A student of architecture must study blueprints and diagrams of buildings he or she has never seen, buildings foreign to his or her own aesthetic. A research chemist studying the genetic markers of multiple sclerosis need not have the disease present in his or her own family. I like to assign short stories and poetry that, while revelatory of the human condition, need not say very much about
our particular
human condition. Why not study “The Lady with the Dog,” or “Bartleby the Scrivener” or Alice Munro's “Boys and Girls” or Margaret Atwood's “Death by Landscape”? I enjoy teaching Cheever's “The Country Husband,” that epic tale of alienation and loss and acting out and redemption, that great stew of roiling emotions—but, thankfully, other people's roiling emotions.

How reassuring that so many of the stories I read in college are still there, 30 years on. I don't know if the reason is inertia or inattention, or if these editors actually think that this stuff is worthwhile. I don't know who's shilling for Charlotte Gilman, but there she is, year after year, with her “The Yellow Wall Paper.” Can't have a textbook without “A Rose for Emily.” It's not a party without “Flowering Judas” and “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.” Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, to be sure—but who among non-English majors even knows who Katherine Anne Porter is anymore? Yet her Granny endures, slipping off into death, cruelly disappointed again. The boy in “Araby” lusts after Mangan's sister, that girl with the rope of hair and erotic way of turning the bracelet on her wrist, and still his passion is unconsummated, still he stands in the darkening gallery and burns with the realization of his own foolishness. The fictions play on, wondrously. Nothing is settled. No one has learned a damn thing and we won't either.

I consider a short story such as John Steinbeck's “The Chrysanthemums” to be a perfect tool for teaching the ways in which literature works. Here we have a highly fraught setup: a marriage with a few holes in it, a couple with a great unfulfilled need hanging over them like a winter fog over the Salinas Valley, a woman's pastime sublimating her real desires, a stranger who enters the domestic scene and reveals the truth, the chrysanthemums symbolically abandoned in the road. Quaint? Perhaps. Stolid, old-fashioned, just a touch sexist? Perhaps. But photosynthesis as a subject of study is pretty quaint and stolid too. Understand how “The Chrysanthemums” works and you've got a leg up on understanding how much of literature works.

Back when I was young and green at the teaching game, when I first assigned this story to my students, I had some concerns about its old-fashioned quality. These concerns evaporated when, before the next class, I asked a pair of students who happened to be black what they thought of it. They smiled and nodded with enthusiasm; their eyes lit up with pleasure and relief. “Oh, it was really good,” one said, and then the other added: “It didn't have the n-word or anything.”

Oh yes. We had been using the word “nigger” a lot in the class.

In the minds of textbook editors, the tortured history of race relations in America is a subject ripe for replaying, again and again. Its presence in the texts is unrelenting. Flannery O'Connor is one of my favorite writers, and I have come to appreciate her more since becoming a college instructor because she is incredibly teachable—full of large ideas, packed with potent imagery, violent and twisted enough to keep everyone awake. But she loves nothing more than having characters talk, in the most offhand way, about “niggers.” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” endlessly anthologized, is indeed a great story, but what is the literature teacher to do with that discomfiting business in the middle concerning the grandmother's old beau, Edgar Atkins Teagarden, who once left a watermelon with his initials carved in it on her front porch? She never received the watermelon “because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials E.A.T.!” I know the grandmother is supposed to be an embodiment of evil, and we can consequently file away her racism, but O'Connor herself, as her letters and the big new biography reveal, was far from fully enlightened about racial matters. This comes through in the story. My black students can sense it; when I teach the story, I feel that I am betraying them. They look up at me, earnestly taking notes, and I feel terrible. Here we are having a pleasant enough time in a literature class; why must they have their noses rubbed in the old racial attitudes? And, come to think of it, why must
I
have my nose rubbed in them? “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Revelation,” “The Artificial Nigger”—sometimes I don't have the steam to teach these things, and so I fall back on photocopies of “Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in which O'Connor's mockery is of religion and sensuality and class, or “Good Country People,” in which she turns her scalpel, at least in part, on herself.

Flannery O'Connor is only part of the difficulty. The textbooks with which I am presented to teach college literature are chockablock with tales of racism and oppression. “Battle Royal” seems to be in every anthology. Can't be avoided. It was written by a black man, of course, Ralph Ellison, but that does nothing to lessen the discomfort level of the piece, in which a black valedictorian, invited to give his speech at a smoker, a gathering of his town's “leading white citizens,” discovers that for the crowd's entertainment he and nine other black men will first have to take part in a battle royal, a group boxing match during which all participants are blindfolded. “Bring up the little shines, gentlemen! Bring up the little shines!” says the school superintendent when they are ready to begin. The narrator, with killing understatement, comments that he “suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech.” “Battle Royal,” essentially the first chapter of
Invisible Man,
is nothing short of a racial nightmare. All attempts to concentrate on the mechanics of the story, the way the thing operates, are doomed by the events of the narrative, which is so dark, so twisted, which posits a world in which cruelty is so pervasive and wounds so deep, whites so sadistic and blacks so humiliated, that race relations can never be anything approaching normal. Maybe it's all true, but is this what the class and I have signed up for? We read “Battle Royal” and the old pot of enmity is stirred up. Soon everyone is a little angry, or a little humiliated, or a little ashamed. The glories of foreshadowing and symbolism and subtext seem rather beside the point.

The catalogue of charged material in the textbooks goes on. “Barn Burning” by Faulkner is full of minstrel show dialect and casual talk of “niggers.” Excerpts from Richard Wright's
Native Son
are just as painful. “What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren't)” by Patricia Smith may be a perfectly estimable bit of verse, but its insistence on keeping me, the instructor, on the poem's outside (for I can tell you this much about myself: I am not a black girl) makes it difficult for me to teach. Natasha Trethewey may have won a Pulitzer Prize, but I feel too much the oppressor teaching her “Domestic Work, 1937.” (“All week she's cleaned / someone else's house, . . .”)

In Wole Soyinka's “Telephone Conversation,” the speaker tries to convey the exact hue of his skin to the skeptical potential landlady on the other end of the line. Okay, so it's not the United States. It's probably Nigeria. I still don't want to teach the poem; I want to apologize.

What of “The Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall, in which a little girl who wants to participate in a “Freedom March”—she must think it's some sort of patriotic pageant—is instead sent off to the safety of singing in the children's choir at church, which is reduced to rubble by a bomb? The poem is chilling, as is Toi Derricotte's “A Note on My Son's Face,” in which a black mother wishes for her child to be born white; when she peeks in the infant's bassinet, however, all she sees is “the face of a black man.” How can I teach such a poem? How can I stand in my little classroom, under the buzzing fluorescent lights, in the quiet and airless blue-white gloom, and present, with academic nonchalance, the vision of a sick nightmare? As Sekou Sundiata says in “Blink Your Eyes”:

Wordsworth was right: The world is too much with us.

Some of the nonfiction we study in College Writing is just as loaded. In Maya Angelou's “Champion of the World,” Primo Carnera knocks down Joe Louis in their heavyweight bout, which prompts the narrator to observe, “It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree.” Then there is Gloria Naylor's “The Meaning of a Word” (that word is “nigger,” by the way). I try to avoid “The Fourth of July” by Audre Lord, in which a northern black family, unused to Jim Crow laws, can't get served at a soda fountain in Washington, D.C.; what a “travesty,” the author says, is the Independence Day celebration for black people.

I can't fault black people for writing about race in America. As Margaret Atwood says, “Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.” Race is America's biggest and saddest story. The life of the black writer stands—a loaded gun. The black faces, young and old, look up at me from their desks and I find it difficult to teach those stories, poems, and essays. They make me too sad and worried about humanity. I try retreating to a neutral ground, where it is high and safe and postracial, where no mortar shells will scar our meadow of learning.