Not so Great Gatsby? A Dialogue about that Novel and the Canon

Dear Reader,

I invited one of my terrific young colleagues, Paul Clark, to talk about The Great Gatsby. Paul–speaking for many others–regards the novel as an American Masterpiece, I do not. Some of this back and forth reflects an ongoing conversation that Paul and I have about canon formation, what kids need to know, the virtues of teaching off-the-beaten track material and the importance of creating a common culture. I spend much of my time reducing Paul’s arguments to straw men and he humors me. I put Paul’s comments in italics.

We thought we’d structure this dialogue (and we are both committed to dialogue) around Gatsby since the movie just came out, though we could have picked something else.

Dan,
 Immediately I’m aware of your home court advantage — and I’m a bit nervous that your invitation to dialogue about Gatsby is in line with your comment about Hemingway’s praise of Twain (“All modern American literature comes from … Huckleberry Finn”). Your claim, if I remember correctly, was that Hemingway was setting a bar he knew he could easily surpass, and so perhaps you drag me to wordpress with similar plans. But I arrive undaunted, with a classic on my side and the memory of many of my students who have requested the “alternate ending” — so charmed were they by the title character.
For my opening: I enter the book the way Nick enters the city:
 Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world….
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all. . . .”
Gatsby’s magic is the sense of infinite possibility he radiates. Nick falls under his spell, and I think it is only the cold-hearted reader who is able to stay sober and clear. Of course, his dreams aren’t able to come fully to fruition, but there’s something hypnotic about his commitment to them, his belief in his own vision of what life holds for him, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This “romantic readiness,” as Nick calls it, should have been stomped out of him years ago, most certainly by the war if by nothing else. And yet the dreams persist, his foolhardy belief that “the rock of the world [is] founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” Admittedly, this is no way to live, but isn’t there something beautiful about it none-the-less? Isn’t there more than a little Don Quixote in him, a character to which you are more than sympathetic?

Dear Paul,
What a wonderful opening! As you know, you have the much more difficult task in our discussion. You love and admire Gatsby and want to share that with others. I do not like Gatsby and think that it and Catcher in the Rye are the two most overrated novels in American Literature with Huck Finn coming in third.
I have taught Gatsby twice (on the recommendation of a colleague I admire greatly–John McGean) and have not re-read it since then–please forgive me if I get things wrong. I found several things disturbing about the novel. Let’s start with this one: is there a likable character in the novel? An admirable one? Daisy? Myrtle? Tom? Gatsby? George? Jordan? Nick?
It is, of course, in theory possible to write a fine novel with no likable characters or admirable characters (but I am struggling to think of one). Nick’s voice, for a WWI vet and Yale grad, has always seemed to me to be remarkably naive (and at times impenetrable–I have no idea what image I am supposed to get from a city “in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money” and I object to seeing a city “always for the first time.” A city could “seem” new each time one enters it but could it be seen for the first time more than once?). While novels have no absolute ethical obligations, I am curious to know what I should learn by watching people who have worshipped themselves and status climbing and money–and finally their own pleasure. You know that when Gatsby was first published reviews were decidedly mixed and the novel was little read until it made it on to so many high school curriculums in the 1950s. During WWII it was handed out free to tens of thousands of soldiers–who having little else to read, read Gatsby. It is my experience that when one has read little, it is easy to have a “favorite” book–when one has read much, few works have no value and few are unassailable masterpieces. Let me answer the question about Don Quixote and pose one to you–Quixote is indeed a character that I admire–a dreamer whose goal is to serve humanity and God (and to become famous doing so). You assert that Gatsby is a “classic,” I wonder on what basis–that lots of people read it (The Da Vinci Code qualifies; that it deals with a particular time period well (perhaps–but wouldn’t that make it a history book more akin to Grapes of Wrath); that it presents a philosophical world view that deserves serious consideration (if so, I’m struggling to figure out what that would be–a Gordon Gecko “greed is good”? a Victorian-era roman a clef looking at the lives of the rich)?

Dan,

I agree with you about the lack of “likable” characters — by my count there’s only one, Gatsby’s father. It breaks my heart when Mr. Gatz arrives from Minnesota, having learned of his son’s death from the newspaper, and asks, “Where have they got Jimmy?” (And the way he beams with pride when he shows Nick his son’s copy of Hopalong Cassidy with that schedule written inside kills me). Though I always find myself rooting for Gatsby, I do think there’s a bit of trickery involved. This has been replicated by countless romantic comedies — to justify the male or female lead cheating on his/her partner to find his/her true love, the partner is made out to be a horrendous character, a trap that the hero/heroine must escape. It’s a failure to provide a reasonable conflict. So we’re rooting for Gatsby to break up a marriage (that has produced a kid no less!) simply because Tom is so vapid and cruel. And when Nick shouts to Gatsby that he’s “worth the whole damn bunch put together,” what, really, is he saying?

But I agree with Claire Messud on this topic. “If you’re reading to find friends,” she says, “you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?’” For me, Fitzgerald’s characters are alive — even (and especially) Nick, whom I tend to “like” less with each read. Quick to judgement and blind to his own short-comings, cold himself while criticizing others’ lack of care, happy to retreat to his own moral upbringing in the face of a conflict of values, yet unable to fully extricate himself from the situation… Nick is still captivated by Gatsby’s strong romantic vision, the little piece of humanity he believes is worth something. Admirable? Heck no. But I think we can find these qualities in ourselves in our lesser moments.

As for what makes a classic, I’m happy to be generous with the term. Isn’t there a natural selection that happens with stories within a culture? So even if Gatsby began its tremendous run in the 1940s barracks, doesn’t it mean something that it has stuck around decades later, and that so many people carry that character around with them in their heads?

We’ll see if Da Vinci Code (or Twilight or 50 Shades) stands the test of time. We English teachers are reader-for-hire, and as such, we are of service in two ways (I’m stealing a bit from you here): we conserve and pass on the great books from the past that our students wouldn’t otherwise encounter, and we help them make sense of the stories they encounter without our suggestion in their daily lives. (The latter is one of the many reasons I’m teaching Frank Miller’s incredible The Dark Knight Returns right now.) I believe that we do not like stories accidentally — maybe they speak to the best in us, maybe they speak to the worst. And maybe they speak to a quality that is just there, one that we have to figure out what to do with: that yearning for perfection, for the ultimate prize, whatever our personal interpretation of it may be.

Paul,

I admire your response on several levels–I had forgotten that Mr. Gatz makes an appearance. I’m not sure the obstacles of a Rom-Com are comparable to the destruction of marriages and, ultimately lives, but perhaps they exist on a continuum. Also, I’m particularly intrigued by Claire Messud’s observation–and I am not sure I agree–though it certainly sounds reasonable on its surface. I do not read searching for “friends” but I suppose I read searching for knowledge of self or the world around me, to be entertained (I think it is easy for “professional readers for hire” such as ourselves to dismiss the appetite for joy or entertainment as somehow not worthy or noble enough–an attitude that says if we don’t suffer as we read then we can’t be learning anything. I suspect also that I am looking for a “friend” in the author if not in the characters–or worthwhile companions if not friends–I have to think more about this). Still, I am struck by your sense of what Forster would call “rounded characters.” Perhaps that is part of my “disillusionment” with Gatsby–the characters are round/real–and universally disagreeable, hypocritical, and repellent–so I do not find myself enriched or entertained by them. Your lovely sense that we “conserve” a tradition and pass that along is indeed something I am charmed by–but like anything else (as a Jungian I can’t help but say this), it has a Shadow side. What if the tradition we pass on is profoundly morally or intellectually flawed (like defending slavery or segregation or refusing to acknowledge the truth of Copernicus, etc–and what current things do we debate [global warming or drone strikes] that future generations will settle against us? What if the acclamation of Gatsby is really the accretion of thousands of readers led to believe that the emperor is clothed when, in fact, he isn’t? I’ll conclude with two things: 1) thanks to you I will re-read Gatsby next fall with my habitual generosity of mind; and 2) we’ll have another discussion like this on the blog and attempt to address the importance of creating common culture and teaching students to “make sense of the stories that they encounter” and, I’ll add, to learn to narrate themselves into a fuller, richer, human tapestry.

Alan Parker’s “Come See the Paradise” complete with ruminations on historical fiction

About a year ago I watched Alan Parker’s Come See the Paradise with a brilliant teacher. This past summer I took part in a seminar run by a gifted colleague that introduced us to the history of various immigrant communities to the United States in the 20th century. For my project, I produced the following review of Parker’s too-little-known movie.

Alan Parker’s Come See the Paradise: Visualizing History
Visual images have a power over us unmatched by the power of words and even by the power of sounds. In the remembrances of Rodney King after his death two months ago several commentators pointed out that absent the video footage of the beating, King’s complaint against the police for brutality would have been merely words—and King likely another anonymous victim.

Repressive regimes have long regarded visual images as incredibly dangerous and have worked diligently to control them. The Nazis, whose obsessive organization and categorization of all things related to the death camps down to the amounts of Zyklon B to be used in any “extermination” and how many corpses could be burned at one time were equally fanatical about keeping photographs of the camps from becoming public. It is believed that only two sets of photographs from camp workers exist.

Visual images can take the form of documentary work and of fictional representations—and there can be a blurred line between these two. One thinks of Matthew Brady “posing” corpses for photographs during the Civil War to make his point more clearly or the work of Dorothea Lange and her relationship to her subjects, the staging of certain iconic shots. In documentary work there are countless ethical questions raised by even taking pictures—by being an “observer” when, critics often maintain, you should be a participant. The relationship between documentary and fictional representations raises both moral and epistemological questions; and perhaps nowhere are those questions more vexed than in a work of historical fiction.

In 1988, British filmmaker Alan Parker released Mississippi Burning, a retelling of the disappearance and death in 1964 of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner that drew outrage from numerous vantage points. Parker had already had some commercial success—and engendered some mild controversy—with Midnight Express (1978) and Angel Heart (1987)(based on the scariest novel I’ve ever read, William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel)

Parker was criticized pointedly for two choices he made. Instead of focusing on the three young civil rights workers, Parker chose to focus on two FBI agents as they searched for the missing workers. Parker defended that choice and he makes a plausible argument. The episode, though it should be extremely well-known, is not. And, by putting the audience with the FBI we follow the investigation and “learn” as they do not only of the crime but of the effects of Jim Crow and the kind of prejudice that ruled Mississippi at the time. The other choice that drew such criticism was to “create” a black FBI field agent who—in a remarkably tense scene, describes the castration of a black man with a heated razor blade and a paper cup. His threat to perform the same “operation” on one of the people who participated in the crime helps the FBI break the case. Problems abound, to point out only two: there were no black FBI field agents at the time because the FBI was a deeply racist organization. In addition, this fiction makes the FBI out to be criminals whose justification is that they are serving a greater good, a position voiced most thoroughly by the character played by Gene Hackman.

The actual facts of the case are now well-established. The three civil rights workers were almost certainly killed on the night of June 21 or early in the morning of June 22 following their release from the county jail in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The deputy sheriff, Cecil Price, working with the Klan, ran the workers of f the road. They were beaten and shot and then buried in an earthen dam. On July 10, the FBI opened a Mississippi office of the FBI and by July 31 they had discovered the probable location of the bodies when someone claimed a $30,000 reward. On August 3 a search warrant was obtained and the bodies were discovered on August 4.

Parker was stung by the criticism of Mississippi Burning and when he announced that his next project was to concern the internment of Japanese American during WWII he faced a barrage of criticism before he got to production. He has said that he is drawn to “the unfinished business of racism in the United States” (DVD commentary). To ameliorate concerns, Parker met with hundreds of survivors; he studied photographs from the time; he scrupulously constructed sets, used background music, and significantly used only Japanese and Japanese American actors for their parts.

     Come See the Paradise is the result and while not a wholly satisfactory film, it has many things to commend it—particularly the visual rendering of an event that the United States government sought to diminish or suppress by controlling visual images. Parker has said that he wanted to write a love story after Mississippi Burning and that at the same time he was haunted by a picture taken by Dorothea Lange of a Japanese grandfather and his two grandsons that he had in his office (“Director’s Commentary,” Come See the Paradise). These two sources exist in an uneasy tension in Come See the Paradise.

The movie is told in a frame where a Japanese American mother is telling her daughter about her relationship to her husband and the daughter’s father. They are walking to the train station to meet him. The scene shifts Brooklyn in 1936 when James McGurn, an Irish American labor activist gets involved in the burning of a movie theater that has hired non-union projectionists. They are supposed to only set smoke bombs but one team intentionally sets a fire and it nearly causes several deaths. McGurn is seen going back to rescue people and identified as an agitator. His local boss gives him money and tells him that he needs to get lost and get a new identity. With a brother in Los Angeles, he changes his name to Jack McGinn and heads to LA. Parker is often heavy-handed in his expository scenes and the scene with Jack (Dennis Quaid) and his brother (Colm Meany) is a primer on labor relations coming out of the depression. A series of events leads him to take the job as a projectionist (non-union!) at a theater in Little Tokyo.

Before Jack gets the job as projectionist we are introduced to the Kawamura family—Mr. and Mrs. are Issei but their six children: Lily, Charlie, Harry, Dulci, Joyce, and Frankie, are Nisei. When we meet the Kawamura’s they are at a Japanese social club where the father gambles and Harry, the oldest son, entertains—his signature song is the catchy “Until the Real Thing Comes Along.” The night we are introduced to the Kawamura’s there is a play being put on at the community center—Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice—in Japanese. Parker filmed the whole thing and then left all of it save the curtain call on the cutting room floor.

The very “Americanness” of the Japanese comes through in all of their interests. Harry is getting small roles in Hollywood—ironically as a Chinese house-boy—and the children from older to younger understand and speak less Japanese until Frankie, the youngest, neither speaks nor understands the language of his parents. Jack and Charlie become friends—going to lunch together and playing baseball together. Charlie introduces Jack to his sister, Lily (the beautiful Tamlyn Tomida), and Jack is love-struck.

The burgeoning affair between Jack and Lily allows Parker to have Lily assert herself as a woman not merely be a Japanese daughter. Parker is conscious that intermarriage was rare though not unheard of in the 30s and he acknowledges as much in his commentary. There is substantial tension in the family as the father has tried to marry Lily off to a much older cannery owner—Lily fights back mightily even though her brother Charlie tells her it will clear the family debts (the father has a gambling problem) and she should marry to help the family. Jack and Lily are forced to move to Seattle, Washington to get married due to the anti-miscegenation laws in California. Their life there, with a child—Mini—and a Jack’s job in a cannery that treats its workers brutally is wonderfully evoked. Lily reminds Jack that he cannot think only for himself but despite her warnings he is caught up in a “work action,” kicked by a police horse breaking his arm and he is arrested. Lily takes Mini and heads back to California to be with her estranged family. It is 1941.

Jack, on parole, goes to rekindle his life with Lily and Mini. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Mr. Kawamura is taken away for questioning. At Christmas of 1941, Jack takes Mini to see Santa Claus and she is kicked out of the store for being a “Jap.” Jack’s “loyalty” to America is questioned by those who know he is married to a Nisei. After Executive Order 9066 is enacted on February 6, 1942, the Kawamura’s have only a few days to get their belongings together—only what they could carry. In an arresting scene at the yard sale Charlie sits spinning a basketball in his hands watching people pick over the family’s goods. Inside Harry, Lily, and the others break all of the albums they have collected and they destroy their piano—in response to the terribly insulting offer of $10. Mrs. Kawamura sits upstairs in the house burning letters, pictures, report cards and mementos. She explains to Lily that she doesn’t want strangers going through their things but that she is completely conscious that she is cutting them off from their history. Lily promises that she’ll remember.

The evacuation to the horse farms which house the 120,000 displaced people while the 10 “camps” were being built, up is depicted with extraordinary fidelity to the few photographs that exist. As the family is being relocated to Manzanar—perhaps the most famous of the camps—Jack is enlisting in the army. Scenes of his basic training where he is expected to bayonet straw dummies with Japanese faces are intercut with the Kawamura family’s installation in Manzanar. Charlie’s bag is searched and his camera is taken from him. One cannot help but think that this is a commentary on the lack of photographic evidence of the camps. Even though the government would hire Dorothea Lange to photograph Manzanar they required her to avoid shots that would show the barbed wire or guard towers in the back ground. In fact, her film was eventually taken from her and the photographs that have been released have been heavily edited.

In an act of historical fidelity, Parker depicts a group of Japanese American musicians playing to welcome the “prisoners.” For those who have studied the induction to Auschwitz the whole scene with the “prisoners” marked with their tags parading past the musicians playing to make them docile and comfortable is exceptionally disturbing—and accurate.

Life in Manzanar is extraordinary–the barracks at Manzanar contain pictures of Roosevelt, a school where the children recite the Pledge of Allegiance, baseball and basketball games, a structure for the making of camouflage nets (Lily gets paid $14.00 a week to do this), and a factory where the inmates work for the government that has betrayed them. They have “Miss Nisei” night and sing Andrews’ Sisters’ songs at gatherings. Every one of these activities is painstakingly rendered and is the result of hundreds of interviews and substantial research. That we “see” so many of the prisoners participate in these activities has an effect on the viewer that mere reading cannot replicate. Parker drew all of these images from diaries, histories, sketches, and interviews.

In camp, Mr. Kawamura—now a profoundly broken man—is returned to the family. He is suspected by the rebellious inmates (mostly kitchen workers) of having informed to the FBI—though he did not. Charlie and Harry battle for the soul of the family. Charlie participates in the uprising that leads to the Manzanar riot. Harry recommends that they answer the infamous survey questions 27 and 28 regarding loyalty with “yes.” Charlie becomes one of the “no-no” boys (those who answered “no” to questions 27 and 28) and is patriated (“repatriated” seems wrong as he is NOT Japanese) to Japan and Harry joins the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—the most highly decorated Army division in history. Jack goes AWOL to see his family and arrives at the end of the riots. Parker’s sense of the dramatic and ironic is on display when Jack sits with the extremely ill Mr. Kawamura treating him as a father while Charlie is sent to Japan and Harry is in the army.
Mr. Kawamura dies. Harry is killed in combat. Jack is imprisoned for his involvement in the long-ago Brooklyn theater fire. The family never hears from Charlie. Dulci returns from a work camp pregnant. In a stunning series of events the Kawamura family is nearly broken—its male members are all gone except for Frankie who is so young he has the least connection to his own culture. When the Endo case is decided in late 1944 and the camp is eventually closed, the Kawamura’s are sent to Idaho. They will listen in horror to the radio reports of the bombing of Hiroshima in August of 1945.

The movie closes with Jack’s return from prison and his welcome on the train station platform by Lily and Mini. Finally, despite the destruction of family, geography, culture, and principles Parker seems determined to end on a hopeful note.

As a work of art Come See the Paradise is almost certainly too long—and not long enough. Its remarkable ambition guarantees that not enough time can be spent on any single story and yet its determination to tell a story that is still too-little known with as much fidelity to history as possible is a mark of distinction. Parker’s sense that a whole sweep of history can be told—shown—through an exhaustive examination of the “real” and “true” experiences of a fictional family is a claim that demands our attention.

                                                           Works Consulted
Akemi Kikumura. Promises Kept: The Life of an Issei Man. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp Publishers, 1991
Akemi Kikumura. Through Harsh Winters: The Life of a Japanese Immigrant Woman. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp Publishers, 1981.
Armstrong, Douglas. “Wartime Japanese American Injustice Plumbed in Come See the Paradise. Milwaukee Journal. Feb 03, 1991 E. 10.
Asian American Encyclopedia, ed. Franklin Ng. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 1995.
Carnes, Mark C. “Shooting Down the Past: Historians vs Hollywood.” Cineaste 2004: 45-49.
“Come See the Paradise,” Wikipedia. 7/21/2012.
Dictionary of American History Revised Edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997
Drummond, William. Report on NPR about Come See the Paradise. Proquest.
Great Events: The Twentieth Century 1939-1947. Englewood Cliffs: SalemPress, xxxx.
Mathews, Jack. “Alan Parker’s Sentimental Paradise a Hit in Cannes Festival: After Mississippi, the English Director Softens His Approach in Dealing with the U.S. Internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.” Los Angeles Times May 15, 1990.
Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Ed. Lawson Fusao Inada. Berkeley: Heyday, 2000.
Parker, Alan. Come See the Paradise. DVD. 1990.
Sone, Monica. Nisei Daughter. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1953.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown.
Zinn, Howard and Anthony Arnove. Voices of a People’s History of the United States. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004.

Summer of Dreck and Marcus Aurelius Takes Inventory! A disjointed blog-post.

The first writing that my students do is a version of making a list.  We read the opening to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and it becomes clear that: 1) he believes that virtue or character can be, and should be, taught and learned (that is a concept many have not thought about); and 2) that one does not learn only in school.  (Here are three entries from Meditations: “Manliness without ostentation I learnt from what I have heard and remember of my father,” and “My mother set me an example of piety and generosity, avoidance of all uncharitableness–not in actions only, but in thought as well,” and “From Rusticus [a teacher] I derived the notion that my character needed training and care….Also I was to be accurate in my reading, and not content with a mere general idea of the meaning; and not to let myself be too quickly convinced by a glib tongue.”) So, I have my students write an imitation of the first book of Meditations.  During the discussion as we set the assignment up I ask them if they can learn from fictional or imaginary characters? from their pets? Can they learn by negation (to see someone do something and swear never to act like that)?  We have a pretty healthy discussion about things that can be learned and who is teaching (even if they don’t think of it as teaching). My students inventory the things that they value (often teamwork, generosity, hard work, compassion, perseverance) and the people who have helped them learn these things–it gives them a chance to make their gratitude explicit–and to begin to define–explicitly–who they are and who they want to be. I also get a chance to see what they value and, in a limited way, where their writing skills are.

THE DISJOINTED PART

The blog is named PulpTeacher because it is my contention that there are lots of things to be learned from genre literature (mysteries, thrillers, horror, SF, graphic novels, and westerns [romances too if I knew anything about them]), popular movies, and all kinds of popular culture.  I spend a fair amount of time working between so-called “classics” (Marcus Aurelius and Plato and Ovid for example) and so-called “pulp” and trying to demonstrate what they share. Critics might point out, fairly, I guess, that I have decidedly middle-brow tastes. In that spirit I provide a list of “pulp” that I read this summer along with a couple of “higher brow” things. Here is an example of PulpTeacher’s mind at work.  (Ah, now we get to the digression–where much real learning takes place.) I taught my students Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Inception last year.  I had admired his Batman Begins and thought The Dark Knight superior. Virtually all of my students really liked the Batman movies (though they were essentially inarticulate about why–“they’re cool” is not really critical analysis).  So I saw The Dark Knight Rises this summer and I thought”–too busy, too ambitious, too loud and, perversely, too long and not long enough–still worth seeing though (it is too long because of the time–153 minutes or so but it is too short because it has so many threads in the loom that it has trouble giving them all the time they need–hence a sense of hurriedness despite the length).  The trio (are they a trilogy?) of Batman movies by Nolan raise the following questions which, though they overlap from movie to movie, are raised in a kind of bas-relief by each one: Batman Begins–What are my obligations to myself? (So we see him engage in a kind of existential self-creation, self-definition); The Dark Knight–What are my obligations to those I love/who are closest to me? (Rachel in particular but Chief Gordon, Harvey Specter, Alfred); The Dark Knight Rises–What are my obligations to my city/the polis/community? (Do I have to lie for them? die for them?). All of these questions overlap, of course, but it is possible to think through them using this template to begin–and students can and will make these arguments passionately.  Notice how these “themes” are shared themes of the “classics.” Acts of self-discovery and self creation from Oedipus to Hamlet; obligations to those I love from Antigone to Lear; obligations to my city or community from The Republic to Measure for Measure and on an on. Pulp teaching makes “pulp” more “respectable” and the “classics” more teachable.

My summer mystery/pulp reading included:

1) Matthew Quirk’s “The 500” (not good)

2) Elizabeth Haynes’ “Into the Darkest Corner” (satisfactory)

3) Barry Eisler’s “The Khmer Kill” (satisfactory +)

4) and 5) Karin [sic] Slaughter’s “Snatched”  (satisfactory +) and “Criminal” (quite good)

6) Harlan Coben’s “Fade Away” (not good)

7) Chuck Hogan’s “The Killing Mood” (good)

8) William Landay’s “Defending Jacob” (good +)

9) Olen Steinhauer’s “Nearest Exit” (OK)

10) Chris Pavone “The Expats” (good)

11) and 12) Gillian Flynn’s “Dark Places” (good) and “Gone Girl” (superior +)

13) and 14) Bruce DeSilva’s “Cliff Walk” (quite good) and “Rogue Island” (good +).

15) Patrick Dewitt, “The Sisters Brothers” (good).

16) James Lee Burke: Creole Belle (superb).  I offer two exemplary passages from it:

“No one likes to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of love and faith and robs us of all serenity. It steals both our sleep and our sunrise and makes us treacherous and venal and dishonorable. It fills our glands with toxins and effaces our identity and gives flight to any vestige of self-respect. If you have ever been afraid, truly afraid, in a way that makes your hair soggy with sweat and turns your skin gray and fouls your blood and spiritually eviscerates you to the point where you cannot pray lest your prayers be a concession to your conviction that you’re about to die, you know what I am talking about.”  Creole Belle, p. 193

“Age is a particular kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don’t recognize.” Creole Belle, p. 204

17) Gregg Hurwitz, The Survivor (very good)

18 and 19) Maureen McHugh, Mother and Other Monsters and After the Apocalypse (Both are collections of stories–superb but unteachable–or better said–most are inappropriate for teaching to high school kids)

I read LOTS OF DROSS FOR A BIT OF GOLD–but isn’t that ever the way.

For school I also reread Simon Weisenthal’s The Sunflower and Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World.

On the nonfiction side I read:

Phineas Gage by John Fleischmann

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden–an almost unbearable look into North Korea; and,

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel–possibly the best thing I read.

Next up for me is the new Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel The Prisoner of Heaven (with a substantial tip-of-the-hat to The Count of Monte Cristo according to the reviews).  I will be teaching his Shadow of the Wind (and getting a chance to really think through “melodrama”) this year.

Next week some thoughts on teaching Ovid and pattern recognition.

Definitions in “Courage”–another great one-day lesson–just cut and paste!

We all know what THAT means…whatever THAT is. Actually, many times we use words and DO NOT mean the same thing that our auditor or reader are thinking. I borrowed part of this cool exercise from a text called Writing Arguments and I do it with my students when I talk about definitional papers and, even more specifically, when I have them work on in-text definitions. There are lots of words we use whose meaning is actually vague, or whose meaning is clear to us but someone else has a different idea about what it means.  Consider the following: myth, anarchy, friendship, fascist, leadership, and love.  These are just a few words that are open to lots of meanings. To set this exercise up, print the following and have students answer each of the 8 following YES or NO (there are two parts to “g”). They do this in silence. In the mean time, put up on the board two columns Y and N (or COURAGEOUS and NOT COURAGEOUS) and 8 spaces. Again, WITHOUT discussion take votes on the answers for each. I’ll give you a chance to vote and then come back at the bottom with some follow-up on what to do once the vote totals are on the board.

Defining “Courage”

a. A neighbor rushes into a burning house to save a child from certain death and emerges, coughing and choking, with the child in his arms. Is the neighbor courageous?
b. A firefighter rushes into a burning house to rescue a child from certain death and emerges with the child in his arms. The firefighter is wearing protective clothing and a gas mask. When a newspaper reporter calls him courageous, he says, “Hey, this is my job, it’s what I’m trained to do.” Is the firefighter courageous?
c. A teenager rushes into a burning house to recover a memento give to him by his girlfriend, the first love of his life. Is the teenager courageous?
d. A parent rushes into a burning house to save a trapped child. The fire marshal tell the parent to wait because there is no chance the child can be reached from the first floor. The fire marshal wants to try cutting hole in the roof to reach the child. The parent rushes into the house anyway and is burned to death. Is the parent courageous?

e. A mountain climbers, parachutists, and thrill seekers courageous in scaling rock precipices or jumping out of airplanes during their leisure time?
f. Is a robber courageous for performing a daring bank robbery? What if someone gets hurt or killer?
g. Tom and Pat are standing on a cliff high above a lake. Tom dares Pat to dive into the water. Pat refuses, saying it is too dangerous. Tom double-dares Pat who still refuses. Tom dives into the water and, after he surfaces, yells up to Pat and calls him a coward and taunts him to provoke him to dive. Pat starts to dive but then backs off and walks down the trail to the lake; he feels ashamed and silly. Was Tom courageous? Was Pat courageous?

About half the time I have everyone agree that the neighbor (a) is courageous–though there are those who will argue that the neighbor is “stupid.” In fact, though this exercise ALWAYS works, I know it will be a killer class if I can get someone to argue the neighbor is not courageous.  After (a) though, I get remarkable splits. Once we have votes for each of the 8 questions I ask someone from the minority vote–whichever that was–to voice reasons and then I ask if anyone wants to add to that. I then ask for the same from the majority vote position. I am able to proffer suggestions and questions–does courage have a moral dimension? (so are thrill-seekers and robbers out? how do you discover the moral dimension?) Is physical danger a part of courage (so Pat cannot be courageous)? Is a “worthy” goal necessary? (And how would we decide worthy?–so the teenager saving movie tickets or whatever is out?) Is success necessary–suppose the neighbor dies? or the parent who disregards the fire marshal survives? Does it matter if the parent has other children and dies essentially abandons them and bankrupts the surviving spouse? What if you gain from the act? or if you are trained for the act? (The robber gains from the act; the firefighter gets paid; but could it be courageous just to do the job of firefighter? What if what you gain is fame?–so, Does motive matter?  How would you know what the motive is?) It is fascinating to watch the discussion turn to ethics and psychology through this definitional exercise.

I have often thought it would be good to generate a few more of these (possibly using some of the words above); or maybe I should engage the students in creating scenarios that give range to the definitions possible in words like leadership and myth, etc.

This terrific little exercise helps us learn that we don’t all have to agree to the meaning of a word but we have to know how the person using it means it. Consider the following paragraph from my essay on horror movie monsters being derived from teaching styles. I have bolded/italicized the in-text definition of a “slasher” movie as opposed to a “horror” movie.

“Still, horror movies are not only about conservatism. They push out the boundaries of what is acceptable–they are doubtless ‘liberal’ in this fashion, each succeeding movie having to out-do the previous one in technical genius, the daring (or revolting) presentation of more naked bodies, more dismembered limbs, or more spurting blood. We have seen this trend intensifying in contemporary versions of the movies just mentioned while still preserving their conservative heritage. It is this preservation of society at the conclusion of the movie that often distinguishes the horror movie from the slasher movie. Slasher movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Saw or Chucky franchises, and Friday 13th do not cage the monster. The audience accepts this and knows that the evil or sick or demented monster is indestructible and will come back. This is a far more cynical view than that of traditional horror movies. In Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994) the society is preserved at the end when the Creature immolates himself after witnessing Frankenstein’s death. This may not be the same ending as the 1931 version but it nonetheless eliminates both monsters—Frankenstein and the Creature—as effectively as the death of the Creature and the marriage of Frankenstein eliminate both those monsters in the earlier movie. In Francis Coppola’s Dracula we are shown the grisly death of the count by beheading and so here, as in Branagh’s film, we are given us the desired conservative restoration at the end. But, the elaborate and detailed scene-setting and the amount of ‘realistic’ gore in these movies is testimony to their liberal dimension, to their directors’ desire to push the envelope of the horror film.”

The point here is not to have people agree with me about “slasher” movies but merely to understand how I am using the term. Definitions are an important part of what we do especially when one of our most important (and often unstated goals) is to get our students to define themselves–to consciously and conscientiously make themselves the human beings they want to be–and to take responsibility for doing so.

Next week infallible signs of a bad teacher (not bad teaching–they are different).

Christopher Nolan or Washington Irving: Teaching and the Canon

I’ll probably be held down and waterboarded by “canonistas” for the following. “Canonistas” are those self-appointed culture gurus devoted to establishing and advancing a particular canon of works before which we must all genuflect–parodied hilariously by the mathematical “reading” of poetry in Dead Poets Society.  But first, a digression (where almost all real learning takes place).  I tell my students to beware of false binaries (and I am making one between the canonistas and myself right now)–and then I repeatedly ask them to choose “A” or “B” until I can get them to say that they choose neither and find a third way (anthropologists call this mediation of pairs-of-opposites a “third term”).  Of course, sometimes there really are only two choices, but in many matters regarding teaching and the canon the answer to, “Do I teach Nolan or Irving?” is “both” not one or the other.  Incidentally, Christopher Nolan and Washington Irving are functioning as metonyms–stand-ins–in this discussion and we could be having this conversation about Clint Eastwood and Nathaniel Hawthorne or Spike Lee and Richard Wright or the Coen Brothers and F. Scott Fitzgerald and so on. I know that I’ve posed these binaries as movie directors and writers but really we could expand to include all sorts of binaries (Springsteen or Auden; Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas; Stephen King or Mary Shelley).  For the purposes of classroom teaching I often do have to choose one or the other given the limits of time (but I am an extremely poor sport about letting a text-book choose for me).

(I might also add that I admire E.D. Hirsch and his followers extravagantly and agree with much of the Core Knowledge program and I do think it is part of my obligation to “conserve” knowledge–to pass along “the best that has been thought and said” [in Matthew Arnold’s felicitous phrase]–as long as we can have a fair amount of skepticism about what the “best” is. )

I’m really just “thinking out-loud” and seeing where that takes me.  I regularly encourage my students to “think out-loud” with me, to be unafraid of going down the wrong alley, of bumping one’s head against a bad interpretation, of fruitlessly pulling in a fishing line with nothing on it–very few want to do this.  Mostly my students would like me to chew up their intellectual food for them and then spit it into their mouths like a mother eagle with her brood.  I am more inclined to push people out of the nest and see if they can fly.  A wonderful thing about most classrooms (many classrooms? some classrooms? a few classrooms?) is that even if the pushed out baby-bird doesn’t fly the landing is not fatal (except perhaps to some egos–and most of the real egos are at the front of the room.  It is for this reason that too much education looks like banking transactions–TEACHER deposits a certain amount of information and later STUDENT returns a certain amount of information–how much of that deposit that comes back is the grade).

I like Christopher Nolan’s work; I know Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Memento, Inception, and The Prestige all reasonably well. I like Washington Irving’s work; I know “The Devil and Tom Walker,” “Rip van Winkle, (one of the three or four most catastrophically mis-taught stories in American Literature)” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” quite well and several other pieces from The Sketchbook moderately well. Should students “know” “The Devil and Tom Walker”? I really like its “Faustian bargain” and if students have never heard that term they’ll recognize the “deal with the devil” in other things (I hope).  What about Rip? Most think they already “know” the story about the guy who sleeps for 20 years (of course he doesn’t–and Irving’s narrators’ misogyny in the two stories is pretty tough going).  What about the anti-intellectualism of “Sleepy Hollow”?  Should we be aware of this story (frankly, I’ve never known what to do about teaching it given its profound anti-intellectualism and so I don’t)?

Could one construct an argument that it is worth it to spend serious classroom time on Nolan’s Inception?  Certainly there are several objections (I’m assuming we can skip the objections about whether it is developmentally appropriate–I’m not talking about little kids but juniors and seniors in high school). One objection might be that the students already “know” the movie and have seen it on their own.  A second objection might be that the movie is popular and therefore can’t be any good (an assumption lurking behind many objections of culture warriors who regard teaching as the intellectual equivalent of eating brussel sprouts–they are good for you but they damn well better not taste good). A third objection, really the only one worth considering, I think, is, does the movie deserve the time you’ll spend watching it?  As to the second objection (popularity) this can be subsumed in the first and third objections.  The first objection, the students “already know it” is demonstrably false (as is the notion that they “know” “Rip van Winkle,” Genesis, Animal Farm, Calvin and Hobbes or virtually any other thing they have come across in or out of school).  Students have not watched the movie with a critical eye (they usually let movies [and books] wash over them in the manner that a tourist jogs through a museum demanding that he be “entertained” rather than the way a pilgrim approaches a journey–as a pilgrim she is determined to be open to a miracle). 

The third objection, “is it any good?” is the critical objection.  Last year when I taught Inception I developed two handouts that “read” the movie in different ways–one was as a commentary on making movies themselves.  A movie, like the dream(s) constructed inside Inception, is a collaborative art that requires a producer, a director, a set designer (or architect), several characters with specific roles and the ability to move between roles.  A movie also has to be careful about how it walks the line of “realism” or if it becomes preposterous (even by its own standards) then it will be rejected–just as the foreign organisms in the “dream” will be ferreted out because they don’t belong. A second way I encouraged my students to “read” Inception was to think of it in context of Nolan’s oeuvre.  I was hoping that they would all have seen The Dark Knight or Batman Begins (and I was lucky, they had). In all of Nolan’s movies with which I am familiar the main character has a secret which is sometimes known to the audience (Batman’s history, identity, and motivation, say) but often not (Memento, Inception, The Prestige).  In addition, sometimes a character in the movie knows the secret (Alfred) or sets about to discover the secret and the audience either participates in the discovery (Memento or The Prestige).  Nolan often plays with reality and fiction/illusion and narrative and interpretation.  I’d say he is fascinated by the moral dilemmas that the roles we play expose us to (and I think he loses the courage of his conviction in The Dark Knight but that’s a question for teaching). This act of reading–of becoming a semiotician–is at the heart of the way the movie is watched and studied. I’d say Nolan has a genuinely serious moral imagination.  For some teachers the above brief description might not be convincing and they SHOULD NOT teach Nolan–but only because they don’t find him good enough or because they don’t know his work (or, of course, he doesn’t fit within the scope of their class–but more on the scope of classes at a later date).  

This year I am making my class come in on a Saturday or after school to watch The Prestige with me–I’m still showing Inception in class (May 7–May 14 if you want to drop in)–and then I hope they’ll write about 3 Nolan movies (the two we watch together and another one) and his intellectual, artistic, and moral concerns (and I also hope that over the summer when they see The Dark Knight Rises [and they will] that they will THINK about the movie and their own thinking).

I also wonder if, given the cheap availability of DVDs (and the ubiquity of YouTube) whether we should devote MORE time to teaching movies in our literature classes than we used to.  Can Eastwood nudge some space from Melville?  Is Spike Lee a worthy competitor for time to Richard Wright or Ernest Hemingway? But what happens if we lose the cultural glue that holds us together? Should we all “know” Hamlet or Huck Finn? I think we should all know everything we can know about everything there is to know(what a cop-out!). Still, I’ve got more to say on this topic next week and beyond–but especially more next week about the virtues of the Graphic Novel and then the week after that some thoughts on a cool, rare, and nearly-impossible-to-sustain form of narration.

Teaching Movies: Two Japanese Masterpieces, “Hara-kiri” and “Samurai Rebellion”

Before 1981 when I started teaching it was difficult to teach a movie–you needed to have 16mm projection capability–films were incredibly difficult (and expensive) to rent (they came by mail in big cannisters–I rented Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Shane for my classes–what a mistake).  But with the invention of Beta, VHS, DVD, and now YouTube, the insertion of video and film into classes has become considerably easier.

I taught the first film class at DeMatha in 1983 using VHS tapes. “Watching movies” doesn’t always endear you to your colleagues for whom movies are purely entertainment (though why school can’t be somewhat entertaining is something of a mystery to me); “studying movies” will be alien to your students whose entire range of film criticism can often consist of “It’s awesome,” “It stunk,” and “It was OK.”  The first time I walked students through Apocalypse Now in conjunction with Heart of Darkness I really began to understand things I could do with movies.

Because students are used to having movies wash over them and often have limited skills in watching movies I have always taken time to teach them how to watch movies.  This often requires picking good “teaching movies” that might otherwise not be particularly good movies (this is true of picking texts for classes–sometimes I use a text because it is a good “teaching text” not a particularly good poem or story or novel.  Consider Hawthorne’s painfully over-written “Young Goodman Brown” with the eponymous character’s wife whose name is “Faith.” He leaves his “Faith” behind one evening, witnesses a coven, sees the evil that people are capable of, and even though he returns home he has lost his “Faith.” Despite the heavy-handedness of all of this, a sophomore will always ask me, “Dr. McMahon, do you think that ‘Faith’ could also stand for his faith–like religious faith or faith in people?” It’s a good teaching story because it is so bald-faced and developmentally appropriate and what seems obvious to an experienced reader needs to be learned by an inexperienced reader.)

In any event, as part of my work on Japanese literature I teach two movies, Hara-kiri and Samurai Rebellion by Masaki Kobayashi.  While not as well-known as Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, Kagemusha, Seven Samurai, etc.), Kobayashi is a top-flight director and the two movies I teach both deal with the Japanese Samurai code in ways I can’t always get to in a story.

Hara-kiri is a tremendous study of power, corruption, hypocrisy, and governmental cover-ups.  The movie opens with beautiful shot of an empty suit of armor that belonged to the ancestors of the House of Iyi; shortly afterward the common book of the manor notes that nothing of significance happened on this 13th of May, 1630 but that about 4:00 a ronin appeared at the house. This ronin, Hanshiro Tsugumo, asks to commit seppuku (the preferred term for hara-kiri which is considered coarse, ‘belly-cutting’) because, as he explains it, he has been living in poverty for 11 years since his clan was disbanded.  Lord Saito, who responds, “Not another one” when told of the request meets Hanshiro and tells him that just 4 months ago another ronin came and asked for the same thing–but he was a common extortionist who was hoping to get a few coins.  This ronin, Motome Chijiiwa, begged for two-days respite when he found out he was going to have to go through with the seppuku and with his own swords–made of bamboo (he had clearly pawned the actual blade some time before).  Hanshiro tells Saito not to worry that his sword is not made of bamboo and that he has no intention of leaving alive.

The tables turn when Hanshiro asks for three specific retainers to act as his second (the one who will strike his head off) and all three are sick that day.  To pass the time while waiting to find out where the sick retainers are Hanshiro volunteers to tell his life story.  Turns out he knew this prior ronin, Motome, and was his father’s best friend–and was commanded by the father to look after him–and his daughter married him and they had a son! The story that Hanshiro tells fleshes out the character of Motome who, to save his family had acted in ways that offended the House of Iyi.  Hanshiro then accuses the House of Iyi of hypocrisy–that their vaunted allegiance to the samurai code of bushido is hollow–and he displays the top-knots of their three finest warriors–who are now feigning illness as proof.  A climactic fight scene ensues (as many as 4 killed, 8 wounded and the orders that the three who lost their top-knots die from “illness”), and before he can be shot (yes, shot!) Hanshiro kills himself in the room where the hollow suit of armor has stood guard.  The movie closes with a montage of the remaining clan members cleaning blood off of the walls, raking the courtyard, and dutifully recording  the official history which is that this ronin delivered a peculiar speech and then killed himself.  The viewer’s outrage at this cover-up is white-hot.

One of the things I love about this movie is its use of “framing.” Doorways, courtyards, rooms, the mat where the seppuku will be committed, are all used to extraordinary effect by Kobayashi who is continuously reminding us of the way we “frame” our stories.  I have had students who cannot quite get over Saito’s version (and vision) of Motome because of how well he frames that part of it.  The way we get to the truth of stories is important and Kobayashi has a passion for the truth but a pessimistic view that “the truth” will ever get out.  He also believes that truth is always the enemy of power and that power will suppress the truth.

In Samurai Rebellion (I make my students come in on a Saturday or stay after one day to watch with me and thereby save a bunch of class time), an undistinguished samurai, Isaburo (the great Toshiro Mifune) endures a loveless marriage to a status seeking shrew.  Her father arranged the marriage only because Isaburo is the finest swordsman in the Aizu clan.  The daimyo “orders” Isaburo’s son, Yogoro, to marry a former concubine who has “rebelled” against him (he can’t punish her further because he has a son with her and that son could end up being the heir).  The family unwillingly takes the beautiful and sweet Ichi in and, mirabile dictu, she and Yogoro fall in love and have a daughter, Tomi. At this point the daimyo, his older son having died, now needs Ichi back to be mother of the heir.  Ichi, Yogoro and Isaburo say enough is enough and they refuse to knuckle under to enormous pressure from the family and then the clan. All sorts of despicable tricks including the kidnapping of Ichi happen and finally in the first of two climactic scenes, Ichi kills herself rather than betray her husband and father-in-law and her husband, Yogoro, is killed trying to defend her.  Isaburo then kills all 20 samurai sent to kill them. (If frames and framing are a key artistic element in Hara-kiri, then walls, borders, doorways, and paths are all critical to “reading” Samurai Rebellion.  At a critical juncture Isaburo walks off the stone path on to the raked sand as he flagrantly disobeys orders.)

After Isaburo buries his daughter-in-law and son, he takes his granddaughter, Tomi, and determines to leave the province and tell the shogun of the daimyo’s cruelty.  He is confronted at the gate by his best friend who will not let him leave–he has no official orders to pass.  The two fight–as we have known they will from the opening scene–and Isaburo kills his best friend who tells him that he had no chance since Isaburo was fighting for three people: Yogoro, Ichi, and Tomi.  After killing his best friend, Isaburo is murdered by numerous samurai with rifles (a motif that Kobayashi has exploited in Hara-kiri)! He crawls to Tomi’s side and implores her to grow up to be a woman like her mother and to marry a man like her father.  The wet-nurse (pressed into service when Ichi was kidnapped) has secretly followed Isaburo and rescues the child Tomi–and presumably tells her the story that we have just seen.

Kobayashi’s artistic vision is bleak and uncompromising–power is not only corrupting it is ineluctable and when you stand up against it you will be destroyed and then the victor will lie about it.  Still, there is tremendous encouragement to stand up for one’s self.  Isaburo says twice, “Each must live his own life.” I can’t really do justice to these movies in such a space but they are available through the Criterion Collection and are quite lovely.  I’m guessing that virtually no other high schools in the country are teaching them but they illuminate so well a theme that I want to cover and present obligations in conflict so intelligently and reveal Japanese culture so thoroughly that I include them in my teaching.

They are great “teaching”  movies.  Next week a reflection on Yukio Mishima and Frank O’Connor, I think.

“Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?”–Answering Diogenes with guest appearances by Batman, the Terminator, Hitchcock, and Schlink

Admit it–you’ve always had a suspicion that Batman, the Terminator, Hitchcock, Schlink, and the Greek philosopher Diogenes (NOT the one searching for one honest man–the other one) were related–but you didn’t know how or when to introduce this grouping to your social set–well here is your Thanksgiving table conversation starter.

I was a philosophy major in college and I was also an English major and this combination of disciplines found its most complete academic expression in my dissertation: a study of utopias and mythologies.  So, philosophers who write literature like Plato, Augustine, and Thomas More bump shoulders with novelists who are invested in philosophy like H.G. Wells, William Morris, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.  While many of the utopians are read through the prism of political philosophy, others—particularly Jonathan Swift and George Orwell—are read through a lens of epistemology. 

From my time as an undergraduate I have believed that “serious” ideas can also be found in pop culture such as The Dark Knight or The Terminator. So, here’s a serious question inspired by The Dark Knight—should the Batman kill the Joker knowing that the Joker will escape Arkham prison and kill scores—maybe hundreds of innocent people; in the comic book stories he has killed one Robin, rendered Commissioner Gordon’s daughter a paraplegic, and killed countless others.  From a utilitarian perspective I suppose the answer is yes, Batman should kill the Joker; from a deontological perspective where we’d consider the intrinsic act and not its consequences, probably the answer is no.  Why would we take one of these views over the other? Can we apply another ethical system to this problem? Do we even know what we are doing when we think about this? Is this something we actually argue about when we are discussing the torture of a captured terrorist to prevent more deaths?  Should we torture the terrorists’ wife or infant child to get him to tell us information that will save more innocents? These are really BIG questions that, incidentally, students want to talk about and it is our moral obligation to give them a language and place to do so.

How about The Matrix or The Terminator—are those movies trying to get at questions about our relationship to machines, the nature of reality, the essence of time, the mutability of the past and future. The Matrix with its numerous tips-of-the-hat to the “Allegory of the Cave” and the “Apology of Socrates” seems to suggest that the unexamined life is not only NOT worth living, it is, in fact, the moral equivalent of being a battery in a machine—“Coppertop” may be the worst insult you could address to someone on the Nebuchadnezzar, the ship where the “enlightened” dwell.  When we replace part after part of ourselves at what point are we a machine and not a human? Certainly that seems to be part of the arc of The Terminator series where some of the machines become more human and the humans act more like machines to save themselves.  Steven Pinker (Language Instinct, The Blank Slate) says that in ALL forms of transplant and organ donation you should WANT to be the recipient—until we get to brain transplant and then you should want to be the donor!

Two of my favorite commentators on philosophy are Woody Allen and Steve Martin.  Woody Allen’s short essays, “My Philosophy”—which incorporates elements of Hume, Kant, Plato, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—and “My Apology”—a contemporary rendering of Plato’s “Apology of Socrates” that ends with a version of the “Allegory of the Cave” that has the philosopher get out of the cave, see the truth, open a meat market and marry a dancer—are wonderful.  When Steve Martin (an actual philosophy major) announces that he has read all the greats like Plato (/plat-eau/) and Socrates (/so-krats/) and has concluded that philosophy teaches you just enough to make your conscience uncomfortable for the rest of your life—we laugh because we genuinely understand. I highly recommend his autobiography, Born Standing Up.

The last three philosophy books that I have read are Michael Sandel’s Justice (the finest nonfiction book I have read in many months), The Terminator and Philosophy, and Batman and Philosophy—the last two are collections of essays.  I notice, too, that I rarely read the great system builders, Plato, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel anymore–though I have a keen desire to read and know more about the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce to help me with my study of semiotics.  Instead, I read more and more of the epigrammatic philosophers (Herakleitos, Diogenes, Marcus Aurelius, La Rochefoucauld, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche).   In fact, I have a theory that the history of philosophy is the dialogue between system builders and epigrammaticists—though that’s the topic for another blog (one I doubt I’ll ever write).  It’s possible that my current reading reflects a belief that the truth often manifests itself in brief flashes that occasionally contradict each other. 

Guy Davenport’s translation of Diogenes renders Fragment 99 in the following way, “Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?” Again—“Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?” There have been times when I have read this as a rhetorical question and times when I have read it as a sarcastic indictment of pupils.  More and more I treat it as just a question that requires an answer.  I now think that it is asking something profound about the relationship between a student and teacher.  How much of the way we turn out is dependent on others?  As teachers, how responsible are we for our students? What parent hasn’t felt that sense of responsibility for a child and a concomitant certainty that we cannot control another human being? 

I have probably been ruminating about this question in one form or another for many years.  In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, two “students” kill a classmate in appreciation of a charismatic teacher’s rendering of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch.  Jimmy Stewart plays the teacher and at the end he repudiates all that he has taught and claims that the students have distorted his message.  I have taught Rope numerous times and Stewart’s defensive protestation that his students have misunderstood and misused his teaching at the end has always bothered me.  He was the teacher.  Should he have known that what he said might cause the students to act in a particular way?  To say, “No, it makes no difference,” and deny that a teacher has any bad influence seems to say also that there is nothing good that a teacher does.  But to admit to responsibility for all of your students all of the time…. Wow….  No wonder I have reflexively rejected Diogenes in the past–who could absorb that kind of responsibility?  Oscar Wilde has observed that “all forms of influence are evil” because they alter the “natural” way one would develop.  I wonder about that, too.  Isn’t that what teachers do?  Influence people, I mean.  I certainly have been influenced by some great teachers and some dreadful ones, though I would be loath to blame any of them for my shortcomings. 

For the past ten years I have been teaching Bernard Schlink’s The Reader.  The narrator, Michael Berg, tells of his affair with a woman some 20 years older than himself that began when he was 15 and that ended abruptly when she left with no warning or message.  Some years later as a law student he sees her on trial for crimes committed when she was a Nazi guard during the Shoah (or holocaust) and he watches Hanna, that is her name, barely defend herself and end up taking the blame for her co-conspirators.  He eventually realizes that most of her life has been an attempt to hide the fact that she can’t read.  In fact, she broke off their affair because she couldn’t read and her bosses wanted to promote her.  She had become a Nazi guard because she was going to be promoted to a job that required reading.  After Hanna is imprisoned, Michael begins to read books into a tape player and send her the tapes.  She teaches herself to read and write through his reading and begins to correspond with him.  He never corresponds with her except to read stories and send them to her.  After many years she is to be released from prison and, as her only correspondent, the warden asks him to come and help her.  Michael makes a perfunctory appearance and then, when Hanna kills herself the morning of her scheduled release, he is distraught with the idea that he has educated her to understand the enormity of her crimes and that, because of this, she has killed herself.  Is he responsible?  Had he left her with her protective stupidity would she be better off?  He also denies to himself that he has treated her badly—another question for another day.

I tell my students occasionally of the responsibilities that one can feel as a teacher for taking students places that they haven’t been.  Some, or maybe many, of them seem to like that because it seems to absolve them of any responsibility for themselves.  But often, when I have them in a good mood, I remind them that they have been teaching me all year, too—and I ask them if they are responsible for me?  Those who want me to be responsible for them, for their grades, their success or failure, seem never to want to believe that they are responsible in any way for me.  In fact, how responsible is each one of us for all of us?  Certainly the teacher bears greater responsibility than the student does, but can any of us avoid responsibility to or for each other?  Would any of us say that we are acted upon but that we NEVER act in such a way as to be responsible for our actions towards others? So, why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?  For the same reason we shouldn’t whip ourselves—we play both roles so often—you’ll remember all teachers are students and that all students are also teachers  Finally, the merely punitive is never good pedagogy.

Let’s give thanks for all the great teachers in our lives. Back next week with some ideas about introducing Japanese literature and culture.

Robin Hood and Dante: Slings, Arrows and Taking Up Arms

I love the 1939 version of The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn as the eponymous Robin and Olivia de Havilland as the beautiful Maid Marian and the superb Basil Rathbone as Sir Guy of Gisbourne.

It is  a good exercise to ask why we like the things we like–to tease out of our inner selves what things appeal to us about those things that draw us to them. Some years ago I created a website for my class and I had the following pictures on it (all down-loaded from Google images): 1) Robin Hood; 2) Yoda; 3) Don Quixote; 4) Sir Gawain; 5) Yoshi (or Oishi) from Chushingura or The Treasury of Loyal Retainers or The 47 Ronin.  A colleague of mine remarked to someone else that my website was filled with people with weapons–this had never occurred to me any more than placing pictures of some of my literary heroes on the website had occurred to me.

What do these 5 have in common?  At first blush perhaps not much.  But a closer look reveals them all to be characters that are immensely offended by injustice and determined to right some wrong.  Robin Hood, Don Quixote, and Yoshi are all essentially anonymous until their society needs them to come forth (Robin Hood and Don Quixote change their names to become the new characters).  The great knight Gawain, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight–ably translated by–variously–Burton Raffel, Marie Boroff, and JRR Tolkien–and brilliantly retold in Thomas Berger’s Arthur Rex–participates in the exchange of blows with the Green Knight in part to protect Arthur and the other court members from having to endanger themselves and even Yoda–long since retired from the world–is called back for one more teaching session to pass on what he knows to Luke Skywalker.  They represent those who are called to rectify some injustice in society (comically but no less seriously in Quixote’s case).  I began to think that maybe this was how I conceived of teaching; at least part of me wants to arm my students (with the weapons of the mind–rigor, wide and deep learning, the ability to think about the best that has been thought and said and lots of good pulp stuff besides) so that they could defend themselves and make the world more just. Of course it’s not just the ability one needs; one needs to cultivate an attitude towards injustice, too.

Back to Robin Hood though–I have seen many if not most of the versions of Robin Hood ranging from Disney cartoons to Mel Brooks’ satire to the BBC series to versions starring Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe–but it’s the 1938 version that intrigues me despite its garish color (new at the time), its day-for-night filming, and generally minimal production values (by today’s standards).  It has none of the medieval grittiness of many more contemporary versions–but it has a tremendously cool depiction of evil that has its roots in Dante’s Inferno. (I can almost hear the head-smacking and the concomitant whispers that I have really rounded the bend this time).

Dante’s Inferno presents three distinct types of evil–in this order of seriousness: 1) the Incontinent (those who cannot control themselves–they are buffeted about by their desires); 2) the Violent; and 3) the Fraudulent (or betrayers).  My students are often thrown off by a couple of things.  They sometimes want to forgive the Incontinent by arguing that their sins were beyond their control (Paolo and Francesca)–and I understand their desire here–it is an attempt to forgive themselves.  They also believe that Violence is far worse than Fraud.  Indeed, this is a demanding argument by Dante.  All of us understand the horror of driving a truck loaded with explosives up to the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, or the crashing of planes in to the twin towers, or a beating on the street of a young man for his tennis shoes.  Those are tangible evils.  But, even given the scope of Bernie Madoff’s fraud, it is difficult to feel quite as viscerally the pain involved.  Having read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short and followed the Enron scandal with some care; I mostly feel a sort of disgust but my anger is not quite as white hot about that as it is when confronted with violence.  Is that because part of us recognizes Violence as something that could compromise our physical being but we don’t quite feel that about Fraud?  The sense of being stalked in a dark alley, cornered, frightened, over-powered and violated gets my heart going much faster than the sense of having my pension stolen–even though that may be more damaging long-term.

In any event, Dante in his genius argued that Fraud represents a distinctly human capacity for evil (and he has lots of theologians and philosophers for company) whereas we share violence with the beasts and therefore, this corruption of reason, is deserving of its being treated more harshly and seriously.  And intellectually I agree (viscerally–not so sure about that).

Back to Robin Hood.  In the 1939 version Robin (and the other rebels) face a three-headed evil.  The comic Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper) has an enormous belly that gives evidence of his gluttony (Incontinence) and in the manner of those tossed by their desires, his cowardice. When Robin is captured he accepts a slap in the face from Sir Guy–and promptly boots the Sherriff away when he attempts to slap him–Robin and Sir Guy are enemies but at least Robin respects Sir Guy.  The dangerous Sir Guy of Gisbourne with Rathbone’s predatory look and simmering Violence that erupts and culminates in my second favority on-screen sword fight (The Princess Bride fight scene is number 1 and various Japanese movie scenes [Harakiri has a great one as does The Twilight Samurai but there are so many!] and Star Wars fight scenes come in third through tenth) is a real tangible evil.  But, finally his sword serves the genuinely reptilian Prince John (Claude Rains is great) who has betrayed his country and his kinship, who has violated the guest/host relationship and betrayed a lord and benefactor (the four inner rings of the 9th circle of Hell–how’s that for a foursome! Dante would be so proud) who presents the greatest evil.  Still, Prince John’s punishment (banishment) seems anti-climactic (as does Bernie Madoff’s prison sentence) and carries none of the memorable flair of the sword fight.

No other retelling of the Robin Hood story has, to my mind, captured this particular representation of evil as a three-headed creature that needs to be fought on all levels.

I spent a day this week with a brilliant and gifted teacher working on Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales–so more about taking up arms against outrageous fortune and injustice next week.