Fasten your seatbelts, I'm about to lecture...
All fascinating comments, and an interesting discussion since the last
time I posted.
Well, perhaps I must confess that I have a phud (which is a plumbers'
license, or piled higher and deeper) in English, that I teach English
and US/World History at both high school and college levels.
For some of you, that may lead to totally ignoring everything I'm
going to say; for others, it may mean legitimizing these comments to a
certain degree (or not...).
I think that forcing students in middle school or high school to read
"Literature" is often a huge mistake, and can lead to an awful lot of
people hating to read what is called Literature (clearly, this
occurred to some of the people on this list). I think that there is a
certain skill level that is needed before one can really appreciate
certain books (a poor vocabulary, for example, can doom anyone from
reading most books). I think there is a certain maturity level that
must be reached before certain topics become interesting (not many
high school students, for example, are really all that interested in
the problems of say, parents...). I think that a certain historical
awareness is necessary before we can understand a whole range of
topics, and a considerable number of books (a hundred years from now,
this will keep people from reading Stephen King, until somebody
explains their historical contexts).
I teach reading to little children too (including my own), and I've
done an enormous amount of research into what brings kids to a love of
reading. The basic lesson from all that research is that we don't
learn to love reading by reading the classics -- we learn to love
reading by reading the popcorn books. Romances, westerns, comic
books, skiffy, and so forth. We learn to love reading through
excessive, EASY reading, and that builds our skill levels, and makes
us want to read more.
Folks, eventually one gets tired of the easy stuff, and wants some
more meat in the broth. Does anybody really want to go back and
reread all those forgettable Tolkien knockoffs? I read hundreds of
fantasy novels in my adolescence, and I have to say, the majority of
them were eminently forgettable (Sturgeon's Law applies here, as it
does everywhere..and before I forget to say it, the great majority of
what was published hundreds of years ago was just as much crap as the
great majority of what is published today. And let me say this as
well -- I miss trilogies. I am so sick and tired of series that never
end...hell, I was sick of trilogies until I realized that at least
they END. There comes a time when we want to feel a sense of
COMPLETION. Anybody else annoyed that we'll never get the end of
Jordan's series? Sad, yes, but there's the more negative response as
well, isn't there?).
I think we come to each book we read with a whole lifetime of
experiences, and expectations, and skill levels, and purposes in
reading. There are times I don't want to have to think about what I'm
reading, when I just want to be entertained. This is why we have
skiffy. But I have to tell you, I see reading as healthy mental
exercise, as a way of stretching my head around new ideas, new ways of
viewing the world, new perspectives on who and what we are, and why we
act the way we do, and how we can change, and so forth, and so on.
Yes, the argument about plot vs. character is germane to this
discussion. And yes, I think plot is "easier" to follow than
character; this does NOT mean it's easier to WRITE plot (it isn't),
but it is easier to follow a novel focusing on plot than a novel
focusing on character (at least for me, and in my experience as a
teacher, for the vast majority of students as well).
When I went to college, I had little interest in reading anything but
sf/fantasy, and history books (oh, I had some interest in Emerson and
Thoreau and Byron, but not enough to seek them out and read them for
pleasure). College did what college (and all education) is SUPPOSED
to do: it planted seeds, and broadened my horizons, and changed my
expectations. College gave me a love of thinking, and exploring -- or
rather, it caused those parts of my character to be enabled and
strengthened.
Folks, I got TIRED of reading most SF, simply because it didn't
challenge me in any interesting way any more. Hemingway and Faulkner
and Flannery O'Connor and Emerson and Sterne and Joyce and the rest of
the merry crew taught in literature courses DID -- because they were
saying things about the way that people behaved, in ways that struck
me as beautifully written, which few SF works ever had. I wanted to
know as much as possible about the way people thought and believed and
struggled and achieved -- and that is what I mean by the human
condition. I still found (and find) negative answers to the
possibilities of human endeavours, personal and public, to be not what
I wanted -- but at least I knew about all the ways in which things can
go WRONG, which SF/Fantasy rarely explores, except as a way of putting
those approaches down.
In the same way, i began to listen to jazz and classical music,
because it was different from the rock and pop I knew so well.
I am going on for far too long here (I can hear the shouts of
agreement there), but I think that anybody who shuts themselves away
from the sheer power and enjoyment of what we call Literature is just
as sad and wrong-headed as someone who puts down SF/Fantasy. These
are two modes of thinking, and I absolutely refuse to deny myself the
pleasure of thinking about the world in different ways.
Put another way, I love both Bach and Duke Elington, and I pity
anybody who can't open their ears enough to hear both varieties of the
celestial music.
I just find it hard to accept so many people ridiculing books they've
never read, or putting them down as not worth reading, when they
haven't really understood what is being said.
I reject Beckett ot because of some some issue of taste, but because I
reject his way of looking at the world -- but that rejection only came
after reading the majority of what he wrote, and thinking about it
extensively.
I think "Catcher in the Rye" is an extremely well-written book, but
it's really nothing more than a teenager cracking up into little
pieces (the fact that Salinger has spent almost his entire adult life
in hiding does not strike me as particularly mature either).
But to reject Literature in favor of what is, for the most part,
escapist junk food, is ridiculous.
To reject the great works of SF because they might be escapist junk
food is just as ridiculous. Great SF stretches the mind, gets it
ready for change, challenges our preconceptions.
I want my Heinlein and Sturgeon and Le Guin and C.L. Moore right next
to the Melville and Hawthorne.
Robert James
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