Why Literature Matters Author(s): Tim Gillespie Reviewed work(s): Source: The English Journal, Vol. 83, No. 8, Literature, Queen of the Curriculum (Dec., 1994), pp. 16-21 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/820324 . Accessed: 01/10/2012 19:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The English Journal. http://www.jstor.org Why Literature Matters TimGillespie Practically speaking, doesanyone need literature? Theauthor saysyes. 16 hy should we teach literature?"is the question on the floor.The pragmatists, clear-eyedand realistic,are unsure literature has sufficient value. I'mattendinga before-school staff meeting of teachersfrom various disciplines to discuss restructuring the high school; morning light sifts through the classroom windows. Here as elsewhere, pragmatic demandsof the workplacedirect much of the discussion about school reform.Literature,it strikes me, has a hard time adaptingitself to this languageof "jobforce literacy." Here is the pragmatists'argument:No one needs literature to be a productive worker,competitivein the global economy In fact, one can be highly successful in the marketplacewith no knowledgewhatsoever of literature;real-worldexamplesare plentiful. The importantreadingmatterof the future will be information,and the main and inforreadingskillsinformation-gathering is more Literature rightly mation-processing. regarded as something like opera-an arcane art form, a spice of life, to be sure; a seasoning.But not a main course. So, since literatureis not essential,why should it be such a majorpartof the curriculum? My friend Gloria wonders how she is going to revampher literaturecurriculumto fit one of the school'snewly-stipulatedcareer pathways."Ifthe theme aroundwhich I am to organizeall my curriculumis Traveland Tourism,"she asks, "how am I supposed to get literaturein? What happens to Romeo andJuliet?" "Maybeyour kids can make a travelbrochure for Verona?"a colleague tentatively suggests. "The question is," says a pragmatist, "who really needs to know about Shakespeare these days?This is an enthusiasm,a leisure-time pursuit, but not a necessary skill for the twenty-firstcentury" Another English teacher earnestlytries to make a claim for literatureas part of our culturalheritage.As she talks,the words culturalliteracyleak fromher lips. Immediately, other Englishteacherschallengeher:"Waita minute!Whose culture?Which books?"We quarrelabout the literarycanon, tradition, exclusion, multiculturalism. Meanwhile, I notice, the pragmatists,ever oriented to the future, are looking at the clock and rolling their eyes skyward. See? I imagine them thinking, thesebookloverswill endlesslyargue aboutwhichliteraryangelsfit on the headof a pin; meanwhile,the real businessof the world goes on unaffected. So, our own in-family English teacher disagreement scuttles the discussion.The meetingwinds down with a shuffleof dissatisfaction.The issue of the literary canon, though critically important, nonetheless eclipses the larger question, without which it appearstrivial:Who really, in this modern world of commerce, needs literatureof any kind? The questionstayson the floor.Teachers startto leave. The firstperiodbell rings,and students pour in. One drops her eightpound literatureanthologyat my feet with a clunk. WHO NEEDS LITERATURE? In the months since that earlymorning meeting, these questions stick with me: Who really does need literature, anyway? What'sit for?How do we justifyits centrality to the Englishcurriculum?They are reasonable questions, I think. Next to claims for helping studentslearn what it takes to get a job and do meaningfullife-longwork, literature can appearextraneous.The discussion pressed me to re-examinemy belief in the importanceof literature.I want to have sensible answersto offerthe pragmatists. Aftermuch reflection,I decided that the most traditionalclaims for literatureare the ones I am most eagerto defend. Primarily,I believe literatureis justifiablein the modern curriculumfor its contributionsto the cultivationof imaginationand of empathyTomy way of thinking, these are crucial skills for the twenty-first century, essential for our thriving,pragmaticto the core. Why, then, is literatureso easily devalued in the conversationabout communications skills of the future?Clearly,traditional claims for the functions of literatureneed December1994 reassertingand updating.Moreimportantly, though, I worry that, in the words of the literary characterPogo Possum, "We have met the enemy,and he is us."That is, I fear we too often neglect to addressin the contemporaryEnglishclassroomthose habitsof imaginingand empathizingthat seem to me literature'sgreatestbenefitand value. Let me elaborate on these themes of imagination, empathy, and teaching practices. as weapons.Menckenled him to SinclairLewis' MainStreetand Babbitt,then to Theodore Dreiser's fiction, then to novel after novel that revealed to him new ways of thinking about his own circumstancesand the wider world: I hungeredforbooks,newwaysof lookingandseeing.Itwasnot a matterof believingor disbelieving whatI read,butof feelingsomethingnew,of beingaffectedby somethingthatmade IMAGINATIONAND EMPATHY PresidentBill Clinton often uses a line thatregisterswith me as a teacher:"Children can't be expected to live a life they can't imagine." We rightly worry that many youngsters'lives are circumscribedby poverty, discrimination,low expectations,cultural insularity,and other conditions that may renderthem unable to see beyond the limits of their immediate horizons. Literature does offer-inexpensively?a vision of otherlives and othervistas.One of its potential benefits is to enlarge a reader'ssense about the many possible ways to live. This enlarged sense seems to me an important part of our traditionalnationalethos. Hope fora betterworld and beliefin the possibility of re-makingoneselfor improvingone'ssituation breed optimism and elbow grease. (Need I point out that these qualities have economic implications?)We have rich testimony about this imaginativefunctionof literature. In the lovely essay,"Ghostsand Voices: Writingfrom Obsession"(1990), for example, SandraCisneroswritesof her childhood, of checking out from her neighborhoodlibraryVirginiaLee Burton'sclassic TheLittle House seven times in a row, of being en- wasnothinglessthana senseof lifeitself.(272-74) In a speech made at last year'sInternational ReadingAssociation conference and reported in ReadingToday(1994), editor WalterAnderson,who grew up in a violent, impoverished environment, said his place of solace and retreat was the library: "I could open a book, and I could be anything. I could be anywhere.I could be anyone... I read myself out of poverty long before I workedmyselfout of poverty"(1). This is the firstargumentI would like to offer for literature,its capacityto stimulate the imagination,to offer differentperspectives and widerworldsthatthe young reader can wander at leisure and experience in safety, without pressure or judgment. We read ourselvesimaginativelyinto other lives and by this act expandthe pagesof our own. If we keep following the track of our imaginativeresponse, other argumentsfor literatureemerge.As a reader,I readnot only to find myself, I also read to lose myself. Sweptalongby the magicof narrative,I give myselfover to otherlives, landscapes,points of view. In this experienceis the cultivation of a deeper form of imagination,the empathetic identification with other humans, tranced by books such as Island of the Blue Dolphins and Alice in Wonderland.Through those books, she says, she was transported to other worlds, instructed about other people and possibilities, offered hopefulness, and inspired to be a writer herself. Richard Wright tells in BlackBoy (1945) of being forced to pretend he was checking out books for a white co-worker, since Jim Crow laws didn't permit him to borrow the books himself. In these forbidden works, Wright found himself electrified by the fiery writing of H. L. Mencken, which gave him the idea that words could be effectively used often people quite unlike ourselves. Through literature, readers travel to different locales, to the past and to the future, and learn during their travels about other cultures and peoples. Literature offers students diversity that their neighborhood may not. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has said, "No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world" (1991, 1). And literature can be a form of this habitation. The effort to understand advances what Percy Bysshe Shelley called the "moral imagination," a capacity to occupy another EnglishJournal the look of the world different. . . it 17 mind and feel the emotionalpulse of anotherheart."Moral" is a trickyword here; such as former U.S.Secretary of Edupeople cationWilliamBennettare speakingmuch latelyaboutthe moralvalueof stories,but I hope the moralopportunitiesof literature aren'toversimplified.Literaturedoes not teach moralsin a didacticway; rather,it moraldilemgivesus a chanceto experience mas. And qualityliteraturedoes not oversimplifythe dilemmasof the world.Unlike the glib,materialistic, vision quick-solution of life offeredon much literatureporTV, trayslives thathave complicatedproblems and toughchoices,andinvitesus to engage withthem,to imaginelivingoutlife'svexing dilemmas along with the characterswe meet.By its truthfulportrayalof life'scomplex moralchoices,literaturedrawsus in, us intoa story,andsummonsour submerges imaginativepowerto identifywith characters.Literature thusmightbe oneantidoteto the diseaseof disconnectionthatafflictsus. Assaultingsomeone, tagginga wall with spraypaint,sexuallyharassinganother,or yellinga racialslurareall actsthatshowan incapacityto empathize, to imagine another'sdeepestresponses,to considerthe real consequencesof actionson others.In the fractiousworldwe inhabit,empathyis a much-neededskill,and literatureis a form in whichwe canpracticethisskill. valueof reading literature. So,evenwhenthe contestwasover,I keptluggingaroundthat box. Therewasmuchto admirein those121 the ampledisplayof sostories,particularly Lotsof the young craft. phisticatedwriting authorshadmasteredthe trickof writingattention-gettingleads, high-impactbeginnings that grab readersby the collarand yanktheminto the story.Manystorieswere ripe with sensoryimagesand detaileddescriptions. Many had snappy dialogue. Someone,I thought,has been talkingwith thesestudentsaboutliterarytechnique. Yetin all thisexerciseof writerlycraft,I felta kindof emptiness.Whatseemedmissing fromtoo manyof the storieswas that rareexperienceof gettinginsidethe skinof anotherhumanbeing.WhenI thinkof the fictionI love, I think of vivid characters, fromJaneEyreto MarieKashpaw, YuryZhiFinn to Huck to Will vago Tweedy,Scoutto Setheto JuneWoo.ThesearepeopleI have come to know well. In theirengagingstories, I learn somethingabout them, and, throughthem,othersandmyself.A handful of the studentswho enteredthe contestdid in theirstocreatesuchabsorbing characters ries.I won'tsoon forgetthe dyingfarmerin one student'sstorywho leaveshis homeand startshitchhikingwith his dog to see the countryin springtimebloomone last time. And I won'tsoon forgetthe young girl in CONNECTIONS TO THECLASSROOM another story,livinga constrictedlife as a The fuzzyrelationship betweenmy beservanton a turn-of-the-century Oregon lief in this empatheticfunctionof literature of escape to the nearby ranch, dreaming and my classroominstructioncame into townto the onlylifethatseemsa liberation, clearerfocusforme lastfall.AfterI agreedto thatof a barmaid.Forthegiftof allowingme contestfor exhelp judge a fiction-writing to cometo knowandunderstand theselives, ceptionalhigh schoolwritersin my state,I I was exceedinglygratefulto thesestudents; foundon my frontporcha cardboardbox thiswasthe delightofjudgingthecontest. filledwith 121 manuscripts,averagingabout ten pages apiece. For the next two weeks, I kept the box in my car. Wherever I went, whenever I could, I read stories: during lunch break,in the quiet of late night, waiting for soccer practiceto finish. Reading all this student fiction offered equal parts delight and dismay,and caused me to ask myself againone of the firstquestions of the educationalendeavor:Why are we doing this?What on earthis the value of having students write fiction, or poetry, or any form of literature?And this, of course, sent me back to my ruminationsabout the 18 The dismay came from the shortageof such vivid charactersand what I felt was an insufficient exploration in many of the pieces of characters'motives, complexities, and changes.What I mostly found was nonstop action, special effects,and greatgobs of violence in many forms. Charactersin various storieswere:shot, knifed,hit by a truck, killed in an earthquake,attacked by killer midgets, beaten with an ax and fireplace poker, bashed with a sledgehammer, stabbedwith a broomstick,eaten by crocodiles, conked on the head with a gravestone, rippedup by a grizzlybear,and on and on. I December1994 culknow we live in a violence-drenched confront have to I writers and believe ture, the givenworldanddealwiththeirdeepest fearsanddesires,but I wasstilltakenaback by all the violence.My surprisewas less aboutthe quantitythan aboutthe poorlyimaginedqualityof muchof it. Mostof the mayhemin these storieswas unnecessary, unearned,emotionallyflat, painless,and lackingconsequence,likewhatwe see in so manymoviesandTVshows. Readingthisworkfromsomeof thebest writersin mystatecausedme to re-thinkmy canenlargeourcapacity claimthatliterature forempathy,thatreadingfiction-and writing it-offers us a chanceto imaginehow anotherhumanmight live, think, dream, and feel.Believingfictionto be a meansfor practicingmoralengagement,I was concernedafterreadingthissmallsampleof stories.I wishedmoreof theseyoungwriters' skillswereasreandempathetic imaginative finedas theirtechnicalskills. PERFECTION VS. TECHNICAL MORALINSIGHT My thinkingon theseissueswas deepened when I re-readRalphEllison'sessay "Twentieth CenturyFictionand the Black Maskof Humanity" (1964)notlongafterhe died.In the essay,Ellisoncriticizesmodernist writerswho seek "atechnicalperfection ratherthan a moralinsight"(38) and frets about excessive absorptionwith literary techniqueandwhathe seesin moderncriticismas a confusionof technicalsophistication with significance.This intriguedme, comingfromthepen of a greatliterarytechauthorof thesophistinicianandinnovator, Man.Yet,I catedandexperimental Invisible mused,Ellison'snovelspeakseloquentlyto me not becauseof his masteryof innovative form and technique, but ratherbecause of the movingly-renderedhuman being who calls out from his invisibility,tryingdesperatelyto be known. This threadof thoughtled me to consider my own teaching.I looked at some of the writing resourcebooks on my shelf, and I looked at my own habitsas a teacherof creative writing. The sight was striking: both tended to stress,in Ellison'swords,technical perfectionover moral insight. That is, more time was spent on writing techniques than on the human issues in students'stories. I realized that my students need more than EnglishJournal just hints on techniquewhen they are exwith fiction.Tipson writinga perimenting catchylead,usingsensorydetails,or "showing insteadof telling"maybe lessimportant to young fictionwritersthan supportfor imaginingwhat might be motivatinganotherperson,payingcloserattentionto huand portraying life in its man interactions, I need to focuson the peofullcomplexity. ple in my students'fiction,notjuston technique. Don'tgetme wrong;I lovethecraft-talk of writing,andI enjoysharingauthors'lore with students.Youngwritersareinterested in colorfullanguage,dialogue,richdescription, invitingleads,all thatgood stuff.Yet craftin writingmust servecontent;techniqueoughtto be employednot forits own sake but in the serviceof some truththe writeris pursuing.Whena fictionwriteris usingflashytricksbut lacksfeelingfor the it feelslike manipulation to the characters, a of lack without reader, commitment, style substance.Wemissmuchin ourteachingif we don'taddressdeeperreasonsbehindthe devicesof writing.Forexample,I havetold studentsin pastclassesto "describe characters using lavish details,"as if this were merelya ruleto followor anotherrhetorical device for the writer'sbag of tricks.It is in their more,of course.Offeringcharacters is notjuststraining fully-detailed complexity foreffect,it is tenderingrespect.Totreatour characters is to makea generous respectfully effortto get to know themwell, the same way we show respectin our nonfictional life. walking-around WhatI wantto learnas a teacherof fiction-writing,then, is how to help young authorscultivatethisspiritof generosityInsteadofjust teachingcraft,I needto talkto Unlike theglib, materialistic, quick-solution visionof life offeredon muchTV, literature portrayslives thathave complicated problemsand toughchoices. them in ways that challenge them to learn more about their characters:Why did that characterdo that? What's motivatingher? What do we know about her background, her dreams,her fears,her wishes? I would like to discipline myself so my first responses to a piece of fictionwould centeron the qualitiesof empathyand understanding: What'sat the heart of this human you are workingto portray?And if you do decide to knock aroundor kill off this character,how will you make it so we all feel the true hurt? 19 A skillat ormal iterary analysismay be usefulfor a few college courses,butit is nota highly marketable skill,nora cornerstone of workplace competence, norsomething mostfolks needas theywalk aroundin theiradult lives. LITERATURE AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE All this thinking about writing finally brought me back around to literature.I'm ready to talk to the pragmatistsnow. Here's what I will say: The callingof literatureis to explorehuman experience in all its dimensions and possibilities.Literaturedeals with our most pressing concerns-family, death, religion, love, good and evil, destiny, will, justice, character,courage-issues not oftencovered in an Applied Communicationsor Business Writingunit. Informationmost often represents humanexperiencein abstractand generalized forms: facts, statistics, data. Literaturerepresentshuman experience in the very specific individualterms of a story or poem. Furthermore,literatureoffersa different form of learningthanjust processinginformation;it requiresus to experience,to participate. Works of literature are not just abouthuman issues; the power of literature is that it makes issues come alive for the reader. Think of the experience so many young readershave with Anne Frank'sdiary. Whatis learnedof the Holocaustin thatlittle book is learnedin a powerful,moving, profoundlyintimateway.Withchillinglyevil insight, Hitler's propaganda minister Josef Goebbelssaid thata singledeathis a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic. We must, of course, confront the statistics about the Holocaust, we must know the information thatmillions of lives were taken.Butto fully understand,we also mustfeel the tragedyof single deaths, experiencethe loss in a way we can shed a tear over, put faces on those numbers.Thatis the functionof literature. Manyyounger readers,it seems to me, already know this. As a parent and sometime teacher of elementary schoolers, I am often amazed to see what can happen when avid young readers plunge into literature. They may cry when the dogs die in Where the RedFern Growsor the father comes home in Sounder. They feel in their marrowbones the awful injustice of racism when they read Rollof Hear My Cry.They share pioThunder, with Laura Ingalls Wilder neer hardships and rehearse the demands of friendship with Katherine Paterson. They care desperately about the fate of characters, laugh out loud, gasp, sigh, get scared, or shiver as they read. 20 This is the way we want studentsto experience literature,a way that allows them to exercisetheirempatheticimaginations. Think, then, about how literature is often taughtin high school:Outlinethe plot. Identify the theme. Detail the setting. List main charactersand supportingcharacters. Commenton the structureof the work.Note descriptiveand supportingdetails.Analyze the mood. Look for certain literary techniques: irony,symbolism,author'ssignature style. Considerthe narrativepoint of view. Definethis work in termsof the SevenMajor Plots, the Seven Forms of Ambiguity,Four Universal Themes, Kohlberg's Stages, Bloom'sTaxonomy,whatever.Writeup some biographicalinfo on the author.Answerthe questionsat the end of the selection.Makea list of new vocabularywords. And on and on. I am as guiltyas anyone. Jumpingtoo quicklyinto these kinds of follow-up activities, we miss the boat, I think. Certainlythere are formal and aesthetic issues to explorein all worksof literature, and I want my students to have a vocabularyof literaryanalysis.But if that is my primaryor only instructionalconcern, the pragmatistsare completelyjustified in questioning the value of the literaturecurriculum, their criticismcorrectlyaimed. A skill at formalliteraryanalysismay be useful for a few college courses, but it is not a highly marketableskill, nor a cornerstoneof workplacecompetence,nor somethingmost folksneed as theywalk aroundin theiradult lives. If the heartof literatureis its exploration of human experience,considerationof the formaland aestheticpropertiesof a work of literature must be secondary to consideration of the social values and ethical dilemmas presented by the work. Bertolt Brecht once said he didn't want people to leave his plays thinking about the theater, he wanted them to leave his plays thinking about the world. In like fashion, our students want to use literature to think about the world, not just to think about the formal aspects of literature. To explore the deepest human concerns is why people read literature, and why they write it. That is what enthusiastic younger readers know, and that'swhat we don't want to stifle in our high school students by focusing too soon or too much on technical elements of literature. December1994 of Storiesis CommonThreadin WideThe skill our studentsmost need to learn "Sharing 1994. ReadLiteracyConference." Ranging of in this fromliterature go-getter pragmatic 11.5 1. ingToday (April/May): thema societyis how to betterunderstand and Programs Stotsky,Sandra.1989. "Literature selvesandothers. of Civic theDevelopment TheLeafIdentity." It behoovesus then,to startourdiscuslet88 (1): 17-21. sion of everyworkof literature open to the Wright,Richard.1945. BlackBoy.New York: Harper& Row human issues dramatizedin it. Our first questionsoughtn'tto be about form,vo- TimGillespie,pastpresidentof the OregonCouncil or literarymoves.Wehaveto give of Teachersof Englishandco-directorof theOregon cabulary, WritingProjectat Lewisand ClarkCollege,teaches studentsa chance first to chew over the at LakeOswegoHighSchoolin Oregon. the questions quandariesof the characters, of rightandwrongtheyface,justifiableand or antisocial . actions,admirable unjustifiable 11I. .v..E. .$.A.O qualities,choicesand limitations.(In this AXat~~ eflv We...... way, as both SandraStotskyand Robert Coleshavepointedout,civicsandsocialinW .................... . world .w .de .$...... s i~th... quirycanbecomethe provinceof literature it is of studies as much as the social study In our classrooms, we haveto teflctbn~t0$ th.Th~~h I~ss ~ X. curriculum.) mainattractions, the opporuse literature's ~oo~r~ye*s pbi~iXon tunityto tryoutotherlivesandconnectwith o ....p .........,..... . ........ otherhumansthroughtheexerciseof imagi~ Tenys~n~ t41 e wh nationandempathy Tosumup, themainclaimforliterature thatI wantto offerto myworkforce-oriented to learn colleaguesis this:Weneedliterature to get along.Literature andlife convergein tT~1ox thefieldof humanrelationships. Whatchar1NT~cON ~ ....... ... E acterizes quality literature-refusal to or to the stereotype generalize, fidelity .OE~tLO..........M whole complicatedtruthin all its breadth ..$.........nb.. 9 ..... and subtlety,energyandinventiveness, eloquence,payingcarefulattention,discomfort .Nahsi .6..t .......e at patanswers,anda generosity andsympawith others-also characterizes thy thoughtful life.Thegreatdangersof ourfindesiecle theinabilityto period-nihilism,barbarism, the of Th~p i~....... .~ ......we acknowledge humanity othersoutside xr~mbev (o~ .N~W ~ar~seIX. one's own tribe, cynicism,boredom-are perilsliterature attemptsto combat. So let's be clear-eyed,realistic,pragmatic.Who needs literature?We all do. WorksCited Sandra.1990."Ghosts andVoices: WritCisneros, .9: eve, t~a ynti4g ST... ....... .... ......y ...t ...... Ui . na, MexicanAmerican Literaing fromObsession." ture.NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. and Coles,Robert.1989. TheCallofStories: Teaching theMoralImagination. Boston:HoughtonMifflin. Ellison,Ralph.1964. "TwentiethCenturyFiction and the Black Mask of Shadow Humanity." andAct.New York:Random House. or Gates, Henry Louis,Jr. 1991. "'Authenticity,' the Lesson of Little Tree."New YorkTimes BookReview(24 November):1. Journal English T61801,1.1*iau~ p e.r.h. ~* ~i~ ......... 21