Monthly Archives: March 2021

Canon Fodder

literary lint,

Caitlin Flanagan tweeted this question Saturday. Usually, I am able to resist such provocations, which inevitably lead to sincere suggestions, too obvious jokes, and ideological arguments vining down the comment thread. (I know, I know: get off Twitter.) But I was provoked enough to come up with my own sincere suggestions:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Diary of Anne Frank; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The White Album by Joan Didion
The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia by George Saunders

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Short, brilliant, bracing. I think of the detail about Douglass as a boy sleeping in a corn sack, his feet poking out, cracks in them deep enough to hold a pen. A country’s trauma written on his body.

Moby-Dick. Look, no one said high school was going to be easy. Do I think America would be a better country if everyone was forced to read this novel? Yes, I do. That’s just the kind of snob I am. Part buddy-comedy, part opera, part Emersonian sermon, part revenge thriller, elastically plotted, brilliantly written. Putting more sugar into the cup paradoxically doesn’t make the coffee overflow. It just makes the country sweeter.

Huck Finn. Is this novel, published to controversy back in 1884, problematic by today’s standards? Yes. Are those problems emblematic of America as it was in the late 19th century and as it remains today? Yes. Look, no one said being an American was going to be easy. What is going on with the central relationship between Jim and Huck? What is going on with the ending?

The Age of Innocence. You could sub The House of Mirth probably just as easily. And there’s a valid argument to be had between the Henry James camp and the Edith Wharton camp for general milieu. One of those elegant society novels that folds together like a perfectly constructed piece of origami. Despite this, I almost want to counter-nominate anything by Willa Cather.

The Great Gatsby. Another obvious choice, but it’s still a worthy novel, from both a literary perspective and a historical one. Maybe one of the only “perfect” novels, though that adjective is problematic. Its characters’ political and racial grievances are sadly perennial.

Absalom, Absalom! Look, no one said high school was going to be easy. I get it: this is a beastly difficult novel. But, really, is it that bad? Is it any more abstruse than, say, pre-calculus? Besides if it’s not the great American novel (sorry, Melvillians), then it’s at least the greatest southern novel. You could probably sub The Sound and the Fury but I still think this is the better novel, especially if you’re going to force the entire country to read just one Faulkner. What can I say? Sometimes rewarding experiences are inherently difficult. It doesn’t just describe the racial schism of the country. It dramatizes it.

The Diary of Anne Frank; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick. Yes, this is three books. I was never good at math. Here you have the anticipatory paranoia of the atrocity, the horror itself, and the attempt to reconcile the horror via art afterward. In terms of introducing students to the Holocaust, it’s barely a start, but it’s probably heading in the right direction.

Black Boy by Richard Wright. One could argue on behalf of Native Son instead. However, the memoir is the one I remember as being evocative and piercing, like Frank’s diary in a way, nauseatingly immediate yet terrifyingly foreign.

The White Album. You could sub Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I suppose, but I find The White Album to be a better book overall. The way the long title essay mixes so many modes, cross-pollinates the personal and the cultural. Are we learning about Didion or the culture at large? Both? Where does one end and the other begin?

The Things They Carried. I am beginning to break a tacit rule: only dead people on the list. I realize not all of these authors have passed, but in general it seems like a canonical list such as this, and most of a high schooler’s literary syllabus, should be made up of dead writers. When else are they going to read the dead people? They can read the fun contemporary stuff outside of class. You know: for fun. Perhaps we can’t learn from the past unless people force us. Anyway, O’Brien: I think this book has become a classic. Students should read the entire book, not just the title story. Aside from being overwhelmingly well-written, an MFA in a book, and aside from the historical importance of the Vietnam War, it’s the metafictional elements that are also important: how the characters create stories, use stories, deploy stories — the manufactured nature of stories. The way the book rewrites itself as it proceeds.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. Saunders thankfully is very much alive and well. And really a better book would be a not yet extant Selected Works. Aside from the humor and the fact that the stories are wonderful, Saunders is on the list because of the way he productively satirizes strands of contemporary American life, the ways the country thinks of itself, talks to itself. One could make the argument that stories such as “Sea Oak” are not appropriate for our nation’s youth, but, really? Have you been on TikTok? I think the teens can handle grandma’s ghost.

Is this list more than three books? Yes. Is this list enough? No. Does this list sufficiently cover the panoramic scope of the American experience? No. Is the list demographically representative enough of America? No. Is this really a good list? No. All would-be canonical lists are inadequate, a blanket that can’t reach all the way to a nation’s feet. There is no list that will ever be good enough. The entire question is deliberately absurd. It should be 30 books. No, it should be 300. But I can’t resist Flanagan’s implicit trolling.

I am not just trying to be vaguely provocative. I genuinely think these are good books that the country as a whole would benefit from reading. For such a list, the books need to capture some ineffable aspect of the history of the country while also equipping the reader, if only slightly, for life as a citizen in 2021. And whatever list one creates is merely a start. It can’t cover everything.

And some of these books are more adult. So what? I resisted the temptation to put Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on the list. If you want teens to act more like grown-ups, then start treating them more like grown-ups. Nothing in any of these books is as weird as the stuff they’ve seen on any given episode of The Bachelor. And let’s not condescend to the nation’s youth by failing to adequately describe U.S. reality, either as it is now or as it was historically.

Finally, a high school graduate should not only read these books. This should just be the spine of what she reads. It doesn’t even have to be part of a class. Give the student the last two years. Tell them to read at least six books a year. Come in every six weeks during the school year and talk with a teacher for 15 minutes about the latest book you’ve read, proving via talk that you’ve read it and have some loose grip on why it’s important. You could make them write brief response papers but it would be easier and quicker and less prone to plagiarism if you just made the students talk one-on-one about the book. You could do it during lunch. Why do you think the ash heap is important? Why is Shreve in this novel? Why does Didion catalog the contents of her closet? Etc. and so forth. Push the details. Shove them into the students’ arms. Here. Deal with this.

As might be apparent, I am no high school teacher. I’m no school administrator. I have no degree in education. I taught writing for a short time, but that was years ago. I have floated completely free from the boat dock of American education. I don’t think these books are the only necessary ingredients in a better educated populace but I do think they’re important. The country has been telling itself a story about itself for a long time. We might as well try to listen. And like some weight training instructors, I think the students should be pushed toward muscle exhaustion. That’s what makes muscles grow. Is your average 17 year old ready for Faulkner? Probably not. And that’s one reason it should be on the list. It’s a worthy lift.

Footnote

literary lint

As I get older, and as I continue to write, I change my mind about the value of artistic intention, particularly related to how it was discussed in college. Back then, we said writers made aesthetic choices. Style was the result of the author’s intentions. And to be sure, there is some choice that goes into it. Artists do have free will. But lately I have begun to think that a writer’s style is equally if not more the result of that person’s limitations. A finished book equals these limitations plus whatever the publisher could be persuaded to print. Deliberate aesthetic choice runs a distant third. Perhaps Hopper simply couldn’t paint faces well. Perhaps Rothko struggled with perspective. The tree grows around its infection.

Once there was a city

plague journal, ,

I wasn’t planning on writing about infrastructure again this week, but as of March 5, approximately 5,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi, are still without reliably running water. That’s three full weeks without. And this is an improvement from the nearly 50,000 earlier. Jackson city metro only has about 160,000 people.

The situation has dragged on long enough so that friends outside the state have messaged me to ask if I’m okay — a version of “just what’s going on down there?”

On February 27, Angie Thomas, a famous writer originally from Jackson who still lives here, decried the situation on Twitter :

For over 10 days now, around half the residents of Jackson, Mississippi have not had running water. And nobody is talking about it on a national scale. I am begging the national media to please pay attention. There is a crisis happening in Jackson. If you wanna talk to the people who are on the ground, doing the necessary work then I can connect you to them. People are struggling, and since Jackson is majority Black, poor Black folks are getting hit hardest. But NOBODY is talking about it. . . . For those asking why I haven’t connected with national media people I know — I HAVE TRIED. But sometimes it takes a bunch of folks making noise for things to happen.

In the week since, there has been subsequent coverage in The Daily Beast, CNBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and the Today Show. From my cursory investigations, it looks as if the Today Show coverage specifically was the result of Thomas’s tweets.

Thomas is correct that there has been little media attention given to Mississippi. This whole time I’ve been much more worried about the situation in Texas, because, yes, it seemed quantifiably worse, but also because it was everywhere on the news. The crisis was broadcast, whereas here it just existed.

There is an echo in this lack of coverage with Hurricane Katrina, where there was a well-publicized catastrophe in New Orleans and a much less well-known catastrophe next door on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It’s a Rodney Dangerfield problem. New Orleans is the more glamorous tourist destination, home of fond memories, better on camera. When it goes, producers reach for the Mardi Gras B-roll. No one knows where Waveland, Mississippi is, relatively speaking.

So an increase in national news coverage to the plight of the state’s ruinous infrastructure is probably a positive occurrence. It certainly can’t make anything worse. But then there is a cynical part of me, a small, persistent voice, beeping like the run-out battery in a household smoke alarm: nothing will change, nothing will change, nothing will change.

Just who is this news being broadcast to? The rest of the country might perhaps be struck with a dagger of sympathy for the situation in Jackson, but they’re not going to actually do anything. Well, that might be incorrect: Thomas sent links to aid organizations and churches who are delivering water to people, so in all actuality that might result in cash in the hands of people dealing with the immediate effects of the crisis. So I’m tripping my cynical alarm too quickly there. But in a slightly more telescoped view, that’s a temporary act of goodwill. Unless those people move to Mississippi, get on the city council, come up with a plan to completely revolutionize the city’s water infrastructure (and hey, come on down! please!), the attention isn’t going to fix the problem.

Is the audience ourselves? By which I mean the people already living in Jackson? Perhaps. And that might make us feel better, feel less alone, feel understood, but this is a symbolic victory rather than a structural one. The city needs physical change. The pipes are literally broken. And that state of decrepitude persists independent of how the citizens feel about how the rest of the country sees them. Positive vibes won’t change the material situation.

Will the national coverage shame our city leaders into effective action? Perhaps. I don’t know. I have a hard time measuring the incentives of shame any longer in this post-Trump era. But the infrastructural problems are so vast and so old that it feels overdetermined to spend one’s energy shaming those currently in office, an easy out for our angst. In reality it’s a shame spread over hundreds of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t fix the problem for decades. Instead of shame perhaps we should pass out bondo and duct tape.

I admit that I have no idea how to fix the problem. I am just observing. I am just typing. I am attempting to describe the situation. I am trying not to complain. I choose to live here. On the one hand it’s good to have more people in the country understand what’s happening and on the other I know that there are people working on the current problem with dedication and diligence. But my point is that it’s a larger problem, one that will outlive this weekend’s news cycle, this weekend’s moment in the jet stream of sympathy. And it’s a problem that needs more than a temporary, emergency fix. Sometimes I think the entire city should just start over. We should recognize that civilized life is simply not viable on this plot of land. The city should pack its bags, leap frog over the suburbs, and start a new city a little further up the highway. Lord knows there’s enough wide open space. We could leave the ruins of the old city as a monument to our century of mistakes. But then, perhaps the leap away has already happened, and the people like me still living in the city are the dupes. The escape, the rebirth, has already happened. Didn’t you hear? We’re living in the ruins already.