When my AP Literature students walk into my classroom at the beginning of the school year, I am aware that I need to try to change the way they think about literature in a number of ways. I've given this speech—or a variation of it—to my AP Literature students early in the school year for the last two years, and, in preparation for the start of this new semester, I thought I'd write it out in full. I usually get some horrified looks from my students as my monologue unfolds, but before I start my rant, I ask them to consider the phrase "Literature is Life" and discuss with their table partners what they think it means.
How many of you noticed that the literature you read in high school tends to have sad endings? Have you ever wondered why that is? Are your teachers trying to depress you? Do they take pleasure in ruining your faith in mankind? Maybe they are trying to prove Wesley's quip in the Princess Bride: "Life is pain...Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."
It actually comes back to the phrase we talked about earlier: "Literature is life". I want you to say it with heavy emphasis on the second word.
Literature is life.
Literature is life just as two plus two is four. Literature is representative of life. It reflects life. It is a snapshot of life. Hamlet says that the purpose of drama is "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature". Its purpose is to illuminate the human experience. And other than being born, every human shares one universal experience. Dying.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the reasons that there are so few happy endings to novels, stories, and plays is that there aren't really any happy endings in life. We all die. In other words, if books worth studying (studying, not just reading) are meant to teach us about what it means to be human, then they are being disingenuous when they claim, "And they lived happily ever after." "Messily ever after," perhaps. "In seasons marked by both joy and grief for the rest of their days," perhaps. But regardless of how we live, we will one day stop breathing, and die, our bodies decaying under the ground or reduced to ashes in a furnace.
If literature is supposed to help us understand the human experience, then it has to include death, doesn't it? Just as the love of Romeo and Juliet is made more dramatic set in a society torn apart by hate, the writer who wants to convey the majesty and aching beauty of life must juxtapose it with its counterpart: death.
In many ways, though, death is not just the biological reality of this world. In literary tradition, going all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve, death is connected with and even created by human foolishness. It is the ultimate penalty for stupidity, for sin, for vice. And so literature becomes, as much as anything, the story of mankind's folly. In East of Eden, John Steinbeck claims that there is only one story, and that "all novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves between good and evil".
We cannot escape this reality, for if we are honest, we live it every single day. That is why we shouldn't read to escape the real world; rather, we should read to immerse ourselves in it and learn more about it. And we can't learn about life if we insist on happy endings, on characters who are like us, on people we understand immediately. There is beauty, however tragic it may be, in our recognition of another human's struggles against his own frailties. More than that, there is deep empathy gained when we see ourselves in someone who initially seems foreign and incomprehensible. So although many of you cannot immediately understand the hubris of Okonkwo, the narcissism of Hamlet, or the aloofness of Mr. Darcy, when you remember that these characters are simply part of a great human tradition—as you yourselves are—of choosing folly over wisdom, the text becomes instantly more accessible. These are characters unlike anyone you know in person. But they are human, and how wonderful it is to know that! And, yes, they are fictitious, but it doesn't mean we can't learn from them. So we need realism, for it is only in realism that we can see the world for what it is: broken and messy.
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| A hastily made list of the works of literature I teach or that I've taught in the past. I think it speaks for itself! |
Now, this does not mean that literature has to be depressing, for we know that so much of life is glorious and beautiful. We are not living, to quote Switchfoot, "in the world of if onlys, stretched tight in between our birth and our graves". For a start, while literature may reflect our lives, it does not have to define them. I think that there are actually very few stories that fail to offer hope. Our mistake is, I think, in always looking at the ending. If we measured our lives by how they end, then we are all, by definition, unsuccessful, because we ultimately fail at living! But scattered throughout the pages of all literature—and our lives—are those transcendent, transformative moments where good rises out of bad. Redemption coming out of suffering, forgiveness when it isn't deserved, power in weakness, and victory in defeat. That's why we read. These are universal traits of the human spirit. Of course, the most memorable and beautiful stories often have these moments at the end, but the reality is that we can find them anywhere in good books. Most significantly, though, while there is plenty of literature that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit, we read, not because we have escaped foolishness through our moments of glory, but because we can only find true glory through, after, learning from, or even in the very midst of our moments of foolishness. Or, as one of my students put it, "We read because humans have been fools for thousands of years."
I think there is one other thing that literature offers us. Beauty. You may not see this in all literature, just as you may not see beauty in all aspects of life, but both life and literature shine a light on things—like sacrificial love—that sometimes make no sense in this world. We can't put our finger on it, but there are things we can never explain about literature. C.S. Lewis suggests that beauty is a mere reflection of something greater: "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited". It is why it is a travesty to claim that Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, merely teaches us that war is bad and that it takes away soldiers' humanity. To reduce the meaning of that novel to a clean, precise phrase—which is, unfortunately, what I will be trying to teach you to do in order to pass the AP Literature exam—is to merely look at it scientifically, splitting it up into all its component parts. And when we write about literature, we can't really avoid this. But perhaps I can convince you, as you read and discuss, to linger over the magic of words and the way they stir our souls in ways we can't accurately express.
So as you journey through the world of Shakespeare, Achebe, Bradbury, Austen, Ibsen, Chopin, and Baldwin, I hope you will discover the sometimes paradoxical truths that these writers illuminate and embrace the fragile, ephemeral, complicated existence we all share, whether you like it or not.
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