I taught 17 and 18 year-olds secondary school English for a long time, and over that time I found myself struggling with young people who, more and more, did not see the point. After all, one of them said to me about reading fiction, It never happened. So why are we doing this? I’m not alone. Teachers’ rooms all over the country are full of people like me wondering why their students don’t read. By this my colleagues don’t mean they can’t decode a menu. They mean their students increasingly resist reading anything longer than a text. Of course this isn’t all students. But something’s changing.
There’s a connection between this pattern and the current state of the Union: reading fiction develops the capacity to see contradiction, decode the implied, value the truth. Not reading does the opposite.
I have been confused by the increasing trouble my students have explaining what is truly going on in human interactions they find in fiction. How does this character feel? I may ask. “Good,” they’ll say. They ignore the fact that the character is lying and the preceding hundred pages made that clear. Lies, I have told my students, are the engines that drive the narrative arc upward to its crisis point. Why are Iago and Macbeth so vulnerable to any witch or subaltern who whispers their unacknowledged fears or desires into their ears? Isn’t it strange that Nick begins his story about Gatsby with the assertion that you can’t believe stories that young men tell because when they aren’t lying, they’re plagiarizing. Now, he says, I’ve got a story for you.
Then there’s the way that fiction demands, if you heed its demands, that you see and make connections. If you don't. . . .
Why did no one go to Willy Loman’s funeral, I ask. A student who had heard the entire play read aloud in class suggested that no one went to Loman’s funeral because there were no email services at the time of his death. Challenged by another student, the young man argued that it could be possible and was therefore a valid position. It was a fact that there was no e-mail then. It is a fact that no one came to the funeral. Voila. He was entirely satisfied with his argument’s strength.
How can this standard of critical attention protect such a young person from lies? What’s going on when he didn’t seem to acknowledge that the truth matters more than a teetering sophistic evasive argument? What does he think when he watches Fox News?
If fiction can’t actually come to the rescue here, it can at least help. It may help us see that the truth is sometimes not immediately evident, that the person speaking is offering a self-serving or cowardly straight-up lie. This might even be a person who has been given enormous authority by his culture or nation, like, say, a king. Perhaps young people resist this idea not only because their world view has been titrated down to an iphone screen but because accepting it means living with the responsibility of weighing, comparing, assessing. Maybe they’ll have to face off against people arguing that what they said could be true. It could be an alternative truth!
I’ve heard the arguments about literature increasing empathy and that’s all well and good but I am more interested in literature helping people spot liars–the ones who lie to themselves as well as the ones who lie to others.
So I say English teachers of the world, pick up your burden. We’re needed.