the Archdiocese of Atlanta GEORGIA BULLETIN SERVING GEORGIA S 71 NORTHERN COUNTIES GEORGIA BULLETIN BOOK SUPPLEMENT THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 1963 Fiction Is Subject With A History It Should Be Taught That Way BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR In two recent instances in Georgia, parents have objected to their eighth and ninth grade children's reading assignments in modern fiction. This seems to happen with some regularity in cases throughout the country. The unwitting parent picks up his child’s book, glances through it, comes upon pass ages of erotic detail or pro fanity and takes off at once to complain to the school board. Sometimes, as in one of the Georgia cases, the teacher is dismissed and hackles rise in liberal circles everywhere. The two cases in Georgia, which involved Steinbeck’s, EAST OF EDEN, and JohnHer- sey’s, A BELL FOR ADONO, provoked considerable news paper comment. One columnist, in commending the enterprise of the teachers, announced that students do not like to read the fusty works of the 19th century, that their attention can best be held by novels dealing with the realities of our own time, and that the Bible too is full of racy stories. MR. HERSEY himself ad dressed a letter to the State School Superintendent in behalf of the teacher who had been dismissed. He pointed out that his book is not scandalous, that it attempts to convey an earnest message about the nature of democrary, and that if falls well within the limits of the principle of “total effect,” that principle followed in legal cases by which a book is judged not for isolated parts but by the final effect of the whole book upon the general reader. I do not want to comment on the merits of these parti cular cases. What concerns me is what novels ought to be assigned in the eighth and ninth grades as a matter of course, for if these cases indicate any thing, they indicate the hapha zard way in which fiction is approached in our high schools. Presumably there is a state reading list which contains “safe” books for teachers to assign; after that it is up to the teacher. ENGLISH teachers come in Good, Bad and Indifferent, but too frequently in high schools anyone who can speak English is allowed to teach it. Since several novels can’t easily be gathered into one text took, the fiction that students are assigned depends upon their teacher's knowledge, ability and taste, variable factors at best. More often than not, the teacher assigns what he thinks will hold the attention and in terest of the students. Modern fiction will certainly hold it. Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning, but that is a part of the problem with which I am not equipped to deal. The devil of Educationism that possesses us is the kind that can be cast out only by prayer and fasting. No one has yet come along strong enough to do it. In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but by the reverse evol utionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail. I WOULD like to put forward the proposition, repugnant to most English teachers, that fiction, if it is going to be taught in the high schools,should be taught as a subject and as a subject with a history. The total effect of a novel depends not only on its innate impact, but upon the experience, lite rary and otherwise, with which it is approached. No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Stein beck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James and Crane, and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been intro duced to some of the better English novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries. The fact that these works do not present him with the reali ties of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time and he has no perspective what ever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasion ally when that seemed neces sary or unavoidable. THERE IS much to be en joyed in the great British nov els of the 19th century, much that a good teacher can open up in them for the young stu dent. There is no reason why these novels should be either too simple or too difficult for the eighth grade. For the simple they offer simple pleasures, for the more precocious they can be made to yield subtler ones if the teacher is up to it. Let the student discover, after reading the 19th century British novel, that the 19th century American novel is quite dif ferent as to its literary char acteristics, and he will there by learn something not only about these individual works but about the sea-change which a new historical situation can effect in a literary form. Let him come to modern fiction with this experience behind him and he will be better able to see and to deal with the more com plicated demands of the best 20th century fiction. MODERN FICTION often looks simpler than the fiction which proceeded it, but in real ity it is more complex. A nat ural evolution has taken place. The author has for the most part absented himself from di rect participation in the work and has left the reader to make his own way amid experience dramatically rendered and symbolically ordered. The modern novelist merges the reader in the experience; he tends to raise the passions he touches upon. If he is a good novelist, he raises them to effect by their order and clarity a new experience—the total ef fect—which is not in itself sen suous or simply of the moment. Unless the child has had some literary experience before, he is not going to be able to re solve the immediate passions the book arouses into any true total picture. It is here the moral problem will arise. It is one thing for a child to read about adultery in the Bible or in ANNA KAR ENINA and quite another for him to read about it in most modern fiction. Hus is not only because in both the form er instances adultery is con sidered a sin, and in the latter, ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH. By Alex ander Solzhernitzyn. Dutton. $3.95 By Rev. Leonard F. X. Mayhew This is an important book. It is the detailed description of a single day in the life of a pri soner in a maximum security labor camp for political con victs in the days of Stalin’s iron- fisted tyranny. The account is completely authentic. Alexan der Solzhenitsyn, now a teach er of mathematics, was a poli tical prisoner in a Siberian labor camp for eight years. The chilling simplicity of his story and the disciplined un derstatement of his writing heighten the effect of every in cident he narrates. The result is overwhelmingly moving. Sol zhenitsyn has chosen his hero well. He himself, an intellec tual, must have been able to analyze his plight, to relate ef fects to causes, to lay blame where it was deserved. In some way this may have eased the at most, an inconvenience, but because modern writing in volves the reader in the action with a new degree of intensity and literary mores now permit him to be involved in any action a human being can perform. IN OUR fractured culture, we cannot agree on morals, we cannot even agree that moral matters should come before literary ones when there is a conflict between them. All this is another reason why the high- schools would do well to return to their proper business of preparing foundations. Whether in the senior year students should be assigned modern novelists should depend both on their parent's consent and on what they have already read and understood. The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opport unity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in de mocracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most re grettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being form ed. horror of those eight years. The hero of the noveL Ivan Denisovich Shukkov, is a sim ple man, a farmer, forced to survive without sophisticated resources of any kind. As for so many Russians, the turning point of his existence came with the German invasion in 1941 In 1945 he was captured by the Germans but contrived to es cape within a few days. Upon his return to the Russian lines his story was disbelieved by die hypersensitive security police and he is accused of treason and espionage. Confused and helpless before his accusers and afraid that he will be exe cuted if he maintains his inno cence, he “confesses” and is sentenced to ten years in a con centration camp. THE BOOK describes one out of the monotonous desert of thousands of days of Ivan’s pri son term. It begins with the clang of a rail at reveille and (Continued On Page 4) Stalin’s Tyranny
