When the hurly-burly’s done

Sweet. Clay tagged me. Let’s knock out the rules, then on to the meat of this thing:

• Select and briefly review one teen novel, classic or modern, which is a sure antidote to the daze of high school.
• Title your post Meme: High School Daze to Praise.
• Include an image with your post.
• Tag four blogger colleagues

Okay. So I want to start by saying that there’s no such thing as a “sure antidote to the daze of high school.” Because, y’see, high school’s “daze” is due to so much more than the novels selected by some English teacher. Can I assign Slaughterhouse-Five and then sit back and assume that my work is done, that my little angels will proceed to meet their academic potential in all of their classes? Will On the Road encourage Ryan to shed his conformist exterior and embrace life? Will The Bell Jar prevent Beth’s becoming another teen suicide statistic?

Nope.

So I don’t buy this thing at all. I don’t believe that literature has that kind of power, or at least the kind of power we English teachers hope it has. I’m not going to pick a universally interesting book; instead, I’d like to write a little bit about the book that woke me up a little when I was in high school.

Entering my senior year in high school, I figured I was a pretty fancy reader. English was the only class I really paid any attention to–why bother with math or science or even history when I could focus my attention on Mr. Decker’s rambling discussions about Shakespeare, St. Exupery, and Gogol? Why bother balancing chem equations when I could explicate a poem? And what was all that business about showing my work?

For my senior year, I enrolled in AP English. As a professional educator now, I believe that the AP system is a load of crap. It exists, as do so many pieces of our educational system, to make money for the testing companies. Why should anyone have to pay money to take an exam? The AP courses themselves, though, serve as a place to collect the students who really want to take that course, who proclaim themselves willing to put in a lot of extra effort to do some higher-level work in a particular subject. It’s become a prestige thing, which is unfortunate, and a way to boost students’ GPAs (at our school, at least, Honors- and AP-level courses are weighted). That’s another post.

In my AP English class back in the ‘94-’95 school year, Mr. Leonard gave us a hot mess of good and engaging literature to read. Nobody who took that class will ever forget the day he climbed up on a desk to demonstrate the bark of a dying dog in a poem; likewise, we’re all scarred by the Swedish TV version of Hamlet that rivaled the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail for absurd bloodiness.

For me, though, the best memory of that class came from struggling with, and eventually loving, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. James Agee and Walker Evans’s masterpiece, Famous Men is a multigenre study of Alabama sharecroppers during the mid-1930s. Agee’s prose and Evans’s indelible photographs combine to make the book the most visceral reading experience I’ve ever had.

Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it; and the question, Why we make this book, and set it at large, and by what right, and for what purpose, and to what good end, or none: the whole memory of the South in its six-thousand-mile parade and flowering outlay of the facades of cities, and of the eyes in the streets of towns, and of hotels, and of the trembling heat, and of the wide wild opening of the tragic land, wearing the trapped frail flowers of its garden of faces; the fleet flush and flower and fainting of the human crop it raises; the virulent, insolent, deceitful, pitying, infinitesimal and frenzied running and searching, on this colossal peasant map, of two angry, futile and bottomless, botched and overcomplicated youthful intelligences in the service of an anger and of a love and of an undiscernible truth, and in the frightening vanity of their would-be purity; the sustaining, even now, and forward moving, lifted on the lifting of this day as ships on a wave, above whom, in a few hours, night once more will stand up in his stars…

The book began as an assignment for Agee, a journalist, and Evans, a photographer. They were to find out about the living conditions of white sharecroppers in the midst of the Depression. Overwhelmed by their experiences, though, Agee and Evans turned their notes and photographs and interviews into a hefty book that is impossible to characterize as belonging to one particular genre. Some sections read as straight journalism. Some sections are nothing if not beautifully executed poetry. The whole thing has the feel of the postmodern in its willingness to challenge existing forms, in its eagerness to include the author and photographer as characters, in its direct appeals to the reader. This is a book that demolishes the fourth wall and brings the reader in.

This is not a book for everyone. This is a book that could fall victim to what Clay calls “schooliness.” There’s a temptation, I’m sure, to have students extract all the vocabulary words and write context-clue sentences. There’s a temptation to do other, even stupider, things to our students. That’s part of why I’ve never tried to teach this book (I’m sure if I wanted to, I could scrounge up the funds to buy a class set or two. My school has a lot of money). But mostly, I’m afraid that if I did teach this book, there wouldn’t be any students who were like me, ready to be challenged and changed by a book from 70 years ago.

Oh, and I tag these folks (not all of them are high school English teachers, which I hope is okay):  Tree, David, Kim, and Adrian.