Friday, January 29, 2016

Teaching Literature: The Light and the Wind

It is heartbreaking to teach literature sometimes. Very rewarding, but often heartbreaking. I teach a lower-level group of high school juniors this year -- nice bunch of kids and many of them way smarter than their work habits show. We are studying American literature and, believe it or not, I insist on teaching them Moby Dick. How do you study the foundations of American lit. without Melville's greatest work?

No, I don't have them read the while book. (I didn't read it until grad school.) We read selections and we watch the movie with Patrick Stewart as Ahab. It is a pretty good Cliff's Notes version that manages to keep many of the themes intact; it also remains faithful to a lot of the book's dialogue. And, the kids like it.

What's heartbreaking is teaching sections like the St. Elmo's fire scene and being (every time) chilled to the bone by the profundity of it; being ignited with my own internal fire of appreciation for the lofty heights that the human animal can achieve in seeing Melville's brilliance in action.

How do you teach that? How do you impart the soul-deep fulfillment -- the actual "high" -- that rises up in you when, for instance, Mr. Starbuck, brought to his lowest of lows, seeing Captain Ahab posing with the aid of a natural phenomenon like static electricity as a God figure, utters the phrase, "Forbear, old man -- God has turned his back on thee. This light is not thine. This light is not thine..."

Literature and music have always been to me as is wind to Coleridge's Aeolian harp; the strings vibrate into feelings of wonder and beauty. Forgive the purple prose, but...how else can one say these things? No wonder the Romantics were poets.

I know it is probably something one can't teach; the strings are either there or they are not, I suppose. I just wish.


6 comments:

  1. I love Moby Dock and became so obsessed with it, I ended up making a pilgrimage to the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford - it was good to see that it was still full of rough-looking sailors. But I've struggled to explain my passion for the book to others, so I really admire anyone who can elicit a positive reaction from a bunch of young teenagers. Perhaps they have to have lived and read more before they can fully appreciate passages like the one you're referring to, but hopefully you've sowed the seeds.

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    1. In the end, really, the idea of sowing seeds is the only real hope. I do need to go back and read the whole novel again. The meat (blubber?) of the story is wonderful, but I do remember long stretches of wondering when the story was going to come back into play... The movies focus on the plot, so it works better for the kids. I do believe you are right that it takes a certain level of sophistication to really appreciate what Melville was up to. That's what makes it endure, I suppose...

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  2. "I love Moby Dock..." Thank you, Samsung autocorrect software.

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  3. You're a much more experienced teacher than I am, but perhaps you've had the experience I had: I found that the people who "got it" and the people who didn't occupied the edges of the curve, but that there was always someone—sometimes several someones—in the middle, who don't know they're inspired by literature or art until you turn out to be the right teacher at the right time.

    If that possibility doesn't cheer you a bit, then maybe this will: I spent nearly every day of 11th-grade English with my face down on my desk, snoozing, taking no notes—and then I failed my huge end-of-the-year term paper. A quarter-century later, I sent that teacher a copy of one of my books accompanied by a truly sincere apology...

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    1. I think you are right, Jeff. Most of the time, we never find out that we were that "right teacher at the right time." Sometimes we do... One has to just try one's best, I suppose.

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