advanced placement literature and composition summer ...€¦ · (derek walcott 1930-2017) the fist...

Advanced Placement Literature and Composition

Summer Assignment 2019-2020 Dr. Joshua D.J. Plocher

Hutto High school [email protected]

Remind: @drplocap

Course Description and Goals AP Literature and Composition functions as a college-level English course. At Hutto High School, it also fulfills the requirements for English IV (senior English).

AP Literature and Composition builds on the analytical skills students have developed in their previous coursework and encourages them to apply those skills to literary works in meaningful ways. The course features intense reading and writing, but also intense conversation and intense analysis of literary texts. The goal of the course is not merely to read and to write, but to read and to write well. Students will be eligible to take the AP Literature and Composition exam in May. Students receiving a score of 3 or higher will receive college credit at state universities in Texas. Requirements to receive credit vary among private institutions. Close reading of imaginative literature is at the heart of the course. Students develop their ability to understand literary works on both the large and small scale, including the ability to relate the elements of a selected passage to elements of the larger work. Successful close reading involves understanding of literary elements such as figurative language and allusion. Analytical writing allows us to share our understanding with others. Students write a variety of essays and short answers over the course of the year. Writing instruction, including revision of drafts, focuses on the clear development of ideas using precise, persuasive language. Informal writing occurs throughout the course.

Overview of the Summer Assignment

The summer assignment prepares students for the rigors of AP Literature and Composition. Students

engage with imaginative literature—both poetry and prose—and write analyses of it. All elements of the

assignment will be submitted via TurnItIn during class on the first day. Students should complete the

assignment in Google Docs or a similarly web-accessible platform. The summer assignment is a test

grade for the first grading period; failure to submit it makes passing the grading period and remaining

in the class a challenge. Importantly, students’ work with the assigned novel is also the foundation for

our class activities and discussions at the beginning of the year.

All students must complete their work individually. In cases where students submit identical or highly

similar assignments, both students will lose credit.

Broadly, the summer assignment consists of three parts:

Part One: Poetry

Students will complete a TPCASTT chart on two poems: Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book”

and Muriel Rukeyser’s “Ballad of Orange and Grape” For each poem, the student will also complete a 2-

3 paragraph thematic analysis of each poem (300 word minimum).

Part Two: How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Students will read the introduction and first four chapters of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature

Like a Professor (rev. ed). While the relevant chapters are attached to the assignment, I encourage students

to pick up a copy of the book. It’s a great resource.

For each chapter, the students will type a set of notes according to the provided guidelines.

Part Three: The Joy Luck Club

Students will read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. After reading, students will write a 900-1100 word

analytical essay based on the included prompt.

Scoring Guide

Item Scoring Criteria Points

TPCASTT: Bradstreet Completion (4)

Accuracy (3)

Use of textual evidence (3)

10

Thematic Analysis: Bradstreet Identification of theme (thesis) (5)


Quality of writing (5)

15

TPCASTT: Rukeyser Completion (4)

Accuracy (3)


10

Thematic Analysis: Rukeyser Identification of theme (thesis) (5)


Quality of writing

15

Notes: Foster Completion 10

Reflective essay on Tan’s The Joy Luck Club

Quality and clarity of thesis (8)


Quality of writing (10)

Understanding of text (14)

40

Total: 100

I will be checking my e-mail intermittently throughout the summer, and frequently beginning in August.

You can reach me with any questions at: [email protected].

PART ONE: POEMS For “To Death” and “Beethoven, Opus 111,” you will complete a TPCASTT chart and mini-essay

considering thematic content. TPCASTT is not an exhaustive method of analyzing poems, but it’s a good

framework for approaching an unfamiliar work and getting your bearings. The section starts with the

example TPCASTT chart below. The insights you develop over the course of filling in the chart should

form a solid foundation for the more formal thematic analysis you will write. (Observations may appear

in both the chart and the mini-essay.) Please note that these analyses should be text-based, not biographical or

historical. Please avoid any secondary research.

You may copy the TPCASTT template into your Google Doc; the charts need to be filled in and

submitted with the rest of the summer assignment. Please include the mini-essay directly after each chart

(minimum 300 words).

The Fist (Derek Walcott 1930-2017) The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has moved past love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss. Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live

TPCASTT

Evidence (from text)

Analysis/Reflection

Title (What can you infer from the title?)

The Fist Clenched fists generally represent violence, either actual or threatened.

Paraphrase (What is happening in the poem? Summarize it in your own words.)

(The whole poem)

The speaker explains that his heart is gripped by love, that this love is painful and threatening (“moved past love to mania”). He closes with an exhortation to his heart to hold fast to the manic love and to the life it represents.

Connotation (Which words have strong connotations? What do those connotations suggest? Pick out four or five of the strongest words.)

“Gasp brightness” “Mania” “Clench of the madman”

“Gasp brightness” suggests coming up from the clenched heart not for air, but for light itself. It suggests that the clenching is fundamentally dark. This is reinforced by the words and phrases that suggest love’s insanity: “mania,” “clench of the madman” and “ledge of unreason.” The poet’s word choices

“Ledge of unreason”

help build the image of a speaker whom love has driven to the edge of reason.

Attitude (How does the author feel about the subject? That is, what is the tone? How do we know? Connect to evidence.)

“When have I ever not loved the pain of love?” Direct address to heart

Despite the suggestions of madness, the poet’s tone is ultimately reflective. For the moment, at least, the speaker has the clarity to recognize his folly and put it in proper context.

Shift (Is there a shift in the poem’s tone? If so, where? What might it mean?)

Stanza breaks There are two shifts in this short poem. While the first stanza describes the clenching and unclenching of the metaphorical fist, the speaker shifts in the second to explain that this love is like madness. The third stanza--just a single line--shifts again, with the speaker directly addressing his heart. The shifts enforce the reflective tone and help create the impact of the ending.

Title Revisited (Does its meaning change now that you’ve worked on the poem?)

The title’s meaning does not change after reading the poem, but it does narrow in focus. The fist is both constraint (clenching) and threat (the violence of madness).

Theme (What is the big picture message of the poem? What fundamental parts of human experience does it address?)

“When have I ever not loved the pain of love?” “This way at least you live”

Ultimately, Walcott’s speaker concludes that the risk of madness is worthwhile in pursuit of love and life. Importantly, there’s nothing valedictory about this statement; a life with pain is taken as the minimum kind of acceptable life.

The Author to Her Book

(Anne Bradstreet, 1612-1672)

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth didst by my side remain, Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view, Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judg). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call, I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could: I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretched thy joynts to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run’st more hobling then is meet; In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find. In this array ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam. In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come; And take thy way where yet thou art not known, If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none: And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.

TPCASTT

Evidence (from text) Analysis/Reflection



Connotation (Which words have strong connotations? What do those connotations suggest? Pick out four or five of the strongest

words.)




Theme (Notes) (What is the big picture message of the poem? What fundamental parts of human experience does it address?)

Complete a two-three paragraph thematic analysis of the poem, being sure to support your answer using textual evidence. The work you’ve done on the chart should be good foundation. (Minimum 300 words)

Ballad of Orange and Grape (Muriel Rukeyser, 1913-1980)

After you finish your work after you do your day after you've read your reading after you've written your say – you go down the street to the hot dog stand, one block down and across the way. On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the

twentieth century. Most of the windows are boarded up, the rats run out of a sack – sticking out of the crummy garage one shiny long Cadillac; at the glass door of the drug-addiction center, a man who'd like to break your back. But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in

rose and pink, too. Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel where the hot-dog-man leans – nothing else on the counter but the usual two machines, the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty, I face him in between. A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes

on walking. I watch the man as he stands and pours in the familiar shape bright purple in the one marked ORANGE orange in the one marked GRAPE, the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE and orange drink in the GRAPE. Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on

each machine.

I ask him: How can we go on reading and make sense out of what we read? – How can they write and believe what they're writing, the young ones across the street, while you go on pouring grape in ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE –? (How are we going to believe what we read and we

write and we hear and we say and we do?) He looks at the two machines and he smiles and he shrugs and smiles and pours again. It could be violence and nonviolence it could be white and black women and men it could be war and peace or any binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend. Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we

don't do. On a corner in East Harlem garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape, forgetfulness, a hot street of murder, misery, withered hope, a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE and orange into the one marked GRAPE, pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into

ORANGE forever.

TPCASTT

Evidence (from text) Analysis/Reflection



Connotation (Which words have strong connotations? What do those connotations suggest? Pick out four or five of

the strongest words.)




Theme (What is the big picture message of the poem? What fundamental parts of human experience does it address?)

Complete a two-three paragraph thematic analysis of the poem, being sure to support your answer using textual evidence. The work you’ve done on the chart should be good foundation. (Minimum 300 words)

PART TWO: READING LIKE A PROFESSOR Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Read the introduction and chapters 1-4 (p. 1-31)

For each chapter (and the introduction), write at least half a page of notes. Summarize Foster’s main ideas and the pieces of evidence that stand out to you. Use the following format:

Chapter Title:

Main idea (use a complete sentence):

Important evidence/supporting ideas (these may be bullet points):

Part Three: The Joy Luck Club Read Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Through its various characters, The Joy Luck Club addresses the sometimes conflicting elements that fall “inside” the hyphen in “Chinese-American,” as well as the way those elements interact with mother-daughter relationships. In a well-developed essay, compare and contrast two of the mother-daughter pairs in the novel, paying particular attention to the ways their relationships illuminate issues of identity.

See the rubric below for scoring. The essay should be approximately 1000 words (900-1100), roughly 4 double-spaced pages.

Thesis 8 points: The thesis clearly and specifically presents an explanation similarities and differences to a single idea.

6 points: The thesis is clear, but may lack specificity or focus on one relationship rather than the connections between the two.

4 points: Thesis is vague.

8

Use of textual evidence (8 points possible)

8 points: Specific textual evidence ties closely to the essay’s argument and is integrated into the flow of text.

6 points: Textual evidence connects to argument, but may be used sloppily.

4 points: Textual evidence loosely connected to argument and lacks integration.

8

Quality of Writing (10 points possible)

10 points: Use of syntax, grammar, and style enhances the presentation of ideas.

7 points: The writing is clear and correct, free of grammatical errors.

5 points: Spelling and grammatical errors are distracting but don’t impede understanding.

10

Understanding of text 14 points: The writer displays a deep understanding of the relationships in the novel, making inferences that show an understanding of subtleties.

11 points: The essay shows a reasonably complete understanding of the main ideas of the novel.

7 points: The writer shows a partial understanding of the work, complicated by isolated misreadings.

14

40

~;

~ ~

~ ~1 ~.

NIR. LINDNER? THAT MILQUETOAST?

Right. M

r. Lindner the milquetoast. S

o what did y

ou think

the devil would look like? If h

e were red with a tail, horns, an

dcloven hooves, any fool could say no.The class and I are discussing Lorraine Hansberry's A

Raisinits the S

un (1959), o

ne of the great plays o

f the A

merican the-

ater. The incredulous questions have c

ome, as they often do,

in response to my innocent suggestion that M

r. Lindner is the

devil. The Youngers, a

n African A

merican family in Chicago,

have made a d

own payment on a house in a

n all-white neigh-bor~liood. M

r. Lindner, a meekly apologetic little m

an, has been

dispatched from the neighborhood association, check in hand,

to buy out the family's claim o

n the house. A

t first, Walter L

ee

xxiv Introduction

Younger, the

protagonist9 confidently turns down the

offer,

believing that the family's m

oney (in the f

orm of a life insur-

ance payment after his father9s recent death) is secuie. Shortly

afterward, however; he discovers that two-thirds o

f that m

oney

has b

een stolen. All o

f a s

udden the previously insulting offer

conies to laok like his financial salvation.

bargains

with the devil g

a back a l

ong way in W

estern

culture. In all the versions of the Faust legend, w

hich is the

doaninant f

orm of this typ

e of story, the, hero is offered s

ome-

thing he desperately wants—

power or k

nowledge or a fast-

ball that will beat the Yankees—and all h

e has to give u

p is

his soul. 'Phis pattern holds f

rom the Elizabethan

Christo-

pher Niarlowe's IJr. Faustus through the nineteenth-century

J ohann ~XTolfgang v

on C~oethe's ~'ausC to the twentieth centu-

ry's Stephen Iincent genet's "

The devil a

nd Daniel ~Iebster"

and lJamn I'ankees. In ~Iansberry's version, w

hen

r. Lindner

makes his offer, h

e doesn't derrgand ~Talter bee's soul; in fact, h

e

doesn't even k

now that he's d

emanding it. Ike is, though. W

al-

ter I,ee can be rescued f

rom the rrionetary crisis h

e has brought

upon the farriily; all h

e has to d

o is a

dmit that he's n

ot the equal

o f the white residents w

ho don't w

ant him moving in, that his

piide and self-respect, his identity, can b

e bought. If that's n

ot

selling your soul, then what is it?

The chief difference b

etween I~ansberry's version o

f the

Faustian bargain a

nd others is that Walter L,ee ultimately resists

the satanic

terriptation. Previous versions

have been either

tiagic or comic depending on whether the devil successfully

collects the soul at the end of the w

ork. I-Iere, the protagonist

psychologically m

akes the deal but then looks at himself a

nd

at the true cost and recovers in time to reject the devil's—

~/Ir. L,indner's offer. T

he resulting play, for all its tears a

nd

anguish, is structurally comic—the tragic downfall threatened

but avoided—

and ~Talter I,ee g

rows to heroic stature in wres-

Introduction xxv

ding with his o

wn demons as well as the external one, Lindner,

and coming through without falling.

A moment occurs in this e

xchange between professor a

nd

s tudent when each o

f us adopts a look. M

y look says, "

What,

you don't get it?" Theirs says, "

We don't get it. A

nd we think

you're making it up." ~XTe're having a c

ommunication prob-

lem. Basically, we've all read the s

ame story, b

ut we haven't

used the s

ame analytical apparatus. If you've ever spent time

in a literature classroom as a student or a professor, y

ou know

this moment. It m

ay seem at times as if the professor is either

inventing interpretations out of thin air or else performing

parlor tricks, a sort o

f analytical sleight o

f hand.

Actually, neither o

f these is the case; rather, the professor, as

the slightly m

ore experienced reader, has acquired over the

years the use of a certain "language o

f reading," s

omething

to which .the students are only beginning to b

e introduced.

What I

'm talking about is a g

rammar of literature, a set o

f

c onventions and patterns, codes a

nd rules, that w

e learn to

employ in dealing with a piece o

f writing. E

very language has

a grammar, a set o

f rules that govern usage a

nd meaning, and

literary language is no different. It's all m

ore or less arbitrary,

of course, just like language itself. T

ake the w

ord "arbitrary"

as an example: it doesn't m

ean anything inherently; rather, at

s ome point in o

ur past w

e agreed that it w

ould mean what it

does, a

nd it does so only in English (those sounds w

ould be so

much gibberish in Japanese or Finnish). S

o too with art: w

e

decided to agree that perspective—

the set o

f tricks artists use

to provide the illusion o

f depth—

was a g

ood thing a

nd vital

to painting. This occurred during the Renaissance in E

urope,

but w

hen Western and Oriental art encountered each other

xxvi Introduction

in the 1700s, Japanese artists and their audiences w

ere serenely

untroubled b

y the lack o

f perspective in their painting. N

o one

felt i~ particularly essential to the experience of pictorial art.

Literature has its g

rammar, too. ~'ou k

new that, o

f course.

~',ven if you didn't k

now that, y

ou knew from the structure o

f

the preceding paragraph that it w

as coming. I~ow? The gram-

mar of the essay. Y

ou can read, and part o

f reading is k

nowing

the conventions, ~ecogiaizing t

hem, and anticipating the results.

i~Then someone introduces a topic (the g

rammar of literature),

then digresses to s

how other topics (language, art, music, d

og

training—it doesn't matter w

hat examples; as soon as y

ou see

a couple of them, you recognize the pattern), y

ou know he's

coming back with an applicatian o

f those examples to the m

ain

topic (voila!). And he did. S

o naw we're all happy, because the

convention has been used, observed, noted, anticipated,and ful-

filled. ~XThat more can y

ou want frorri a paragraph?

Well, as I w

as saying before I so rudely digressed, so too

in literature. Stories and novels have a very large set o

f con-

ventions: types of characters, plot rhythms, chapter structures,

point-of-view limitations. P

oems have a great m

any of their

own, involving f

orm, structure, rhythm, rhyme. Plays, too. A

nd

then there are conventions that cross genre lines. Spring is

largely universal. So is s

now So is darkness. A

nd sleep. W

hen

spring is mentioned in a story, a poem, or a play, a veritable

constellation. of associations rises in our imaginative sky: youth,

promise, n

ew life, y

oung lambs, children skipping .

.. on and

on. Pand if eve associate even further, that constellation m

ay lead

us to m

ore abstract concepts such as rebirth, fertility, renewal.

Okay, let's say you're right and there is a set of conventions, a key to

reading literature. ~Iow do I geg so I

can recognize these?

Same way you get to Carnegie Fall. Practice.

T hen lay readers encounter a fictive text, they focus, as

they should, on the story and the characters: w

ho are these

peo},le, w

hat are they doiiag, and w

hat wonderful or terrible

Introduction xxvii

things are happening to them? Such readers respond first o

fall, and sometimes only, to their reading o

n an emotional level;

the work affects t

hem, producing j

oy or revulsion, laughter or

tears, anxiety or elation. In other words, they are emotionallyand instinctively involved in the w

ork. This is the response

level that virtually every writer who has ever set p

en to paper

or fingertip

to keyboard

has hoped for

when sending the

novel, along with a prayer, to the publisher. W

hen an English

professor reads, o

n the other hand, h

e will accept the affective

response level of the story (

we don't m

ind a g

ood cry w

hen

Little Nell dies), but a lot o

f his attention will be engaged b

yother elements o

f the novel. W

here did that effect c

ome from?

Whom does this character resemble? W

here have I seen this

situation before? Didn't Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard)

say that? If you-learn to ask these questions, to see literary texts

through these glasses, you will read and understand literature in

a new light, a

nd it'll b

ecome more rewarding a

nd fun.

Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These

are the three items that,more than any

other, separate the professorial reader f

rom

the rest o

f the crowd. English professors, as a class, are cursed

with m

emory. Whenever I read a n

ew work, I spin the mental

Rolodex looking for correspondences a

nd corollaries—

where

have I seen his face, don't I k

now that t

heme? I can't not d

oit, although there are plenty o

f times w

hen that ability is not

something I w

ant to exercise. Thirty minutes into Clint East-

wood's Pale Rider (1985), for instance, I thought, Okay, this is

Shane (1953), and- f

rom there I didn't watch another frame

of the m

ovie without seeing Alan Ladd's face. This does not

necessarily improve the experience o

f popular entertainment.

Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is

a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. W

e

xxviii Introduction

a sk, Is this a rrietaphoY? Is that an analogy? What does the

thing over there signify? T'he kind of mind that w

orks its w

ay

through undergraduate and then graduate classes in literaturea nd criticism has a predisposition to see things as existing in

themselves while simultaneously also representing somethingelse. Grendel, the monster in the medieval epic Beowulf (eighthcentury e.D.), is a

n actual monster, but h

e can also symbolize

(a) the hostility o

f the universe to h

uman existence (a hostil-

ity that rriedieval finglo-Saxons would have felt acutely) and

(b) a darkness in h

uman nature that only s

ome higher aspect o

fourselves (as symbolized b

y the title hero) can conquer. This

p redisposition to understand the world in symbolic terms isr einforced, o

f course, b

y years o

f training that encourages and

rewards the symbolic irriagination.A

related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern rec-

ognition. Most professional students o

f literature learn to take

in the foreground

detail while seeing the patterns that thedetail reveals. bike the syrribolic imagination, this is a functionof being able to distance oneself f

rom the story, to look b

eyond

t he purely affective level of plot, drama, characters. Experi-

ence has proved to them that life and books fall into similar

patterns. IeTor is this skill exclusive to English professors. G

ood

rriechanics, the kind who used to fix cars before computerized

diagnostics, use pattern recognition to diagnose engine trou-

bles: i~ this and this are happening, then check that. Literature

is full of patternsy a

nd your reading experience will be m

uch

more rewarding w

hen you can step bacl~ f

rom the w

ork, even

while you're reading it, and look for those patterns. W

hen

s mall children, very small children, begin to tell you a story,

they put in every detail and every word they recall, with n

os ense that s

ome features are m

ole irriportant than others. A

st hey brow, they begin to display a greater sense o

f the plots o

ft heir stories —

what elements actually add to the significance

a nd. which do not. S

o too with readers. Beginning students are

Introduction xxix

o ften swamped with the mass o

f detail; the chief experience o

freading Dr. Zhivago (1957) m

ay be that they can't keep all the

names straight. W

ily veterans, o

n the other hand, will absorb

those details, or possibly overlook them, to find the patterns,

t he routines, the archetypes at work in the background.

Let's look at an example o

f how the symbolic m

ind, the pat-

tern observer, the powerful memory combine to offer a read-

ing of a nonliterary situation. Let's say that a male subject y

ou

are studying exhibits behavior and makes statements that s

how

h im to be hostile toward his father but m

uch warmer and m

ore

loving toward, even dependent on, his mother. O

kay, that's just

one guy, so n

o big deal. B

ut you see it again in another person.

And again. A

nd again. Y

ou might start to think this is a pattern

of behavior, in w

hich case y

ou would say to yourself, "

Now

where have I seen this before?" Y

our memory may dredge

up something f

rom experience, not your clinical w

ork but a

p lay you read long ago in your youth about a m

an who mur-

ders his father and marries his mother. Even though the cur-

rent examples have nothing to do with drama, your symbolic

imagination will allow

you to

connect the earlier instance

of this pattern with the real-life examples in front o

f you at

the moment. find your talent for nifty n

aming will c

ome up

with something to call this pattern: the Oedipal complex. A

sI said, not only English professors use these abilities. S

igmund

Freud "reads" his patients the

way a literary scholar reads

texts, bringing the same sort o

f imaginative interpretation to

understanding his cases that w

e try to bring to interpreting

novels and p

oems and plays. His identification o

f the Oedipal

complex is o

ne of the great m

oments in the history o

f human

thought, with as much literary as psychoanalytical significance.

What I h

ope to do, in the c

oming pages, is w

hat I d

o in class:

g ive readers a view of what goes o

n when professional students

of literature d

o their thing, a broad introduction to the codes

and patterns that inform o

ur readings. I w

ant my students not

xxx

I.~i. ~o_::ction

only to agree with rr~e that, iizdeed, Nir. Lindner is a

n instance

o f the d

emonic tempter offering Walter L

ee ~'ounger a Faus-

tian bargain; I want them to b

e able to reach that conclusion

without rrie. I k

now they can, with practice, patience, a

nd a bit

of instruction. A

nd so can youe

0~ .~.

OxAY, s

o xEaE's

TxE DEnL: let's say, purely

hypothetically,you're reading a b

ook about a

n average sixteen-year-old kid

in the s

ummer of 1968. The kid—let's call h

im Kip—who

hopes his acne clears u

p before h

e gets drafted, is o

n his w

ay

to the A

&P. His bike is a o

ne-speed with a coaster brake a

nd

therefore deeply humiliating, and riding it to r

un an errand

for his mother makes it even worse. A

long the w

ay he has a

couple of disturbing experiences, including a minorly unpleas-

ant encounter with a German shepherd, topped

off in thesupermarket parking lot w

here he sees the girl o

f his dreams,

Karen, laughing a

nd horsing around in T

ony ~Tauxhall's brand-

new Barracuda. N

ow Kip hates T

ony already because h

e has

a name like Vauxhall a

nd not like Smith, w

hich Kip thinks is

2

How To READ LiTERATuxE LgxE e

PxoFEssox

petty l

ame as a Heine to follow Kip, a

nd because the '

Cuda is

bright green a

nd goes appro~rriately the speed o

f light, a

nd

also because Tony has never h

ad to w

orkaday in his life. S

o

Karen, w

ho is laughing a

nd having a great time, turns a

nd sees

I~ip, who has recently asked her out, a

nd she keeps laughing.

(She could stop laughing a

nd it wouldn't matter to us, since

we're considering this structurally. In the story we're inventing

here, t

hough

t' she keeps laughing.) I~ip goes on into the store

to buy the loaf o

f ~Tonder dread that his m

other told h

im to

pick up, and as h

e reaches for the bread, h

e decides right then

a nd there to lie about his age to the M

arine recruiter e

ven

t hough it m

eans going to ~Tietnam, because nothing will ever

happen for h

im in this one-horse b

urg where the only thing

that matters is how much irioney your old m

an has. Either that

or I~ip has a vision o

f St. Abillard (any saint will do, but o

ur

i maginary author picked a comparatively obscure one), w

hose

face appears on one of the red, yellow, or blue balloons. F

or

our purposes, the nature o

f the decision doesn't matter a

ny

more than w

hether Karen keeps laughing or w

hich color bal-

loon manifests the saint.

T hat just happened here?

I f you were an English professor, a

nd not even a particularly

weird English professor, you'd k

now that you'd just w

atched

a l~night have a not very suitable encounter with his nemesis.

In other words, a quest just happened.

but it just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread.

True. b

ut consider the quest. O

f what does it consist? A

knight, a dangerous road, a ~Ioly Grail (whatever o

ne of those

may be), at least o

ne dragon, o

ne evil knight, o

ne princess.

Sound about right? 'That's

a list I can live

with: a knight

(named I~ip), a dangerous road (nasty G

erman shepherds), a

~Ioly Grail (

one form of which is a loaf o

f Wonder Bread), at

least one dragon (trust m

e, a '6~ '

Cuda could definitely breathe

Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It's Not)

3

fire), one evil knight (Tony), o

ne princess (

who can either k

eep

laughing or stop).

Seems like a bit of a stretch.On the surface, sure. B

ut let's think structurally. T

he quest

consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b

) a place to go, (c) a stated

'reason to

go there, (d) challenges

and trials

en route, a

nd

(e) a real reason to g

o there. I

tem (a) is easy; a quester is just

a person who goes o

n a quest, w

hether or n

ot he knows it's a

quest. In fact, usually h

e doesn't k

now Items (b) a

nd (c) should

be considered

together: someone tells

our protagonist, o

ur

hero, who need not look very heroic, to g

o somewhere and do

something. Go in search o

f the H

oly Grail. G

o to the store for

bread. G

o to Vegas a

nd whack a guy. Tasks o

f varying nobility,

to be sure, but structurally all the same. G

o there, d

o that. N

ote

that I said the stated reason for the quest. That's because of

item (e).

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason.

In fact, m

ore often than not, the quester fails at the stated task.

So why do they g

o and why do we care? T

hey go because

of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is

their realm

ission. We know, however, that their quest is educational.

They don't k

now enough about the only subject that really

matters: themselves. '1'lxe real r

eason fox a quest is a

lways

self-l~aovvledge, That's why questers

are so often

young,

inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old m

en

either have self-knowledge or they're never going to get it,while your average sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old kid is likely

to have a l

ong way to g

o in the self-knowledge department.

Let's look at a real example. W

hen I teach the late-twentieth-

century novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of

the last century: T

homas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 4

9 (1965).

Beginning readers can find the novel mystifying, irritating, a

nd

highly peculiar. T

rue enough, there is a g

ood bit o

f cartoon-

4

F3oW To REes~ L.zTrzaATu~aE LrxE A P

ROFEssox

ish strangeness in the novel, which can m

ask the basic quest

structure. O~ the other H

and, Sir ~

awain and the Green Knight

(late fourteenth century) a

nd ~',drnund Spense~'s F'aerie Q

ueen

(1596), t

wo of tl~e great quest narratives f

rom early English lit-

era~ure, also have what n~odein readers m

ust consider cartoon-

ish elerrients. It's really only a matter of whether we're talking

Classics Illustrated or d

ap Comics. So here's the setup in T

he

Crying of L,ot 4

9:

1) Our guestev: a y

oung woman, not very h

appy in

her marriage or hey life, n

ot too old to learn,

not too assertive w

here znen are concerned.

2) ~i place to go: in order to carry out her duties,

she must dive to

Southern California f

rom

I~er homy near S

an Francisco. Eventually she

will travel b

ack and forth

between the t

wo,

and between her past (a h

usband with a disinte-

g~ating personality and a fondness for I,SI~, a

n

insane ex-I~Tazi psychotherapist) and her future

(highly unclear).

3) fl stated reason

~o go there: she has b

een made

executor of the will o

f her f

ormer lover, a fab-

ulously wealthy and eccentric businessman a

nd

stamp collector°

4) challenges and trials: o

ur herozne m

eets lots o

f

really strange, scary, and occasionally truly d

an-

gerouspeople. She goes o

n a nightlong excursion

t hrough the w

orld of the outcasts a

nd the dis-

possessed of San F'rancisca; enters her therapist's

o ffice to talk him out o

f his psychotic shooting

rampage (the dangerous enclosure k

nown in the

study of traditional quest r

omances as "

Chapel

Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It's Not)

5

Perilous"); involves herself in w

hat may be a

centuries -old postal conspiracy.

5) The real reason to go: did I m

ention that her n

ame

is Oedipal Oedipa Maas, actually. She's n

amed

for the great tragic character from Sophocles'

drama Oedipus the K

ing (ca. 4

25 s.c.), w

hose

real calamity is that he doesn't k

now who he

is. In Pynchon's novel the heroine's resources,

really her crutches—and they all h

appen to b

e

male —

are stripped a

way one by one, shown to

be false or unreliable, until she reaches the point

where she either m

ust break d

own, reduced to a

little fetal ball, or stand straight and rely o

n her-

self. And to d

o that, she first m

ust find the self

on whom she c

an rely. W

hich she does, after

considerable struggle. Gives up on men, Tup-

perware parties, easy

answers. Plunges ahead

into the great mystery of the ending. Acquires,

dare

we say, self-knowledge?

Of course

we

dare.

Still .

. .

You don't believe m

e. Then why does the stated goal fade

a way? We hear less a

nd less about the will a

nd the estate as the

story goes on, and even the surrogate goal, the mystery o

f the

postal conspiracy, remains unresolved. A

t the e

nd of the novel,

she's about to witness an auction o

f some rare forged stamps,

and the answer to the mystery m

ay or m

ay not appear during

the auction. W

e doubt it, though, given what's g

one before.

I Vlostly, we don't even care. N

ow we know, as she does, that she

can carry o

n, that discovering that m

en can't b

e counted o

n

doesn't m

ean the world ends, that she's a w

hole person.

So there, in fifty w

ords or m

ore, is w

hy professors o

f lit-

6

Ho`v To Ig~eD LiTE~aeTuxE L

ixE a PxoFsssoR

erature typically t

hink The Crying of .Lot 4

9 is a terrific little

book. It d

oes look a bit w

eird at first glance, e

xperimental and

superhip (for 1,965), b

ut once you get the h

ang of it, y

ou see

that it follows the conventions of a quest tale. S

o does Huck

Finn. T

he Lord of the Rings. I~Iorth by 1Vorthwest. Star W

ars And

most other stories o

f someone going somewhere and doing

something, especially if the g

oing and the d

oing wasn't his idea

in the first place.

li word of warning: if I s

ometimes speak here a

nd in the

chapters to c

ome as if a

certain statement is always true, a

certain condition always obtains, i apologize. "

Always" and

<<never" are

not words that h

ave much meaning in literary

study. for one thing, as s

oon as s

omething seems to always b

e

true

9 some wise g

uy will c

ome along and write s

omething to

prove that it's not. If literature s

eems to b

e too comfortably

patriarchal, a

novelist like t

he late A

ngela Carter o

r a

poet

like the

contemporary Eavan Boland will c

ome along and

upend things just to r

emind readers a

nd writers o

f the falseness

o f our established assumptions. If readers start to p

igeonhole

African -

American writing, as w

as beginning to h

appen in the

1960s and 1970s, a trickster like I

shmael ~Zeed will c

ome along

who refuses to fit in a

ny pigeonhole we could create. Let's

c onsider journeys. Sometimes the quest fails or is n

ot taken

up by the protagonist. M

oreover, is every trip really a quest?

It depends. Sor~ae days I just drive to work—no adventures, n

o

growth. I'm sure that the s

ame is true in writing. S

ometimes

plot requires that a writer get a character from home to w

ork

and back again. T

hat said, w

hen a character hits the road, w

e

should start to pay attention, just to see if, y

ou know, some-

thing's going on there.

Once y

ou figure out quests, the rest is easy.

i

~ 1 ~, y

1

PERHAPS YOU'VE HEARD THE ANECDOTE about

S1gri1U11C~

Freud. O

ne day o

ne of his students, or assistants, or s

ome such

hanger-on, w

as teasing h

im about his fondness for cigars, refer-

ring to their obvious phallic nature. The great m

an responded

simply that "

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." I don't really

care if the story is true or not. Actually, I think I prefer that itbe apocryphal, since m

ade-up anecdotes have their o

wn kind

of truth. Still, it is equally true that just as cigars m

ay be just

cigars, so sometimes they are not.

Same with meals in life and, o

f course, in literature. S

ome-

times ameal is just a meal, a

nd eating with others is simply

eating with others. More often than not, though, it's not. O

nce

or twice a semester at least, I will stop discussion o

f the story or

o°

MOW TO DEAD LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR

play under consideration to intone (and I invariably intone in

bold): w

henever people eat o

r drflnk t

ogether, it's c

om-

union. For some reasons, this is often m

et with a slightly

s candalized look, communion having for m

any readers o

ne and

only o

ne meaning. ~Thile that m

eaning is very important, it is

not the only one. 1~Tor, for that rriatter, does Christianity have a

lock on tl~e practice. I~Tearly every religion has s

ome liturgical

or social ritual involving the corning together o

f the faithful to

s hare sustenance. So I have to explain that just as intercourse

has meanings other than sexual, or at least did at o

ne time, so

not all c

ommunions are holy. In fact, literary versions o

f com-

rriunion can interpret the word in quite a variety o

f ways.

~Iere's the thing to remember about c

ommunions of all

kinds: in the real world, breaking bread together is a

n act o

f

sharing and peace, since if you're breaking bread you're n

ot

breaking heads. O

ne generally invites one's friends to dinner,

unless o

ne is trying to get o

n the g

ood side o

f enemies or

employers. ~Ie're quite particular about those with w

hom we

break bread. ~Te znay not, for instance, accept a dinner invita-

tion from someone we don't care for. T

he act o

f taking f

ood

into our bodies is so personal that w

e really only w

ant to d

o

it with people we're very comfortable with. As with a

ny con-

vention, this one can b

e violated. A

tribal leader or Mafia don,

say, may invite his enemies to lunch a

nd then have t

hem killed.

In most areas, however, such behavior is considered very b

ad

form. Generally, eating with another is a w

ay of saying, "

Pm

with you, I like you, w

e form a c

ommunity together." A

nd that

is a form of communion.

So too in literature. A

nd in literature, there is another reason:

writing a m

eal scene is so difficult, a

nd so inherently uninter-

esting, that there really needs to be some compelling reason to

i nclude one in the story. A

nd that reason has to d

o with h

ow

characters are getting along. Or not getting along. C

ome on,

food is food. W

hat can y

ou say about fried chicken that y

ou

Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion 9

haven't already heard, said, seen, thought? A

nd eating is eating,

with soiree slight variations o

f table manners. T

o put characters,

then, in this mundane, overused, fairly boring situation, s

ome-

thing more has to b

e happening than simply beef, forks, a

nd

goblets.

So what kind o

f communion? And what kind o

f result can it

achieve? Any kind y

ou can think of.

Let's consider a

n example that will never b

e confused with

religious communion, the eating scene in H

enry Fielding's

Tom Jones (1749), w

hich, as o

ne of my students o

nce remarked,

"sure doesn't look like church." Specifically, T

om and his lady

friend, Mrs. Waters, dine at a

n inn, chomping, gnawing, suck-

ing on bones, licking fingers; a m

ore leering, slurping, groan-

ing, and, in short, sexual meal has never b

een consumed. While

it doesn't feel particularly important thematically and, moreover,it's as far f

rom traditional notions o

f communion as w

e can

get, it nevertheless constitutes a shared experience. W

hat else

is the eating about in that scene except devouring the other'sbody? Think of it as a c

onsuming desire. O

r two of them. And

in the case o

f the m

ovie version o

f Tom Jones starring Albert

Finney (1963), there's another reason. T

ony Richardson, the

director, couldn't openly show sex as, well, sex. T

here were

still taboos in film in the early sixties. So what he does is s

how

something else as sex. A

nd it's probably dirtier than all but t

wo

or three sex scenes ever filmed. W

hen those t

wo finish swilling

ale and slurping o

n drumsticks a

nd sucking fingers a

nd gener-

ally wallowing and moaning, the audience wants to lie back a

nd

smoke. But what is this expression o

f desire except a kind o

fcommunion, very private, admittedly, a

nd decidedly n

ot holy?

I want to b

e with you, y

ou want to b

e with m

e, let us share the

experience. And that's the point: c

ommunion doesn't n

eed to

be holy. O

r even decent.

How about a slightly m

ore sedate e

xample? The late R

ay-

mond Carver wrote a story, "Cathedral" (1981), about a g

uy

10

~Iow To I~Etsn LixEan~ruRE I,zxE a

PxoFEssox

with real hang-ups: included a

mong the m

any things the nar-

rator is bigoted against are, people with disabilities, minorities,

those different frorri hirriself, and all parts of his wife's past in

which h

e does not share. l

ow the only reason to give a char-

acter aserious hang-up is to give him the chance to get over

it. Ike rriay fail, but he gets the chance. It's the C

ode of the

Nest.

Then our unnamed narrator reveals to us f

rom the first

orrient that a blind m

an, a friend o

f his wife's, is c

oming to

v isit, we're not surprised that he doesn't like the prospect at all.

~Te k

now immediately that otar m

an has to overcome disliking

e veryone ~vho is different. And by the e

nd he does, w

hen he

and the blind m

an sit together to d

raw a cathedral so the blind

rrian can get a sense of what one looks like. 'I'o d

o that, they

have to touch, hold hands even, and there's n

o way the narra-

tox would have been able to d

o that at tl~e start o

f the story.

Carver's problem, then, is h

ow to get f

rom the nasty, preju-

diced, narrow-mindecd person of the opening page to the point

where he can actually have a blind man's h

and on his o

wn at

the ending. T

he answer is food.

Every coach I ever had w

ould say, w

hen we faced a superior

opposing team, that they put o

n their pants o

ne leg at a time,

just like everybody else. That those coaches could have said, in

all accuracy, is that those supermen shovel in the pasta just like

the rest of us. O

~ in Carver's story, cube steak. W

hen the nar-

rator watches the blind man eating —

competent, busy, hungry,

and, well, normal —he begins to gain a n

ew respect for h

im.

rI'he three of them, husband, wife, and visitor, ravenously c

on-

sume the cube steak, potatoes, and vegetables, a

nd in the course

of that experience

our narrator finds his antipathy toward

the blind m

an beginning to break d

own. He discovers he has

s omething in common with this stranger —

eating as a funda-

mental element of life—

that there is a b

ond between t

hem.

That about the dope they smoke afterward?

Passing a joint doesn't quite resemble the wafer a

nd the


chalice, does it? But thinking symbolically, where's the differ-

ence, really? Please note, I am not suggesting that illicit drugs

are required to break down social barriers. O

n the other hand,

here is a substance they take into their bodies in a shared,

almost ritualistic experience. Once again, the act says, "

I'm

with you, I share this m

oment with you, I feel a b

ond of com-

muniry with you." It may be a m

oment of even greater trust.

In any case, the alcohol at supper a

nd the marijuana after c

om-

bine to relax the narrator so he can receive the full force o

f his

insight, so he can share in the drawing o

f a cathedral (which,

incidentally, is a place of communion).

What about when they don't? W

hat if dinner turns ugly or doesn't

happen at all?

A different o

utcome, but the s

ame logic, I think. If a well-

run meal or snack portends good things for c

ommunity and

understanding, then the failed meal stands as a bad sign. It hap-

pens all the time on television shows. T

wo people are at dinner

and a third c

omes up, quite unwished for, and o

ne or m

ore of

the first t

wo refuse to eat. T

hey place their napkins o

n their

plates, or say something about losing their appetite, or simplyget u

p and walk away. Immediately w

e know what they think

about the interloper. Think of all those movies w

here a soldier

shares his C rations with a comrade, or a b

oy his sandwich with

a stray dog; from the overwhelming message o

f loyalty, kinship,

and generosity, y

ou get a sense o

f how strong a value w

e place

on the comradeship o

f the table.

That if we see t

wo people

having dinner, then, but o

ne of them is plotting, or bringing

about the demise of the other? In that case, our revulsion at the

act of murder is reinforced b

y our sense that a very important

propriety, namely that o

ne should not d

o evil to one's dinner

companions, is being violated.

12

~Io~ To Igr~D I,iT~~aATURE LixE n

PxoFEssoR


Or consider 1~nne Tyler's l~inne~ at the rlomesick Restaurant

(1942). Tlie m

other tries and. tries to have a family dinner,

and every tirrie she failsa S

omeone can't m

ake it, s

omeone gets

c alled away, sorrie minor disastei befalls the table. IVot until her

death can her children assemble around a table at the restaurant

and achieve dinner; at that point, o

f course, the b

ody and blood

t hey symbolically share are hers. I-Ier life —

and her d

eath—

becorne part of their c

ommon experience.

For the full effect o

f dining together, consider J

ames Joyce's

s tory "'The Dead~~ (1914). 'Phis wonderful story is centered

a round a dinner party a

n the Feast o

f the Epiphany, the twelfth

day o

f Christmas. All kinds o

f disparate

drives and desires

e nact therrnselves during the dancing and dinner, a

nd hostilities

and alliances are repealed. ~'he rriain character, Gabriel C

onroy,

must learn that h

e is n

ot superior to everyone else; during

the course o

f the evening h

e receives a series o

f small shocks

~o his e

go that collectively demonstrate that h

e is very m

uch

part o

f the m

ore general social fabric. T

he table a

nd dishes o

f

food themselves are lavishly described as Joyce lures us into the

a tmosphere:

A fag bro2vn goose lay at orce end of the table and at the

other end➢ on a

bed of creased papev strewn with sprigs

of paysley, lay a gveat hani, stripped of its outer skin and

peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its

s hin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between

E hese ro ~ival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little

t ninsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of

b locks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf -shaped

dish with astalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of

puvple vaisins and peeled almonds, a coYnpanioi2 dish on

which lay a solid recCctngle of S~reyrna figs, a dish of custard

t opped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolates

and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass

vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centreof the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which

upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, twosquat old fashioned decanters of cut glass, otze containingport and the other dark sherry. O

n the closed square piano

a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behindit were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals,drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, the firsttwo black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest

squad white, with transverse green sashes.

No writer ever took such care about food a

nd drink, so m

ar-

shaled his forces to create a military effect of armies d

rawn up

as if for battle: ranks, files, "rival ends," sentries, squads, sashes.Such a paragraph w

ould not be created without having s

ome

purpose, s

ome ulterior motive. N

ow, Joyce being Joyce, h

e has

about five different purposes, o

ne not being e

nough for genius.

His m

ain goal, though, is to d

raw us into that m

oment, to pull

our chairs u

p to that table so that w

e are utterly .convinced

of the reality o

f the meal. A

t the s

ame time, h

e wants to c

on-

vey the sense of tension a

nd conflict that has b

een running

through the evening-

there are a host o

f us-against-

them and

you-against-

me moments earlier a

nd even during the m

eal—

and this tension will stand at odds with the sharing o

f this

sumptuous and, given the holiday, unifying meal. H

e does this

for a very simple, very profound reason: we need to b

e part o

fthat c

ommunion. It w

ould be easy for us simply to laugh at

Freddy Matins, the resident drunkard, a

nd his dotty mother, to

shrug off the table talk about operas a

nd singers we've never

heard of, merely to snicker at the flirtations a

mong the y

ounger

people, to discount the tension Gabriel feels over the speechof gratitude he's obliged to m

ake at meal's end. B

ut we can't

maintain

our distance

because the elaborate setting o

f this

scene makes us feel as if we're seated at that table. S

o we notice,

I4

IOW TO F~EAD LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR

a little before Gabriel does, since he's lost in his own reality,

that we'xe all in this together, that in fact we share something.

The thing w

e share is our death. Everyone in that r

oom,

from old and frail A

unt Julia to the youngest music student,

will die. l~Tat tonight, but sorrieday O

nce you recognize that

fact (and we've L~een given a head start by the title, whereas

Gabriel doesn't k

now his evening has a title), it's s

mooth sled-

ding. 1~Text to our rriortaliry, which comes to great and small

equally, all the differences in our lives are mere surface details.

Then the s

now carries at the e

nd ~f the story, in a beautiful

and moving passage, it covers, equally, "all the living and the

dead:' O

f course it does, w

e think, the s

now is just lik

e death.

~XIe're already prepared, having shared in the communion meal

Joyce has laid out for us, a communion not o

f death, but o

f

what c

omes before. O

f life.

~ ~

/ '

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A PREPOSITION MAI{ESA

I{~ y0U take the

"with" out o

f "Nice to eat with

you," it begins to mean

something quite different. Less w

holesome. More creepy. It

just goes to show that not all eating that happens in literature is

friendly. Not only that, it doesn't even always look like eating.

Beyond here there be monsters.

Vampires in literature, y

ou say. B

ig deal. I've read Dracula.

And Anne Rice.

Good for you. Everyone deserves a g

ood scare. B

ut actual

vampires are only the beginning; not only that, they're noteven necessarily the

most alarming type. After all, y

ou can

at least recognize them. Let's start with Dracula himself, and

we'll eventually see w

hy this is true. Y

ou know how in all

16

IoW To READ LiTERATuxE LixE A P

xoFEssox

t hose I~racula movies, or almost all, the count always has this

weird attractiveness to h

im? Sometirries he's d

ownright seamy.

fjlways, he's alluring, dangerous, mysterious, and he tends to

focus on beautiful, u

nmarried (which in the social vision o

f

nineteenth-century

England meant virginal)

women. And

when he gets t

hem, he gro~,vs younger, m

ore alive (if w

e can

say this of the undead), m

ore virile even. M

eanwhile, his vic-

tims become lik

e hiin a

nd begin to seep out their o

wn victims.

Tan I~elsing, the count's ultimate nemesis, a

nd his lot, then, are

r eally protecting young people, a

nd especially y

oung women,

from this m

enace when they h

unt him down. Most of this,

in one form of another, can b

e found in d

ram Stoker's novel

(197), although it gets m

ore hysterical in the m

ovie versions.

low let's think about this for a m

oment. A nasty old m

an,

a ttractive but evil, violates young women, leaves his m

ark on

t hem, steals their innocence —

and coincidentally their "use-

fulness" (if you think "marriageabilityy" you'll b

e about right)

to young men—and leaves t

hem helpless followers in his sin.

I think we'd be reasonable to conclude that the w

hole Count

I~racula saga has an agenda to it b

eyond merely scaring us out

of our wits, although scaring readers out o

f their wits is a noble

e nterprise and one that Stoker's novel accomplishes very nicely.

In fact, w

e might conclude it has something to d

o with sex.

Well, o

f course it has to d

o with sex. Evil has h

ad to d

o with

s ex since the serpent seduced ~,ve. W

hat was the upshot there?

body shame and unwholesome lust, seduction, temptation,

danger, a

mong other ills.

So vampirisv~i isn't about vampires?

Oh, it is. It is. b

ut it's also about things other than literal

v ampirism: selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to

respect the

a utonomy of other people, just for starters. ~Te'll return to this

list a bit later on.

'his principle also applies to other scary favorites, such as

ghosts a

nd doppelgangers (ghost doubles or evil twins). W

e can

Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires 17

take it almost as an act o

f faith that ghosts are about s

omething

besides themselves. T

hat may not be true in naive ghost stories,

but m

ost literary ghosts—

the kind that occur in stories o

f last-

ing interest—have to d

o with things b

eyond themselves. T

hink

of the ghost o

f Hamlet's father w

hen he takes to appearing o

nthe castle ramparts at midnight. He's n

ot there simply to h

aunt

his son; he's there to point out s

omething drastically w

rong

in Denmark's royal household. O

r consider Marley's ghost in

A Christmas Carol (1843), w

ho is really a walking, clanking,

moaning lesson in ethics for Scrooge. In fact, Dickens's ghosts

are always up to s

omething besides scaring the audience. O

rtake D

r. Jekyll's other half. T

he hideous E

dward Hyde exists to

demonstrate to readers that even a respectable m

an has a dark

side; like many Victorians, R

obert Louis Stevenson believed

in the dual nature o

f humans, and in m

ore than o

ne work he

finds ways of showing that duality quite literally. In 'I he

StrangeCase of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. H

yde (1886) he has D

r. J. drink a

potion

and become his

evil half, while in his n

ow largely

ignored short novel The Master of Ballantrae (1889), h

e uses

twins locked in fatal conflict to convey the s

ame sense. You'll

notice, b

y the way, that m

any of these examples c

ome from

Victorian writers: Stevenson, Dickens, Stoker, J. S. L

e Fanu,

Henry James. W

hy? Because there w

as so m

uch the Victorians

couldn't write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they

found ways of transforming those taboo subjects a

nd issues

into other forms. The Victorians w

ere masters o

f sublimation.

But even today, w

hen there are n

o limits o

n subject matter or

treatment, writers still use ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and

all manner of scary things to symbolize various aspects o

f our

snore common reality.

The last decade o

f the twentieth century a

nd the first decade

(and counting) o

f the twenty-first could b

e dubbed the teen

ampire era. The phenomenon can likely b

e traced to A

nne

T~:ice's Interview with the Vampire (1976) and its successors in the

18

How ~a IZEeD L

iTExeTuxE I,axE A F

xoFEssoR

~a~npire Chronicles series (1976-2003). F

or a n

umber of years

F ~ice was aone-woman industry, b

ut slowly other n

ames came

f orward. ~Tampires even made it to w

eekly television with the

unlikely hit ~

u~y Che u

mpire Slayev, w

hich debuted in 1997.

Things really tools off with Stephenie 1Vleyer's Twilight (

2005)

a nd the series o

f teen -

and -vampire tales it s

pawned. Meyer's

great innovation

is to

center the stories

on a nonvampire

t eenage girl and young (these things are relative, I guess) v

am-

pire who loves her but rriust fight his bloodlust. M

uch has

been made of the element o

f the bloodsucking (

and therefore

s exual) restraint of the novels, notable in a genre w

here tradi-

tionally the main figures have h

ad no self-control at all. W

hat

t urned out to b

e unrestrained w

as the reading appetite o

f teen-

agers; Meyer was the top -selling A

merican. author in 2

008 and

2009. Critics generally cringed, but, clearly, adolescents don't

read book reviews.

~'ry this for a dictum: ~ho~ts and vampires are

never

oa~ly a

bout ghosts and va

Aires.

I -3ere's where it gets a little tricky, though: the ghosts a

nd

v ampires don't always have to appear in visible forms. Some-

times the really scary bloodsuckers are entirely human. Let's

l ook at another Victorian with experience in ghost a

nd nong-

host genres, I -henry Jaynes. James is k

nown, of course, as a m

as-

ter, perhaps the master, of psychological realism; if y

ou want

a nassive novels with sentences as long and convoluted as the

~ /iissouri lgiver, James is your m

an. Pit the s

ame time, t

hough,

he has s

ome shatter w

orks that feature ghosts a

nd demonic

possession, a

nd those are f

un in their o~vn way, as well as a g

ood

deal rriore accessible. Ibis novella T

he Turn of the Screw (

1898)

is about a governess who tries, without success, to protect the

t wo children in her care f

rom a particularly nasty ghost w

ho

s eeks to take possession of them. Either that or it's about a

n

i nsane governess w

ho fantasizes that a ghost is taking over

the children in her care, a

nd in her delusion literally smothers


them with protectiveness. O

r just possibly it's about a

n insane

governess who is dealing with a particularly nasty ghost w

ho

tries to take possession of her wards. O

r possibly .

..well, let's

just say that the plot calculus is tricky and that m

uch depends

on the perspective o

f the reader. S

o we have a story in w

hich

a ghost features prominently even if we're never sure whether

he's really there or not, in w

hich the psychological state o

f the

governess matters greatly, a

nd in w

hich the life o

f a child, a lit-

tle boy, is consumed. Between the t

wo of them, the governess

and the "specter" destroy h

im. One might say that the story

is about fatherly neglect (the stand-in for the father simplyabandons the children to the governess's care) a

nd smothering

maternal concern. T

hose two thematic elements are e

ncoded

into the plot of the novella. T

he particulars o

f the encoding

are carried by the details o

f the ghost story. It just so happens

that James has another f

amous story, "

Daisy Miller" (1878), in

which there are n

o ghosts, n

o demonic possession, a

nd nothing

more mysterious than a midnight trip to the C

olosseum in

Rome. Daisy is a y

oung American woman who does as she

pleases, thus upsetting the rigid social customs of the E

uropean

society she desperately wants to approve of her. W

interbourne,

the man whose attention she desires, while b

oth attracted to

and repulsed b

y her, ultimately proves too fearful o

f the dis-

approval of his established expatriate A

merican community to

pursue her further. After n

umerous misadventures, Daisy dies,

ostensibly b

y contracting malaria o

n her midnight jaunt. B

ut

you know what really kills her? Vampires.

No, really. Vampires. I k

now I told y

ou there weren't a

ny

supernatural forces at work here. B

ut you don't n

eed fangs a

nd

a cape to be a vampire. T

he essentials o

f the vampire story,

as we discussed earlier: a

n older figure representing corrupt,

outworn values; a y

oung, preferably virginal female; a stripping

auay o

f her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance o

f the life

force of the old male; the death or destruction o

f the y

oung

20

~Iow To REAP LiTERa~uxE LrxE e

PxoFEssox

woman. Ol~ay, let's see n

ow I~interbourne a

nd Daisy carry

a ssociations of winter —

death, cold —

and spring —life, fl o

w-

ers9 renewal —that ultimately c

ome into

conflict (we'll talk

a bout seasonal implications in a later chapter), with winter's

f rost destroying the delicate

young fl ower. Ike is

consider-

ably older than she, closely associated with the stifling Euro-

~nglo-l~merican society. She as fresh a

nd innocent —

and here

is James's brilliance—so innocent as to appear to b

e a w

anton.

~Ie a

nd his aunt a

nd her circle watch Daisy a

nd disapprove, but

because o

f a h

unger to disapprove o

f someone, they never cut

her loose entirely. 'Whey play with her yearning to b

ecome one

o f therri, M

ing her energies until she begins to w

ane. Winter-

bourne mixes

voyeurism, vicarious thrills, a

nd stiff-necked

d isapproval, all of which culminate w

hen he finds her with

a (male) friend at the Calosseurn and chooses to ignore her.

Daisy says o

f his behavior, "F-Ie cuts m

e dead!" 'That should

be clear e

nough for anyone. Ibis, a

nd his clique's, c

onsuming

of I~ais~~ is congplete; having used u

p everything that is fresh

a nd vital in her, h

e leaves her to waste away. E

ven then she asks

a fter hzin. but having destroyed a

nd consumed her, h

e moves

on, not sufficiently touched, it s

eems to m

e, by the pathetic

s pectacle he has caused..

S~ how does all this tie in with vampires? Is J

ames a believer

i n ghosts a

nd spooks? D

oes "Daisy Miller" m

ean he thinks

we're all vampires? Probably not. I believe w

hat happens here

a nd in other stories a

nd novels (

The Sacred Fount [

1901] comes

to mind) is that h

e deems the figure o

f the c

onsuming spirit

or vampiric personality a useful narrative vehicle. W

e find this

f igure appearing in different guises, even under nearly opposite

c ircumstances, from one story to another. O

n the o

ne hand, in

The Turn of the Screw, h

e uses the li teral vampire or the possess-

ing spook to e

xamine a certain sort o

f psychosocial imbalance.

'These

days we'd give it a label, a

dysfunctional something

or other, b

ut James probably only s

aw it as a p

roblem in o

ur


approach to child rearing or a psychic

neediness in young

women whom society disregards a

nd discards. O

n the other

hand, in "

Daisy Miller," h

e employs the figure o

f the vampire

as an emblem of the w

ay society p

olite, ostensibly n

ormal

society—battens on and consumes its victims.

Nor is J

ames the only one. T

he nineteenth century w

as filled

,with writers showing the thin line b

etween the ordinary a

nd

the monstrous. E

dgar Allan Poe. J. S. L

e Fanu, whose ghost

stories made him the Stephen K

ing of his day. T

homas Hardy,

whose p

oor heroine in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (

1891) provides

table fare for the disparate hungers of the m

en in her life. O

rvirtually a

ny novel o

f the naturalistic m

ovement of the late

nineteenth century, where the l

aw of the jungle a

nd survival o

fehe fittest reign. O

f course, the twentieth century also provided

plenty of instances o

f social vampirism a

nd cannibalism. Franz

Kafka, a latter-day P

oe, uses the d

ynamic in stories like "

The

,'V~etamorphosis" (1915) and "A Hunger Artist" (1924), where,

in a nifty reversal o

f the traditional vampire narrative, crowds

cif onlookers watch as the artist's fasting consumes him. Gabriel

Uarcia IVlarquez's heroine Innocent Erendira, in the tale bear-

ing her name (1972), is exploited a

nd put o

ut to prostitution b

yLer heartless grandmother. D

. H. Lawrence gave us a

ny num-

ber of short stories w

here characters d

evour and destroy o

ne

m other in life-

and-death contests o

f will, novellas like "

The

Fox" (1923) and even novels like

Women in Love (1920), in

~~ luch Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich, although ostensi-

blv in love with one another, each realize that only o

ne of them

caii survive and so engage in mutually destructive behavior. Iris

iviurdoch—pick a novel, a

ny novel. N

ot for nothing did she

gall one of her b

ooks A Severed H

ead (1961), although T

he Uni-

corn- (1963) would work splendidly here, with its wealth o

f faux

gothic creepiness. There are works, o

f course, w

here the ghost

or ~~ampire is merely a gothic cheap thrill without a

ny partic-

tilai~ thematic or symbolic significance, but such works tend to

ZZ

T~IOW TO READ LITERE~TURE LIKE A PROFESSOR

be short-term c

ommodities without m

uch staying p

ower in

r eaders' minds ar the public arena. ~XTe're haunted only while

we're reading. In these w

orks that continue to h

aunt us, h

ow-

ever, the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the

s pook announces itself again a

nd again w

here someone grows

in strength b

y weakening someone else.

What's w

hat this figure really c

omes down to, w

hether in

Elizabethan, ~Tictorian, ar m

ore modern incarnations: exploita-

tion in its mane forms. U

sing other people to get w

hat we

want. D

enying someone else's

right to live in the face of

our o

verwhelming demands. Placing o

ur desires, particularly

our

uglier ones, above ,the

needs of another. That's

pretty

rriuch what the vampire does, after a1L ~-Ie w

akes up in the

morning —actually the evening, n

ow that I think about it—

and says s

omething like, "

In order to r

emain undead, I m

ust

s teal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to m

e

t han my own." I've always supposed that W

all Street traders

utter essentially the seine sentence.

y guess is that as l

ong as

p eople act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways,

the vampire will b

e with us.

~;

OrrE o

f TxE cxEaT TxiNcs about being a professor o

f English

is that you get to keep meeting old friends. F

or beginning

readers, though, every story m

ay seem new, and the resulting

experience of reading is highly disjointed. T

hink of reading,

on one level, as o

ne of those papers f

rom elementary school

where y

ou connect the dots. I could never see the picture in a

connect-the-dot drawing until I'd put in virtually every line.

Other kids could look at a page full o

f dots a

nd say, "

Oh, that's

an elephant," "That's a locomotive." M

e, I saw dots. I think it's

partly predisposition—some people handle two-dimensional

visualization better than others—but largely a matter o

f prac-

tice: the more connect-the-dot drawings y

ou do, the

more

likely you are to recognize the design early o

n. Same with

24

~Iow To IZr~D Lrz'ERA`ruxE Lrx~ a

PROFEssox

l iterature. Part of pattern recognition is talent, but a w

hole lot

o f it is practice: if y

ou read e

nough and give w

hat you read

e nough thought, y

ou begin to see patterns, archetypes, recur-

rences. fi nd as with those pictures a

mong the dots, it's a matter

o f learning to look. I~dot just to look but where to look, and how

to Pork. Literature, as the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye

observed, grows out o

f other literature; w

e should not be sur-

prised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature. As

y ou read, it m

ay pay to r

emember this: there's

o ~cl~ th~~

a~ a

holly o

n

gi nal ~rl~ o

f lftera~ure. O

nce you know

t hat, you can g

o looking for old friends and asking the atten-

dant question: "now where have I seen her before?"

One of my favorite

novels is Tim O'~rien's

Going After

Cacciato (1978). L

ay readers and students generally like it, too,

which explains w

hy it has b

ecome a perennial strong seller.

although the violence o

f the tlietnam

Tar scenes may turn

s ome readers off; rr~any find themselves totally engrossed b

y

s on7ething they initially figured would just be

gross. That

r eaders sometimes don't notice in their involvement with the

stogy (and it is a great story) is that virtually everything in

t here is cribbed from somewhere else. Lest y

ou conclude with

d ismay that the novel is s

omehow plagiarized

or less than

original, let m

e add that I find the b

ook wildly original, that

e verything O'~rien borrows makes perfect sense in the c

on-

text of the story he's telling, even m

ore so once w

e understand

t hat he has repurposed materials f

rom older sources to a

ccom-

plish his own ends. T

he novel divides into three interwoven

parts: one, the actual story o

f the w

ar experience o

f the m

ain

c haracter, Paul Berlin, up to the point w

here his fellow soldier

Cacciato runs a

way from the war; two, the imagined trip a

n

which the squad follows Cacciato to Paris; a

nd three, the long

night watch o

n a tower near the South C

hina Sea w

here Ber-

lin manages these two very impressive mental feats o

f mem-

ory on the o

ne hand and invention o

n the other. T

he actual

Now, Where Have I

Seen Her Befove? 25

war, because it really happened, h

e can't d

o much about. O

h,

he gets s

ome facts w

rong and some events out o

f order, but

mostly, reality has i

mposed a certain structure o

n memory. The

trip to Paris, though, is another story. Actually, it's all stories, orall those Paul has read in his y

oung lifetime. H

e creates events

and people out o

f the novels, stories, histories h

e knows, his

o~yn included, all of which is quite unwitting o

n his part, the

pieces just appearing out of his m

emory. O'Brien provides us

with a wonderful glimpse into the creative process, a view o

fhow stories get written, and a big part o

f that process is that

you can't create stories in a v

acuum. Instead the m

ind flashes

bits and pieces o

f childhood experiences, past reading, every

movie the writer/creator has ever seen, last week's argument

with a p

hone solicitor—

in short, everything that lurks in the

recesses of the m

ind. Some of this m

ay be unconscious, as it is

in the case o

f O'Brien's protagonist. Generally, though, writers

use prior texts quite consciously a

nd purposefully, as O'Brien

himself does; unlike Paul Berlin, he is aware that he's drawing

from Lewis Carroll or Ernest H

emingway. O'Brien signals the

difference between novelist and character in the structuring of

the two narrative frames.

About halfway through the novel, O'Brien has his charac-

ters fall through a hole in the road. Not only that, o

ne of the

characters subsequently says that the way to get out is to fall

back up. When it's stated this baldly, y

ou automatically think

of Lewis Carroll. Falling through a hole is like Alice in Wonder-

land (1865). Bingo. It's all we need. A

nd the world the squad

discovers below the road, the network of Vietcong tunnels

(although nothing lik

e the real ones), complete with an officer

condemned to stay there for his crimes, is every bit as m

uch an

alternative world as the one Alice encounters in her adventure.

Once you've established that a

book—a man's b

ook at that, a

war b

ook—is borrowing a situation f

rom Lewis Carroll's Alice

books, anything is possible. So with that in m

ind, readers m

ust

26

I~ow To ~ZEe~ L,rTExATURE LixE a

PROFEssox

r econsider characters, situations, events in the novel. This one

looks like it's f

rom ~-Iemingway, that o

ne like "I~ansel a

nd

C ~retel," these two from things that h

appened during Paul B

er-

Iin's "real~~ war, and so o

n down the line. O

nce, you've played

around with these elements for a while, a kind o

f Trivial P

ur-

suit of source material, g

o for the big one: w

hat about Sarkin

Rung Wan?

Sarkin A

ung ~XTan is Paul Berlin's love interest, his fantasy

girl. S

he is ~Tietnamese a

nd knows about tunnels but is n

ot

~Tietcong. She's old enough to b

e attractive, yet n

ot old e

nough

to make sexual d

emands on the virginal y

oung soldier. She's

not a "rea1

99 character, since she c

omes in after the start o

f

Berlin's fantasy. careful readers will find her "real" m

odel in

a young girl with the sarrie h

oop earrings w

hen the soldiers

frisk villagers in one remembered war scene. Fair e

nough, but

t hat's just the physical person, not her character. T

hen who

is she? There does she c

ome from? 'Think generically. L

ose

the personal details, consider hex as a ty pe, a

nd try to think

where you've seen that type before: a

brown-skinned young

woman guiding a g

roup of white m

en (mostly white, anyway),

s peaking the language they don't know, knowing where to go,

where to find food. 'I'al~ing t

hem west. Right.

No, n

ot Pocahontas. S

he never led anyone. an

ywhere, what-

ever the popular culture may suggest. S

omehow Pocahontas

has received better PFZ, but w

e want the other one.

Sacajawea. If I n

eed to b

e guided across hostile territory,

s he's the one I want, a

nd she's the o

ne Paul Berlin wants,

tao. ~Ie wants, he raeeds9 a figure

who will b

e sympathetic,

understanding, strong in the w

ays he's not, a

nd most of all

s uccessful in bringing him safely to his goal o

f getting to Paris.

O'I;rien plays here with the reader's established k

nowledge

of history, culture, a

nd literature. Ire's h

oping that y

our mind

will associate Sarkin Psung W

an consciously or unconsciously

with Sacajawea, thereby not only creating her personality a

nd

Now, Where Have I

Seen Her Before?

27

impact but also establishing the nature a

nd depth o

f Paul B

er-

lin's need. If you require a Sacajawea, you're really lost.

The point

isn't really

which native

woman figures

in

O'~rien's novel, it's that there is a literary or historical m

odel

who found her w

ay into his fiction to give it shape a

nd pur-

pose. He could

have used Tolkien rather than Carroll, a

nd

while the surface features w

ould have b

een different, the prin-

ciple would have r

emained the same. A

lthough the story w

ould

go in different directions with a c

hange of literary m

odel, in

either case it gains a kind of resonance f

rom these different

levels of narrative that begin to e

merge; the story is n

o longer

all on the surface but begins to have depth. ~XThat we're trying

to do is learn to read this sort o

f thing like a wily old professor,.

to learn to spot those familiar images, like being able to see the

elephant before we connect the dots.

You say stories grow out of other stories. But Sacajawea was real.

As a matter o

f fact, she was, but f

rom our point o

f view, it

doesn't really matter. History is story, too. Y

ou don't encounter

her directly; you've only heard o

f her through narrative o

f one

sort or another. She is a literary as well as a historical character,

as much a piece o

r the A

merican myth as H

uck Finn or Jay

Gatsby, a

nd very nearly as unreal. A

nd what all. this is about,

finally, is myth. Which brings us to the big secret.

Here it is: tlxere's

only one story. There, I said it a

nd

I can't very well take it back. There is only o

ne story. Ever.

One. It's always b

een going o

n and it's e

verywhere around us

and every story you've ever read or heard or w

atched is part o

f

it. The Thousand and O

ne Nights. Beloved. "Jack a

nd the B

ean-

stalk." The Epic of Gilgamesh. T

he Story of O

. The Simpsons.

T. S. Eliot said that w

hen a n

ew work is created, it is set

~unong the m

onuments, adding to a

nd altering the order. T

hat

<always sounds to me a bit too m

uch like a graveyard. T

o me,

literature is something much more alive. M

ore like a barrel o

fecls. W

hen a writer creates a n

ew eel, it wriggles its w

ay into

ZS

IOW TO READ LITERATURE LIKE A PROFESSOR

the barrel, muscles a path into the great t

eeming mass f

rom

which it c

ame in the first place. It's a n

ew eel, but it shares its

e elness with all those other eels that are in the barrel or have

e ver Ueen in the barrel. I~Tow, if that simile doesn't put y

ou off

r eading entirely, you know you're serious.

but the point is this: stories g

row out o

f other stories, p

oems

out o

f other poerris. A

nd they don't have to stick to genre.

Foerris can learn f

rom plays, so~~gs f

rom novels. S

ometimes

i nfluence is direct and obvious, as w

hen the twentieth-century

American writer 'I'.

Coraghessan Boyle writes "

The Over-

coat II," a postmodern reworking o

f the nineteenth-century

l ~ussian writer l~Tikalai Gogol's classic story "The Overcoat,"

or w

hen ~Tilliarn Trevor updates tarries Joyce's "

Two Gallants"

with "

Two More Csallants," or w

hen John Gardner reworks

the medieval Beowulf into his little p

ostmodern masterpiece

Grendel. O

ther times, it's less direct a

nd more subtle. It m

ay

be vague, the shape o

f a novel generally reminding readers o

f

s ome earlier novel, or a n7odern-day miser recalling Scrooge.

I nd of course there's the bible: a

mong its m

any other func-

tions, it too is part of the o

ne big story. A

female character may

r emind us o

f Scarlett O'I-iara or Ophelia or even, say, P

oca-

hontas. 'These similarities —and they m

ay be straight or ironic

or c

omic or tragic —

begin to reveal themselves to readers after

much practice o

f reading.

All this resembling othev literature is all well and good, but what

does it mean fov our reading?

Excellent question. If w

e don't see the reference, it m

eans

nothing, right? S

o the worst thing that occurs is that we're

s till reading the same story as if the literary precursors weren't

t here. From there, anything that happens is a bonus. A

small

part o

f what transpires is w

hat I call the aha! factor, the delight

we feel at recognizing a familiar c

omponent from earlier expe-

rience. That moment of pleasure, wonderful as it is, is n

ot

e nough, so that awareness o

f similarity leads us forward. W

hat

Now, Where Have I

Seen Her Before? 29

typically takes place is that we recognize elements f

rom some

prior text a

nd begin drawing comparisons a

nd parallels that

may b

e fantastic, parodic, tragic, anything. O

nce that happens,

our reading o

f the text changes f

rom the reading governed

by what's overtly o

n the page. Let's g

o back to Cacciato for a

moment. When the squad falls through the hole in the road

in language that recalls Alice in WondevlatZd, w

e quite reason-

ably expect that the place they fall into will be a w

onderland

in its o

wn way. Indeed, right f

rom the begimiing, this is true.

The oxcart a

nd Sarkin A

ung Wan's aunties fall faster than she

and the soldiers despite the l

aw of gravity, w

hich decrees that

falling bodies all move at thirty-two feet per second squared.

The episode allows Paul Berlin to see a Vietcong tunnel, w

hich

his inherent terror will never allow h

im to d

o in real life, a

nd

this fantastic tunnel proves both more elaborate

and more

harrowing than the real ones. T

he enemy officer w

ho is c

on-

demned to spend the remainder o

f the w

ar down there accepts

his sentence with a weird illogic that would do Lewis Carroll

proud. The tunnel e

ven has a periscope through w

hich Berlin

can look back at a scene from the real war, his past. Obviously

the episode could have these features without invoking Carroll,

but the wonderland analogy enriches o

ur understanding o

f~~ihat Berlin has created, furthering o

ur sense o

f the outland-

ishness of this portion o

f his fantasy.

This dialogue. b

etween old texts a

nd new is always going

on at o

ne level or

another. Critics speak of this

dialogueas intertextuality, the o

ngoing interaction b

etween poems or

stories. This intertextual dialogue deepens and enriches the

reading experience, bringing multiple layers of meaning to

the text, some of which readers m

ay not even consciously

noeice. T

he more we become aware o

f the possibility that o

ur

te~:t is speaking to other texes, the more similarities a

nd cor-

respondences we begin to notice, a

nd the m

ore alive the text

becomes. We'll come back to this discussion later, but for n

ow

30

How To DEAD LiTExATURE LixE A P

ROFEssox

we'll simply note that n

ewer works are having a dialogue with

older ones, and they often indicate tl~e presence o

f this conver-

sation by invoking the older texts with anything f

rom oblique

r eferences to extensive quotations.

Once writers k

now that w

e know how this g

ame is played,

the rules can get very tricky. T

he late Angela Carter, in her

novel Wise Children (1992), gives us a theatrical family w

hose

t ame rests o

n Shakespearean performance. ~Ie m

ore or less

expect the appearance of elements f

rom Shakespeare's plays, so

we're not surprised w

hen a jilted y

oung woman, Tiffany, walks

onto a television s

how set distraught, muttering, bedraggled—

in aword, mad—and then disappears shortly after departing,

e vidently having drowned. ~-Ier performance is every bit as

heartbreaking as that o

f Ophelia, Prince I-3amlet's love interest

who goes rnad and. d

rowns in the m

ost famous play in English.

Carter's novel is about rriagic as well as Shakespeare, though,

a nd the apparent drowning is a classic bit o

f misdirection. T

he

a pparently dead Tiffany shows up later, to the discomfort o

f

her faithless lover. Shrewdly, Carter counts o

n our registering

"'Tiffany =

Ophelia" so that she can use her instead as a dif-

ferent Shakespearean character, Nero, wlio in Much Ado About

I OTothing allows her friends to stage her death and funeral in

order to teach her fiance a lesson. Carter employs not only

materials f

rom earlier texts but also

her knowledge of our

r esponses to them in order to double-cross us, to set us u

p for

a certain kind of thinking so that she can play a larger trick

in the narrative. loo k

nowledge of Shakespeare is required

to believe 'Tiffany has died or to be astonished at her return,

but the more we know of his plays, the

more solidly our

r esponses are locked in. Carter's sleight of narrative challenges

our expectations a

nd keeps us o

n our feet, but it also takes w

hat

c ould seerri merely a tawdry incident and reminds us, through

its Shakespearean parallels, that there is nothing new in y

oung

m ien rmistreating the women who love t

hem, and that those

Now, Where Have I

Seen Her Before? 31

without p

ower in relationships have always had to be creative

in finding ways to exert s

ome control o

f their o

wn. Her new

novel is telling a very old story, w

hich in turn is part o

f the

one big story.

But what do w

e do if w

e don't see all these correspondences?

First o

f all, don't worry. If a story is n

o good, being based

on Hamlet won't save it. T

he characters have to w

ork as char-

acters, as themselves. Sarkin Aung Wan needs to be a great

character, which she is, before w

e worry about her resemblance

to a f

amous character o

f our acquaintance. If the story is g

ood

and the characters w

ork but y

ou don't catch allusions a

nd

references and parallels, then you've d

one nothing worse than

read a good story with m

emorable characters. If y

ou begin to

pick up on some of these other elements, these parallels and

analogies, however, you'll find your understanding of the novel

deepens a

nd becomes more meaningful, m

ore complex.

But w

e haven't read everything.

Neither have I. Ivor has anyone, not even Harold B

loom.

Beginning readers, o

f course, are at a slight disadvantage, w

hich

is why professors are useful in providing a broader context. B

ut

you definitely can get there o

n your o

wn. When I w

as a kid,

I used to go mushroom hunting with m

y father. I w

ould never

see them, but he'd say, "There's a yellow sponge," or "

There

are a couple of black spikes." A

nd because I k

new they w

ere

there, my looking w

ould become more focused a

nd less vague.

In a f

ew moments I w

ould begin seeing t

hem myself, not all

of them, but s

ome. And once y

ou begin seeing morels, y

ou

can't stop. What a literature professor does is very similar: h

ecells y

ou when you get near m

ushrooms. Once you know that,

though (and y

ou generally are near them), y

ou can h

unt for

mushrooms o

n your o

wn.

advanced placement literature and composition summer ...€¦ · (derek walcott 1930-2017) the fist...

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