A Wreck, A Catastrophe, A Mess

One of the reading assignments this week in "The Language of Composition" was an essay by writer Francine Prose, entitled "I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read". This essay evoked such a violently negative response in me that I felt I must retreat to blogdom and vent a while.

To put it simply, I think the majority of Prose's essay is poorly-argued, egotistical nonsense. I probably shouldn't be saying this when Prose is a published, award-winning writer and I am an opinionated highschool English student--but hey, this is what I truly believe...and I will try to explain why.

First of all, what is Prose's essay about? Well, her essay is subtitled "How American High School Students Learn to Loath Literature". And that about sums it up. Her essay is an attack on current highschool literature programs and how she believes they are failing to teach a love of literature. What exactly is the problem with them? Ummm...on second thought, Prose doesn't seem to know. Sure, she offers lots of extreme complaints and claims, but when framed with "What exactly is the problem?", her essay draws a blank. If you don't believe me, let's take a closer look.

First, Prose attacks the books which modern high schools choose for their reading lists. She flames everyone from James Conrad to John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury to Harper Lee, Maya Angelou to John Knowles, Aldous Huxley to William Golding. She then hones in on I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou) and To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) and proceeds to grind them into the dirt, leaving them for dead only after more than a page of sarcastic jibes, mocking descriptions, and cruelly under-handed methods. Then, she mourns the disappearance of Homer and Dante. So, after this first section, Prose has established her argument, right? High school literature courses are bad because of the books they select for study. But wait a minute...Prose isn't finished.

Next, she launches off on a tirade about how students have been ruined for deep literary study. She complains that her students are "nearly incapable of doing the close line-by-line reading necessary to disclose the most basic information in a story by Henry James...". She complains that literature courses are so focused on teaching tolerance, identity, and values that they have ceased to teach about aesthetic beauty in the writing itself (imagery, wit, rhythm, language). Every book, she states, is being weighed down by cheesy self-examination, values-oriented study questions, and inane creative writing assignments. Besides the fact that I thoroughly enjoy the goofy creative writing assignments in literature class--which must make me a literary fool in Prose's eyes--I understand Prose's point about how literature study has become more focused on self-examination than on the use of language. But her sarcastic method totally alienates the reader, and we observe in utter bewilderment as she multifariously bashes various literature curriculums, works of literature, student responses to literature, literature discussion questions, and Freud. Ok, so maybe Prose's point is that literature is not being taught and discussed with the right focus.

But now Prose starts complaining about how books for high school literature are chosen simply to represent diversity and values and some worthy books are ignored because of their complex worldviews and difficult subjects. According to Prose, teachers lazily select books with simple messages and ideal characters instead of difficult books with confusing worldviews that are hard to discuss. Let's learn how to handle "ambiguity and contradiction" in literature, Prose exhorts, instead of sticking with books "with banal, simple-minded moral equations". And guess which examples get dragged out again? To Kill a Mockingbird and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She points to stories that contain "realistic" characters, unadmirable characters with issues and complexities, as the ideal stories to study. So does Prose want literature classes to tackle tougher topics?

Well, now, Prose wraps everything up with a rant about how education is dumbing everyone down and turning them into future McDonald's employees. And then she aims one final hit at the books she attacked at the beginning, calling them "lightweight, mediocre hich school favorites".

So what on earth is Prose trying to say? Is a high school literature class bad because they study To Kill A Mockingbird? Is To Kill A Mockingbird a bad book because it is overly sentimental, or poorly written, or idealistic, or what? Or is studying To Kill A Mockingbird alright as long as you study it correctly and avoid values-based questions? If I do obscure creative writing assignments about To Kill A Mockingbird instead of circling all the extended metaphors in The Odyssey, does that mean I will end up working at McDonald's? One minute Prose is attacking the literature, the next minute she is saying the literature is ok as long as it is studied right, and so on and so on.

Besides Prose's total lack of a concrete premise and total faliure to present a convincing and cohesive argument, she writes her material in such a belligerent, sarcastic, exaggerated, superiour way that she serves only to aggravate. She slams more and more major authors of modern literature; is she prepared to offer anything better? I don't hear about any of her writings surpassing the enduring greatness and popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird, A Separate Peace, Of Mice and Men, or Fahrenheit 451. She tags Maya Angelou's memoir as "murky, turgid, convoluted language". She dismisses Elie Weisel's Night as "overwrought". Both of these are memoirs of unimaginable circumstances--racism, rape, concentration camps, death, a loss of faith--through which these authors passed...but Prose offers them no respect for this. She rolls her eyes at the nobility of Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird because it is not realistic. Of course, readers will gain much more from reading about crude, rude, sinful characters that swear at one another every time they open their mouths. Forbid the thought that we might find inspiration greater than ourselves in a book...instead, we must be confronted with ugliness and confusion so that we can become great readers of literature.

In this essay, Prose sets her self up as the omniscient author/reader who is free to scorn everyone else's offerings to the literary world. Because she once went through, circled all the references to sight in King Lear, and found revelation in this act, she has some kind of divine understanding of the only way literature can possibly be experienced. All poor students who are deluded enough to enjoy To Kill A Mockingbird or some similar work are incapable of understanding higher literature and are doomed to live as unenlightened cashiers at McDonalds...

And while you're at it, she says, buy my latest novel...

Ok, she didn't exactly say that last part...but, to summarize, I found Prose's essay to be highly irritating because she couldn't stick to a premise, she took a highly insulting tone towards other authors, and she arrogently set herself up as all-knowing.

And there's my two cents.