Thursday
Friend and occasional guest blogger Carl Rosin alerted me to a heartfelt Commonweal article by an English professor describing how literature helped her confront and work through childhood abuse. Cassandra Nelson’s difficult history leads to some remarkable insights into trigger warnings, which she opposes.
Nelson’s view on trigger warnings is pretty much my own but comes from a deeper place: Because it’s impossible to know how someone will respond to a work of literature, and because one doesn’t want to determine ahead of time how someone will interact with a work, trigger warnings in literature classes are counterproductive. Nelson sets forth a number of reasons why as she recounts her own story.
Nelson was abused by someone in her own household, who threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She repressed what happened, and for years the repression helped her live a normal life. At some deep level, however, the trauma was eating away at her, and her brain let her know, in her late twenties, that she was ready to confront it. Put another way, she sensed at some deep level that she needed to read something on the subject and so the right book showed up: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:
It is not giving away too much of the plot to say that Oscar’s sister is molested, and as I read about her experience I had a memory—no words, just an image, and a smell, and a feeling of absolute terror—of being abused. My first impulse was to refuse to believe that it was real, and I actually managed to wall it off again for a few months. But when the memory surfaced a second time, and wouldn’t go away, there I was: twenty-eight and scared out of my mind, confused about what had happened and what else might have happened, shut out by the same family systems that had allowed the abuse to happen in the first place, told by campus mental-health services that it was a “bad time” to make appointments so close to the semester’s end—not completely alone in my misery but in crucial ways forced to be simultaneously my own detective, lawyer, judge, and protector, and, what is more, to do all this at exactly the moment when the foundations of my identity had been shaken, and daily existence was newly riddled with bottomless pits and oubliettes. The physiological effects alone—panic attacks if I tried to exercise, an endless well of sorrow if I drank, nightmares when I slept—were overwhelming. I had entered, through no fault of my own and very much against my will, what readers of Dante might recognize as a dark wood.
Nelson doesn’t mention where Dante fits into her self-discovery timeline, but at some point he entered her life as part of her support group. After all, he knew what she was going through:
“In the middle of the journey of our life,” he begins the Inferno, “I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death.”
Dante knows what he is talking about here. There are spaces in life that are dark, brutal, and overgrown with brambles, and while we are in them we haven’t the slightest idea how to get out.
Nelson couldn’t get in to see the campus therapist—all the slots were full—but she did have access to books. They proved invaluable:
I wasn’t all steely-eyed clarity. But sometimes I was, and I don’t think I could ever have done that if it weren’t for a lifetime of reading. Dante had Virgil, and I had Julian of Norwich, and Saul Bellow, and Thomas Pynchon, to guide me through the vagaries of life, to explain the pain I felt, and to teach me the primacy of love and the sacredness of children.
Reflecting on why literature functioned as her Virgil, Nelso says it’s because “words can make order out of chaos”:
Why is literature so helpful as a guide? For one thing, because words can make order out of chaos. Indeed, they might be the only things that ever have. In the beginning, Genesis tells us, when “the earth was without form, and void,” God used language to separate the light from the darkness, and the earth from the waters, thereby paving the way for creation and human life. (I believe in the Big Bang and evolution, by the way; I am reading this as a symbol to help our finite human brains grasp infinite theological truths.) In everyday life, too, language can help separate us from the sometimes overwhelming muddle of real-time existence.
Against all expectation, Julian of Norwich, whom she had read for a Ph.D qualifying exam, came to her aid. In today’s post I won’t detail the unexpected discoveries that Nelson makes from reading Julian or, later in the article, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Suffice it to say that sometimes she found insight in unexpected places and came to unanticipated conclusions:
And so one moral of this story is to read widely, because you never know which book could end up saving your life. It might be a month or a year or a decade before you need it. Another moral of this story is that seemingly dark material—accounts of violence, sin, hate, suffering, rolling around in pain, etc.—can be consolatory, too. Toni Morrison is very good on violence and hate, in part because she confronts their effects and causes with equal candor. She doesn’t shield readers from the horrors of child abuse, incest, and infanticide, nor does she spare them the hard work of understanding how it is that such acts come to be committed.
Such understanding, Nelson says, can lead to forgiveness:
Finally, these moments serve to strip Cholly and Pauline [Cholly sexually abuses their daughter] of power and menace: they’re not exciting, diabolical villains or larger-than-life monsters or unstoppable forces of nature. They are fathomably and stoppably cruel. One could take concrete steps to counter them, to prevent them from developing a capacity for such cruelty in the first place.
And if, as a side effect, such moments kindle in the reader a spark of sympathy for Cholly and Pauline—which again, does not justify or excuse their behavior—that is not a bad thing. Years ago I stumbled across a line from Thomas Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution, and I have never forgotten it: “Pity them all; for it went hard with them all.” Forgiveness—and it would take a separate essay to explain exactly what I mean by that—preserves the forgiver as well as the forgiven. Calm recognition of what has happened, and calm respect for one’s own ignorance of what else might have happened before, can be freeing. I don’t know if I would have come to that realization without Toni Morrison.
Because of her eye-opening experiences with Oscar Wao and Bluest Eye, Nelson concluded that it is okay to be triggered:
[A]lthough the student with a trauma history has something to fear in the short term—I’m sorry to say that it does get worse before it gets better—he or she has much, much, much more to gain in the long term, by not ignoring the wound.
Interestingly, Nabokov’s Lolita didn’t trigger her when she was in college, or at least not in a predictable way. Wondering why she was annoyed at a fellow student who was triggered, Nelson arrives as a couple of fascinating insights:
In retrospect, I wonder if I resented her because she made me think about something I didn’t want to think about, and, consequently, if the people stifling discourse now are, on a level below consciousness, actually themselves traumatized and afraid of what they might find.
In other words, a non-response can be as revealing as a dramatic response, and those who would ban or issue warnings about certain works may be grappling with their own deep fears.
A problem with trigger warnings is that people assume a direct cause-and-effect between subject matter and response. Nelson demonstrates that the reading experience is much more complex. In fact, labeling a work might make the problem worse rather than better:
[P]utting labels on painful subject matter encourages a kind of prurient reading. If you’re scanning every page waiting for a scene of rape or murder that you know is coming, you’ve given the material more power over you, in some sense, than if you had just stumbled onto it. In a way, the painful subject matter becomes the star of the show, when it isn’t, necessarily, in the context of the work as a whole or the life.
Nelson therefore is against “prescriptive reading strategies.” How can we get “the vicarious preparation for life that literature can provide,” she asks, if teachers have signaled to us what they think we’ll take away from a work. Perhaps drawing on Bruno Bettelheim, she notes that children instinctively turn to fairy tales because they know they will find important life lessons there, even though the themes are dark:
Children love fairy tales precisely because they provide a worst-case scenario and, usually, a way out. What if I should someday find myself, like Hansel and Gretel, left alone to starve in the woods? How can I keep my wits about me, to escape starvation and the evil witch?
King Lear can also step into our lives when we need it:
At the end of King Lear, students sometimes complain that no one seems to have learned any lessons, because they’re all dead. “But who is not dead?” I ask, gesturing around the room. Together, we survivors tally up the dead bodies and sort them into categories. The bad characters all die. The good characters, and a few formerly bad characters who have shown some attempt at remorse and reform, sometimes die and sometimes live. There is no discernible reason why. True love is revealed to be patient, kind, humble, self-sacrificing. It all seems about right to me.
Nelson is somewhat defensive in talking about literature in ways that are second nature to this blog. Her teachers apparently did not approve of such practical applications. Nevertheless, she does end up making a strong statement that I can only applaud:
No longer do I read fiction to cultivate a sophisticated scholarly distance. I read it to find out how to live, which is the only reason why anyone ever reads anything in the first place.
And later:
As a teacher, I want my students to wrangle with the language of Shakespeare’s play, yes, but I also hope that they will gather up these pearls of wisdom as they do, like squirrels gathering nuts, against the day when they might find themselves alone and in the woods in a time of famine.
Yes, think of literature as a survival kit: the more you have read, the more tools you have for dealing with whatever life throws at you. We need literature’s “vicarious practice for life” because life doesn’t fit neatly into predetermined categories:
Now more than ever—in an age in which communication of every sort is endlessly tagged, categorized, and filtered, and when the breadth and depth of human expression has, for many, been compressed into a couple of hundred characters or six graphic emoticons—we need this kind of vicarious practice for life. The digital world is coded; indeed, it consists of nothing other than code. But the present moment, which is all that human beings can exist in, is not coded. It’s constantly shifting, and there are no pre-programmed warnings. On the worst day of your life, no sign will light up on the dashboard to let you know that the cancer diagnosis, or affair, or miscarriage you’ve always feared—or the one that you hadn’t even thought to fear—is landing at your feet today.
Nelson’s conclusion is a little confused but she appears to be drawing on the lessons of Lear when she talks about how literature helps us “brace for this kind of impact.” Through it we “develop the capacity to stay calm enough, alert enough, and secure enough in [our] own worth and the goodness of God to keep [our] eyes open and face reality.” Through literature we can “gain the ability to bear what Shakespeare calls ‘free and patient thoughts,'”—Edgar’s words to his blinded and guilt-ridden father–as we face up to even the harshest of realities. Literature provides us with Lear’s discovery that “the bad things are hollow and passing, while perfect love endures.”
Nelson concludes, “[I]t’s the truth—and not a running from the truth—that sets us free.”
She speaks from hard-won experience.