Tuesday
(Warning: This essay comes with spoilers.)
Julia and I attended Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale the past week with our University of Ljubljana colleagues and long-time friends Cvetka Sokolov and Mirjana Zelezic, which means that we four English teachers got to watch a cinematic English teacher eat himself to death. Images from the film still haunt my imagination, but I want to focus today’s post on his performance as a writing and literature instructor.
The story is about a man who has lost his gay lover to a combination of religious guilt (he was raised by an apocalyptic Christian cult), anorexia, and, in the end, suicide. Tormented by his inability to save his lover, Charlies eats himself to death, although not before becoming a virtual whale of a man. Between bites, we watch him totter around his apartment and interact with various people, including his angry teenage daughter, whom along with his wife he abandoned eight years previously. We also see him teaching a writing class via zoom, although his students can’t see him because he informs them his camera isn’t working.
Early on, when he thinks he is dying, he asks a door-to-door missionary (from this same Christian cult) to read him a short student essay about Moby Dick. As much as I love my students, this would not be my dying request, and it seems on par with Charlie’s later insistence that he has to finish grading his students’ essays before he dies (!). And then there’s the scene where, towards the end, he uses profanity in order to get authentic writing out of the students. The outburst gets him fired but, in his last meeting with them, he turns his camera on, revealing his grotesque self to them. If he is demands honesty from them, it is only right that he be honest in return.
A word on authenticity. As I told my Slovenian colleagues, whom I have known since coming to Ljubljana on a Fulbright fellowship in 1987, that I spent that year exploring how to get authentic literature essays from my students. It’s more difficult that simply throwing expletives around. Or, as Langston Hughes reveals in “Theme for English B,” telling students just to
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—Then, it will be true.
Hughes, remembering when he was a student, wonders, “I wonder if it’s that simple?” And goes on to reveal a very different self than the teacher is expecting.
If great literature is writing that achieves the highest level of truth-telling, then it has potential to provide students with meaningful insight into issues they care about. On the other hand, if they regard reflecting on literature as no more than a process of hoop jumping (“reification” is the fancy word for this), then it is no more (to quote St. Paul) than noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. In my seventh year of teaching, such essays were sucking the lifeblood right out of me, which is why I was so determined to find a more successful approach. If I hadn’t, I would have gotten out of the profession.
I finally learned, after that year of introspection in Slovenia, that I needed to listen carefully to whatever my students were saying about literature—and to take their insights, which were sometimes no more than glimmers—and help them develop them. It’s labor-intensive work, involving paying close attention to their brainstorming, their proposals, their rough drafts, their final drafts, and their revisions. Throughout I would tell them that there had to be something at stake in their essays, and when I saw what I called an “energy point” in their writing, I would point it out to them and encourage them to develop it.
Ultimately I was able to break through. In the years since, I have received hundreds of essays from students using literature to grapple with issues that were central to their lives. Many of these I have documented in this blog and some will be appearing in my recently finished book. While this approach devoured much of my time, it saved me as a teacher.
In The Whale, an essay that reveals such a glimmer is the one Charlies asks to be read to him. It has been written years before by his daughter. I wish I could quote it but here’s the gist as I recall it from the fil.
Basically, his daughter sees Moby Dick as a novel about loneliness. She focuses on how Captain Ahab thinks he will find happiness if he ever kills the whale that has deprived him of his leg. But the whale, she notes, is not malevolent—after all, it’s just an animal—and Ahab is wrong in thinking that he will achieve satisfaction in killing it. In fact, the novel’s irritating whale chapters, she says, are just diversions that protect him from him confronting the fact that he is lonely.
Charlie is enamored with the essay because he recognizes it for what it is—which is to say, a reader using a work of literature to process the deepest issues in her life. In this instance, his daughter, through Ahab, feels angry at the whale (Charlie) for (in her case) abandoning her as a little girl. But at the deep level that literature can take us to, she realizes that getting revenge on her father will not bring her happiness—that, in fact, her father is no more malevolent than the whale. Indeed, all her acting out in school is a way of evading her deep sadness about feeling alone. The novel has provided her with a way to frame her hurt feelings and find a positive way forward. Rather than continuing to blame Charlie and remaining trapped in victimhood, she can acknowledge her loneliness and search for positive ways to move forward.
This is the authentic communication that is possible through literary interpretation, and Charlie can die happy knowing that his daughter—who at his request reads it to him right before he dies—has recognized this possibility. She has shown that she is smart, sensitive, and empathetic, and someone with these qualities has the potential for great things. He can leave his daughter knowing that she will be all right.