“What really knocks me out is a book
that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a
terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you
felt like it.”
So declared Holden Caulfield, one of the most memorable in a
long cast of characters that has taken up residence in my own personality,
consciously or not.
When I was young I was an insatiable reader of novels, short
stories, poetry – anything except nonfiction. Many a tortured soul lingers in
the catacombs of my neural networks, like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (Crime and
Punishment). A fair number are villains, just plain creepy, or both. In my
mind, Dicken’s immortal Uriah Heep rises to the top of these unforgettable
characters like foetid cream, a testament not only to that incomparable
author’s ability to sculpt believability from his imagination and love of
language, but also to the fact that the most compelling characters aren’t
always the protagonists.
They don’t have to be human, either. In what was my favorite
book during my middle school years – I reread it 18 times – Cruella de Vil,
that eponymously evil antagonist, played one hundred and second fiddle to 101
delightful Dalmatians. And of course, we mustn’t forget that ever-humble
hobbit, Frodo, reluctant hero of Middle Earth.
Tragedy also looms large in my remembrances: Are George and
Lennie mice or men? Heroism and transformation in the face of tragedy has
special power: think Scarlett O’Hara. Or my favorite character of all, Yossarian,
the haunted, tragicomic survivor of Catch 22.
The one thing all these characters have in common, aside
from lingering in my otherwise spotty memory, is that they are fictional. The
stuff of literature.
My riff on memorable fictive characters was inspired by Alan
Borsuk’s editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel entitled “Shift to nonfiction in schools becoming reality.” Borsuk’s regular beat is education. In
today’s article he observes, “A broad shift is under way from fiction
to nonfiction, propelled by the Common Core English and language arts standards
that are being implemented in 46 states and the District of Columbia. It almost
certainly will mean fewer classics, more historical documents, fewer personal
essays, more analytical writing.”
Yet another assault on creativity and imagination. As an
artist and art educator I long ago got used to having to defend the value of my
discipline. Art, music, dance – all the creative and expressive arts – are
defensible on many grounds but I never thought it would come to this. Not
literature. It’s axiomatic that every student takes English every year, while
“the Arts” suffer second-class status as elective, or worse, are dispensable.
But now literature, too?
The importance of English has always been unassailable, or
so I believed.
“Why?” asks Borsuk rhetorically. “In
general, advocates say, nonfiction gives students better preparation for
college and careers by developing such things as analytical skills.”
Ridiculous!
I learned how to write an expository
essay in freshman English under the profound tutelage of Mrs. Wiggenhorn, one
of few high school teachers whose name remains in my mental catacombs along with
a library full of imaginary ones. She delivered without sacrificing Romeo and
Juliet, as the new Common Core Standards do.
Today I read and write far more
nonfiction than fiction. I have no ambition to be a novelist despite my
admiration for those who do. But I wonder how I would feel about writing today if
I’d been forced in high school to read “FedViews,” written by the Federal
Reserve Bank of San Francisco, or “Innumeracy:
Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences” instead of Hamlet or The Little Prince. (I didn’t make those nonfiction titles up; they
are on the official Common Core Standards list.)
Great
literature, like great art, is more than an educational tool. Reading fiction
does far more than provide lessons in vocabulary, grammar, style, and content. To
paraphrase author Lloyd Alexander, fiction is not an escape from reality but a
way of understanding it. Fictional characters and stories are memorable because
they insinuate themselves into our psyches. They express emotions, debate moral
dilemmas, suffer consequences. They live in us. They help us figure out how to
be human.
Borsuk assures us that there is still
room in the English curriculum for fiction; however, the balance will be
shifted. As much as 70% of all reading in the 12th grade is destined
to be nonfiction.
James Piatt, principal of Brown Deer
High School, is quoted as saying "I believe it's a strong disservice to
kids to spend too much time on fiction when they don't have good nonfiction
skills." Borsuk continues, “Nonfiction prepares kids better for the real
world, he said.”
Nonsense.
I believe in a more nuanced reality, one expressed well by author Yann
Martel, who famously imagined a riveting and philosophical narrative of a boy
trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger in Life of Pi. He wrote, “Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily
divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of
facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for
history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no
fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to
everyone except the historian.”
The value of fiction is not confined to writers
themselves, however. The arts have been recognized for their unquantifiable but
demonstrable role in increasing the bottom line in the corporate world, too.
Annette Byrd of GlaxoSmithKline says “We need people who think with the
creative side of their brains—people who have played in a band, who have
painted…it enhances symbiotic thinking capabilities, not always thinking in the
same paradigm, learning how to kick-start a new idea, or how to get a job done
better, less expensively.”
My world would be so much poorer without all those
characters in my head. I know it would. I possess analytical skills but they have not helped me weather the news these past few days. It is a comfort, however, to have Atticus Finch ruminating up
there – and Scout, too.
And even Boo Radley. Maybe especially Boo Radley.
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