Post #2 – Not Safe, But Good: Thoughts on Controversial Language in Post #1 and Beyond (let’s get meta)

After a suggestion from a colleague (whom I wildly respect) to make a swearword modification (the insertion of an * in place of a certain “u”) in my first post, I put up a bit of an argument, saying that it would go against the whole point of what I was saying – that sometimes there’s rough stuff in good literature, and that’s okay if it has a point – that’s real life. I get the ethos behind him suggesting the change, in that he wanted to endorse it to other educators, and you never know just who your audience is going to be and what their convictions are, and so I made the change. But I just couldn’t live with it after about a week. So I changed it back.

The point here is, if I’m not censoring that word when in comes up in literature or film with senior high students, why am I censoring it in literature that will be read by adults? Isn’t that backwards? (To be clear, I don’t censor the print word of it in class if it arises, but when reading aloud say “cuss” or “cussing” instead, à la Wes Anderson’s film Fantastic Mr. Fox). What also ate me alive was the fact that censoring that word totally crippled the message of the post itself, in an ontologically self-defeating sense. The post is saying that real life is messy, and unsafe, and that literature is going to sometimes reflect that if it is to meaningfully speak into the fallen human situation. And by censoring, I’d totally contradicted that point. So I changed it back.

This was not meant to be an act of volitional defiance in any way, it's just an issue of logical consistency, for which I have superlative regard.

I had a Christian professor in university (what a treat) who taught me Greek and Latin, and one day when it kind of came up when we were talking etymology, he confidently said, “Oh, you know the word ‘fuck’? It comes from the Latin word ‘pugnare’ which means ‘to fight,’” and then he riffed on that for a bit. The thing that struck me was the bold earthiness with which he addressed the word, no holds barred, which I found to be very winsome and engaging. So often Christians are the most easily offended people, who get huffy over the smallest controversies, which I think is to our detriment, and not really even in line with our worldview, since we have the best answer for why the human condition is the way it is. In other words, we of all people should expect messiness in life. If we can be more real and meet people in the world more where they’re at (in a “not of the world, but in the world” kind of way), maybe Christ would seem more attractive to them, and more pertinently real. For example, if a Christian were to go volunteer at a homeless shelter, they would see very quickly that life is often anarchic and unsafe. Should the Christian refrain from going there to serve the poor because there is swearing and talk of drugs and other unsavory things in that environment? Of course not. If so, they’d be denying the command of Christ to love the poor and disenfranchised of society.

I’m not advocating swearing for the sake of it, or gratuitous profanity for the sake of controversy (who can think of anything more obnoxious than someone whose speech is ubiquitously peppered with vulgarity?). What I am advocating though is a realness, both with ourselves, and with our students. They’ve all heard that word hundreds of times in a variety of places, and Christian education gives us the safe context in which to talk about some very unsafe things. Where better to equip our high school students on this and other big issues? If we don’t do it, it’s fairly unlikely that many others will outside the home. Do parents want to be the only people talking about tough issues with their kids, or is this best done in concert with Christian community as well, which Christian schools function as a part of?

An addition to this point, and the general conversation that was discussed in Post 1, I recently ordered a book entitled The Best Christian Short Stories (ed. Bret Lott) that sets itself up in the intro as a collection of literary fiction. I discovered it after reading a story called “Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire” by David Drury with my English 10 and 11 classes, which was anthologized in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003, edited by Dave Eggers, who is one of my favourite writers. I discovered later that The Best Christian Short Stories had reached a second edition (as well as a second volume), where the title had been changed to Not Safe, but Good, which is a quote about Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Aslan is not safe, but he’s good. He’s a lion; he could rip your face clean off. But he would only do it justly and in total righteousness. And we all know who Aslan is.

                                       

 

The point here is that good literature that has meaningful and real things to say to us is probably not going to be safe all the time, but it is going to be good; especially when we can talk about it in the right setting and context, as Christian educators get to. There’s been a lot of conversation around The Hunger Games lately, which I think is pretty entry level in this discussion, if we’re talking about senior-high level students, as I have been. I feel that book, though a bit violent (though not gratuitously so – the descriptions could be a lot gnarlier, based on the premise), is pretty safe in that it doesn’t contain many other unsavory things like sexual content or swearing. I think The Lord of the Flies and 1984 are much darker and more visceral than The Hunger Games, and those books are standard fare in public senior high schools. Again though, Lord of the Flies is still pretty safe in the ways I just mentioned. But if we can concede purposeful violence in what students are reading, can we also concede other adult themes, within non-gratuitous reason, so long as they're purposefully redemptive or educational? 

Post #1 (Longest one ever, I pretty much promise)

Let me state categorically, and for the record, that I think David Foster Wallace is basically the most insightful and prophetic voice in the modern age, in terms of what it means to be a human being living in the tension of the pain/pleasure dichotomy. To quote:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive [emphasis mine]; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

This is a quote I’ve more or less implemented and regularly cited with my Grade 10 and 11 English students, and refer to ad nauseam in class because I think it’s beautiful (in its own way) and true.

For students in a Christian “bubble” [rampant cliché], I see staggering value in the ethos of this statement because the Christian life is often framed in said contextual bubble as good, pure, and perhaps easy, and that the unbelieving, outside world is dark, sinful, and patently wrong. Wallace’s conception of life as 51% pain/49% pleasure, however, applies just as much to the Christian as to the adherent of any other worldview.

On a related note, and in another place in this 2003 interview, Wallace states that the role of fiction is to accurately portray “what it is to be a fucking human being.” He goes on:

This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.

From a Christian education standpoint, if we’re not turning students on to literature that explores the depths of the human experience, in all of its fallen and (hopefully) redemptive glory, then I maintain that we’re doing them a radical disservice.

This has several interesting implications for the Christian educator (which I’ll explore more in Post #2). Firstly, it occurs to me that literature of the aforementioned kind can unsettle students' parents. The reason being is that literature of this kind will usually feature certain “unsavory” language or adult themes, both of which many parents may want to safeguard their children from (until what age, I know not). In the shelter/preserve model of Christian parenting (in which the preservation of the child’s innocence is priority #1) lies an inherent danger: What happens to the child when they graduate from their Christian education and go on to the secular university campus or workplace? Essentially, I think the answer to this is that they’re in for a real straight-up and existentially shell-shocking metaphorical smack to the jaw. The outside world will bewilder said child, in a way in which they have no context or tools to adequately interpret, engage, or deal with.

So what are we to do? Enforce the shelter/preserve model favoured by many parents, or equip students with the abilities needed to not only handle a grossly fallen world, but to speak Christ’s redemptive presence into the messiness of the fallen human condition?

Stated rather obviously, I propose the latter option. For how can the message of redemption actually be redemptive without a teenager having prior knowledge of the messiness that needs redeeming?

In the Christian community, and perhaps at times from the parental viewpoint, the emphasis seems to often be on what adolescents should or should not be reading/watching/viewing, rather than on how adolescents are thinking and engaging critically with what they’re reading/watching/viewing. Obviously, there are certain forms of media Christians ought to avoid (pornography, most horror films, and Nickelback come to mind), but a willingness to be open-minded about typically non-conservative forms of literature, film, and music that portray life as it really is (for the purpose of considering what it means to be a human being, as Wallace says) would be beneficial to our Christian students.

Maybe this 51%/49% pain/pleasure conception of life is a bit too bleak for our students? Well, maybe in some ways, but perhaps there's hope in this too. Life as teenagers experience it (even Christian teenagers) isn't always all roses, and certainly from a biblical perspective, this experience is a true result of what it means to live in a state of fallenness, sin, and partial separation from God. But without this ubiquitous pain and suffering we experience on a personal and collective level as humans, there would be no redemption, hope, or ultimate victory. Good literature helps us to empathize with the pain of others and be comforted in the midst of our own pain. It also vividly outlines what it means to be a human being living between the trees, which is to say after the Tree of Life in Genesis 2 (where man falls directly after in chapter 3), and before the reappearance of the same tree in Revelation 22 (where man is ultimately redeemed). Being between the trees is certainly the worst place humanity can find itself (as it's after the entrance of death and before the final absolution from the sin that causes it), but this is where Christ (and good literature) most relevantly speak to us in our human condition.