Found in Translation

(Many thanks to reader M. Scott Clark for inspiring this blog with his mini-rant on college English papers.)

Sometime between the moment I graduated from college and the beginning of my children’s high school years, there was a very dramatic shift in the substance of language arts education.  When I was in high school—back when dinosaurs roamed the planet—we wrote tons of English papers.  Read a book, write a paper.   For many years I kept a box in my attic filled with papers dating back to 9^th grade.  

Strangely, I do not remember having been instructed in the mechanics of writing papers.  I remember learning sentence structures (subjects and predicates) and grammar.  There were exercises in tenses and parallel construction.  But when it came to taking a theme from a novel and developing it into a well-constructed essay, this did not happen.   For most of my classes, we were simply required to submit a paper by the time we finished discussing each book in class.  More often than not, our papers took the form of plot summaries or comparisons of one character to another.  Many were peppered shamelessly with opinion and broad generalizations.   In the end, teachers seemed to assess our papers according to whether or not we could prove that we had read the book in its entirety.

For my kids, English papers were a scholarly exercise from the earliest years of their education.  There were “persuasive” essays and “reflective” essays.  There were carefully pointed “prompts.”  There were “lenses” through which to view the characters and plot elements.  I remember my 9^th grade son having to choose between a “feminist lens” and a “Marxist lens” when writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter.  For them, papers sank or swam on the strength of the “thesis statement,” which had better offer a theory or point of view to be proven.  They were required to underline their thesis, or the paper could receive no better than a B.

Throughout my eighteen years of formal education, I probably wrote more than seventy English papers.  I never really minded writing them, as I loved the books and stories that we read.  But I have to admit that despite getting pretty good grades on them, I spent years producing work about which I had no idea.  Between the challenging language of the ancient works, like Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales, and 20^th Century novels that covered themes that were more adult than I was, so much of my energy went into trying to decipher what the plots were about.  It was a long time before I could appreciate the beauty of Hamlet’s soliloquys, or the ingenious way that King Lear’s eldest daughters were constructed of two distinct and contrasting brands of evil.  (I remember my college professor, the incredible Walter Kaiser, suggesting in lecture:  “While Goneril may beat the cat, Regan will twist its tail into submission.”)

I can still remember the precise moment in time when it all came together for me.  It was one of those instances when you hear an audible click, like the tumblers of a lock falling into place.  We were reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, still one of my favorite novels of all time, for Mr. Cook’s English class.  I was laid out on a sofa in our “Florida Room” trying to push through this thick novel, hoping that my frequent viewing of the old Charles Laughton film would provide enough plot knowledge to get me through the many dramatic layers and the florid tone of English translation.  Early in the novel is an enigmatic chapter titled, “This Will Kill That.”  It is a complete departure from the story of the sad disfigured character and the gypsy girl.  The chapter is based on a declaration by Claude Frollo, who speaks derisively of “the German pest”—the printing press.  It injects a commentary on how freedom of the press and the wide dissemination of thought would be the end of architecture as a form of artistic expression.  This, in turn, would threaten the Church, whose prominence in society was fortified by the construction of great monuments.  Notre Dame, in particular, was the center of Paris—both literally and figuratively.

To this day, I remember sitting and pouring over that section again and again.  I thought the deliberateness of this chapter so puzzling that I became obsessed with understanding why the author had interrupted his tale with it.  I came to realize that Notre Dame was the main character of the novel, the others serving only to expose the frailty of the Church through the weakness of the Archdeacon Frollo and the frivolous use of the cathedral as “sanctuary.”  It is the greatest use of architecture in fiction, The DaVinci  Code notwithstanding.

This is the book that taught me what literary analysis is all about.  Through this single book I realized that authors reflect the politics and culture of their times, using their characters to give voice to their own concerns and observations.  It taught me to appreciate the “art” in literature by paying attention to the choices that authors make in setting a scene, dressing the characters, revealing their strengths and vulnerabilities, and putting words in their mouths.  It opened my eyes to the power of the written word.

For that week’s assignment, my paper was not just a pro forma book report.  I wrote about that single chapter, raising and trying to answer the questions that assaulted my senses the first time I scanned it. I still have that paper, in a small box on a shelf in my home office, with Mr. Cook’s brief comments written across the top.  It is an important and personal relic in my life; like a dried, crumbling corsage, it marks a milestone in my young adulthood.  It reminds me of my youthful exuberance and my thirst to examine all things.  It evokes—even after all these years—the excitement of seeing a door open that was never there before.  It represents a moment of unusual clarity in a troubled childhood, one that led me to find “sanctuary” in education and lifelong learning.