I picked up this book after a reader compared Eureka Street to this classic about the Lost Generation. I read The Sun Also Rises once before, perhaps in junior year of high school, but I discovered I had retained little from the experience. Thus, my reading it in June was in many ways like reading a brand new book.
Back in high school, The Big Idea was to read a book and write about the symbolism, literary devices, or general meaning found in the writing. Longtime readers of the blog will understand why I was fairly good at this. I probably wrote something about Brett Ashley's hair or remarked on the significance of Jake appreciating Romero's bullfighting technique. (1)
But in looking back, what was the point? I suspect the K-12 approach to literature focused too much on letters, words, and phrasing at the cost of cultivating a desire to read in students. For over-matched students, I imagine the approach turned reading into an activity akin to a word search: try and find the relevant similes contained within the larger incomprehensible mass! (2)
The crux of the issue is how reading and writing are taught together. Why? When I arrived at college, I was surprised when math turned out to essentially be a writing class. This did not need to be the case, either. High school math could easily have included writing. Other subjects like history incorporated writing, sort of, but it was more a way to organize memorized facts than it was an opportunity to write. Maybe the important question is to ask why any subject is allowed to ignore writing.
It was important to read books like The Great Gatsby, Fahrenhite 451, and The Sun Also Rises before I left high school (3). But it was important in the way watching the NBA helps a young basketball player. The benefit is in exposure, not imitation. Becoming a better basketball player means finding the right level of competition, not prematurely replicating the dunking, long range shooting, or social media activity seen at the NBA level.
Nothing cuts skill development short like discouragement. In the same way a young athlete always on the losing side becomes disinterested in the sport, a young writer forced to write assertively about topics poorly understood will lose interest in the form of expression. Why write when writing appears the fastest way to saying something dumb? (And in print, no less!)
Young writers would learn better by describing in-depth what they fully understand. Groping desperately for meaning within what is considered important literature makes this goal more difficult to reach. If such a task is accomplished only by assigning essays about The Hunger Games, so be it (4). It would be easier to do such a thing if writing and reading were taught separately.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. One more symbol...
I also remember my English teacher was sort of obsessed about Jake 'losing his manhood'. So maybe I played to this fascination by mentioning the scene when the bulls and the steer come together and the narrator points out how the pack functioned without issues until an animal became separated from the rest.
2. I actually wrote about this book on the SAT writing section.
I bet I would have been better off describing my contrarian views about Professor Snape in the Harry Potter series (at least in terms of developing my writing skills).
3. Ser o no ser, esta es la pregunta...
Even Shakespeare's indecipherable verses were valuable to some degree, perhaps so in the same way Spanish was. After all, the great playwright's version of English was basically a foreign language to everyone I knew, my teachers included.
4. Do dystopian novels ever fail?
Plus, who really knows what will be considered classic literature a hundred years from now? It could just as well be The Hunger Games, anyway.
