Years ago, I had an ill-fated encounter with The Return of the Native; it was summer reading for high school, and either I was too immature to appreciate the work or too inclined to roll my eyes at my Christian school’s summer reading selections. Either way, I shunned Hardy’s work because I loathed that one book. But someone mentioned Tess in a blog comment, and I decided that it was high time to read it.
I’m thankful that I didn’t read this in high school. One of two things would’ve happened.
1. I wouldn’t have appreciated Tess of the D’Ubervilles.
Although I’d suffered depression for years, I still hadn’t reached the acute stage of mental crisis that I did in college and later. I hadn’t been through my own harrowing experience of darkness, my own crisis of faith, my own experiences of rejection and loneliness. Sometimes we have to go through things before we can empathize with certain characters (or real people!); other times, the characters evoke our empathy for their fictional trials, and that empathy extends beyond the page into the real world.
2. My Christian high school teachers would’ve ruined the book.
Don’t get me wrong; I mean no disrespect. My English teachers were good women, trying to stuff literature and grammar and writing into the chemically-imbalanced, hormonally-out-of-whack brains of teenagers. They weren’t the horrible people I’ve read about on the #ExposeChristianSchools hashtag tweets. But they weren’t necessarily well-informed on literature. Being a book-crazy girl, their relative ignorance disgusted me.
For me, their thinking had two major faults.
-
Censored thinking.
As if embarrassed by the disturbing themes in classic novels, the teachers and administrators avoided these books entirely and picked safe (and inferior) works to study. My senior year of high school, we read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, an overview of the major Greek and Roman myths. My teacher told us to skip two chapters—the myths of Oedipus and Clytemnestra—because we “didn’t need to read it.”
I read these chapters anyway. (Probably one of my few acts of rebellion as a teenager!) For pity’s sake, it’s not like the guy acted intentionally, so why make a fuss? And if we can’t maturely (if awkwardly) discuss Clytemnestra’s affair and subsequent killing of her husband, then are we really mature enough for college?
Why be flustered by bawdiness in certain of The Canterbury Tales to the extent that they go unread? Why not address it in a Christian classroom to a group of college-bound seniors?
We were going to encounter even more “disturbing” things at a secular university. Why not prepare us now, when we can learn how to think through the issues with a teacher who believes in moral absolutes and not moral relativism? Give a disclaimer or acknowledge the problematic contents, and work with the students through these issues.
-
“Christian” was narrowly-defined.
For them, there was one Christian view of just about any subject. They didn’t want to stray from The Christian View of whatever. But Christians don’t all think alike—shocking, I know—and Christians are allowed to have different interpretations of Hamlet or Moby-Dick.
Really. You don’t have to agree with me.
Even as a high schooler, I wanted to devour the texts: sniff out the potentials, dig deep into the dirt and grit of the novel, sink my teeth into the words until I tasted the truth amid the flavors, a dog ripping meat from a bone. But only the meaty texts. Not throwaway junk food.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
–Sir Francis Bacon
-
Reading too many junk novels is like eating too much junk food: it kills the taste for anything else.
Artificial and sugary and chemical and salted to induce addiction: that’s junk food. That’s junk reading. That’s junk thinking.
Years ago, when I ditched my favorite Diet Coke, I went for a year without another soft drink. I had to learn what water tasted like. Strange, but true. After a while, I preferred water. I didn’t crave soft drinks.
Water tasted real.
Refreshing.
Thirst-quenching.
Nothing settled my thirst like water.
One night at my daughter’s track meet, there was only Diet Coke to drink. My husband handed me a cup. I took a sip. Stopped. Stared at the styrofoam cup. “Are you sure? Taste this—” I thrust the straw at him. “Does this taste right to you?”
“Tastes like Diet Coke.”
I’d been drinking this nasty chemical concoction? I had preferred this over other beverages? I gave the drink to my husband and found a water bottle. For years, I had been quenching my thirst with something artificial, when the really satisfying object was just a water fountain away.
When we satiate ourselves on inferior things, the junk food of thought, and read and swallow and listen to these things to the exclusion of all else, what happens?
We kill our taste for the real.
And when our taste for the real is dead, we have difficulty thinking for ourselves, and thinking (and acting) in the radical, turn-the-world-inside-out manner that Jesus demands.
And that includes having empathy for those who suffer like the fictional Tess.
I’ve updated this post (with references to the #ExposeChristianSchools hashtag) from my old blog.