Hildegarde

Okay, I know.  The title.

I couldn’t help myself.

Just a couple of notes about the things I said yesterday:

First, I’m not talking about allusions or references.   In Anne of the Thousand Days, the fact that a child borne out of wedlock cannot inherit from his father is not an allusion or a reference, it’s the foundation of the plot. 

For the story to make any sense at all, you have to know what anybody even as late as 1960 would have known–that sex outside marriage was not only frowned on by a few judgmental people, but that it came with real legal penalties.

There has been a real break in social assumptions in the West since the 1960s.   Entire great rafts of social meaning have changed, and changed so radically that they make this culture unique in the history of the world. 

You can think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but what it is is an enormous barrier to understanding. 

I’ll agree that my students are mostly less curious than, say, my children are, but students with their level of curiosity would have had no trouble understanding  Anne of the Thousand Days fifty years ago.

Even my students who are (seemingly) devoutly religious have this problem, because they don’t see extramarital sex as any big deal–it might not be the best way to behave, but if everybody treats everybody else right and everything is consensual, then the practice is at most a venial sin.

The idea that a girl’s parents might respond to the fact that she was pregnant out of wedlock by throwing her out of the house wouldn’t surprise them–but it would surprise them to think that this response was the usual thing with parents, rather than the depredations of people who are too rigid and controlling for their own good, and therefore not like the society around them.

And although sex is the obvious arena for this kind of social dissonance, it’s hardly the only one, and it’s hardly the most seriously damaging one.

Many of my students have a hard time understanding what the big deal is about plagarism, or cheating of any kind–they don’t see it as a blow to their own honor or integrity, because they see school (and life) as a game where they try to win and we try to stop them and there are no holds barred.

They’re also completely innocent of a world in which it mattered how you made your money, or how you got “famous.” 

In the world in which they live, almost any way is good enough.   They don’t like child abusers or serial killers, but they see nothing wrong with being Bernie Madoff as long as he’s getting away with it.

And even when he isn’t. 

Which bleeds into why they see nothing wrong with getting a BA by cheating their way through–it’s as if achievement had no content, only a finish line. 

It is not just difficult, but damned near impossible, to explain most of Western literature to people who think like this, because they lack almost all the key concepts as concepts, never mind as realities.

Honor, duty, integrity, loyalty, patriotism–the closest they come to any of it is in their conviction that cheating on the person you’re sleeping with is a bad thing.

I used to wonder why that one had survived when none of the rest of it had, but I think it’s because they have direct and irrefutable evidence of the consequences–they know that being cheated on hurts.  They’ve seen it in their own lives and the lives of their friends and family.

I am not trying to be universal here.  There are exceptions, and the exceptions are often spectacular. 

But even the exceptions live in an atmosphere without the shape of an actual culture–using “culture” here in the anthropological sense, I guess.

They remind me, in more ways than one, of the rich kid syndrome I saw growing up–the I can do anything as long as I get away with it and I can probably get away with it attitude of the richest kids from the richest families in the most expensive private schools and colleges, the people my father was always warning me against as people who had let money erase their common sense.

My kids aren’t rich, though, except in the sense that everybody in this country is rich vis a vis people in the shack villages of South America.

They don’t care because the society around them no longer seems to care. 

And the lack of understanding is truly profound. 

Every once in a while, I give students the Apology and the Crito and try to get them to talk about why Socrates would not escape his execution even if he could.  They find him an alien from another planet, and that’s if they’re willing to deal with him at all.

And “death before dishonor”?  I’d have to translate it. 

A few years ago I had an adult student, once a boat person from Vietnam.  He came to this country as a child, got married, had a family, built a business, encouraged his sons to go to college–and then had a massive stroke at forty-five.  It put him in a wheelchair and made him severely and permanently disabled.

So the sons gave up college and went to work to support their parents. 

My students find this story not inspiring or heart breaking or any of the rest of it.  They find it impossible.  They wouldn’t do anything like that, and if their parents made them they’d fight back, because something like that is just not fair.

And yet, I’d guess that in my parents’ generation, and even to an extent in mine, it was taken as a matter of course that in circumstances like that you would quit and support the family.  It was what families did, and what “family” meant. 

Given fiction in which such circumstances play a prominent part, their tendency is not to sympathize with the boy who gives up his dreams to support his suddenly widowed mother–but to blame him.   He should have been strong enough to resist his family’s pressures and follow his dream anyway.  Any normal person would have done that.

This sort of thing is not the same thing as not understanding an allusion or not getting a reference to the politics or the popular culture of the time. 

It’s a change that’s much more fundamental than that, and I don’t think I’m being completely crazy to say that it’s difficult to know how you teach literature to people like that.