Why High School English Sucks

And why studying literature can suck in general

Symbols are things that, because of their placement, gain meaning through the story. Not random, superfluous insertions.

Themes arise from stories. They can't substitute for the stories.

A story is not a mystery to be solved for its meaning. It's not a maths equation to be 'figured out'. 

A story is an experience to be appreciated. The author is sharing something with you. 

From "A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable" (Flannery O'Connor):

In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle. 

I realize that a certain amount of this what-is-the-significance has to go on, but I think something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story becomes simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment. 

So many readers try too hard to find that imaginary kernel of significance and enlightenment. They tend to make _assumptions_, and read things that aren't really there in the story. Then, when they arrive at a pseudo-sophisticated-sounding conclusion, they feel so smart. This over-interpreting is completely counter-productive, and is not the purpose of narrative. 

Consider the following exchange, regarding O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find". (You can read the story here.)

From a letter from a professor of English to O'Connor: 

I am writing as spokesman for three members of our department and some ninety university students in three classes who for a week now have been discussing your story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." We have debated at length several possible interpretations, none of which fully satisfies us. In general we believe that the appearance of The Misfit is not 'real' in the same sense that the incidents of the first half of the story are real. Bailey, we believe, imagines the appearance of The Misfit, whose activities have been called to his attention on the night before the trip and again during the stopover at the roadside restaurant. Bailey, we further believe, identifies himself with The Misfit and so plays two roles in the imaginary last half of the story. But we cannot, after great effort, determine the point at which reality fades into illusion or reverie. Does the accident literally occur, or is it a part of Bailey's dream? 

(*emphasis added by the blog author)

O'Connor's reply:

The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology.  I am not interested in abnormal psychology.

There is a change of tension from the first part of the story to the second where the Misfit enters, but this is no lessening of reality.  This story is, of course, not meant to be realistic in the sense that it portrays the everyday doings of people in Georgia. It is stylized and its conventions are comic even though its meaning is serious.

Bailey’s only importance is as the Grandmother’s boy and the driver of the car.  It is the Grandmother who first recognized the Misfit and who is most concerned with him throughout.  The story is a duel of sorts between the Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt involvement with Christ’s action which set the world off balance for him.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation.  If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction.  Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

My tone is not meant to be obnoxious.  I am in a state of shock.

(*emphasis added by the blog author)

Certainly, the following extract from "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" (Flannery O'Connor) captures the entire problem:

… In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the story itself, and when this happens, they become symbolic in their action. 

Now the world symbol scares a good many people off, just as the world art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader—sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated. They seem to think that it is a way of saying something that you aren't actually saying, and so if they can be got to read a reputedly symbolic work at all, they approach it as if it were a problem in algebra. Find x. And when they do find or think they find this abstraction, x, then they go off with an elaborate sense of satisfaction and the notion that they have understood the story. Many students confuse the process of understanding a thing with understanding it. 

I think that for the fiction writer himself, symbols are something he uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that these are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction … 

People have a habit of saying, "What is the theme of your story?" and they expect you to give them a statement: "The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class"—or some such absurdity. And when they've got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story.  

Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

Schools need to teach students such essential ideas, without the understanding of which they cannot appreciate literature. Students are forced to search for the meaning of life and find English class f*ing pointless and f*ing tedious.

I do not blame the students. I blame the schools.