Required Reading
SONENCLAR, KEN
Perspectives REQUIRED READING BY KEN SONENCLAR The New York Times reported recently that Silas Marner, the third most frequently assigned book in American high schools 30 years ago, had...
...The possibility of Selective Service was inching closer, Kent State was current events, not history, and, from my perspective, President Nixon's secret plan to end of war in Vietnam was unfolding much too slowly...
...They probably shouldn't...
...Consequently, my preoccupation was organizing antiwar rallies and exposing the absurdity of high school life in wiseacre commentaries for the school paper...
...To a combative 16-year-old he was the icon-bashing devil on my shoulder, the permissive uncle, the young Charles Foster Kane who tells his J.P...
...The book, it turns out, resembles MTV more than a political tract...
...But engaging young people today requires greater imagination than ever...
...Naturally the book had not changed, so it has to be me...
...I picked it up a dozen times over the years, thumbed its 200-odd pages, and set it back down...
...By the late '80s, four of those novels and Our Town (set in 1901) had been bumped in favor of five works published between 1937 and 1960, and although Shakespeare still had three plays in the top 10, Hamlet was replaced by Romeo and Juliet...
...Morgan-like guardian that he aspires to be "everything you hate...
...Like Uncle Sam's eyes on that famous Armed Forces recruiting poster, for the next two decades Marner stared down at me from countless bookstore shelves...
...Total escape, however, was not at hand...
...I can only guess, moreover, that the chairman believed my teacher, though faculty adviser to the Future Teachers Club, had dealt out too severe a blow...
...My nonnegotiable opposition to the book did not arise from any research...
...It even takes a hard slap at Christian fundamentalism...
...Marner's Raveloe, a sort of tuneless Brigadoon virtually untouched by the Industrial Revolution, is an exemplary, self-contained world...
...I bought the book and it consumed me for the next couple of days...
...In the early 1960s Thornton Wilder's Our Town was the sole 20th-century work among the 10 most-assigned books...
...As for Hoffman himself, I suspect his suicide three years ago was partly a result of his deepening personal sense of irrelevance...
...That bit of scholastic trivia struck a personal chord...
...With issues of war and peace receding daily, I find myself focusing on family, home and community...
...Never slumping to melodrama, the story grapples with a multitude of contemporary problems...
...In addition to the myriad diversions of high school life and adolescence in general (actually, these have not changed much), there are 40 or 50 cable channels, videos and computers...
...My teenage misencounter with the novel lingered...
...Whatever the case, in the end I was back in class, restored to the honors track...
...My penchant for political agitation grew out of the '60s-style activism that was finally trickling down through my Long Island high school...
...Ken Sonenclar, a new contributor to The New Leader, is a free-lance writer...
...I must admit, though, that his death touched me more deeply than the passing of most public personalities...
...It wasn't necessary...
...In most cases, of course, Mariner is not taught properly, which explains, why it remains among the most pilloried books on required reading lists...
...After finishing Marner, I dug up my old copy of Revolution for the Hell of It to see what had grabbed me so forcefully 20 years ago...
...In 1971, I was suspended indefinitely from junior-year English for refusing to read George Eliot's classic...
...she was from the old school, and from the day I began first grade she had demonstrated a distinct bias toward teachers' critiques of her contrary son...
...Bad teaching and laziness were as rampant then as now, and teens have always found reasons to defy their parents or teachers, as Romeo and Juliet make evident...
...Children's psychiatrist Robert Coles has observed that, taught properly, Marner can have tremendous appeal for students of all economic backgrounds, especially if a teacher takes care to emphasize the novel's focus on the emotional rebirth of a lonely victimized individual (as many teenagers see themselves...
...I realize now that it would not have been impossible to demonstrate Marner's pertinence, even to someone with a Vietnam-era sensibility...
...If asked to suggest a suitable substitute, I probably would have proposed Abbie Hoffman's Revolution for the Hell of It, which, along with a small shelf full of other adolescent calls to action, constituted the core of a self-designed 11th-grade curriculum...
...But, having grown from the restless hooligans we were at 17, we may yet discover gems, like Silas Marner, in corners abandoned long ago...
...Marner had nothing to say to me...
...Anticipating the tactics of the self-appointed censors who have sought to expel Mark Twain and Anne Frank from high school libraries, I condemned Marner without reading a page...
...Looking at the bigger picture, it appears that high schools nationwide have adopted more germane reading lists, if publication date is any criterion...
...Oddly, the same words that for years had prompted me to tuck it back alongside Middlemarch now comforted me like a warm wind on a chilly afternoon...
...Forced underground by the authorities, Hoffman re-emerged at a time when self-absorption was endemic and compelling social issues were not stirring passions...
...To be sure, the bar may have been lowered of late, yet it was hardly much higher 20 years ago...
...Last year the humorist Roy Blount Jr...
...he was a performer without an audience...
...At one point, for instance, the wealthiest man in Raveloe implies that the surest way for him to grow richer is for the Napoleonic Wars to continue...
...Nevertheless, we 30- and 40-some-things emerged with some of the tools and the desire to explore and enjoy literature...
...its companions were three Shakespeare plays and six 19th-century novels...
...I pictured Silas and myself as two asteroids whose orbits bring them within 1,000 miles of each other every so often, yet they never collide...
...No matter what I was doing ??attending college or graduate school, living and working on both coasts, buying and selling homes, changing jobs, changing careers, getting married...
...I realized that Silas Marner is, after all, very much a tale for our times...
...How strange to find ourselves standing at the ramparts of civilization??a role we never asked for...
...but perhaps today's English teachers, burdened with Marner when they were adolescents themselves, are reluctant to inflict the pain they suffered on their students...
...Indeed, at the time relevance seemed the only appropriate literary scale, and Marner failed even to register...
...Spending so much as a day contemplating what Marner's author herself described as "A story of old-fashioned village life" struck me as ridiculous...
...adultery, betrayal, substance abuse, deceit, mental illness, larceny, thievery, spiritual transformation, and enough family feuding to amuse the Ewings...
...The revised reading lists, for all their up-to-date language and characters, are fighting an uphill battle against increasingly dominant flickering images...
...Looking for something to read the Christmas before last, I again pulled Marner down from a shelf...
...Despite all of its problems, largely generated by a decadent ruling class, it is a place typified by concern for neighbors, strong family ties and many of the other virtues we feel deprived of today...
...quipped that the novel should be compulsory college fare "for the same reason that I feel the military draft should be reinstated: Why should young people today get off easy...
...Not that she endorsed my view...
...and I had been out long enough to miss all of Marner...
...The tragic teens, incidentally, quickly zoomed to the number-one spot, assigned in 90 per cent of the schools surveyed...
...Once more I read from the author's own description: "A story of old-fashioned village life...
...Eye-catching photos combine with sophomoric prose to make the perfect lure for a teenage rebel's fly-like attention span...
...Three weeks into the suspension my mother bailed me out by pleading my case to the English Department chairman...
...If nothing else, the more contemporary language of modern authors is one way schools are seeking to draw students to literature and possibly preempt outbreaks of boredom and opposition similar to mine...
...the 19th-century story of a weaver's life in a remote English village was obviously irrelevant to the problems plaguing the country, issues that demanded my full attention...
...Probably she rose to my defense because suspension brought with it a permanent expulsion from the honors track...
...Perspectives REQUIRED READING BY KEN SONENCLAR The New York Times reported recently that Silas Marner, the third most frequently assigned book in American high schools 30 years ago, had disappeared completely from reading lists by the late 1980s...
...Our enemies are the endless responsibilities of adulthood, not to mention those same 40 or 50 channels...
...At 38, I suppose that, along with most Americans, I have turned inward...
...Silas Marner has become an important book for me, but I would not necessarily include it on high school reading lists...
...And what of us baby boomers, whose teachers, schooled in Latin and maybe some Greek, considered their pupils borderline illiterates...
Vol. 75 • December 1992 • No. 16
