Can A Book Really Do That?

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This is my second year teaching a one-credit, honors First Year Experience course I designed called Why Read?  Like last year, I have mostly STEM majors, and we’re reading novels that deal with book banning and censorship, and using those novels as launching pads for a broader discussion about the role reading has and should have in our lives.

We just began to read Fahrenheit 451 and later in the semester we’ll read The Giver. We just finished reading Brave New World.  Two weeks ago we had just gotten to the point where Bernard and Lenina get to the Reservation and meet John the Savage, and we learn that John, unlike the other people on the Reservation, can read, but that unlike the citizens of the World State who only read practical texts like manuals, John has read literature.  In particular, John has read the complete works of William Shakespeare.

As I do in all my courses, I require the students to take turns being responsible for leading discussion, and in last week’s class, the student who led discussion began by pointing out that John sees the world through the lens of Shakespeare’s works, especially Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest (which, of course, gives us the title of Huxley’s novel).  She pointed out that every time Bernard experiences something significant, he quotes Shakespeare in order to give that experience a familiar literary frame.

So I decided to riff off that observation, and I asked the students if any of them had a beloved text through which they saw the world.  At first there was hesitation, but then one young woman raised her hand and said she saw the world through the lens of Pride and Prejudice.  Then another raised her hand and said, apologetically, that she saw the world through the lens of Gone With the Wind.  She then explained that, although she knew the book was controversial in some ways, she really admired Scarlett O’Hara and the way she learns to fend for herself after the world she knew of patriarchy and slavery falls apart and there’s no one left to do things for her.  I asked the first student if the feisty Elizabeth Bennet was who she admired so much in Austen’s novel, and she said yes.

The rest of the class was still pretty reluctant to open up on this question, so I offered that I tended to see the world through The Scarlet Letter but also through The Catcher in the Rye, which I taught to high school juniors for many years, and that when Salinger died, many of my former students memorialized him and the experience of reading his novel in my class by posting quotes from Holden on my Facebook wall.

Then a third student offered, again apologetically, that she saw the world through the Harry Potter books, and even went so far as to say that she learned about morality from the series, not just the importance of doing the right thing in the face of evil or despite your fears, but also, in the later books especially, she learned to have compassion even for people you think don’t deserve it.  She elaborated that just as we learn that Draco Malfoy and Severus Snape and even Tom Riddle suffered childhood abuses that transformed them into bad people, we also learn that seemingly good people like James Potter and even Albus Dumbledore had dark sides and selfish motives.  She said that taught her to have more compassion for others.

So then I asked, can a book really do that?  In Brave New World, one of the reasons that even the Alphas and the Betas are not allowed to read literature is that literature would make them appreciate individuals, and, in their society, that can’t happen.  In their society, individuals are expendable, and that’s why so much of their hypnopaedic pembinaan teaches them to objectify one another as interchangeable sex partners and assembly line workers.  But in real life, can books have that much power, the power to make people appreciate individuals and feel compassion and empathy for others?

One young man in class spoke up and said emphatically, yes.  He said that when you read a book, you see the world through that character, and you learn to feel for that character.  You root for them to succeed and feel sad when they don’t.  Sometimes when a book is really good you even begin to feel like the characters are real.

But can that experience actually make you feel greater compassion for real people? I asked.  Yes, said the student again, and everyone nodded their heads.

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