Teachers are forced to force on their kids a program of reading and re-reading texts to sift and analyze them, annotate them. I've heard students say that by the time they are finished reading a novel, the post-it notes they've put on each page outweigh the book and kill the joy of reading. A student in the summer fiction writing class I am currently teaching mentioned today how much she loved To Kill a Mockingbird--until she was forced to annotate it and over-analyze every sentence.
I found her statement particularly interesting in light of Mockingbird's recently renewed notoriety caused by the release of the author's long-lost novel, Go Set a Watchman, and in light of what we are doing in our class this week.
The class of 12 students I am teaching at Stetson University's HATS program this week is an interesting mix of fourth through twelfth graders. My college-aged son is teaching with me, and at this point we have broken the class into two groups of 6, and each group is writing a short novel. We will, as a class, produce two short novels this week. I am in no way suggesting that we are going to produce works of literary art on the level of To Kill a Mockingbird in just five days, but what we are doing, in our own humble way, has distinct similarities. Our stories will have settings, characters, themes, plots, subplots, and ironies. If someone felt the need or was forced to do so, they could sit and close-read our books and find all kinds of interesting things to analyze or annotate.
We wouldn't want them to, though. We are having fun putting all of those elements into our books. Fun. Shouldn't readers be allowed to have fun pulling those elements back out? Why do we take reading and turn it into a chore? Why does literary analysis have to ruin reading?
I don't think it has to.
Thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird took me back to when I read it for the first time in my ninth grade English class with my teacher, Mrs. Myers. When I was in school we didn't annotate. We created projects. For my project, I drew a map of what I thought the town of Maycomb looked like. I love fictional maps, and tried to craft one that was consistent with the action of the book. To draw the map, I focused on one scene: Scout standing on the porch of Boo Radley's house near the end of the book. Scout mentions the things she can see from the porch, which are the settings of nearly every main event in the book.
Re-reading this scene and creating the map were an epiphany for me. The scene had virtually no action. It involved a little girl standing on a porch she'd never stood on before and looking out at her town. On one level,that's all there was to this scene. Girl stands on porch. Girl looks at town. Big deal.
But what I realized was that this scene, this simple act, was operating on multiple levels all at once.
Plot-wise, it was a flashback of epic proportions, a review of all the major events in the novel. If the climax of the book in terms of a high point of the action was Mr. Ewell's attack on the children, then the climax in terms of a turning point of the plot was this scene. Everything in the book, I realized, led to this moment when every event was replayed in Scout's mind, but from a different perspective.
The scene also represented the literary tool of setting in a complex way. Scout, in reviewing the events of the past months, is revisiting the various places around town where important events happened. And by seeing the events from a different perspective, Boo Radley's perspective, Scout helped me to realize that how we perceive a place, and even how we act, greatly depends on where we stand. And I came to realize how much the town itself was a character in the story.
In terms of character, this is a transformative moment for Scout. In seeing the world from Boo's perspective, she sees the truth of one of her father's adages, that you don't understand someone until you consider things from his point of view. It's one thing to get advice from one of fiction's most admired (at least until recently) dads. It is another thing entirely to experience the truth of that advice for yourself.
The scene is also, of course, about the literary concept of point of view.
The irony of the scene is that from the early chapters of the book, Boo Radley is a mysterious, ghoulish monster living at the end of the street. Here at the end of the book, Scout finds that he is not only not a monster, he is a hero. He saves Scout and her brother Jem from being killed, and all through the story, he has watched over them.
The themes that are present in this scene, this simple scene of a girl standing on a front porch are almost too many to count. Seeing things from someone else's point of view. Prejudice. Memory. Family. Fear. Judgement. Compassion. Growing up. All these ideas and more gather around Scout as she stands on the porch, just looking out at her town from a new perspective.
What struck me in ninth grade, and strikes me still as an adult is this: a single scene working on so many levels is not a thing to be dissected and analyzed. It is phenomenon to be marveled at, savored, appreciated. Harper Lee probably never even intended the scene to be so infused with levels of meaning, but they are there nonetheless. Writers often write more than they know.
To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the first books to make me feel wonder at what story can do, wonder that a story could mean so many things. Had I been forced to analyze those meanings to death, I might have missed appreciating them. What Mockingbird, like many of my other favorite books, taught me, was that it is not only books that operate on many different levels; life does too. We don't need to be doing anything spectacular like standing at a mountain's summit, walking through the crashing surf, or skydiving to realize it, either. We might realize the different levels of meaning in our lives standing in front of a class, in front of a mirror, over a campfire, or on a front porch.
At the Frederick Buechner Writer's Workshop I went to recently, Yolanda Pearce, a seminary professor as Princeton, said that we tend to view mystery as "not understanding," but suggested that perhaps "mystery is the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend."
When I drew my map, I realized that it would be possible to read To Kill A Mockingbird's final pages and think of them as being about nothing more than a girl standing on a porch. It is sometimes easy to read our own lives the same way. My life is about going to work and coming home, eating and sleeping.
Rather than being forced to dissect and pull out individual meanings in To Kill a Mockingbird, I was allowed dive into and explore the levels of meaning. Appreciating the levels of meaning there has lead to me to appreciate it in other books I've read. I've come to believe that just as Scout is surrounded by multiple levels of intertwining meanings as she stands on Boo Radley's porch, we are surrounded by more meaning than we can comprehend, even when we can't see it or sense it.
But once in a while, we get a glimpse of some of it.
Call it close living.
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