...which a few people asked me to post:
So I’ve been on tour for six weeks, traveling around the country talking with readers about my new book. And I’d like to share with you some actual questions actual teenagers have actually asked about my new book, and I swear these are true and can produce witnesses if necessary.
“Can you talk about why Quentin survives his encounter with the land whale while Captain Ahab doesn’t survive his encounter with Moby Dick?”
“Is Margo’s hair always in her face because no one is seeing her?”
“Are we really able to reinvent ourselves like Dr. Jefferson Jefferson or are we just boats getting borne back ceaselessly into the past like they say in Gatsby?”
Real questions. Real teenagers. There were hundreds more. And of course there were silly questions, too—do you think margo or lacey is hotter; if you could be any kind of cheese, what kind of cheese would you be? (To the latter, I answered Nicholas Sparks.) Silly questions are great, too. But again and again, I met teenagers who were reading thoughtfully and critically, and I believe that as writers and educators, we have a shared responsibility to give teenagers every opportunity to encounter everything that books can do.
This is the business, right? It is not just reading for the sake of reading. Literacy is important. Literacy is vital, but literacy is not the finish line. Literature is not just in the business of See Jane Run. Literature is in the business of helping us to imagine ourselves and others more complexly, of connecting us to the ancient conversation about how to live as a person in a world full of other people.
I want to talk today about my new book, and I also want to talk about a book I wish I’d written: M. T. Anderson’s two-volume novel
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and I want to talk about the importance of classrooms as a place for intellectual discourse in the lives of teenagers, but I want to begin by discussing the most fascinating and complex individual I have ever had the privilege of knowing: Me.
Let me tell you what is, in my opinion, the central problem of human existence: I am stuck in my body, in my consciousness, seeing out of my eyes. I am the only me I ever get to be, and so I am the only person I can imagine endlessly complexly. That’s not the problem, actually. The problem is you. You are so busy taking in your own wondrousness that you can't be bothered to acknowledge mine.
When I was a kid, I believed in an embarrassingly total way that I was the only human being in the world and that all the other people, including my brother and parents and everybody, was in fact an alien, and that the aliens had created the entire world to do a series of controlled experiments on how a human child—me—would respond to various forms of trial and tribulation. And when I wasn’t around, they would take off their human costumes—the aliens had very advanced costuming technology, naturally—and they would do alien stuff. You know, go to the alien zoo and watch the alien local news and whatever else. I really believed this.
And obviously, on some level, this indicated the kind of massively narcissistic worldview that would later require decades of therapy to adjust. But in a way, I was right. I am the only person whose existence I can directly attest to. By the way, when I've talked about this in the past I've seen people nodding, like they also believed in their childhoods that they were the only real person in the world, and I would imagine that right now, some such people are probably feeling the comfort we feel when we learn that our delusions are shared, that we are not alone even in our darkest corners.
And to those people, I would like to say: Is it not possible that the aliens have sent me here today precisely to make you believe that everyone else IS a person, but that we are in fact all aliens, including me, the alien messenger boy sent here by my alien masters?
It is possible, isn’t it? I mean, I will allow that it is improbable. I will acknowledge that you are all likely to be people. The probability that I am the only person in the world is extremely small—it is that number that infinitely approaches zero but isn’t zero. And yet. On some level, I have to take it on faith that you are as complex as I am, that your pain and joy and grief are as real and as meaningful as my own.
This is why I wrote my new novel,
Paper Towns: I wanted to write about the way we draw the world and its inhabitants, and the relationship between those drawings and the actual world. It’s about what the imagination can and cannot accomplish when it comes to imagining other people. As writers and educators, we are literally in the business of celebrating the powers of the imagination. And it is very powerful, indeed. But can we inhabit someone else’s consciousness? Can the blade of grass that is me travel through the root system and become the blade of grass that is someone else? Can we imagine places into reality? I think we both can and cannot, which is both the hope and the hopelessness of the species.
But let me say this: I think this is why we read. I mean, finally, what does reading do that movies and video games and television do not? I would argue that books, more than other media, allow us to live inside the lives of others because we have to translate scratches on a page into ideas and make the story ours. We become co-creators of the story, and they allow us to inhabit someone else's body for a while. Books give us the faith that others are real, that their joy and pain should matter to us, and that ours can matter to them. In some ways, this confirms our own existence, because most of our mattering is in the context of one another.
And this cannot be accomplished in books without what one kid I recently met referred to as “all that English stuff.” All that English stuff—metaphor and symbolism and the creative use of language. All That English Stuff, that teenagers distrust. All That English Stuff, about which readers always ask me, "Did you really mean that or is my teacher just beating this to death?" (I meant it.) All That English Stuff is how we as writers and readers re-create the experience of being one’s self. Inside my body, I see myself in nonliteral ways constantly—in fact, it’s impossible for me to imagine something so endlessly fascinating and complex as myself without symbol and simile and metaphor. And so I would argue that it is through all that English stuff that we as readers are able to truly experience another’s world. It is through the nonliteral facets of writing that readers move from Seeing Jane Run to Being Jane Running. In the end, All That English Stuff is not about analyzing a novel for the sake of analyzing it or sucking all the emotion out of it. All That English Stuff is an integral part of living inside someone else’s head for a moment. All That English Stuff is the glorious pleasure of almost knowing how you came to be connected to characters you do not know and who may not exist. Walt Whitman said it like this: “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, / But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, / And filter and fibre to your blood.” Whitman does not say you will not know who he is or what he means; he says you will hardly know. To me, Hardly knowing is the ecstatic pleasure of critical reading, and I think we make a mistake every time we imply to young people that their brains are not yet ready for that joy.
Too many times, we say to our young people, “Hey, read this. It’s a fun read. Not too serious, you know. None of that English stuff.” As if there is some kind of dichotomy between good and fun. As if Gatsby is oatmeal and vampires are Lucky Charms. Vampires, of course, ARE Lucky Charms—they are magical and delicious and just dangerous enough to excite me. I love vampires, and I love vampire books. And please know that I would never argue against putting books kids want to read in their hands. But I am arguing that we need to make space in our classes—no matter how advanced or remedial the students—for ambitious novels. Because good is not the opposite of fun. Smart is not the opposite of fun. Boring is the opposite of fun, and when we create the smart/fun dichotomy, what we end up implying is that
Gatsby is boring.
Well, let me tell you:
Gatsby isn’t boring. Nor is
Speak. Nor is
Fallen Angels. Nor is
Ethan Frome. Okay. Okay.
Ethan Frome is a little boring. But teenagers can (and do!) like seriously good books. I find it very strange that we acknowledge children’s ability to grapple with endlessly complex plot—that we don’t for one second question whether a novel is age-appropriate when it contains 430 characters with unpronounceable names, each caring for their own particular subspecies of dragon. But we sometimes deny that teenage readers have a similar level of sophistication when it comes to language and theme and emotion. I have seen again and again that through your work, young people are as capable with language as they are with plot—I have seen it in the English classes I sit in on in Indianapolis to understand how teens learn and how they read, and I have seen it with my own readers and their astoundingly good questions.
The best books are rarely easy, but teenagers love fun things that aren’t easy. If you don’t believe me, ask the billionaires who gave us
Super Mario Galaxy. Great classics are fun, and great contemporary books are fun, and it is a wonderful blessing to have both in your classrooms and in your curricula. I believe, as I know many of you do, that reading contemporary fiction thoughtfully and critically in a classroom helps teenagers to see that literature is not a cold, dead place, that books are not something that used to happen but are instead a long and unbroken conversation in which we are all called to participate.
Now, this is the part of the speech where I say, “You know what smart and thoughtful contemporary book would make an excellent addition to your class? MINE.” I am very grateful that my work has made its way into many classrooms, but I want to talk about another book, M. T. Anderson’s
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. For those of you who may not know this two-volume novel,
Octavian is the story of an extravagantly well-educated black kid growing up in a kind of weird Enlightenment experiment whose life is upended by the American Revolution. The book is written almost entirely in 18th century prose. It is big and complex and heartbreaking and difficult and funny and very sad. When I think of the novel’s peers, I think about the writing of Nobel laureates like Toni Morrison and William Faulkner.
There has been much talk in the past few months about whether
Octavian Nothing is indeed a book for teenagers and whether teenagers can “get” it. I am convinced that they can get it at least as well as we can and maybe better, that generations of teenagers will hardly know who Octavian is or what he means, but that he will be filter and fibre to their blood nonetheless.
Octavian, and books like it, are challenging. But in this room, we know that young people can rise to intellectual challenges. I know because the course of my life was altered by teachers who challenged me, who assumed I was smart and refused to acknowledge otherwise despite considerable evidence. We know the importance of never selling kids short and never selling them out, because I’d imagine we’ve all seen our lives changed by teachers who believed in us.
So but about Whitman: I think he was right to realize that the connectedness of us, one to the other, is filter and fibre to the blood. Millions of people have facebooks, and I know only a fraction of those people, but there’s a strangely fortifying comfort to knowing that they are out there, and that I am—through one network or another—connected to them.
But there is profound risk in the hyperconnectedness, too, as we are beginning to see: It becomes very easy to find a group of people who agree with everything you think, and then to spend your life in an echo chamber, only hearing voices you already know you agree with. Many communities have this quality about them in real life, too: For instance, I feel very safe standing here telling you that I think, as I do, that educators are criminally underpaid.
But, I mean, when is the last time someone came to ALAN and said teachers shouldn’t receive raises? Such people must exist, right, or else you would all get the kind of extravagant raises that you and I think you deserve. But I’ve honestly never met one of these people. And I really would like to meet them, you know? And not to beat them up or anything, although surely they would deserve it, but because I think it’s always good to be challenged, to know that there are other people out there, and not all of them value the same things you do.
Which is precisely what great books like
Octavian do on a grand scale: By giving us the other, they give us new selves. For example: In America, we tend to believe, on the whole, that the Revolutionary War was a good thing. Right? Freedom, representative democracy, etc. But then along comes Octavian, and for the first time, we are all forced to grapple with the idea that maybe the American Revolution was not a good thing, and that for many people—for the people who perhaps most needed the protection of a government—it was a very, very bad thing. But it is not only that: It is also the opportunity to live inside Octavian’s head, to see that a young black man living two hundred years ago was a person just as I am a person, to see that his griefs grieved on the same bones that mine do. Forget the connections that Facebook can give us. Octavian and other great books make us facebook friends with the other, with our past, and with the dead. This is a valuable experience, sure, but it is also a hell of a fun ride.
So now let me return to that most fascinating creature, myself, who is now—while still endlessly intriguing—living in a world occupied by billions of people who are almost as real and as interesting as I am. My eleventh grade English teacher was a guy named Paul MacAdam. I got a D in the class, and I only got the D because I wrote a paper about Toni Morrison’s
The Bluest Eye over the summer. I was a crap student: I didn’t read; I didn’t participate; I didn’t turn in papers, or when I did, it was embarrassingly obvious I hadn’t read the books. I also skipped class a lot. It was in the morning, and I didn’t think very highly of morning classes.
I actually said that to him once. He took me aside after the bell rang one day and said you’ve been missing a lot of class, and I was like, “Yeah, I don’t think too highly of morning classes.” I was a real peach.
But when I did go to class, I was usually the last person to file into the room. One thing I remember about that class: Mr. MacAdam always held the door open for us until the bell rang. We’d walk in, and he’d greet each of us. He always held the door open until the bell started ringing, and I’d come in last, three seconds before the bell rang, staring at my untied sneakers, stinking of cigarette smoke, and he’d say, “Mr. Green, always a pleasure,” and then he and the class would talk about the book. Say it was
Slaughterhouse Five. I hadn’t read it, of course, but they would talk about it, and MacAdam would get to talking about war and the nonlinear nature of time and how Vonnegut had stripped down the language to tell the nakedest of truths.
But the discussion was always so interesting—these big, hot, fun ideas seemed to matter so much. So I read the books. I never read them when I was supposed to read them; I’d read them a week later, after I’d already gotten an F on my reaction paper. But I’d read them. In essence, I was reading great books for fun. MacAdam didn’t know it, of course. He probably still doesn’t know it. But it didn’t matter whether I was worthy of his faith; he kept it. He still held the door open every day for me. He still treated me like I was the smartest kid in the class, still took me seriously on those rare occasions when I’d raise my hand, still listened thoughtfully to me when I’d give him my reading of a passage I could comment upon only because he’d just read it out loud. He believed I was real, that I mattered. I wasn’t yet able to understand that he mattered, but he was okay with that. He just kept holding the door open for me.
Thank you for holding the door open for your students.
