Paris Notes 1: Climate Change, Katrina, and the Return (?) of the MetaNarrative

Of all of the ideas to emerge from high postmodern theory, the one that has penetrated the furthest into the wider culture is probably the notion of the collapse of "metanarratives" and their replacement with smaller, local truths. Articulated in its academic forms by Jean-Francois Lyotard (on the Left) and Francis Fukuyama (on the Right), the general contention that totalizing narratives (particularly that of communism versus capitalism) are either deeply flawed or no longer applicable has spread into most every form of multiculturalism, pluralism, and respect for diversities of identity and life experience. It would be hard to imagine today, for example, a university religious studies class that sees one religion as telling the correct story of the universe or that fails to acknowledge the different wisdom to be drawn from every faith tradition. Even cable news journalists now speak reflexively of the different narratives (plural) politicians create, often with no attempt to establish whether one of these narratives is closer to objective truth than the others.

Climate change would seem to pose the strongest possible challenge to the "collapse of metanarratives" theory. With climate change, we have a narrative that is, in the strongest sense, "meta." Here is a phenomenon that ties all life on earth together in a single, increasingly teleological story of ecological collapse. Where the communism vs capitalism story always required some obvious stretching to account especially for events in the colonial and postcolonial world, climate change affects every human and, along with its twin, ocean acidification, reaches even to places that humans do not and cannot visit. Perhaps most strikingly, climate change, unlike the theological and political metanarratives that preceded it, is grounded increasingly in the world of verifiable, scientific fact.

Thus, one could reasonable expect climate change to emerge in our era as a metanarrative even more powerful and all-encompassing than the communism-capitalism story that preceded it. From farming to national security to race to trade agreements, climate change would seem able to subsume every individual event into one story. At the very least, it is a much stronger contender than it post-9/11 rival, the facile story of a "clash of civilizations" promoted by American neoconservatives. With climate change, we have the return of just what Lyotard said could no longer exist: one coherent story that applies everywhere and to everyone.

The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina gives us an opportunity to test this hypothesis. First, let us note that for many years after, Katrina and its aftermath were about race. Both Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke and Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water narrate the event through the lens of black-white race relations. Dave Eggers' Zeitoun shifts the focus slightly to anti-Arab animus, but remains concerned with race and civil rights. Jamelle Bouie's recent 10th-anniversary piece on Katrina makes the case for a race-relations framing most pointedly, arguing that Katrina was "the most defining moment in Black America's relationship to its country" thus far in the 21st-century. (Most famously, Kanye West's public declaration during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser that "George Bush doesn't care about Black people," demonstrated quite clearly how race was, for many Americans, what was at issue in Katrina.)

The one exception to the racial lens is Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, where Katrina appears very briefly as an example of possible effects of climate change; Gore subsumes the specific events of Katrina into the larger story of global climate change and, in so doing, provides a (very brief) preview of what I am hypothesizing should become a more popular reading of Katrina as climate change becomes a more powerful metanarrative.

Jelani Cobb's New Yorker essay on the anniversary of Katrina provides an instructive example of how my hypothesis here fails, and why its failure might matter to the politics of climate change. Cobb places the Katrina disaster in the long history of institutionally sanctioned black poverty and black oppression in America, continuing the tradition of narrating Karina primarily in terms of race. In the midst of making this case, he makes the point that the term "natural disaster" is a "linguistic diversion": "Hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods are natural phenomena; disasters, however, are often the work of humankind." Thus, Cobb argues, the impacts of natural disasters need to be understood in their specific, local context of differential access to infrastructure, emergency aid, and so forth.

Setting aside the matter of whether hurricanes might not be, at least partially, the work of humankind, Cobb makes quite clearly here what seems to me the correct intellectual point: rather than subsume local events to a totalizing metanarrative, clear understanding requires articulating global phenomena (like earthquakes and hurricanes) through the specific circumstances of the localities they effect. Saying, "Katrina is one example of climate change-driven disaster" is far less precise than saying "here are the ways this climate change-driven disaster ended up having the specific effects it did, given the specific history of race and poverty on the American Gulf Coast." All of this is roughly in keeping with Lyotard's initial reading of the collapse of metanarratives.

But if something is gained here, something also lost. By focusing on the specific and the local, attention is taken away from the general and the global. And that shift in focus makes it harder to see the places where large patterns do, in fact, hold. Moreover, it makes it harder to build the kind of global coalitions needed in advance of the Paris climate talks; if my disaster is primarily the result of my local circumstances, I am less likely to see that you and I are both victims of the same global problem.

If Cobb's essay is emblematic of how we narrate Katrina ten years on, then one of the challenges for climate change politics will be how to re-narrative Katrina as part of a global climate change story, without losing the insights Cobb derives from geographic and historical specificity. How to do that, and how to do it for a mass global audience, remains unclear.

Ann Rule May Be a More Important Cultural Icon than Truman Capote

With the publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote famously claimed to have invented a new genre, "the nonfiction novel." As with much Capote said, this was not exactly true. When In Cold Blood came out in 1965, it was riding the crest of an almost twenty-year wave of book-length creative nonfiction, much of it generated at The New Yorker, including Capote's own The Muses are Heard. What Capote did do was move the nonfiction novel on to the terrain of what was, at the time, a very, very lowbrow genre: true crime. In so doing, Capote in one fell-swoop elevated true crime to the cultural level of The New Yorker and extended it to a book-length genre rather than the stuff of pulp magazines. These were significant accomplishments.

After that, though, Capote bailed. Capote never again returned to true crime (but for a kind of late self-parody entitled "Hand-Carved Coffins"). Indeed, In Cold Blood represents more less the end of Capote's nonfiction career rather than the beginning of it.

The person who did do the heavy lifting to establish true crime as a major genre was Ann Rule, who died in July at the age of 83. Rule was a tireless author and promoter of true crime whose The Stranger Beside Me is perhaps the most important example of true crime as a mass-market genre rather than as the self-consciously literary texts of Capote and, later, Norman Mailer. Capote will certainly be remembered as a great prose stylist. Rule, however, may ultimately be seen as the more important cultural figure. Rule's version of true crime exists at the intersection of a new conservative movement and the women's movement, two things that go a long way to defining late twentieth-century American history. In light of Rule's understanding of contemporary politics and culture, Capote's foray into true crime seems surprisingly divorced from its time and place.

Rule's true crime, as with most true crime, is in many ways very conservative, often an unabashed cheerleader for the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the New Right. As I argued in my dissertation, true crime creates something of a conservative fantasy about what America and American crime look like:

         "First, true crime skews America’s demographics.  In a nation in which people of colour and the poor are far more likely to be the victims of crime, true crime presents a world in which victims, criminals, and police are almost exclusively white and middle class.  Moreover, the victims are almost always women, thus often turning misogynistic violence into a kind of entertainment.  As Jean Murley argues, the demographics of true crime represent 'a countercurrent to the social progress and cultural changes—feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness—that have transformed American life in the past four decades' (3).
          Second, true crime is almost always about the restoration of the status quo.  By definition, the genre describes a person or people who subvert society’s norms and, if they are murderers, violate its most sacred taboo.  In the end, however, the police get their man: 'In true crime, the killers are usually incarcerated or executed at the end of the story, reassuring us with a good old-fashioned reordering of the chaos wrought by crime' (Murley 3).  While there may have been a psychopath on the loose, true crime assures the reader that order has been restored, usually by brave and earnest officers of the law.
            Third, true crime’s means of production tends to underscore its close affiliation with law-and-order ideology.  As Laura Browder points out, 'True crime writers are often affiliated with victims’ rights groups, and some, like former policewoman Ann Rule [arguably True Crime’s most successful writer], work with law enforcement agencies' (936).  In the case of televised true crime, the link between text and law enforcement is even more pronounced.  Shows like America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries actively solicit the viewer’s participation in restoring the social order; by calling in tips, viewers become an arm of the state, assisting in the capture and incarceration of wrongdoers."

At the same time that is a very conservative genre, however, true crime as Rule produced it is also in some ways a female-dominated, even feminist genre: (quoting my dissertation again)

           "Browder argues that, while they may be overtly reactionary in their stated aims, some true crime texts 'are also subversive, in that they tend to question the very foundations of patriarchal culture—the family in true crime is often a poisonous unit' (Browder 936).  Moreover, in her interviews with female true crime readers (by all accounts, the genre’s readers are overwhelming women), Browder discovered something other than the passive consumption of misogynistic violence: 'Many [fans] read true crime to help themselves cope with the patriarchal violence they have encountered in the past, and fear in the present' (Browder 928).  'As read actively by female fans, what seems…to be anti-feminist can be read as feminist, and what is often perceived as sick, warping material can become a form of therapy, however flawed' (949).  Thus it is possible to see True Crime’s depictions of violence not as a normalization of that violence, but as a critique of a society in which that violence is normalized."

Thus true crime in general, and Rule's books in particular, sits right in the tangled intersection of the two biggest American cultural shifts in the last third of the twentieth century: the shift away from the New Deal consensus and toward Reaganism, on the one hand, and the rapid cultural successes of the women's movement, on the other. And to drive the point home, Rule demonstrates the tangled ways in which these movements over lap. The women's movement was a progressive, liberatory movement--except when it wasn't: for example, when empowered female voters favoured Phyllis Schlafly over the ERA. And the New Right was a regressive, reactionary movement except when, as Rule makes clear, its concerns about rising violent crime actually served the cause of greater daily freedoms for women. (Perhaps these political contradictions go someway to explaining the riddle posed by Amanda Marcotte at Slate, why Rule initially had to publish under a male nom de plume.) 

This is not the place to sort out the precise relationship between the women's movement and the New Right. It is only the place to say that Rule captured the tensions between these cultural poles in ways far beyond anything Capote ever did. And, in the end, crystallising cultural history into specific narratives might be what great writers do.

       

E. L. Doctorow and the Danger of Crossover Fiction

E. L. Doctorow, who died last week at the age of 84, both wrote about American history and warned us about people who write about American history. Both parts of that formulation are fun to read, but the second one is too often ignored. Where Doctorow warned us against letting any representation mistake itself for reality, those of us who teach high school too often let the most overt of fictions crowd out careful study of the facts.  

Probably Doctorow's most famous passage of writing comes from the opening paragraph of Ragtime. It has been quoted everywhere in the last week, but is worth reading again in full: "Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900's. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another, That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants."

Doctorow is here obviously not writing about the Progressive Era. Rather, he is writing about how we write about the Progressive Era, pointing us to all of the most threadbare cliches we have for the age. As Fredric Jameson famously points out in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Doctorow renders history "flat," as though, were he writing in French, he was using only the passé composé and thus taking all nuance of chronology out of his narration. This is history as rendered in the worst of high school history class film strips. 

This passage is emblematic of a strong strain in Doctorow's fiction. Part of his project was, in a sense, to write so badly about history that we could not help but pay attention to how badly we all write about history. (And, of course, Doctorow then went on to play delightfully with the vignettes he had created, subverting the story he had started out telling.) In this way his novels stand for us as a warning: don't do this to history; don't mistake the threadbare fictions for the actuality of the past.

That aspect of Doctorow's fictional project is particularly relevant for those of us who teach high school English for it is us, too often, who allow the convenient fiction to stand in for the complexity of history in just the way Doctorow warned us against. 

Let us take the most obvious (if somewhat complicated) example, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. To make the obvious point, The Jungle is a novel: every character is invented, as is the plot. Moreover, it is an extremely didactic novel, with events arranged not in the name of verisimilitude but in the name of socialist propaganda. And yet, as I argued in a 2007 article for Studies in American Naturalism, neither The Jungle nor Sinclair himself are often considered as literary matters at all. Rather, they are treated as primary sources on the Progressive Era. Thus fiction makes a strange crossover move, becoming fact right before our eyes. 

In The Jungle's case, this crossover move is a bit more complicated. Sinclair claimed that every individual event in the book did, in some manner, actually occur. Moreover, his claims of veracity led to a federal investigation that, more or less, confirmed much of the "truth" of the novel. Nonetheless, The Jungle did not happen. No one family suffered the avalanche of hardships foisted upon the Rudkus family, and condensing every evil of the Progressive Era into one book greatly skews our sense of the period. 

This problem is, I think, broader than just The Jungle. If Sinclair's novel has become our snapshot of the Progressive era, how often does The Things They Carried become our snapshot of Vietnam? Or To Kill a Mockingbird become our vision of the pre-Civil Rights South. This, we imply, is what it was like back then. And thus one highly mediated text becomes historical fact. 

An even more problematic case is the ubiquitous use of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to represent the Harlem Renaissance. Here a novel written well after the Harlem Renaissance (at least in the usual dating) was over, not set in Harlem, and thematically much more connected to a later generation of Black writers' (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison) rethinking of Southern life can become a kind of cartoon of the period it now stands in for: Black artistic expression, African American vernacular, boisterous Black communities, etc. 

Doctorow warns us against letting easy fictions slide into the place of history. When these novels become primary sources, we allow a version of just that movement. 

A counter-argument could be made here: In reality, if, two years after taking a year of American studies, what a student remembers of the Progressive Era are 3 vivid scenes from The Jungle, that would have to be considered a win. Given the enormous breadth of information high school students are expected to study, retaining much beyond that is both unlikely and not particularly well rewarded when it happens. 

But maybe that is another challenge Doctorow poses to us. If students were to get past the clichés Doctorow enumerates in the opening of Ragtime, they would have to focus more deeply on fewer periods of history and literature. And doing that would imperil the whole survey-course model; students would have to spend much more time studying the contradictions and complexities of fewer eras. In the process, they would lose sweep in the name of depth, a substitution that might have its benefits.   

Middlebrow: The 2 Poles of Wednesday Martin's "Primates of Park Avenue"

The publicity for Wednesday Martin's Primates of Park Avenue got off to a sensational start, with an excellent op-ed in the New York Times that managed to be both salacious and feminist alongside a tonne of press about the book's more titillating details. But then, with the book's release, things went a bit off the rails. The Times ran a scathing "Reporter's Notebook" piece questioning both the book's facts and its politics, and the New York Post went further, poking several holes in the book's chronology and suggesting that entire scenes had been fabricated. When the Post's accusations proved to be largely correct, the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced that subsequent editions of the book would contain a disclaimer explaining that liberties had been taken with certain facts.

Compared to the op-ed that preceded it, the book itself is largely disappointing. Much of the op-ed's feminist critique of wealthy Manhattanites is lost in a haze of self-justification and Martin's increasingly unlikely attempts to claim outsider status in the world of the super rich. Martin's hook is that she is a kind of amateur anthropologist studying the foreign world of the Upper East Side. This theoretical framework, however, is very thin and is more often condescending than insightful. Martin's anthropology, though, gives overt expression to an internal tension within the book: that between exoticism and universalism. In so doing, Martin provides a particularly clear example of a narrative structure key to middlebrow entertainment.

At one pole, Martin's anthropological conceit requires her to represent the Upper East Side in as exotic terms as possible. If she is really to be an anthropologist teaching us about a foreign tribe, then she needs to convince us these people are meaningfully different from both us and her. Thus, much of the book is given over to hyperbolic (and vague) descriptions of the dizzying cultural differences between lower Manhattan and the Upper East Side and, later, between the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. Those of us from other parts of the world may find it hard to believe that moving a few blocks within the same borough of the same city constitutes field work, but Martin continually insists on the dizzying culture shock she faces at every turn. The cars are different; the clothes are different; the way they pick up their kids from school is different; the way they exercise is different; etc. Never mind that the language, religion, geography, and food are the same--Martin suffers through months of culture shock. (This is a kind of provincialism perhaps unique to New Yorkers; only Woody Allen has been caused such psychological trauma by switching subway lines.) Tellingly, Martin does not spend much time analyzing the economic differences between Manhattan neighbourhoods. Doing so would likely reveal that the most meaningful difference between different New Yorkers, that of money, is largely irrelevant to her; she was super-rich all along, and thus is hardly a foreign observer of these other super-wealthy moms.

At the same time that her anthropological framework insists on exoticism, however, the way she deploys it erases all differences between not only people, but all primates. After describing each strange Upper East Side ritual she discovers, Martin turns to an analogous behaviour amongst some non-industrial culture or, more often, amongst some other species of primate. From there, Martin makes her most surprising move. She does not analyze the similarities and differences between the Upper East Side ritual and that of its anthropological analogue. Instead, she just asserts that they are identical and moves on. Thus anthropology is deployed to level all differences, not only between cultures but between species. The aggressive displays of female baboons are not an interesting point of comparison to the way women buy purses in New York; for Martin, they are the exact same thing, full stop.

The levelling of all difference reaches its climax in the book's final section, as Martin describes the loss of her third child during pregnancy. After conceding that there exist enormous differences in infant mortality rates between the global poor and the global rich, as well as between antiquity and today, Martin goes on to assert that all mothers' emotions (including those of non-human primates) are grounded in the same fear of a loss of a child. Thus individual and cultural differences are subsumed by something even broader than human nature--some kind of (gender-specific) primate nature. Martin may be exponentially better off than even an average American mother but, trust her, all mothers feel the same way.

These are the poles of Martin's anthropology: first she exoticizes a group of people; then she erases that exoticism so we might see that, deep down inside, we are all the same. This is the basic structure of really bad anthropology. But, more importantly, it is also the structure of a certain kind of middlebrow entertainment. The travelogue in which the narrator lives amongst an exotic tribe only to discover that we are all human; the sitcom which ends with the family reunited in the living room; the folksy Readers' Digest joke set on a distant army base: all three depend for their narrative logic on a quick trip into discomforting difference before a safe return to a generalized humanness. The specifics of Upper East Side life aside, Martin's main contribution to letters may have been to provide a strikingly frank example of this narrative progression.

Should Essays Be in Novels?

In one sense, the 1960s wave of postmodern writing was about stripping things away. Could one write a novel without coherent plot? What about a book with no rounded characters? Is it possible to write a mystery without narrative resolution? Could one write the start of a novel without the ending? While this is obviously not the only impulse in that first generation of postmodern writing, it is a theme that ties together figures as diverse as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. All were conducting simultaneous experiments in writing stories without attributes that seemed key to writing stories. What, in the end, is the plot of Naked Lunch? Is the baroque mystery of The Crying of Lot 49 ever resolved? Is there any Vonnegut character who matters beyond the dialogue he utters? (As an experiment, try finding a great line in Slaughterhouse-Five and dropping it at random into the mouth of a character in Bluebeard. My money says that you won't notice the switch. This is not to insult Vonnegut, but rather to highlight what he is able to accomplish without the traditional mechanics of character.) This experiment in stripping away reached its logical endpoint with the Oulipo school: novels without the letter "e"; novels with only one scene; and, in Oulipo mainstay Italo Calvino's later work If On A Winter's Night a Traveller, a novel with only the first chapter.

If that generation of postmodernism was about stripping away, there is a more recent effort at altering the form of the novel, this one interested in crowding out. Take, for example, the novels of the late W. G. Sebald. In some respects, Austerlitz is postmodern in the 1960s sense--while there is some semblance of a plot, the plot is hardly the point; much of the novel seems to drift in the way a Paul Auster novel drifts. This plotlessness, however, is not the result of stripping away plot. Rather, the plot is crowded out by long expository passages on architectural history and the history of the Nazi ghetto system. At least to me, those are the memorable passages of the novel. Something similar takes place in the two novels thus far published by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole. In Everyday Is for the Thief, long passages are given over to the architectural history of Lagos; in Open City, the most memorable passages come from digressions on art history and the spectacular closing set piece on the history of the Statue of Liberty.

What I would like to suggest is that these expository passages function something like essays and, to the extent that they are essays, the essay form is finding a home within the contemporary novel.

To be sure, there is at least one obvious difference between an essay embedded in an novel and an essay qua essay: The novel-embedded essay comes from the mouth of a fictionalized narrator. Do we know that such an essay presents true information? Why should we think that what Cole's narrator tells us about the history of the Statue of Liberty and ornithology is at all true? Why should we believe Sebald's version of Czech history when it is in the middle of a fictional work?

But, then, that experience of questioning is not terribly different from the essay as we have known it previously. When Annie Dillard tells us about her experience flying with a professional stunt pilot, we have questions about the fidelity of her recollections; we wonder if she can really remember such precise sensory details about an event so far in the past. Those questions are part of the aesthetic complexity of the essay form. Right back to Montaigne, the essay presents us with an interplay between the character of the author and the factual matter being recounted. It is at least arguable that this interplay is what makes an essay an essay in Montaigne's sense of the genre.

When a novel takes on the essay form, this complexity is heightened by a textual layer not overtly present in the traditional essay form: in Cole and Sebald we have 1) a seemingly nonfictional essay, 2) a fictional narrator, and 3) a real author. If we are being precise, those three levels also exist in any nonfictional text. In general, though, nonfiction ignores the middle level, while the novel foregrounds it. In a traditional essay we assume there is a true story recounted by a real writer. But of course in any act of writing there is a narrator--that is as true in a history textbook as in Mrs. Dalloway. However, we tend to ignore the fictionality (or, perhaps, "textuality" is the better word) of nonfictional narrators. We just see the text and the author. In a novel, the fictionality of the narrator is foregrounded, and thus another layer of textual and epistemological complexity is introduced.

If the chronology I laid out at the beginning of this essay is correct, these are early days for the novel-embedded essay; perhaps the aesthetics of foregrounding the essayistic narrator are still to be worked out. If the essay might develop further in the hands of novelists (and Cole's essay for The New Yorker on the    Charlie Hebdo shootings, "Unmournable Bodies," suggests it might), the novel might also benefit from the crowding out effect of embedded essays.

The Old College Try

I originally wrote this essay for Ming Pao Weekly, where it appeared in November, 2014.

I am going to read some terrible essays this month. Of course, as a high school English teacher, that is my job. And, of course, I will also read a few brilliant ones. But what makes this month's terrible essays special is that they will all be written for one purpose: to get into an American university.

            While we hear a lot about the failings of America's schools, America remains home to most of the world's best universities, and this fall thousands of Hong Kong students will try to win a place in one of them. As the Wall Street Journal reported in September, their parents will do what they can to ensure their success; Hong Kong donates more money to American universities than any other foreign country.

            Applying to an American college can be a byzantine process. Of all its odd elements, the most opaque is the "college essay." In its most common form, this essay is a 650-word personal statement answering one of five very broad prompts. This year they include recounting an experience of failure and describing a place where you are "perfectly content." The goal of the essay is, as a guide from the College Board suggests, to provide "a clear sense of who the writer is and what he cares and thinks about."

            You do not have to be an analytical philosopher to see some troubling assumptions here, and this is the first reason students struggle with this task. Why does a university want to look into my soul? Don't you just need to know if I am a good student or not? If the university is judging me as a person, which aspect of my personality should I put forward? And, wait a second, how am I supposed to accomplish this act of soul bearing in 650 words? Virginia Woolf may have done that once or twice but this is hardly a reasonable goal for the average 17 year old.

            These difficulties are multiplied for Hong Kong applicants. How is someone raised here supposed to figure out which qualities an American college wants to see? That is a big cultural gap to navigate. For those without perfectly fluent English, the risks get even higher. Is one awkward adjective going to signal an English-as-a-Second-Language learner and doom the application to perdition? Given the tiny numbers of students admitted to top American schools, you can imagine the pressure created by these sorts of guessing games. You can almost hear Hong Kong students shouting, "Just look at my high school transcript! That will tell you what kind of student I am!"

            The second reason students struggle with the college essay has to do with the word "essay" itself. Hong Kong students are, in general, great at writing essays in the sense that we use that word today: using evidence and analysis to support a thesis. Unfortunately (and this is the part nobody tells you) that is not what "essay" means in this case. Here, essay is used in its much older, French form meaning "to attempt" or "to try." We still have a version of this word in English (to assay), though it is rarely used.

This version of the essay falls somewhere closer to what we today mean by "memoir": A writer takes some small observation or recollection from her own life and builds a philosophical idea upon it. It is not meant to be a closely reasoned argument, but rather an idea or theory the writer is trying out: hence "to assay." 

            These kinds of essays are still around. David Sedaris, who was in Hong Kong in September for Story Worthy Week, writes comic versions of them, and the best of stand up comedy gets close to them. Podcasts like This American Life and Radio Lab do audio versions of the essay. While the genre can still be found here and there, however, it is far from the poems, plays, and novels that form the vast majority of a high school student's literary education.

Thus the college essay asks students to write a thing they have probably never studied, like asking devoted classical violin students to write a country song on the final exam.  And, I think it is fair to say, the Hong Kong student is asked to write in a self-revelatory mode much closer to the American cultural mainstream than to our own.

This essay you are reading isn't the kind of essay that ends with a clear solution to that problem. But you have a better shot at success if you know what you are aiming for. So, America-bound students, download This American Life and double-check your adjectives. It won't get you into Harvard, but it might make for a better essay.

What Do We Mean by "Informational Text," Exactly?

Much of the controversy surrounding the Common Core has been both nakedly political and embarrassingly provincial, the kind of "how dare those fat cats in Washington shove this down our throats" talk that gives the rest of the world an excuse to laugh at America. Within the language of the standards, though, is an odd inconsistency that speaks to a real dilemma about the purpose of language arts education and the ideology of literary analysis. From kindergarten through grade 5, reading standard 10 calls for students to read an appropriate range and complexity of "informational texts." Beginning in grade 6, however, the standards shift terminology without explanation; now students are asked to read an appropriate range and complexity of "literary nonfiction." Why the shift?

The Common Core declares its mission to be "preparing America's students for college and career." (This phrase is built right into the logo.) In terms of career readiness, the phrase "informational text," the phrase used only until 5th grade, is probably the better term. If informational text denotes a text meant to be processed for its content rather than its formal complexity, then surely the vast majority of workers read much more informational text than they do, say, poetry. Indeed, outside of language arts teachers and humanities professors themselves, it is difficult to think of a profession in which reading for formal complexity rather than information is at all common. I would prefer my airline pilot to have gleaned the key steps of the landing procedure from the manual before she proceeds to analyze the manual's sophisticated imagery.

What is perhaps more surprising is that "informational text" is the better term for college readiness as well. One of the biggest shifts from high school to university English is a shift from reading obviously literary texts (meaning, primarily, novels, poetry, and drama) to reading theory and criticism. It is not impossible (probably not uncommon) for a student to graduate high school never having read a word of literary theory, and then be faced on Day 1 of English 101 with Jacques Derrida (or, at least, Terry Eagleton). In English programs that work in the rhetoric or professional writing traditions, this bias toward informational text is even more pronounced. At Carnegie Mellon (where I taught for 2 years), the English 101 program is built around 8 weeks of argumentative and historical writing before the first introduction of a literary text. And the most common complaint is that incoming students have no idea how to approach criticism; they are used to John Steinbeck, not John Stuart Mill.

So, if informational texts will make up most reading for most people in college and in their careers, why does the Common Core switch to the narrower term "literary nonfiction" after the 5th grade? And why do they insist on it so strongly? Corestandards.org states directly in its "Key Design Considerations" for English Language Arts, that "Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional." The Common Core is, in general, leery of directly mandating how its outcomes are to be achieved, so this comes as close to a direct order as anything in the Common Core Standards.

One possible reason is that literary nonfiction allows language arts teachers to appear to address the concerns of colleges and workplaces (that students do not know how to read difficult informational text) without really changing much. After all, if literary nonfiction is taken to denote primarily long-form journalism and historical writing, it is still narrative text. You can use all the usual techniques for studying a novel and simply add that these events really did happen. I'm not sure that a student essay on In Cold Blood would be much different if the class had been told the book was entirely fictional. If the goal is really to get students ready for college-level reading, shouldn't we be dropping the New Journalism and pushing students to read criticism and philosophy instead? (And there are ways to do just that. See Tim Gillespie's Doing Literary Criticism.)

But that is maybe too cynical an answer. Teachers wanting to push students toward informational texts need a path to get there, and literary nonfiction may be it. Literary nonfiction, as hybrid a genre as its name suggests, allows students to push into the world of informational text without suddenly losing all of the genre markers they are used to. In Tom Wolfe, we still have characters, settings, and plots; but we also have some actual historical events. In this sense, literary nonfiction may be the ultimate value-added teaching tool: you get everything you get with a novel plus it's true! (Or, at least, it claims to be true.)

Here, though, is where the ideological stakes get a bit higher. High school English programs are grounded in the formalist approaches of the New Criticism, and a bedrock assumption of the New Criticism is that it is the form of the text that matters. For the New Critics, we are not supposed to care whether MacBeth was a real king who did all of that stuff. We are supposed to care whether the pattern of clothing imagery holds together in an aesthetically pleasing way. To put it another way, truth claims are largely irrelevant to New Criticism. (The only truth claims that do matter are the very generic, "human nature ones"--truths about love and redemption and suffering.) If high school English abandons that position, it will be abandoning one of the key tenets of its own founding philosophy. 

This might be a great thing. An adherence to New Critical principles has certainly foreclosed a million interesting questions in high school classrooms over the years. Why not let students ask what Keats knew about the astronomy of that bright star or whether Upton Sinclair got the meatpacking details right? We might find some interesting answers to those kinds of historical, contextual questions, questions that go unexplored when teachers direct students to analyze metaphors and character development instead.

Those are interesting questions. But once you go down that road, you have a new set of problems. Because if we are no longer reading for form--if we are reading for history or philosophy or science--then what is the point of reading fiction at all? Why not just read great nonfiction? Because you can always analyze its form it you want to. Unless language arts teachers can answer those questions in a convincing way, the Common Core's slippery use of "literary nonfiction" may open up a path (at least a theoretical path) to the end of high school literature as we know it. And, in a world with far more great works of nonfiction than any of us will ever have time to read, maybe that's okay. If students graduated high school having read the essays of James Baldwin rather than Harper Lee's novelization of some of those same issues, would the world be a worse place? I am not sure it would.





References

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 6. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved  from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/6/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014).  English Language Arts >> Introduction > Key  Design Consideration. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-  Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved      from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Gillespie, Tim (2010). Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts.  Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.