Le Guin 5: The Omelas Q&A

 

Intro

I hadn’t planned on doing this episode, but the past few weeks or so have had several folks reach out to ask questions, some directly related to our discussion of Le Guin and a few that fit into our discussion whether in Omelas or not. So, since I have enough questions to carry a whole episode of them, I thought this would be a good time to pause and address them.  

There’s a fairly wide assortment, from some literary terms and strategies for reading to teaching strategies and taking on larger activism. If you’re not interested in all of these, your podcast app may show you the chapters which divide this episode question by question so you can skip around as you want.

But as we start, I want to make it clear that Q & A isn’t exactly what will go on here today. Maybe I’d better call it Q & R, changing the Answer part to something more like a Response. My goal is not to offer you a single-solution approach so that we can all just nod and leave. More important, I’m still a bit of a nomad on these things myself. I’m exploring and connecting and questioning it all out, so what I offer today may not be what others will say, but then again, that often seems to be the case.

Because Literary Nomads is not a podcast just about “what a poem or story means” but one about how we make meanings from our reading and how those meanings shape our lives and communities. It’s about building a critical literacy, not just about “how to read” but one about ways to think about what we read. 

So what does it mean to do a Q&A episode on Literary Nomads? Gosh, I don’t know, I’ve never done one before!  . . .   Let’s try it out and see.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m pretty excited about what you have to say.

 

Getting Questions

Now, if you’re listening and you’re wondering where these questions came from and how you might submit one, the answer is, a lot of different ways, apparently.

The best and easiest is right from the Show Notes where I have a link to our Mailbag, basically a Google Form where you can submit comments and questions. They can be long or short, anonymous or not, and you can even upload a sound file of your recorded question for me to play. Though, sadly, nobody was brave enough to do that, just yet, so you left it to me to manhandle and misrepresent you! 

But just as many questions come to me directly from my email (which is also in the Show Notes) or through messages on one of my social media accounts. Basically, you can find me on most of the more common social media platforms as Waywords Studio. And, at least right now, I’m responding to everything, so if I don’t post your question here on the podcast (or you don’t want me to), I’ll get back to you privately, anyway.

But that’s all just directions you could figure out on your own if you peaked over at the Show Notes or went to the website. Let’s get on with the questions!

 

Questions 

 

1. Is the narrator in “Omelas” unreliable?

Cody Matthew in Arizona asked me a question a few weeks back that wasn’t directly related to the Omelas story, and I responded to him already, but it seemed like such a good question for our talk, I thought I’d add it here. To adapt Cody’s question a bit, Is Le Guin’s narrator in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” considered an unreliable narrator or if there’s some other name for what she’s doing?  

And since we haven’t spoken about this term specifically, but I make such a big deal about speakers and narrators, I want to address it. Thanks for writing, Cody, and I’ll probably go into more and maybe different detail here than in my message to you.

From the outset, we have a problem. Though there is a ‘general sense’ of what we all mean by an unreliable narrator–a speaker or narrator of a poem or story that we cannot trust to tell us the truth of events, defining what exactly this means is not something everyone in literature agrees with. Sure, there are narrators that intentionally deceive or lie; and there are also narrators who just have a bias or prejudice and so relate the story’s details subjectively; and just as often, there are narrators who themselves don’t realize that they are in error, that they are too naive or confused to communicate what is really happening. 

Wayne Booth defined the unreliable narrator back in the 1960s, and the debate has been going on ever since. But while we could spend an entire episode on this concept (and maybe someday we will), here’s what I think is important, because I don’t want to argue all of these theoretical differences out there.

There are two distances or differences that we have to look at, and we have to ask ourselves if there is a difference in what is known between them. The first distance is between the author and the narrator. We’ve already talked about how these are never quite the same people–the author is creating a speaker or narrator for the sake of delivering the poem or story. We can think of Marvell’s speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” or, if we consider Ivan Karamazov a narrator of his tales of suffering, definitely different from Dostoevsky. This space or difference between narrator and author almost certainly means that there is a kind of ironic space there, where one knows more than the other. Ivan, for instance, completely misunderstands Aloysha’s devotion to God and the nature of faith: he has a blind spot because of his cynicism. And our speaker in Marvell is a sexist manipulative cavalier, hardly the world-aware philosopher that the poet is. For me, when I read, this is always one of the first places I look. I ask “Who is telling me this poem or story? What do I know about them? Because if I can see that right away, I have a better idea what the story is about. As a hypothesis, I might guess that in some ways, every single first person (or maybe second person) narrator is at some level unreliable. 

And I offer that hypothesis because of the second distance, the one between that narrator or speaker and the reader. The question we could ask here is, “Does this narrator know less or more than I do as a reader?” If they know more, why aren’t they telling me? If they know less, then I can spot the problem easily. A narrator, for instance, who might have a mental health condition or suffers from amnesia might be one who understands less than I do about what’s going on. But if the narrator knows more and isn’t telling me? Why aren’t they?

Now let’s take a quick look at our Omelas narrator (and at our Um-Helat narrator, too). I’ve made the case that the Omelas narrator might be considered the same as the author, but that’s only because she invites the reader up to a level of co-authorship. It seems, then, that all three of us–writer, narrator, reader—are at the exact same level. We all see everything at the same time. The narrator several times says things like she doesn’t know or doesn’t understand these people, aligning us all along. On the other hand, we’re not quite co-authors, are we? She holds back a single ace, a single card she’s going to play just when we are comfortable with our utopia. Only then does she drop the Suffering Child on us like a trap. It’s kind of a manipulation, then, and we have to wonder how much we can trust what we see here. She’s not giving us the whole story; she allows us to see only the happy happy joy joy part of Omelas for a few pages, even while she knows that this is not, in fact, what is happening.

Personally, unless the narrator is completely invisible as a third person narrator, someone who relates the story and never appears, I always suspect that there is a character who is narrating. And once I know there’s a character, I assume they’re unreliable: Guilty until proven innocent. It alerts me to look immediately. I used to tell my students: “Assume there’s some ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More in everything you read. Now go find it.” 

And that’s the more important part. Schools may want us to check off our discoveries of unreliable narrators (I found one!), but what’s more important is what we discover because the narrator operates differently from author or reader. We could argue that Le Guin’s narrator is completely reliable: she never brazenly lies about what she sees and tells us. But if we do that, we may miss the manipulation of the readers, that she shows us the one dark element that was there all along, in each of us, but she left it until the end for a gut punch accusation. 

 

2. Some examples of subverting fantasy tropes?

I’ve mentioned in one of our earlier podcasts that good genre writers and utopia writers don’t simply follow and repeat tropes–those plot and character types and stereotypes which repeat themselves almost as a requirement of the genre–but that the best writers subvert them. Then I guess I moved on too quickly without giving enough examples. M. Rodriguez sent me a message to one of my Tumblr posts about that. And, though I don’t advertise it much, I appreciate the small but active group of followers and love from Tumblr. Anyway, M. Rodriguez asked if I had a single, easy-to-follow example of a fantasy trope that has been subverted.

First, Hey M! Thanks for writing me.  I’ve got a few big ones that give you an idea of what I meant about subverted tropes, but since I don’t know what you’ve read or haven’t, I’m going to choose books that are also films so hopefully one will resonate with you.

The first is The Lord of the Rings. Now it’s hard to reverse or undermine or subvert a trope in a book that basically created most of the ones we know, but remember that up until then, what we had from fantasy was great heroes like Odysseus and Beowulf and Sir Lancelot and Amadis of Gaula and Siegfried, larger than life dudes who kicked monster ass. Everyone expects now that fantasy works will be epic heroes knocking down whatever gets in their way. But not Tolkien. He’s got larger-than-life heroes (Gandalf and Aragorn and Boromir and Galadriel and Theoden) and they do plenty of cool things, but they can’t do the “thing,” the main thing, the destruction of the Ring which is the source of the evil. Gandalf is specifically given the task of defeating Sauron but he knows he is no match for the Dark Lord. So what do they do? The greatest of tasks is given to the weakest, the smallest, the humblest,  the hobbits, to accomplish. The entire story is based on this fundamental inversion.

In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, we have the classic light side vs dark side battle, but it eventually becomes clear that these aren’t the good and evil we’ve come to understand. The Authority, a great power of good and light, turns out to be repressive, a tyrant. And the dark side? Monsters and witches and even dark angels and such? They’re fighting for freedom. Hmm. But best of all is our chosen one, Lyra. You would think it is the task of the chosen one to resolve this conflict; we’ve followed her through the whole trilogy to do that. But–and I won’t say everything here because we have yet to see any movie or TV version of this series finish the story–But, Lyra’s task as “chosen one” is to actually do something far more difficult than simply defeat evil, which is a fight she wasn’t equipped to do, anyway. Pullman’s books are exceptional and awful for these reversals.

Finally, a quick word on The Witcher series, which does the same trope reversal that the too-long running series The Walking Dead did. Monsters abound in these worlds, they’re the obvious and terrible threat to mankind. But over and over again, both Geralt of Rivia and Rick Grimes of America discover that the real monsters, the most wicked and treacherous and dangerous of creatures in the world, are human. In the zombie series, the title doesn’t even refer just to the zombies but to the people. 

Now these are all cool reversals, subverting the tropes we might expect. But again, like the unreliable narrator conversation, what’s more important is what meanings emerge from these changes. If it’s just an alteration of the trope for kicks, just to surprise the reader, it’s more of a cheap gimmick. But the best writers change it up to create some larger idea: Tolkien poses questions of heart and character throughout the series as more vital than strength; Pullman opens up the question of the curse of free will and whether mankind is more content if commanded (and a few other questions, as well); and Andrzej Sapkowski, the original author of The Witcher books, challenges the human moral center, our unjust arrogance and ego.

The trick to finding a subversion of trope is to ask ourselves what we expect to happen next, and then find ourselves surprised. Try predicting how characters will behave, what might happen in a new setting, or how the ending will turn out. Do it frequently as you encounter new places and characters and events so you can monitor the changes. Then you can ask yourself why you believed what you did. What expectation did you have going in? Probably a trope.

I’ll mention, too, that by now, this subversion approach is so common that we sometimes find ourselves expecting the reversal, that the reversed trope is now itself a trope. The only way to subvert that is to go yet a third or fourth direction.

 

3. How do I keep contradictions in my head?

Noah84 had a spot on question for me, and here’s part of what he wrote in the Mailbag:

I love Le Guin and I love her feminism and her fantasy magic, but mostly I just like that her characters are real. I was thrown af when you said that her story was gendered, that it was sexist, because I never thought of it that way. How do I keep my idea of Le Guin as a feminist when she wrote Omelas that way?

Thanks, Noah, for the question!

Yeah, I pointed out the possible problems with the Omelas city–the gendered space and the lack of diversity there–because a lot of readers don’t think about it when they are meeting the story. There’s a lot going on in those four or so pages, and Le Guin’s narrator has given us a ton to think about, in any event, whether we see the utopia’s other issues or not.

Notice, though, that I pointed out that Le Guin, a bit of a feminist anarchist herself, though, allowed these blind spots here with some intention, I suspect, especially for white male readers like me. If I don’t see that problem (and I didn’t when I first read the story many years ago), this is another one of those mirrors being held up. It’s “normal” for me to see a fantasy world of gendered white people, just like most of Europe has traditionally fed me for a long while. And we’ve already covered now how “normalization” is exactly the problem.

But let’s get to your larger question, I think: what do we do with contradictory ideas in our heads about something we read, or anything else for that matter? What would have happened if Le Guin offered us a true contradiction and we couldn’t resolve it? Or a story seems to have two very different possible interpretations? Which do I choose?

For the story issue, I would suggest that it is the contradiction itself which becomes a subject of the story. It’s less a matter of choosing an interpretation than of realizing that they both exist for a reason of their own.

But for the author challenge, where our ideas of an author and what they say or write doesn’t match up, this is an altogether different issue. First, and most importantly, and I think this is not insignificant, authors are people and they are complex and fallible with full lives which are not our own. Nietzsche looked back on a lot of his earlier writing in shame; Stephen King dislikes some of his earlier books that he churned out rather than loved; and even writers like Margaret Atwood or Louise Erdrich sometimes lament that they could not fully realize their vision in writing. Erdrich worries now that she worked far too hard to be poetic and so missed the point; and I, for one anyway, love the books she writes that lavish us with that prose. So we can forgive. Or set aside one work or another as “not for us.” Remember, most all works we read are meant to stand on their own apart from the author, anyway. Would you have had trouble with the Omelas story if you knew nothing of Le Guin? (This is a topic we’ll address down the road, too, how much of a writer should we consider.)

But finally on this for now, remember that we—all of us—always have a lot of different ideas in our heads, contradictions, advice at cross-purposes. It’s only when we try to categorize everything neatly, try to iron out all of the hypocrisies, that we run into problems. Hypocrisy and contradiction aren’t sins; they’re the result of changing circumstances and changing times and changing texts and changing readers. Not too long ago, I had to face a childhood hero again, Steve Austin the Six Million Dollar Man, and realize as an adult that he wasn’t at all the kind of guy I remembered him being. Kind of slimy and simple, actually. Now, what do I do with my former hero worship built as it is upon some kind of childhood nostalgia? That’s a me problem, not a Steve Austin problem.

 

4. How am I supposed to take action in uncertainty?

Addy Michelle wrote me a wonderful note that was partly about our Omelas talk and partly about some things she was experiencing in her own activism. Without going into the details of what she’s involved in, something in our discussion of uncertainty seemed to resonate for her. She said,

How do we even start to figure out what’s real and what’s not? You talk about this uncertainty thing, and honestly, I get it I think.  Instead of just accepting what everyone tells you, you’re constantly questioning it. It’s not about being cynical, it’s about being smart.

 

They just want simple answers so we can all just shut up and do what they say. But that’s not how change happens. The people who resist—we’re the ones who get messy and refuse to accept the simple, easy answers.

 

So, how do we stay in that “strenuous mood” without getting totally overwhelmed? How do you not get lost in it?

Addy writes about some of the things she’s been doing, and she talks about how she tries fact-checking and talking to people who give her different opinions. But she also talks about how exhausting it can be. Near the end of her note, she says,

We can’t let them make us so confused that we stop caring. 

So, wow, yes, Addy. You’re right. And thank you for all of the thoughtful comments and the work you’re doing. I’ve left out the details of your community, but I can definitely understand that everything seems to shift quickly. I’m putting together a more specific response to you that you’ll probably have by the time this episode airs, but the most important thing first: the most important thing that tells me you’re doing well is that you’re asking these questions.

Here, for all of us, let me respond to you first from a literary point of view and then broaden it to the broader action. 

You’ve identified the exact challenge for reading deeply, for thinking genuinely. That there are so many ways forward that we can become paralyzed by choices, or lost in the crowd of ideas, or even just so fatigued that we give up. Thinking through all of this is exhausting, and it requires—like any muscle we work—practice. And maybe sometimes a conscious focus. 

In one book I taught every year I could fit into my classroom, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, there were simply so many layers and connections operating that even after literal decades of teaching it, I still can’t keep it all inside my head—and I wonder if Ellison could, sometimes. What I told my students was to choose one or two ideas, one or two images, one or two symbols, one or two characters, whatever. Choose just a few things to trace through the book. Maybe on one read you look at how he uses colors and stay mostly focused on that. On another read you can add his ideas of jazz and improvisation; on yet another you can work in the whole bildungsroman, the coming of age part of the story. In each read, you’ll find more to discover, to slowly take in. And I know, I know, that means that you may be reading a 600-page book multiple times, but that’s why we keep returning to art. We don’t go and see a Monet painting or hear a Linkin Park song a second time just to repeat the same experience; we hope for something more. We slowly work up our cognitive muscles so we can broaden that experience. I know I have to read Joyce’s Ulysses several more times before I can begin to have what I’d call a full grasp of it; I’ve only read it three times so far. In the meantime, I have these questions, posed at different levels of uncertainty.

But uncertainty is also an “end state,” rather than a final summary closure in art. I still don’t follow all of Ellison or all of Joyce or even all of Tolkien. I have questions, I see tensions and frictions in different elements of the work. And it’s the uncertainty itself that becomes challenging for us. Art, politics, life I guess, is not an objective measurement; they’re not physics problems. They’re places where there is darkness before us–and as I said last week, darkness isn’t bad, just unknown. We ask our questions and we move forward a little further with each interpretation. 

But ultimately, I think, we come to a point where we can walk no further without choosing. In literature, this is called “aporia,” a state where we can go no further in our knowing. And we have to choose, to step forward, to interpret. Make our best guess. Will people challenge us? Maybe. Will we find ourselves in error? Perhaps. But it is at this moment, stepping out into that uncertainty, making our best choice and going forward regardless, where I think we are our most human. Our most authentic. You said it’s about being smart. Yes, we measure and consider, we think it through; but it also means sometimes going in a direction different from everyone else, and that might be what you meant by getting “messy.” 

But give yourself a break every now and then, perhaps more now than then. The brain can’t work like this all the time, and neither can any other muscle we have. The workout isn’t meant to be 24/7. Build time for the rest of life’s nonsense, too. For me, I pause for another look at that bad 1970s horror movie, like Track of the Moon Beast or The Swarm or Jaws II. Or 3 or 4. Then we can find that energy to take on a new project again. 

And do let me know if my longer response to your note is helpful. I’d love to know how it all turns out. 

 

5. How do I find the “main idea” of the story?

Another question I got through social media, this time through Instagram from a user, VoidBloom, which I am reading as a hopeful name, kinda cool. Anyway, VoidBloom asked me about an assignment they had and how they can find the main idea. This question wasn’t directly related to “Omelas,” but I thought I’d respond to it here in that context. And, by the way, I’ll just say here–not that I suspect most of my kind and thoughtful listeners would do it–but no, I don’t do homework help, especially if you’re looking for answers to challenges instructors have given you. There’s a reason they offered you that challenge, so that you might work through it. (I say all this knowing that some students will just keep posting their questions in different places until they get an answer. Or, more often today, I guess, they just use AI.)

Anyway, to this main idea thing, and this is just an elaboration of what I wrote back, I’m betting by now you may know the gist of my response. The concept of a “main idea” might belong to non-fiction, like in an essay or a book on business. In those fields today’s books are being boiled down by AI to 15 minute summaries or even one-paragraph sets of takeaways. In fiction, we have all sorts of websites that offer exactly what you’re asking: the three main themes, or a quick summation of what “the author was trying to say.” (And by the way, I’ve always loathed that phrase “was trying to say,” because it suggests that the author failed, but the mighty teacher or website could somehow fix it.) 

But more, if we want such a thing, the main idea, there are any number of sites with approaches that will help us step by step make a generally simple claim of what a poem or story offers. They tell us that the theme is “love” or “love conquers all” or something like that. And frankly, if that was all the author ‘was trying to say,’ why did they take 400 pages to do it? It’s nonsense; it’s crap. But like I said, there are tons of places out there to find that information. And AI can do it for us, too, and often does right from our browsers, summarizing the key points of any text we name, even without our asking. 

And all for the same reason: that we have designed the world to be built upon takeaways, utility, practical uses and life hacks, that we are given immediately to take with us (and that we just as often immediately forget, let alone think much about). Art is not built upon “main ideas” but it’s about capturing concepts that cannot be articulated in expository prose. 

It’s a shame, because I suspect VoidBloom’s assignment is from a teacher who is either using a textbook’s plan (and they are famous for this kind of objective transactional Q&A) or is just trying to build up reading development skills in students. It’s understandable, but Void, if you’re listening, and you have followed any part of this podcast, I’m going to offer you an approach to the question that I don’t think most expect.

Offer your response to the “main idea” of a poem or story as a question. A thick question, the tough question the writer poses for us to consider. The one that is asked and not answered. For Le Guin, it would be easy enough. It could be something like, “Le Guin asks us how much responsibility we will take for our living on someone else’s pain,” or “How long can we stare at ourselves in a mirror?” There are probably a dozen questions like this we might ask, and I would definitely consider these a main idea, and the best part about them? They don’t close the discussion but open it, just like most authors would wish. 

And how do you get to these ideas? Well, that’s what our long podcast journeys are for, to demonstrate the many routes we can take. But I’m sorry, Void, there’s no simple takeaway answer to your question which can come from Waywords. And for that, you should be happy and anxious.

 

6. How can we teach controversial literature without triggering students or causing hurt?

The last two questions I have today come from teachers in different places, and they’re kind of related in their concerns. Anika (Aneeka? Annika?), I’m sorry that I am not certain of the pronunciation of your name, asks about the situation in our classrooms today and all of the sensitivities and heightened angst around pushing too far into some topics, so she has decided to avoid the “Omelas” story. Part of her message reads:

How do I do this without it becoming a debate about political correctness or wokeness or even just triggering students with strong opinions? I realize the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More of asking this when the whole hideous bargain is about what we can tolerate.  

Anika, I am totally with you on this, and you are asking exactly the kinds of questions you must, all the time. 

This answer has much more to do with a longer education discussion than I would typically do here, but I will say briefly that it has to begin with–and this is essential–a well-prepared classroom community where the norms for discussion and inquiry have already been practiced. And that’s partly a management question, a question of establishing climate, a place of challenge but safety nets, a place where intolerance–in Karl Popper’s argument–has already been set by agreement, as intolerable. 

That means other pieces of literature that move up more slowly and into these larger talks, about practicing in areas of safety. But it also means something quite a bit more important, I think. It’s about putting the very questions that you have about these discussions in front of the students themselves and solving these issues together as a class community. You need to facilitate the discussion, but you do not and should not need to bear the burden of responsibility for what is too risky. Let the students work with you to decide. I’ve always been a believer in nearly full transparency where literature talk is concerned, and that must include the challenges we face in the contexts of school politics, personal sensitivities, and importance of the topic. 

It’s quite possible you will not reach the kind of discussion you wish because the students you have will never quite be ready. But your work to prepare them, to transparently work with them through this readiness or non-readiness, will itself be vital to where they go next. I’ve already laid out some tools for this preparation: a reading process that remains focused on the text and foregrounds the connections we readers make: Notice-Significance-Pattern-Coherence, I’ve talked about ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More at length in our last Journey and how it functions to seduce and make ambiguous what more aggrieved students might have as absolute. And how uncertainty itself, the questions we carry away from a reading–not the judgments we bring into it–is a valid place to end. Let’s note that none of these strategies as I’ve discussed them involve practices like literary terms identification or drawing plot-lines. The more a classroom engages in this sort of low-level thinking activity, the more the classroom culture blinds itself to potential danger when we finally want to get to these higher level practices.

But I think I should be clear, too. As teachers, we don’t get a pass on difficult conversations just because we avoid difficult texts. Yes, a poem or story can provoke strong responses, but by and large, my experience with the kind of scene that Anika wants to avoid is that it will arrive regardless of the text chosen if the classroom culture is not developed for good talk. Accusations and intolerance, indifference and insensitivity, are most often attitudes our students bring into a space, not one that the space creates. And literature, of course, works to reduce these intolerances, to broaden our understanding. That’s a big part of what we’re here for.

So suppose it happens. Suppose you’re teaching a relatively unassuming text like an O. Henry story or an Ogden Nash poem, and suddenly the room erupts with anger. “The Gift of the Magi”–that little story about the gifts of chain and combs, the sacrifices of hair and watch–is suddenly seen as a romanticizing of poverty, of making wholesome the difficult struggles of those who have little. It suddenly seems to some students that the wealthy can read it and, say, ignore the poor because, you know, “they always have their virtue to keep them strong.” Kind of a fun interpretation, by the way.

What do we do? Well, my first gesture is always to put up openly, on the table, what is happening in the class community, to speak the assumptions or the situation, the context, so we can all see it equally. I might thank the students for their idea, promise we would address it, but first discuss what happened that the anger might have arisen. After all, maybe we were just trying to talk about surprise endings or the nature of tragedy or something simple like that. I might start with questions about what sorts of questions can and should be asked of literature and why. Let’s see the dimensions of the discussion people want to have. Also, without singling out the new interpreters in the room, I might ask how different audiences might read the story and why, how reader context and experience influences text. Or we might find that the question of authorship arises and how William Sidney Porter’s own struggles might or might not challenge the argument. Or how the publishing world likes offering us a particular kind of story. Who knows where these questions will lead, but I will guarantee that–abstracting them a bit like this–they introduce students to something a lot larger than just marking “surprise endings” and situational ironies. 

Only then, after we’ve framed the discussion some, would we come back to the poverty romance interpretation and talk about its validity. But even then, that might follow a discussion of how we should introduce ideas in the classroom, if it was offered in a disruptive way. And I’ll point out that most such emotional interruptions–most—are founded in a truth or sincerity from students, however boldly or rashly offered. A teacher who crashes down penally upon outbursts like this is only likely to create deeper resentment than by respecting the idea-making but tempering the approach. 

For Omelas, for Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” for Adichie’s “Tomorrow is Too Far” or Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” we may never in the classroom reach all of the possibilities for exploration, based partly on time but mostly upon the readiness of students to address these questions. Even in my strongest Advanced Placement courses or IB studies, my students didn’t hit all the pieces that I have mentioned in Literary Nomads; we take them as far as they are ready, honing that inquiry practice and receptivity as the most important skill we have–you know, specifically the one that is not listed in any benchmarks or on any SAT assessment, that one.

Finally, since I’ve left Anika’s question a little behind, a word too about ELL students and other older students whose base reading skills are developing more gradually, those still learning the language. We make a mistake–and we create more problems later–by equating slower reading comprehension with unpreparedness in critical thinking. These skills are closely related, but they are not equivalent, and the kind of discussion that we’re talking about here—the open inquiries and investigations into the contexts and dynamics of meaning-making—should be key goals for all students all of the time, full stop. By spending a majority of classroom time on independent practice low-level drills instead of these larger questions, we undervalue their dignity and potential, and we leave the critical thinking development to time outside of the classroom where only the media have their attention. We need to make space and accommodation to invite the developmental readers in for the talk. 

 

7. How about some teaching strategies?

This last question comes from two teachers who wrote through the mailbag and a third anonymous teacher I spoke to a few weeks ago. Jessica Harper works at a high school in New Hampshire and Dani Marie is a classroom teacher, but I don’t know at what level. My anonymous instructor I will call Mick who teaches literature at a community college. Together, they all have a similar set of questions, kind of the other side of Anika’s. If they do decide to teach “Omelas,” besides the more traditional approaches of teachers–things like journaling, group discussion, annotating, teacher-led breakdowns of the text, things like that–besides these more traditional approaches, what non-traditional strategies or ideas do I have to get students to find the complexity or ambiguity we find in the story? 

I love this question, because it speaks to an awareness of the limits of “tradition,” that is, expected educational methods, to reach the kinds of insights we’re talking about here. And you’re all right: we could just lecture these ideas at students, but that proves nothing (he says while doing almost exactly this on every podcast, you hypocrite. But I have ideas, just wait). 

What else can we do? Well, do you have twenty years to talk about it? 

Here are a few approaches to, if nothing else, get us thinking about practical applications for classrooms and larger spaces.

First, I will say that, while in the classroom itself, I had one lesson design which was always my absolute favorite. I would start every class with this question, “Well, what do you want to talk about?” And we’d spend the better part of the hour exploring their thinking and ideas. It was always the most memorable and rewarding of times. This question came, of course, after we had all agreed to arrive to class having read a particular poem or chapter or whatever. And, often as not, one day’s talk would lead us down a larger path in the following days. And, because my students were always different each semester or year, the kinds of inquiries would change. One of my Humanities classes ended up spending an entire semester on the question of female archetypes in literature, and we shifted our reading list along the way to find out more. 

Now, I can hear objections. Yes, I recorded this before you heard it, and yes, I can still hear some of you muttering. So two other factors were always involved in these open talks. The first is that I had a notebook with me with all of the key concepts and state learning benchmarks that I was required to teach, and I had a chart for each class. It was always inevitable that anything the students came up with, we’d touch upon some of those. And I would check them off and work them into whatever upcoming assessments we had to do. At the end of every semester, I would have a 1-2 day “clean-up” session where I would tell the students openly that we had learned everything we needed, according to the state, except for these four things, so we were going to “fulfill the mandate” and get them done, too.

The other thing that made this work well is that I already knew a lot of the conversations and questions they had, because I ran online discussion forums through the weeks for students to post to, all with their own chosen screen names for anonymity and reduced risk, and these ran concurrently with our talks. They could wrestle more with the ideas, process their questions, help each other with understanding of passages, or critique the class discussions. Anything related to what we were doing that showed they were thinking and engaged. And then most of the “hottest” topics on the boards would find their way to the classroom for more formal talk. The key reason for all this, though: students who needed longer to process a classroom idea or who were perhaps less aggressive with their interjections aloud, could still participate, and I could see what they were thinking.

So, classroom discussions may seem traditional–heck, I think they’ve been around as long as Socrates—but that’s because dialogue, exchange, is critical for literature. See my episode “Holding Difficult Conversations” where I talk a lot more about this importance.

The second general approach is something that has become more popular of late in schools, but I think the safety brakes are on it more than they should be: and that’s inquiry-based authentic projects. If you’re not a teacher and you don’t know what I’m talking about here, just hang in there for a moment while I get the jargon out of the way.

We hear a lot about “inquiry” models these days and authentic assessments, but too often these just become fancy story problems inside the classroom, almost always a simulation of a real-world problem highly-controlled by the teacher and the school system. We pull out the rubrics and maybe a “design wheel” of process, and then we laboriously work the students through the steps like little engineers, demanding they write their inquiry questions down in the small square we made on the seventh handout we’ve delivered to them. In my previous school, we did the International Baccalaureate’s Middle Years Program Personal Project—that’s IB MYP PP for those who love acronyms as much as every teacher does—and I have to say, by the time we were done with forms and steps and oversight and requirements, this project was anything but personal, and every year we’d sit around and scratch our heads and ask, “I wonder why so many resent this project? It’s theirs!”

So okay, here it is in plain English. Let the students go and find out the answers to their literary questions. I mean, that’s the big issue in literature instruction always, isn’t it? All these big ideas float around in our heads, and then we pack it in and head over to trigonometry or our jobs at the Dairy Queen. Literature is irrelevant and reinforced as irrelevant by the methods used in so many classrooms. We ask, “What can you do with a literature degree? Just teach it?” Somehow we miss that this is about what communities we build, what narratives we choose to live, and if anything has made these stakes clear, it’s stories like Le Guin’s or even more aggressively, Jemisin’s. So . . . are we expecting some miraculous transformation where students will somehow learn how to apply it all, realize the work of narrative, only after the class is over?

We can’t. We bring them to the questions, the challenges, the ambiguities and uncertainties, the themes and arguments, that the classroom readings offer, we equip them with the skills for discussion and engagement, and then we let them design out projects into the world they live in and report back to us what they’ve discovered. And, importantly, it’s not up to us to decide what those will be–the ideas or the real inquiries into the world–it’s up to them, and for us to support their actions and their failures, their successes and their reflections. And these are scaffolded, too, but let’s not underestimate the ability of age groups to engage. My 14-year-old students were designing, writing, producing, and distributing podcasts and films (and two of them do the chapter headings for this podcast now). My seniors sometimes would exchange letters with literary critics at the graduate university levels. One student wrote to our Michigan legislature for bills related to one of our book themes and received a Kafka-esque pile of mimeographed pages with a list of numbers. Mimeographed. In the 2000s. We read two Kafka stories specifically for him after that. One student, I remember well, wanted to see how difficult themes could be communicated in the language of his punker friends, if they would listen. In his presentation he turned in a cassette tape of his efforts along with his notes written on diner napkins. Now, teachers, we can force such projects into the benchmark packages required by our profession–I got pretty good at it after a while–but let’s be clear. Who cares?

The learning these students do in these two simple teaching practices—honing discussion and engaging in praxis—is more memorable, more significant, and more vital for their learning and our community health than any classroom test can ever be. I still speak to tons of my alum from past years. Guess what we talk about?

 

Literary Nomads as Model

Well, I don’t know about you, but I had a good time thinking about your excellent questions and ranting back a bit. 

What we see, easily enough, is that there are no easy or quick answers to any of it. And even the posing of relatively straightforward ones like unreliable narrators or main ideas becomes itself a place for inquiry, for investigation and reflection.

Now we can see a bit more about what I mean by a literary nomad, someone who moves and explores, settles and moves on, meets and exchanges, in actions and questions that are almost always communal. Sometimes we get there through difficult passages and over literary obstacles, sometimes–even often—we push back, resist. 

But there are also some things this podcast and Waywords can’t be, completely. We can’t settle on final answers for you that close the discussion, not so long as there are more questions to ask. We can’t offer blueprints for utopias or for teaching that we can handily xerox off and give to students. Those things are out there and aplenty. If that’s what you seek, DuckDuckGo that stuff and see what comes up. No worries.

But the larger talks, the ones that don’t always happen in schools, the ones that aren’t always acknowledged by web answers and AI inquiries are here, because they are human-generated, human interrogations and human hypotheses. And our explorations follow paths, follow themes, just as my own classrooms often did but further still, because there are stakes out there. There’s something important at stake in our thinking, in how and what we choose to think about, in what we’re even allowed the time to think about. And those stakes are the spaces we live in, the communities we engage. 

More ahead, of course, a lot more, because we’ve still only barely begun to ask the questions. Next week I will offer my own thinking on what this utopia and otium discussion have meant for me, and these will shape the rest of Journey 6. If you want some homework, do the same: think about what questions you have from our experience so far, questions that are personally important for you and that you can’t seem to easily find a settled response to. Let these guide us ahead. 

After that, I’m going to give us some reflection time and post a few side episodes that are about how I imagine each of us using this podcast in practical ways. Call it an audio “How to Use This Podcast” guide, perhaps overdue, but still necessary. Then we resume our explorations.

In the meantime, you know what you must do. Write me some more questions, drop them in the Mailbag (or through social media messages, I guess!), and then

Go read something.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.