Cannibalizing Literature

Literature, as well as bringing intellectual joy to those who are lucky enough to have achieved literacy, is an art form which passes on ideas, whether they be to mould the mind of a two year old against the concept on peeing directly into carpet or enlighten a young adult about latent philosophies.
George Will of Newsweek magazine, in a seemingly bitter and resentful attack against a poor, possibly innocent woman by the name of Iannone, assails a political left which he believes "emancipates literature from the burden of esthetic standards." Will thinks most universities look at literature and end up creating "collective amnesia and deculturation" because their technique sucks away the author's original purpose and replaces it with groups of critics who instead fight for the right to say that they know what the writing is actually supposed to mean.
Stephen Greenblatt, on the other hand, advocates what Will refers to as the "political decoding" of literature by way of creating groups which see politics as the predominating function of a piece of writing, although see no one function of that piece of writing. "Poets cannot soar when their feet are stuck in social cement." Greenblatt feels that one culture should not lord over a piece of writing, should not determine its meaning, lest other cultures be stamped out and left no room for inquiry.
Yet Greenblatt's theory is plagued by holes. True, a piece of writing may not have one definitive meaning or purpose. It's audience may be far-reaching in culture and thought. But Greenblatt fails to point out that even in his argument, he advocates the idea that the writer had a definitive purpose behind his writing. "We know that Shakespeare read Montaigne; one of the characters in The Tempest quotes from "Of Cannibals." Greenblatt spends half is article convincing the reader that Shakespeare had a concrete purpose, centered around imperialism's disgusting existence, in writing the The Tempest. He points out that commentary on mysoginism, racism, and anti-semitism can be found in Shakespeare's writing. But in saying so, he agrees with Will that Shakespeare had a concrete purpose within each writing. It is wrong to stifle creativity, to push aside any thought that another way of reading or acting something out may exist, but it is not wrong to say that Shakespeare attacked the evils of imperialism in one of his plays. If it is for that reason that Shakespeare wrote it, then it cannot be argued that he wrote it for that reason. Of course, the man is dead. We can't ask him. We'll never know.
But one can deduce that The Tempest made a specific assumption. That statement can and should be questioned. But it can't change the fact that, unless Shakespeare blindly stumbled upon to the coincidental, random shaping of those words and letters and meant nothing when writing the actual script, something drove Shakespeare's pen, and that something came from the mind of William Shakespeare, not a twentieth century college professor.

Caliban of the Island People

Prospero, once Duke and now master of the seas, wields great power over the inhabitants of Shakespeare's comedy The Tempest, and after many years turns his dethroning into a new opportunity for control, manipulating the characters' environment to control each character's mental state. Miranda, for example, knows no other life outside the one Prospero tells her to live and therefore follows his advice, whim, and fancy. Ariel, Prospero's spirit-slave, knows only the torturous masterdom of Sycorax, who trapped Ariel in a tree for tweleve years before Prospero saved the poor spirit and set him unto new service, which to Ariel seems like something close to freedom after being trapped by his last master for so long. Caliban, a native of the island and bastard son of Sycorax leads a life with just as narrow a view as the others.
Caliban resents Prospero for stealing Caliban's homeland away, enslaving the poor boy, and keeping him "in this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me the rest o' th' island." The postcolonial article points out one writer whose modern views meld nicely into Shakespeare's own: Frantz Fanon "believes that as soon as the colonized were forced to speak the language of the colonizer, the colonized either accepted or were coerced into accepting the collective consciousness of the French, thereby identifying blackness with evil and sin and whiteness with purity and righteousness." Although Caliban resents Prospero for the man's dictatorial tendencies, Caliban refers to his mother's practices only as negatives, such as "plagues," and reveres to Stephano, a man of 'higher breeding'and of distant lands like Prospero, as "a brave god [who] bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him." Caliban throws himself at the feet of a man simply because of the man's physical appearance and goods. However much Caliban may despise Prospero, Shakespeare shows that Caliban is bound to make the same mistake he did with Prospero again simply because he believes that even a life of freedom holds the prerequisite of some kind of outside 'master.'

Narration

Prospero, from Shakespeare's The Tempest, seems to have secluded himself upon an island into a world of his own making. His 'daughter' Miranda washed upon the island when she was too young to remember life in any contrary surrounding and therefore is free to build a world upon whatever advice and teaching Prospero, who does remember life outside the island, chooses to give her. Prospero describes he and Miranda's arrival upon the island was due to Prospero's subjects of Milan who "So dear the love my people bore me" that they dumped Prospero and Miranda in a boat and pushed them out to sea. This story, to Miranda, is as likely as any other because she doesn't know that anything else could possibly exist. She likely also believes all that Prospero tells her, considering he is and has been her parental role model from as far back as she has memory.  Prospero also said, "here in this island we arrived, and here have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit than other princesses can that have more time for vainer hours and tutors not so careful." Since Miranda has no point of reference for what princesses could possibly be taught by their tutors, she may as well believe that Prospero's teachings are the greatest she could receive. In reference to our previous reading material, the Party also infects the minds of its subjects like Prospero does the mind of Miranda by creating a world of constant evil, which, although evil from the point of view to a happy, knowledgeable American, is simply the way of life for citizens of Oceania who have never experienced otherwise. Julia, for example, wants to rebel against the wretched absurdities of life, putting sex down as if it were a crime and then relishing it in privacy, advocating loyalty to the party and fighting against it from every angle. But she has no reference point to know how life could be any permanently different. She has no hope. She merely wants immediate change, a short bit of satisfaction. Anyway, not only can Prospero control the elements, but also his daughter's mental state and his enemy's location. Prospero, within himself and partly due to his ethereal powers, is a kind of Shakespearean Big Brother.

Writing history?

To begin with, I must note the New York Times writer's subtle anger towards the Texas Republicans. His anger was directed at the fact that Republicans were adding their bias to history, yet in the article he pointed out only points in the education reform which he found worthy of criticism, not any positives. It was a delicious bit of irony which made the article, although entertaining, hardly practical enough for me to believe the writer as a credible source of hard fact. In Chimamanda Adichie's mind, reading only this article would be insufficient, an incomplete story. It would be merely one fraction of rising action chunked out of a fully comprehensive novel on the subject of historical reform.

Through the Socratic Circle, we students, with our curious little minds, were able to get a firsthand taste of what it is like to see how stories can be incomplete and one speaker can be partial to a certain way of telling. Had both articles we read been unbiased, the discussions of each half of the class would have been the exact same. They were not because each article looked at the controversy from its own perspective.

Attacking the textbook issue is obviously no easy task; otherwise, it would have been resolved long ago. Although I may not know the right way to solve it, from the Socratic discussions, it seemed practical to me that a predominant bias cannot be cancelled out by adding an opposing bias to the mix as the Texas Republicans seemed to be attempting. Each bias seems merely to create an increasingly confusing stew of mismatched beliefs. Only bare fact, stripped of all political sway, could allow for an unarguably fair history. And of course, in the textbook, all points of view available would have to be included, no cultures shoved aside as less important or more.

But a child's attention span is short. Even into high school. Discounting a very beautiful, but miniscule population of children enthralled by facts of the past, children prefer active, exciting adventures of the present, such as video games or frisbee. Time in the classroom in which a teacher actually controls the attention of his or her students is minimal, and to increase that time, the teacher must make their subject interesting. When playing frisbee, most young children do not want to first study the various frisbee-making companies and the various types of frisbees which they could toss, but instead pick up the first frisbee they see and throw it as hard as they can. As with history, a child does not want to hear how various Native American tribes gathered food, but how Geronimo used his telepathic abilities to sneak through enemy camps without leaving a trace and could be shot through the belly without leaving any sign of a grievous wound.

History is quite expansive according to state standards. Life could go back as far as 3.5 billion years and history even further, possibly even to the beginning of time. Or, in a world like the one illustrated in 1984, could be completely based on perception and only go back as far as one individual or another chose to take it. But since we students follow along state standards, there is a lot of material to cover, and only some of it can be fed to us at school. The rest must be voluntary. Therefore, although the desire to infect ignorant children with their personal bias is great, the small amount of information we can be fed should not be corrupted by whether the Republican party of the past was awesome for helping along the Civil Rights Movement, but merely HOW it helped along the Civil Rights Movement. And possibly how the Democrats and maybe Libertarians played a role. But that might be unpatriotic. So no. Nevermind.