Orwell’s Dystopia in Composition Pedagogy

For almost eight years, I have taught college writing courses such as “freshman comp” and “first year seminar” the way I was trained to do at my two graduate institutions — the neo-Aristotelian way first advanced by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca and later developed by people like Marie Secor, Andrea Lunsford, Jack Selzer, and Cheryl Glenn. Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of finding the available means of persuasion,” and today Aristotelians emphasize attention to the “rhetorical situation” of any argument. Among other things, this approach includes strategies for addressing particular audiences and contexts. It also includes focusing one’s rhetorical goal — whether one’s goal is to define terms, ascertain causes, predict effects, prioritise values, advocate an action or policy, or determine jurisdiction and responsibilities.  The main idea here is that students would be better prepared both for college writing and for “real world” writing if they were circumspect about the purpose and context for each and every act of writing, speaking, and behaving. In other words, what might be appropriate for a newspaper editorial might not be appropriate for a political speech, and what might be appropriate for one class might not be for another. For example, the style, tone, and organization of this blog is not the style, tone, and organization I’d usually want my students to emulate in the analytic papers they write for my class. In sum, rather than teaching a formalist one-sized-fits-all or a touchy-feely-express-yourself kind of course (two other models of writing pedagogy), Aristotelian pedagogy gives students practical skills that are useful for a range of situations, both academic and non-academic.

For a while, I was happy with this approach, but last year I grew frustrated with it, because it seemed to me to assume that writing must always be intentional and must always aim to persuade. This suggests a goal-oriented, self-interested ”instrumental rationality” rather than a critical, dialectical, humanistic, or ethical concern for others and for the world. Also, I have always felt a tension between the various goals of composition pedagogy; academic writing has its own set of standards and rules for governing truth claims that differ from Aristotle’s sense of persuasive speech; similarly, although critical thinking can certainly serve the art of persuasion, critical thinking has other roles to play as well; in addition, a lot of the creative writing we most admire did not have clear rhetorical goals but instead helps us think. Now that I’m at a liberal arts college, I decided this year to do something different — something a little more liberal artsy — and so the question that I’m struggling to answer is what and how to teach writing differently.

Instead of focusing students’ attention on specific rhetorical goals and strategies for persuasive writing, I wanted to emphasize the ethics of writing and develop a more critical approach so that the students would diagnose the socio-economic and political forces that shape our world and our position as writers in that world. In other words, instead of adapting themselves to the rhetorical situation and becoming well-adjusted writers, I want students to critically assess the situation and consider the ethics of “mal-adjustment” as Martin Luther King, Jr. encouraged his audience to do in his speech, “The American Dream.” In that speech, King asks, why should we adjust ourselves to an un-just society? 

Through literature, I hoped my class could come to a deeper understanding of the “rhetorical situation” than the one usually posited by the Aristotelians. (To be fair, Aristotelians often do wonderfully critical analyses of culture, but by the time it gets simplified for the writing classroom, most of this sophistication is lost.) So, I’ve divided the course into topics such as ”the politics of writing,” and “representation” and “writing about violence,” and we will read literature such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye, Josefina Lopez’s Real Women Have Curves, and Sitawa Namwalie’s Cut Off My Tongue, for example.

We just finished Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed with it. I liked it a lot when I was a teenager, but I hadn’t read it since then, so I wasn’t sure how well it would work. I chose it for a couple of reaons. One thing I like about this novel is how it draws attention to how ordinary life might be political. Even sex can be political in certain situations, Orwell points out, and one of my students brilliantly observed in class that not too long ago in America sexual relations between different races was prohibited. And so I think the novel is useful for a class discussion on how there are many ways writing can be political — as Orwell also says in his essay “Why I Write”  — and not just the obvious ways such as political speeches and newspaper editorials. Another thing I like is how it draws attention to the importance of memory and writing’s relationship to memory. In the novel, the Ministry of Truth is able to manipulate memory by controlling the written record. This – along with Orwell’s invention of newspeak — was useful in class for highlighting the importance of academic citation and how academic citation was developed precisely to prevent the kind of manipulative, dishonest activity we see in Orwell’s novel.

But here’s the problem with the novel. Orwell creates a dystopia (the opposite of utopia) so extreme and far-out that most of my students could not see much connection between what Orwell is describing and what is going on in the world today even though the edition of the novel we read was published in 2003 with a new forward by Thomas Pynchon that implies there is such a connection. Pynchon himself suggests a critique of how president George W. Bush and the mainstream media manipulated public opinion and falsified evidence to justify war against a made-up enemy, just like what happens in Nineteenh Eighty-Four. And now, in 2009, how is it possible that after six years of war with Iraq, very few Americans know anything about the history of our supposed enemy and how its relation to us has changed over the years. Perhaps we suffer from the same kind of historical amnesia that Orwell’s characters suffer from in his novel. Also in his forward to Orwell’s novel, Pynchon observes the extent to which the internet (with its cookies that track what we do and suggest more things for us to buy) has has become a much more subtle form of social control than the “telescreens” that Orwell imagined. But it’s not my students’ fault for not making that connection. I think it’s Orwell’s.

Orwell creates such a fantastic situation that the most natural reaction to his novel is “Wow, I’m glad I don’t live in that society. That would suck.” And of course the political aspect of that natural reaction is the sense that ”America has freedoms and totalitarian socialism doesn’t.” It’s hard to reconcile the fact that the most vivid attack on socialism was written by a man who was himself a socialist, but Orwell’s book could in some ways be read as a rhetorical failure. Instead of presenting a cautionary tale for his fellow socialists or giving his readers some concepts for critically evaluating their own society as I believe he intended, he instead created a boogey-man that Americans define themselves against. In other words, his portrait of the society of Oceania is so totally other that when Americans read Orwell’s novel, they say to themelves, “I’m not that.” My point here is not that Americans should realize that they in fact are that, because they aren’t. Nobody is. Orwell’s Oceania is a rhetorical “topos” (or dystopia), not a real place.  It’s a symbolic figure, not a coherent picture of reality. Rather, my point is that, in a way, this novel almost gives Americans an excuse not to really try to understand what Chinese or Iraqi or Iranian culture is like, because they imagine life in those countries to be just as Orwell described daily life in his dystopian Oceania. And because this far-away, freakish other so fully captures our imagination, we seem to have an excuse for not really understanding ourselves or the historical truth of our relationship to real others.

I’m trying to think of another novel that might focus on the more subtle forms of thought control and historical amnesia that exist in the real world. Perhaps a novel that also recognizes that sometimes human beings often prefer to be ignorant rather than knowledgeable. (Albert Camus’s The Fall or Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, I suppose.) For instance, consider the recent debates about health care, which have become almost too painful to pay attention to. How is it possible that so many people in America could believe that President Obama was prescribing “death panels”? So much of the health care debate has focused on ridiculous mis-information that little energy is left for honest discussion about real solutions.

Moreover, it might be useful for us to try to understand why Americans have become so hysterical these days. I suppose it’s not surprising that with an unemployment rate over 9% (and it’s actually 20% for people who didn’t graduate from high school) people would get a little paranoid and search for freakish, non-existant things (such as death panels) to define themselves against. It feels good and self-affirming to be outraged at something, even if that something isn’t real. While Orwell shows us this outrage in the daily “two minutes hate” scheduled by Big Brother, Orwell’s idea about how the human ego can be manipulated in Oceania doesn’t seem to account for the willful ignorance we all have in our everyday lives. Nor does he account for how other social factors such as unemployment, poverty, and job stress might affect our ability to understand what’s happening around us.

This leaves me with two questions. How do we take stock of the forms of writing and representation (mainstream media, Google, FaceBook, etc.) in our world today? And how do we respond ethically to this state of affairs (including the high unemployment rate today) in our own writing?

Lone Star / No Country for Old Men

I just showed Lone Star, written and directed by John Sayles, to my English class. I remember when I first watched it in the movie theater in 1996, back when I was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler detective novels. Back then, two things about the movie really struck me. First, what a cool idea it is to use the noir detective genre to explore the history of race relations. After watching the movie, I began to read African-American detective novelists Walter Mosley and Barbara Neely, who also do this really well. Second, that Elizabeth Peña is one of the sexiest actresses of all time. (Hey now — I know this is a theory-teacher blog, but I’m just saying what I was thinking as a young guy thirteen years ago.)

That was 1996, but last year, as a teacher, I was reminded of Lone Star because the Cohen brothers’ movie No Country for Old Men won so many Academy Awards then. And here’s why I can’t help but make the connection between the two movies, and why I can’t help but think Lone Star is the movie that most clearly demonstrates what a load of crap No Country is. Both movies are about the Texas-Mexico border. Both movies can be categorized as noir. (Noir is usually defined as hardboiled and morally ambiguous crime fiction.) Both movies feature a supernaturally evil villain. Both movies were nominated for a lot of awards. 

But those similarities make the differences all the more striking. Lone Star actually developes white, black, and Hispanic characters in some depth, whereas in No Country, the Hispanic characters hardly speak at all, which is kind of messed up considering that its main character Llewelyn Moss spends some time across the Mexican border. In other words, in No Country, Hispanic characters are more symbolic than real, and the movie is somewhat racist in the way that, symbolically, their presence in the story is always associated with drugs, violence, and the moral degredation of society. In contrast, as one of my students pointed out in class a couple days ago, Lone Star actually has black and Hispanic poeple in it, who talk and think like real people and whose lives are cross-culturally entangled the way real peoples’ lives are — in other words, they aren’t some assinine Hollywood stereotype or a plot device or shorthand symbol for violence. You can tell Sayles put a lot of thought into his movie  (as you can see his interview about it [here].) To put it another way, we come away from watching Lone Star with a better understanding of the Texas-Mexico border than we came in with, but we come away from No Country with a worse understanding than we came in with.

Second, Lone Star features many conversations among characters of different backgrounds (not just cultural backgrounds, but also professional backgrounds) and uses the cinematic form of the noir detective story to bring their inter-connectedness to the surface. In contrast, the only lengthy conversations we see in No Country are either between a couple of old, white sheriffs moaning about the good old days or between the psychopathic killer and his victims. While the noir structure of Lone Star encourages us to develop a more complex ethical vision, the noir structure of No Country merely excites and titilates us. Now, against my argument, I suppose someone might point out that the absurdity of No Country — along with its unresolved, troubling ending – deconstructs our nostalgic sense of law and order, and I would grant that that’s true… but so what?

Finally, the evil villain in Lone Star is the white sheriff who stands in as a symbolic figure for the systemic violence of racism and who must be overthrown by a collaboration among black, white, and Hispanic characters, but the evil villain in No Country is an unbelievably omniscient psychopath who stands in as a symbolic figure for the arbitrary randomness and senselessness of criminal violence. Curiously, this villain’s ethnicity is vague — all we know is that he is somehow foreign, a foreigness which is used by the Cohen brothers to augment his evilness. It is curious that a character who is meant to symbolize the monstrosity of pure evil has to be not just somehow foreign, but indeterminately foreign.

In my view, John Sayles is one of the most ethical writer-directors of all time, and many actresses and actors have said they love acting in his movies because they feel like they are performing real characters. Especially women have noted that his female characters actually have some depth and aren’t just a projection of a male writer/director’s fantasy about, desire for, or fear of women. This is especially true in his beautiful movie, Casa de los Babys. To be fair to the Cohen brothers, most of the time, I think they also do a wonderful job in their movies, just not in this one. 

But here of course is the kicker. While Lone Star was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, it didn’t win. In contrast, No Country was the Cohen brothers’s most successful film of their careers, nominated for eight Academy awards with four wins, including best screenplay even though the movie was merely adapted from the novel. (And if you’ve read the novel, which I have, you’ll see that the Cohen brothers didn’t do much with the story. Their cinematography was excellent, for sure, but best screenplay?) In other words, the Academy Awards was stupid and unethical in 2008 just as it was in 2009 for giving all the awards to Slumdog Millionaire. (About that movie, see my blog post [here], and also go to your local Barnes & Nobel or Borders bookstore and get the current issue (#78) of CineAction, which features a terrific analysis of Slumdog… as well as, I’m not too modest to mention, my own essay about James Bond, which was originally conceived in this very blog!) However, in spite of the lameness of the Academy Awards, I won’t despair because all of the critial and scholarly essays that continue to be published about Lone Star assures me that it will endur as a classic, while No Country will fade as a cinematic novelty.

Jessye Norman, The Roots, and Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama

Jessye Norman

After we read a couple of Langston Hughes’s poems in class last week, one of my students told me about this project to musically perform Hughes’s book Ask Your Mama, and it looked pretty cool, so I thought I’d post it up on my blog and say a few words. Hughes always meant this poem to be performed with music and even provided musical directions, but he died before it could happen. This year, opera singer Jessye Norman teamed up with composer Laura Karpman to do it. Among many others, they invited members from the hip hop group The Roots, whose artistry is well-known for pushing hip hop to higher aesthetic, musical, and intellectual levels. This website here that my student e-mailed me includes some of the recordings along with several interviews — one with Roots’s drummer Questlove — that you can listen to. And here’s a promotional video:

Questlove of The Roots

As Questlove points out, this project reminds us of something that hip hop has always foregrounded — the fact that literature, music, pop culture, political activism, and community are not so distinct as we often imagine them. Especially in the literature classroom, students seem to expect literature to be a purely textual and serious thing, no matter how much I try to insert music, pop culture, politics, and community, and — most importantly — laughter into the curriculum (as I did [here] in my blog on the hip hop canon last fall, as well is in my many blogs on pop music [here] and on performative poetry [here].)

Langston Hughes

But of course, the literary text’s intimate relationship with its performance and its cultural context is something I struggle with too. It’s not that easy to bring all this together in the sterile setting of the classroom. Moreover, text has the advantage of seeming solid, permanent, and immutable, in contrast to the fleeting nature of individual performances and timely articulations in specific political contexts.  The internet definitely helps return the text to its performative dimension or at least makes that performative dimension more accessible. I say “helps,” because I know we could have a long conversation about whether the internet successfully does return it home to its performative originality or whether the internet form somehow changes the performative text.