Deep reading, p.19
Deep Reading, page 19
However, and unfortunately, it is common—the Chicago Tribune article quoted above certainly does it!—to conflate trigger warnings with content warnings. A trigger warning alerts a reader to content that might provoke an uncontrollable physical and emotional response. A content warning is more like a movie rating: it alerts readers that they may encounter something they find challenging or objectionable.77 Content warnings, thus, do not exist to warn readers that their nervous system may be triggered by something in the text so that they are jerked back into reliving some aspect of their trauma; they are meant to warn readers that they should be prepared to encounter something that may make them uncomfortable.
Neither trigger nor content warnings have at their core the purpose of helping students (or anyone) completely and forever avoid whatever might be triggering or objectionable. For example, the entirety of van der Kolk’s work, most popularly encountered in The Body Keeps the Score, is concerned with naming trauma so that it can be treated through therapy and relationship. Avoiding triggering topics is not treatment for trauma; communicating one’s experiences to another is a first step toward recovery.78 However, providing therapy is not the job of the teacher, the book club leader, the pastor, or the other lay leader. To attempt to act as a therapist would be gravely irresponsible. Rather, prudent leaders of reading communities will recognize the boundaries of their expertise and ability. Such leaders should, we believe, seriously consider providing trigger warnings, but they should be even more invested in cultivating trust between themselves and those they are guiding so that their fellow readers feel comfortable inquiring about what they have been asked to read and may respond to encouragement to seek therapy.
Providing content warnings is a prudent practice if the instructor or other leader emphasizes that they are designed to prepare readers to encounter certain content, not to allow readers to decide whether they want to avoid content that makes them uncomfortable. I (Ooms) frequently provide content warnings to students. When teaching Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, which includes scenes of sexual assault and suicide, I tell my students ahead of time so that they are prepared. When I teach Dante’s Divine Comedy, I similarly warn my students about Dante’s depiction of the Wood of the Suicides, because the topic of suicide is one that many students have told me weighs heavily on them, as they may have friends or loved ones who committed suicide. Discussion of suicide as a mortal sin, as a result, will doubtless be distressing for these students. And when I teach Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I warn the students of the novel’s repeated use of the n-word. For some students who have endured sexual or racial trauma, these content warnings may need to become trigger warnings, and these students will need treatment beyond what I can provide. For other students, however, the content warnings are prudent ways to help them prepare to encounter discomfiting material.
Key to prudence in these situations is relationship. Speaking of treating trauma, van der Kolk offers the hope that “as long as our relationships are intact, by and large we are pretty good with trauma.”79 Disagreement, hardship, and suffering are inevitable parts of human life. None of us can avoid, or help others avoid, these difficult aspects of life. Being a person with whom others feel safe can go a long way in helping our students and neighbors feel seen, heard, and able to communicate their emotions—even if those emotions are distressing ones in light of a certain reading.80 Prudent deep readers, in other words, cultivate the ability to read not only texts but also their neighbors in love.
Ordering Our Loves
Readers can grow in wisdom by learning about the world through reading texts of all sorts—from history and philosophy, which help us understand how our world has been shaped, to drama and fiction, which help us understand the human condition. Our deep reading practices are thus a venue for gaining experience and ordering our loves, which results in our cultivation of prudence. Prior notes, “Prudence requires some knowledge of the world,” and Wood similarly argues, “Judging aright requires that one have a memory for past cases, in order to understand how the present case is or is not like past cases.”81 Pieper writes about the way that our knowledge transfers into prudent action as he identifies three “stages of transformation,” to which he gives the names “deliberation, judgment, decision.”82 In our experience as both readers and educators, we have found that deep reading—especially when we are interpreting worldviews in texts—is particularly instrumental in developing the “deliberation” stage that Pieper argues is integral to prudent actions and decision making. In particular, when we inhabit the decisions of characters we read about, making connections between their ideology (or the ideology of the text itself) and their actions, we have opportunities to deliberate over fictional situations, considering what “loves” drive characters to certain actions.
Two texts I (Griffis) regularly teach have provided both me and my students with opportunities to deliberate over difficult, heart-wrenching situations and to develop prudence through the intellectual exercise. The first text is William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” wherein a boy rats out his abusive father for destroying others’ property, a decision that results in his father’s death. The second text is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a postapocalyptic tale in which a man agonizes over whether to kill his young son to save the boy from being tortured and eaten by cannibals. The father in this story ultimately decides not to kill his son, even as he himself dies and leaves his little boy alone in a cold, brutal world. Both of these texts present the decisions these characters face from multiple perspectives, so that readers usually sympathize with more than one point of view. We understand why Sarty in “Barn Burning” regrets his decision while also applauding the act that puts a stop to his father’s abuse. We recognize why the father in The Road wants to protect his son from a horrific death at the same time that we prize the sanctity of life and feel relieved when the man decides against killing his son.
Texts such as “Barn Burning” and The Road bring us into moral quagmires, putting us through the deliberation that helps us develop prudence. Pieper writes that “in deliberation we may hesitate; but a considered act must be performed swiftly,” and he notes that “the capacity for instantly grasping an unexpected situation, and deciding with extreme quick-wittedness, [is] one of the components of perfect prudence.”83 In other words, our prudent actions and decisions depend on our having done the work of deliberation prior to the moment of action. The man in The Road knows that “when the time comes there will be no time,” and this knowledge prompts him to consider, over and over through the novel, the best course of action.84 Readers who have spent time earnestly mulling over complicated moral issues and their possible ramifications in real life thus engage in practices that offer preparation for making prudent decisions. We encourage all readers to make moral quagmires and crucial decisions in texts topics of discussion in which the worldview guiding the character or author is considered deeply and from multiple angles. We recommend thinking about the question “What would you do?”—not so that you can stand in judgment over the text but so that you can become more aware of what you love and if those loves align with Christian virtue.
Another exercise that helps us order our loves and develop prudence is taking stock of the stories and ideas that have captured our imaginations and wondering why. James K. A. Smith insists that “our hearts traffic in stories” and that “education not only gets into our head but also . . . grabs us by the gut.”85 At the end of each course, when my (Griffis’s) students have completed a semester’s worth of reading, I assign them a reflection activity in which they review the reading list for the entire course, name several texts they enjoyed or appreciated reading, and explain why. Conversely, I also ask them to name texts they disliked and explain why. By surveying a variety of texts that they have read over a fifteen-week semester, my students have the chance to consider what stories have grabbed them by the gut, which gives them some insight regarding the stories that make up their vision of the good life. When they turn to the list of texts they disliked, I similarly encourage them to ask themselves why. Does the text contain characters they reacted negatively to? Does the text’s ideology conflict with their own? Was this reading difficult for them to complete? Answering these questions offers students another angle of insight into what they love and desire. And all readers, not just students, can engage in self-reflection about what they read through practices like journaling. These self-reflective exercises can help readers to become more aware of their own priorities and visions of a good life, knowledge that can then be used to better align themselves with the kingdom of God.
Resisting Either/Or Interpretations of Texts and Embracing Complexity
Reading about characters who are unlike us or reading the works of authors whose values we do not share is a key way to grow in prudence by thoughtfully encountering the repugnant cultural other—and by embracing the complexity such encounters generate. Key to such thoughtful encounters is a focus not so much on the other but on ourselves, seeking out the reasons why we do not understand or like the other and asking what these reasons reveal about our own condition. Prudent reading offers us a chance to eschew criteria that demand ideological purity and that view texts as either good or bad. Rather, we can embrace a text’s complexity, recognizing that it may contain both admirable and morally problematic stories or messages.
For example, reading the novel Purple Hibiscus by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demands a thoughtful approach to complex and problematic issues. The novel begins with several levels of allusion: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the heavy figurines on the étagère.”86 Adichie’s words are an allusion to the work of her predecessor and fellow Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, whose novel Things Fall Apart was and is a groundbreaking work of African literature, telling a story of precolonial Igbo culture that challenged the characterizations of Africans common among white European colonizers and their stories.87 Achebe’s title, in turn, is an allusion to the William Butler Yeats poem “The Second Coming”; the relevant lines are quoted as an epigraph in many editions of Achebe’s novel:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Adichie alludes to Achebe’s work in part because he is her literary predecessor; his foundational work in African literature in English established a literary tradition in which she has followed. Achebe quotes Yeats because his poem touches on a deep human fear of disaster, though the latter is responding to World War I and the influenza pandemic, the former to the British invasion of Nigeria. But the fact that both Adichie and Achebe write in English—and are well acquainted with Yeats—is inextricable from British colonial rule of Nigeria, from English being the language that Igbo and other Nigerian children needed to master in order to gain any influence in their own country, from colonizer literature rather than indigenous literature being what was taught in school.88 The practice of prudently encountering the repugnant cultural other (in this case, several problematic others) involves considering all these complications together without needing to reconcile them.89
We make a point of teaching problematic texts while drawing attention to their complexity and encouraging students to avoid labeling a text in absolute evaluative terms before they have prudently considered the author’s perspective. Within the field of American literature, one such text is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), a novel that contains many racist caricatures of Black people but was nevertheless an antislavery work credited with starting the Civil War less than a decade later. When I (Griffis) teach this novel, I ask my students to consider both its racist and antislavery elements without attempting to reconcile these contradictory aspects of the work. Further, I give them different, complex examples of Black critics’ responses to the novel, such as that of James Baldwin, who describes Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “self-righteous” and “a catalogue of violence,” or Toni Morrison, who holds that it was not “written for Uncle Tom to read or be persuaded by.”90 This novel, and readers’ responses to it, is an example of the befuddling reality Jacobs articulates when he wonders about people who can “be so incisively critical of some injustices while being so utterly blind to others,” a reality he reflects upon with the question, “Isn’t this strange mixture of vices and virtues, foolishness and wisdom, blindness and insight, simply the human condition?”91 Jacobs’s generous and multifaceted response to problematic texts has deepened and nuanced my own perspective on these issues, and in turn, I strive to model that generosity and complexity when I lead discussions about Uncle Tom’s Cabin with my students. By understanding this complex story as part of “the human condition,” we turn our attention away from strict evaluation of a text and its others and toward ourselves, asking how we, too, partake of this complicated condition.
Additionally, the three of us reinforce the larger complexities bound up with the production of literary texts in general, echoing novelist Cormac McCarthy’s pithy statement that “books are made out of books.”92 Some antiracist books are made out of racist ones, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which challenges Stowe’s nineteenth-century novel with the aptly named protagonist Bigger Thomas. Similarly, Louise Erdrich’s poem “Captivity” (2003), which responds to Mary Rowlandson’s 1676 account of her captivity among the Wampanoag during King Philip’s War, challenges the earlier author’s racist assumptions as it simultaneously builds upon this problematic text to create a new one. One significant practice for developing prudence is therefore to read a recently produced text that would not exist without the earlier racist (that is, repugnant) one, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Native Son or Erdrich’s “Captivity” and Rowlandson’s narrative. In literary studies, examples of such texts abound, such as Saint Lucian writer Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), which expands upon many of the tropes and narrative techniques of the Odyssey, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which challenges the colonization of Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1719), or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel written from the perspective of the villainized Creole woman trapped in Mr. Rochester’s attic in Jane Eyre (1847). We encourage all readers to search for responses to and retellings of the books you choose, works that would not have been written without an earlier, problematic work. Resisting either/or interpretations and prudently encountering the repugnant cultural other in the texts we read can shape us into people who avoid impulsive and hostile judgments and who are open to the intricacies and contradictions of history and human nature.
Celebrating Common Values
Just as important as encountering those who we may find repugnant—or at least who defy easy categorization—is celebrating points of connection and commonality wherever we find them, both in the texts we read and in the people with whom we share this reading experience. When our reading experience creates connection with others, we can celebrate that commonality and avoid, or at least resist, judgmental, either/or approaches to texts and people.
The character study, the tried-and-true approach to writing about literature that forms a staple for many high school and college classrooms, offers us opportunities for prudent study of the people who inhabit the texts we read. A study of character can be an imaginative exercise in forgetting the self and a way to resist easy, cut-and-dried judgments that blindly reinforce our worldviews and cultural mores. Virtuous characters can provide opportunities for us to learn from their wise choices. Wood argues, “Prudence on our part sometimes shows itself in having the good judgment to identify and imitate the morally wise among us.”93 Moreover, Paul J. Wadell writes that “we cannot live and act well without prudence because more than a wholehearted commitment to the good is needed for doing good. We need insight, imagination, and wisdom about how to bring the good to life amid all the diverse situations of our lives.”94 While, as usual, most of our examples are drawn from literature, historical figures and authors can also be excellent candidates for nuanced character studies.
One approach to the character study that resists easy judgment is assigning personality types to characters. I (Roberts) use this method in my British Literature classes, asking my students to assign a Myers-Briggs or Enneagram personality type to a character or author from our reading list and to provide support for their choice of personality type. I have had students assign personality types to heroes like Beowulf, morally dubious characters like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and historical figures like Elizabeth I. The value of the personality-type approach is that these types are usually presented with an array of strengths and weaknesses, along with signs of growth (or regression). These ready-made lenses to gauge strengths and weaknesses (though they certainly have their limits) can add nuance to characters who—like Beowulf, for example—are usually seen as all good (or all bad). This exercise can also create empathy with characters; I recently had a student decide that Shakespeare’s thoroughgoing villain Iago had the same personality type as herself, although she is in no way villainous. These moments of empathy and of resisting a one-sided approach to character study provide training in prudent judgment.
