The Blight Stuff
Do you read sad literature, the bleak stories with no ray of hope? If so, what draws you to them?
I only read it when I had to--I appreciated the author's skill on some level, but mainly endured for a grade. To me, reading is wonderful when it uplifts, provides beauty, and provokes thought. There's a good chance, though, that I am missing some dimension when I pass over the cheerless, suffocating works.
I'll give you some examples, and I'd love to see why they should or should not be read:
- Faulkner: We read As I Lay Dying in American lit. The characters are a poor farming family whose mother is on her deathbed. Each family member is revealed through stream-of-conciousness narration. From what I remember, their thoughts are ugly and simple. The father builds the mother's coffin right outside the house while she is still alive. He is obsessive about burying her in a certain location, or something. When they finally get to transporting her in her coffin, they run into some trouble and the coffin starts to come apart. It's kind of sickening.
- Theodore Dreiser: My number one example. We had to read a story about a strike early in the century, and the protagonist crossed the picket lines to work and got stones thrown at him. Bleakest thing I've ever read. Sister Carrie doesn't sound like it gets much better.
- Flannery O'Connor: Okay, I get her. The ugly human heart and all that. She's edifying, but I wouldn't pick her up for cozy bedtime reading. It's been seventeen years, and I still can't shake the scene of the pampered boy vomiting his mixture of ketchup and chocolate cake.
- Some contemporary poem I read one time about wanting to be deposited in a tree after death and decay right there in nature. Lots of vivid imagery where it wasn't wanted. Is anyone familiar with this poem? Have we run out of topics?
- The surprising works that are chosen for students as young as eighth grade in Honors and AP English: The Color Purple, The Handmaid's Tale, Beloved, The Poisonwood Bible, etc. Heavy, I think, for an introduction to the world of written art.
I should put the popular Kate Chopin in this list, but oddly, I found her engaging to read even though her themes were depressing. I think she was just before the Dreiser era--was that the twenties?--when art got dreary.
I guess if I wanted to be consistent, The Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness would appear, but this is subjective because--well--seen through the filter of my worldview, these works are not only done well, but also constructive.
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Jan '11
Re: The Blight Stuff
Bleak House. Although maybe that doesn't count because I don't think it's on many assigned reading lists. It's got to be Dickens' dreariest. Book. Ever!
Nov '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Although the BBC drama was wonderful, don't you think? I just saw it. It was full of virtue and hope--dark, though, too.
Dec '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Hahahahahaha!
I just completed a screenplay based on a story my college-aged daughter wrote as an assignment for her "Psychology and Religion" class. She postulated a cosmic catastrophe that was going to destroy the Solar System, and looked at how humankind and its various constituent members would deal with impending, inevitable doom. In her story (written in the first person), she steals a spaceship and heads for the edge of the Universe, hoping to confront God face-to-face to ask Him why He decided to destroy Earth and everyone in it.
In her telling of the story, she imagines that her younger sisters join a cult like the Heaven's Gate cult that formed around the time of the Hale-Bopp comet's arrival. Writing the scene where she and I discover the mass suicide at the cult compound and find her sisters lying dead, holding hands.
It's a marvelous story, with the ultimate unhappy happy ending.
Dec '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
My favorite short story of all time is "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. In about eight pages, it creates a world so terrifying and hopeless that haunts you forever. If you don't know the original story, you probably know the retellings of it on the original The Twilight Zone and its variants. No one has ever come close to capturing its terror on film, however.
As for Theodore Dreiser, I like the movie version of his "An American Tragedy," "A Place in the Sun" with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor when they were just about the two most beautiful people on Earth. The moral of the story is very telling: murder in your heart is just as deserving of punishment as murder in deed.
(By the way, I wrote another screenplay about an American real-life tragedy: the death of Tom Dooley of folk-song fame. He was a real person, hung for the murder of his fiancee. In my telling, he chooses to go to the gallows for a murder he didn't commit in order to save his true love from hanging as well. I find that sad but sweet.)
Nov '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Horrible, Stuart. Tragic. Do you have insights on the appeal of Faulkner?
Jun '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Stuart Creque: Hahahahahaha!
I just completed a screenplay based on a story my college-aged daughter wrote as an assignment for her "Psychology and Religion" class. She postulated a cosmic catastrophe that was going to destroy the Solar System, and looked at how humankind and its various constituent members would deal with impending, inevitable doom. In her story (written in the first person), she steals a spaceship and heads for the edge of the Universe, hoping to confront God face-to-face to ask Him why He decided to destroy Earth and everyone in it... · Feb 25 at 8:08pm
Reminds me of Woody Allen's Radio Days, when as a child he learns that millions of years in the future the Sun will explode so he stops studying in school. "I mean what's the point?" He tells his teacher and his parents...who end up slapping him upside the head.
Jul '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Exposure to a certain amount of oppressiveness serves proper notice to students that all is not cheerful and light in our little corner.
When my children encounter these and wrinkle their noses and whatnot, I pull an antidote off the shelf for them. Like "The Marching Morons," a short story by CM Kornbluth that farcically treats grim issues, "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," another short story by Roger Zelazny which treats a stern morbidity of spirit with light irony, or everyones favorite, "A Modest Proposal," an essay where Jonathan Swift manages a bit of both.
I do think that some find the stern and oppressive stuff the real meat of literature. Faulkner's stuff dwells on the post-bellum South's decay. Depressed and alcoholic, his few stories I have read speak to punctured dreams and unwinding or vestigial southern mores. This stuff is an acquired taste, a blend of Twain's eye for character and Poe's sense of story, pacing, and timing. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" has been used to teach generations the art of indirect exposition by exploiting the setting.
For my mind, the masters, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Twain, mix humor and irony into their work.
Jun '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
I was an English major and the Department Chair was a Faulkner nut. I have mixed feelings about the man's genius & was quite sick of the Snopes family by the time graduation rolled around. I ltruly loved Sister Carrie, Heart of Darkness, and Lord of the Flies.
While I think there is value in reading a mix of the bleak and the beautiful, I distinctly remember feeling almost clinically depressed after reading Last Exit to Brooklyn for an English class at Rutgers. The darkness and depravity haunted me for months.
Try The Good Thief for a good, dark read. Exquisitely written.
Feb '11
Re: The Blight Stuff
sawatdeeka
I agree with you that F. O'Connor can be difficult, but she is also incredibly funny at times. "The Enduring Chill" for example, I find hilarious. I had a priest in 12th grade English who adored her, and had us read her exhaustively, even comparing earlier versions of short stories with later ones to see how she edited her own work. I can't agree with you placing her on a list of writers you describe with the words, "sad literature, bleak stories with no rays of hope. . . . cheerless, suffocating works." !!!! To judge all of her work by one story, admittedly extremely grim, is not right. She can be macabre, but she is never without rays of hope.
I am not an optimist, and I can enjoy books that are grim, but not ones without rays of hope. Hope is essential to the Christian life.
Nov '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Sisyphus: Exposure to a certain amount of oppressiveness serves proper notice to students that all is not cheerful and light in our little corner.
Okay. I can live with that.
Sisyphus: I do think that some find the stern and oppressive stuff the real meat of literature. Faulkner's stuff dwells on the post-bellum South's decay. Depressed and alcoholic, his few stories I have read speak to punctured dreams and unwinding or vestigial southern mores. This stuff is an acquired taste, a blend of Twain's eye for character and Poe's sense of story, pacing, and timing. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" has been used to teach generations the art of indirect exposition by exploiting the setting.
I don't like to think that studying literature should have to mean marinating in darkness, especially for high school students. Maybe Hawthorne is as dark as they should get. Dark doesn't necessarily mean more complex and challenging, although I suppose it could. And there are levels of bleakness a teacher should consider.
As for your brilliant summary of Faulkner's merits, I think that maybe I should not have majored in English.
Nov '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
StickerShock: I ltruly loved Sister Carrie, Heart of Darkness, and Lord of the Flies.
While I think there is value in reading a mix of the bleak and the beautiful, I distinctly remember feeling almost clinically depressed after reading Last Exit to Brooklyn for an English class at Rutgers. The darkness and depravity haunted me for months.
Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies--I saw they served a clear purpose. Or, if I didn't quite get Heart of Darkness, I was awed by this Polish man's command of English. Sister Carrie--I don't think you could pay me to read it, after sampling some of Dreiser's other work. I would love to hear why you loved it.
Clinically depressed, haunting darkness and depravity--no, thank you. This is a great example of why I question the choices of literature professors and teachers everywhere. If it doesn't make your life better and enrich you in some way, but instead brings you darkness, why uphold it as worthy of study?
Edited on Feb 26, 2011 at 7:59amNov '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
MamaToad: I am not an optimist, and I can enjoy books that are grim, but not ones without rays of hope. Hope is essential to the Christian life.
Agreed. I need hope in my sad stories. O'Connor and others that speak to the truth of human depravity are writing on a worthy theme, one that forces us to look outside ourselves for redemption. I have no problem with that.
I still wouldn't read O'Connor in my free time.
Dec '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
I would have to say Atlas Shrugged was one of the most depressing tomes I've ever tackled. Every time I'd pick it up I just felt down. It honestly discouraged me from picking up anything else by Rand.
Of course, you can always turn to the Holy Bible and the book of Job. Depressing literature has been around for a long time.
Jul '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
sawatdeeka: ...
I don't like to think that studying literature should have to mean marinating in darkness, especially for high school students. Maybe Hawthorne is as dark as they should get. Dark doesn't necessarily mean more complex and challenging, although I suppose it could. And there are levels of bleakness a teacher should consider.
As for your brilliant summary of Faulkner's merits, I think that maybe I should not have majored in English.
You are far too kind. I appreciate Faulkner's technique, but was never drawn to his work the way I was to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Literature is such a huge field that there are not enough days in a lifetime to read everything you really want to read. Especially now that more is in print and cheaper than ever before in human history, counting electronic format.
Spending a month delving in dark fields is not the worst thing that can happen to an adolescent. Years and years could be a very bad thing. Under most college curricula, by senior year you are picking what you read and write about. Going in, I thought I would focus on Hemingway, but found Chaucer in the interim. Enjoy.
Jan '11
Re: The Blight Stuff
Stuart Creque: My favorite short story of all time is "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. In about eight pages, it creates a world so terrifying and hopeless that haunts you forever. Yes. Unforgettable. Brilliant.
One story I would like to erase from my mind is Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day." Heartbreaking.
Mama Toad: I agree with you that F. O'Connor can be difficult, but she is also incredibly funny at times. "The Enduring Chill" for example, I find hilarious.
Yup. I can remember sputtering with laughter while reading some of her stories. Maybe you have to be from the South to fully enjoy how she nails some of our peculiarities.
Nov '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Funny, I kind of like Bleak House. My nomination for the most depressing book ever is Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I had to read it for a class, and I just couldn't do it. Finally I had to find a friend and sit and read it in her dorm room, with her for company. Even so I had to get up and walk around the room every few pages.
Dec '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
sawadeetka, Faulkner didn't stick with me. Steinbeck, on the other hand, did. Of Mice and Men is a favorite for how it dangled the hope of a better tomorrow and then dashed it to pieces, and The Pearl was also unrelenting in its bleakness. They recall Greek tragedy, tales of how the Fates and the Gods hold our future in their hands, and we can do nothing to change their plans for us.
Dec '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
Harlan Ellison is a master of this genre. I Hav No Mouth (And I Must Scream) is amazing, a novella about the last humans on Earth, kept alive merely as playthings and objects of vengeance by the all-powerful global computer intelligence that wrested the world from humankind. The computer wants them to feel his impotent despair at being all-knowing and all-seeing... but being chained to a small planet in the corner of a middling galaxy, unable ever to learn and see more.
Jun '10
Re: The Blight Stuff
The Great Adventure!: I would have to say Atlas Shrugged was one of the most depressing tomes I've ever tackled. Every time I'd pick it up I just felt down. It honestly discouraged me from picking up anything else by Rand.
Of course, you can always turn to the Holy Bible and the book of Job. Depressing literature has been around for a long time. · Feb 26 at 9:08am
Wow! I had just the opposite reaction to Atlas Shrugged. As a young man reading it, it put squarely into focus for me two contrasting philosophies - one that said that wealth was something to be seized from another human being and that by mere existence people were owed something (what the union protesters in the Midwest apparently believe); and the other that said that wealth is something that is created by imagination, creativity and hard work and that those who create it deserve the credit for doing so and not be enslaved by those who claim their imagination, creativity and hard work as their own. As someone whose always had a bit of a creative bent, I found Rand's message to be revelatory and refreshing.
Re: The Blight Stuff
Stuart Creque:
As for Theodore Dreiser, I like the movie version of his "An American Tragedy," "A Place in the Sun" with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor when they were just about the two most beautiful people on Earth. The moral of the story is very telling: murder in your heart is just as deserving of punishment as murder in deed.
(By the way, I wrote another screenplay about an American real-life tragedy: the death of Tom Dooley of folk-song fame. ...
One of my all-time favorite movies and one of my all-time favorite songs. Wow. All in one comment! Maybe I'm a misanthrope at heart, after all.
Yet I can't stomach Faulkner, Dreiser, or O'Connor, although I feel that I should. Then again, my favorite book is Anna Karenina -- quite depressing, but the writing is lively somehow; there's not a dreary veil over the whole work like with the others. How is that possible, I wonder? The genius of Tolstoy, I guess.