By Flannery O'Connor

In two recent instances in Georgia, parents have objected to their eighth and ninth grade children’s reading assignment in modern fiction. This seems to happen with some regularity in cases throughout the country. The unwitting parent picks up his child’s book, glances throughout, comes upon passages of erotic detail or profanity and takes off at once to complain to the school board. Sometimes, as in one of the Georgia cases, the teacher is dismissed and hackles rise in liberal circles everywhere.

The two cases in Georgia, which involved Steinbecks’s, EAST OF EDEN, and John Hersey’s, A BELL FOR ADONO, provoked considerable newspaper comment. One columnist, in commending the enterprise of the teachers, announced that students do not like to read the fusty works of the 19th century, that their attention can best be held by novels dealing with the realities of our own time, and that the Bible too is full of racy stories.

Mr. Hersey himself addressed a letter to the state school superintendent in behalf of the teacher who had been dismissed. He pointed out that his book is not scandalous, that it attempts to convey an earnest message about the nature of democracy, and that if falls well within the limits of the principle of “total effect,” that principle followed in legal cases by which a book is judged not for isolated parts but by the final effect of the whole book upon the general reader.

I do not want to comment on the merits of these particular cases. What concerns me is what novels ought to be assigned in the eighth and ninth grades as a matter of course, for if these cases indicate anything, they indicate the haphazard way in which fiction is approached in our high schools. Presumably there is a state reading list which contains “safe” books for teachers to assign; after that it is up to the teacher.

English teachers come in good, bad and indifferent, but too frequently in high schools anyone who can speak English is allowed to teach it. Since several novels can’t easily be gathered into one text book, the fiction that students are assigned depends upon their teacher’s knowledge, ability and taste, variable factors at best. More often than not, the teacher assigns what he thinks will hold the attention and interest of the students. Modern fiction will certainly hold it.

Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning, but that is a part of the problem with which I am not equipped to deal. The devil of educationalism that possesses us is the kind that can be cast out only by prayer and fasting. No one has yet come along strong enough to do it. In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.

I would to put forward the proposition, repugnant to most English teachers, that fiction, if it is going to be taught in the high schools, should be taught as a subject and as a subject with a history. The total effect of a novel depends not only on its innate impact, but upon the experience, literary and otherwise, with which it is approached. No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James and Crane, and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when that seemed necessary or unavoidable.

There is much to be enjoyed in the great British novels of the 19th century, much that a good teacher can open up in them for the young student. There is no reason why these novels should be either too simple or too difficult for the eighth grade. For the simple they offer simple pleasures, for the more precocious they can be made to yield subtler ones if the teacher is up to it. Let the student discover, after reading the 19th century British novel, that the 19th century American novel is quite different as to its literary characteristics, and he will thereby learn something not only about these individual works but about the change which a new historical situation can effect in a literary form. Let him come to modern fiction.

Modern fiction often looks simpler than the fiction which preceded it, but in reality it is more complex. A natural evolution has taken place. The author has for the most part absented himself from direct participation in the work and has left the reader to make his own way amid experience dramatically rendered and symbolically ordered. The modern novelist merges the reader in the experience; he tends to raise the passions he touches upon. If he is a good novelist, he raises them to effect by their order and clarity a new experience—the total effect—which is not in itself sensuous or simply of the moment. Unless the child has had some literary experience before, he is not going to be able to resolve the immediate passions the book arouses into any true total picture.

It is here the moral problem will arise. It is one thing for a child to read about adultery in the Bible or in ANNA KARENINA and quite another for him to read about it in most modern fiction. This is not only because in both the former instances adultery is considered a sin, and in the latter, at most, an inconvenience, but because modern writing involves the reader in the action with a new degree of intensity and literary mores now permit him to be involved in any action a human being can perform.

In our fractured culture, we cannot agree on morals, we cannot even agree that moral matters should come before literary ones when there is a conflict between them. All this is another reason why the high schools would do well to return to their proper business of preparing foundations. Whether in the senior year students should be assigned modern novelists should depend both on their parent’s consent and on what they have already read and understood.

The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.