Classical Myths And Modern-Day Heroes

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bandarqI’ve been reading Beowulf with my on-loan teenage daughter, helping her wade through translated old English verse.  It is painstaking at times but can also be fun, making Maria laugh by pantomiming the killing of Grendel’s mother with the giant sword he finds in her lair.  And Maria is smart, and so we also talk about important concepts from the work, like heroism and the conflicts between pagan and Christian heroic codes that permeate the work.

At the same time, Cormac is studying comparative mythology—Greek, Roman, Norse, and Egyptian—in his 4^th grade enrichment class.  They’ve been talking about heroes, too, and sooner or later his teacher will pose the question of what constitutes a pendekar today.

Then the other day with my undergraduates, we were discussing Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and I was pointing out some of the various allusions in the novel to Paradise Lost, The Scarlet Letter, and Classical myths such as that of Narcissus and Odysseus.  (My undergrads are sadly not very well read, and only a handful had read either Hawthorne or Homer, and none had read Milton). The protagonist of Sanctuary is a small town lawyer named Horace Benbow, who’s fleeing a morally compromised situation with his step-daughter, and winds up defending the husband of a prostitute against charges that he raped the daughter of a local judge.  One young woman in my class made an astute observation that Horace seemed like a modern, common man’s hero, going on a journey and battling metaphorical monsters.  I enthusiastically agreed, and pointed out that Horace’s surname even alludes to the scene in the Odyssey when Odysseus challenges the suitors to bend and string his bow, which none of them can do.  Odysseus then bends the bow, which allows him to kill the suitors and thereby cleanse his home, defend his wife, and restore order to a world fallen into chaos and disrepute.

All this talk of heroism got me thinking about heroes in this masa when so many athletes have been discredited as cheats, and politicians have been reduced to mud slinging power seekers, and public servants like teachers and state troopers are routinely demonized by legislators and journalists alike.  I thought, who and what is a pendekar today?

On Wednesday, I brought my daughter to art class after school, over at UConn’s Depot Campus, and on the way out I ran into an old friend and his kids.  I’ll call him Ben, for the sake of privacy.  Ben’s about 52 and looks it.  He has not seen the inside of a gym in decades.  He smokes, though he has been trying to quit for as long as I have known him.  And he probably drinks a little too much.  Ben grew up working class, had an undistinguished high school career, and worked many unglamorous jobs before attending Avery Point and then transferring to Storrs.  Upon graduation, Ben worked here and there, was often out of work, and then briefly owned his own business.  For many years now he has worked in retail. 

In terms of heroic codes, Ben does not come particularly close to meeting any Classical criteria.

But let me tell you a little about Ben.  In his twenties, Ben fell head over heels for a slightly older woman who had recently divorced her abusive husband and was struggling to raise her two daughters as a single mom.  Ben married that woman and loved and raised those girls as his own.  Both girls went to college (one to an Ivy League school).  And both are now happily married with children. 

Ben and his wife made decisions back in the day to not have children of their own.  They were busy enough raising the two girls.  But after the girls were grown up and moved out, Ben and his wife decided it was time to try to have a child together, before they were too old to attempt it.  The short version of the story is that they lost the baby in the third trimester.  Enough said. 

As soon as their grief subsided sufficiently, Ben and his wife contacted the state about pre-adoptive foster care.  Initially, they were told there’d be a long wait.  They were surprised, and asked if there weren’t plenty of children in need of homes.  The agent told them there were plenty of kids, but they were all black and Hispanic.  If they wanted a white child, they’d have to wait.  Once Ben and his wife assured the woman that they did not care about the race of the child, they were told they could have a foster child within days.  In fact, they had twins in less than a week.

The twins had been born prematurely to a heroin-addicted prostitute.  Their biological father, as determined by DNA testing, was serving a life sentence for first degree murder.  The kids had (and have) myriad medical needs, and the fight for full custody took three years and was exacerbated by an activist judge who refused to give custody of Latino children to non-Latino parents.  In the end, Ben and his wife won that battle, which was seven years ago now.

Today, the twins are middle schoolers.  They receive all the medical care they need, they take dance and music classes, study martial arts, and ride their bikes up and down their street.  They have a stable home, a loving mom and dad, two older sisters, and even nieces and nephews.

Ben does not have the noble lineage of Aeneas, the ripped torso of Achilles, or the flowing auburn locks of Odysseus.  Nor does he have the academic or professional resume of a renowned scholar or a wealthy entrepreneur.  But Ben is a loving husband, and, more impressively, he has stepped in where other men have failed, slayed the demons of prejudice and bureaucracy, and helped raise four children into healthy, happy, successful people.  Perhaps you’ll never read his story in an epic poem or a best-selling novel, but his heroism is arguably peerless.

Embracing The Shitty First Draft

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Lately I have been trying to get my students to buy into the Shitty First Draft.  I teach writing intensive courses each semester, and one of the core requirements of the W courses is that there must be explicit writing instruction.  When I sit down at the beginning of each semester and think about what I want to do differently or better in my courses, I always come to the conclusion that I can do a better job of teaching writing.  This is not necessarily true in the Advanced Composition course the Education students have to take, but I’d have to admit that there’s some truth to my own self-criticism in regards to the American Lit courses I teach each fall.

The students have to write a 15 page paper, for which I require a succession of drafts.  I build in workshop days approximately every fourth class for the students to work in groups on their latest drafts of the assignment, and during these I sit in on the groups and add my two cents.  I also require conferences at midterm and make myself available for conferences by appointment throughout the semester.  But this isn’t always enough. 

This semester, I have found that my students are having tremendous difficulty just generating ideas for their papers, and they are coming to workshop sessions with very paltry drafts.  Not just shitty drafts in the classic sense of the term, but drafts that are really nothing more than a paragraph or a list.

After having talked to about half of the twenty students in the course, I began to see clear patterns.  1.  Students were not taking the time to read the samples of student essays I had provided, and even when they did they really did not know what was important to observe.  2.  The students were not especially well read, either in terms of classic literature, Bible stories, or mythology, or in terms of current events.  In terms of popular texts like movies and television, they were unsure how to begin reading these as texts.  3.  They were so terrified of not having enough to say about a topic for fifteen pages that they strove for exceedingly broad topics in the resigned belief that even if they didn’t write a good paper they’d at least be more likely to fulfill the page requirement.  4.  They were unwilling to embrace the messiness of the drafting process.  They were horrified by the thought of cutting and pasting, moving things around, exploring tangents, and having multiple, interrelated tasks going on simultaneously.

So then I asked myself what I could do differently.  I started by taking a day to discuss some of the student papers I have posted on a course wiki, talking aloud about what I thought was successful, effective, or interesting, and why.  I asked the students to make observations and note patterns of what students did to make the papers effective.  In conferences, I spent time going online and showing the students good websites for current events, starting with places like the New York Times.  Many students were surprised at how comprehensive such a site was.  I also gave a lot of pep talks and struck deals.  I’d say, "Get to seven pages and then let’s revisit this idea about the 15 page paper."  I also had to assure the students that the learning process was more important than the grading process.

Lastly, and this was in many ways the hardest and most important psychological hump to get over, I had to encourage and cajole the students into embracing the shitty first (and sometimes second, third, and fourth) draft.  We read Annie Lamott’s chapter by the same name.  I showed them how I use two—and sometimes, with the help of a laptop, three—screens to be able to see multiple drafts and pages, so I can cut and paste from one draft into a new one, while simultaneously doing research on a third screen.  I told them stories I’d heard from Wally Lamb about using notecards on bulletin boards, and even showed photos of William Faulkner’s home where he wrote his outline of ideas and events for A Fable on the walls of his bedroom. 

I don’t know yet how much this has or will help, but students thus far have expressed thankfulness for these various efforts.  Their next draft is due on the 18^th.  I guess I’ll find out then how much of this was taken to heart and mind.