I’ve been kind of torn up by this week’s reading, The Chocolate War.
In the second chapter the antagonist Archie Costello claims that “Life is shit.” It seemed shocking, yet somehow quaint, to put such a raucous phrase in a high school student’s mouth so soon in the novel. The character seemed to be genuine, but it felt like the book might be trying too hard.
By the end, however, I was agreeing with the little monster Archie, the master puppeteer organizing most of the hostility and violence in the story. I agreed with his sentiment, that life is shit.
The characters are fascinating, the plot is cruelly pragmatic and also fascinating, but this is a contemporary tragedy on the scale of Macbeth or Lear. Things start bad, they get worse, the good guys get broken, things are looking good for the bad guys, and The End. I can understand why this book is a “banned book.” I don’t agree with the concept that there should even be a “banned book,” yet I’ve been having a hard time imagining a situation in which I’d actually recommend this book to a student. It’s dark, nihilistic, misogynistic; It doesn’t communicate a world that is hopeful, and that’s going to be an important idea in my classroom.
And that’s fine. I don’t need to teach this book. There’s a bevy or books to read and you can’t get to them all anyways. But then, if a student brings it to class, and is reading it, then I do have to ‘teach it.’ Have to consider it.
I remember being in high school, and I remember reading The Open Boat by Stephen Crane, and I remember enjoying it for its pure pragmatism. There wasn’t any bullshit happy ending (sorry, cussing seems to be the order of the day for me, apparently). There wasn’t any invisible rule or inspiration that made it all alright. In The Open Boat, the most likeable, hard working character is the one to perish in the end – and when I read it, I thought to myself, fuck yes, this is life. Just because he worked hard doesn’t mean he gets a free pass at mortality. In fact, because he worked hard he had no more strength for self-preservation.
There was something brutally honest about that, like someone pulling on your ear and saying “Listen here kid. Let me tell ya how it really is.”
That being said, I’m a big proponent for giving kids a positive life message. You can do it! Keep it up! Things get better! Yeah, and then there’s The Chocolate War, whose message seems to be: there is no message. Dogs eat dogs. You want to be happy? Get in line, don’t make waves, bow down to your superiors. If someone holds you in the palm of their hand, don’t rebel, or you will get squished.
But, I have to admit, there’s a time for that kind of message. This summer I was in a class that was discussing the nature of the American Dream: the idea that so long as you have God given ability, and you work your butt off, you can achieve whatever you want to achieve. I like the idea behind this, the self-reliance, and I want to promote it, but the truth is: people need support. You know that movie we’ve all seen once or twice, where the unfortunate kid rises above and gets out of the ghetto, purely on his own integrity and will to rise above? Yeah, that story is a myth, if you consider how often it actually happens. People need support. People without support get squished. You can achieve a lot by will alone, but people who get beat up all their lives don’t usually come out the other side intact, rearing for another go, ready for another fight.
Nope, people who get beat up get beat down. The American Dream is a myth. As Archie puts it, “Life is shit.”
And I still don’t know if I’d willingly introduce that story to my classroom, but I’m pretty sure students will be bringing to the classroom on their own. And it would be a disservice on my part to ignore it.
I actually came to this conclusion sitting in the park, working on my reader response, letting my son play on the monkey bars. He was playing with a couple girls twice his age, one was probably twelve and the other one was maybe a year younger. He actually knew the older girl, a sarcastic pre-teen, because she was the older sister of a boy he’d played with before. It was the first time I’d met her. But I overheard a conversation between them all that seemed relevant to the struggles I was having with The Chocolate War:
“I was in Canada,” the sarcastic twelve year old stated. “I got to go to Canada, and I got to watch a guy have a heart attack. And I was sad.”
“Who was it?” her younger friend inquired.
“I don’t know, some old guy, except all he did was spit spaghetti out. It was in Calgary, a place called The Spaghetti Factory.”
“Was he okay?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t know him, so I didn’t check on him.”
“Did the ambulance come?”
“Someone called, and then when it came my favorite song was on, and I couldn’t enjoy it.”
“Watch me jump. I can jump farther than anyone.”
“You’re a brager.”
“What?”
“A brager, someone who says they’re better than anyone else. You’re a brager.”
“No I’m not.”
“Yeah, you said you have the best shoes. That was bragging. Like all the boys would notice you because of your shoes. And like you first.”
“What?”
“NEVERMIND.”
At this point my son pipes up, five years old, still eager to please, still taking his parent’s word as the way it is: “If you guys don’t agree, why don’t you just not play for a while?”
“We’re stuck with each other,” the sarcastic girl relented, “we’re cousins.”
“We love each other,” the other girl confirmed.
“Yeah. Well, NOT like that! We’re cruel to each other. Well, I’m cruel to her.”
“We’re often meanest to the people we love,” I interject from across the way, where I’m sitting at the bench, scribbling all the dialogue down.
“Yeah,” the sarcastic girl agreed. “It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true. I’m just devious. No, not devious, my brother’s devious. I’m cruel. But I said that already.”
And there it was, a pre-teen self-identifying as cruel. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that teens and pre-teens aren’t dealing with just as harsh, dark, nihilistic concepts as we deal with as adults. Everyone deals with real tragedy. So somehow I can see where The Chocolate War could be important in a child’s life, although I’m not really possessed with the ability to explain how. It’s kind of a hunch. Something yet to meditate upon.
