education, education reform, literacy, reading, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Formal Schooling and the Death of Literacy

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My privilege is easily identified in my being white and male, but it is the story of my life that better reveals my enormous privilege established by my mother when I was a child.

I entered formal schooling with such a relatively high level of literacy and numeracy that from those first days I was labeled “smart”—a misnomer for that privilege.

From Green Eggs and Ham to Hop on Pop, from canasta to spades, from Chinese checkers to Scrabble—games with my mother and often my father were my schooling until I entered first grade. And none of that ever seemed to be a chore, and none of that involved worksheets, reading levels, or tests.

Formal schooling was always easy for me because of those roots, but formal schooling was also often tedious and so much that had to be tolerated to do the things I truly enjoyed—such as collecting, reading, and drawing from thousands of comic books throughout my middle and late teens. I was also voraciously reading science fiction and never once highlighting the literary techniques or identifying the themes or tone.

During my spring semester, I spend a great deal of time observing pre-service English/ELA teachers, and recently I had an exchange on Twitter about the dangers of grade retention, notably connected to third-grade high-stakes testing.

And from those, I have been musing more than usual about how formal school—how English/ELA teachers specifically—destroy literacy, even when we have the best of intentions.

From the first years of K-3 until the last years of high school, students have their experiences of literacy murdered by a blind faith in and complete abdication to labeling text by grade levels and narrow approaches to literary analysis grounded in New Criticism and what I call the “literary technique hunt.”

Misreading the Importance of Third-Grade Reading

As I have addressed often, reading legislation across the U.S. is trapped in a simplistic crisis mode connected to research identifying the strong correlation between so-called third-grade reading proficiency and later academic success.

Let’s unpack that by addressing the embedded claims that rarely see the light of day.

The first claim is that labeling a text as a grade level is as valid as assigning a number appears. While it is quite easy to identify a text by grade level (most simply calculate measurables such as syllables per word and words per sentence), those calculations entirely gloss over the relationship between counting word/ sentence elements and how a human draws meaning from text—key issues such as prior knowledge and literal versus figurative language.

A key question, then, is asking in whose interest is this cult of measuring reading levels—and the answer is definitely not the student.

This technocratic approach to literacy can facilitate a certain level of efficiency and veneer of objectivity for the work of a teacher; it is certainly less messy.

But the real reason the cult of measuring reading levels exists is the needs of textbook companies who both create and perpetuate the need for measuring students’ reading levels and matching that to the products they sell.

Reading levels are a market metric that are harmful to both students and teaching/learning. And they aren’t even very good metrics in terms of how well the levels match any semblance of reading or learning to read.

The fact is that all humans are at some level of literacy and can benefit from structured purposeful instruction to develop that level of literacy. In that respect, everyone is remedial and no one is proficient.

Those facts, however, do not match well the teaching and learning industry that is the textbook scam that drains our formal schools of funding better used elsewhere—almost anywhere else.

Remaining shackled to measuring and labeling text and students murders literacy among our students; it is inexcusable, and is a root cause of the punitive reading policies grounded in high-stakes testing and grade retention.

The Literary Technique Hunt

By middle and high school—although we continue to focus on whether or not students are reading at grade level—we gradually shift our approach to text away from labeling students/ texts and toward training students in the subtle allure of literary analysis: mining text for technique.

Like reading levels, New Criticism’s focus on text in isolation and authoritative meaning culled from calculating how techniques produce a fixed meaning benefits from the veneer of objectivity, lending itself to selected-response testing.

And thus, the great technique hunt, again, benefits not students, but teachers and the inseparable textbook and testing industries.

The literary technique hunt, however, slices the throat of everything that matters about text—best represented by Flannery O’Connor:

I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.

In other words, “A poem should not mean/But be,” as Archibald MacLeish explains.

Texts of all genres and forms are about human expression, about the aesthetic possibilities of creativity.

No writer, like no visual artist, writes in order to have the words or artwork replaced by the reductive act of a technocratic calculating of meaning through the algebra of New Criticism.

To continue the hokum that is “reading level” and to continue mining text for techniques—these are murderous practices that leave literacy moribund and students uninspired and verbally bankrupt.

The very best and most effective literacy instruction requires no textbooks, no programs, and no punitive reading policies.

Literacy is an ever-evolving human facility; it grows from reading, being read to, and writing—all by choice, with passion, and in the presence of others more dexterous than you are.

Access to authentic text, a community or readers and writers, and a literacy mentor—these are where our time and funds should be spent instead of the cult of efficiency being sold by textbook and testing companies.

Charleston Post and Courier, education, education reform, Educational Research, Florida Miracle, grade retention, Media, NCTE, NCTQ, NEPC, reading, teacher preparation, Testing

Today in “Don’t Believe It”

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More often than not, mainstream media and think tanks produce claims about education that are without credibility.

Sometimes the source is also lacking credibility, but many times, the source has good intentions.

Today in “Don’t Believe It,” let’s consider both types.

First, NCTQ—a think tank entirely lacking in credibility—issued a report claiming that teacher education is lousy, basing their claims on a fumbled review of textbooks assigned and course syllabi.

Don’t believe it because NCTQ bases the claims on one weak study about what every teacher should know, and then did a review of textbooks and syllabi that wouldn’t be allowed in undergraduate research courses.

See the full review here.

Next, despite genuinely good intentions, Kecio Greenho, regional executive director of Reading Partners Charleston, claims in an Op-Ed for The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) that South Carolina’s Read to Succeed, which includes provision for third-grade retention based on high-stakes test scores, “is a strong piece of legislation that gives support to struggling readers by identifying them as early as possible.”

Don’t believe it because Read to Succeed is a copy-cat of similar policies across the U.S. that remain trapped in high-stakes testing and grade retention, although decades of research have shown retention to be very harmful to children.

See this analysis of Read to Succeed, the research base on grade retention, and the National Council of Teachers of English’s resolution on grade retention and high-stakes testing.

When you are confronted with claims about education, too often the source and the claim are without merit, but you have to be aware that those with good intentions can make false claims as well.

education, NCTQ, NEPC

NEPC: Review of Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know

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Review of Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know

P.L. Thomas, Christian Z. Goering
March 22, 2016
Press Release →

As part of an ongoing series of reports by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Learning About Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know makes broad claims about teacher education based on a limited analysis of textbooks and syllabi. The report argues that teacher education materials, specifically educational psychology and methods textbooks, are a waste of funds and do not adequately focus on what the report identifies as six essential strategies. These inadequacies, the report contends, result in ill-prepared teacher candidates lacking in “research-proven instructional strategies” (p. vi). The report offers recommendations for textbook publishers, teacher education programs, and state departments of education. However, it is not grounded in a comprehensive examination of the literature on teaching methods, and it fails to validate the evaluative criteria it employs in selecting programs, textbooks, and syllabi. The single source it relies on to justify its “six essential strategies” provides limited support for NCTQ’s claims. This primary source concludes, with only one exception, that the evidence supporting each of the six strategies is only moderate or weak. Limiting the analysis to one source that provides only tepid support renders the report of little value for improving teacher preparation, selecting textbooks, or guiding educational policy.

Capitalism, consumerism, Disaster capitalism, Meritocracy, privilege, racism

U.S. Offers Only Soft or Hard Commitments to Ravages of Consumerism

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Many people have commented on the rise of Trump as the leader in the Republican quest for president—noting it is like a bad reality show or some life-imitates-art version of Idiocracy.

However, the truth of what Trump represents is much, much uglier than any of those speculations because Trump represents almost perfectly exactly who the U.S. is, and essentially always has been.

The U.S. has always bloviated on sweeping and grand ideologies about Freedom, Liberty, and so much horse manure, but the very beginnings of that were while white males owned human slaves and white females were human only in relationship to some white man.

The U.S. has always been about someone’s freedom at the expense of other people’s human dignity; and that fact remains today in 2016.

And when people say the the U.S. is a conservative nation, mostly right of center (especially in relationship to Europe and Canada), the reality of that is “conservative” is a code for a blind and nearly rabid commitment to consumerism—a consumerism grounded in Social Darwinism that breeds a lust for financial wealth regardless of the consequences to others.

Sure, Trump is profoundly unqualified to be a national leader and is spewing vile and inexcusable hatred, but the space between Trump and mainstream Republicans and Democrats is minuscule once you set aside the rhetoric.

From Trump to Cruz, a slight step back and to the side; from Cruz to Hillary, yet another slight step back and to the side. Republicans bark a hard commitment and Democrats skirt a soft commitment to the ravages of consumerism, but the consequences are the same.

Except for Sanders in the 2016 election cycle, team politics between Republicans and Democrats is splitting hairs and turning a blind eye to your candidate while eviscerating the other side’s candidate for the same behavior.

Mainstream politics in the U.S. creates the delusion of choice and keeps the public frantic so that no one notices there really is no difference because everything is about the winners maintaining their edge.

Never-ending war, mass incarceration, staggering income and wealth inequity, underfunded public institutions, refusals to acknowledge lingering racism—these are the qualities among every candidate on both sides of the so-called aisle.

The Nixon/Reagan contributions to mass incarceration of black and brown populations are nearly indistinguishable from the Clinton era gutting of the social safety net devastating the same people.

And all the while, the only thing that matters is the economy. The sacred economy doomed George W. Bush’s presidency and ushered in Obama—not any ethical matters of war or failures to secure human dignity or the lip service we give Democracy.

There could be few indignities worse than electing Trump as president of the U.S., but to be perfectly honest, Trump is in the course of the history of the country, the most perfect representative of who we are and have always been: A cartoon character spewing bromides to hide our dark and soulless greed.

And then, nearly as bad, if we elect someone from the remaining mainstream candidates, that indignity will be only slightly less than choosing Trump because what she or he represents is so close to being the same that it really doesn’t matter.

Capitalism, Charter schools, Disaster capitalism, education, education reform, Teach for America

A Crack in the Dam of Disaster Capitalism Education Reform?

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“Disaster capitalism” may at first blush appear to be hyperbole, ideological manipulation, or so much academic jargon; however, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the education reform that disaster unintentionally created now represents the various components of how those market-based policies both reflect and perpetuate the very educational problems reformers claim to be addressing.

For this post, I am targeted as elements of disaster capitalism education reform the following: dismantling teachers’ unions/tenure, hiring Teach For America (TFA) cadets, converting traditional public schools to charter schools, and creating takeover districts (often called “achievement” or “opportunity” districts).

Before addressing how these disaster capitalism reforms are failing, I want to emphasize that very real and clear problems exist in traditional public schools (TPS), for example:

  • TPS are increasingly segregated by race and social class.
  • Vulnerable student populations (poor, black/brown, English Language Learners [ELL], special needs students) are disproportionately attending underfunded schools and school buildings in disrepair; they are funneled into low-tracked courses that are test-prep and/or unchallenging (basic); they are assigned inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers while also sitting in high teacher-student ratios courses; and they are disproportionately subjected to inequitable disciplinary policies and outcomes.

When the education reform movement kicked into high gear, the promises were grand and the evidence was thin, but now we are beginning to have evidence of how the grand claims have wilted on the vine, and the fruit is rotting all around us.

The blunt truth is disaster capitalism reform commitments failed to admit the real problems facing our TPS (societal inequity as well as in-school inequity), offered market-based solutions that could only address problems indirectly (the Invisible Hand), and have refused to admit the growing research base showing that these so-called reforms create and perpetuate the problems reformers ignored at the outset (the whole “no excuses” charade that trivialized addressing societal inequity as making excuses).

Charter schools are not raising test scores, but they are segregating children by race and class. Charter schools are also intensifying the already inequitable disciplinary practices vulnerable students face in formal schooling (notably for black and brown children).

Takeover school districts (such as the Recovery School District in New orleans) have been unmasked as failures.

But possibly the best example of how disaster capitalism education reform is failing is now being exposed by former TFA participants, specifically the research of Terrenda C. White.

White’s analysis reveals that while TFA makes big claims about addressing diversity (and may have done so within TFA), the consequences of districts and states committing to TFA have had the opposite effect. In an interview, White strikes at this paradox:

What happened in New Orleans, for example, is a microcosm of this larger issue where you have a blunt policy that we know resulted in the displacement of teachers of color, followed by TFA’s expansion in that region. I’ve never heard TFA talk about or address that issue. Or take Chicago, where the number of Black teachers has been cut in half as schools have been closed or turned around. In the lawsuits that teachers filed against the Chicago Board of Education, they used a lot of social science research and tracked that if a school was low performing and was located on the north or the west side and had a higher percentage of white teachers, that school was less likely to be closed. As the teachers pointed out, this wasn’t just about closing low-performing schools, but closing low-performing schools in communities of color, and particularly those schools that had a higher percentage of teachers of color. What bothers me is that we have a national rhetoric about wanting diversity when at the same time we’re actually manufacturing the lack of diversity in the way in which we craft our policies. And we mete them out in a racially discriminatory way. So in many ways we’re creating the problem we say we want to fix (emphasis added).

The evidence is clear, across the elements of disaster capitalism education reform, that these policies are suffering from the same inequities that are at the root of TPS failures.

I have been making this plea for some time now, but the evidence has grown in my favor, and even those from within the disaster capitalism education reform movement, such as White, have begun to admit the crack:

Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease (emphasis added). (Oscar Wilde [1891], The Soul of Man under Socialism)

Let us now admit the larger problems, confront the failures of TPS, and then create policies that address directly and openly the problems, many of which are related to race and social class inequity.

Childhood, education

Stop Normalizing, Idealizing “Exceptional”

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My granddaughter loves Disney Junior, and while she was watching and eating breakfast, a transition commercial announced with excessive glee: “Dream big and never give up!”

And all I can think is: What total and harmful crap.

Because our cultural narrative that normalizes and idealizes “exceptional” has been gnawing at me lately.

I have always bristled a the horse manure sloganification we heap on children: You can be anything you want to be! Reach for the stars!

Part of my concern is that this idealizing of exceptional to the degree that we make it the norm that everyone must aspire to be exceptional (a result impossible since once everyone achieved that, no one would be exceptional) feeds into our cultural ignorance about outliers: Make any generalized claim about a topic people don’t believe despite the evidence or don’t understand, and the typical response will be something like: “O, yea, see this anecdote of mine about an outlier!”

But my direct concern about “Dream big and never give up!” is how this cultural hokum drives our alienation and anxiety, especially among children.

Why can’t we allow people to be happy and content with their mediocrity, their normalcy, their average abilities and aspirations?

George Clooney and I are about the same age, but he has mega-dollars and mega-fame—and, damn it, he is very pretty.

If his exceptionality is the basis for my self-worth, my happiness, I am royally screwed, languishing under the anxiety that I just didn’t dream big enough and I gave up in my quest to be pretty, popular, and wealthy.

So, all you kids out there, and all you languishing adults trapped under the avalanche of “Dream big and never give up!,” let me offer a much healthier dictum: Dream big and never give up? No! Dream appropriate to you and then give it your best effort; and then, feel free to change your mind and levels of effort—and you may want to be OK with not making any of that work.

And feel free to tell all those Dream-Big merchants to kiss off.

Anxiety, CCSS, Charter schools, comic books, Critical Pedagogy, education, education reform, race, racism

Sunday 20 March 2016 Reader: in Just-/spring?

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In many regions of this planet, humans are gifted the changing seasons, including the drift into hibernation and then the rebirth of spring.

One of my favorite poems has always been [in Just-] by e.e. cummings—in part because I read the “Just” as both “only” and the root of “justice,” wondering if in fact spring is just in the human sense of that justice or more so in the less ethics-grounded justice of natural dynamics.

As we slip into spring, then, I offer a smattering of varied readings, many of which should help in meditating on our human sense of justice.

Critical Pedagogy, education, education reform, Grit

Confronting and Rejecting Jargon and Practices Reinforcing Racism/Classism in Education

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Doreen Massey recounts her experience with a “customer liaison” at an art exhibition, leading her to note:

This is a crucial part of the way that neoliberalism has become part of our commonsense understanding of life. The vocabulary we use to talk about the economy is in fact a political construction, as Stuart Hall, Michael Rustin and I have argued in our Soundings manifesto.

In other words, the words we use reflect and reinforce the dominant ideologies of a society, a culture, an organization, or a field.

What is troubling about the power of the language we use—often unconsciously and uncritically—is that we are in a constant state of maintaining the status quo, including bigotry and inequity.

If we shift our attention to formal education, what would you consider the primary differences between struggling or failing students (mostly poor and black or brown) and successful or excelling students (mostly financially secure or affluent and white)?

Despite the current jargon of the day and the bombardment of programs, materials, and experts being sold to educators and schools, those primary differences are not a lack of grit, the absence of a growth mindset, a failure of rigor in the curriculum and the teachers’ expectations, or some combination of these.

“Grit,” “growth mindset,” and “rigor”—to name a few—are veneer, marketable veneer, for the truth about what students succeed/excel and what students struggle/fail. These terms force all the attention of educators and education on the student, creating in those students who struggle and fail (and the teachers who teach them, the schools who serve them) a deficit identity—they lack rigor, they lack a growth mindset, they aren’t being exposed to rigorous curriculum or expectations. In short, these terms and practices are about fixing broken children.

The problem with these terms and practices is that veneer masks the existing racism and classism at the root of who fails and who succeeds in our schools and in our society.

The primary reasons some people flourish and some people flounder are not in those people but in the conditions of their lives—often conditions not of their making.

Wealthy white students flourish in the slack provided them because of their privilege, and poor children of color flounder in the scarcity of living under the weight of racism and classism.

As I have noted often, if we use level of educational attainment as a marker of effort (more education equals greater effort), why do two people with the same education, one black and one white, result in the black person earning less?

The evidence is overwhelming that class and race (as well as gender) trump significantly manufactured silver bullets such as grit, a growth mindset, or rigor.

To claim that academic success dominated by white and wealthy students is mostly from their effort is a nasty lie, and to suggest that struggling and failing among student populations dominated by poor and black/brown students is mostly from their lack of effort, their lack of vision for success, and a failure to demand enough of them is even nastier.

“Grit,” “growth mindset,” and “rigor” are coded words for classist and racist ideologies and practices. They work to make the victims of bigotry and inequity turn all their attention and effort inward so that they are too distracted, too frantic to see the unearned fruits of privilege.

“Grit,” “growth mindset,” and “rigor” are about embracing and perpetuating “you must work twice as hard to have half as much.”

If we believe in education that is liberatory and a source of change, we must confront the language, stop using it, and then totally reject the practices that mislabel privilege as achievement and impose deficit identities on our most vulnerable students.

Massey ends her examination of the words we use with a call relevant to education:

Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic “common sense” needs to be challenged root and branch.

We must question the very way we think about, talk about, and practice education. To fail in that regard is to maintain an education system that reflects and reinforces on the backs of other people’s children the bigotry and inequity that still plagues us as a people.

Charleston Post and Courier, Charter schools, education, education reform, Teach for America

The Post and Courier: Beware of ‘turnaround’ school districts

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The Post and Courier: Beware of ‘turnaround’ school districts

[see original submission with hyperlinks embedded below]

South Carolina has a shameful history regarding vulnerable populations of students being served in our high-poverty, racial minority areas of the state, notably our Corridor of Shame along I-95.

That neglect eventually prompted a court battle in SC over adequately funding high-poverty schools. That case has finally been settled, and now SC political leaders are faced with how to address school funding; low achievement among impoverished students, racial minorities, English language learners, and special needs students; and teacher recruitment and retention in those high-needs schools.

In the Post and Courier, Paul Bowers has reported that some are advocating for charter takeover of these struggling districts, strategies made politically appealing from New Orleans to Tennessee to Michigan. Nearby Georgia and North Carolina are also considering takeover plans.

However, these so-called “opportunity” or “achievement” districts have two serious problems that warrant SC not making such commitments. First, advocacy for takeovers is mostly political cheerleading, and second, a growing body of research has revealed that takeovers have not achieved what advocates claim and often have replicated or even increased the exact problems they were designed to solve, such as race and class segregation and inequitable educational opportunities.

Three important reports on takeovers include the following:

Although media and political claims about the recovery of education in New Orleans post-Katrina have promoted success, Adamson, Cook-Harvey, and Darling-Hammond have concluded:

Based on respondents’ experiences and district data, as well as a review of existing research, policies, and documents, we find that the New Orleans reforms have created a set of schools that are highly stratified by race, class, and educational advantage, operating in a hierarchy that provides very different types of schools serving different “types” of children.

In other words, the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans created by firing the entire public school teacher workforce and forming an all-charter school system has continued to suffer low test scores, while the new school system remains deeply segregated and inequitable.

Further, in Education Week, Kent McGuire, Katherine Dunn, Kate Shaw, and Adam Schott argue:

Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery, but it’s not an appropriate prescription for the challenging work of providing individualized support to schools that need it.

[B]oth Georgia and Pennsylvania are poised to implement sweeping school turnaround plans in the form of state takeovers. These plans draw inspiration from systems operating in very different contexts elsewhere in the country and are based on a fundamental misreading of the evidence on effectiveness of these models. Just as concerning, the proposals double down on unproven governance strategies that reduce community voice in education and apply a cookie-cutter approach to the specific challenges confronting individual schools.

Takeovers in several states—similar to embracing charter schools and Teach For America—have simply shuffled funding, wasted time, and failed to address the root causes of struggling schools: concentrated poverty and social inequity.

Yes, SC must reform our public schools, and we should shift gears to address our vulnerable populations of students first. But charter takeover approaches are yet more political faddism that our state and children cannot afford.

Continuing to double-down on accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing as well as rushing to join the political reform-of-the-moment with clever names is inexcusable since we have decades of evidence about what works, and what hasn’t.

SC must embrace a new way—one committed to social policies addressing food security for the poor, stable work throughout the state, and healthcare for all, and then a new vision for education reform built on equity.

All SC students deserve experienced and certified teachers, access to challenging courses, low class sizes, fully funded schools, safe school buildings and cultures, and equitable disciplinary policies and practices. These are reforms that must be guarantees for every public school student regardless of zip code, and they need not be part of complex but cleverly named programs.

It is well past time for SC to reject falling prey to political advocacy disguised as education reform. Adopting the takeover experiment already discredited across the U.S. would be a calloused choice to continue to neglect our vulnerable students and the schools that serve them.

—

See this reader of research and analyses of that advocacy and evidence:

See also the Quality Education Project.

education

Meditations Inspired by The Vegetarian, Han Kang

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Out, damned spot! out, I say!…
Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little
hand.

Lady Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1

Gregor’s body was indeed completely dried up and flat, they had not seen it until then, but now he was not lifted up on his little legs, nor did he do anything to make them look away.

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

“Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist.

A Hunger Artist, Franza Kafka

I have come to recognize that bookstores are a sort of polar opposite of a Trump rally, a sanctuary, a place where you are surrounded by books and lovers of books—except bookstores have also become havens for WiFi vampires and coffee fiends (although these can be gentle souls as well).

I am one of those triple-sinners—book lover, WiFi vampire, and coffee fiend—but I am in my bones a book lover who walks the aisles of bookstores, ravenously gazing at book spines and covers, occasionally allowing myself simply to take a book in hand to stroke the cover without its consent.

And then there are days that rise above the simple and perverse rituals of worshipping in a bookstores. Days when a book reaches out and demands I read it.

There on the shelf of new hardback fiction was Han Kang’s The Vegetarian—a slim volume designed to enflame us like a bullfighter’s cape:

41a6hfufzql-_sx327_bo1204203200_

At first, I simply had to hold and caress this book—the texture as inviting as the colors and graphics—but then I read the inner jacket blurb.

“Nightmare” hooked me, and then “Kafkaesque” reeled me in.

///

The Vegetarian delivers on aesthetics inside the beautiful and haunting cover, its silhouette hinting at the macabre nightmare that entangles the titular character, Yeong-hye, whose life is unraveled by and entangled in a violent dream that drives her to become the vegetarian.

Originally published as three novellas, Yeong-hye’s story is revealed by a masterful use of shifting point-of-view and verb tense. One of the most powerful elements in this novel is narration: Part I: The Vegetarian narrated in first-person by Yeong-hye’s husband; Part II: Mongolian Mark narrated in third-person limited omniscient, focusing on Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law; and Part III: Flaming Trees narrated in third-person limited omnicient, focusing on Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye.

Han Kang’s craft is a testament to the power of that craft to create and reinforce meaning: Yeong-hye’s story is absent her voice, except for brief italicized glimpses of her dreams in Part I.

The narrative decisions keep Yeong-hye behind the voices of two men, in fact, before her sister—the person possibly closest to her biologically and psychologically—closes the novel; although even then, In-hye, as the men have, turns Yeong-hye’s story into her own.

Like the Kafkan emaciation of Gregor in The Metamorphosis, a work many scholars have come to admit is about the family more so than Gregor, Yeong-hye’s decent into vegetarianism metamorphoses into a suicidal eating disorder and surreal longing to become a tree—vegetarian to vegetation—and exposes through this nightmare-journey the essential nature of her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister along with her parents at a somewhat greater narrative distance but no less important.

Yeong-hye’s terrors manifested by, reflected by, or both, her recurring dream result in those closest to her slipping themselves into not recognizing Yeong-hye, acts of violence, sexual obsession, and the existential vertigo of self-awareness/self-doubt.

“Life is such a strange thing, [In-hye] thinks,” we read near the end:

Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves—living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they’d briefly managed to forget. (pp. 173-174)

There is a dark, dark beauty to Han Kang’s existential nightmare that offers nothing simple or clean while raising essential questions about human nature, human autonomy, human sexuality, and the very human urge to create and destroy.

///

About a week before I wrote about raising my daughter without the threat of physical violence, The Vegetarian reached out to me while I scanned new hardback novels.

As a former English teacher who spent much of his career helping students learn the evil art of literary analysis, I am well aware of both the skepticism by many that literary analysis is too often imposing meaning onto text and the reality that human beings see what they want to see, or possibly more fairly, what they are primed or equipped to see.

The latter, I feel, is the great human gift of being able to revisit texts again and again in order to have new and different experiences—even though the words on the pages have not changed. The change is in us.

And although I was clearly primed to read The Vegetarian as an allegory about the world’s violence against women, I am trained sufficiently in New Criticism’s cult of textual evidence to trust Han Kang weaves this motif with great purpose and intent throughout the disturbing atrophy of Yeong-hye.

The Vegetarian, for me, speaks in some ways to cultural norms as they echo so-called universals—reminding me of Haruki Murakami’s work, which offers a tangled thicket of reflecting paternalism and misogyny while not-so-clearly confronting or challenging either.

Han Kang, however, seems more purposefully handing the reader on a gothic plate a very clear condemnation of the eviscerating of women by that paternalism and misogyny.

Part I being narrated in first person by her husband strips and dehumanizes Yeong-hye immediately in the reader’s mind. He is cold, superficial, and merciless as our only conduit to Yeong-hye’s sleeping and lived nightmare seemingly linked to some guilt about or fear of all-encompassing violence:

Dark woods. No people. The sharp-pointed leaves on the trees, my torn feet. This place, almost remembered, but I’m lost now….

But the fear. My clothes still wet with blood. Hide, hide behind the trees. Crouch down, don’t let anybody see. My bloody hands. My bloody mouth….

Chewing on something that felt so real, but couldn’t have been, it couldn’t….Familiar and yet not…that vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling [original in italics]. (pp. 19-20)

Yeong-hye’s husband sees his wife’s transformation as it impacts his life, and his response is sort of a passive-aggressive violence which appears little different than his perception of her before her commitment to being a vegetarian—his disdain for her not wearing a bra, for example, that offers a twisted commentary on objectifying women through the motif of Yeong-hye’s breasts throughout the novel.

It is in this first section that we witness the violence first-hand of Yeong-hye’s father, who attempts to force Yeong-hye to eat meat, spurring Yeong-hye’s dramatic slicing of her wrists and then her being committed by Part II.

Switching to limited third-person, the narration of Part II remains through the eyes and lust of Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist.

His life as an artist is resurrected by a disturbing combination of Yeong-hye’s suicide attempt, his discovering Yeong-hye’s lingering Mongolian mark on her buttocks, and the sexual/pseudo-artistic compulsion that culminates in what can be viewed as the violence inherent in human sexuality.

Yet, it is the brother-in-law who bears witness to the absurd violence of Yeong-hye’s father:

But that her father, the Vietnam War hero, had actually struck his rebellious daughter in the face and physically forced a lump of meat into her mouth, that was something else. However much he thought back on it, he couldn’t convince himself that it had actually happened—it was more like a scene from some bizarre play. (pp. 73-74)

In Part II, Han Kang investigates art through art while wrapping a meditation on art inside Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law’s fetishizing the Mongolian mark and the need to document on film his sexual coupling with Yeong-hye—a video discovered by In-hye.

And then, in Part III, Yeong-hye is institutionalized and her story is handed to her sister. In-hye must navigate a world dominated by their father, Yeong-hye’s huband, and In-hye’s now ex-husband.

This last section will not allow us, I think, to ignore the violence, the paternalism, the  misogyny.

This last section is about women as sisters, literally and figuratively:

Yeong-hye was four years younger than her, enough of an age gap for them not to have been in competition with each other growing up. As small children their young cheeks were frequently left throbbing by their heavy-handed father, and Yeong-hye had provoked in In-hye a sense of responsibility that resembled maternal affection, a need to expend all her energy in looking out for this younger sister. (p. 135)

However, we learn eventually that the violence of their home had a primary target:

Only after all this time was she able to understand why Yeong-hye had said what she did. Yeong-hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings….Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their afther’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. (pp. 162-163)

Again, not so different than with Yeong-hye’s husband and brother-in-law, In-hye adopts Yeong-hye’s story as her own: “Could I have prevented it? Could I have prevented those unimaginable things from sinking so deep inside of Yeong-hye and holding her in their grip?” (p. 163).

The violence of the father seems to have destroyed Yeong-hye and hardened In-hye: “The feeling that she [In-hye] had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure” (p. 167).

There is an existential absurdism to Jeong-hye and then an existential realism to In-hye—each a side of In-hye’s realization that “[l]ife is such a strange thing.”

The Vegetarian builds to a parallel existential/Kafkan depiction of human existence as a mental ward:

Perhaps it is because the patients here are not free to leave….

They’re trapped here, In-hye thinks. Just like this woman, Hee-joo is bound up with the guilt she feels over having had Yeong-hye incarcerated here. (pp. 177, 183)

Has In-hye acted in conjunction with her familial and cultural paternalism and misogyny to determine her sister’s fate?

At least feeling complicit leaves In-hye contemplating female agency:

It’s your body, you can treat it any way you please. The only area where you’re free to do as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted. (p. 182)

Like Yeong-hye, In-hye also becomes consumed by dreams:

When she lifts her head, the face she sees reflected in the mirror is wet. Eyes from which so much blood has spilled in her dreams. Eyes from which that blood always refused to be wiped away, no matter how fiercely she scrubbed it with her hands. But the woman’s face is not crying, not now. It’s only staring wordlessly back at her, like always, betraying not even the faintest hint of emotion. (p. 182)

The Vegetarian starts and ends in dreams—and these are nightmares of the sort we associate with Kafka but also the blurring of alternate realities found in Murakami.

The real world, however, remains rapacious and violent, especially for women—some of whom wilt while others harden.

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See Also

Portrait of the Artist under High Capitalism: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children

Han Kang: To be human, Mark Reynolds

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free