Kurt Vonnegut wrote (I’m quoting from memory) that banning fiction “is like donning a full suit of armor to attack an ice cream sundae.”
If that’s true, certain kinds of ice cream sundae make certain kinds of people awfully nervous.
In Toronto, 12th grade students taking an English exam were assigned to write a short fictional “essay,” and one of them, a kid named Brendan Jones, created the literary equivalent of a jalapeno-pepper-hot-salso sundae. In his little fiction, a girl who doesn’t like a particular teacher, has him trapped in the basement of her home, and as the story ends, she brandishes a baseball bat, saying, “Sorry, Mr. McAdams, schools (sic) out….”
Jones, an average kid, not known to be troubled, was immediately and summarily expelled, three credits shy of graduation. What he had done was roughly equivalent to making a “bomb” joke at the airline counter. No matter how harmless you are, that’s something you just don’t do. When the matter reached the principal’s desk, post-Virginia Tech liability fear seems to have clicked in as the driving factor, and the overreaction was inevitable.
Brendan Jones’ exam fiction has been removed from most of the internet sites where it was briefly posted, but you can still read it here.
It’s not a very nice story, to be sure, but neither is “The Casque of Amantillado.” A Facebook group has been started by the kid’s friends to defend him (yes, he has friends, and they are furious). His personal explanation and apology are also posted there as well.
The full explanation (which I’ll post tomorrow) doesn’t ramble, isn’t a rant; it’s not angry or “crazy,” nor does it rumble with apocalyptic warnings. Jones claims he was trying to complete the detailed requirements of the assigned task (and he lists them) under great time pressure. There’s an innocence in his tone that may be somewhat stretegic, but does not ring false. There’s always the possibility he was trying to get someobody’s goat, and if so he did. He may have deserved reprimanding or even some minor sanction for being a smart-ass. But expulsion? For a student, that’s the nuclear option. the death penalty. We don’t have the Principal’s side of the story, because she’s made herself unavailable for comment, but it looks like she handed it down without regard for extenuating circumstances.
A personal note: in reading hundreds of student stories, over 12 years, I saw fictional representations of torture, murder, suicide, sadism, brutality of many kinds, in stories intended to frighten. I also saw beauty, love, hope, and other good things depicted in stories designed to make you feel good. In all those years, only one student gave me cause for mild alarm. And it was mostly his behavior, not his work per se that was disturbing. Reading the reports of the Brendan Jones case, unless there is somthing hidden in it that hasn’t been reported, I can’t help but feel that decisions of this sort should not be made by people (administrators) prone to rash, fear-driven impulses, or ill-equipped to consider the broader contextual details that should guide them to a wise decision.
But suppose a teacher really DOES see things the rest of us don’t. Creative Writing teachers at Virginia Tech accurately spotted something upsetting in the work of student (and future mass murderer) Seung-hui Cho. Program director Lucinda Roy pulled him out of a class and tutored him one-on-one, while at the same time repeatedly warning University officials that Cho was one dangerously sick puppy. The University essentially did nothing. Cho remained in school and we know the awful result.
So which is preferable: early warnings about possible danger, sounded by professionals trained and intuitively disposed to understand the potential meaning in what they are seeing? Or a war on ice cream sundaes, waged by bureaucrats untrained in reading the dark possibilities (or lack of them) in the writers or their texts?
Or could there be a middle-ground?
No one can deny that humanity has been spectacularly successful in gaining control of the physical world. Why then, as Masters of the Physical Universe, do we turn into pumpkins when faced with with the inner realms, like personality, motivation, and intuition?
What do you think?
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