By Kristen Rouse
When I returned in early 2007 from my first deployment to Afghanistan, I found myself teaching a college English composition and literature course at the Fort Drum education center. I’d taught a class there before — I was one of those odd (although not totally rare) birds who enlisted in the active duty Army with a master’s degree in hand and experience teaching college English. I was a supply sergeant by day, English instructor by night. (Also worth noting: in my Army day job, I wrote really great emails.) Teaching on base was a welcome relief from Army life because I could talk about literature and feel relaxed with a room full of students, free of the demands, rank structure, and other pressures that came with wearing the uniform. It seemed like an accident of good luck to get an email at the end of my deployment asking if I could pick up teaching a course upon returning home because another instructor had dropped out at the last minute. It would be a perfect way, I thought, to spend my last few months at Fort Drum, waiting to transition back to civilian life.
I started teaching less than a month after returning from Afghanistan. I had students who had also just returned from Afghanistan, or who’d been working at Fort Drum to support units those of us who’d been deployed. Others were spouses and family members of soldiers just returned or still deployed. War was fresh and urgent for all of us, and as I perused the curriculum, it almost jumped off the page at me — so many of the works we looked at were in some way touched by the aftermath of war or some other pivotal social conflict. So I opted to make this an entry point for our discussions. How did the stress of awaiting an impending attack of the Turkish navy impact Othello’s judgment as a military leader, or as a jealous husband? How did Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” measure against the experiences of the soldiers in class who’d just been in Afghanistan? Did it make any difference that the setting of “The Masque of the Red Death” seemed modeled on the casemate at Fort Monroe where Edgar Allan Poe was stationed as a soldier in the 1820s? How did Stanley’s military background factor into his characterization as a strong, self-made man in A Streetcar Named Desire? How did the conflicts surrounding the legacies of slavery, Civil War, and civil struggle in the South play out in the stories of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston?
I’d started with the thought that focusing on war would make the literature more relevant to the lives of my students. What I soon started noticing was that we were actually looking at how literature made war and civil conflict more relevant to society as a whole.
Although we read plenty of great drama, poetry, and short stories that semester, the standout for me was Oedipus Rex. I’d both studied and taught the play before, but this time I focused on how Sophocles was a war veteran who wrote the play for an audience of war veterans and an Athenian society that was still in the midst of major conflict and social upheaval. Sophocles wrote Oedipus Rex during the early years of the Peloponnesian war — a conflict between city-states in ancient Greece that was maybe comparable in scale and long-term devastation to the American Civil War. The play was performed just after the major outbreak of a plague epidemic in and around Athens that had taken the lives of one in three Athenians. Pericles, the famed general and elected leader who’d presided over the Golden Age of Athens, had just died of the deadly disease. It seemed to me no mistake that Sophocles chose to open Oedipus Rex by showing a society suffering from plague, loss of crops and cattle, and misery across the land — and citizens crying out to their hero and leader Oedipus for guidance and wisdom.
The myth of Oedipus was already well known to an Athenian audience: that he rose as a powerful and revered leader, yet through a cruel stroke of fate, also unwittingly killed his biological father, married his biological mother, and had children by her. What struck me in my post-deployment reading of the play was to see community leaders and citizens themselves (as the chorus) imploring Oedipus for his sound leadership to see them through this time of crisis — and then commenting throughout the dialogue of the play, as Oedipus by turns is both dogged and arrogant in his quest to learn the cause of the apparent curse on his land. The citizens want strength in their leader, yet beg him also to show wisdom and reflection. They bemoan discord between Oedipus and his deputy, Creon. They advise their leader to heed the words of the blind prophet who may yet know the truth. Yet Oedipus, their hero, is supremely confident in his leadership and capabilities, and after much argument and suspicion, ends up uncovering the full truth that devastates everyone involved: his inadvertent actions as a young man had brought on the plague and curse. Was it purely fate that had brought Oedipus and his city to ruin, or was it his arrogant divisiveness and suspicion that caused his downfall? Or both? By the end, the citizens of the chorus lament their hero, saying they wish they’d never laid eyes upon him. They say, “It was through you I found my life and breathed again — and then, through you, darkness veils my eyes.” How powerfully, or uncomfortably, did the chorus of Oedipus Rex resonate with its Athenian audience?
In our own post-9/11 era, we’ve seen the American public crying out for war and retribution, only then to dissociate with it, or turn against it as we’ve watched the reality on the ground become far more complicated and costly than we’d initially thought. We’ve strained over competing narratives of cosmic good and evil, apocalyptic clashes of religion and civilization, and other mythologies to explain our new realities of terrorists and globally-interconnected conflict. We’ve become disillusioned that there have been no simple answers, and that our leaders have fallen into what seems to be hopeless discord and division. Do we regret the cascade of unintended consequences of our actions, or wish that we’d never laid eyes on some of the leaders we’ve believed in over the years?
There are, of course, no simple parallels between ancient Greece and our situation today, but teaching Oedipus Rex immediately following my first deployment — and thinking through that experience ever since — nevertheless has found me, time and again, reflecting on the play, and even on Sophocles himself. Thirty years after the first performance of Oedipus Rex, the Peloponnesian war still raged on, leaving much of Greek civilization in ruin. Sophocles, who Pericles had called a better poet than general, returned to battle. He died before the war’s end.
Kristen Rouse (author photo).
As for me — I transitioned to civilian life in New York City after finishing the course and leaving Fort Drum, although I later deployed twice more to Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. I personally found that it got progressively harder, not easier, to transition back to civilian life after each subsequent deployment. One of the most important anchors for me has been reading literature and doing some of my own writing as well, and using this as a sort of prism to refract and reflect upon my own personal experiences and our collective time in history as a society.
I still look back at what I learned through teaching that course after my first deployment. I remember searching for the right culmination for the semester. After all we’d read and discussed and written about, I wanted something that felt like a deeper-level reflection on how literature informs our understanding of war and conflict and the struggles of our time. We’d read some short stories by William Faulkner (who, it is worth noting, served a short term in the Royal Air Force in Canada during World War I after being rejected by the U.S. Air Force). I ended up finding his acceptance speech for the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, in which he spoke of the role of literature in society following war and the horrific developments in the technology of warfare that then dominated the global narrative. We discussed the speech in class, and on their last exam, I asked my students to write about the works we’d read and discussed during the semester through the lens of Faulkner’s speech. The full text was rich and powerful in its entirety, and I gave these paragraphs to my students to read and digest and comment on:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
William Faulkner
The responses from my class were profound (although, alas, I was unable to save them). My students came at this from a spectrum of abilities and reading interests, but each one of them had something sincere and incredibly insightful to say about the power of literature to transcend and reflect upon our current situation, to inspire us, and to become part of what passes the value of our thoughts and experiences on to future generations. At the time, it was most important for me to have my students feel that literature was valuable and relevant to their lives. But over the years and deployments that have followed, I’ve returned to Faulkner’s words to think through my own reading and reflecting and writing. Am I just the puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking? Or am I thinking and writing about the broader truths of the conflicts of the human heart — and how they play out in this era of terror and uncertainty and seemingly endless wars?
I count myself among the many recent veterans working on giving a literary voice to my wartime experiences. My hope is that there will be many of us who find authentic ways to express the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice of our generation. But I also hope to see more civilian writers writing these truths as well. Our recent history at war must feel relevant and shared by all of us — as a fully-engaged Greek chorus — our griefs grieved on universal bones, our victories shared, and with hope and pity and compassion. This is how we all will endure and prevail.
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