470
PARTISAN REVIEW
The teaching of English has a direct and continuous relationship
to
the kind of oooks which juvenile, adolescent, and adult readers are
likely to desire to read. The cartoon version of
Gulliver's Travels
suggests still another incident in the teaching of English literature.
The text in this instance was Swift's
A Modest Proposal,
in which
Swift proposes among other things that the economic problem of
Ireland might be solved if the Irish bred children and then butchered
them for food. In the seven years during which, at some point during
the year, I had to assign this little classic of satire to freshmen students,
I naturally encountered a variety of impressions on their part. But the
most frequent and representative comment was exemplified by a student
of Armenian parents (he must have heard of the Turks) and a boy
who was Irish (and who must have heard of the English in Ireland).
Both students announced that Swift was "morbid." I was tempted to
embark upon a self-indulgent excursion when I heard this comment
and to say that I would not permit the greatest prose writer in English,
except for Shakespeare, perhaps, to be called "morbid," and to recall to
the students what they had heard about the Turks in Armenia, the
English in Ireland, to say nothing of Buchenwald and Dachau. But I
felt that the students would merely have concluded that I too was
morbid. By questioning them with some degree of patience, I found out
that after they had read comic books, listened to soap operas, and
witnessed the sweetness and light of the motion pictures, they were in–
clined to regard anything which is serious satire as morbid sensation–
alism.
To return directly to the cartoon versions of the classics: it is
customary and habitual, when one has expressed the point of view I have
suggested here, to be asked,
What is
00
be done?
I do not suffer from
the delusion that I know what is to be done. But I confess that I
sometimes entertain certain modest guesses, the practicality of which
I cannot determine. The reading of comic books, and cartoon versions
of the classics (and listening to the radio, looking at the motion pic–
tures and listening and looking at television programs) cannot be stop–
ped. Mass culture
is
here to stay: it is a major industry and a very
profitable one, and one can no more banish it than one can banish the
U'Se of automobiles because thirty-four thousand people are killed by
cars every year. And even
if
the reading of cartoon books might be
stopped, it is probable that prohibition and censorship would have the
usual boomerang effect.
What can be done, I think (or rather, I guess), is to set a good
example, or perhaps I should sayan example which is the least of all
