Correspondence from when I taught a Cormac McCarthy excerpt that upset a parent

The first time I taught The Road must have been in 2013 or 2014. Some students reacted strongly in a positive sense. They could relate to the existential dread. They could relate to the environmental concerns. Many were puzzled by how the book failed to be The Walking Dead, but those supposed failures actually led to the most interesting questions and conversations about the book and how maybe it was about the gaps between generations and common experience as much as anything remotely resembling hordes of zombies or cannibals. Students also really wanted to know why random passages that did nothing for the plot were included: what was up with that windup penguin? At the time, I hadn’t seen the classic heist film Rififi, so I couldn’t direct students to what I didn’t yet know in order to say the passage is both a tormented parable and an homage to an old movie that is itself an homage to another era. Still, that conversation about the penguin managed to wind itself up and produce insights into this father and son duo surviving on the brink.

And, in our encounter with a world so depleted of meaning and moral fiber that the human species has turned inward on itself and started devouring its own, no parent or student complained the book should not be taught in an AP Language and Composition class full of juniors.

A couple years later for the same prep and to supplement a class reading of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway I put together a packet of Cormac McCarthy border-crossing scenes from Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, and No Country for Old Men. These materials were accompanied by some film excerpts and a couple other nonfiction accounts of border activities between Mexico and the United States. The idea was that we as a class were going to hold a seminar discussion about how various subjects and topics are depicted in a specific space that is both real and fictional — and how in both instances that shared border space evolved over time.

For most students, this set of readings and activities proved informative at least in the way that encountering snakeskins or wasp nests is always informative. We were later in the year. We all knew each other. The group had displayed a growing sense of maturity, and they were students much closer to being college freshmen than newcomers to high school. However, the materials for the lesson were not artifacts everyone could allow inside the home. When a parent wrote an email to me, the principals at my school, and to the county superintendent, the message was clear: keep the outside world away from my door and far from my front porch.

That initial email resulted in a series of emails. And all those 2015 emails now read like harbingers of an assault on the academic integrity and freedoms of our educational system. They are ripe with the idea that the classroom should be a mirror for previously held conceptions and not a place to dust off artifacts or dissect organisms that might require either curiosity or toughness. Here is that exchange with the names (other than my own) redacted:

1st email

Mr. Harvey-

My daughter, ___________________, is in your _______ period AP Language Arts class. I was reading the excerpts from Cities of the Plain that you requested they annotate. Isn’t there plenty of decent reading material out there for them instead of assigning this kind of garbage. Not only is it full of profanity but is demeaning to women.

I’m trying to provide and wholesome and Christian environment for my daughter and was hoping her teachers could support that.

Please let me know what is going to be done to correct this.

Sincerely,

Response to 1st email

I apologize for any offensive material. Students and parents can always opt out. Cormac McCarthy is one of the most revered writers living and working in literature. He has won or been nominated for almost every major literary award. He actually draws quite heavily on Christian symbols and meaning in his novels. He was raised Catholic, and he is featured in college curriculums nationwide. He has been used by the College Board. This is a college-level class run by the College Board, which is one of the reasons I chose to use him. I also think that the merits of a book or writer can be difficult to judge based off of one chapter. I will keep your concerns in mind moving forward, but I think McCarthy’s book actually is intended to say that women should not be treated in such a way but that people and places in the world sadly do treat women in such a way.

I hope this explanation helps.

Sincerely,

Bryan Harvey

2nd email

Mr. Harvey-

I am not debating the status of the author or of the book. I am debating your lack of judgement in assigning this to 16 year old children. This might be fine reading for an adult or college student but not minors.

How could she have opted out when the reading assignment was sent home? Neither of us knew what she was reading until it was read. Is this listed in the curriculum of the school?

Response to 2nd email

An email saying the material was found to be objectionable would have started the process. Once I saw it, I could have started thinking and looking for alternatives.

Also, out of curiosity, did ___________________’s 9th and 10th grade classes read Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Kite Runner? Those texts are commonly taught at _____________ High School and across the country. Cities of the Plain in no way deviates in terms of content or literary merit from these other well-established texts, in its defense. My judgment was somewhat informed by texts the school, county, and students across the US typically read and would have encountered prior to this school year.

Lastly, if material is found to be objectionable, then students can always approach me in class or through email. Students were not asked to annotate the text; they were asked to read it. We are compiling information and research for further discussion, which this text is important to advancing. But I could have supplied _______________ with an alternative if informed of your judgments about the excerpt. My intentions are never to force a text upon students, but to provide them with as much information as possible about a subject.

Sincerely,

Bryan Harvey

3rd email

Again, I could not have objected until I read it. And with all due respect I was hoping you would be “thinking” as you called it before it was assigned. Not after the fact.

Response to 3rd email

I think I was thinking. I was at school until six or seven o’clock selecting the passages with the intent of reducing McCarthy’s 1500 plus pages about the border down to about fifty. I weighed the merits of the text and thought they served the purposes of the class. I did not assign the reading in September or October, but later in the year after deeming the class a group of mature students who are members of the workforce, drive cars, and will one day be confronted by the difficulties of a world that is not always perfect and sometimes falls short of the ideal. In fact, Cities of the Plain is a book that discusses such problematic opportunities.

Anyway, I apologize. And, as planned, we’ve already read all that we’re reading from Cities of the Plain, which alludes to Sodom and Gommorah, has a possible Christ figure for a protagonist, and is a story about the fallible nature of humankind and our struggles to resist worldly temptations (as well as foolhardy idealism) and, in the end, does aim to right the wrongs done against women and men by events and circumstances outside their control. I will try not to assign any more books that contain these subjects.

Sincerely,

Bryan Harvey

I taught this lesson a couple more times at the same school. In those instances, the excerpted copies had the following line redacted: “We told Clyde he looked like a monkey fuckin a football.” This line is the one that caused the McCarthy text and my judgment to be questioned. The line is vulgar and cruel, but the line of dialogue helps readers understand a particular side character and that understanding of character helps to understand a particular setting. Both the character and the setting are shaped by ideologies and notions much older than McCarthy or his novels, and that inheritance from past eras does not make such ideologies acceptable even though it does mark them as accepted.

The following tweet sums up McCarthy’s writing of and about women in the American South and American West perhaps better than I can:

The cruelty in the excerpted opening scene from Cities of the Plain is primarily verbal. The language is akin to what is often spoken in schools by students who make such statements often from a place of immaturity and ignorance blossoming into prejudice and misogyny. McCarthy’s novel in a learning environment, I thought, might give students a chance to discuss and examine a withered snakeskin as opposed to the venom often rattling and writhing in the school’s hallways and social media. Maybe I was wrong.

Either way, I grew tired of trying to convince others that fiction containing the most dangerous elements of our very real world was a safer place to encounter those dangers and to sharpen one’s convictions than everywhere not found within the cover of a book. I grew tired of having that conversation with myself as well. But I never grew tired of reading McCarthy’s books because those books were always honest and forthcoming about what makes the world.

(And I never told any class before reading The Road that they were about to enjoy a baby roasting on a spit.)