Heart of Darkness
Teaching Introduction to Literature, I see a curious new phenomenon: more and more students complain, bitterly, about how dark the readings are. I’m not sure what this new critical term 
means; I employ a canonical set of works including Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Sophocles, and newer works by Phillip Larkin, Tobias Wolff, and J.G. Ballard. If such authors do anything, they force us to face existential questions. Once, students went to college to experience just this sort of perennial questioning. Today, questioning is a nonstarter having been replaced by what Phillip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic” and, as he predicted, by students preoccupied only with themselves and with attaining a “durable sense of well-being.” This ends any interest in reading about what Victor Davis Hanson calls “the tragic limitations of human existence and how to meet them and endure them with dignity.”
When Larkin observes that
At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see
it does not sit well with the Facebook and Twitter crowd, many of whom are now convinced that advancements in regenerative medicine will indefinitely postpone their senescence. With death no longer inevitable, they find that a literature based on the tragedy of mortality is both archaic and irrelevant. In insulated, technological isolation, with electronic “friends” and avatars, Comedy Central and Family Guy, they are more concerned with distraction and are irritated that plot and character create inevitabilities and moral consequences. That’s just so…dark.
I think this is a great question at Christmas.
Maybe it’s time that literature professors realize that these existential forays into the human condition are indeed dark. And that people are looking for an ANSWER!
In the enlightenment/modern era, the belief was that humans could rise above this condition. But in the post-modern world, it’s recognized that humans can’t do it alone. Ironically, the pushers of post-modernism don’t know what to do with the questions their teaching generates.
Which leads us back to Christmas. Clearly the authors of the New Testament believed that the limitations of human existence were tragic, but that God provided a way to do more than meet and accept them. The birth of mankind’s Saviour is a reason to celebrate. Joy to the world indeed!
I agree with VDH on the rise of the therapeutic mindset, but are you really having students read Hawthorne, Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Sophocles, Phillip Larkin, Tobias Wolff, and J.G. Ballard all in one course, and ALL for the existential questions?
Really?
There are other pieces of fiction, and other questions that are timeless without being about the depths of our souls’ pain in our existence. Middlemarch. Pride and Prejudice. Lolita. At least Candide is funny.
VDH’s point was that the classics point to answers to these existential questions, not that we go in circles of fear and despair, ever searching. If you end with Ballard, no wonder people are tired of dark. Lysistrata isn’t dark. It might be refreshing to see that “feminism” as such wasn’t an invention of the 1960s.
In the past, students were anchored in something good–their families, their communities, their church, their town. They belonged. So asking existential questions about the nature of humanity was within the context of social and political structures. It wasn’t that they were in the void and then being asked to question their fundamental assumptions that kept them from drowning in it.
Don’t push the existential void on people. It isn’t nice. Perhaps it’s easy if you’re older and more mature to stand and think about these questions because you’ve got bedrock underneath you. Your students might increasingly have nothing at all beneath them. This kind of questioning may just lead to panic and despair.