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Commentary
Why I’ll keep teaching the work of artists who’ve done monstrous things
As I welcome college students back into my classrooms to study literature this fall, a familiar desire arises. I want to create a challenging, engaging environment with rich texts and stimulating conversation. But within that challenge, I want to present a vision of a hopeful world. I want to assure them that, after these last utterly catastrophic years in our shared history, something better lies ahead. But this is a fantasy.
It’s enticing to pretend we can hold catastrophe at bay, contain it somewhere “over there” instead of feeling it in our own lives. Yet, this flight into fantasy facilitates an elision of the presence of evil and suffering in our midst, even in ourselves.
When Andrea Skinner revealed that her mother, the Nobel-prize winning author Alice Munro, knew her daughter had been sexually abused as a child, and that Munro did nothing to protect her — indeed stayed married to Gerald Fremlin the man who abused Skinner — I discovered yet another artist failing in life, in one of the most wretched of ways. Munro is another artist whose presence on my teaching syllabus has come into question.
I teach at an arts college where most of my students have chosen to become musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers, actors. Many aspire to be producers and engineers. All are creatives, moved by and wanting to move others through art. My students want to learn not only how to play or dance or compose like the people they most admire, they also want to learn to think and live like them. They, at 18, might imagine those role models as perfect versions — and of course they are not.
All humans, even the most accomplished and talented in their fields, are flawed and imperfect, which is why it is vital to keep teaching Alice Munro’s work in my courses.
All humans, even the most accomplished and talented in their fields, are flawed and imperfect, which is why it is vital to keep teaching Alice Munro’s work in my courses. It is why I actively choose to include great literature authored by people who have done monstrous things.
I want my students to grapple with being inspired by art without idealizing the person who created it. I want them to know that mere imitation is no way to build a life. There are no shortcuts to being a human; no quick-fixes or hacks for living up to our ethical responsibilities, sorting through moral dilemmas, or owning up to our failures to one another. In fact, the conversations that emerge from these facts are some of the most valuable that occur in my classroom. Not because we figure it out, but because we engage the dilemma together.
We must attend to what in us pulls toward domination instead of mutuality. It is useful for some 18-year-olds to learn that the problem posed by Dostoyevsky in “The Grand Inquisitor” is not hypothetical. Evil is not “out there” or “back then.” It is now. It is here. (A good number of my students do not need this reminder, of course. They live with racist violence, sexual abuse, transphobia or other deep injuries.)
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Because I teach methods of literary interpretation influenced by psychoanalysis, many students want to read the artist’s life into the text. I find this simplistic and reductive. Great art is considered art precisely because it does something beyond the intentions or consciousness of the artist. The piece exists in space and time, and acts on us in ways that the artist could never know or predict. Isn’t a close examination of the impact of cultural norms in the production of a piece of art a vital part of an artist’s education? Might this investigation give my students, these young artists, tools to think not only about their own work, but also about their minds and souls with more curiosity and concern?
When we acknowledge the presence of monstrosity in ourselves and in our midst, the world that erases the existence of victims and survivors crumbles.
In class we begin with literary interpretation and move to self-interpretation, the latter being a necessary part of becoming an adult.
If we acknowledge that Alice Munro is not the only mother who betrayed her daughter, that Fremlin (Skinner’s stepfather) is not the only man who raped a child, then we have to live in in a world in which children are raped and abandoned, in which mothers and fathers sometimes utterly fail their children, in which humans destroy one another.
This is the reality of the world our young people inhabit and we shouldn’t deny it.
Choosing not to teach work by people who have done monstrous things can be, in some circumstances, a participation in the conspiracy of silence. In Munro’s case, for example, her biographer knew, journalists knew, other authors knew her secret. If I stop teaching Munro will I continue to create the illusion that great artists are great people? Will I reinforce the lie that accomplished people are not sometimes monstrous, when of course, some are? Teaching this work is one way to make visible the existence of victims.
When we acknowledge the presence of monstrosity in ourselves and in our midst, the world that erases the existence of victims and survivors crumbles. A culture that assumes there are no survivors in the room until we tell you our most painful secret — in which victims and survivors are assumed to be “out there” away from you, in the same way the one who does monstrous things is “out there” away from you — changes.
If we deny the monstrosity in our presence, we deny the people who survive it, including some of the students in our classrooms, my classroom. Their experiences, resilience and artistic capacities need to be cultivated as much as their peers’. We need to create a world in which their art becomes visible, interpretable and part of the cultural conversation. At least as much as the art of those who do monstrous things.
