Member of the Faculty, Greg Mullins discusses the Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural with Evergreen students in downtown Olympia. Greg explores literature and human rights in his research and teaching. Photo taken by Shauna Bittle
Editor’s Note: We recently asked Greg Mullins, Member of the Faculty, to write a piece about his research into human rights and literature. He is the author of Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Greg is currently working on a project called The Banality of Good: Cultures of Human Rights and teaching a program called Freedom Dreams: The Cultural Revolutions of the 1960’s.
Greg Mullins: When I first read John Milton’s Paradise Lost many years ago, I noted an irony much commented upon by literary scholars: as heroes go, Adam is anemic at best. Lucifer, the villain, has all the star power. In fact, many readers find him powerful and charismatic.
Ordinarily, wouldn’t we expect villains to be vile?
Over several years of teaching and writing about human rights and literature I’ve often thought about that irony. In a morality tale, the good guy wins and the narrative offers a moral lesson to the readers. But in a great deal of contemporary literature concerned with human rights violations, there is no simple moral to the story. Frequently, the text refuses closure, leaving the reader on her own to contemplate what to think upon finishing the book. Consider, for example, Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost, or Danticat, The Dew Breaker.
Is it possible that reading literature concerned with human rights violations can nudge readers toward a better ethical and political understanding of why those violations happen, and what can be done to prevent them? I would argue that literature can serve that function. In fact, I argue that literature can provide a sort of antidote to the banalization of the language of human rights that we see all around us in political rallies, slogans, bumper stickers, fundraising appeals, and sound bites.
Not only does the act of reading literature force us to slow down and think, but the best of that literature challenges us to reevaluate what we think we know. A vile villain is easy to hate; a virtuous hero is easy to love. But why would we need to teach ourselves to think ethically if the world were as simple and unambiguous as a morality tale?
Readers: What’s your response to Greg’s questions? Can literature nudge us towards a better understanding of human rights violations?
Miyiiha Prof. Mullins, tehoovet’a xaa! ‘Aweeshkone xaa ‘ekwaane xaa.
Hello Professor Mullins, you are awesome! I’m glad that I found this.
Reading this article immediately took me back to the program Human Rights and Wrongs. As I read this I couldn’t help but smile as I am reminded of your wit and sense of humor, an important quality that you brought to the classroom. But it is not only those qualities that I am reminded of but also the ability to be placed in a space where critical questions, such as the one you have posed, may be thoroughly pondered.
I also agree that literature is an important avenue that allows the subject involved a unique and personal arena to question and grow. Powerful images and ideals may be captured in catchy phrases or hash-tags in social media (as you have mentioned) but literature is a far more complex, demanding and enlightening world. It is so easy to become astray and lose sight of the importance of literature in our current reality and that is why it is more important than ever to stress its ability to enable us, as my high school English teacher stated, to “wallow in complexity.” In short, literature is a doorway to enter a “discussion” of sorts in which everyone and everything is involved. It will change you.
Reading Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost forever changed how I understand literature and human rights struggles. If Ondaatje had the ability to influence me in the way I was then there is no reason that other readers could not come away with something as equally important. I acknowledge how privileged I have been in my ability to come to a learning institution such as Evergreen, meet educators such as yourself, and be exposed to important works such as these in order to aid my development as a student and activist. I am grateful for such experiences.
Tehoovko’po’a mii,
May you go well,
Jesse
Possible? Sure. Likely? Doubtful. It is getting harder and harder to get American’s to read books, let alone robust literature. Pew did a poll last year that said some 19 percent of respondents did not read any books in the previous year, up over 10 percent since 1978. I’m sure technology has some influence on that number (it wasn’t clear if respondents were counting ebooks), but I think it is indicative of a trend most of us have long suspected. It has been my experience since my time at Evergreen that actual life experience, live witnessing, and images have done more to shape my ethics than any literature I have read no matter how moving or thought provoking. Images and film are effective, if untrustworthy at times. Perhaps literary approaches that combine other media can achieve the goal of invoking thought on genuine and robust ethical thought. Audience and reach are practical concerns that I believe are often ignored when evaluating any form of media.
What if we consider broadening the question to not just literature? How do we bring human rights thought and deep ethical consideration into the public consciousness? I know it sounds broad, but hey, I’m not in seminar any more so nyah nyah nyah.
Greg,
You’re certainly scratching the surface of an enormous and intricately webbed issue here, namely, literature for the purpose of empathy, or empathy as the end-game of literature.
Generally speaking, literature gave rise to sympathetic villains and broken heroes after the disillusioning meat-wagon that was World War I, as the straight line of morality simply failed to reflect the reality (or what people began to comprehend as their reality) of the dawning global consciousness where everyone has a side of the story.
Morality tales have a place (generally in childhood), but ultimately they do not reflect morality in its true, 3-Dimensional form, and literature (or any medium, really) that does not properly reflect, illustrate, or at least acknowledge this form, I would argue, is actually detrimental.
Tolstoy asserted that art’s quality—indeed, its usefulness—“lies in the growth of brotherhood among men” (What is Art?, 1897), that not only can art (literature in this case) positively affect the reader, it better damn well should. This was reasserted and further distilled by John Gardner some eighty years later in On Moral Fiction when he argued that moral fiction “attempts to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out which best promotes human fulfillment.” We see this sentiment mirrored in the UDHR which calls repeatedly for the “free and full development of the human personality.”
David Foster Wallace was also obsessed with this responsibility of morality (or positive effect) in fiction as he saw a passive kind of solipsism in postmodern society wherein reality, or a full comprehension of reality, diminished over distance from the reader/viewer/listener/subject.
I suspect I’m probably talking about a few different things here, but I’m not sure I can help it as, like I said, this is a huge topic, and everything is connected to almost everything else. I guess my point is that I agree with you that yes, literature can and does engender empathy, and any literature that does not, or worse, engenders nothing, is a formal exercise at best, developmentally damaging at worst.
I came away from Paradise Lost with the same view. I read this classic in college in the 1970’s, then again during a midlife – er, let’s say hiatus. I had read Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat not long before and couldn’t help thinking what fun it would be to teach a class comparing the two, Milton’s Lucifer and Rice’s Lestat.