Antique stacked books. CC0 Public Domain

Mystery, Manners, and High School English

High school teacher Tom Tobin reflected on Flannery O'Connor's essay, "The Teaching of Literature," and its implications in the modern classroom.
Tom Tobin

By fortunate coincidence, I was recently asked by my headmaster to make a presentation on planning literature classes to our faculty at the same time that a friend had suggested to me to read an essay by Flannery O’Connor entitled “The Teaching of Literature.” O’Connor was not a teacher and her essay cannot help with the minutia of planning, but she did an excellent job of defining the essential purpose of writing and engaging serious literature.

O’Connor defines the “business of fiction” as an attempt to “embody mystery through manners.” She defined her two terms by stating the mystery is “the mystery of our position on earth” and the manners are “those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.” In these short phrases, O’Connor goes to the heart of the matter in a way that I have rarely encountered in twenty-five years of studying and teaching literature. For O’Connor, literature becomes great not only when it exhibits a mastery of the craft of writing, but when a mastery of craft is informed by an awareness of the mysterious depths of the human heart and its predicament in life. To read a text in a manner consistent with her observation is to approach it with a willingness to become reconnected with the actual desires and ideals that constitute your own heart. To teach a work in this manner is to help students see this mystery percolating in the work and to recognize that it is touching on the actual experience of life and is not an intra-literary phenomenon.

If not this, then what? Well, educators have a long list of responses, each one of which is less comprehensive and satisfying than O’Connor’s suggestion. When I studied at Georgetown in the 1980’s, the vogue was for professors to assign long, detailed literary biographies that “explained where the work was coming from.” The text was accounted for by psychological factors in the life of the writer. An alternative to this was accounting for the text as an artifact of broader historical and cultural factors. “In Thomas Hardy we see the Victorian crisis of faith and how the forces of modernity transformed the English countryside.”

When I began teaching in the public schools, I encountered other approaches. Literature was to be taught as a means of acquiring valuable reading and writing skills that would in turn be measured by multiple choice tests. The value of the work was that it allowed the student to acquire skills that were genuinely important (as opposed to the work itself). The higher level expression of this is found in IB and AP courses. My most enjoyable teaching experiences have been teaching these classes and there is much that is commendable in the assessments and in the seriousness of the programs. The weakness, though, is that there still tends to be an emphasis on using works to gain skills. This time they are sophisticated skills of analysis and interpretation of language.

All of these different approaches have merit, but they lack a solid starting point. Without the clear understanding of the true value of literature that O’Connor proposes, approaches to teaching it will inevitably become reductive and inadequate as our current educational situation so often demonstrates.