Lit4Life

About halfway through George Saunders' short story "Ask the Optimist," a parody of advice columns, the Optimist receives a letter from Satan, who's having trouble finding the silver lining in his situation: 

Although I know I should be grateful--I love working for myself, and I'm one of the two most powerful beings in the universe--I sometimes feel a certain absence, as if there's some essential quality I'm lacking. I've heard people, as I make my rounds, speak of something called "goodness." Usually when I hear someone use this word, I get frustrated and immediately tempt them into doing something horrific--but lately, somehow, this isn't enough. Thoughts? 

Of course The Optimist has thoughts--he always has thoughts about his correspondents' problems, most of them inane (Look on the bright side!) or self-serving (as when he invites a turkey over for Thanksgiving dinner). Faced with pure evil, he suggests that Satan cure his loneliness by visiting another hopeless correspondent, unless he'd rather not, which would also be fine, because, as the Optimist concludes, "Whatever! It's all good!"

When we discussed this story in my Comedy class, my question for students was If it's all good, how do we decide what's bad? And if we define evil out of existence, what are the consequences? (In the story, the consequences are violent, bloody, grim, and hilarious.)

And this is what I love about teaching literature classes: dig beneath the surface and any text and we're bound to unearth an invitation to talk about ethics, epistemology, ontology, and a whole host of questions about living a meaningful life. (I've been thinking about introducing a course called "Literature for a Meaningful Life," but it would be abbreviated "Lit4Life," which might give students a mistaken impression.)

Sure, we can talk about metaphors, similes, imagery, diction, and all the literary devices Miss Groby liked to hunt down and count up in James Thurber's "Here Lies Miss Groby." Or we can follow the example of the readers in Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry" and "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it." But at some point we need to stop identifying literary devices and ask what they all add up to, what they suggest about the human condition or how we should live or what I call meaning-of-life issues.

I suspect that some of my Comedy students did not expect to address philosophical questions in a class that includes Monty Python on the syllabus, but here we are talking about how we distinguish between good and evil. If they get tired of my probing questions, they can vent their anger in a letter to the Optimist, but he'll just tell them to look on the bright side--Whatever. It's all good. (Until it isn't.)