The Risks and Rewards of Teaching

I've taught Graham Greene's "The Destructors" for as long as I have been teaching.  It was the first work I ever read by Graham Greene. And from the very first read, I recognized it as a short story that seemed perfect for the adolescent male: straightforward plot, easily remembered character names, rampant juvenile delinquency, seemingly pointless destruction, and a strangely funny conclusion. As for that timeless task of identifying a theme, the story seemed to be perfectly balanced: it was complex enough that the students probably wouldn't be able to "find it" (which is the verb I would have used at the time) on their own, but with a little demystifying by yours truly, I'd make it seem like each and every student "found" it on his own in class. Furthermore, the story easily lent itself to important lessons on literary basics like conflict and character. Voila! Let's teach.

And so I taught the story every year. Even when teaching at a new school last year, I assigned it to my freshmen. Despite the new classroom, new students, new everything, I took the same old approach. My students would funnel in the door, several of them asking, "Why'd they do that?" And I, as their teacher, would help reveal to them the very real purpose to purposeless destruction. With meticulously selected passages, I set out to show Trevor as an aggrieved victim of English class systems. Having "come down in the world," I explained, Trevor wants to also bring down this house that "stands up like a top hat." Hence, the burning of money. Hence, the boy's interest in the house's architectural pedigree. We'd also focus on setting; Old Misery's house is surrounded by rubble, left over from the World War II blitz, and this daily reminder of destruction, I explained with a drawing on the blackboard, must make these boys think there are no pathways for creation. After two or three classes, we came to consensus. Our theme was nicely wrapped up and ready to be packed away before our next story: the forces of class and war can sometimes cause creative energies to become destructive.

I always had private misgivings about this interpretation. It seemed too reductive of the story's many mysteries. I'd conclude the story with many questions of my own. What's with the laughing at the end? Can we adequately explain the burning of the money? Who is Trevor? Trevor was not, I privately believed, the little Communist I made him out to be in class. Instead, I knew there was something darker at work here. Sure, Greene makes us aware of class in the story; sure, the daily reminders of war and austerity must have played a part in this. But to simply ascribe class resentment as the genesis of a meticulous, ingenious destruction -- to the very last brick -- of the house of a kind man implied that evil acts themselves are always reducible to a rational, socially conditioned motivation. And this interpretation left me wanting.

But could I really start a freshman course with some philosophical musings on mystery, darkness, and evil? Would it be better to teach an interpretation I didn't quite believe in, in order to show them how to analyze a text? Or ought I to use the story to show them sometimes there aren't answers for evil? That there is a darkness to the world?

In a way, this is one of the risks of teaching. We become entrenched in our way of teaching a story, a historical conflict, a mathematical theory. We convince ourselves that we need to teach it this way because, only then, will our students see that, if we use the rational methods, problems can be solved, texts interpreted, and history understood. We so desire to convince our students that analysis is rewarded with conclusions that we forget that sometimes the reward is confronting the mystery, the limits of our understanding.

I didn't think of any of these questions about "The Destructors" until I decided to teach a senior elective on Graham Greene (for which students will be contributing to this blog) and immersed myself into, as his fans call it, "Greeneland." Only then did I realize how secondary issues of class are in his work. Greene's English, so class issues can never wholly disappear, but they certainly take a backseat to his obsessions with evil, innocence, and the comic in the tragic. When read as the opening work of first collection, titled Twenty-One Stories, "The Destructors" suddenly seems less an exploration of class and more an introduction to Greene's universe. It's a fallen world we live in, we learn, but we, like the lorry driver at the end of the story, still have "got to admit it's funny."

So from the cinders of my previous understanding, I start anew with this course. "[D]estruction," Greene's narrator tells us, "after all is a form of creation."