A Taste for Quarantine

A Taste for Quarantine

Gerald Graff

University of Illinois at Chicago

It has always seemed strange to me that bad books aren’t a prominent part of our school and college literature curriculum. How do we expect
students to learn to tell the difference between good and bad books unless we assign some bad ones for comparison? Don’t you need badness in order to know goodness?

I can only conclude that those who have de-termined the literature curriculum have been more interested in protecting the good or great books from contamination—that is, in feeling virtuous about their own tastes—than they are in helping students understand what they read. There is also the view, though, that reading good books is itself sufficient— no reason to read bad ones for comparison, especially since some students might think some of the bad ones are good and vice-versa, or might catch on to the fact that which books are good or bad is often alarmingly debatable.

The best thing I’ve ever read on the question of literary value, by the way, is a chapter entitled “Evaluation” in Making Sense of Literature (1977) by the late John Reichert. This book deserves greater prominence.

Romance for Men

Christine Granados

Texas A&M University

I believe that the novel is a blueprint into a writer’s soul. Anyone who has ever attempted to write one knows how much of the author is embedded into its sentences and structure. When I read what I consider to be a bad book, I notice that it is usually written by an arrogant person.

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

(1992) comes immediately to mind. I think of it as a romance novel for men, his trilogy included. Like all good romance novel writers, McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies.

He gives men a romanticized view of manliness. Mc-Carthy wraps his characters in half-truths and ideal-ized anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star State, the border, and its cowboy myths. His strong, silent, and very Ameri-can John Grady

Cole is a main character that can only come from reading Louis L’Amour pulp fiction and watching

John Wayne and Clint Eastwood Westerns. McCarthy, originally from Tennessee by way

of Rhode Island, adds his superiority complex into the tale when he has Cole and his two companions traverse the border into the wilds of Mexico where adventure awaits. Cole beds the “Felina” of Mc-Carthy’s imagination (only in this tale her name is Alejandra, and she is rich) and holds his own in a Mexico that is seen through his colonizing lens, meaning a foreign country filled with black and white (mostly black). The natives are either violent and corrupt or gentle and honest. Cole gets the best of these natives in the end, teaching them a thing or two about his truth and diplomacy, and heads back home to the good U.S. of A.

Is it any wonder that such a book was written by a man who said in an interview last year, “I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it”?