Tag Archives: classics

Does pronunciation equal intelligence?

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I don’t usually go to Wheel of Fortune to get inspiration, but a very unusual circumstance occurred during a recent episode where a contestant had the words “Mythological Hero Achilles” on the board and only had to read it to win. He pronounced Achilles as “A-CHILL-ees” and was pronounced by Sajak to be incorrect. Wheel of Fortune later stated that “When a contestant tries to solve a puzzle, they must pronounce it using the generally accepted pronunciation.”

Now, I won’t go into the incorrect plurality in that sentence, but let’s just take them on their word. And that brings me to my conversation today, because I’ve been through this exact same thing, and let me tell you that quite often people assume you lack intelligence just because you can’t pronounce something correctly. To explain that, I’d like to bring you back to my days as a Ph.d student at Western Michigan University where I was studying political science, and in particular political philosophy.

For those who know me, it’s generally understood that I’m very well read. While other kids were reading the equivalent of Harry Potter back in my grade school days (Harry Potter wasn’t around yet, so to be honest, I don’t even remember what the kids were reading back then), I was reading classical literature, and at some point got into a major Greek and Roman influence that drove me to read all sorts of historical tomes. When I got to graduate school, I had read a lot of the material that was being assigned, so you might think that I was pretty well prepared.

Well, that might have been the case if I had read these books because some school had required me to read them. But I read them on my own, and quite often I had to go through other critical studies to even figure out what I had just read. What I never got out of this was some type of discussion about the literature, which meant that I was picking up as much information as I could without anyone actually helping me along. I remember in high school asking a teacher about some of the material I was reading on my own, and she tried really hard to pretend she knew the material, but it was pretty obvious that she was making it up as she went along and was too proud to admit that she wasn’t a reader of Hume, Rousseau and Tacitus (which I had been reading at the time). And these weren’t even obscure authors from history.

So, when I got to graduate school, I remember being in one of those group discussions where were were talking about someone like Herodotus, and I brought it up in conversation right before the professor corrected me on my pronunciation of the name. And then when I brought up another author, I received that same correction on that name as well. A few days into this course, I started to notice a sense of sarcasm coming from some of the other graduate students who had grown up with these authors in the formal courses they had taken. They all pronounced the names correctly, and there was a sense of dismissing me whenever I brought up anything that I thought was significant.

It took nearly an entire semester for that professor to finally recognize that my bad pronunciations were not indicative of my lack of knowledge concerning these authors. When that moment happened, she and I had many conversations about political philosophy that indicated that she no longer thought of me as some grade school dunce who entered her classroom. But I will say that for years of graduate school, I never received that same respect from some of those same students who attended class with me that semester. There was always a sense that I didn’t know what I was talking about because I couldn’t pronounce a name as well as they could.

And this is one of those snapshots I took back with me when I realized that much of my education before graduate school was self-taught and self-learned. While others were attending really expensive Ivy League colleges to gain knowledge, I was spending my time in the Army, reading whatever I could find whenever I had a spare moment to myself. I sometimes wonder if my understanding of literature has a bit of a skew because of how I learned it and because of what I was exposed to while learning it.

But I do know how that contestant felt like on Wheel of Fortune. After he lost, he then gave an apologetic interview about how he knew how to pronounce the name but just flubbed it. I remember making the same kind of comment the first time I mispronounced a literary name. And then I stopped apologizing after it happened numerous times after. Because I learned something during that time that it took me a long time to realize. You see, I did a lot of mispronouncing of names back then, but one thing I did know was what those authors wrote, and what they meant. What I learned was how many graduate students bullshitted their way through conversations about those same authors, as they knew how to pronounce the names, but hadn’t a clue what those authors really meant.

And I find that very important, no matter how you say the names.

Classic Literature is not a Punchline of Knowledge

Books, Education, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

I was having a conversation with someone about a mundane topic, specifically about butterflies, when it reminded me of Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes, a story of butterfly hunter who gets trapped by a society that mates him with a woman in an inescapable sand house. When first discussing it, there was no expression of interest about my story until I mentioned that the man’s story served as somewhat of an allegory to the fact that he used to trap butterflies (and thus, he became the trapped butterfly as a result). Then there was the recognition of the point of the story, and that’s the end of that.

But it got me thinking because I realized that after telling this little literary selection that there are a lot of people who seem more focused on the punchline of a story than in the story itself, and that’s the purpose behind this post. You see, what I’m starting to suspect is that people are so focused on the outcome and the “rest of the story” that they miss the purpose of the original story in the first place. In other words, people will read about Machiavelli, figure the Prince was about gaming the system and then feel they know what they are talking about when they refer to someone as being Machiavellian. I use this example because it is probably one of the more misused literary references in current usage. I observe the media constantly trying to act academic when they call some world leader, or some local leader, as Machiavellian, and what they’re really saying is that someone is manipulative. It immediately gives me the impression that they’ve never actually read Machiavelli to understand that to understand Machiavelli is to understand the Discourses, not the Prince. The Prince is only a small part of a much larger canvas, and quite often people read the Cliff Notes of even the Cliff Notes version of Machiavelli, meaning they’re getting about 1/10th of 1/10th of an understanding of the government scribe, not even realizing his whole purpose was to explain Aristotle in his modern day terms, not to create an understanding of how people can be snide to get over on others.

I find this in a lot of media (and common) references to literature. I hear a lot of referral of Moby Dick from all sorts of sources, and almost always they focus on a tiny segment of the story. Sure, they usually get the overall message, but almost every time I get the impression that that’s all they got out of the story, meaning they probably never read it all of the way through. A couple of years ago, while sick in Prague, I sat in my room and read through Melville once again, and I came away with a completely new understanding of his novel. Most people, if lucky, might read it once, and that’s it. And usually it’s because it was required reading.

I see this same thing with Don Quixote, which is such a brilliant story, in both English and Spanish, yet I would bet that one percent of the people who talk about it have actually read either version all of the way through. I was reading it a year or so ago again, in English this time, and I was just floored at how great a story the author constructs. It’s not just a literary story, but it’s hilariously written by a man who truly understood the human condition enough to hold it responsible for all of its absurdity. A media critic bringing up his loyal assistant doesn’t come close to relaying the significance of that poor follower who leads us through so many of the protagonist’s great, yet ridiculous, adventures.

A year or so ago, I sat down and re-read Dostoyevskiy (one of many spellings of his name) again. I had read Crime and Punishment when I was a young child. As a matter of fact, it is the very first book I ever read, and I only read it because my grade school teacher at the time said I was too young to ever read such a book. The first time I read it, I struggled through it and barely eeked out an understanding that this was the story of a man who did something horribly wrong and was fearing the ramifications of his actions, kind of a reading I would have years later of the Tell Tale Heart from a much different nuanced author. Yet, I have re-read that book many times over my life, each time getting a better understanding of what the author was trying to reveal to me, only understanding it differently because I had years of living that backed up my new understandings. This time around, as I read through the Idiot, I think I came one step closer to understanding why the author told the story he did. Years from now, I hope to revisit it again and see if I came closer that time.

The problem I perceive right now is that way too many people are hearing stories, or watching them on TV or in movies, and they’re convinced they’ve “read” the novel and understand all of the choices the author took to relay his story. That is such a weak interpretation of literature and so sad of a compromise that it bothers me to even think about it. I fear for America because almost all of our bestseller charts are filled with young adult books rather than powerful novels that challenge us to think, rather than fill our heads with mild entertainment. From vampires and zombies to Harry Potter, we keep filling our libraries with crap that does so little to stimulate people intellectually, and while I sometimes think “well, at least the masses are reading”, I’m left wondering if we’re a society doomed to complacency and easy manipulation by people who are smart enough to realize that an intellectually void mass is much easier to control than one that thinks for itself. All it takes is someone with the wrong intentions, perhaps someone very, shall I say Machiavellian, and the future might not look so bright.