Our theme for the month of October is “haunt.”
Cover photo: “The Sword of Damocles,” drawing, Giuseppe Piattoli (MET, 80.3.373)
As painful as it is to remember one’s teenaged years, it’s even more painful to remember one’s teenaged writing. Even in college, I’d look back at an essay I wrote the semester prior and wonder what I thought I was doing. But highschool? I haven’t dared to look back…until now….
[cue sinister organ music]
My highschool education was excellent—exceptional, even—and so I thought, in my sixteen-year-old wisdom, that I’d try blowing the socks off of my fellow AP English Composition students with our term project. Essentially, we were tasked with writing a literary essay that was about ten pages long and what dear Mr. Minick referred to as “the magnum opus.” (In hindsight, I’m uncertain as to why Mr. Minick would have subjected himself to such torture every year for his AP Comp students, but so it goes.)
Instead of thinking about what would make a good essay, I took the approach of “What if I crammed some of my favourite pretentious literary books all into one paper with some sort of common theme?” My end result was a piecemeal concoction of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Les Miserables, Crime and Punishment, and The Great Gatsby (in my defense, I took AP Comp and AP Lit concurrently, so there was bound to be crossover at some point). And you know what? I wrote about hauntings.
This is, as one would say, the punchline as to why I’m writing about my bad high school writing during our October themed month here at the post. I wrote about hauntings in what I thought was the crowning achievement of my high school writing career, so I might as well write now about how I, um, wrote about it, nearly a decade (!) ago.
“Despite their different approaches, beliefs, stories, and times, Wilde, Hugo, Fitzgerald, and Dostoyevsky all conclude that there are two opposite, ever-present forces, demanding to be felt and reckoned with, that pull at the hearts, minds, and souls of men. This undeniable paradox of the beautiful and the damned that are within of us—and the hauntings that come from such an impossible state—is a fundamental part of our humanity, and it makes us the ugly and beautiful, complex, inexplicable, created beings that we are.”
In retrospect, my “magnum opus” was a valiant effort, however misguided and elementary. Especially since I’ve iterated over all of these works again and again over the years (and written more woeful papers) and welcomed the pleasant metaphysical haunting of rolling them like river rocks in my stream of consciousness. In fact, I’m re-reading Les Miserables right now—and it still troubles me like a pebble in the shoe.
I don’t understand why Hugo called his crowning achievement “The miserable.” Especially when one reads the book (or watches bad adaptations with Hugh Jackman), the miserable…stay miserable. Javert, Fantine, Eponine, et al.—they live and die, miserable. Arguably, Valjean and Cosette were miserable, but in a cynical light, they overcame it with a rather simple trajectory and achieved contentment. Marius is a buffoon but doesn’t seem especially miserable, either.
In fact, in many respects, the Thénardiers should be the titular characters as they seem the most human—dare I say, the most “relatable”—of the characters. Yeah, they’re morally corrupt, but what miserable person isn’t? And, in the end, the Thénardiers claw their way up, because they know that the poor and moral stay poor, but the poor and opportunistic have the chance to be not-poor…. This troublesome reality has been percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. But, that’s another essay for another day, and I think I’ve veered off topic enough as it is.
Honestly, if you had to connect all those books, haunting is a pretty solid theme for doing so.
I think I wrote my big IB English paper about like, existential grappling in Chekhov’s stories or something extremely dramatic for a 17-year old. Something about high school English classes just brings out the desire to make grand sweeping statements about the nature of humanity.
I think that’s a great idea for a paper! I certainly would never have had the wherewithal to tackle that as a high schooler. Those are all such great selections, too.