Watching Netflix's new adaptation of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, I found myself struggling. Grappling might be the better word, actually.
I wasn't grappling with the show itself, an ambitious, gorgeously shot if ultimately thin take on a book I absolutely hated, back in ninth grade when my fellow classmates and I got pedagogically frog-marched through its ham-fisted symbolism. ("What do Piggy's spectacles represent? Write 500 words.") The new series' creator, Jack Thorne, co-created Adolescence, last year's grim chronicle of youth and violence and masculinity — hey, guy's got a niche.
What I was grappling with was my own reaction to the show — namely, how the only character I could manage to care about was Piggy, the brainy, bespectacled fat kid who's forever carping about looking out for others, fire safety and finding water. (In both the series and in Golding's book, he represents civilization, judicious restraint, the voice of reason, etc. You get it.)
My affinity for the character didn't exactly surprise me. Bullied? Bespectacled? Brainy? Body shame? Check, check, check, check. Piggy, c'est moi.
But it did worry me, because it fed into something I started noticing long ago, when I used to teach writing at the high school and undergraduate level. Call it literary narcissism — students tended to care about a piece of fiction only if they could see themselves reflected in it.
Now, look, I get it. As a queer person, as a member of a marginalized community, I know that seeing yourself represented in art is a powerful and inspiring thing. It didn't happen for centuries, and now finally women, people of color and queer folk are telling our own stories, which creates a broader, deeper literary canon that better reflects the world as a whole.
But this, among the kids I taught, felt different. Ingrained. Baked in. The default. Of course it is: There's always been a form of literary narcissism behind children's and young adult publishing — the abiding conviction that kids only want to read stories about kids. It's why we teach books with kid protagonists like Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games and The Catcher in the Rye. It's why I'd have students read John Updike's "A&P," a story told in the voice of a teenager. I wanted them to realize that writing isn't something removed from their lives, sealed away collecting dust in books on library and bookstore shelves. It's a conversation they could take part in, today, by telling their own stories about their lives.
So I'm fully complicit in where we stand today, having taught several generations of kids to internalize this literally self-centered approach to art and carry it with them into adulthood. I keep having conversations with grown, discerning adults whose chief metric for their enjoyment of a book, show or movie is how relevant it is, how directly it speaks, to the granular particulars of their lived experience. I worry that they're effectively cutting themselves off from the possibility that a work about and/or made by someone who doesn't happen to share their specific circumstances might be universal.
And universality — that's the real goal of art, no? That's what we're all out here trying to do? To find and elucidate the humanity that transcends individual circumstance? To define and exemplify the messy stuff that connects us?
Anyway, I was grappling with all this, writing myself some notes, some points I might bring up on the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour we were about to tape about Lord of the Flies (I didn't end up bringing them up, as the conversation didn't happen to flow in that direction). (So you get them here! You're welcome!).
As I do with everything I write, I read those notes aloud to myself, quietly.
A few hours later, I was scrolling through Instagram, and the algorithm just so happened to serve me up a clip from an onstage interview that the essayist/bon vivant/crank Fran Lebowitz conducted with novelist Toni Morrison at the New York Public Library in 2008. Lebowitz opined:
… People have been taught to look for themselves in books — you always hear people saying this: 'I love this book, this character is just like me.' … People have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, instead of a door, or a window. A way out.
I saw that, and two thoughts occurred to me simultaneously:
- Man, Fran Lebowitz is great. "A way out." Perfect.
- I need to get the hell off Instagram.
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