School in Nature
from Raising Girls in Bohemia: Meditations of an American Father
Regarding my daughters, I worry that I'm over–protective almost as often as I worry that I am not protective enough. These worries register differently in America and in Europe. In the United States, in New Orleans or Kalamazoo, I worry daily, hourly, for my daughters' physical safety. In America, men creep through windows to brutalize, then drag away and murder, little girls. In America, girls and boys should not be on the streets unattended, should not play beyond the gaze of caring adults. In Prague, women, even teenage girls, may traverse the streets after dark. My teenager scoots about the city on public transport, the terrific metro and tram systems, without fear. There are monsters everywhere; children are stolen, hurt and killed everywhere, even in Prague, though much, much less frequently than in American cities and environs.
Both of my older girls have commented as to how different it feels to live on the two continents, different in terms of safety, feeling safe. The twelve–year–old insists that I am "over–protective" generally, but particularly so in America. My eighteen–year–old says that she herself doesn't feel safe in the United States, though understands that she may be responding as much to my and her mother's sense of threat as manifesting her own.
I recall standing a couple of years ago with my daughters' Czech mother, before we divorced, waving at Annie as she and a busload of her eight–year–old compatriots began their journey eighty kilometers outside of Prague to "Skola v Prirode," School in Nature. She would spend a week there, sleeping in a dormitory, taking three hardy squares daily, studying a little but playing a lot "in nature," which is simply to say nowhere near a paved street and in the midst of much organic stuff. There would be hiking and organized play. Perhaps they would learn about which mushrooms, hloby, are edible and which will make you nauseous. I recall hoping she would learn to tell time with a stick, though she was not yet very swift to read time on a clock face. We could only dream that she would be infused with good domestic habits "in nature" that she all but laughs at us for trying to instill in her at home.
As the bus pulled from the curb, over twenty sets of parents—and, remarkably, both a mother and father accompanied almost every child—waved goodbye; one had tears in her eyes. She was a red–cheeked dumpling of a woman whose head was completely bald, no doubt less a fashion statement than the result of chemo. All of the parents twitched a little or fussed with toddlers, suppressing, it seemed, tiny trepidations. No one expected anything bad to happen to any of the children on that bus; indeed, "School in Nature" is a regular feature of public elementary schooling in the Czech Republic, beginning in daycare. Every late spring, kids are packed off to the country for a week to bond with their classmates and teachers in a more expansive and intimate setting than the classroom.
Do children four to eight–years–old get bundled off, say, to summer camps in America? When they do, aren't parents usually heavily involved? I mean, imagine even a single school district, much less an entire state, or the entire nation, procuring the infrastructure to accommodate such an event, and then imagine fifty or so families (in this case, two second–grade classes) on a given day sending off such young children to a place those parents have never seen and will likely never see, to be cared for by individuals who, with the exception of the classroom teacher, they have never met and will likely never meet. Do American parents of very young children harbor that much trust? In America I wouldn't; here I do, but mainly because everyone else does.
Around that time, I attended a lecture at the American Embassy's Woodrow Wilson Center that is housed, inexplicably, in the Irish Embassy next door. A fellow from a middling southern university, on some sort of Fulbright tour of U.S. embassies, gave a talk on the contemporary American novel. I immediately disliked him for numerous reason: his sensible suit; his pissy, condescending demeanor; the fact that he thought German was Kafka's second language; the fact that he asserted baldly that Pynchon is the greatest living American writer; the fact that the first page of his hand–out was a list of McArthur "genius" Award winners, with Pynchon's and three or four other names in bold type; but I disliked him primarily because he listed off the top of his head several "popular" novels, among them The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, about which he said, with an actual sigh, "It really isn't very good, is it?"
No, it isn't, for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that the second half is contrived, oddly predictable. But the first half is brilliant if for no other reason than the fact that the author found probably the only way the subject of the most extreme brutality against female children could be made palatable to an American, predominantly female audience. By entering the realm of the fantastic, by soldering Mickey Mouse ears onto Ted Bundy, by bringing the most puerile elements of American popular culture to bear upon the most hideous features of that culture, Sebold made it possible for Americans, but especially American women, to consume, in all its hideous details, the brutal murder of a child.
The narrator is the murdered adolescent Susie Salmon, as even most folks who haven't read the novel probably know by now. There's much prattle throughout about a goofy Heaven she now occupies, the rules of engagement between the dead and the living. But Sebold does not spare the reader the details of the crime, the protracted suffering of the victim; and the reader, the target audience for the novel, is female. Is it the first novel by a woman, for a predominantly American female audience, that is about the most extreme violence against female children? If it isn't, there can't be many others that depend upon the reader feeling empathy for the child victim at the moment of victimization, depend upon the reader projecting onto the victim's consciousness at the moment a hideously violent crime is being committed. Indeed, how many novels by American women have centered on explicit, fatal violence against female children? I can't think of a single work of fiction, whose primary audience is female, which centers on the detailed revelation of such violence. The fact that it could only be done in the realm of the fantastic; that it could only reach its audience by asserting that death is not death; that it could only stare unflinchingly into the maw of a child's doom by giving that child a most implausible life after death, stabs me in the heart, my father heart. The Lovely Bones is a mediocre novel that touches greatness by accomplishing something Pynchon's writing never has and never will; it gives an authentic voice to those who have been silenced, authentic not in a literary sense because the point of view of the novel is sophomoric; it is authentic rather in the sense that it speaks passionately to the deepest need for wish fulfillment, the wish that the world, that American society, be other than it is, regarding children, especially.
There is art that flies below the intellect's radar; this is true of much popular art, MTV stuff, Hollywood stuff. But a novel like The Lovely Bones is not "popular"; it occupies an interesting zone, though, one that is broader than the elite audience for such authors as Pynchon, Barth and Delallo, certainly, but one that is not, I would argue, any less sophisticated, just less professional in its tastes, less self–conscious and condescending, certainly less hierarchical. There are novels, such as Gravity's Rainbow, that are great in spite of being fodder for jaded academic discourse, and mediocre novels that manage to ride the slipstream of a national dream or nightmare. It is the latter that somehow get under the skin, and burrow deep into the dreambox of the psyche, as do myths and fairytales.
A father's fear for daughters can be debilitating, for him as well as for the female children. In nature, gender roles are fixed; in human society, because it is human nature to stand at once in and out of nature, roles result from generations of tough negotiations. A reflective person cannot be an American father of females and not be, in the most fundamental sense, feminist, even if he considers himself a social conservative, which I do not. There cannot be many among those who consider themselves social conservatives who do not wish their daughters to have opportunities equal to their sons' to pursue career goals, to earn the educations that will enable them to have desired careers and social status. And certainly those same fathers want society to be organized such that daughters do not have to run life–long gauntlets of physical threat. But since all women, in America especially, must indeed run such gauntlets, what is a father's role in preparing his daughter for life–long physical threat? The powerful desire to protect runs counter to a father's feminist ideals. To protect a female, or, more precisely, to be "overly protective," as my ten–year–old has learned to say, is to fall back into the patriarchal paradigm, but to speak practically, and not just ideologically, how can a female child learn to negotiate the gauntlet, to survive it, to thrive in spite of it, when she is being protected, even "overly protected," by her father?
No daughter of mine would ever be allowed to walk the route from school that the narrator of The Lovely Bones is allowed to traverse daily; it is a route similar to ones that millions of adolescent girls routinely take to and from school, to and from friends' houses, and the parents of those girls are not bad parents, of course; they're playing the odds, as everyone everyday must play odds, tempt fate, at least a little. But I am constitutionally unable to play those particular odds regarding my daughters. I will not allow my teenager to walk by herself anywhere that is not at least moderately peopled. At what point will I loosen up? At what point will I, too, play the odds?
When she herself insists. She has, to now, never complained about a lack of mobility, a lack of physical freedom in America. But I do worry that I have conditioned her to require my protection, to prefer protection to freedom, and how, thus conditioned, will she learn to run the gauntlet? Will she simply require another male to "protect" her after she has left home?
My daughters, especially my teenager, love nature shows; they watch the National Geographic channel on Czech cable, and are unfazed by mating beasts; they also thrill to see the lioness drag down the gazelle from behind. They root for the lioness, love that it is she who hunts for the pride while the old guy, in all his grouchy, maned glory, sits on his haunches blinking out over the killing field. They are not sentimental about the prey, and that is good, I think. When a couple of years ago I threatened to drop the Ginny pigs off on a grassy plot in Vysehrad Park, near our home in Prague 4, my then eight–year–old of course knew that the animals would probably be immediately devoured by cats, but called my bluff; I said, "Annie, you know they'll be eaten, right?" to which she replied, "That's only natural." I continued to clean her pets' cage, grumble about how little she attends to them.
The problem arises when we tolerate violence against females as somehow natural, simply a nasty aspect of the order of things. And that is precisely what has happened in America. We tolerate what seems natural, what seems simply nature's dark side. European society generally, and certainly Czech society specifically, in ideological terms are more sexist than American society; the feminist hue and cry has been loudest and most effective, as ideology, which is to say as rhetoric, as social discourse, in America. But in the developed world, in the vaunted West, America is also the most dangerous environment for females. It is quite simply the case that my daughters are more physically free in Europe, and more ideologically free in America.
I lived for ten years with a woman who was brutally raped a year before we were together. It was the late 70s, and she and a workmate were traveling from New Orleans to somewhere near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as I recall, to visit with colleagues on a holiday. Their car broke down somewhere on the highway to Hattiesburg; three men in a pickup stopped. She and her friend climbed into the flatbed, but instead of driving them to the next gas station, the truck turned off the highway into the woods.
What they did to her, what it took her years to describe to me in full, lying in the dark, weeping, often intoxicated, was beyond description, literally. That is, it is the sort of event, the sort of experience, a systematic, even ritualistic humiliation and terrorizing that must never be appropriated, in any manner. I mention it here obliquely simply to celebrate her heroism, her maintenance of dignity, her humbling grace, and to speak briefly to the effect such an act may have upon a man who loves a woman who has been thus victimized.
She never sought counseling, never received the disinterested care anyone who has experienced such brutality should. In the midst of the attack, she'd been certain that when they were through with her they'd kill her, and, thereafter, on occasion, expressed the sentiment that she wished they had indeed swiftly killed her there, among the trees.
She got better. She healed, in a fashion. We loved each other, in a fashion. We were young, living in the French Quarter, working in restaurants between stints in graduate school until I finally found a teaching job in New Orleans. Perhaps I was even tenderer towards her than I otherwise would have been, more attendant. She was the most poised and beautiful person I'd even known, and I wanted to kill the evil bastards who'd hurt her. I fantasized coming upon them, individually, and beating each one to death with my fists, choking life out of them. Such revenge was utterly impossible, of course. She hadn't officially reported the attack. The evil was untraceable.
She certainly didn't thereafter make a secret of the rape, so my referencing it here breaks no confidence. It didn't define our relationship; it didn't siphon all joy from her life, our lives. There was much laughter, much fun. But no day passed without my thinking about it, without my feeling that surge of anger, the desire to destroy physically the men who had brutalized someone so beautiful.
Which is to say I wanted to destroy myself, that part of me that was culpable, that part of every man that is culpable. I would bring brutality to bear upon brutality, and thereby sanctify it.
The gauntlet my daughters must learn to negotiate is organized according to the same imperatives by which I would protect them. I would traverse the border from Nature to Nurture even as my girls must learn to straddle it. And that haughty, ignorant, professor of wholly irrelevant, hierarchical judgments, even as I judge him so coldly, perhaps unfairly, should renegotiate his relation to whatever canon he prays to with the pride of an illiterate who has done and seen almost everything.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Richard Katrovas
Richard Katrovas is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, most recently The Years of Smashing Bricks (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007). He is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program and teaches at Western Michigan University.