Saturday, June 11, 2005
Pet peeve
All too much great stories or novels get degraded by time to lowly places. Take Gulliver's Travels for example, what really is a major political satire has somehow been degraded to a children't story about some guy meeting weird people. Ask people what places Gulliver traveled to, and they can only think of the lands of the midgets and the lands of the giants. Why? So many people are simply too stupid to notice any symbolism in a work. They can only understand the superficial layer of what the author is directly saying. What the heck are our schools teaching? Maybe we should tell kids stories that are not just about bunies and squirrels where everything ends happily. People just aren't thinking about what they see, read, or hear. They just believe what is directly being told them.
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3 comments:
I've seen some copies of Gulliver's Travels at schools, in which the last scenes are been edited out. Remember when Gulliver is leaving the land of the Houyhnhnhms on a boat made of human flesh, to return and recoil in disgust at the touch of his wife?
Ray Bradbury mentioned once a "literary anthology" for high schools, which condensed 400 BOOKS into a mere 1,000 pages.
I think I told you before that I am happy to see someone your age take an interest in something other than music and movies. Every Sunday I post my Question Of The Week. I would like to hear a younger persons answers to some of them. I hope you will stop by to answer this weeks question.
God Bless America, God Save The Republic.
On the other hand I am glad children at least still learn that there is a Gulliver's Travels, which like many great books works on many levels after all. Perhaps some will come back to it as adults and see its depths, and indeed its nastiness at times.
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