From the Bookshelf: For the Man Who Has Everything

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook. In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

There are fantasies we all have, ones that come from regret.  While we are often able to surpress them, there are times when we wish we could indulge those fantasies, to go back and live life as if that girl had never left, or as if you hadn’t missed that third strike … or, well, as if Krypton had never exploded.  Such is the premise of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1985 Superman story, “For the Man Who Has Everything.”

Published in Superman Annual #11, the comic is a story wherein Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman arrive at the Fortress of Solitude on Superman’s birthday (February 29) in order to celebrate.  What they are greeted with is not a jovial, one-year-older Man of Tomorrow, but a catatonic Superman who has a strange life form attached to his chest.  They try to figure out what is going on and soon get their answer in Mongul, an alien despot who as “poisoned” Superman with the Black Mercy, a parasitic flower that feeds off its host, giving him his heart’s desire while slowly driving him insane.

Naturally, our heroes begin fighting the big alien.  Wonder Woman goes right at Mongul while Batman and Robin try their best to get the black mercy off of Superman.  While they’re doing that, Superman is living life as Kal-El, a family man living on a Krypton that never exploded and from which he was never sent to Earth in a rocket.  Slowly, as the fight rages on, his ideal world begins to tarnish and then starts to fall apart.  When that happens … well, I won’t spoil it for you if you’d like to read it.  In fact, it’s on sale for 99 cents at the DC Comics digital store for 10 days!  (honestly, it’s a coincidence.  I didn’t write the post to get you to buy a 27-year-old Superman comic)

Now I am a big fan of comics being used in the classroom (and notice I’m using the word comics, not “graphic novels.”  I hate that phrase.), but I find that there is a considerable obstacle to using them.  No, it’s not the format; no, it’s not the perception of comics being “juvenile;” no, it’s not the lack of good material.  It’s availability and cost of said material.  Being a comics fan, I know of quite a number of great stories that exist outside of the catalogues I see in my mailbox periodically.  There’s no price break for a class set of “For the Man Who Has Everything” the way there is Moore and Gibbons’ other famous work, Watchmen, and the logistics of getting a cart’s worth of digital copies is often more of a headache than it’s worth.

What I had to do in order to get enough copies for my students is take the one copy that I had (in a trade paperback) and make 30 copies of it using the photocopier.  It wasn’t innovative, it was violating a few copyright laws, and it was also beyond tedious.  But as a piece of literature, it was worth the effort.

After all, by simply looking at Superman, you can take a look at the heroic ideal, the epic hero, and everything that goes along with that archetype. But beyond that, there is the look that the students who were leading their discussion group decided to take, and that is a look at dystopia on a very personal level.  The society of a Krypton that survived seems ideal at first but as the story goes on we see that what the Black Mercy has given Superman is a perversion of a perceived ideal and not his “heart’s desire.”  Put beside the other story we had read — Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” — the idea of a perceived ideal (in the case of the Vonnegut story, a society where everyone is truly equal) versus the horrible reality led to a fascinating conversation about the tropes of science fiction, the concept of utopia vs. dystopia, and how the perversion of an ideal such as equality can be applied to the American educational system.  The only downside, to be honest, was that the bell rang.

And all of that from a short story and a comic book?

I’ve found that if you give the medium the respect you’d give any other medium, then it becomes a very worthwhile work to study, which is what happened here with Moore and Gibbons’ work.  Now, if only I didn’t have to make 30 photocopies …

From the Bookshelf: “Lamb to the Slaughter”

Mary Maloney (Barbara Bel Geddes) prepares to whack her husband over the head with a frozen leg of lamb in the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" version of Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter."

Very often when I’m figuring out what to teach, I find myself going outside of the classroom English textbook.  In this feature, I take a look at those reading selections.

“Well,” I said after they’d finished reading the story, “I guess if you wanted me to get into the literary value here, we could talk about pacing in plot and character development and irony. But in all honesty, I just wanted you to read it because it’s fun.”

I think that my advanced English class appreciated me saying that after we had finished reading Roald Dahl’s short story “Lamb to the Slaughter,” probably because with two days to go before spring break, they didn’t feel like having a lengthy discussion about figurative language. And to be honest, I think the story was a little “below their grade level.” But I’ve used the story in 10th grade English for four years now and it always seems to be the one students remember the most and to me that’s because it’s the most fun.

If you are familiar with it, “Lamb to the Slaughter” is the story of Mary Maloney, a housewife married to a police detective whose husband comes home from work one day and tells her that he wants a divorce and is leaving her. We don’t know why, just that he told her and that it’s enough for her to grab a frozen leg of lamb from the freezer in the garage and hit him over the head with it. What she does with the leg of lamb afterwards is a master plot twist: Mary cooks it and then later winds up serving it to the police (the best line is one of the last, a police officer saying that the murder weapon is probably right there under their very noses).

The story itself is not in my English textbook. In fact, the stories in the textbook don’t seem to be too particularly entertaining. I have found myself over the last few years taking short stories from other sources–sample textbooks from other publishers, collections I have at home, literary journals and magazine–because a dearth of material provided by our school’s chosen publisher. And I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to use it so well as a teaching tool for literary devices to a “general-level” English class is because it’s an easy read. If you’re not getting stuck on the material, you’ll be able to grasp some of higher-order stuff.

After reading, one thing my students have had fun with is writing the missing scene from the story. Like I mentioned, in Dahl’s story, Mary’s husband telling her that he is leaving her is accompanied by the phrase, “And he told her” and that’s it. There’s no reason given as to why, just that he’s leaving. So having students write a dialogue where he tells her allows them to stretch creatively and also helps teach how to write dialogue properly. I’ve had the obvious (he’s leaving her for another woman) to the crazy (he’s actually a spy or he’s wanted or the mob is after him).

And of course there is a movie. “Lamb to the Slaughter” was adapted into an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” back in the 1960s starring Barbara Bel Geddes. The show fills in that missing portion, but is quite entertaining and really pulls off the irony at the end.  And … it’s available on DVD as well as on Hulu (provided the internet in your building is working properly; mine wasn’t last week).  I’ve done a classic compare/contrast between the two where we talk about why some aspects of the story were changed.  And I suppose if you wanted to go the full nine, you could use this as a way to teach writing plot twists.

But it’s also a good story just for the heck of it.