The Boy in the Long Coat: Thirteen Ways of Looking into Darkness

Abstract

The Boy in the Long Coat:Thirteen Ways of Looking into Darkness Thomas Maltman (bio) 1 The boy had vacant eyes and a long, cadaverous face. For my high school English class he'd written a gore-soaked story about a chainsaw massacre committed by two drugged-out men. I read a portion of it aloud to another teacher and told him my plans to show it to the principal. "Don't," he advised. "This happened last year, too." He went on tell me about how the previous year the boy had written a different violent story. His English teacher had turned it in to the principal, but her concerns were dismissed when the boy's mother claimed that the teacher's curriculum had given her son the ideas for the story. I had met his mother—a thin, spidery woman who worked for the district—and knew how this was going to go down. I crumpled up the pages and stuffed them in the garbage can. 2 Following Columbine, so much of what we learned about Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris later turned out to be myths. Neither boy was bullied or a member of the Trench Coat Mafia. They didn't target jocks, blacks, or Christians. Neither boy was much into Goth, and Dylan had even taken a date to prom a few days before the killings. Writing more than a decade later, Dave Cullen, the author of Columbine, said, "We created those myths for a reason. We were trying to answer the question of why and we were trying to answer it too soon." 3 The oldest written story in English is a monster story. In Beowulf the monster takes the shape of Grendel, a creature the epic poet describes as a "spawn of Cain." Cursed from birth. Cursed from the beginning of time. [End Page 119] The word monster, from the Latin "monstrum," literally means a "malformed animal or human, creature aΔicted with a birth defect." There is no other reason given for Grendel's existence, no explanation for the nightly slaughter in Hrothgar's mead hall, and the monster wears the Dark Age equivalent of Kevlar, magical skin that can't be pierced by any weapon. His antithesis, the hero Beowulf, is so unimaginably strong he swims the ocean in full chain mail, killing sea monsters with his fists. When Beowulf slays Grendel by ripping off his arm, it's just the beginning of trouble. You remember. Grendel has a mother, biding her time at the bottom of the swamp. Even monsters have mothers, the oldest written story in English reminds us. 4 "I don't assign the personal essay anymore," one teacher confided. He talked in a low voice about the ones who cut, the near suicides, the ones who have already been in and out of rehab or mental institutions. "I just can't read that stuff anymore. I don't want to know." While I understand how this teacher feels, I know that as long as I teach I will always assign some form of personal narrative in my composition and creative writing courses. It's not that I want to know. Sometimes I wish I could forget or unread what I've read, but the root of the word "essay"—essai in French—signifies a trial, an attempt to explain or understand, and what better place for my students to begin this process than by exploring the stories that shape their identity? I will teach this personal form and also encourage my students to draw upon their own lives when writing fiction, even knowing that disturbing things might come to light. In the years before Seung-Hui Cho massacred thirty-two students at Virginia Tech, he terrorized his creative writing classroom. Cho's play "Richard McBeef" featured a molested child who is killed in the end by his stepfather. It was not just the violent content of his work, however, but how he interacted with classmates that caused the most concern. Seung-Hui Cho demanded that other students refer to him as "Question Mark" in class and reportedly photographed the legs of female classmates from under his desk using a...