“I don’t know how Japan reacted to The Hunger Games, but I have to imagine it was not nearly as shocking as it was here in the States. It seems that Japanese comics (and I assume books as well) are very willing to go the distance when it comes to killing kids and kids killing other kids, kids having their arms cut off by bug monsters, kids falling into a chasm…
And I, for one, am happy about it. I feel like America has barely scraped the surface of kids dying and killing each other. We still talk about a few books like this in the western canon, like Lord of the Flies, meanwhile Japan has the balls to explore the shit over and over and in gruesome fashion. Why didn’t someone hand me Battle Royale or Drifting Classroom instead of Lord of the Flies in high school? I found this shit WAY more harrowing, way darker, and a lot more engaging.
Plus, these books have the advantage in the classroom of having fewer scholarly bullshit articles about them.
In 8th grade, I think I experienced one of the worst versions of literary theory from my English teacher.
We read Lord of the Flies, and she insisted that the pig murder scene was, definitively, a rape scene.
Now, I don’t think that literary theory is a stretch. But let’s just briefly talk about where it falls a little flat:
1. Does it make more sense that the boys will kill a pig, in order to eat it, or that they’d rape another boy?
To me, it makes more sense they’d be hungry AF and kill a pig.
2. Is the pig killing not horrific enough?
Does making the most brutal aspect of the book more brutal serve to change the meaning of the book?
3. Could they really NOT have shown this because of morals of the time?
Although the book maybe wouldn’t be as popular or work the same way if there was a rape instead of a murder, I think it could’ve been implied, easily, in a more direct way. A boy is kidnapped in the night, returns in the morning, and from then on won’t talk about what happened. I think you could’ve gotten away with that.
4. Isn’t it a little convenient that this interpretation goes with the popular style of interpretation at the time?
If you were in college in the 2000’s, you swallowed A LOT of literary theory that basically made everything a penis or a rape. It was the style at the time.
5. If it is a metaphor, aren’t there several other interpretations that make more sense?
For example: the killing of a literal mother and the way the boys have to emotionally sever the connection with their mothers. Survival requiring becoming an animal. The way we all have animals inside of us that don’t take much to come out. The need to shift morality based on what’s required in a different situation.
But all that aside, what annoyed me about my 8th grade English teacher’s religious adherence to the rape theory is that she was treating literary theory as literary fact.
Literary theory is the worst when someone finds a theory they think is correct and then sticks to it and tries to make it seem objectively, scientifically correct. And it’s even worse when it’s your 8th grade teacher and she gives you a test where you have to answer a question like, “What does the pig slaughter scene represent?” with the answer she’s expecting based on a theory she subscribes to.
People, if you’re teaching literary theory, the main thing to know is that ALL literary theory is theory. Legit scholars who work in this field are easy to find: They’re the ones who readily admit that what they pose is theory, one way of looking at a story, and that the purpose of theory is to explore different ways of seeing the same thing, not to definitively prove that a story is about something in particular. Because if that was the case, the answer is easy: what’s there on the page is the most likely, most defensible version of what happened. The end.
And that’s a very boring world, a world in which there’s no point to talking about stories.”