Edward Falco, a playwrite and novelist whose name is likely familiar to readers of the litblogs, was quoted by CNN today concerning Cho Seung-Hui, who was a student in Falco’s playwriting class at Virginia Tech.
Asked why he thought Cho became an English major, Falco offered what he called a guess.
The kid couldn’t speak. I did everything I knew to draw him out. I tried to joke with him. I touched his shoulder while asking him a direct question. I put myself in quiet, one-on-one space with him — and I still could not get articulate speech out of him.
Yet, in writing he could communicate. You’ve seen the plays. They’re not good writing. But they are at least a form of communication. And in his responses to the other students’ plays, he could be quite articulate. If writing is the only way you can communicate with the wider world, then I guess being an English major makes sense.
Other respected members of the Virginia Tech creative writing department are Fred D’Aguiar, Nikki Giovanni, and Lucinda Roy (who worked one-on-one with Cho after Nikki Giovanni had him removed from her class for threatening behavior). My friend Erika Meitner, a gifted poet, is scheduled to begin teaching poetry at VT in the fall. All of which just brings the tragedy closer to home . When I first heard that the massacre had happened in the engineering building, I assumed it was a disgruntled engineering grad student–which, for some reason, seems to fit our assumptions (or at least mine), about the kind of person who might carry out such an act of violence and destruction. To discover that it was an English major, not to mention an aspiring writer, came as a shock. Falco should be commended for his efforts to help a troubled–and yes, as Giovanni has said publicly, “mean”–student through writing.
Having read the plays that Cho submitted for Falco’s class, which became available online yesterday, it struck me how impossible it would be to predict behavior through writing. While the plays shocked Cho’s classmates, the fact is they are no more violent than a Quentin Tarantino script. (Click here to read the script for Resevoir Dogs). It so happens that the quality of Tarantino’s writing raises it to the level of art (whatever that may mean), while Cho’s fails on an artistic level. But if we were to vet every undergraduate writing class for violence that makes the readers uncomfortable, we might end up with rather sparse classes. I would hope that this terrible event doesn’t somehow result in the censorship of student work in writing classes; as Falco says, writing can be very valuable for students who have difficulty communicating in other ways. Tragically, it didn’t work for Cho, but that doesn’t mean it can’t work for others.
Plus–I just saw on Rarely Likable that Gordon is talking about this on After the MFA, as is Erika on Practicing Writing and Tod Goldberg.
YES, Michelle. Thanks for writing this. I see people flailing about trying to understand what happened at VT, and in the course of that, looking to lay some responsibility on Cho’s creative writing teachers for not catching the hints of impending violence. Falco is to be commended for his compassion and wisdom. How many writers expunge their demons through writing them? Far more than turn to violence.
Thanks for the comment, Ericka. I’ve been annoyed by the newscasters who say, “why didn’t his teachers do anything?” They DID do something. Lucinda Roy took it upon herself to try to figure out what was going on with him, and it sounds like Falco did too.
It’s hard to read the plays without digging for little psychopathic ingots, so most analyses are maybe bullshit–we’re finding what we want to find, something to distinguish the killer from the rest of us.
But God, I can’t help thinking that the sheer incoherence of the plays is revealing. It wasn’t the violence that bothered me–there are many comedies more brutal. But there’s an uncontrolled incoherence of events: loose narrative threads break down into isolated ravings, instances that just don’t follow from one another.
I don’t know. Maybe bullshit. But it was the sheer crazy–not the violence–that struck me.
I’m with Eric on this. Yesterday I read the plays, too, and were Cho in a class I was teaching (and were I not too creeped out to give his work attention), I’m sure that I’d begin assessment of his writing with the issue of the incoherence: “I don’t care one way or another about the violence; I don’t buy the behavior and speech of these characters.”
On a side note, the more we learn about this, the more amazing it is that Lucinda Roy agreed to work with Cho one-on-one. Students getting mad about their grades used to make me nervous enough that I’d only meet them in public places…
Eric makes a very interesting point. Yes, the incoherence is indeed the kind of thing that makes one wonder about the mind and possible madness of the writer. Interestingly, a friend (who shall remain nameless here) just appeared on a panel with a well-known critic for one of the major newspapers. This friend said that the critic’s obvious incoherence on the panel, and the critic’s glaring lack of lucidity, made it shocking that the critic was given such a major venue in which to rant. (okay, but that’s off the topic–I suppose I’m just saying that the mad are among us, often in very prominent positions…)
I think most of us who teach have been cursed by that student who turns in a 30-page, single spaced manuscript in which one cannot discern an iota of rational thought. It sounds as though Cho was just such a student.