Book Talk: The Once and Future King by T. H. White

The Once and Future King by T. H. White

Description:

Based largely on Le Morte d’ Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, The Once and Future King by T. H. White is a book that is difficult to categorize. It is both a retelling of the Arthurian legend and a social commentary surrounding the thinking and events of World War II. It is both hilariously fantastical and mysteriously dark. Its symbols and structures are common to the traditional fairy tale and yet it threatens to upset the thinking of a student of philosophy.  It is at once a snapshot of humanity’s past, humanity at the time when the book was written, and a look into humanity’s future, all wrapped up in the Arthurian tale. White uses the iconic symbols, characters, and themes of the Arthurian legend(such as Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, the Round Table, The Questing Beast, The Quest for the Holy Grail, Merlin, and many others) to comment on the nature of humanity, war, love, power, justice, morality, nationalism, failure, class, time, progressivism, and much more. The scope of ideas within this book is quite near boundless.

Rationale for choosing this text:

I selected this text because I believe it offers ample opportunity for critical analysis. It is thematic, full of both archetypal and complex characters, and comments on social/moral issues. The Once and Future King would be appropriate for a vast majority of High School students and probably some Middle Schoolers as well. The only elements of difficulty are length (it’s actually four novels in one), allusions (including other languages here and there), sentence complexity, and some difficult dialogue (eye dialect, slang vocab, tracking difficulty). To get the most out of this text, students will want to search the internet for references they don’t understand at first. It’s not the most accessible text, but I think most High School students would be up for the challenge, and the challenge is well worth the reward.

Teaching ideas:

There’s ample material within The Once and Future King from which to derive a variety of lesson/unit plans. There are at least half dozen characters that would make great subjects for analysis of complex characters (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.3). Being a thematically rich text, The Once and Future King is also a great opportunity for students to engage in the development of themes across a text (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2). Additionally, while sometimes challenging, the linguistic choices made by T. H. White also present students a great opportunity to evaluate those choices and explore how they enrich and develop the narrative (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.4). There are quite a few lesson plan and curriculum ideas that have already been developed for this text and I believe it’s a relatively common part of any curriculum that discusses the Arthurian Legend.

Potential challenges:

The length and complexity of The Once and Future King could be initially intimidating to some students or instructors, but I really don’t think it’s inaccessible by any means. It’s not a book that a novice reader can just pick up and “get” (I’m not even sure that an expert reader could just pick up this book and “get” it); it is a highly allusional and nuanced text. For that reason, it is a great text for students to practice critical reading strategies with. Nothing super graphic is described, but the story does contain quite a lot of death, mayhem, dark emotional turmoil, incest, a love triangle, a whole bunch of morally challenging material, and the boiling of a cat. I don’t see there being huge concerns with regard to administrators’ or parents’ responses to the text, and if there is an issue it’s pretty easy to omit the offending material. Students might complain a bit if they’re required to read some of this text and aren’t given ample time to discuss it.

Additional thoughts:

The Once and Future King is a high cost/high reward book as long as it is read critically, otherwise it’s mostly just high cost. If you teach this book (and you should), be prepared to spend some time helping your students chew on it for a bit. It’s worth the hard work.