Few American novelists of the twentieth century looked as professorial as Kurt Vonnegut, at least in a rumpled-fixture-of-the-English-department way. But though he did rack up some teaching experience, not least at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he could hardly have been a conventional lecturer. This is evidenced by the 2004 clip above, in which he explains his ideas about the “shapes” taken by all stories — an idea he first formally presented as his master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Though the thesis itself was rejected (a quarter-century later, the university accepted Cat’s Cradle in its stead), its ideas proved powerful enough to entertain Vonnegut’s audiences up until the end of his life.

On his chalkboard, Vonnegut draws a vertical and a horizontal axis: the former charts the protagonist’s fortune, good or ill, and the latter represents time (from B to E: “beginning, entropy”). He then plots the curve of an especially simple and reliable story form, “man in a hole,” which involves someone getting into trouble — downward turns the slope — then getting back out again.

But the protagonist should end up a bit higher on the scale of fortune than he began, because “the reader thinks, ‘Well, by God, I’m a human being too. I must have that much in reserve if I get into trouble.” Then come the stories of other shapes, including such popular favorites as “Cinderella” and Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

“This rise and fall,” Vonnegut warns us, “is, in fact, artificial. It pretends that we know more about life than we really do.” When he attempts to describe the shape of Hamlet, he ends up coming across one reason the play is regarded as a work of genius: “we are so seldom told the truth,” but Shakespeare tells us the truth that “we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” Rather, “all we do is echo the feelings of people around us.” As Vonnegut’s readers know, a dimmer view of human nature than his would be hard to come by. But if he didn’t have faith the ability of stories to teach us good from bad, he did have faith in their ability to teach us that we aren’t about to figure it out for ourselves.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Some good news: Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a recounting of her first 17 years, including a rape at the age of 7 or 8 by her mother’s boyfriend, and her subsequent emotional trauma, no longer leads the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom’s list of banned and challenged books.

The bad news: there will always be titles assigned to high schoolers that vividly depict young people’s actual experience, that parents and community groups will target on similar grounds.

New African listed some of the verbatim objections that have been leveled against I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – that it encouraged “profanity”, was filled with “descriptions of drug abuse, sexually explicit conduct and torture”, preached “bitterness and hatred against whites”, was “likely to corrupt minors” and contained “inappropriately explicit sexual scenes.”

Angelou, who accused the book’s detractors of not reading more than two words of it, bridled that anyone would “act as if their children are not faced with the same threats.”

Mollie Godfrey’s TED-Ed lesson, animated by Laura White. above, points out how radical Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was for a work of its time:

Her autobiography was one of the first to speak openly about child sexual abuse and especially groundbreaking to do so from the perspective of the abused child. For centuries Black women writers have been limited by stereotypes characterizing them as hypersexual. Afraid of reinforcing these stereotypes, few were willing to write about their sexuality at all but Angelou refused to be constrained. She publicly explored her most personal experience without apology or shame.

Robert P. Doyle, vice-president of the Freedom to Read Foundation, revealed that the ALA was inspired to launch Banned Books Week in 1982, when the American Booksellers Association displayed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and other works in a cage outside the entrance to their annual conference:

The display generated a lot of press attention. And the book community realized that we have not only an opportunity, but a responsibility to engage the American public in a conversation about the First Amendment as it relates to books and literature. A coalition was formed immediately with the authors, publishers, and major distribution centers (bookstores and libraries) in the U.S. to draw attention to the importance of the freedom to read, to publicize threats to that freedom, and to provide information to combat the lack of awareness.

Many of the book’s high profile defenders discovered it at a formative age, including rapper Common, who decided to become a writer after encountering it as a 5th grader, and Oprah Winfrey, who was blown away to learn that another young Black girl had also endured sexual abuse:

I read those words and thought, “Somebody knows who I am.”

No less moving is a comment on Godfrey’s TED-Ed lesson left by a teacher in Texas:

Caged Bird helped saved my life. Thankful for the day my 11th grade English teacher at a conservative Christian school handed it to me and said, “read this, sweet pea”…I still encourage my students at a conservative Christian school in TX to read it.”

“I am glad you got the help you needed,” another viewer responded. “I live in Florida, and that teacher who helped you would be charged with a felony here. I’m dead serious.”

Listen to Maya Angelou discuss I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in this 1970  interview with Studs Terkel. 

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.