【연구논문】

“The Dickensian Lives of City Children”: Urban Pedagogy and David Simon’s The Wire

Kelly Walsh (Yonsei University)

Early in the fifth season of David Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series, The Wire (2002-2008), Gus Haynes, city desk editor for the Baltimore Sun, argues with executive editor James Whiting over an investigative series chronicling the failures of the Baltimore school system. “The word I’m thinking about is Dickensian,” says Whiting, explaining that the series should portray the “Dickensian lives of city children, and then show clearly and concisely where the school system has failed them” (5.2). What Gus specifically objects to is Whiting’s directive to simplify an extremely complex issue by ignoring the larger contexts and social forces that have left the schools in their decrepit condition. For Gus, invoking an American tradition of long-form investigative journalism, an informed series must address the unruly constellation of systems in which the schoolchildren find themselves embedded: 162 Kelly Walsh

You want to look at who these kids really are, you got to look at the parenting, or lack of it, in the city. The drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods. . . . Sure, we can beat up on city schools. Lord knows they deserve to be beat on every once in a while, but then we’re just as irrelevant to these kids as the schools are. I mean, it’s like you’re up on a corner of a roof and you’re showing some people how a couple of shingles came loose, and meanwhile, a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house. (5.2)

Scott Templeton, the ambitious, ethically challenged reporter―who will subsequently file fraudulent, Pulitzer Prize-winning accounts of the city’s homeless population―ignores Gus’s analogy, asserting that a narrow focus will not preclude telling an impactful story: “You don’t need a lot of context to examine what goes on in one classroom.” Gus, with obvious annoyance, responds: “Really? I think you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything.” The crux of the conflict, then, boils down to readership and profit, with Whiting’s demand that the paper “limit the scope, not get bogged down in details” reflecting a neoliberal sensibility that contemporary readers are indifferent to “some amorphous series detailing society’s ills” (5.2). Instead of challenging readers’ received views of urban education with a broader, sociological examination, the executive editor calls for a decontextualized, “rifle-shot approach” (Williams 220), oversimplifying a social ill to provoke sentimentalism, increase circulation, and, ideally, gain recognition from the national media. The irony here, as sensitive readers of Charles Dickens will attest, is that Gus’s invocation of the complex, interconnected social forces― the family, police, and drug trade, urban deindustrialization, de-facto “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 163 segregation, and poverty―which have precipitated the crisis of Baltimore’s schools is much more faithful to the expansive vision of Dickens’s serialized fictions than Whiting’s cinematic image of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. At the same time, this scene enacts a moment of significant self-reflexivity in The Wire, for its fourth season, which examines West Baltimore’s Edward J. Tilghman Middle School and the conflicting social forces traversing it, closely resembles the type of wide-lens story for which Gus advocates (Valdez 200). The Wire, then, is “Dickensian” in its deeply contextualized, serialized presentation of urban social reality, which constitutes an appeal for comprehensive and reflective social reform. Moreover, if we consider Hard Times (1854), The Wire may also be described as “Dickensian” in drawing viewers’ attention to the act of reading and misreading, representing and misrepresenting, social reality, to the question of which “facts” count and for whom. This is fundamentally a pedagogic process,1) one, particularly in the fourth season, that subverts teleological, American narratives of advancement and achievement. And, like Dickens, who “popularizes an understanding of bureaucracies as inward-looking and self-perpetuating” (Levine 99), the series imparts lessons in critical thinking by attending to the vicissitudes of relations between part and whole. In the process, it reveals the distressing, yet banal, reality of how institutions reproduce themselves by conditioning the individuals that pass through them. The knowledge gained from The Wire is largely negative, but, having

1) Paul Farber, in a different vein, calls The Wire “both a dramatic and pedagogic work,” in which “information is to be attained by both its characters and viewers” (416). 164 Kelly Walsh recently taught the series in a Korean university seminar, I can attest to its pedagogical force, provoking student-viewers to critical reflection on their own positionality, their readings of, and complicity in, the realities of today’s globalized, neoliberal societies. The Wire, then, has frequently been considered “Dickensian” in its ambition to present urban social reality in its totality (Jameson 240; Valdez 198; Knight 37; Williams 209). And, indeed, the term is almost ubiquitous in critical discourse on the show, even as the adjective tends to function as shorthand for an aesthetic “realism,” rather than designating concrete points of convergence or influence. Dickens’s reform-minded critiques of nineteenth-century English society are lengthy and densely textured, sprawling with details that contextualize urban poverty and reveal myriad interconnections of various social networks. In its sixty-some-hour “realist representation of Baltimore’s victims of American capitalism,” The Wire, as Galen Wilson argues, offers itself as an extended “meditation on whether such realist representations can be a productive force for social change” (Wilson 59). The answer today, it would seem, is even more ambiguous than in Dickens’s time, but the effort to provoke critical reflection, rather than exploiting viewer sentimentality, transforms television into a medium for serious social investigation;2) while The Wire invites viewers to form attachments to individual characters, its appeals for affective investment are counterbalanced by formal strategies―self-reflexivity, ironizing, lack of narrative closure―which

2) Simon, himself, notes how the show addresses concerns more traditionally taken up by serious novelists: “it is, of course, vaguely disturbing to us that our unlikely little television drama is making arguments that were once the prerogative of more serious mediums” (“Thank You”). “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 165 bring attention to how viewers “read,” construct, and cognitively map social reality. And for the characters, not unlike those we find in Dickens’s fiction, their possibilities and material outcomes remain tied to their ability to learn their “place among global, social, economic, and political conditions” (Buttress et al. 363), their success in navigating the “rules” of the different institutions they cycle through (Anderson 375). The Wire is also novelistic in its deployment of intertextuality, with Dickens a significant touchstone.3) But while the length of the series and its expansive form resonate with Dickens’s Victorian fiction, there are other generative intertexts; these include writings by serious literary figures, Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, and popular culture visual texts, police procedurals like CSI (2000-2015) and uplifting urban education narratives like Lean on Me (1989). These hybrid intertextual nodes, in part, accentuate the opacity and inertial force of bureaucracy, while adding texture to the sense of fatalism or historical determinism that pervades Simon’s Baltimore. Equally, the self-conscious deployment of intertextuality draws attention to how cinematic and literary narratives have prefigured and distorted viewers’ understanding of urban social reality; in particular, The Wire strives to dispel American myths of individual achievement and advancement, in which intelligence, effort, and inspiration seamlessly eventuate in a future qualitatively better than past and present. The Wire’s inaugural season focuses on the Baltimore police and

3) The sixth episode of the fifth season is ironically titled “The Dickensian Aspect.” 166 Kelly Walsh their efforts to bring down Avon Barksdale’s drug organization. The second turns its attention to organized labor and organized crime at the Port of Baltimore, while the third examines the city’s political landscape. The fifth and final season, as suggested, is concerned with the media, specifically the decline of American print journalism. The Wire’s penultimate season, widely considered its best, thus takes on the educational system, tracking four students, Michael, Randy, Duquan, and Namond, in their eighth-grade year at Tilghman Middle School. Of this season, Robert Bell argues that it dispenses with the others’ affective investment in nostalgia, offering, instead, “an uncharacteristic exploration of the inchoate as such, the nature of potential” (531). On the surface, this seems plausible; as I shall argue, though, it is more accurate to say that the fourth season expends significant energy exposing how “the nature of potential” is circumscribed before students enter the classroom, significantly limited by the social, familial, and economic forms in which they are immersed. Epistemologically, this season, like its predecessors, “privileges the worldview of the block” (Neal 399), disclosing both the mechanisms by which the horizons of the children’s imagination are narrowed and how their heightened attunement to the social codes of “the block” provide them oppositional scripts, shaping their attitudes toward learning. The school and the street work in concert and at cross-purposes, the ultimate result being the reproduction of both institutions. The children are not unaware of this reality, and this gives shape to a cynicism vis-à-vis academic achievement; for viewers, despite some promising microstructural changes, the almost mechanical self-perpetuation of these institutions conveys “an affective “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 167 truth of indiscriminate suffering amidst structural poverty and racism” (La Berge 558). To a large extent, the force of this truth resides in The Wire’s realist emphasis on repetition and cycles, which, for the boys, retards the capacity to reimagine their world. This realism refuses to offer more than intermittent moments of optimism; its negativity, however, can at least provoke reflection and lead to the conclusion that things ought to be otherwise.

I. Fact-Based Pedagogy: Hard Times and The Wire

In critical discourse on The Wire, it is Dickens’s later works, like Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend (e.g., Williams 219; Valdez 196-97), which are frequently referenced; each is a long novel that patiently unpacks the interconnections of social networks, presenting “social relations as a complex heaping of networks that not only stretch across space but also unfold over time” (Levine 115). Simon’s serialized drama, likewise, demands both attentiveness and time, for only in apprehending the entire series can the viewer, as Dickens writes in the postscript to Our Mutual Friend, “perceive the relations of its finer threads to the whole pattern which is always before the eyes of the story-weaver at his loom” (OMF 893). But unlike the London of Bleak House, a bustling metropolis at the imperial center, with sites and details well known to Victorian readers, The Wire’s Baltimore is a second-tier American city, and the localized texture of its inner city is unfamiliar to most viewers. Moreover, with a majority African American population, the city has 168 Kelly Walsh seen its fortunes steadily decline due to deindustrialization, “urban dereliction and a geographical, historic retreat of the black middle class” (Bell 535). While I believe there are perils imbued in a comparative, “Dickensian” reading of The Wire, particularly in light of the show’s complex racial dynamics and unflinching violence, my contention is that Hard Times provides the most generative point of reference. To start, Dickens’s fictional Coketown, a midsized, industrial hamlet, is more resonant with the historical realities of Simon’s mid-Atlantic American city. More importantly, Hard Times offers Dickens’s most sustained engagement with the educational institution, with Thomas Gradgrind’s utilitarian pedagogy seemingly concretized in Coketown, “a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever” (HT 20). And both novel and television series are deeply concerned with the manners in which capitalism, with its theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings, materially degrades urban denizens. In Hard Times, Dickens’s narrator, with thinly veiled contempt, describes how Coketown systematically “ruins” its millers:

They were ruined, when they were required to send laboring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make so much smoke. (86)

This ruinous system extends from parents to children, factory to school, government bureaucracy to the air that must be breathed. The “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 169 substandard working, living, and educational conditions work in concert and forge the prevailing sense, for the working class, that the future will be little more than a miserable repetition of past and present. For the African American residents of Simon’s West Baltimore, where many children, incidentally, suffer from asthma, the aggregate system is equally ruinous. With a dearth of viable alternatives, the illegal drug trade―known as “the game”―provides one of the few reliable sources of economic opportunity; while ruining its consumers, this institution exposes workers to violence and incarceration, thereby depriving many homes of parents. At the same time, it recruits children to handle the drugs, as they will not face prison if arrested for drug possession. While, in Season 4, Namond and Michael are “corner boys”―involved in drug dealing―and Randy and Duquan are not, all four enter the classroom marked by “the game”’s culture of toxic masculinity, fear, and resistance to official figures of authority. “You can tell the days by their faces,” the English teacher, Ms. Sampson, explains to the former policeman, now mathematics teacher, Roland (“Prez”) Pryzbylewski: “The best day is Wednesday. That’s the farthest they get from home, from whatever’s going on in the streets. You see smiles then. Monday is angry. Tuesdays, they’re caught between Monday and Wednesday, so it could go either way. Thursdays they’re feeling that weekend coming. Friday, it’s bad again” (4.4). At the microlevel, for individual students, the school can serve as a temporary way station, a refuge from the traumas of the street; this temporal rhythm, the passage from street to school to street, though, necessitates a repetitive pattern of unlearning, which, individually and systemically, fosters academic underachievement and 170 Kelly Walsh stunts imaginative faculties. In his recent epistolary memoir, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts how, as a student in West Baltimore, both the school and the street made him acutely aware of the vulnerability of his body. “Fail to comprehend the streets,” he writes, “and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. I suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the schools more” (Coates 25). His acrimony towards the educational institution stems, in part, from the lack of correlation between its “theorems extracted from the world they were created to represent” and his actual, lived world, with its prevailing sense of fear and nakedness; equally, he decries the actual function of the school, which, rather than cultivating creativity and imagination, was to discipline the black body: “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance” (26). Coates’s recollections of West Baltimore align with Simon’s representation of the inner-city school system in several ways, not least of which is the understanding that the educational institution systematically intensifies students’ sense of vulnerability and fatalism, stressing “compliance” at the expense of “curiosity.” In similar manners, Simon and Dickens understand the individual student’s classroom experience as the reflection of a much larger system,4) one in which the social, political, economic, and epistemological are deeply intertwined; the school both reflects the demands of the

4) Coates writes: “It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black―what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable” (18). “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 171 capitalist state, whether industrialist or neoliberal, and contributes to perpetuating its forms. The important difference, though, is that the systemic forms shaping West Baltimore’s schools are anonymous, diffuse, and aleatory, while Hard Times locates the driving force in the figure of Thomas Gradgrind, member of parliament and zealous educational reformer. In the novel’s memorable opening, Gradgrind articulates his utilitarian educational philosophy, a fact-based pedagogy in which unreflective empiricism, brute logic, and self-interest exclusively determine the shape of the world and what is known of it:

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” (5)

Gradgrind’s fact-based world exists only to the extent that it is empirically or mathematically verifiable. Imagination, feeling, play, all are to be interdicted in his vision of an ideal society, and the aim of this education, he makes clear, is the shaping of a well-regulated citizenry that will realize an entirely fact-based world:

“You are to be in all things regulated and governed,” said the gentleman, “by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, 172 Kelly Walsh

in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets.” (9)

In Victorian England, the word “fancy” corresponds to what we now term imagination; as the final sentence indicates, any idea or representation concerning what does not presently exist in the material world is to be banished. The subject of admonishment here is Sissy Jupe, daughter of a circus equestrian performer, who is incapable of defining a horse independently of the lived context in which she knows the animal. Although Gradgrind, who ultimately proves to be kindhearted, adopts Sissy into his family, he fails in his endeavor to strictly educate her according to his system, such that she is “reclaimed and formed” (40). Her counterpoint in Hard Times is Bitzer, Gradgrind’s most complete disciple, who correctly defines “horse” by enumerating its empirically observable attributes: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye- teeth, and twelve incisive” (7). Here a schoolboy, Bitzer subsequently gains employment in the bank of the pitiless industrialist Bounderby, becoming a man whose “mind was so exactly regulated, that he had no affectations or passions. All his proceedings were the result of the nicest and coldest calculations” (89). In Hard Times, Gradgrind’s fact-based pedagogy sustains Bounderby’s Coketown―“where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing airs and gases were bricked in” (52)―while forming, or failing to form, the lives of Bitzer, Sissy, and his children, the criminal Tom and unhappily married Louisa. Gradgrind’s scientific vision of “political “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 173 economy,” as Martha Nussbaum observes, is highly reductive, for it excludes “the complexities of the inner moral life of each human being, its strivings and perplexities, complicated emotions,” while his idealized fact-finding intellect merely “plays around the surface of objects, not even obtaining very adequate perceptual data” (Nussbaum 886, 888). Holding levers of political and institutional power, Gradgrind, with his unmovable facts, has a direct hand in forming the social, economic, and political reality of Coketown and is culpable, at least indirectly, for the city’s various miseries. In The Wire, by contrast, it is the aggregate social system―which includes George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act―that creates misery by necessitating the renunciation of “fancy” in favor of certain “facts.” Within a “low-risk, low-reward educational apparatus” (Bell 535), the facts to which students must adapt themselves seemingly bear little correlation to those to be learned in the classroom. The fact-finding intellect formed by The Wire’s urban pedagogy, then, realizes a world almost entirely disconnected from the professed aims of formal education. “They’re not fools, these kids,” says Bunny Colvin, the former police major serving as an educational consultant for a Johns Hopkins University professor at Tilghman Middle School. “They don’t know our world, but they know their own. They see right through us” (4.10). There are several well-meaning, modestly effective teachers at Tilghman Middle School, most notably Mr. Pryzbylewski, and The Wire does suggest possibility for microstructural change. In particular, Duquan, whose addict-parents sell his donated clothes for drug money, makes significant strides under the tutelage of Mr. Pryzbylewski, 174 Kelly Walsh learning math on the computer his teacher installs in the classroom. However, even with individual classroom successes, the systemic factors, which shape students’ oppositional attitudes, combined with the institutional practice of interpreting their behavior “as evidence of lower academic ability,” ensures that “the broad pattern of social stratification is reproduced and remains durable” (Chaddha and Wilson 184, 182). In the short-lived educational experiment of the fourth season, in which Professor Parenti, Bunny, and the Ph.D. candidate Ms. Duqette isolate and attempt to socialize disruptive students, there is a genuine effort to validate their “street knowledge” and use it to facilitate future academic achievement. Namond, one of these students, joins with classmates in cogently articulating the managerial skills needed to be an effective drug dealer. In a subsequent class, though, Ms. Duqette asks the group to write down where each sees herself or himself in ten years. The first two responses are cynical, recycling popularized tropes of black achievement: the first says he wants to play in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers; the second invokes Ben Carson: “I want to be a pediatric neurosurgeon like that one nigger, what’s his name?” Ms. Duquette then asks: “How many wrote ‘dead’?”:

Namond: Shit, you saw that coming huh? Duquette: Shame y’all have so little time and you’re wasting it here. You know where you’re going. We can’t teach you anything about that. Namond: That’s what we’ve been saying. Duqette: Namond, put away the magazine. (4.8) “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 175

Namond’s brisk return to an oppositional attitude reflects the deep entrenchment of social scripts, shaped by social, economic, and familial forms, which prescribe a narrow range of possible outcomes for an African American student in inner-city America. There is, instead, a realism, not unlike that fostered by Dickens’s Coketown, which remains deeply skeptical of notions of individual agency, circumscribing the capacity to reimagine the world. Education, for Namond, as for his peers, does not offer an alternative, for, to his mind, the outcome remains the same. In its failure to provide a credible script, the school, as Bunny recognizes when the administration prematurely ends their pedagogical experiment, merely reinforces the students’ sense of a prefigured destiny: “We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn, and where―where’d they end up? Same damn corners” (4.10). While Professor Parenti returns to his world, successfully publishing his research on Tilghman Middle School, the students are left to “their world,” with only Namond, and perhaps two other students, having made some progress. Bunny’s distinction between “our world,” one of relative prosperity and upward mobility, and “their world,” that of the block, may be paralleled with the irreconcilability of Gradgrind’s fact-based world and Sissy Jupe’s world of sensibility, intuition, and compassion, to the extent that his pedagogy fails to form her due to its disjunction from her real-life contexts and investments. Similarly, Mr. Pryzbylewski is initially confounded in his attempt to teach a story problem, for students are more interested in giving real-life contextualization to the story than the arithmetical skills it is designed to test: 176 Kelly Walsh

Prez: All right, like I was saying, my friend Andre is leaving Baltimore. He’s going 60 miles an hour. Student: Hey, what side of Baltimore, east or west? Prez: It doesn’t make any difference. Student: That’s what you think. Prez: OK, east. . . . West, OK? (4.3)

For these students, the question of “east or west” is not a minor one; it makes a world of difference, for straying into the wrong half of the city might very well be fatal. Pryzbylewski, proving to be a dynamic pedagogue, quickly learns from these experiences, and he achieves some success when he uses poker and dice, games the students enjoy, to teach them fractions and probabilities. (It also enables Randy to win a bundle of money from a corner dice game.) But, as mentioned, such microlevel successes are highly vulnerable to the larger institutional forces, which seemingly conspire against the school’s children. This is driven home when, in the wake of No Child Left Behind, the severely under-resourced Tilghman Middle School mandates that all teachers teach questions from the standardized state examination in order to boost official metrics. Pryzbylewski immediately realizes that these neoliberal, quantitative methods for assessing student learning are highly susceptible to institutional manipulation, likening the practice of “teaching for the test” to the police force’s “juking” of crime statistics: “Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear―you juke the stats and majors become colonels. I’ve been here before” (4.9). As he recognizes, the predictable result of substituting pliable statistics, “facts,” for holistic, qualitative evaluation is no learning, and, more distressingly, the “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 177 perpetuation of underachievement. This instantiation of “the cycles of institutional progress” (Peterson 464), the reality that institutions “take more of interest in structures and statistics than people (Knight 39), is not only dispiriting; it breeds a deep cynicism which remains largely unredeemed. F.R. Leavis describes Dickens’s Hard Times as “possessed by a comprehensive vision, one in which the inhumanities of Victorian civilization are seen as fostered and sanctioned by a hard philosophy, the aggressive formulation of an inhumane spirit” (Leavis 365). For Simon, a “hard philosophy” and “inhumane spirit” also aggress Baltimore, ruining lives and foreclosing possibilities; with an irony that might be called Dickensian, The Wire exposes a capricious, unfeeling system, which, traversing school and street, is a severe pedagogue, giving students little choice but to adjust their minds and bodies to the hard facts surrounding them. And this reality is reflected in the classroom, where, for the most part, the students merely pretend to learn the facts their teachers have to teach, confident they will end up on the “same damn corners.” Watching a football game at home, shortly after a vicious razor blade attack in his classroom, Prezbylewski, with “a form of limited tragic omniscience” (Love 502), says: “No one wins. One side just loses more slowly” (4.4). The Wire makes it difficult to disagree; nevertheless, with remarkable acuity, it navigates the tension between affective attachment and ruthless critique, part and whole, self-reflexively suggesting uncomfortable facts about the conversion of “the suffering lived experience of others into a commodity for safe middle-class consumption” (Wilson 77). Perhaps in this it is most Dickensian. 178 Kelly Walsh

II. Gatsby, Chess, and “The Game”

“Learning, accepting, or rejecting the rules of a workplace’s game,” writes Paul Anderson, “is of major consequence on both sides of the law, in local politics, and beyond” (Anderson 375). In The Wire, many of the important rules of the street, school, or police force are implicit, learned through a process of trial and error, with “hard” lessons, be they violence, detention, or demotion, resulting from violations of them. At certain junctures, though, the show becomes explicitly pedagogical, articulating unspoken rules and institutional patterns to provide characters, and the viewers tracking them, a different framework and scale with which to reconceive their position within an institution. Formally, this is achieved by having characters think along with, or against, different kinds of texts; be it the game of chess, economics textbooks, or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, these “readings” bring forth insoluble tensions between determinism and autonomy, repetition and change, inertia and mobility. One of the most remarkable “teaching” moments of the series occurs early in the first season, when D’Angelo Barksdale, nephew and lieutenant to West Baltimore drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, uses a chessboard to analogically reveal the larger, structural reality of the drug trade, in which the teenage “corner boys,” Bodie and Wallace― “city children” who have dropped out of school―are positioned as “pawns.” Finding Bodie and Wallace playing checkers on a chessboard at the low-rise apartment complex where they sell drugs, D’Angelo offers to teach them to play chess; he begins by explaining the objective, to capture the other side’s king, while preventing one’s “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 179 own king from being captured. To more vividly demonstrate the function and mobility of each piece, he likens the king to his uncle Avon, the queen to Stringer Bell, Avon’s second-in-command, and the castles to the “muscle” that moves and safeguards the drug stash. D’Angelo then shifts to the pawns, identifying them as the “soldiers”:

D’Angelo: They move like this, one space forward only except when they fight. . . . And they like the front lines. They be out in the field. Wallace: So how do you get to be the king? D’Angelo: It ain’t like that. See, the king stays the king, all right? Everything stays who he is except for the pawns. Now if a pawn makes it all the way down to the other dude’s side he gets to be queen. And like I said, the queen ain’t no bitch. She got all the moves. Bodie: All right, so if I make it to the other end, I win? D’Angelo: If you catch the other dude’s king and trap it, then you win. Bodie: But if I make it to the end I’m top dog. D’Angelo: No, it ain’t like that, look. The pawns, man, in the game they get capped quick. They be out of the game early. Bodie: Unless they’re some smart-ass pawns. (1.3)

D’Angelo’s chess allegory, in Anderson’s view, is designed to encourage Bodie and Wallace to detach “themselves from their everyday perceptions of personal autonomy in order to map their typical work activities amidst the broader game-like structures that constrict their agency” (Anderson 382). Nevertheless, the allegory’s invitation to establish a critical distance from “the game” and take a broad view of its structure and “rules” has limited success, for 180 Kelly Walsh

Bodie’s final rejoinder reflects the tenacity of the myth of upward mobility, even among “the game”’s foot soldiers. Instead of registering the precarity of his position, the reality that pawns end up “capped quick,” Bodie gleans the message that, with canniness and hard work, it is possible for him to become a “queen,” to one day move how and where he chooses.5) Confined by the “worldview of the block,” Bodie, at this point, is incapable of perceiving the limited agency he has to determine his own destiny in the midst of this institution. For the viewer, though, scenes like this enact significant dramatic irony, in the recognition that “the characters themselves are incapable of seeing the broader contexts and piecing together the kinds of stories about themselves that the viewer can” (Hsu 523-24). In this regard, The Wire’s urban pedagogy operates by inducing viewers to recognize the characters’ misrecognition of their own social reality; appealing to viewers to “piece together” the larger contexts and stories, the show encourages them to reassess what, heretofore, they have understood as social reality. “The game” is gradually revealed to be a bureaucratic structure, not unlike the school or police department, a fact of which, viewers, like the police, are initially ignorant (Jameson 241). What makes this hierarchical institution distinct, though, is its volatile mix of neoliberal capitalism and highly masculinized tribalism. While Stringer Bell, who takes business courses at a local community college, attempts to apply textbook economic theories to the drug trade to

5) Bodie is murdered in the final episode of the fourth season by the Marlo Stansfield drug organization, which takes over West Baltimore after defeating Avon Barksdale. Bodie is killed after he is seen with police detective McNulty by a Stansfield associate. “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 181 maximize profits and minimize violence, “the game” remains fundamentally violent, as Avon reminds him when their drug organization is faced with a supply shortage. “Man, every market- based business runs in cycles,” says Stringer, “and we going through a down-cycle right now.” Avon pushes back: “String, this ain’t about your motherfucking business class either. It ain’t that part of it. It’s that other thing” (2.12). “That other thing” is the cultural capital of the street, strength, which is marked by territory and body counts. While Stringer does not hesitate to order murders he deems necessary, he understands the irrational use of violence, which draws police intervention, to be counterproductive, preventing their trade from operating efficiently, as in a rational, market-based economy. The conflict between Avon’s violent fatalism, formed by the “worldview of the block”―“the game is the game,” he frequently says―and Stringer’s more abstract neoliberalism, which seeks to reinvent “the game” by privileging profits over territory, remains unresolved in The Wire. For Avon ends up in prison, Stringer dead, both victims of each other’s worldview. D’Angelo, while having a wide-lens perspective of “the game,” shares Avon’s fatalism; appalled by what he perceives to be senseless loss of human life, he nonetheless remains deeply pessimistic about the possibility of escaping the block. In the second season, D’Angelo is serving a twenty-year prison sentence for drug trafficking, and he struggles to establish a personal integrity and morality. In particular, he has broken from his uncle, who is serving a shorter sentence in the same prison, disgusted by the fatal drug overdoses of several prisoners orchestrated by Avon in order to have his sentence reduced. 182 Kelly Walsh

In D’Angelo’s case, the combination of a sharp conscience and disbelief in the possibility for a qualitatively different future results not in redemption, but tragic passivity. Shortly before his death in the prison library, ordered by Stringer for fear he will inform on the Barksdale organization, D’Angelo is seated with several African American inmates and a white professor in a reading group. The focus of their discussion is the conclusion to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which the narrator, Nick Carraway, reflects on the green light from Tom and Daisy’s dock, surmising that, for Gatsby, it stood as a beacon, symbolizing a richer, near-at- hand future:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter― tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning― So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (Fitzgerald 189)

To stimulate discussion, the professor asks them to consider: “Fitzgerald said that there were no second acts in American lives” (2.6). In response, D’Angelo proffers a strikingly pessimistic interpretation of the novel, in which the weight of Gatsby’s past, his self- dissimulations, ineluctably foil his pursuit of “the orgastic future”:

He’s saying that the past is always with us. And where we come from, what we go through how we go through it, all that shit matters. . . . Like at the end of the book, you know? Boats and tides and all. It’s like you can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 183

you can give yourself a whole new story but what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. And it don’t matter that some fool say he different ‘cause the only thing that can make you different is what you really do or what you really go through. Like, you know, like all them books in his library. Now, he fronting with all them books but if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read near one of them. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did and ‘cause he wasn’t ready to get real with the story that shit caught up to him. I think, anyway. (2.6,)

D’Angelo’s personalized, detail-oriented interpretation of The Great Gatsby―“what came first is who you really are”―is reflective of the narrow framing engendered by the social reality of the block. Equally, it indicates just how aware he is of his own predicament; trying to move forward with life, his past circumstances foreclose the possibility of an “orgastic future,” and he sees himself enacting a Gatsby-like fate with a lucidity and self-reflectiveness unpossessed by Fitzgerald’s bootlegger. D’Angelo’s localized insights into the novel, moreover, have powerful affective force, particularly for viewers with no access to his street-level view. Fitzgerald’s canonical American novel, that is, gains new life and sensibility as it circulates through the penitentiary, achieving a racialized reception strikingly different from those cultivated in the high school or university classroom. In this regard, the scene seeks to train viewers to reconsider their cultural understandings, to see them as situated and contingent, constructed by forces and forms typically taken for granted. D’Angelo, it seems fair to say, is a tragic figure, a young man “with enormous potential” trapped in a system and culture “wired to 184 Kelly Walsh destroy [him]” (Kinder 52). Nevertheless, this tragic “waste of human productivity and intelligence” (Jameson 244) has a pedagogic force, provoking viewer reflection on how and what is read―and by whom.

III. Conclusion: Tragic and Hopeful Pedagogy

D’Angelo’s reading of The Great Gatsby is representative of a larger lesson gleaned from The Wire’s urban pedagogy, that the past, to a regrettable extent, prefigures the future, at the microlevel and the macrolevel. This sense of historical determinism is amplified, particularly in the lives of the “city children,” by the show’s enactment of “a tragedy of systems and institutions rather than of individuals” (Wilson 67). Simon, himself, describes the show’s Baltimore as “a world in which the rules and values of the free market and maximized profit have been mistaken for a social framework, a world where institutions themselves are paramount and every day human beings matter less” (Introduction 30). The exposure of “the power of preexisting societal structures over individual agency” (Brown 442), then, is integral to Simon’s tragic vision; the dramatic irony subtending it, though, has an insistent pedagogical function, training viewers in “an attentive, painstaking way of looking,” a “multiscalar thought that negotiates the micro- and macrolevel units of reality” (Jagoda 190). The Wire’s appeal for a mode of attentiveness that shuttles between part and whole, individual and system, is complemented by challenges to negotiate the tensions of historicity and futurity, affective attachment and critical detachment. The “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 185 necessity for these forms of dual attentiveness thus highlights the act of interpretation, how the mediations of mass culture have trained one to neglect social and historical contexts, while motivating a caring concern to give them greater visibility. For only through such a learning process, Simon insinuates, can we begin to imagine new forms of social life not determined by neoliberal capitalism. If we return to The Wire’s fourth season with these forms of dual attentiveness, we can more precisely understand how the fates of Michael, Duquan, Namond, and Randy emerge from “a complex collision of social forms” (Levine 133), which include the school and foster system, “the game” and police, the family and political system. But, with our investment in these characters, we are also provoked affectively, bearing witness to the aleatory effects of the interaction of microstructure and macrostructure, the overriding lack of justice the friction generates. Namond, the most privileged of the four, is the most fortunate, adopted by Bunny Colvin and his wife; transplanted to a stable, middle-class environment with strong parental support and better schools, he has a solid foundation for achievement, which is reflected in his debate competition victory during the fifth season. Michael is obligated to become a Stanfield lieutenant after enlisting the brutal drug syndicate’s assistance in removing his abusive stepfather from his home. Proving depressingly talented in this role, he ultimately replaces the stick-up man Omar Little, discovering the hierarchies of “the game” to be anathema to his independent nature. A victim of bureaucratic incompetence, Randy is sent to a group home by the state following an arson attack on his foster mother’s home, which is in retaliation for his revelation of the location of a 186 Kelly Walsh murder victim killed by the Stanfield organization. The police fail abysmally in their efforts to protect him, and, on arrival at the home, he is assaulted by other boys for being a “snitch.” When we last see Randy, he has become a hardened young man. Duquan, for his part, is a victim of “social promotion,” sent to high school midway through the school year, part of an institutional policy of advancing students “with their peers by age, rather than academic level” (Levine 140). Without the mentorship of Mr. Pryzbylewski, he drops out of school, eventually becoming a heroin addict like the older character Bubbles. The Wire’s police detectives sometimes invoke the need for “soft eyes,” returning to the start of a case “by letting go of preconceptions” (Farber 429). “Soft eyes” might also be conceived as a self-reflexive figure for the show’s pedagogical process; foreclosing the pleasures of sentimentalism, escapism, or “poetic justice,” it generates an alienation effect, bringing viewers’ preconceptions into sharp relief― particularly the myth of the individual’s capacity to right injustices and protect weak―and the insufficiency of modes of watching fostered by mass culture entertainment. Whether this disruptive challenge to viewing habits can translate into collective intervention in the social sphere is far from certain. At the very least, The Wire furnishes the raw material necessary to promote ruthless interrogation of American beliefs of innocence and teach viewers how their modes of spectatorship may be complicit in the real-world suffering of the urban poor, particularly its children. In their reflections, my seminar students―some Korean, some from overseas―recognized The Wire as “a valuable teaching tool,” cultivating “empathy and critique” through its “comprehensive depiction of urban “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 187 social inequality.” More specifically, some noted the discrepancies between “official statistics and policies and actual urban reality”; others expressed the sense that “public problems are too difficult for single individuals to tackle.” Most promising, a few students explained: “The Wire made me reflect on my privilege and my complicity in the modern capitalist system.” A final student proposed having the “chance to reflect on what is going on in The Wire and connect it to what is going on in our society, today, in Korea.” Enabling today’s university students to reencounter their social reality with “soft eyes,” it seems, is an eminently worthy transnational, “Dickensian” legacy for Simon’s show. And an ennobling pedagogical aim. 188 Kelly Walsh

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■ 논문 투고일자: 2019. 05. 15 ■ 심사 완료일자: 2019. 06. 13 ■ 게재 확정일자: 2019. 06. 18 “The Dickensian Lives of City Children” 191

Abstract

“The Dickensian Lives of City Children”: Urban Pedagogy and David Simon’s The Wire

Kelly Walsh (Yonsei University)

David Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series, The Wire (2002-2008), has frequently been termed “Dickensian” for its ambition to present urban social reality in its totality. Primarily focusing on the fourth season, which offers a wide-lens, deeply contextualized investigation into Baltimore’s failing public school system, I interpret the show intertextually to discern its different forms of urban pedagogy. With Dickens’s Hard Times and other narrative intertexts, I argue that The Wire, with its “Dickensian” attentiveness to the relations of part and whole, attachment and detachment, foregrounds the act of reading and misreading social reality. This is fundamentally a pedagogic process, positioning its characters and viewers as “students,” imparting to them lessons in critical thinking. The knowledge gained is largely negative; nevertheless, teaching The Wire in a Korean university has revealed its efficacy in provoking student-viewers to critical reflection on urban social reality and their own positionality.

Key Words David Simon’s The Wire, urban pedagogy, race, intertextuality, social reality