Dungeons & Dragons in my AP Lit Classroom – Part 1 – Why Did I Want to Try This?

[I will write more later about what happened in the classroom, what lessons I learned for next time, what I ended up doing to grade them, and how I think this will help them with the rest of the AP Lit curriculum and test)

Part 1 – Where Did I Get this Idea?  – Or – What do D&D, the Odyssey and Hip-Hop Have in Common?

Ever since I first read The Singer of Tales, by Albert Lord (1954), about 15 years ago, every few months I go down a rabbit hole trying to learn about oral composition and “The Homeric Question” – the question of what we can actually know about the author/authors of the Homeric epics, and how we can tell.  Lord’s hypothesis, which is a popularization of Milman Perry’s more obscure philological work in The Making of Homeric Verse (1930?), is that “Homer” was a community, not a person, and that the Homeric texts were largely composed orally, in performance (i.e., improvised) and that over hundreds of years, Greece went from many, many Illiads, say, where every town had its local community of bards that told and retold the story, towards a more national epic.  Gregory Nagy, writing in the 80’s and 90s (The Best of the Achaeans, Homeric Questions, Homeric Responses), has argued that the text gradually evolved in three stages, 1) as a totally orally composed set of stories, where every version was differently told every time, in many different local settings, then 2) a gradual shift towards “rhapsodes” who memorized individual parts of the Homeric epics to enter performance contests, then finally to 3) written transcriptions of those rhapsodic performances which originated the manuscript tradition to we access today.  I did MA work about the ways these theories of collective oral composition may have influenced Joyce as he wrote both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake – by my argument, Joyce would have encountered them in the intellectual milieu of Paris and Zurich (Perry lived in the same place as him at least for a few years and it was tempting to imagine a conversation, but there was no evidence).  What there is evidence for, though, is Joyce’s encounter with those ideas as they are anticipated (very clearly, actually, in a chapter called “The Discovery of the True Homer”) in Vico’s The New Science (1754), a book that Joyce is widely believed to have adored for its idiosyncratic accounts of history, language, and the gods, reference to which he makes in the opening lines of Finnegans Wake.  

What is most fascinating to me about all of that is the idea that these epics were not produced by a sage, an aesthete or a wealthy lone genius in his palatial Greek estate overlooking the Aegean – what these authors all seem to agree on is that communities of illiterate field workers did this as a form of recreation.  They’d work in the fields for hours, and to unwind, they’d have contests where they generated songs on the spot, sparring as their partially memorized, partially improvised epics grew longer and longer.  What had been introduced to me as a piece of elite patrician culture was in fact evidence – the tip of the iceberg really – of a collaborative, plebeian and highly democratic practice that must have gone on for hundreds of years.  I get a glimpse of this world from these beautiful lines from the Iliad Book 1:

οἳ δὲ πανημέριοι μολπῇ θεὸν ἱλάσκοντο

καλὸν ἀείδοντες παιήονα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν 

“And then all day they pleased the god with dance, 

the sons of the Achaeans singing a beautiful paean.”   [Iliad I.472-473] 

The version of the rabbit hole I went down this past summer was reading a massive book called How to Kill a Dragon (1997) by Calvert Watkins.  Watkins traces what he describes as an Indo-European poetic tradition that predates the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Ramananya, the Rig Veda, and any other written epic that we have, from any Indo-European peoples – from Ireland to India and anywhere in between.  Despite its title, the book is not mostly about dragons as a universal system in mythology, or what it might tell us about prehistoric cosmology.  What it IS about is the way that patterns of poetic tropes and schemes could be argued to have come from an original culture of Proto-Indo-Euporeans who told a very specific type of story about a hero that kills a dragon.  Using the comparative method, which looks to multiple “sibling” languages to discover traits of those languages’ common parent languages, he notes stunning syntactic parallels between Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic and Lithuanian texts, among others – there is a chapter of the Rig Veda that, for example, very directly parallels a the story of Bellerophon as it’s narrated in a seemingly irrelevant digression near the start of the Iliad.  It’s not only that they all talk about dragons, it’s more importantly that they all use metrically and lexically equivalent patterns to do that, right down to the line, the word and even the syllable level.  I don’t know enough of any of those languages besides Greek to have any idea if he’s right, but my understanding is this book has been widely accepted in the field.

As an aside at one point, Watkins mentions that Dungeons and Dragons has been a very popular game for the past 50 years – he’s citing this as evidence for the thematic resonance of beast-slaying stories.  But based on what he said, I don’t think he’s actually played the game.  And I think if he had, he would have seen a deeper analogy!  What immediately went off in my head was this: Dungeons and Dragons has a lot of very specific syntax of its own, one that is meaningfully analogous to the rhetorical situation of those illiterate Homeric bards.  It provides a model for collective, oral story telling, one that generates its own rhythm, one that moves at a fast pace, is in some ways both cooperative and competitive, wherein players tell stories that must adhere to strict rules of combat, ability, and more.  The “Dungeon Master,” who is the primary driver of the story, must continually improvise, while relying on ready-made enemy templates, maps and procedures, but they must continually re-mold those to make them work for the situation being narrated by the players, and do so very quickly, to the players don’t get bored while they calculate and roll dice.  And this world, too, is populated by people doing this in their free time.  Whereas the Homeric bards were likely farm-bound peasants who strung primitive string instruments to drive their songs, weaving agricultural metaphors into nearly every page of their epics, Gary Gygax, the co-creator of D&D, was an insurance adjuster who saw the world as one giant numerical simulation best modelled through charts about armor class, initiative, experience points, and character attributes, and mediated through dice-rolles, and who also happened to have been a Lord of the Rings enthusiast in 1971.  

So then the thought occurs to me – well if that’s true, what better way to get students to understand the early pre-literate history of storytelling that to teach them how to play D&D – I immediately imagined 5 groups of 5 students each playing their own adventure, each with the same starting points – characters, plot outline and maps – going on imagined divergent adventures, and then somehow placing their stories in dialogue with each other as they synthesize them into one meta-story.  This – I thought – this would come close to them understanding how the Iliad or the Odyssey or Beowulf came to be.

That was one thread.  Another was hip-hop.  Over the last several years in different ways I’ve challenged my students to record podcasts that engage with some great, complex hip-hop albums – one of those albums being Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star (1998).  As Kweli points out in his memoir, one of the things rap does best, and does most, is talk about rap itself.  He points out that that might seem like a circle – in fact it IS a circle – but it’s a productive one.  Just like the Homeric bards before them, we get this beautiful couplet from “Definition”:

A Cypher will complete us as we come through your receivers

You can play us and repeat us and then take us home and read us

Black Star uses the cypher as a central organizing metaphor for Black power and unity – something Christopher Emden also draws on in his For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood (2010?).  Emden suggests a cypher – a group of folks creatively and collectively rapping (in either sense) about their lives, on their street corner – can be used as a productive educational classroom organizing principle. Black Star’s album’s coda – the freestyle-adjacent posse track “Twice Inna Lifetime” enacts this political-aesthetic ideal just like the Homeric bards before them – consider the album’s final line:

We like the five on the fist, fortified organized like this!

That five is the five rappers on the track, the five boroughs of New York, the five fingers on the raised fist of Black Power, and so much more.  “This” – well – that’s their performance – it’s the performance that organizes and fortifies, it’s the “cypher” that “completes us.”

What I have learned from leading students on this enterprise can be summarized by one very strong memory.  I had 5 groups of 5 work through 5 different albums.  They listened as a group and recorded a short group podcast intro.  They then each picked their favorite song on the album and recorded an extended rhetorical analysis of that song, intersplicing sound from the song and any other sources (like originals for samples) into their readings.  

But each time, the truly magical moment came when I asked them to record a conclusion. They’ve now worked with the albums for weeks, and listened to each other’s recordings about all the songs.  And all the groups are arrayed around a large open space in our school (an abandoned computer lab), most sitting on the floor, recording their final segments.  And I start to realize what’s happening: they’re now both reporting their final rhetorical “takes,” but also, and this was the deeper part – they’re now recreating the very unity of discourse Mos Def and Talib Kweli were striving for on the record.  They’re taking turns listening and responding to each other, quoting lyrics, telling and retelling, rapping about rapping, they’ve moved beyond analysis of the lyrics to very sincere and vulnerable conversations about the topics rapped about in those lyrics.  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a group of five high school students have an emotionally invested high-level conversation about types of love (this time, inspired by Lauryn Hill’s recorded conversations with Ras Baraka talking to grade school students about the same, interspersed throughout The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) but I felt the truth of what, I think anyway, this music is supposed to do, what it means for a cypher to complete us.  People who communicate like that actually stand a fighting chance of finding real freedom.  When they can find the time and the place to listen, speak, laugh, and joyfully interpret, all at once. 

So what do D&D, hip-hop and the Odyssey all have in common in a more specific way?

Mos Def offers this motto in “Definition”:

“Intelligent Embellishment from Flatbush Settlement”

“Intelligent embellishment’ is a great two-word summary of oral composition.  One begins with something pre-established and to some extent already known or codified: for the Homeric poetics, it’s bits and pieces of epic stories.  As Perry explains, a big part of it is epithets – which often form pre-fab half lines that can be fit together like pieces of a puzzle in a story they are inventing.  “Swift-footed Achilles” and “Crafty Odysseus” are both phrases that appear again and again and equivalent metrical positions.  In fact, sometimes they’re totally inappropriate for the thematic context – but they’re slotted in there as an aid to composition.  The poet recites that half of the line (which they have memorized) while the rest of their brain focuses on inventing new story from other scraps of memorized verse.  Sometimes these formulae are longer – they can be full stanzas or paragraphs which repeat, again, since the poet knows them so well, they can think “hm, after this guy gets on his horse, where is he going?  Well, I’m not sure yet, so I better make this horse description longer while I think about it.”  The audience engages with the improvised story, which will be similar to what they’ve heard before, but always subtly different, depending on the mood of the bard, the time of day, who else has joined them, and so on.  Intelligent embellishment.

The same thing happens in hip-hop: if people are freestyling, they’re working together (or competing, or both) to throw each other pieces of pre-fab verse (often cultural references, advertising slogans, formulaic nicknames, predictable rhymes) while they think about what to say next.  The rhyme is the organizing principle but the allusions and references are those things they know well enough to say without thinking, while they develop the creative part of the bar – like the punchline directed at the other rapper.  And the pleasure in listening comes from the mashup.  Nothing is predetermined, however many known allusions or familiar rhymes fly through the air.  Intelligent embellishment.

And D&D.  You start with the rudiments of a story: there’s an island with a mysterious temple, a party of adventurers each embodying recognizable tropes that everyone is familiar enough with to lean into when they need to think for a moment: the valorous fighter, the cunning rogue, the aloof yet powerful wizard, the spiritualistic but violent druid.   The Dungeon Master DM’s makes maps, and imagines the outline of a plot, sprinkles in possible encounters with enemies, allies, and other side characters.  The other players design their characters by developing a statistical model of an imagined hero, following rules enumerated in books.  The magic of the adventure comes when the DM describes the start to the adventure, and the players begin to interact with that description.  The story goes where it goes, based on luck, decision-making, personality and creativity.  Intelligent embellishment.

In each of these contexts, it’s precisely the dynamism, the fact that they’re not primarily “literary” but instead collective and oral – that drives the artistic and communal energy.  So I wanted my students to get a sense for that.