Teaching literature and the question of questions

This year we received several contributions for our ‘Teaching Literature’ section in Footpath-11. We are always looking for lively articles which will help other teachers to engage with literature and with their students, a double task which is by no means easy. We know very well that young people in most developed countries are less inclined to read at length than they were a generation or two ago, especially if they have to struggle with a foreign language. Moreover, several of the books in the Oxford Russia Fund that the students are asked to grapple with are novels that run into hundreds of pages. I have been asked by several teachers for advice on how to teach literature, since that is my profession whereas most of you are professional teachers of the English language. This editorial is an attempt to provide some help. I therefore turn from the editorial ‘we’ to the individual T’ because these are personal opinions. Throughout the piece I use the term ‘literature’ as it is understood in English, meaning a work of the imagination.

When we receive articles about the methods of teaching, I am sometimes distressed at accounts of what goes on in the classroom. On the one hand, you are skilled teachers of the English language whose pupils are hugely admired in England whenever we have the opportunity to talk to them. Reading with understanding in a foreign language is an advanced accomplishment. However, reading fiction in any language requires different kinds of comprehension from reading technical or other factual material. Faced with a world of imagined characters, imagined narratives, imagined conflicts and resolutions, the reader’s mind wanders and speculates, puzzling over this word or that idiom, wondering if it has discovered the crucial key to a mixture of ideas and emotions or merely stumbled over an incidental and unimportant phrase that is somehow in an unexpected place. If the authors of articles submitted to Footpath were exploring any aspects of this complicated process which you, the teachers, must encounter daily, I would study them eagerly. Alas, these articles seem to be all about devices and tricks to avoid reading the text at all!

Let us put aside the question of ‘the film of the book’. That matter is discussed in the article by Elena Kireichuk and by one of our letter-writers in this issue of Footpath; and it has been raised by contributors in earlier issues of our journal. What distresses me is the misuse of literature in an attempt to engage students in a mass of unrelated facts and bizarre irrelevancies. For example, many teachers have told me that they like to begin by looking at the picture on the cover of the novel they are going to read with their students. Where is the sense in that? First, many artists do not read the book they are illustrating. (There is a pirated translation into Russian of Waterland which shows a blue sea, a bright yellow sandy beach, and someone relaxing in a chair, contemplating this sharp distinction of water and land. It would be hard to think of a cover that suggested less of the place, the plot or the mood of Waterland.) Secondly, if you want your students to speculate about the way that this unknown novel might develop, why not begin with Page One, with the real, complex text? At the very least, your students will have read some words that the author actually wrote.

Another device is to get students to speculate about the meaning of the title. Sometimes the title can point us in the right direction - for example The Taxi Driver’s Daughter or Capital. But how do we know it is the right direction until we have read the book? After reading the book we can see more significance in Capital, much more in, say, White Teeth or A History of the World in 10 V2 Chapters, while we will probably continue to be baffled by An Experiment in Love. In any case, titles are sometimes chosen by the publisher or the author’s agent who has to think about an effective title for selling the book.

I do not understand why students on the basis of very limited or inaccurate information should be asked to ‘guess’ what a novel is about. What is the point of ‘guessing’ anyway? However, these are preliminaries. In these articles submitted to Footpath I wait to learn about the impact of - for example - the first chapter, but again it seems that despite a desperate shortage of time, the novel itself will be put aside in the interest of external matters.

Teachers tell me that they like to get their students involved in ‘facts’ which have nothing to do with the text. Imagine a teacher of Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 V2 Chapters demanding that students should do research on the novel by using a textbook on ‘World History’. Or imagine students reading About A Boy required to draw a picture of Regent’s Park in London with a diagram of the pond and the exact angle of Marcus’ arm when he threw the sandwich at the duck. I hope and believe that if you know these novels you will agree that such tasks would be a ridiculous waste of time. On the other hand, a teacher of A History of the World in 10 V2 Chapters who asks the class to read together the story of Noah as it appears in the Bible (it will take less than 10 minutes) will be helping his students to understand the bitter-humorous irony of Barnes’ first chapter. In this particular case, it might even be helpful to read the Bible story before beginning the novel for one good reason: Barnes expects his readers to know the story.

The question we teachers must ask is: what essential contextual information do new readers need before they start on Page One? This is a question that I ask myself every time I settle down to write a commentary to one of the novels in the project. My instinct is to say ‘Nothing until a definite problem arises’. Readers are not going to worry about accuracy or oddities while they are getting on with the story. For example, for Russians living in city flats which were built in the last few decades some misunderstandings about living in houses in Britain may need to be corrected; but very often the novelist will do the work for us. John Lanchester gives detailed descriptions of the buildings in Pepys Road in the first and later chapters of Capital, in order to show how their market value has varied over the years. His point is, of course, that most people do not think of their homes in terms of their market value but in terms of family and family history, of daily life and comfortable security, of minor irritations usually ignored, and of the unquenchable desire to make the home more beautiful. Such feelings are common to all of us. Lanchester is demonstrating the huge discrepancy between the attitudes of ordinary people and the attitudes inherent in the property market. Readers do not need ‘research’ to understand that.

Unfamiliar facts and contexts which may confuse or misdirect the reader emerge where the characters are affected by a complex political situation or a historical expectation. Grace Notes and Regeneration are obvious examples. For these novels, I wrote commentaries which tried to give the minimum essential information to explain why the characters react as they do - minimum information because the students should be getting on with reading the text! Bernard MacLaverty, author of Grace Notes and Pat Barker, author of Regeneration, could expect their first readers to have some knowledge of the conflict in Northern Ireland and of soldiers’ experiences in the First World War. Hence the need for the commentaries for Russian readers who do not have this knowledge. By contrast, the authors of, say, White Teeth or Whirligig or A Week In December are well aware that their British readers need to be told about Muslims living in North London or about controversies over wind turbines, or about computer role-playing games - and so they tell us.

Nonetheless, many teachers are not comfortable about trusting the novelist even in the most essential themes of the novel. Svetlana Dvinina has kindly given me permission to use her article in this issue of Footpath as an example. She is describing how she teaches the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and writes, ‘After students have learned that Christopher has Asperger’s Syndrome (not only through the review but after having read about his peculiarities in behaviour), it is useful to show a documentary about this syndrome.’ My distress at this seemingly innocuous suggestion is because it simply isn’t true. The novel is a work of fiction and Christopher, the fictional character who tells his own story, never describes himself as having ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’. Reviewers of the novel often suggested that this was Christopher’s ‘problem’ as though diagnosing a fictional character’s medical condition is a step forward in understanding the character. If we were reading a medical case history, such information might be useful, but we are not. We are reading fiction. Christopher tells us in great detail about how he understands the world and what he does not understand. Literature works in a completely different way from technical studies, in that it allows readers to use but also control their imagination in order to enter a very specific world that is both like and unlike their own. I believe this mental activity is profoundly important both for the individual human being and for the human culture within which we live. To generalise and distort that specific imaginative world is to damage or even destroy it.

People need stories. Modern novels are a highly developed form of story that opens the mind, challenging both emotions and intellect in a complex interaction of what is known to the reader and what is unknown or unfamiliar. In the case of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, in the first paragraph Christopher tells us that it was 7 minutes after midnight when he saw a dog in a neighbour’s garden. The dog, which was on its side, looked like a dog dreaming that it was running, but it was in fact dead, with a garden fork holding it to the ground. He decided that the dog had probably been killed by the fork but he could not be absolutely sure that this was what had happened.

It seems to me that any teacher should ignore everything else and ask the class to read this first paragraph. One student can read it aloud - they are simple, short sentences. Christopher’s story is totally fascinating for three obvious reasons. We want to know what happened to the dog; we want to know more about the person who is telling the story in a strange -but at the same time understandable -way; and we want to think about that simile of the dog running on his side. The third reason is striking even for readers who cannot identify a simile. Not knowing the technical term is unimportant. Thinking about a dog dreaming of chasing a cat and therefore running on its side is one of those imaginative leaps that the human brain can accomplish with surprise and shock and pleasure.

Despite the surprise and the pleasure, reading in this way is not easy. We all yearn for our accustomed paths, just as we prefer slipping into our native language even when we are trying to learn a new language. But the discipline of reading imaginative literature forces us to extend our imagination and our intellect in order to grasp another person’s experience, beliefs, emotions, ideas, values and think about them. Philosophy presents us with abstractions, general ideas. Literature presents us with the concrete, with human actuality -and Christopher’s experience is very concrete, very actual.

So why, I wonder, should any teacher who is short of time direct his or her students to find out more about topics that happen to interest Christopher - such matters as the Apollo space missions, the methods of Sherlock Holmes, the Gulf War and the Monty Hall Problem? All are no doubt very absorbing subjects outside the novel, but they do not enlighten us, as Christopher’s narrative does, inside the novel.

I would like to give one more example that must surely appeal to those young people who are all-too-conscious of the scariness of new experiences. In the middle of his story, Christopher, who fears noisy and confusing environments, people who touch him, and anything out of his usual routine, makes a journey from Swindon to London (about 130 kilometres) first on a train, and then on an underground train. As an account of distress struggling with determination, of fear countered by logical thinking, and of panic overcome by patient endurance, this is heroic. Any student who has felt nervous of, say, a big unknown city (‘How am I going to cope? What happens if I get lost?’) or an alarming new situation (‘What will I say if she asks a question I can’t answer?) will understand Christopher. They will not, however, be wandering in their own selfabsorbed world, but following what that familiar fear means for another human being who is not like them and yet is like them. This imaginative focus on another consciousness is of the essence of literature, a transforming involvement that has nothing to do with studying Asperger’s syndrome.

‘What you are describing may be true,’ my Russian colleagues tell me. ‘But you are describing Paradise and we do not live in Paradise. We are faced with students who do not want to read, who have inadequate knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, whose attention span is minimal and who find the dilemmas of these characters boring. So naturally we try to find any way of capturing their interest. What else are we supposed to do?’

I have no right to tell you what to do in these uncongenial circumstances. I have met such groups of Russian students, and I have also met many lively enquiring groups. These differences, sometimes inexplicable, can be found in any British university too; and occasionally one new arrival in the class can transform a group so that its attitude changes strikingly for better or worse. My admiration for Russian students remains very high. However, when choosing these novels and plays for our project on Contemporary British Literature I never intended them to be used for students in the first year or the second year whose English is simply not adequate. They are for the mature reader-of-English. I notice that some first-year groups have very good English and are eager to read, while other groups have been ‘spoilt’ by the time they reach their fourth year and can be loudly disillusioned. Consequently, one cannot be too prescriptive: enthusiasm matters, good teaching matters above all, and - I would say - for these lessons, it is also important to keep vocabulary and grammar and technical questions to an absolute minimum.

The authors of these novels did not write them as textbooks but as imaginative literature. They were certainly not provided for your universities as textbooks. So why worry about vocabulary? Provide a list of essential difficult words so that the students don’t have to be slowed down by endlessly consulting the dictionary, and let them fill in the gaps in their own way. People learn words when the words are important to them, just as children do. Unless they are able to plunge into the story they will never discover what is important to them. And grammar comes naturally by reading extended prose.

There is a further stage that many of you are very aware of. In order to encourage reading, we have to think about response, speaking, writing. One crucial way in which we can hold the attention (and willingness to read) of students is to consider very carefully what questions we ask them. This is another area where I think common practice is unhelpful. Many (not all) Russian students tend to be asked two kinds of questions: The first includes questions such as ‘Describe this character - his looks, his behaviour, his nature’ or ‘Recount what happens in Chapter 2.’ Both are ways of checking on a student’s comprehension. But such questions do not ask ‘Why?’ or ‘What is being implied here?’ or ‘How much are we supposed to know?’ which lead into more sophisticated investigations of the writing.

The second kind of question is basically ‘Write an essay on this novel’. The student has undirected freedom to express his or her opinion. Although some essays of this kind have provoked students into quite remarkable essays which we have been able to publish in Footpath, too often what the student writes is vague and vacuous and pays no attention to the actual structure of events or the emotional tone of the novel. Questions which do not encourage attention and argument merely lead to an amorphous drift of impressions with no direction or goal.

We should avoid either the tediously factual or the completely open, since the aim is to help students probe more deeply into a work of literature. So what questions should we ask? Rule Number 1 must be ‘Different works of literature need different kinds of attention’. This rule requires us to work out what kind of a novel we are reading and where its particular interest, focus, complexity of response lies. I shall try to give some examples, but since this editorial must be limited, I shall confine my discussion of appropriate questions to some of those concerned with character, and leave aside matters of structure, technique, genre and so on.

Most readers if they have to choose (and why should they not choose from among a careful selection of questions?) like to write about their views of the characters. Russian teachers often ask their students to provide a physical description of a character and then, perhaps, to account for their moral qualities.

I set myself a little test question. Of which novels in our project can you say that the physical descriptions of people are important? Here is my shortlist: Portobello, Nice Work, Whirligig, White Teeth, Morality Play, An Experiment in Love. (Many authors scarcely mention the looks of their characters. Why? - That would be an interesting question.) What then are the different purposes of physical description in these six novels?

Portobello is a quasi-detective story which requires ‘clues’ provided by the appearances of characters. In Nice Work, Lodge makes a point of Robyn’s startling good looks because their effect on people is part of the social comedy. In Whirligig, Claypole is painfully fat. A fat red-headed unhappy comic character who becomes, slowly, a less comic (and less fat) character is one thread of the narrative. In White Teeth, Zadie Smith demonstrates how to explore questions of ethnicity and skin colour with real wit. (Look at the passage where Archie Jones, a would-be suicide, is sitting with his head in his hands, a bewildered unwanted guest at a New Year’s Party. Then Clara Bowden walks down the stairs. Ask your students to write about those paragraphs and their effect on Archie and on the reader. This will get them involved!)

Morality Play uses physical description to help Nicholas and the reader identify the players in their normal guise. Then we see how, as actors, they transform their natural looks via gesture and costume. Physicality is at the heart of acting, so physical descriptions are necessary in this novel.

An Experiment in Love works differently. Carmel, the narrator, explores the effect on her own sensibility of other people. We cannot, therefore, divorce the description from the reflection (of which there are many in this novel). Consider this introduction to Lynette.

I liked her even before she spoke: she was pale, neat and delicate, with a brunette’s glitter and many good rings. Her eyes were the colour of blackberries. They fell first on the skull on our bookshelf. She said simply, T admire.’

Asking students to describe Lynette makes no sense. But asking them to reflect on the description followed by Carmel’s pondering on her own feelings makes a great deal of sense.

I think women carry this faculty into later life: the faculty for love, I mean.... Even today there are ten or twenty women whom I love; for a turn of phrase or wrist, for a bruised-looking ankle where the veins have blossomed out, for a squeeze of the hand or a voice at the end of the phone. I would no more go to bed with any of them than I would drown myself. Perhaps I love too easily; I can say Lynette has left a mark on my heart.