Drama, Literature

Insanity in the Duchess of Malfi and A Streetcar Named desire

Leave a comment

Recently I’ve been studying and comparing two seemingly very different plays – The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster and A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. The first is a mid 16th century play, the second a mid 20th century one, but the similarities between their attitudes to insanity are worryingly similar in some ways. 

There are fundamental differences between the treatment of madness in The Duchess of Malfi and A Streetcare Named Desire, of course, but it is the similarities which I found so striking. It made me wonder if attitudes had really changed that much in the three hundred years between the two eras, and if they are still the same now. Bedlam of 16th century London and psychiatric hospitals which lobotomised patients in ‘50s America both exhibit the same fundamental impulses towards mental illness.  We fear it. We are uneasy around it. We see the chaos that surrounds it.  We would like to put it out of sight and forget it. Authors use it now, as they always have, to create an alternative view of the world, to say what can only be said by those outside of society’s norms. They use it to warn, but also to entertain and excite. I don’t see that human reactions are much different now than they have ever been.

Williams’ tenderness for those who suffer the flying apart of reality, those who hide behind fantasy and illusion to protect themselves from the glare of reality is, however, quite different from Webster’s cold, perhaps even judgemental, depiction of the mad.  Williams’ sister was taken to a mental hospital and lobotomised; it is hard not to see a parallel with the fragile, vulnerable Blanche who could no longer confront life’s hard realities. During the play, Stanley who is on the side of the real and the sane, is depicted as brutal, wilfully dismantling Blanche’s constructed fantasies revealing the cowering, broken woman beneath. The pathos of the weak woman who is destroyed by life and its cruelties is at the very heart of what the play shows us. Webster’s detached, clinical charting of the descent of the corrupt and perverse Ferdinand into madness and death is of a very different character. Ferdinand has tortured and killed the beautiful, vital and loving Duchess, either for his own gain or for more twisted perverted motives; the audience are not likely to have much sympathy for him as he wrestles on the floor with his own shadow and can no longer see the world as it is, but as it appears to him in his head. Despite the differences in the audience’s reaction, the way these authors view madness is not as diametrically opposed as you might suppose.

Both characters, Blanche and Ferdinand, become mad as a result of the dissidence between what society wants, expects and requires of them and what they can and wish to give. Blanche is supposed to be the perfect Southern Belle.  She certainly tries to play that part.  But despite her dissembling, it is very soon obvious that she drinks to excess and is sexually promiscuous. Neither of those things can be tolerated by her society. Her life is ruined by the ruin of her reputation.  Having slept with the soldiers on the army base as well as men in the town, she finally comes down to having an inappropriate affair with a seventeen year old student of hers at the High School. She is turned out of town for that and there is no way back. However much we may sympathise with why she has slid down this slope, society can not accept that a woman should behave this way. (The sympathy we feel as a modern audience is stretched thin here too – she is preying on the weak as much as she is preyed upon.) In the same way, Ferdinand’s sexual desires are unacceptable. He desires his sister – or at least the play can certainly be interpreted that way. His graphic description of his imaginings of his sister having sex with a succession of sexy, working class men would certainly seem to suggest he has some inappropriate impulses.

F-Talk to me somewhat – quickly,

Or my imagination will carry me

To see her in the shameful act of sin.

C-With whom?

F-Happily with some strong-thighed bargeman,

Or one o’th’wood yard that can quoit the sledge

Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire

That carries coals up to her privy lodgings.

You can imagine that he longs for the money and power he can have if his sister is gone, and also you can imagine his rage when he is not obeyed and considered in his sister’s plans. But, for me, the most compelling reason he kills the Duchess is that he cannot face his own desires and kills his sister to escape them. Ferdinand and Blanche are both outside society’s expected norms when it comes to their sexuality. Is it a coincidence that madness results?

Both Ferdinand and Blanche also feel guilt and have suffered trauma – this seems to be the root of their madness.  Blanche’s husband kills himself when she says she is disgusted by him (when she discovers he is homosexual) and she never recovers from that.  As the play advances, the music of the Varsouviana plays to signal the memory of her husband is triggered. As it becomes more intrusive and sinister, her madness advances. Ferdinand orders the killing of his sister, but when he sees her dead, he is overwhelmed.  “Cover her face.  Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.” It is from this moment that we chart his full descent into madness.  The wolf he believes he is has its hair on the inside – to torture him as he tortured the Duchess. Although we may be able to forgive Blanche’s fatal lack of understanding of her husband, and fully blame Ferdinand for his murderous and bloodthirsty killing of the Duchess, they have both suffered traumas and both feel guilt and grief. They have both lost the one they love – through their own fault.

Webster’s society looked on madness as inexplicable and terrifying, but it also had a weird fascination.  It could entertain, it could be used to comment on society and its ills, as we see in Webster’s madmen in Act IV of The Duchess of Malfi.  They are meant not only to torture and frighten the Duchess, but also to entertain the audience with their comments on contemporary society (the tailor driven mad by the fast changing English fashions; the lawyer driven mad by the madness of the law). Williams, on the other hand, showed interest and understanding without the horror and amusement we see in Webster. The fact, however, that one contemporary audience cheered Stanley’s rape of Blanche might show that he and his audiences had startlingly different perspectives.

We might like to think that twenty-first century society has moved past that desire to laugh at the mad, or to categorise them as ‘other’ so that the chaos they bring can be safely put aside. I wonder how far this is the case. We make progress, perhaps, but our lack of understanding of the diseases of the mind, and our fear of becoming less ourselves and losing control over our perception of what is and is not real, these things remain.

Essentially, the reason why we still watch and read The Duchess of Malfi and A Streetcar Named Desire is that they look at things which still concern us, fascinate us and terrify us. If we had found an answer to the problems these plays discuss, we might not still want to watch them.  As a society, we still don’t know how to respond to mental illness, and so the plight of Blanche, and even of Ferdinand, are still relevant.

Reading, Teaching

November Resits

Leave a comment

I spend a fair proportion of my time teaching students who got a 3 or less in their GCSE English and want to resit. Especially in the Autumn term, I work with many Year 12 students who, while studying for either A levels or other qualifications, want to get that all important 4 in their English.  Many of them need to get a 4 to do the course they are working on or aiming to do next. Despite that, the institutions they attend – either 6th Form in a school or a Further Education College – seem to struggle to provide the resources to help them improve their grade.

When a student comes to me, it is sometimes clear why they have not so far succeeded in their English.  It may be that studying hasn’t been a priority for them, that school was perhaps more of a social rather than academic experience, from their point of view. It may be that they weren’t really cut out for the strait-jacket which is the school experience, and learning in a classroom environment was difficult for them. Most of the time, though, it is not at all easy to discern why they have not got the grade they want.

Inevitably, some students simply are not capable of the level they are looking for.  I like to think that in some way, at some time, they would be capable of it, but to tackle underlying literacy issues takes time and effort which the student is often unable or unwilling to give. I feel that those students should have access to other English tests which might help them on their way.  Functional skills qualifications are a good way forward, but for many courses this is not enough; most require GCSEs at a level 4 or above.

Most students, though, are almost there with their grade and just need that extra boost.  The issue is that, when they come to me in September, they have already had nearly 3 months away from education.  They are not reading either fiction or non-fiction.  They are not writing stories, journals or letters.  So, of course, their standard of work has already dropped.  And they only have two months until their exam.

The shortness of the time is not the only issue.  The environment these students are studying in has changed.  Previously, as a normal GCSE student, they would probably be getting around 7 or 8 lessons a fortnight, usually of an hour each.  In Year 12 in a school where they are studying for A levels, they may get one lesson a week resit class.  In college it may be similar. I’m sure these times vary, but it is certain that the student resitting is getting far few hours exposure to English, to reading and writing. The constant repetition of the way the student should go about tackling a question, the sentence starters, the grammar and punctuation, the understanding of the text – this constant revision is no longer there. Usually, students who are at this point are not readers themselves, therefore the less they are required to read and write in their school or college day, the worse their standard becomes.

In addition, for the students and for the school, the focus is no longer on their English resit.  Generally, they are not particularly interested in the subject and wish to get the magic ‘4’ simply to go on to other things.  The school or college does not have the resources to concentrate their energies on these classes either.  I have repeatedly heard stories of students who, through staff illness or whatever, have not had teachers for weeks on end, but have been simply left with exercises to do.  The lessons also seem just to be a repetition of what they had before, which clearly did not work for them.

The truth is, the student has probably been working on those skills in English which are being tested in the GCSEs since Year 9, and hopefully before. They have gone through hundreds of tests, worked on hundreds of examples of past paper questions, and have had hundreds of lessons explaining SQI/PEA/PETER paragraphs, evaluation and SITE, simple and complex comparison and so on. Why, then, have they been unable thus far to get the grade they want and need?

Perhaps the reason is that we do spend too long looking at those aspects of teaching English (in order to get them through the exam) and not enough time simply on learning to read and write. Perhaps we think they have already learned to do that by the time they leave primary school, but the truth is that literacy is something you have to keep working on.  Not just until you get your GCSEs, but for the rest of your life.  The more you read, the better you get at it.  You can not only decode, but understand the implications of the text.  You can not only get a feeling for the tone of it, but also understand the bias of it. You start to see how all that is written is based on some other written text.  You begin to see patterns.  The same is true when you write.  If you don’t do it, you don’t develop the skills needed.  As you continue to do it, you become ever better at persuading, or involving your reader, or teaching them. To create this sort of learner, we should be focusing on reading and writing for fun, so that they become a part of life which continues whether you have English lessons at school or not.

Dragging the student’s grade up those last few marks to get the all important ‘4’ of course matters practically for those involved. It opens those doors to the careers or study they hope to do. But in terms of actual education, rather than fulfilling the needs of employers and the education sector, we are missing the point.  Not only are we missing the point over those last few months before the resit.  But we have been missing it all through Key Stage 4.

The question is, how can we strike the balance between helping our students on to the next rung of their education or the first rung of their career, and making them literate citizens whose learning continues for their whole lives? As educators, we only get judged on one of these things, but that should not determine our whole focus.

TES article: Another GCSE Results Day Disappointment

Literature

Beowulf

Leave a comment

There’s a music and magic to Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon that I had forgotten.  The look of the strange words on the page evoke images of chill winds off stormy grey seas, shields and swords clanging in violent conflict, the merriment of the Viking Hall, warm and jovial in a dark world.

Hwæt! We Gardena     in geardagum, 
þeodcyninga,     þrym gefrunon, 
hu ða æþelingas     ellen fremedon. 
Oft Scyld Scefing     sceaþenaþreatum, 

You may notice that even some of the letters were startlingly unfamiliar. Given that I had spent many hours of the second year of my degree studying them, perhaps I should have remembered more. The two I struggled most to recall were ð (eth) and þ (thorn) which, as it turns out, both make the ‘th’ sound. What have we lost when these two disappeared from our pages?

There is a beauty and majesty to the rhythm of the poem, which captures the heart of many of its readers. I believe J.R.R. Tolkein was one of them.  The heroic quest led by the brave warrior to rid the land of an evil monster is a story which continues to enthral even now. The number of films made based only on this idea is myriad. Even the story of Beowulf itself has relatively recently been made into a film, although I don’t think the latter will become a classic. However, Tolkein’s books are undeniably classics, and the films which have been made of them are on their way to becoming so. Some of his ideas seem to come in a direct blood-line from Beowulf. The importance of courage, of loyalty, of honour, these are taken up by Tolkein, and woven with even more magic and mystery to create another world.

Recently reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, I came across this passage:

…until the day arrived

when he had to come face to face with the dragon.

The lord of the Geats took eleven comrades

and went in a rage to reconnoitre.

By then he had discovered the cause of the affliction

being visited on the people.  The precious cup

had come to him from the hand of the finder,

the one who had started all this strife

and was now added as a thirteenth to their number.

They press-ganged and compelled this poor creature

to be their guide.  Against his will

he led them to the earth-vault he alone knew,

an underground barrow near the billowing sea

and the heave of the waves, heaped inside

with exquisite metalwork.  The one who stood guard

was dangerous and watchful, warden of that trove

buried under the earth: no easy bargain

would be made in that place by any man.

Does it remind you of anything?  I read it out to my Tolkein obsessed 17 year old son, who recognised it straight away.  The lord of the Geats (Thorin) with eleven companions (the dwarves) add a ‘press-ganged’ thirteenth to their number (Bilbo Baggins) to go and plunder the barrow filled with ‘exquisite metalwork’ (treasure hoard) owned by the ‘one who stood guard’ who was ‘dangerous and watchful’ (Smaug).  This passage definitely has echoes of The Hobbit.

As haunting and rich as the language is in Heaney’s translation, I have to confess to finding the poem itself embodying too much of the masculine boastfulness and preoccupation with physical prowess which is toxic in our modern world. Perhaps you think that I impose modern ideas onto an ancient poem in a way that is anachronistic and unwarranted.  You may be right.  Though I might argue that there is no other way to read the classics of the past except through the prism of our own time.  Any attempt to circumvent our own ideologies and concerns would only ever be partially successful. Since our new perspective is all we can truly bring to the interpretation of well-known classic literature, it may be wise to resist the impulse to immerse ourselves too completely in the ideas of the past. I might argue that if reading Beowulf can help us explain and understand the origins of how we define manhood, not only can we enjoy the work for itself, but we can perhaps shed light on our own times.  You may, however, prefer to plunge deeply into the society of these long dead Vikings, reading the thoughts of ghosts who walked an earth we would barely recognise.  There is magic in that too.

What the poem leaves me with, after all these conflicting thoughts, are the pictures and the sounds of an alien world, brought to us both by the original poet from between the 8th and the 11th centuries and by a twentieth century one. The images created by lines like ‘the billowing sea and the heave of the waves’, the musicality in their assonance and alliteration, make the poem worth reading in themselves. For those of you educated enough to have read the poem in the original or to understand more of Heaney’s craft in translating it than I do, I hope you forgive my untutored, personal thoughts on the subject.  I hope all reading this will be inspired to look at the poem itself and judge for themselves.

Reading, Teaching

Why do schools put books into levels?

1 Comment

The answer is that it is convenient. In the absence of a member of staff who knows the books available in the school, and knows their content, reading level and interest level, schools have to find an easy, quick way of matching a book to a child. It is nothing new.  I remember books like that when I was at school.  The excitement of finishing the red books and being allowed to try the silver books – what a sense of achievement!  My children too, at primary, went through the same process. I appreciate that there is a certain amount of sense to the progression through varying levels of difficulty.  But I have a fundamental problem with the idea.

It is not just that, even before some children are out of key stage one they know their reading ability and label themselves as ‘non-readers’, though that is extremely detrimental to any hope of making those children into readers for pleasure. It’s not just that children are picked on for being either too clever or too stupid, though, again, that is another reason why school is a torment for so many children. I have a problem with the idea of finding a level for books at all.

There is a practical problem, even before we address what my fundamental objection is.  How do you find the correct level for a book?  If you have to read every book first, why are you not just recommending them to children as and when they want them without the need to explicitly categorise the book and the child? If you are relying on the companies and their computer driven data, then you will inevitably find that there are some startling anomalies.  Enough to make you doubt how accurate the rest of the data is.  Books in the same series are given hugely different levels – which is a nonsense, particularly if your aim is to create readers rather than just set homework. Books which are clearly classics and difficult in themes and ideas can be given a low level.  Books which are for younger children can be given a high one. I always think about William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.  They are not complex, they are simple to read and understand, but a huge amount of context and a high level of understanding are appropriate when reading them.

However, the practicalities aside, I hate the idea of giving books levels because it goes against everything I want children to understand about what books are.  They should be gateways to other worlds, keys to knowledge, tutors to teach empathy, journeys to be taken inside your head. They should be what you long to get home to, what you are excited to talk about, what you love to share with your friends and family.  They should not be a way to tell you how clever you are or are not.  They should not be homework.  They should not be hard work.

I have said before on this blog that we all read books of different levels at different times. Who reads to the top of their ability every day? It would be exhausting and disheartening. Pushing children to choose books from a certain level makes them have to push themselves every time they open their book.

I have also talked about the importance of choice when encouraging readers.  Reading levels in school narrows the already restricted choice for the student. Of course we want them to choose something they can read and that they won’t get bored with or struggle with.  But taking away their chance to try something ambitious or relax into something comforting and familiar will not encourage the children to become readers. I read Bleak House when I was 16.  I doubt I understood much of it at that point. No doubt many of the references and ideas passed me by.  But my love of Dickens stems from that point.  No one said, don’t try that, it’s too hard.  I didn’t realise it was, so I got what I could from it.  If it truly had been so far above me, I would have left it and tried something else.  Would that have been so bad?  At the other end of the spectrum, I have just been reading Fantastically Great Women who changed the World by Kate Pankhurst.  Admittedly I was doing so to prepare for a lesson, but, I have to say, I really enjoyed it.  I learned so many things about famous women who should be celebrated. What I am trying to say is that no book is too easy or too hard, unless you yourself decide that it is.

For those children who have lots of choice of books outside school, the book levels in school may not do too much damage.  They may visit the library, be allowed to buy books at a book shop, get presents at Christmas and birthdays of books they might like, and may have books in the house to go to in order to satisfy their reading needs.  For those children who do not have books outside school – and these children are already at a disadvantage educationally – the levels may be restrictive and judgemental enough to put them off reading.

I may be asking for too much of the education system in these dark days, but I would like to see a book expert who recommends books to children based on what they like, what they want to try, what has been recommended to them and, yes, on their reading level.  I would like to see a range of books in every school with no prescriptive demarcation of levels or age. The book expert, well maybe we could call them a librarian (based, you know, on the latin for book) and the place where the books are kept could be called a library.  What do you think?  Do you think it might catch on?

Literature, Poetry

Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn by Tim Turnbull

Leave a comment

It struck me for the first time how very few people will be able to fully appreciate Tim Turnbull’s poem, Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn. And that small number of people is decreasing all the time. It is ideally placed to be part of the Poems of the Decade anthology studied by A level literature students (Edexcel). Young people, steeped in youth culture, full of vitality, open to risk and preoccupied by sex and fun, will very clearly see a link between themselves and the young people depicted on Turnbull’s imaginary Grayson Perry Urn. But, in contrast with most other youngsters, they will also appreciate, not only the language and form of the poem, but also the links between this modern verse and John Keats’ poem Ode to a Grecian Urn. Without that vital bit of cultural knowledge, so much of the meaning will be opaque. As we drift in time further and further away both from Keats (and those who think studying him is important) and from the youth culture of the noughties, the pool of readers who will be able to fully grasp this poem without substantial footnotes grows fewer and fewer. The poem is almost like a sand sculpture being gradually eroded by the tide.

The conceit is that, like Keats’ Grecian Urn depicting a scene from Ancient Greece, an urn by Grayson Perry has caught a scene from our modern culture and immortalised it, frozen it, guarded it from decay and preserved it for future generations. The poem echoes Keats’ masterpiece from beginning to end. The verse form of Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn is the most obvious, but probably the least interesting, echo of Keats’ original poem. To me, the contrast of imagined sounds which the two scenes create is far more evocative. In contrast to Keats’ unheard melodies on ‘pipes and timbrels’, Turnbull describes the ‘joyful throb’ of garage and house, ‘the screech of tyres and the nervous squeals of girls’.

The love which Keats writes of is ‘for ever warm and still to be enjoy’d/For ever panting, and for ever young’, just like that of the ‘buff’ girls and ‘toned and strong’ geezers in Turnbull’s version. Here, however, instead of the delicate ‘human passion’, we have ‘Calvin’s’ and ‘thongs’ ‘charged with pulsing juice…never to be deflated’. The humour in the juxtaposition of Keats’ pipes and Turnbull’s screeching tyres, of Keats’ passion and Turnbull’s chlamydia ridden couplings in cars is what takes the sting out of the caustic description of today’s youth. Turnbull does not forget to highlight those young people’s vulnerability, calling them ‘children’ and saying they are ‘too young to quite appreciate the peril they are in’. That warmth infuses the poem with a care for these fun-seekers, which otherwise would have looked like a demolition of today’s youth culture.

The humour in the incongruity of the levels of language also lends the poem a warmth to temper the brutal depiction of urban youth culture. The poem begins with the colloquial ‘Hello! What’s all this here?’ and evokes a teenage voice in words like ‘crap’ ‘buff’ and ‘geezer’.  These contrast starkly with academic, highly educated terms such as ‘delineating’, ‘gaudy evocation’ and ‘peril’. Of course this just mirrors the incongruity between Grayson Perry’s urn and the Grecian urn, Greek youth and modern British youth, as well as Keats’ classical poetry and Turnbull’s modern verse. The third voice is the one I like most, however. It is the voice of the middle-aged curtain-twitcher.  It is the voice of the ‘complaining cardigan’ is what I wrote in the margins of the poem when I first read it. Phrases like ‘creating Bedlam on the Queen’s Highway’ seem to come straight out of the Daily Mail. Turnbull’s irreverence is generously sprinkled over everyone, but his warmth and compassion he reserves for those youth who are not lucky enough to have been immortalised (and therefore saved from danger) on the modern urn.

In the last part of the poem, Turnbull expects us to have Keats’ maxim in mind: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. In his poem, however, there are no certainties, ‘truth is negotiable’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. On some level I feel there is a genuine admiration for our modern, insubstantial relativism in this, even through the satire. But what is left, for me, is the feeling that freezing them in time, our young people’s joy and lust for life remains, though the danger and consequences do not. The dirty, every-day life those children share cannot be frozen or idealised, though, in stopping for a moment in attempting to, we can see more clearly their joy and passion as well as their vulnerability.

The irony is that, as the understanding of Turnbull’s poem diminishes, the poem itself becomes like both the Grecian urn and Grayson Perry’s urn: a half-glimpsed snapshot of a half-understood culture. The nuances will fade to leave a static picture of a culture long vanished, the poet’s intentions even more difficult to discern, the people it depicts even more difficult to reach. That the poem feels so ephemeral seems even to heighten its beauty.

New Year

New Year’s Resolutions or meditation?

Leave a comment

Have you made any New Year’s Resolutions this year?  Much is written about whether we should or should not do so.  Matt Haig has said in his book Notes on a Nervous Planet, “Don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re not enough”.  He tweeted in the days following New Year’s Day that we should not think of ourselves as like iPhones which need constant upgrading, instead we should be happy with who we are:

“You don’t need a new you. You don’t need replacing every year like another iPhone. Don’t throw yourself away like another piece of plastic trash. Love the old you. Improve, evolve, do better, but head towards yourself not away. Be gentle with your mind. Happy new year”

For many years I made resolutions, which I have not kept.  The resultant feeling of failure is not a helpful one. More recently, I wrote a list of things I would like to improve on.  Things like trying to help people rather than just talking about or thinking about their problems.  Or working on my patience – which my family will tell you could do with a bit of refining! Last year, I looked at the previous year’s list, and, honestly, I just needed to repeat the same things. I wonder if any progress had been made.  It is hard to say, and, at the time, I did not stop to analyse whether it had.

I think possibly this is closer to being the issue than whether resolutions should be made in the first place. I will confess that I did not make any resolutions this year. My Christmas holiday has contained too much – both of good and bad – to have afforded me enough time . More importantly, I have not stopped to think about what direction I want to go in, and how to make that happen.

What I mean is that contemplating your trajectory, analysing your life and its successes and failures, its strengths and weaknesses, and thinking about what you want for yourself, and what you want to give to the world, these are valuable things to do.

Meditating has become very fashionable and I believe it may have some real value.  Thinking about yourself and your life is so important, and not just at the start of the year. But just having time to take in the world around you – truly see it, truly experience it – this is something else we could do all year round. W.H. Davies wrote this poem – which you may recognise a couple of lines from:

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

The notion of stopping and looking at the world around us, the people, the sights, the sounds, is one which is alien to most twenty-first century westerners. We rush from event to event, from meeting to meeting, and in our down time we fill our minds with entertainment rather than contemplation. We have so much we can input into our minds, but we rarely take the time to sort, analyse and understand the things we have learned.

I could say that the problems we have as a society stem from such issues, but I don’t think this generation are the first to have experienced these types of difficulties. So, we can’t blame it all on a frenetic modern world. But, I do truly think that if we spend a bit of time thinking about what we can do to change things for the better, for ourselves, for our communities, for our world, then we are more likely to put our limited resources to good use.

So, my advice, probably too late for most (and possibly ignored by anyone left), would be to spend more time meditating on your life, and more time experiencing it, rather than vowing one more time that you will lose 10lbs before the end of the month!

Christmas

Christmas – A time which does us good?

1 Comment

Christmas is a time to think and take stock.  We think back to Christmases we have known, we think about what we have now and we imagine what is ahead.  Putting the same baubles on the tree and putting out the same decorations as last year, we can’t help our minds going back to the last time we did this, and the times before that.  The badly made crumpled decorations our children made in primary school are still there waiting to be put on the tree. The decorations bought on holiday in beautiful places, those given to us as gifts, bring thoughts and memories of the past. Opening up the cards from friends we have not seen in years, people we shared special times with whose lives have now moved on – it all brings the past flooding back in to our ordinary present.

This can be wonderful!

I love to get news of friends and their families, what they’ve been doing and what stage they are at. I’m not one of those who regards round robin letters as a chance to be cynical and compare myself unfavourably with the successes of others. Facebook can do that for me any day of the week! Instead, I love to recall the happy times and closeness I shared with people and am happy to find out a little something of what their lives have been this year. I also love to remember the holidays we’ve had, the fun times of Christmases past, and friends and family who have made them special.

Inevitably, though, there is some sadness involved in the process. Even if everything is going well – and for some it may not be – looking back has a sting to it.  Philip Larkin, the miserable old thing, puts it very well:

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives. 
They link us to our losses: worse, 
They show us what we have as it once was, 
Blindingly undiminished, just as though 
By acting differently we could have kept it so. (Reference Back)

I never thought that acting differently could have kept things ‘undiminished’, but I don’t doubt that they are diminished in so many ways. I have to constantly remind myself that where things have eroded, often a good thing has grown in its place. Though I know this is not true for everyone.

I might even say that it is inevitable that at some point we will find ourselves lost and Christmas can be a time when we notice how far we have strayed from the path. Dante begins The Inferno by talking about this mid-life confusion, and it is a strange comfort to me that people were experiencing this feeling in thirteenth century Italy!

Midway on the journey of our life
I found myself within a dark forest, 
For the straightforward path had been lost. 
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough and stern, 
Which in the very thought renews the fear. 
So bitter it is, death is little more;  
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.  
Ahhi quanto a dir qual era è coas dura 
Esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte 
Che nel pensier rinova la paura! 
Tant’è amara che poco è più morte;

The ‘magazine’ term ‘mid-life crisis’, like all of these things, belittles what is a natural and painful process in life. Our youthful culture laughs with scorn at the travails of the middle aged, making them caricatures and allowing people to dismiss perfectly reasonable doubts, fears and worries as a pathetic decline from the bloom of youth. In essence it removes the need for empathy – which, I need hardly say, is never a good thing.

But young or old, Christmas can be both a difficult and painful time, even though it may still be magical and joyful. The difficulty, perhaps, also lies in the contrast between what is expected and what we have.  We see the happy people on the TV, hear the best bits of the lives of our friends and colleagues, and we have the picture in our heads of twinkling lights, carols, turkey and happy family.  If our Christmas is not like this – and let’s be honest, whose is? – then we feel we have failed, that life has given us a raw deal, that reality is bleak and lonely and the rest is just a tinsel-coated lie.

May I suggest something as an attempt at an antidote to this feeling?

I think the problem partly lies in what we are thinking that Christmas is.  I am a Christian and for me it should primarily be about celebrating the birth of Christ, his forgiveness for our sins and the hope and love he brings. This message acknowledges the pain, the suffering, the difficulty, the injustice, and says there is hope ahead. Not that things are perfect now, but that we are loved and there is hope for love to spread in this dark world.

If you are not a Christian but follow other beliefs, then your faith will, I hope, bring you a similar message, however you celebrate at this time of year. If you have no specific faith, then I offer to you Charles Dickens’ idea of Christmas.  Despite how picture perfect costume dramas present his ideas, it is not a view of unattainable perfection. Instead it is a call to behave differently, to feel differently about those around us. Fred says to Scrooge’s ‘Bah! Humbug!’ that Christmas is a time to do us good:

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that – as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable pleasant time; the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Whatever your Christmas time holds this year, whether it is a blessing to be savoured or a time to be suffered through until the light shines again, we can change how we look at what it is, and what it can be for us. This year I want to think of how Christmas can be an opportunity to try and change my own attitudes towards others, rather than thinking of what Christmas is going to give me. Those who are missing loved ones, finding the gap between their reality and the perfect Christmas picture too hard to handle, those who feel alone or ill, I wish you all the very best – and at least the endurance to get through to a brighter place. If you feel exhausted and stressed, put upon and worn out, I wish you rest and recovery. If you are finding Christmas to be everything you wish for, I am happy for you and I hope you can pass your joy onto those around you. Whatever we feel about this time of year, let it be a time which does us good.

Literature, Novels, Reading, Teaching

Lost Cultural Capital

Leave a comment

To understand the nineteenth century texts that we throw at our unprepared teenagers, they must have more background knowledge than we probably expect.  Some background is taught in school, and some is assessed in the GCSE mark schemes.  But, the truth is, there are students who are at an immediate disadvantage, and, as the world changes even from how we experienced it in our youth, young people get further and further away from the shared culture and societal expectations which are required to properly understand a text.

As we treat the next generation to the delights of A Christmas Carol – taught in my area in the run up to Christmas – teachers throughout Britain spend precious lesson time talking about the ‘invention’ of the Victorian Christmas, Christmas trees, Christmas cards, lights and carols. There will be some explanation of ‘pagan Christmas’ and ‘Christian Christmas’ and possibly Dickens’ view of what it meant. I have taught students who have hopelessly mixed up ideas of Yule and Christianity and traditions in the scramble to get some ideas into the heads of twenty-first century teenagers. Some understanding of The Poor Law, workhouses and other aspects of nineteenth century society that Dickens was aiming to criticise, is also rapidly shoved into half a lesson. Despite this albeit hasty preparation to read the novella, context is not assessed in Edexcel’s GCSE English Literature when it comes to A Christmas Carol.  (Though it is considered worthy to be assessed in other topics such as poetry.)

Assessed or not, schools do not have time to teach nineteenth century politics, law or social history as part of the English curriculum. Inevitably, students have to fall back on their own cultural knowledge.  This will disadvantage certain types of student.

Understanding Greek mythology will help you understand Byron’s poetry; knowing the Bible will help you understand Hardy’s novels; knowing what the gothic genre entails will help you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is not to say that you can’t enjoy these works without that knowledge, but it is much, much more difficult. Those whose parents do not come from Britain and so have other traditions and histories to tell their children, those who have not spent a life time watching Dickensian carolling on the television, those who have not read Anthony Horowitz or Rick Riordan explaining the Greek myths, these are just a few of the people who will struggle to get the same out of the texts they study as others.

As we travel further and further away in time from Victor Frankenstein, from Little Nell, from Tess Durbeyfield, the less they will be understood.  It is not surprising that Chaucer is rarely studied outside of university these days.  Very few have read Piers Plowman, John Webster’s plays are staged less frequently, Aphra Behn is a name that even students of literature may well be unfamiliar with. The world they wrote about, the understanding they shared with their readers or audiences, these have disappeared into the mists of time.  It takes deliberate study and determined application to appreciate not only the contexts of these authors, but also their language. The same is happening to our nineteenth century favourites. 

For old ladies such as myself, the world of mid to late twentieth century is close and familiar.  It links back much more easily to a time when most of the (educated) people in the country knew about Noah and the Arc, Icarus, Neptune. Even the Latinate language of the nineteenth century novel was still heard in hymns and in speeches. Wandering sentences were not so uncommon. The world is very different now. The writing style of choice, even in formal prose, offers shorter, less complex sentence structures and more Anglo-Saxon words rather than Latinate ones. We’re used to sound-bites, tiny extracts, pithy stories.  We have Twitter’s brevity, three minute YouTube clips and the five minutes the news devotes to the latest issue.  Dickens’ audiences were content to read volumes of his prose, winding their way through the intricacies of his labyrinthine sentences. Our minds are not accustomed to this discipline.

My point is that Michael Gove, harking back to the halcyon days of his childhood in the middle of the twentieth century, was happy to encourage (or impose) the study of texts he will have probably appreciated.  But the difference between him, his cultural knowledge, and the students now and theirs, grows ever wider.  This is even before we start talking about privilege and middle class cultural capital.

I don’t advocate stopping studying texts such as A Christmas Carol.  I love them!  Students learn more than a bunch of language and structure techniques from reading such a wonderful tale. I just want to acknowledge yet another barrier to success that students face, particularly students from working class backgrounds and ethnic minorities. But the biggest barrier is the speed of change our world is seeing. The change from Dickens to my classroom in 1980s Northern England was huge.  But subsequent change makes that leap seem miniscule. Next time we are trying valiantly to cram cultural, societal and political history into the starter of a literature lesson, we might give ourselves and the students a break if the knowledge gap is not immediately bridged.   

Reading, Teaching

How Cool is Reading?

Leave a comment

Reading For Pleasure

The holy grail for school librarians and English teachers is to inspire this – Reading For Pleasure. But is it ever possible to change a child’s attitude and habits and turn them into a reader?

What is at the root of the issue? It seems to be reading ability.  According to a recent study, speaking of children up to 10, () ‘slower readers and poorer comprehenders read less than more fluent readers and more able comprehenders’. (Quoted in a TES article from November 2019) This seems perfectly logical. If you can’t read very fluently, it is not much fun to attempt it. It’s hard work, even. Which child (or adult for that matter) wants to spend their spare time doing something they find extremely difficult? Of course, the gap between what the poorer reader is able to read easily and the appropriateness of the books to their interest and sophistication, grows rapidly. What happens before long is that the books they would be interested in reading are no longer within their grasp.  What they can read seems juvenile and simplistic to them. This makes it even less likely that they will maintain the effort of reading in their spare time.

We have not even yet mentioned the shame and humiliation so many teenagers feel or fear when it comes to reading. No wonder they don’t want to try it or spend any time thinking about it. When someone knows that a book they have is beyond them, often they still carry it around like a talisman, helping them fit in and seem part of the group. I have seen this so often in my work as a librarian. I would love the student to take a book they will truly enjoy and be able to appreciate. Even if they can find one, they are reluctant to be seen reading it, because they know they will be judged by their classmates.

So much excellent work has been done by publishers like Barrington Stoke.  They publish so many fantastic books which appeal to older readers but have simple sentence structures and a specific vocabulary – not to mention many other features such as readable typefaces and cream coloured pages for those with dyslexia. Even these, though, are not the books which a ‘cool’ kid at school wants to be seen with.  Those will be the ones on the shelves of Asda and Tesco which have been publicised to death, and are therefore popular enough to be acceptable in school.

To be honest, though, at school, reading is not seen to be cool at all. As teachers and librarians we continually try to fight that stereotype. But what can we do?  We were never the cool kids at school when we were young, and we certainly have no vestige of coolness now!  Anything we recommend or encourage will inevitably be lame, whether we like it or not. The attempts to make it desirable to be a reader, such as getting points as part of the Accelerated Reader programme, are as likely to backfire as to be successful.  I hope the element of competition does encourage some students to read more, but I fear it does the opposite for so many others. To be the year group’s ‘Word Millionaire’ will only seem desirable either to young children or to people who love reading in the first place. It is certainly not like winning the cup for the school football team, is it?

So, if we come back to reading ability, how do we tackle the issue of improving a student’s chances of being competent enough to be inspired to read?  Truthfully, it comes down to reading practice.  If a baby is read to, spoken to, and interacted with, their language skills will develop well.  If their parents and friends continue to read to them, model reading, encourage reading, they will have a better chance of growing up to be a reader.  If their parents have large vocabularies, if they continue to talk to their children, the children will have a large and growing vocabulary themselves.  This makes accessing books all the more possible. Once the child starts school, reading in lessons, living in a reading culture all day five days a week will help encourage them to pick up a book and make the effort to understand it.

It’s easier said than done.

In the years that I worked as a school librarian, I saw children turn to reading who had never read. I saw the pride of a child of 11 who had successfully finished reading their first ‘proper’ book.  I saw the interest sparked in children who found their place in the pages of a book.  People who had been on the outside suddenly felt they belonged.  People who did not see themselves reflected in those around them, found others like themselves in the books they read.  However, I did not see many children who valued ‘coolness’, popularity or social status turn to reading. By the time they had come to me, it was already engrained that reading was not for people like them. Not if they wanted to carry on being cool.

This is not the key to the issue.  The key is with parent-child relationships, adult literacy, resourcing and working on school reading cultures, school libraries and librarians and so on. But it is a serious impediment to reading for pleasure. Those who love to read can always keep quiet about it – so it doesn’t ruin their reputation at school.  But those who have already slipped through the net will never be caught again because of the fact that teenagers do not aspire to be readers.

As a swot, the least cool of all, I have no answer to this problem. It may be that I have to pass this one on to someone better qualified. The problem is, which of us librarians is cool enough for the task?

Literature, Novels

Narrative Perspectives – The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Leave a comment

Using a variety of narrators to give different perspectives is a well used structural device in novels. The most sparkling of those that I can remember is Ali Smith’s How To Be Both.  George and Francesco’s narratives, so separate, so interwoven, can be read in either order.  Some books were published with George first and others with Francesco – the experience inevitably being completely different. Until now, I had not read a book with only one chapter with an omniscient third person narrator – slap bang in the middle of a book with three different narrators. The Help beautifully creates the sounds of the South of the United States through the dialect, vocabulary and preoccupations of the three female protagonists, Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter.

Aibileen – gentle, loving, forgiving, but hard and worn from decades of pain and difficulty, speaks with a fairness to her tone which seems all the more saintly considering what she has had to live with. The dialect she uses, strangely stronger in tone that Minny’s, creates a warm and vivacious sound in the reader’s ear, even if it is sometimes hard for this white, English-woman to catch the flow of the narrative as easily as others might.

Minny – the younger, fiercer friend of Aibileen, speaks with the passion and anger that the reader feels the subject of discrimination deserves. Her ‘sass’ and plain speaking, her loyalty, her pride, her strength and daring, all stand out from the page.  I believe I could detect Minny’s voice even if her name was not written at the head of the chapter.

Skeeter – is the young woman who makes the journey the author presumably hopes the reader will make – from blind acceptance of the status quo to a deeper understanding of the people and the society around her. Her voice is clearly different again in tone, dialect and ideas. Her coming of age mirrors the reader’s developing understanding of the intricacies of segregated America. Reading as someone who does not instinctively know about white-black relations in Mississippi, but who has read and seen the usual things, Skeeter’s voice is a step away from my own experience, but her ignorance is also mine.

The idea that the book is written by a white woman about the experiences of black women, in a time in which she has not lived, might be controversial. To write in the voice a black woman when you have not lived as one, might be criticised by some. I am not going to make that criticism. Who am I, a white Northumbrian, to make a judgement on such things?  But Kathryn Stockett obviously felt this unspoken criticism:

I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person.

To me, however, the voices seem authentic and the intention pure. If Skeeter’s had been the only voice, the book would have lost its richness, its intense scrutiny of the heart of racist America. If Aibileen and Minny had been the only ones to be heard, we would not have seen the awakening of understanding that Stockett would want her readers to experience.

In giving the reader three female narrators, we look at the actions from those three different viewpoints. We see Hilly’s history with Skeeter, her honesty and their closeness. Without Skeeter’s narrative, the reader would struggle to see why Skeeter would ever be friends with such a woman. Even with Skeeter’s perspective, that part of the novel was the hardest for me to accept. We could not have seen Minny’s heroic suffering in a violent marriage, but for Aibileen’s perspective, nor seen Minny’s love for and dependence on him but for her own perspective.  We also experience different relationships through the three woman narrators: Celia and Minny, Stuart and Skeeter, Minny and Leroy, Aibileen and Treelore. The richness of the interplay between all three is magnified through this adeptly used narrative structure.

However, Chapter 25, the only third person narrative in the book, is, for me, a failure of imagination. Could this not have been written by one of the characters in a way in which we could have understood the action, perhaps even more than we in fact were able to?  It could have been Hilly’s caustic voice, or Johnny Foote’s, or even Celia’s.  I realise all of those create problems with the narrative and would give each character more knowledge that they in fact had.  Skeeter was the observer of the event; she could have recounted it so that the reader understood the whole of the story, even if she did not.

I hesitate to criticise a book I truly admire, particularly because I could not ever have created such a masterpiece myself, so who am I to disparage it?  I don’t see what good chapter 25’s narrative structure did.  Instead it broke down the close bond I had been developing with the characters when I heard the cold, dispassionate voices of the god-like narrator. To others, no doubt, it is an interesting facet of a beautifully written novel.  I would like to hear someone disagree with me in my unease at this strange hiatus that chapter 25 creates. It is a fascinating book, and certainly singular in its structure.

Exploring, discussing and revelling in reading.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started