Notes from Under the Bookstack - teaching literature while learning literature; entering the portal of the written word
“In considering a period when literature was narrower in range and men possessed a less diversified stock of ideas and themes, one must seek to recapture and esteem the deep pondering and profound feeling that they gave to such as they possessed.”
Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics
I thought it would be helpful for me - and maybe some of you - to record something from my weekly efforts at teaching literature, since this year I am teaching and studying literature more than I have before. If you are not interested in reading, that is fine. The delete button was invented for such emails as this.
This week we went back to our homeschool co-op which means that I am now teaching 3 literature classes: Junior High Literature, British Literature, and Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. It was all introduction and ground laying in those first classes. In Jr. High Lit, we started with fairy tales and will read more next week before we jump into our books. In Brit Lit and Tolkien, we started with Beowulf and will continue for the next 3 and 4 weeks, respectively. In both of these classes we will listen to selections of Beowulf read in Anglo-Saxon by Dr. Michael Drout1 and try to walk through the portal of the written word into the world of the story.
In all my classes, every year, I start with old, strange stories. This was not my idea; my literature teachers introduced this method to me and it is a solid method. Beginning this way helps introduce story structure and imagery, but it is also an excellent way to help kids realize that it is ok if what they are reading feels strange, foreign, unfamiliar. In each class, I emphasized that when we come to a story, we are the visitors, we are the foreigners. If we don’t understand the language, it means we need to listen and pay attention, we need to be willing to learn. How rude would it be, I asked, if I came to your home and began criticizing your furniture and wall decorations and even your family members? We are guests in these stories, and guests ought to show deference to their hosts, asking for explanations of the things unfamiliar, rather than condemning them as weird and useless. It takes time and effort to, as Tolkien says, “recapture and esteem the deep pondering and profound feeling that they gave to such as they possessed.”
In Junior High Literature, we are reading myths and fairy tales for two weeks. Northrop Frye says, “The reason for studying myths [and fairy tales are structurally very similar to myths] in a course in literature is that myths represent the structural principles of literature: they are to literature what geometrical shapes are to painting. The reason for studying mythology is that mythology as a whole provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as a whole is about, an imaginative survey of the human situation from the beginning to the end from the height to the depth, of what is imaginatively conceivable. This ultimately the kind of deductive framework that, ideally, the teacher should have in mind.”2
After fairy tales in Jr. High Lit we will read The Hobbit, Anne of Green Gables, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Giver, and Brother’s Keeper, which is a newer story but one that I think is a good example of historical fiction and which I plan to pair with the Korean fairy tale, “The Brother and Sister Who became the Sun and Moon.” The point of this class will be to help the kids recognize the repeated patterns and images in the stories which form it’s internal web of meaning, and which connects with the internal webs of meaning in other stories. Because all stories are told in the language of images and patterns, story connects with story, and we find, as Northrop Frye says3, that when we read, we are not just reading one story but entering a universe of Story. I want my students to see that these stories share a common language and connect organically with each other, though the dialects might change with time. When we read The Hobbit and The Giver, we notice overlapping patterns, or where the image in one story has a darker side in another. We might need to work a bit to understand the way the author is using patterns and symbols, but it is worth the work.
This is the goal for all of my classes. When I teach Tolkien, starting with Beowulf helps the students acclimatize to an atmosphere that pervades The Lord of the Rings: the passing away of greater things that still echo around us, and the courage of fighting for what is good in the face of certain defeat and even if we know that the good we fight for will not last. In British Literature, I structured it so we can see how one work connects with another through genres and movements. I want them to see how the literary tradition is like a river running through the canon of Western literature. We are reading Beowulf, Macbeth and Paradise Lost first semester, Robinson Crusoe over break, then Northanger Abbey, Frankenstein, Animal Farm and The Last Battle. It occurred to me only a few weeks ago that the class with begin with an elegiac for a hero and that hero’s world passing away, and end with the same kind of idea but from a modern point of view, which is just as optimistic as the end of Beowulf. In Frankenstein, we have clear and intentional references to Paradise Lost, but it also connects with Macbeth as a tragedy since, as Harold Goddard says, “tragedy has to do with men possessing the capacity to become gods who, momentarily at least, become devils.” This also connects with the ending of Animal Farm in an eerie way.
Setting the imaginative context for stories and seeing how stories inform and connect with each other is my favorite part of teaching literature. Those points of connection are like when someone turns on another light in a room: everything is a little clearer and brighter. Once the kids get the hang of reading this way, they always surprise me with connections that I missed but that are so obvious once they’re seen.
This is not how I was taught to read in school. It is not how literary study guides teach reading, with their lists of vocabulary and questions like, “Should Frankenstein have made his monster?” But this is reading as people read for hundreds of years before us. Speaking of readying symbolically, Frye writes
The allegorical approach to literature is often, therefore, spoken of as a fantastic freak of pedantry, though it lasted for centuries and probably millennia, whereas our modern neglect of it is an ignorant parvenu of two centuries and a half. Surely if the word ‘pedantry’ means anything, it means that kind of contact with culture which consists in belittling the size and scope of the conceptions of genius, the “nothing but” principle of reading everything on the minimum imaginative level. It is of course true that one may read too much to a poem, but…[i]imaginative intensity applied to a wrong or inadequate object can be corrected; a deficiency in intensity never can be. …it is with symbolism as with etymology: the true course is neither to accept all resemblances as proving common descent from a single ancestor, nor reject them all as coincidence, but to establish the laws by which the real relationships may be recognized. If such laws exist, it will be quite possible to develop an imaginative accuracy in reading the arts which is not, like the accuracy of pedantry, founded purely on inhibitions.And
The work of art suggests something beyond itself most obviously when it is most complete in itself: its integrity is an image or form of the universal integration which is the body of a divine Man.4This is what I want the students to recognize, that even in children’s literature the symbolism of the story “suggests something beyond itself.” In the context of the story, it has meaning, and if we respect it’s place in the story, we will find that it connects - or rather, contains - our experiences as well.
In an essay entitles “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship,” Frye writes,
“As for the teaching of literature, it is obvious that a good deal of it should consist in reading and listening to stories. …all through elementary school a student should become gradually aware that stories come in certain conventional shapes. …It seems to me that the analogies and resemblances that the you student finds in all his literary experience from Shakespeare to television are what should be stressed…”“When the student has reached high school he should be aware of the recurring or conventional images of poetry, or what I call archetypes. There are two great structures underlying poetic imagery, the cyclical and the dialectic. The cycle of nature, running through the phases of the day, the year, the circulation of water, the generations of human life, and the like, stretches like a backbone across the whole of literature. The separation of images into the contrasting worlds or states of mind that Blake calls innocence and experience, and that religions call heaven and hell, is the dialectical framework of literature, and is the aspect of it that enable literature, without moralizing, to create a moral reality in imaginative experience. The full understanding of these two structures is complicated for the teacher, but their elementary principles are exceedingly simple, and can be demonstrated to any class of normally intelligent fifteen-year-olds. Analysis of this simple kind is, in my opinion, the key to understanding, not merely the conventions and the major genres of literature, but the much more important fact that literature, considered as a whole, is not the aggregate of all the works of literature that have been written, but an order of words, a coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason. If the teacher can communicate this principle, he will have done all he can for his student.”4
“All themes and characters and stories that you encounter in literature belong to one big interlocking family. …the more you read, the more you learn about literature as a whole.”
“We relate the poems and p lays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.”
“Behind our responses to individual works, there’s a bigger response to our literary experience as a whole, as a total possession.”
-The Educated Imagination
4Fearful Symmetry
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