[The Sunday Times] Bringing literature to life for students

By Janadas Devan

I OFTEN receive e-mail from English teachers. An unusual number write about the difficulties they are having interesting their students in literature. Judging from the e-mail, our children are exceedingly lucky that they have teachers who are not only aware they aren't getting it, but also care that they don't.

Which novels and poems should they teach to interest their students, the teachers ask. Which would work best - 'local literature' or the English canon? How to sustain an interest in language, in literature, so students might be encouraged to read more than their assigned texts?

I received one such letter a month ago from a teacher in a top girls' school. She was teaching John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, she told me, and her students were having 'trouble understanding and grasping' its portrayal of migrant workers in 1930s America. She tried to liken the plight of these migrants to 'the foreign menial workers present in Singapore', but found that her pupils, mostly from affluent homes, remained unmoved. Of Mice And Men is different from the 'normal chic literature that they love to read', she said. Steinbeck might as well have written of creatures on a different planet. To all intents and purposes, he did.

'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her?'

Shakespeare's Hamlet asks that question upon hearing an actor recite the tale of Troy's fall. The actor had told of Hecuba seeing 'Pyrrhus' bleeding sword... make malicious sport' of her husband Priam's limbs, and wept as he recalled the scene. What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? Because in that brief instant his own art had made Hecuba him, and he Hecuba, and it was only natural he should have wept for himself.

But art or no art, such identifications are never assured, as Shakespeare himself well knew. Take, for instance, the passage in Sir Thomas More, commonly ascribed to Shakespeare, where More, as Sheriff, tries to pacify a crowd of rioting Londoners demanding the removal of alien immigrants from their city. (Yes, there were 'foreign menial workers' in 16th-century England too.)

'Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,' More tells the rioters, 'Their babes at their backs, with their poor luggage/ Plodding to th' ports and coasts for transportation.' You think you can sit in judgment of them like kings, he demands. And what if you got your way? 'I'll tell you: you had taught/ How insolence and strong hand should prevail.' And 'other ruffians.../ With self-same hand, self reasons, and self right,/ Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes/ Would feed on one another.'

It is a remarkable piece of rhetoric. The key word in the passage is of course the first - 'imagine'. That is followed by the graphically imagined scene ('babes at their back', 'poor luggage', 'plodding') and the moral consequences of hatred ('men like ravenous fishes' feeding 'on one another'). All great literature grips us thus, replacing our familiar abstractions and simplifications with the concrete and the particular.

Shakespeare's More, after considerable effort, does succeed in convincing the rioting Londoners. But would making things similarly concrete, particular, suffice to make the unfamiliar interesting to middle-class Singaporean children? The teacher who wrote to me about Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men tried to be a More to her students. She failed. Why?

I don't think it is because Singaporean children are less pervious to reason, or more resistant to imagination, than More's 'ruffians'. I think the problem here is that our children have been captivated to such an extent by the imaginative world that has been specially created for them, that they find it difficult to interest themselves in little else, including the world as it is.

Television, movies, GameBoys, PlayStations, computers, the Internet, iPods, Harry Potter, etc - it is an incredibly engrossing world. And this world is not merely linguistic, but visual and aural as well - and in the case of PlayStations, virtual, tactile and three-dimensional too. What is Of Mice And Men next to this all-encompassing, multi-dimensional world? Even Shakespeare, if he were our contemporary, would have difficulty penetrating it.

One way one might penetrate it is to begin with novels more likely to appeal to teenagers than realistic fiction like Of Mice And Men. Why not Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Animal Farm or William Golding's Lord Of The Flies instead? Why not the science fiction of H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany? Why not the fantasies of JRR Tolkien, the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

The above is by no means an exhaustive list - there are many more fabulous fish in the sea of world literature. But my own experience with my 13-year-old son suggests that such novels are more likely to appeal to the young than straightforward realistic ones requiring some knowledge of societies unfamiliar to our children. My son adored Brave New World, for instance, for he found it a revealing portrait of his own world. He saw how Huxley's 'feelies' resembled, to an amazing extent, PlayStations. That helped his parents win the argument as to whether he should have a PlayStation of his own. Having read Huxley, he decided perhaps not.

The other thing we should be conscious about our children is that we need to work at introducing them to the world. Somehow, this introduction does not take place naturally or inevitably nowadays, especially among well-off middle-class children. I don't think simply having them read newspapers or Steinbeck on Californian agricultural workers in the 1930s would do the trick. One has to work at making them aware, work on having them acquire cultural and social literacy.

So why not, instead of just urging students to imagine the lives of foreign menial workers, have them find out about these lives on their own? Make a project, say, of collecting the oral histories of the foreign maids who work in their homes, the construction workers who build their homes, the sweepers who clean their streets, the security guards who protect their condos? Make a project of connecting these lives to Mice and Men (if that has to be the text) by way of a documentary, say?

Our children are comfortable with multimedia formats. Well, why not allow them to use this comfort to make the literature interesting to themselves? Every generation has done something similar; the literature of the past would not have remained news if each generation had not made it new in its own terms. So why not let our children do their own translation, acquire their own ownership of literature?

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? If the Prince of Denmark were a 15-year-old today, I doubt a simple actor reading his lines, however effectively, would have moved the prince to ask such a question. We just have to let our children ask and answer such questions in their own way.

janadas@sph.com.sg