Teaching Literature as Literature

Norman Rockwell Visits a Country School, 1946.

Several years ago, some friends recommended a dystopian novel that was very popular within Catholic academic circles. The book had a lot to say about our contemporary situation, they said. It was a sharp critique of where we’re heading and the kinds of fallout we might have to suffer if we don’t change course. I eagerly picked it up and read the whole thing. I was not disappointed. The novel indeed offered a poignant critique of contemporary culture, and the ideas contained within its pages were deeply insightful. Even so, as a novel, it left me cold. It didn’t seem life-like, the setting was unimportant and nondescript, and I couldn’t shake the suspicion that the novel’s characters were no more than thinly-veiled ideas. What the author loved, it seemed to me, were the ideas themselves, and the people and places that filled the novel’s pages were secondary. Sure, it possessed characters, setting, an interesting plot, all the necessary equipment of a novel, but the novel’s “soul” wasn’t literary.

Over the years, I have spent long hours reflecting on exactly what literature is and what makes the literary form distinct from other forms of writing. It seems to me there are two defining features that all great literature possesses. In a great literary work, people, setting, and all the earthy “stuff” of human existence are primary; and the work’s orientation is upward, moving from the earth to the heavens. I’ll begin by explaining these two defining features and then I’ll give five practical suggestions for teaching literature in a way that honors the literary form.

Defining Characteristics of the Literary Form

In great literature, people and setting are primary. This isn’t to say that ideas aren’t important. They are, but they only come secondarily, after immersing oneself in the concrete people, places, times, and circumstances that a novel presents to us so vividly. The best novelists I know possess a keen sensitivity to the way real people think and act, and they display sincere sympathy for their human characters. I am often struck, when reading a really well-written novel, by how much love the author seems to possess for his characters, despite their failings. The results of that love are rich, multi-layered characters like we find in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Upon reading Undset’s novel for the first time, my sister-in-law exclaimed, “I know these people!” Great novels produce that sensation in us. The best poets and novelists also display sharp vision when it comes to place and time. Who but Wordsworth could render the ravages of time on Tintern Abbey with such a loving eye for detail?

A second defining trait of literature is its orientation to the truth. In a well-crafted novel, human beings begin in the muck and earthiness of life, and through difficulties and triumphs strain toward heaven. The image that often comes to mind is of a human hand forcing its way through the earth, and stretching as far as it can toward the sky. Poets and novelists lock onto and elevate earthly matter. In “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins demonstrates profound sensitivity to all the dappled things he sees in nature, “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;/…rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,” and “Landscape plotted and pieced” (Lines 2-3, 5). This close inspection and attention to speckled things in nature leads him to reflect upon how awesome God must be since He is the origin of all the surrounding variety. Through the concrete, the poem’s speaker glimpses the divine, but he cannot skip any steps: he must first immerse himself in earthly matter in order to catch the divine glimmer. In “Pied Beauty,” we see the literary mode of approaching wisdom on vivid display, moving from the speckled stuff of earth up to the heavens.

Implications for Teaching

Trying to define the nature of literature is all well and good, but how does any of this affect our teaching? If we believe that literature roots itself in real people and concrete places and possesses a ground-up orientation to the truth, there are real repercussions for how we lead seminars, how we roll out novels, and which parts of books we choose to focus on in class. I am going to offer five ways teachers can honor the literary form and teach literature as literature.

1. Root students in character and place, the “earthy” material of the story, at the beginning of every book or poem. In literary texts, we get to witness human beings acting in a particular time and place. Therefore, take some time getting to know the characters. What do they want? What are their strengths, their weaknesses, the circumstances surrounding the decisions they face? What motives prompt them to act in a particular way? And where are they placed? What is their historical setting? Is the location rural or urban? In what country and climate? What is the prevailing religion of the place? What do the people honor?
2. Choose a few lengthy descriptions of a scene and linger there. Students often want to skip over long descriptive paragraphs in order to move onto the next bit of exciting dialogue, but it is precisely in these passages that you’ll find the rich details of life. Whenever I taught A Tale of Two Cities, I would devote entire class periods to close readings of pivotal descriptions – when the wine cask falls to the ground and the starving people of France greedily drink it, resulting in blood-red stains around their hungry mouths that foreshadow violence to come; when the revolutionaries sharpen their bloodied weapons on a centrally-located grindstone, which Dickens uses to initiate and turn the novel’s final act. Dense, detailed passages force us to slow down and sustain our attention on concrete things. They curb our tendency to speed on to the large ideas while avoiding the very “matter” of life.
3. Take time working your way toward the novel’s crescendo, its final revelation of truth. Very often in seminars, we want to cut to the chase too quickly, beginning with questions like, “What does this play reveal about the interplay between fate and free will?” But the literary form doesn’t rush straight to final ideas. It slowly works its way through concrete particulars toward wisdom. It “dazzles gradually,” to use the words of Emily Dickinson (“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”). We must allow works of literature to dazzle our students gradually, and that requires a great deal of self-discipline on our part. We must temper our enthusiasm to rush straight to the “big ideas” and instead slowly unfold a text.
4. Make sure students comprehend the literal level of the text before moving into deeper waters. As a young teacher, I so badly wanted to stretch my students and to deepen their thinking that I rushed straight into the most complicated questions. One day, a sweet and brave student raised her hand and said, “I really appreciate all the deep ideas that are in this book, but I don’t really understand what’s happening. Did the dwarves escape from the wood elves or didn’t they?” That question reoriented my teaching. From then on, I made sure that my students firmly grasped the basic plot before diving into anything deeper, and that practice paid dividends. Rooting them in the concrete action of the story first, I found, increased their capacity for receiving more fully the book’s wisdom later on.
5. Don’t flatten the complexities of the human experience, which the best literature realistically portrays. A wise colleague of mine once told her students, “Life is the best teacher, but if you pay close attention to literature, you can speed up the learning process.” In literature, we read about lifelike people making huge mistakes and performing noble actions, and we learn what to imitate and what to avoid without having to suffer into that wisdom ourselves. For this reason, we shouldn’t be afraid of the dilemmas presented to us, even in children’s books. When we read about Frog and Toad and a hard decision one of them has to make, we should examine with our students how difficult it is sometimes to make the right choice. We should talk about what the right thing to do is in a particular situation and why it is right. Of course, the younger our students are, the more responsibility we have to point them toward a clear right and wrong so that their moral sense doesn’t get muddied while it’s still developing. Even so, modeling and then asking students to talk through how we as humans make moral choices is invaluable. As students get older, literature will introduce them to complex characters, who are simultaneously admirable and pitiable. Teachers of older kids will need to be cautious not to reduce these characters to simple good and bad categories. Holy figures can be odd. Evil influences can be charming. And doing the perfectly virtuous thing requires the people we meet in literature to avoid a thousand missteps, all of which we could easily see ourselves making. When it comes to navigating the complexity of the characters and situations they will come across in literature, our students need a mature guide, both to help them receive the wisdom to be gained from literature and to prepare them for the equally complex decisions they will make in life. For these tasks, there is no substitute for a good, wise, and holy teacher, who is unafraid to wrestle with the complexities of the human psyche because he knows where the struggle ends – the human hand breaking through the soil and straining toward the divine light.

When I was first introduced to Catholic liberal education as an undergraduate, what struck me most profoundly was the unity of all subjects in the person of Christ through whom all things were created. Even so, there are different modes by which we approach that fount of knowledge, and literature has its distinctive mode. Works of literature can communicate profound ideas, but they aren’t primarily philosophical. A novel can beautifully illustrate a historical period, but it is not primarily historical. If we are to read and teach literature as literature, we must begin where it begins — in the messiness of the created world. We must first love speckled skies and pieced-together landscapes, richly-layered human characters and complex circumstances. Then, we must slowly guide our students up literature’s trajectory, from the soil of human experience toward the light that illuminates all.