One of my most formative lessons about communication came during a summer stay at the “Silent House” of Taizé, a monastic retreat center in Burgundy, France. The concept was simple: Save for singing at the large community services, the 20 or so reflective souls living in that stone farmhouse were not to talk to each other — or themselves — for a solid week. No music, no television, no games, nothing but silence. Once I got over the lip-smacking, porridge-slurping din of group meals, I began to submit to the experience. I remember sitting under the lone, bare light bulb in my room and filling an entire journal, or staying up late into the night to read offbeat selections from the house’s bookshelves. I was running a lot then, and as I settled into quiet focus, I could feel my heart beating strongly and slowly. Though the bed I was on may well have been stuffed with the hair of 18th century horses, I felt like a sponge at the bottom of the ocean, able to absorb anything with great interest. I learned the crucial difference between choosing to be silent and being silenced.
Perhaps this is what made me especially receptive to the young Brother who led our morning “class” that was really a verbal meditation upon a selected passage. It was here I came across my favorite word in any language — disponible, which translates into something between “available” and “open-minded.” To have this quality, he explained to his silent class, was to be adaptable, to inherit a challenging situation, to listen to both sides and try to make it better. He mentioned this word several times that week, sometimes in relation to meekness and humility and sometimes in relation to fluidity and “good works,” mentioning pure souls who were able to pick up their entire lives to help victims of famine or oppression.
In my more modest translation, it struck me that this was the ideal word to describe the kind of literacy I mean to inspire among my students. I want their fluency with language to be open, clear, and willing, for the purpose linguist B.E. Foley suggests: “Literacy . . . enables an individual to use language fluently for a variety of purposes.”1 During my morning walks through vineyards, among the chanting monks, I projected the roundtable discussions I would have about Hester Prynne’s virtues, getting excited about how disponible my students would be in revealing the heroine’s own quality of disponibilité and how my students would transform this literature, set in the 17th century, into a modern treatise on perseverance. Those were some of the best fake classes I have ever taught!
But it is a long way from the monastic vineyards of France to the first day of school in New York City, where the stacks of Hawthorne and Dickens are obscured by deep summer tans and furtive attempts at texting. Much as I would like for telepathic travel to bring my Upper East Side private school AP English students to the meditative pace of those French hillsides, I knew that my job was to arouse that open-minded, impressionable presence somewhere within each of them.
So we open The Great Gatsby and start reading aloud. As they sort through the stimuli of narrative perspective, class, and varying shades of morality, the summer’s rust is shedding and they seem to want to be there. The power of this literature — its complexity, its craft, and its challenge — calls them to a state of being disponible. Where they may have begun reading Fitzgerald’s words listlessly, like so many other pieces of information to buzz through, they slow down to respect the complex syntax and the music of its rhythm. Without knowing it, they are engaging in the gear-shifting fluidity of new literacy — adjusting their receptors from the grist of information technology to the Jazz Age. As Judith Langer, distinguished professor at SUNY Albany, posits,
Literate thinking manifests itself in different ways in oral and written language in different societies, and educators need to understand these ways of thinking if they are to build bridges and facilitate transitions among ways of thinking. 2
The eloquence of Fitzgerald’s ash heaps made this “bridge” into close passage analysis easy to cross:
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-gray men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. . . . 3
Though this passage is likely analyzed tens of thousands of times each year, my class had never studied it before and approached it with appropriate freshness. Plot-wise, they were confident, which allowed them to sprawl into deeper considerations. And so they read it again and again. Why, after closing the prior chapter with the possibility of the “green light,” does Fitzgerald open with this image of waste? Why is this confluence of pollution and decay likened to a “fantastic farm”? What does this imagery suggest about the morals of industry? Of class? Who are these “ash-gray men” and why are they there? Their questions might have continued rippling off each other for the full length of the class had they not been just as intent upon answering them. And so literature cast its spell again.
While my students are native experts with social media literacy, they readily reveal that the more timeless pursuit of “literature literacy” is important to them. If not a true part of their lives, they appreciate that there is at least a 45- or 90-minute block amid their days when phones shut down and they can commune with passages that ask more of them than “browsing.” It is their form of the Silent House, their chance to wallow in the salubrious waters of disponibilité.
The plain truth is that most novels and plays read in English class come from times when horsepower was literal. So, only when “you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back,” as E.B. White describes the gesture of reflection,4 can “you” access these slower, more insular contexts, when sentences spiraled long and deep into the interior of hearts. A student, then, needs to leap across time in order to imagine the common, timeless experiences of the characters he or she confronts. It is this alchemy that forms the fundamental literacy an English student needs. As Langer says, “Literate thinking suggests that we help students become analytic about the language and ideas they already know, and help them find ways to relate what they know to the new content and skills they are learning.”5
I admit that I was a rather cynical high school student. If I had to swear under oath that the Pythagorean Theorem, the chemical formula for calcium chloride, and the function of (x) at some point moved me to scribble something in a notebook, I would have to confess. But even an amateur graphologist could detect my inner frustration from these notes: “Why is this necessary? What is the point? What will I ever do with this knowledge?” For a time, I kept the notes and papers I deemed important in a box in my parents’ attic. After 25 years now, the contents have been whittled down to a few essays I keep to remember what I was like at my students’ age. As a career high school teacher, I find it hard to reconcile that much of the work students do is abstract, resting somewhere in that platitude that “it teaches them how to think.” This collective grumbling has lately fermented stronger arguments for classes in cooking, finances, farming, and entrepreneurship (and more of this seems to be coming). But it also cements the invaluable skill of literacy that English teachers offer.
While it is true that no one has ever approached me on the street for a discourse on whether Hamlet was mad (preferably incorporating Freudian implications), I can readily defend the practicality of literary analysis. Just as today’s navigation of media, advertisement, and social ethics requires the skills of detection and sympathy, so does reading. This is because literature is not meant to be taken at face value, but always in context, with considerations toward occasion, setting, and character. Understanding comes with interaction and engagement; class discussion is a creative act that selects facts about characters in order to bring them into the subjective realm of the living. Paulo Freire sees this critical literacy between the text and its world as dynamic:
We begin with the conviction that the role of man was not only to be in the world, but to engage in relations with the world — that through acts of creation and re-creation, man makes cultural reality and thereby adds to the natural world, which he did not make. 6
Because words of a passage can grow and build through classroom discussions, the text can effectively be recreated with each reading. This is why teaching a rich text can be “novel” even 10 or 15 years running, and how fictional contexts can be alchemized into present day.
Independent, original thought depends upon this literacy. And, if we believe the aphorisms of so many graduation speeches, such adaptive creativity is the sweeping goal of education. Addressing Virginia Tech’s 2012 graduating class, First Lady Michelle Obama said, “People can only define you if you let them. In the end it’s up to each of us to define ourselves. It’s up to each of us to invent our own future with the choices we make and actions we take.” Speaking to the graduates of Stanford in 2005, Steve Jobs said, “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.” Just as our shared authors question their societies and suggest something different in their novels, students are meant to respond to their environments with the inner voices that distinguish themselves. I always appreciate the disponible student who takes the initiative to devise an essay question that is not included on my list of suggestions. Invariably, these pieces reflect a more thoughtful connection with the operative character, “thereby add[ing] to the natural world, which he did not make.”
Reading the word in its context in the world means appreciating that literature is a microcosmic example of its macrocosm. It is a fictive documentary about the day or month or year in the life of a symbolic figure who begins a dialogue. And, as their landscape is far outside the classroom and thus free of consequence, the vicarious lives of literature offer a safe springboard for rich conversations. Freire believed that “education makes sense because women and men learn that through learning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men are able to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing.” 7
The vicarious lives of literature, then, allow students another important means of gauging character before they must take full responsibility for their own. We applaud those characters whose disponibilité makes them wholly literate; we are also safe to learn from those who fail. From one symbolic character, Edna Pontellier, of the late 19th century Creole society of The Awakening, comes a wealth of cultural phenomena — women’s contemporary enrollment in colleges, employment, childbirth rates, and depictions in arts and as artists, to name some. I sometimes tell my students that English class is really history class, but with fewer characters and dates.
There is a magical point in a student’s life — reached after high school, if ever — when knowledge becomes less about facts and remembering than about making connections. From a reductive warehouse where load upon load of product lies on cold, gray shelves, the vaults burst open and reveal a dependent ecosystem of synthesized ideas. This is the most important lesson that literature can teach about literacy — nothing exists in isolation. The moral depravity of a man like Kurtz, the dubious hero of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, can feed a world history class study of King Leopold II. This might bring a student’s eyes to an online story about child labor in Burkina Faso’s gold industry, which could lead to an essay on modern slavery and would have the student interested in watching a documentary about income disparity in this country. A text like August Wilson’s Radio Golf, about gentrification in Pittsburgh, could transform into discussions on urban planning, economic policy, tax laws, and the efficacy of Whole Foods. Like this, loops of intrigue overlap, and the amalgam of new literacies — cultural, multicultural, information, media, and computer — may be accessed fluently.
We need more literate people. Some of our biggest misconceptions – how to feed ourselves responsibly, what our our place in the natural world is, government spending, and tort reform exist because we are falling for the ruses of public relations. In the movie Hot Coffee, George Lakoff, professor of neurolinguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, comments upon these drubbing campaigns:
If you have the right words that evoke your whole system of thought and your way of understanding an issue, and when that language is repeated over and over, the brain changes. The circuitry becomes stronger and can become permanent. 8
George Orwell wrote that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” and warned that those who lost the power to articulate would become silent.9 This is the wrong kind of silence. This is where English teachers come in.
Notes
1. Beth E. Foley, “The Development of Literacy in Individuals with Severe Congenital Speech and Motor Impairments,” in Severe Communication Disorders: Intervention Strategies, ed. K.G. Butler (Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen, 1994), p. 184.
2. Judith A. Langer, “Literacy and Schooling: A Sociocognitive Perspective,” in Literacy for a Diverse Society: Perspectives, Practices, and Policies, ed. E.H. Hiebert (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), p. 13.
3. F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribers, 1925), p. 27.
4. E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 197.
5. Judith A. Langer, “Developing the Literate Mind,” Reading Hall of Fame Session, IRA Convention 2004, Albany, New York, May 4, 2004.
6. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004),
7. Ibid., p. 15.
8. George Lakoff, interview in Hot Coffee, documentary feature film, Susan Saladoff, director, 2011.
9. George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press,” Times Literary Supplement, September 1972.