Real Magic

Richard Antolak, UK

Richard Antolak is a teacher of Enhanced Provision with Falkirk Council Education Service. He is the author of "Finding a Voice" a book about self-advocacy for adults with complex learning needs. He has contributed to journals in Mexico and the USA. E-mail: Antolak@blueyonder.co.uk

The older I become, the more I begin to miss old-fashioned descriptions, the kinds that are found in Tolstoy, Proust or Flaubert. I miss their arduousness, their solidity. This growing appreciation of description is probably a self-defence reflex against the ubiquitous tag lines that are fast replacing description in our culture.

Description - communicating with words what the camera registers with an image - is becoming ever rarer in these times of computer games, news soundbites and cable TV. It is also disappearing from our classrooms. Today, the world is either shown or it is named. Fewer people can describe an object (or a person) than can name it. Descriptive Literature has almost become a kind of rebellious act against the machinery of clichés and lies we are asked to accept every day of our lives. To write descriptively in our time demands not only faith in oneself, but faith in Literature in defiance of what (for want of a better term) we call "contemporary civilization". Indeed, perhaps if we were to teach Literature as if it were a subversive activity (as it was perceived during the time of Shelley, e.g.,) we might get a better response from our students.

Great writers deal mainly in raw material - feelings, impressions, experiences - but rarely attempt to explain them. Their method is to prolong the pre-conceptual moment before the formation of rational interpretations, thus freeing their readers from any ideological concepts and theories that stand between them and a clear vision of their subject matter (Reality). Yet in school, we all too often expect our students to respond to a poem (or a text) as if it were an intellectual jigsaw puzzle to be "solved": a kind of intricate Da Vinci Code deliberately constructed from a finite list of literary devices. The students' task is to "solve" it, clinically and rationally, otherwise they do not "get the message" (for message it must always have) and they fail the "test". In the course of this process, the work is translated into a critical language that may be foreign to the spirit of the original text. It is dissected and analyzed ad absurdum until little of the original "flavour" remains. No wonder so many students are turned off. We limit them to so few, and narrow, acceptable modes of response. How many of us were put off Shakespeare for life because of the way we were taught it at school?

Language (and particularly Poetic language), is not Mathematics. Sometimes it can be wiser than its users, possessing a life all of its own. There are times when even the writer himself is not fully aware of the depths of meaning he is imparting to a phrase. It just seems to "pop into his head" and he uses it.

More creative and affective responses to Literature are called for in our classrooms. Language is not primarily an intellectual activity. It speaks to the heart, the emotions and the imagination - to the rational as well as the non-rational parts of us. It is bound up with aesthetics, with "beauty", with paradoxes, with the whole controversial area of "poetic inspiration". So responding intellectually to a creative text is not always the best way to address it. Room needs to be left for wonder, mystery, enchantment, for that dreamy imaginative part of ourselves that occupies more of our waking lives than we care to admit.

The runaway success of the Harry Potter books a few years ago showed us something many of us thought we would never see again: children brought up on cable-TV and video games passionate about books once more. Thousands of them queued up outside bookshops (sometimes in the rain and often for hours) to purchase the latest installment of the Potter saga. It was a sight for sore (teachers') eyes everywhere. The books were not examples of great literature by anyone's standards, but at least children were reading again.

It became obvious, however, that a deeper hunger lay below the surface of this phenomenon. The gradual reduction in the quality of our language over the decades had led to a kind of one-dimensional literalism that did not fully allow for the affirmation of mystery and uniqueness. Children, however, had a natural need to express their sense of wonder and exercise their imaginations. They were looking for Poetry in their lives. But lacking the language resources necessary to enter the traditional world of Poetics (the historic home of value and meaning), they turned to the Harry Potter books instead. These seemed to offer a bright, though synthetic, alternative: a ready-made, simplified "poetic world", complete with its own quasi symbolism and vocabulary.

Some of us were disappointed they had been linguistically short-changed, especially as the real "World of Magic" lay so tantalizingly within their reach. The language of magic in the Harry Potter books is Classical Latin. This was for centuries the lingua franca of every educated European writer. To have the means to express complex nuances of feeling, to be able to access the thoughts of writers from distant ages was simply to be a possessor of "magic". Language was power. And this remains so today, except that now we no longer need to struggle with the subtleties of a dead language to possess it. The heart of this new "magic" is Metaphor. It is the principal vehicle for transporting meaning from one frame of reference to another, and hence the catalyst for illumination and revelation. Through its use, everyday "mundane" reality becomes enlivened and illuminated.

We need to put children back in touch with the real living (magical) world they long for, the world which cannot be found in history and which is not remembered precisely because it is not yet dead, not yet passed away (the immediate poetic present). We can do this by giving them a language capable of speaking about (and to) a psyche that is not just rational, but has many faces. We need to de-anaesthetise the everyday language of the classroom through the use of metaphor and poetry.

Children's language is poor because the language they hear in the classroom is poor. It is: utilitarian, basic, mundane, dry and one-dimensional: in short, unimaginative. Enriching it, demands first and foremost that the class teacher herself uses an imaginative language, not only during English periods, but throughout the whole school day. I am not just talking about improving vocabulary, but using the language resources already available in a more creative and imaginative way.

The odds, unfortunately, are stacked against us. We (adults) have all but bankrupted our capacity to be wonderstruck, to be bewildered and enchanted by the world around us. Our language reflects this. We find it difficult see the magical in the particular as we once did. Our senses have become jaded (which is why we never needed poets more than we do today).

Literature, as I understand it, is an effort for liberation and transcendence. Its function is to translate "dead facts" into a form amenable to the "soul": i.e., the realm of meanings. What the soul attempts to do through Literature (and through all great Art in general) is to reach out and embrace ordinary everyday reality in order to create from it an environment in which it can truly feel "at home": a home in which objects are no longer opaque and sterile in their materiality, but transparent with symbolism. The world of 'hard reality' (the world of matter) remains no less real than before, but its meaning (belonging to a world which is not material) now carries more value for us as persons. Everyday reality becomes resurrected, resulting in a deeper enrichment of meaning. This is a magic far more powerful than any Hogwarts or boys on broomsticks can provide.

We have the power to give our students the magic they hunger for. Whether we choose to do so is another matter.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Writing course at Pilgrims website.