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"White Rabbits: Method-Based Literature Teaching"

By John R. Yamamoto-Wilson
Sophia University, Japan

When I tell people I am a teacher of literature a typical response is, ‘What period?’ or ‘What authors?’ If they appear to mean, ‘What is your research specialism?’ then I tell them, but more often they seem to be asking, ‘What exactly do you teach?’ I get this response from people from a wide range of backgrounds and nationalities, but it is particularly common in Japan. Here the assumption is that literature teaching is a content-based activity, rather than a method-based one. Of course, it has the potential to be both, but literary criticism, in the sense that we know it in European and American tradition, is not well established in Japan, and the idea that literary criticism is a specialist field in its own right is not self-evident, even to many Japanese teachers of literature.

I usually try to explain to such questioners that my teaching is, on the whole, method-based, not content-based, that I am concerned with teaching an approach to literature, one which students will be able to apply to any text. Compared with their counterparts in European or American universities, many Japanese students do not have a very clear idea about how to comment intelligently on a text, and are at a loss when asked to do so, and so developing my students’ confidence in this area has become one of my main objectives. 

One of my main underlying assumptions is that readers – students, me, anyone – do not and cannot approach a given text as a tabula rasa waiting for the text to imprint its message on them, but come to it with a wide range of expectations and beliefs. In the case of some students, those expectations may be largely negative – ‘It’s going to be difficult,’ ‘It’s probably boring,’ ‘It’s all highfalooting stuff that’s got nothing to do with me’. Others may have a belief that reading is, in principle, good for their soul, but not a particularly enjoyable exercise. A good many of them will assume that somewhere, fixed and unalterable behind the words, lies the meaning, which the author, for some inexplicable reason does not state clearly, but wraps up in complexity and obscurity. Such expectations and beliefs condition the way my students perceive literature. My literature courses are largely an attempt to supplant impoverished assumptions about what literature is by a more positive and creative approach which students can then apply for themselves. 

So much for theory. What do I actually do in a typical 90-minute lesson? As an example, here is a piece of teaching, covering two 90 minute sessions, using The Blue Film, a short story by Graham Greene. I pre-teach one or two essential pieces of vocabulary (such as ‘blue’ in this context, or ‘Spots’ in the sense that Mrs Carter uses it in the story), and read the story aloud. It is a tale of a married couple on holiday in Siam (now Thailand) in the early 1950s. Mrs Carter is complaining that the holiday is tedious, and urges her husband to take her to ‘Spots’. After ruling out an opium den and a striptease show, he leaves the hotel in search of something.

A little boy comes up to him and, after turning down his offers of a young girl and a boy, Mr Carter takes him up on the offer of a French film. Returning to the hotel, he picks up his wife and they set off together to watch the film.

The first film is unattractive, but the second has ‘some charm’. It is not for some time, though, that Mr Carter realises that the film is familiar to him. When he does realise, he tries to get Mrs Carter to leave, but she refuses. Then the male actor turns his face toward the camera for the first time, and Mrs Carter cries out, ‘Good God…it’s you.’

It turns out that thirty years ago Mr Carter had been attracted to the young woman in the film. She had needed money, and he had helped her out by acting as her partner in the film. On the way back to the hotel, Mrs Carter professes herself shocked, but when they get back to their room she is in fact aroused, and makes love to her husband with a passion she has not known for years. The story ends:

Carter lay in the dark silent, with a feeling of loneliness and guilt. It seemed to him that he had betrayed that night the only woman he loved.

After reading the story, I ask students (working in groups of 4-6 people) to discuss together what they make of it. There are several points of comprehension which will need clearing up; I will just deal here with the main one. As I monitor the groups, I usually find that many students are assuming that the final sentence shows Carter’s regret at betraying his wife, while others are in some doubt, and only a very few (if any) are sure that it does not mean that. This is an excellent chance to make students aware of how their beliefs and preconceptions when they approach a text can actually prevent them from understanding what is actually going on in the text.

‘How many women are there in the text?’ I ask.

‘Basically, two,’ they reply (setting aside such minor figures as the actresses in the first film).

‘How many women did Carter love?’ This forces them to look at what the last sentence actually says. It says the only woman he loved, so the answer must be ‘one’.

Students can then either fall back on their preconceptions of life (among which is the idea that a man betrays his wife by sleeping with a prostitute) or they can draw conclusions based on what the text tells them. I urge them to do the latter.

‘Is there anything in the text that tells us that Mr Carter does or does not love his wife?’ I ask them. ‘What does the text say about his feelings for the young woman he appeared with in the film?’

With regard to Mr Carter’s wife, we are told that ‘there is no company more cheerless than that of a woman who is not desired’, and of the young woman in the film Mr Carter says simply, ‘I loved her’. So he did not love his wife, and ‘the one woman he loved’ was the prostitute. The story is a clever twist on everyday life. In this case, the husband betrays a prostitute by sleeping with his wife!

Once this point has been cleared up we move into a discussion of the main characters. Basically, what are they like at the beginning of the story, what are they like at the end of the story, what changed them and why? The broad outlines (which I elicit from groups as I go round monitoring, and put on the chalkboard) are something like this:

•	At the outset, Mr and Mrs Carter seem to be deeply dissatisfied people. Reference is made to her ‘frigidity,’ and he acknowledges the existence of his wife ‘gloomily’. He undertakes the search for a suitable ‘Spot’ not so much to satisfy his wife as to teach her a lesson (‘it was worth it, Carter thought, if it closed her mouth for ever from demanding “Spots”’). 

•	At the end, Mrs Carter is anything but frigid, but Mr Carter is saddened and lonely, feeling perhaps that he has wasted his life. 

•	The incident which changed them was a pornographic movie featuring Mr Carter as a young man.

•	The movie reminds Mr Carter of a time when he was young and in love with another woman, but its effect on Mrs Carter is to make her feel attracted to her husband. He feels distant from her, and the fact that she makes love to him makes him feel even worse.

I usually end with some discussion of what the author’s moral purpose may have been in writing such a story. After all, it does not appear to uphold such values as the sanctity of marriage, as one might expect from a Catholic writer. The class’s conclusions usually hinge on the fact that there is really nothing to like about either Mr Carter or his wife, except that, as a younger, more carefree man, he did something foolish (but not unforgivable) for no other reason than to help someone he felt drawn to, and in a tarnished world such tarnished purity may be better than no purity at all.

In this first lesson I have forced students away from their preconceptions and got them to look more closely at what is actually written on the page in front of them. The results are thought-provoking, but it is still not enough. I want to go further. I want to show how, by approaching the text with other preconceptions, we could reconstruct the text in a very different way. This forms the content of the second lesson.

‘Suppose, for example, we were feminists,’ I ask. ‘What  significance would the text take on for us then?’

A few minutes’ discussion in groups is usually sufficient for most students to conclude that they have absolutely no idea. What could I possibly be talking about?

So I give them a few basic pointers, reminding them that the parameters we are looking at here are those of sexual politics.

‘Complete this sentence: “This story was written by a…”’

‘…man.’

‘And this one: “The central character is a…”’

‘…man.’ (However crucial Mrs Carter is to the story, Mr Carter is nevertheless clearly the main character.)

‘OK. One more: “Female characters in this story are seen through the eyes of a…”’

By this time they have got the idea, and we are ready to do some more close analysis of the text. If women are seen through the eyes of a man, precisely how are they seen? With a bit of discussion, and some guidance from me, students will come up with such points as:

•	Mr Carter compares his wife unflatteringly to a bird (‘When he looked at her neck he was reminded of how difficult it was to unstring a turkey’; ‘Her thin bare legs reminded him of a heron waiting for fish’; ‘she screamed like a hurt and angry bird’), that is, to something less than human.

•	The phrase, ‘there is no company more cheerless than that of a woman who is not desired,’ makes it clear that a woman’s worth is defined in terms of her attractiveness to men. This impression is conveyed elsewhere in the text (for example, when Carter says of the young woman in the film, ‘I thought she looked lovely’), and even Mrs Carter colludes, dismissing the Japanese strip-teasers as ‘Ugly women in bras’. 

•	Women are seen in economic terms, that is, as a kind of commodity, or merchandise (‘He thought of the money he had spent to take his wife with him’; ‘They paid her [the young woman in the film]. Fifty pounds. She needed the money badly’).

•	One of the very few specific references to what people are wearing (the others are to the strip-teasers’ bras and the hat worn by the young girl in the film) is to Mrs Carter’s slave bangles, which are mentioned twice. It is as if the writer wishes to draw attention in this oblique way to the status of the woman. 

•	These observations all cut only one way; Mr Carter is defined on his own terms, not in terms of economics or dress or his attractiveness to his wife (we do not get to learn what he was wearing, or what she thought of his neck!). At the end of the story, though, this general principle is violated – Carter redefines himself (negatively) as a result of his wife’s attraction to him. This leads to the observation that the sexual contract is itself conventionally a one-way deal. The young woman was paid to appear in the film, whereas the young Mr Carter was not, because women have to be rewarded for appeasing male desire. When this conventional paradigm is overturned, when it is the woman who feels the desire, as in Mrs Carter’s case at the end of the story, the man feels threatened and uncomfortable; ‘She was dry and hot and implacable in her desire’. It is as if the ‘natural’ order has been subverted.

The message for students is clear. There are all kinds of things going on in this text which they didn’t notice, simply because they weren’t looking for them. Practically every text they’ve ever looked at probably has something to say about the feminist question; finding out just what is a matter of asking the appropriate questions.

By now, I have covered a lot of the ground I was aiming for. However, like a magician who still has one more white rabbit to pull out of a hat, I end by asking students what meaning the text might have for me if I was a Marxist, approaching literature from the point of view of the struggle between rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged.

Again, only a few minutes conferring among themselves is usually sufficient for students to confirm that they do not have a clue about this. To help them, I ask them to make a list of the characters, and try to place them in their appropriate social class or grouping. They usually reason that, since Mr and Mrs Carter are rich enough to go on holiday in Asia and go everywhere by taxi, they are at least comfortably off. They also deduce that, since the young woman in the film needed money badly, she must have been poor. And then, in many cases, they lean back satisfied that they have completed the task. It sometimes takes quite a lot of prompting before they acknowledge the little boy who comes up offering sexual services as a character at all. When they do, though, they of course have no hesitation in assigning him to the ranks of the poor and underprivileged.

I ask them to think about that little boy.

‘How old do you think he is?’

They look at the text, but the text doesn’t say.

‘Do you think he’s three years old?’

No, that’s too young.

‘Eighteen?’

Too old. They settle for about ten years old, give or take a couple of years.

‘And what time of day is it when he comes up to Mr Carter?’

Again, the text doesn’t say explicitly, but it is clearly after dark.

‘So, we’ve got a little boy, about ten years old, out after dark selling sex and pornography on the streets of a big city. Do any of you have a little brother or sister? How would you feel if they were doing what this little boy’s doing?’

It goes without saying. They’d be horrified. Now I ask them to make the connection.

‘Why is he there? Why is this little boy out on the street at night selling sex?’

The fact that the answer is obvious to me doesn’t mean that it’s obvious to my students. It may take several minutes conferring in their groups before I hear someone say, ‘He’s there because there are people like the Carters who are willing to buy what he’s offering.’

It’s not just a lesson about literature. It’s a lesson about life. Because there are people like the Carters – rich, bored and decadent – there are little boys out on the streets, corrupted and compromised, pandering to them in the hope of earning a pittance.

The first lesson homes in on the idea that literature may be offering new perspectives, not simply trotting out old truisms. The second illustrates how those perspectives are two-way, depending as much on the reader, and what questions the reader asks about the text as on the text itself. And, finally, it all has direct relevance to the world we live in and the life we lead. I might follow the lesson up by asking students to take a look at another short story (for example Greene’s ‘The Innocent’), and comment on it along similar lines to the work done above, or I might simply ask students to look again at any text they thought they understood and see what new understandings emerged by adopting a new approach.

(‘The Blue Film’ and ‘The Innocent’ are both to be found in Graham Greene, Collected Short Stories, Penguin Books, 1986.)