Roger Lewis graduated from Cambridge in English, the subject he subsequently taught in both primary and secondary schools. He has also worked in colleges of education and adult education and is currently a staff tutor in the Arts faculty at the Open University.

Roger Lewis

Fiction and the imagination

'Half a million books' in Trends in Education 24, 1971

E W Hildick Children and Fiction

Connie and Harold Rosen The Language of Primary School Children

There are at present in schools many widely different attitudes to fiction:

Books are only worth reading if matched with comprehension cards. (Headmaster of a primary school)

�9 . . most school collections of fiction presented a sorry sight . . . . In most schools the good examples of children's fiction were dated . . . some teachers showed little familiarity with contemporary children's literature . . . .

These quotations are taken from a survey of 96 primary schools, undertaken in 1970. The report gave cause for concern about the provision and use of fiction in schools.-Non-fiction is often more plentifully available, though some teachers would believe, with E W Hildick, that

. . . one good story is worth hundreds of non-fictional topic books, no matter how tastefully illustrated or attractively laid out, because for every Spanish galleon or Chippendale commode or lapwing's egg a child will be required to recognize in life there will be hundreds of Steerforths or Uriah Heeps or Huck Finns he will need to understand.

In spite of this, non-fictional reading is seen by many teachers as more obviously 'work', and such teachers will be able to assuage their guilt feelings about fictional reading only if they can annex the novel to some topic or other. Connie and Harold Rosen point out that the question the teacher should be asking of fictional reading is not, 'By what means can I use this book as a launching-pad into non-fictional areas of the curriculum?' but 'What will take children more deeply into the experience of the book? ' As they conclude:

It is as though there is a deep lack of confidence in the power of literature to do its work and a profound conviction that unless literature

Fiction and the i,tl~gim, tion 1 73

The Open University's course, Reading Development (PE261) has a useful section summarizing arguments t%r reading fiction: Unit 2, especially section 2, p 11.

Maicom Yorke ~ teach literature ?' in English in Education 8, 2, Summer 1974. This article is interesting for its survey and classification of the opinions given.

J s Mill quoted in F R Leavis Mill on Bentham and Coleridge and J Britton The Arts and Current Tendencies

can be converted into the hard currency of familiar school learning it has not earned its keep.

So there appears to be a need for the justification of fiction by those of us who read the English journals and have a strong belief that the experience of reading fiction is an important one for our pupils (and for ourselves). We also see that many children - and teachers fail to find room in their lives for this experience. Some schools, while they place importance on the mechanics of 1earning to read print, bother little about what their pupils then go on actually to read.

It is all the more important, then, that we have a set of compelling reasons to offer in support of our convictions, and to convince others of the value of reading fiction. Many of these reasons are easy to find and make clear educational sense (though they are difficult to measure). Thus the following benefits could be adduced - increased vocabulary; more knowledge of other times, people, places; an increase in communication skills (talking, writing) and a general extension of control over language. The more ambitious might even include the development of standards of literary appreciation.

These are vital and important arguments, but there are even more important justifications, often mentioned but very hard to define. The key word is imagination - 'developing the imagination'. In an article in English in Education Malcolm Yorke, reporting a small research project he had undertaken into the justifications for teaching literature, claimed that this was quite the most popular justification. As well as 'developed', the imagination was 'stimulated, broadened, extended, widened, encouraged, fed, exercised, roused, sparked off, stirred up . . .' and other things too! I want to look at this concept of the imagination to see if we can define it further.

Perhaps a useful starting point is the definition by John Stuart Mill, in the last century:

[The Imagination is] . . . that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another.

Mill's emphasis on the elements of sympathy and of experience seem to me important: the reader by an act of displacement is able to live through, at one remove, the feelings and ideas of others. Perhaps it's worth noting that Mill's definition can be extended in this way to include the cognitive (ideas) as well as the emotional (feelings).

But the reference to clothing the imaginary in the feelings brought along by the real seems rather static and abstract, and the phrase 'voluntary

Children's literature in education 19 1 74

R K Elliott "Imagination in the experience of art' in Open University AIO0 Summer School Book

P H Hirst 'Liberal education and the nature of knowledge' in R D Archambault (ed) Philosophical Analysis and Education

Michael Polanyi Personal Knowledge

w R Nibtett in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 January 1973

effort ' seems to impty a deliberate exercise. More recent writers have stressed the randomness of the creative act. It is this unpredictabili ty that Etliott emphasizes in his concept of the ' involuntary imagination'. When using the involuntary imagination we enter 'a state of r a p t u r e . . . ' and become 'superabundantly generous, able to lavish upon the work a wealth of images and ideas which are not normally at our disposal'. (It is interesting to compare the accounts of writers on their own imaginative processes, e.g., Keats pecking with the sparrow.)

Such as abundant , apparently disproport ionate imagination would seem an important part of our response to literature and one we should want to encourage as educators, since it may be that 'persons of unready imagination . . . simply (do) not get to the heart of the work. ' (glliott, op. cir.).

This goes, too, with a stress on the importance of fun and at least momenta ry escape in the act of reading. Are we prepared enough to allow for such an escape in our schools? There has been ptenty writ ten recently about the importance of creative, divergent and open-ended thinking and of the need to allow for diverse learning styles. But much literature teaching seems to suffer from a kind of caged uncertainty. Some think the process should be 'serious', 'positive' and 'moral ' (probably derived f rom Leavis). Others use literary texts in schemes of integrated studies, thus choosing on the basis of social or thematic relevance. Those who want to erect a firmer disciplinerbased study would presumably take the London Insti tute of Educat ion line of Professors Peters and Hirst and turn literature into one of the 'forms of knowledge' with its own distinct, testable public meanings and 'distinctive logical structures'.

As teachers of literature trying to present a new case for our study, insisting on the centrality of imaginative response, we need to build on such sympathet ic theory as there is. To Polanyi, for e x a m p l e , . . . ' the ideal of a knowledge embodied in strictly impersonal statements now a p p e a r s . . , a fit subject for ridicule'.

Knowledge is 'manifestly personal'. Professor Niblett, too, points out that in our secondary education ~mysteries' have become 'problems', that ffeelings as a way of knowledge are ignored' and that ' the knowledge learned from experiences, insights, and introspections is hardly tested . . . . ' He relates this belief, or intuit ion, to the study of the arts and concludes that ' the humanities simply cannot be taught unless there is a more inward appreciation as well as a detached examination. '

Thus one value of imagination would be to establish areas of security and it would seem to be important both for strengthening our hold on what we already have and for extending our control into new and strange areas of experience. It can help the child realize and define his feelings: as Helen Cresswell puts it, ' the reader is experiencing things which

Fiction and the imagination 1 75

Helen Cresswell in a radio broadcast, 1973

R K Elliott 'Imagination in the experience of art'

D H Lawrence (1929) ~Chaos in poetry' reprinted in Anthony Beal led) Selected Literary Criticism - D H Lawrence

G Hough in Times Literary Supplement, 1963

L C Knights in Times Literary Supplement, 1963

Richard Adams Watership Down

perhaps he . . . never had words for and this gives meaning for this feeling, because there it is in words . . . . it actually exists'. It can thus help him recognize his feelings and (by extension) those of others.

In some mysterious way (in which we have to put our trust) the reader, as he enters the lives of others through his imagination, is also at the same time establishing himself in his own eyes: acquiring a sense of his own powers and of their limits. He is likely to gain greater security: he realizes, for example, that feelings which he might have thought unique to himself are in fact shared. In this sense, he discovers his own resources and that what he possesses is worth acknowledging. 'Teaching fiction' is thus nothing directly to do with imparting information about books, authors and periods; nor is it necessarily of any social or moral relevance: it is a much more subtle, personal and complex process than any of these formulas would suggest.

But just to stress the increased security would be to oversimplify and perhaps become too complacent. For the imagination can also lead to increased confusion. This is because it tends to 'break the domination of our ordinary habits of conception and p e r c e p t i o n . . , which seem to bind us absolutely to the given w o r l d . . . ' , i.e., it gives us glimpses of experiences, attitudes, values, forms of expression quite beyond those we recognize in our own lives. In this sense, the process is an anarchic, disintegrating one. Not surprisingly, this is an aspect of the imagination that D H Lawrence welcomed. He saw the job of the poet as to put us t~ack into touch with the 'strange and for ever surging chaos' that exists beyond the 'umbrella' we have erected to protect us from it. Thus the poet 'makes a slit in the umbrella' and as a result the reader "discovers" a new world within the known world': he both desires this process and fears it.

Maybe the imagination can reconcile both worlds, the real (or everyday) and the new, thus providing 'coherence and another dimension to daily experience' (to use Hough's words). The imagination can thus enrich our daily lives and our own inner lives at one and the same time. It can, in this way, function as a mediator between the 'unknown depths within and the so little known world without ' . To achieve such a balance is very difficult. To use literature as a source for information on the 'world without ' in too insistent a way can defeat its deeper purpose (e.g., Natership Down as a source book of rabbit behaviour). Similarly, to use literature overtly to discuss personal problems ('Have 2you ever felt victimized . . .') falls into the same kind of error. In fact, given such a complex process, what is the role of the teacher at all? What are the implications for us as salaried teachers of literature ?

First of all, given this definition of the imagination, it would seem that fictional reading brings the imagination into play only through

Childretffs literature in education i 9 t 76

George Sampson English for the English

Marjorie Hourd Relationship in Learning

enjoyment or appreciation. Sampson showed us the way over 50 years ago when he maintained that if 'literature is not an experience in creative reception it is a failure'. It further follows that 'stories' are not a relaxation from work but involve strenuous mental and emotional effort. How many teachers treat stories just as a rest from the real world, as something which can act as useful sedatives at the end of a busy day?

Fiction is written basically as an imaginative act, with the unspoken message from author to reader 'Now, let's imagine . . .' The teacher's job would seem to be to facilitate imaginative reception, allowing the child not only to understand the author's message, but to reflect upon it, assess it and move beyond it imaginatively. In the worst kind of literature teaching the students merely observe the teacher's own reactions and study his demonstration of what he sees as the literary critical process. Here, the students are themselves in a very marginal position. They can themselves play the game, and articulate responses fully but at the cost of a depth of genuine feeling. Much worthy, rational study of the grammar school kind probably suffered from this weakness, and Hough warns too of the dangers of ' "close reading" and the intent scrutiny of the internal structure of poetry', since this can become 'an end in i t se l f . . , divorced from all the natural affections and associations of ordinary reading' with the result being 'a weight on our imaginative life . . . . ' Manipulating such a system, teachers might wetl encourage the formulation of pat judgments that suit the examining boards but that replace the full and unpredictable assimilation of the material. Pupils' judgments become merely tactical.

The teacher's role in fostering responsive reading seems a covert, delicate one. He is a learner himself, trying to help children formulate their changing reactions to books. In the process, there can be no 'right answers', rather different qualities of response. In the process, the teacher's own grasp of the material is crucial:

'the child's grasp of the material before him depends very largely upon the quality and depth of the teacher's re-creation of it in his own life and imagination'.

The teacher by his fidelity and unobtrusiveness witnesses to the vagaries of the imaginative act itself, And by his patience and his sense of priorities he shows his willingness to accept the intangible nature of the results of this 'study', and to value them. Unfortunately such intangible processes tend to be discounted in formal education: critical essays, the results of comprehension tests, neatly documented project files are all there to be seen and admired.

Some priorities in classroom practice can be emphasized. First, in view of the importance of keeping the focus on the story itself, reading aloud and oral retelling are important gifts. Cooperative reading (sessions

Fiction and the imagination 177

Antony Jones and June Buttrey Children and Stories

Gabriel Josipovici 'The lessons of modernism' in English in Education 6, 2 Summer 1972

where the children work on their own on a text) and the writing of the children's own stories are all probably more useful than some more traditional modes. The teacher can, too, try ways of involving the readers in formulation responses throughout the reading act, encouraging anticipation and exploration and thus demonstrating that the process of reception goes beyond the actual words themselves. 'What do you think will happen next?', the pregnant pause, 'What would you yourself have done?' - all these are examples of how such an approach might work. Projects can, of course, work sympathetically to the fictional reading: such a project, respecting the text, is described by Jones and Buttrey.

Finally, the teacher must be adept at two skills, those of silence and game. These are the two tactical lessons for the teacher of literature referred to by Josipovici, and I think they apply at whatever level of education or age of the pupil. Josipovici reminds us of the importance of the 'element of play in all art', which we would seek to 'release' in the classroom. Such works of art as Sterne's prose, medieval lyrics, Anglo-Saxon riddles, Beckett's novels 'cry out for reading aloud, and they turn the reader into a maker rather than a man of culture or a man of wisdom'.

References

Adams, Richard (1972) Watership Down London: Rex Collings, Penguin; New York: Macmillan, Avon

Archambault, R D (ed) (1965) Philosophical Analysis and Education London: Routledge; New York: Humanities Press

Beal, Anthony (ed) (1956) Selected Literary Criticism - D H Lawrence London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam

Britton, J (1963) The Arts and Current Tendencies London: Evans Hildick, E W (1970) Children and Fiction London: Evans Hourd, Marjorie (1972) Relationship in Learning London: Heinemann Jones, Antony, and Buttrey, June (1970) Children and Stories

Oxford: Blackwell Leavis, F R (1950) Mill on Bentham and Coleridge London: Chatto Open University (1972) AIO0 Summer School Book Milton Keynes:

Open University Press; New York: Harper 8: Row Open University (1973) Reading Development 2 - Literature for

Children Milton Keynes: Open University Press; New York: Harper & Row

Polanyi, Michael (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, New York: Harper & Row; London: Routledge

Rosen, Connie and Harold (1973) The Language o f Primary School Children London and New York: Penguin