The Magic of Words

The other day I found myself reading several pages of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things aloud to a class. It was the bit describing the khatakali dancers performing for themselves as penance for having demeaned themselves in their truncated version of the dance performed for the tourist audience. It's rare that I read anything at length in the classroom these days - it's not really suitable to do so for the part of the IB course I teach which tends to focus on students' independent reading. In the course of the reading I realised 1) how much I enjoy this kind of reading and 2) how much it felt like this is what doing Literature should be about. Of course, I could simply be rationalising my self-indulgence, but, equally, I could be onto something.

I think the best lesson I have ever given in the course of what is now a pretty long career was one years ago teaching a first year class in Rotherham, reading the chapter from (the wonderful) Stig of the Dump when the bad boys (the Snargets, if I remember rightly) offer innocent caveman Stig a cigarette. I found the sequence so funny I couldn't get to the end of a sentence without bursting into laughter, which, in turn, resulted in the kids laughing at both the book and me, in turn making me laugh even more - a kind of virtuous, but destructive cycle. At one point I was actually crying with laughter, as were several kids. In fact, at least three ended up rolling on the floor. I met one of those kids about six years later in a pub near the school and the first thing he talked about was how funny the book was and what a brilliant time we had. The complete anarchy of that half hour became a kind of shared secret between me and the kids, as if we'd shared some kind of glorious holiday together. Laughter is one of the great, true responses to literature. Another is tears. And no one can assess those.