'From Old English to Standard English'

Is it possible to develop a Catholic approach to English language teaching? The dangers are obvious but we shouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.

One starting point, for example, might be to look at the history of the language, using books like Dennis Freeborn's excellent From Old English to Standard English and its really useful companion website. English spelling and punctuation, to give just two examples, don't really make sense unless viewed in historical perspective and this book and website help provide just that.

Studying the history of the language also helps us to deal with the curious blindness that afflicts most school curricula: anything written pre-Reformation is deemed too difficult for schoolchildren which means that we end up with a wholly lopsided curriculum despite the supposed importance of the English literary heritage.

The book cannot be used straight, of course, but there are plenty of examples that can be profitably adapted for use from Key Stage 3 right through to A Level.

Evelyn Waugh, Postmodernism and 'Helena'

Postmodernism is a popular A Level option for all sorts of good reasons but what might be called the Catholic Postmodern rarely gets much of a look in. However, I would argue that authors like Ian McEwan and John Fowles could quite happily be joined by Muriel Spark, Antonio Tabucchi and Evelyn Waugh. 

Yes. Evelyn Waugh.

According to Martin Stannard, what Evelyn Waugh regarded as his best book - and how that irritated the critics - was "Helena [which] can be seen to be a vital, technical experiment, nether modernist nor realist, but postmodernist, metafictional." Brideshead Revisited it is not but Brideshead was never what Waugh meant it to be. 

In his preface to Helena, Waugh writes that he simply wishes "to retell an old story", that "this is a novel" rather than "History or Archaeology", and finally that "the story is just something to be read; in fact a legend." However, in between these claims of fictionality, Waugh also sets out the historical facts about Helena and her discovery of the True Cross as far as they are known.  The novel is a legend but it's based on truth. There is nothing in the book that is "contrary to authentic history", though there are "certain wilful, obvious anachronisms". He plays with us and then hands over to the equally postmodern narrator.

The narrator starts his story twice, firstly as legend and then as history. He skates over events of apparently huge historical significance and focuses on the life of a clearly anachronistic figure, a horsey girl from the British provinces who becomes Empress Dowager and a modern seeker after truth. 

It is this search for truth and, more importantly, the solid reality of the cross which holds the novel together. The postmodern trickery is not designed, as in The Name of the Rose, to cast doubt on the Church's understanding of the world, or even on the very nature of truth itself, but to tease the reader into asking the right questions, into becoming a pilgrim.

The image of the pilgrim is perhaps the most important in the book. Helena is a traveller - from Colchester to Rome to Jerusalem - who begins her travels not knowing where she is going or why but who ends the novel by being led, we assume, by a greater author who works through and with the narrator and his characters. This is postmodernism as written by a Catholic.

Indeed it is only if we take this postmodern mixture of playfulness and hardheadedness seriously that we will be able to appreciate Helena. What Waugh gives us is not history and certainly not hagiography but a carefully constructed (and funny) novel about a piece of "wood which has endured". As Helena herself put it: “just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against.” 

Was Tintin a Catholic?

Here's an intriguing book 

Uwem Akpan - 'Say You're One of Them'

An author who has been causing a stir recently is Uwem Akpan. With rave reviews in The New York Times, The Times and a whole host of other newspapers, Akpan is hot literary property. He's even won the ultimate accolade: the approval of Oprah Winfrey. (Note slight tone of irony here.)

What makes all this adulation so surprising is that Akpan is a Nigerian Catholic priest. He doesn't bash you over the head with his Catholicism but clearly his beliefs are a major motivation behind his writing, as this fascinating interview with Granta Online reveals. 

Akpan writes about some truly horrific events - everything from the Rwandan genocide to child trafficking - but he does so in a way which  is always deeply humane if not always terribly hopeful. By focusing on the perspective of children, by addressing a range of Africa's contemporary social and political difficulties, and by presenting characters who are often only tangentially affected by the Church, Akpan avoids the trap of writing from a narrowly denominational perspective while simultaneously demonstrating what one type of contemporary Catholic fiction could look like. Indeed, on the rare occasions when he writes directly about the Church, as in this story from The New Yorker, he is less successful because he seems to be defending a particular (and perhaps questionable) theological position.

Having worked in Zimbabwe, it will be intriguing to see whether Akpan addresses the difficulties of that country. Until his next collection of short stories is published, we shall have to remain content with the substantial offering he has already given us.

A few ideas

I am currently working on a more detailed article about Catholic English teaching but here are my ideas in miniature, in an article for 'Networking - Catholic Education Today', Volume 11, Issue 3, February 2010.

Creating a Catholic English Curriculum

In an important booklet published by the Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education (CRDCE), four authors, including the editor of this magazine, asked whether there “can be a Catholic School curriculum?”[i] Given that their answer was “yes” (though they were more guarded and nuanced than my one-word summary suggests), what I want to do in this article is begin to map out what the basis of a Catholic English curriculum might be.

Neither I nor any of the authors of the CRDCE booklet wish to create an English Catholic ghetto, nor would we be able to even if we wanted to. The constraints of the National Curriculum and the requirements of public examinations ensure that we cannot approach the teaching of English in schools from a narrowly confessional perspective.

However, practical considerations apart, there are several other reasons why a Catholic English curriculum must necessarily focus on more than just Catholic literature. First and foremost, as John Henry Newman recognised 150 years ago, “English Literature will ever have been Protestant.”[ii] Whether we like it or not, the fact is that most English literature is not Catholic and never has been.

For three hundred years or more, Britain was solidly Protestant and its literature reflects this basic fact. Nonetheless, as G.K. Chesterton once wrote in a typically forthright riposte to Newman’s essay, “The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant.”[iii]

Indeed, it is arguable that one of the great weaknesses of the English curriculum in schools today is its almost total neglect of any pre-Shakespearean literature. A starting point for the revival of an English Catholic curriculum, therefore, might be the recognition that English Literature began some thousand years before 1564. I am not suggesting that our students should study Old English (though it’s not as daft an idea as it might at first sound) but I am suggesting that there is a place in the curriculum for some of the classics of our pre-Protestant past.

We should not dismiss the work of Catholic authors simply because they wrote along time ago. Pope Benedict was not talking about English literature when he described the hermeneutic of continuity but his insights can clearly be applied in the English classroom.

Some may baulk at the idea of teaching such apparently inaccessible texts but I would argue that Old English and Middle English literature is no more inaccessible than Shakespeare, especially when it is taught in translation and in conjunction with more recent works. Kevin Crossley-Holland, J.R.R. Tolkien and Seamus Heaney, in their very different ways, have all shown how the world of Anglo-Saxon literature can be revived in a form that is fully comprehensible to modern readers.

Such literature does not need to be taught in isolation. The Middle English ‘Pearl’, for example, could be taught in conjunction with Tolkien’s ‘Leaf by Niggle’ while, for the more daring, ‘Piers Plowman’ could be taught alongside Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’.

A thematic approach is also possible. An interesting scheme of work about the afterlife could easily be constructed around Claudio’s speech from ‘Measure for Measure’[iv], the last chapter of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, Miroslav Holub’s ‘Death in the Evening’[v], Nina Cassian’s ‘Ghost’[vi], passages from the Book of Revelation, as well as some of the Old and Middle English classics.

Part of the problem, of course, is teaching the teachers. How many, I wonder, have studied Middle English or Old English literature at university, even in translation? If the Reformation is the starting point for the teachers then what hope do the children have?

Newman’s assertion is not the final word then, especially as we are now more aware than he perhaps was of the ideological judgments and prejudices that went into the forming of the English literary canon. We have rightly recovered the female and non-English voice in English literature, but we have been slower to re-evaluate the place of Catholic literature in the English canon.

This is not to say that no work has been done in this field. Literary scholars such as Alison Shell, for example, have started to demonstrate the fundamental strength of post-Reformation Catholic literature in much the same way that Eamon Duffy and others have enabled us to see the fundamental strength of the pre-Reformation Church in England.[vii]

Some teachers may feel uneasy about this rewriting of literary history but the point is that we filter what we teach already. The most blatant anti-Catholic diatribes are already expunged from the curriculum, if not from the history of literature. Nobody teaches Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chesse or Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon any more.

Indeed, one could go further and argue that Donne, Herbert and, above all, Shakespeare are taught, at least in part, because their religion is, or appears to be, a thoroughly modern, reasonable one. Their poetry conjures up what C.S. Lewis once called “a sweet, Protestant world”[viii], a world apparently free from religious intolerance and bigotry.

By contrast, authors like Thomas More and Robert Southwell – St Thomas More and St Robert Southwell – don’t get a look in because, through no fault of their own, they remind us of precisely such an era. Our English curricula are weaker without them.

Far from imposing our views on our students, we are failing in our duty if we do not teach them to cast a critical eye over the English literary canon. If we teach Shakespeare and the Metaphysical poets then surely we should also teach More and Southwell? If we teach Milton and Wordsworth then surely we should look at the work of Dryden and Pope too? If we are going to teach Hardy, George Eliot and the Brontës, surely we should find some place, at least in passing, for Newman?

Newman’s wise words in The Idea of a University remind us that we cannot simply replace the Protestant past with a Catholic one. However, the truth is that we are much more likely to go along with the marginalisation of our Catholic authors than we are to overturn the English curriculum altogether.

Fortunately, the Catholic English teacher’s task becomes much easier when we reach the 20^th century. The children’s fiction of Rumer Godden and Frank Cottrell Boyce, the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts and Les Murray, the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton are all readily accessible. We have Catholic literature in abundance and do not need to restrict ourselves to the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.

Nor, indeed, do we need to restrict ourselves to literature written in England. One simple way of reviving the Catholic English curriculum is to draw upon Catholic literature from around the world. There may not be much teaching of the Nobel Prize-winning Catholics, Sigrid Undset, François Mauriac and Heinrich Böll, in our schools but there is no reason why they should be ignored entirely.

However, there are plenty of other writers to choose from. Uwem Akpan, a Nigerian Jesuit, for example, has swept all before him with his debut collection of short stories, Say You’re One of Them.[ix] With the recent endorsement of Oprah Winfrey, his star is sure to rise still further.

Another quite different Catholic author is Willi Chen, a Trinidadian of Chinese descent, who is a baker, painter and church designer, as well as an author. Chen may not have the same range as Akpan but his short stories could certainly find a place in any school curriculum. The Christmas stories in Chutney Power and Other Stories[x], for instance, offer a wonderful Caribbean alternative to yet more versions of A Christmas Carol.

We don’t need to restrict ourselves to English-language authors, though their works are more readily available. Asian Catholics have suffered from severe publishing neglect but the works of the Indonesian priest, novelist, architect and political activist, Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya, and the Japanese novelist, Ayako Sono, are well worth seeking out.

Japan also offers some fine non-fiction. In The Bells of Nagasaki, for example, the radiologist, Takashi Nagai, describes the moments immediately before and the days after the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan’s most Catholic city.[xi] There is plenty of Catholic literature out there if we want to teach it.

However, we cannot allow ourselves the comfortable illusion that all is well elsewhere. As Newman wrote in that same essay, “other literatures have disadvantages of their own … One literature may be better than another, but bad will be the best, when weighed in the balance of truth and morality.”[xii] Catholic literature from the rest of the world can complement literature written within the narrow confines of our country but it can never entirely replace it.

I have been writing so far as though English and English Literature were synonymous. However, it is quite clear that there is much more to the English teacher’s job than the teaching of literature. Whether there can be a specifically Catholic approach to English language teaching is much less self-evident.

Our starting point needs to be an awareness that language, and the teaching of language, is never a neutral activity. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in recent debates about the translation of the liturgy into English. Language is contentious, which is why part of the English teacher’s job is to make students aware of its persuasive and propagandist power.

It is easy to discuss jargon in class, to have a lesson on euphemisms, to expose military obfuscation, but perhaps we should also not be afraid to venture into the realm of ethical debate. “Assisted dying”, “dignity”, “terminations”, “emergency contraception”: all these, and very many more, are highly loaded terms which are too often taken at face value. As Catholics in an overwhelmingly secular culture, we need to protect our students from insidious misuse of the language.

There is more to the English language, though, than the power to deceive. I once attended a Welsh evensong at which Rowan Williams preached (in English). He spoke about the Tower of Babel and endangered languages, arguing that the glory of the God is so great that no single language can do justice to Him.

He was speaking about so-called minority languages but his argument holds true even if we limit ourselves to English. The full resources of the English language are not enough to describe the wonder of God and his creation but, if we help our students widen their vocabulary and broaden the range of their expressive powers, we can at least make a start.

There is, then, a great deal more to the Catholic English curriculum, I would argue, than “some critical enjoyment of Christian and catholic poetry and novels”.[xiii] Indeed, there is more to it than the study of Catholic literature and the development of a Catholic approach to English language teaching. Ultimately what is required is the development of a Catholic imagination.

It is entirely possible, for example, to study Chaucer with a 20^th century mindset. The Chaucerian narrator so easily becomes a proto-Protestant, a Lutheran looking for a church door on which to pin his theses, rather than a devout pilgrim who was able to poke fun at abuses in the Church because he took the place of the Church in life for granted. It is easy to read Hopkins’ poetry for the music and to ignore the theology. It is easy to buckle under the secular, liberal consensus.

However, if we take our Catholic English heritage seriously, if we allow Catholicism to creep out from the RS classrooms, if we develop a Catholic approach to the language itself, we can help our students develop a Catholic imagination that will serve them well for the rest of their lives.

If we cherish our faith, we cannot but allow it to enter into every aspect of our lives and that includes our schools and our curricula. It will take more than a short article to tease out exactly what that might mean in practice but I offer these brief thoughts, if nothing else, as a means by which to continue the debate.

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[i] Can There be a Catholic School Curriculum: Renewing the Debate (Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education: 2007).

[ii] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Longmans, Green and Co: 1947), 272 [First published, 1852].

[iii] G.K. Chesterton, The Thing (Sheed & Ward: 1929), 236.

[iv] III.i.

[v] Mirsolav Holub, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1967).

[vi] Nina Cassian, Life Sentences: Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

[vii] Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination: 1558–1660 (Cambridge University Press: 1999); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altar: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (Yale University Press, 1994).

[viii] C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Pan Books, 1983), 20.

[ix] Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them (Abacus, 2008).

[x] Willi Chen, Chutney Power and other stories (Macmillan, 2006).

[xi] Takashi Nagai, The Bells of Hiroshima (Kodansha Europe, 2007).

[xii] John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (Longmans, Green and Co: 1947), 273-274.

[xiii] Can There be a Catholic School Curriculum: Renewing the Debate (Centre for Research and Development in Catholic Education: 2007), 35.