The latter part of this chapter is concerned with the reading of prose narrative, beginning nonetheless with what may be called the discovery of poetry within prose. It has much to do with what was described in chapter two: the discovery of the extraordinary suddenly within the very experience of the ordinary.
The following longer example is included as a similar model to those
readings of Shakespeare’s sonnet 29 which were given early on in this chapter. This
173 William Webbe, ‘A Discourse of English Poetrie’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. by G.
allows for a demonstration of that whole movement which took place during the session. But I begin with some background detail.
The group takes place in a continuing care unit – basically a long-stay care home – for older people diagnosed with a chronic mental illness. Many of the people here have lived with mental illness for a long time, dating back to a much earlier stage in their lives. This much was evident from the traces of autobiographical memory – stories relating to their younger selves, or involving family members – which patients would quite often recount in the context of being gathered for the reading group. It was however comparable to a group in a dementia care setting (or to groups with people recovering from a brain injury) in at least one respect: that the material chosen was restricted quite early on to poetry, as opposed to a novel or longer story which would require greater levels of extended comprehension and short- as well as long-term memory. Nonetheless, granted the opportunity provided by the research project, an occupational therapist who regularly worked on this unit made the suggestion of alternating the poetry sessions174 with one in which the project worker would read to the patients from a book of their choosing. The idea was trialled as a kind of experiment to see if it would in fact help improve patients’ motivation (a key issue in many mental health settings) and lengthen the period of time for which they were able to concentrate.
Membership of this group was always difficult to predict, varying from day to day and week to week depending on whether patients felt well enough to attend. Some of the major difficulties that they would report included having too little energy, being very low in mood or feeling too distracted. On the occasion described below the group was made up of three women. One has problems with speech and
174 These had been running for several months before I started visiting the unit, but in the session
pronunciation, and usually responds only to direct questions, responding even then in a very brief manner. Another is more talkative, and often restless, saying at the beginning of this particular session that she had been unable to sleep the previous night. Her friend on the other hand has a more subdued and sunken appearance, and often complains of physical pain. The group has been following the story of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, in line with the occupational therapist’s
proposal, and the project worker suggests resuming the reading from where it had been left the previous week. Ellen is polite, but frank:
I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I’m never in the mood for reading – or hearing a book described and that you know. I’d rather have the poetry myself. Ellen does have a reputation on the ward of making rather loud protests or demands, to which the project worker has been instructed not always to give in. Having the other two patients also to consider (one of whom has been particularly enjoying the book), the project worker decides to continue. Ellen stops her as she is reading the following passage:175
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one’s heart stands still
Ellen: Excuse me Jean. I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you, Project worker: Yeah.
Ellen: but when you look at the sky,
Project worker: Yeah?
Ellen: it’s got beautiful colours Project worker: Oh I agree, I agree.
175 Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911), ed. by Alison Lurie (London: Penguin,
Ellen: hasn’t it, the descriptions in it, are lovely. Project worker: I agree.
Ellen: I, I could look at it forever. [Laughs]
This is quite unlike an interruption, as Ellen calls it, and in fact contrasts with her earlier objection. It is participative, almost the act of a co-facilitator:176 stopping to make time to share an experience that otherwise is mutually felt but in a quite unspoken way. What seems to lie behind Ellen’s interruption is an immediately heightened sensitivity to the passing of time – even the transcendence and the getting outside of it happens within it – to the extent that Ellen crucially but politely wants to get in her response before even the sentence has ended. Her timing offers to
demonstrate how her attention has been peaked. For ‘I could look at it forever’ is related to the ‘heart stand[ing] still’ in the passage, but also to what is even so a transient moment in life. The passage, positioned at the beginning of a new chapter at a point where the narrator pauses for reflection, creates a different kind of excitement and attention from that which a plot-driven narrative often produces. Ellen is not too concerned about getting to the end of a book: she is instead contented by the ‘detail’ of this small section, and content to let time stand still.
The project worker attempts to give Angela a way in to what has developed initially as a dialogue between Ellen and herself, as a result of the project worker’s own supportive response to that to which Ellen has been calling attention:
Project worker: Do you like looking at the sky Angela?
176
French and Local distinguish between two types of interruptions, which they call turn-competitive and non-competitive, where the latter signals a different kind of interaction which is actually more like co-operation. Several examples are given where one person ‘yields’ to another; a so-called interrupter. The writers note that in these examples ‘the original turn-occupants do not recommence speaking immediately upon interrupters’ completions but fractionally delay their restarts. One plausible interpretation of this delayed re-start is that original turn-occupants are giving interrupters ‘time to complete’ thus exhibiting that they are treating the interruptive speech as non-competitive.’ Peter French and John Local, ‘Prosodic Features and the Management of Interruptions’, in Intonation in Discourse, ed. by Catherine Johns-Lewis (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 157-180 (p. 171).
Angela: Yes, I do. Where I used to live on Park Avenue, I used to have that front bedroom: I had a front bedroom my mum and dad had a back bedroom, and I used to look out of the window, and I could see right over the district, and all the sky was lit up with, lovely little golds, gold and orange.
Ellen: There’s greyness, there’s pinkness, there’s, little bit of whiteness,
there’s all sorts of colours isn’t there. To meet the eye. [Laughs] Yes they could go on forever. Well they do go on forever, don’t they. Let’s say they fascinate the eye. [All laugh] Well they do.
Angela describes this scene as if at the time it might only have been she who had seen it, given the advantage of having the view from the front of the house. There is an awareness of being – as the book puts it – ‘alone’, and yet in Angela’s account there is no accompanying feeling of loneliness. She is almost participating in the scene itself, as Beryl also had done in the first session in this chapter, where Angela’s ‘right over’ recalls the lark which Beryl imagines singing ‘right up there’.
Ellen still feels that sense in which the passage points above and beyond a solely individual experience even whilst this is what it begins from within. Back in the present tense, she follows Angela’s captivation with the ‘lovely little golds’, beginning to imagine a list of other colours which she discovers ‘could go on
forever’ (that word of hers again), in an infinitude of colour. Another sudden world is opening up to the imagination: one which is not governed by the same laws that operate in the realm of the finite or indeed normally within the walls of the enclosed institution.
We had been in the middle of a sentence however, and the project worker now returns to the reading in order to maintain its own momentum and to continue and further this act of attention:
and one’s heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun – which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so. And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying
slowly again and again
Ellen: That’s a way a putting it isn’t it Jean. Project worker: It is, isn’t it, yeah.
seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching
Angela: That main star’s lovely. I watch that for hours. Project worker: Do you.
Angela: Oh I watch that, absolutely for hours you know, and I love watching that. Just sitting there, and I’m gazing out the window at it you know,
Project worker: I do, ‘slowly, again and again’
Angela: That’s my star I say every time I see it you know. Must think I’m mad.
Project worker: No, no.
Ellen: The stars at night a sailor’s delight! [Laughs] Go on Jean don’t let us
interrupt you.
Project worker: Oh no I like it, it’s nice.
sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true;
Ellen: Oh, there we are. [Laughs]
Project worker: and sometimes a look in some one’s eyes.
The gently energised atmosphere of close attention, moving between the literature and the people present in the room so that neither is emphasised at the expense of the other, provides an important context for Angela to be able to risk that qualifying statement: ‘Must think I’m mad.’ It is an expression of trust, both of the fellow group members and the project worker, and an indication of the need to be able to
communicate at a direct human level. Although housed within this environment of care in which the nurses would often enjoy a friendly, comfortable banter with
Angela, it was the very safety of such conversation that she did not seem to want here. As a fellow resident on the ward Ellen too is aware of the implications of that word ‘mad’, yet unworriedly continues, acknowledging Angela from within the position that she shares alongside her: ‘don’t let us interrupt you’.
It is not that Angela does sound mad in this extract, though perhaps if one described her as gazing at and talking to the stars, she might be thought to seem somewhat vacant or wandering by her carers. What distinguishes both Angela and Ellen though is their apparent lack of an inner censor in response to the language of the passage, thus making available experiences that in a more ordinary setting might easily pass unregarded, without being spoken of. The experience of being taken out of oneself, for instance, is fairly recognisable and sought-after. And yet people are often unable to say too much about what this is like, precisely because of the way in which these experiences happen out of context, almost by removing us from the ordinary or the mundane.
Ellen later reviews those few pages which have been read during the session: Now that’s the part of a book I like. The author’s done it very well hasn’t she. She’s spoken every detail that comes to the imaginary thoughts.
Reading is like being ‘spoken’ to, when it works well, allowing one to hear thoughts ‘spoken’ that one seems to have had inwardly oneself. ‘The imaginary thoughts’ thus become a vessel for a kind of shared reality. This makes reading a potentially quite different activity to the dreaming mind’s evocation of fantasy.
The context of the passage itself is interesting. Colin, the young boy who for many years has been bedridden and treated as an invalid, has been thinking at length about what it will be like to see the garden in springtime (p. 180). When he is finally wheeled into it, in his chair, he looks around:
veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above his head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents. And the sun fell warm upon his face like a hand with a lovely touch. And in wonder Mary and Dickon stood and stared at him. He looked so strange and different because a pink glow of color had actually crept all over him – ivory face and neck and hands and all.
“I shall get well! I shall get well!” he cried out. “Mary! Dickon! I shall get well! And I shall live forever and ever and ever!”
The Secret Garden, p. 183.
It is a profound moment, to which Mary and Dickon bear testimony, in their
‘wonder’ at Colin. For in crossing over this threshold he has suddenly entered into a world that has been waiting for him all along, and which seems to invite him to take his place within it. He can suddenly see what it is to be alive and well, and this gives him the idea that it must be possible for him too; that it could be possible, at least in this new-found world. But part of the significance of this lies in the fact that the sudden intuition comes before there has been any real change in Colin’s condition: he is still in the wheeled chair. Belief is released in despite of the question of whether it will later be proven correct. But the belief in itself has an effect. For already the person starts to look and to sound different, just as in the session here described. One would not necessarily have known that Ellen was the same person who shuffles (rather than walks) around the ward at a painfully slow pace, and who often struggles to hold a piece of paper due to the strength of the tremor in her arm.
The release was something that the patients would themselves look for. They would ask for poems about children (though not necessarily childhood, a subject which for several patients was associated with traumatic memories or thoughts). But they also liked poems about flowers: young, fresh, growing things. Ellen spoke with great excitement about a strawberry plant that she had been tending in the garden, and was adamant that I accompany her to see how it had grown. I was somewhat
perplexed to find that I could not actually see any evidence of the plant, as she pointed to the little plot of ground lying close to the benches positioned just outside the ward. Perhaps, I thought (disappointedly), it was all in her imagination. And yet there was something impressive in it: in what she had managed to create out of what seemed to me a rather dry corner, where the smokers would sit.
Supplements to the toolkit
What this chapter has yet to show is that added, explosive effect which is produced when the features already identified earlier in this chapter and in chapter one within poetry are translated back out at the macro level or dimension of a human story portrayed usually in temporally ongoing prose narrative. It is here that we see realism’s mixtures at work in that simultaneity of different characters and different lives which are being lived sometimes almost in despite of each other. But because there is in this sense more to take in than with poetry, it becomes crucial within a novel to be able to find, as Ellen and Angela did, stopping points within the
narrative. These are like the pauses which the structure of a poem formally creates; though the novel form also instils an awareness of the contingency of that pause within a narrative that in reality has no stop. Indeed for some authors even the close of the novel itself does not mark an end, but only a breaking point from which to begin again with the same characters in a new novel.
The very difficulty more generally for the characters created by nineteenth- century realism is that they often cannot experience certain crucial moments in their own story as having that distinct quality of a moment. For within a life which is ongoing, it can be difficult to tell where that pivotal moment might have begun, and