They wanted to keep flying.
* * *
IN THE OLDEN days of the twentieth century, a correspondence school for “speedwriting” ran magazine ads that read:
f u cn rd ths, u cn
bcm a sec & gt
a gd jb w hi pa.
My friends and I laughed over the ads. We could read the ad copy. We could become secretaries and get good jobs, with high pay!
The point was, of course, that we didn’t need to be given every single letter of every word of the ad to get the gist. In the same way, a listener—especially a young one—doesn’t need to be able to understand every motive of the characters or even know what all the words mean to become engrossed in a story. The speedwriting ad is not so very different in this respect from, say, “Jabberwocky,” the nonsense poem from Lewis Carroll’s second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass. The verses famously begin and end:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Maria Tatar, who teaches Carroll to her students at Harvard, says, “You hear it, and it’s a story, but you only understand half the words in it and it doesn’t matter. It holds together. I often think that must be the experience of a young child hearing stories—getting half of it but still getting it.”
The gap between receptive and expressive vocabulary—that we understand more than we can say—is in some respects a mechanical issue of grammar, syntax, and context. In a wider sense, it becomes a space in which we can experience the transcendent and even mystical. Lewis Carroll can make up screwball words and string them into a poem, and somehow we are able to supply a meaning. The artistry of words can stir and excite us without our knowing quite why. That was the experience of the novelist Philip Pullman when he was a teenager and his English teacher introduced the class to John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost.
“Many of the references made little or no sense to me,” Pullman told the children’s book historian Leonard Marcus. “Nevertheless, the sound of Milton’s poetry when heard read aloud, and then tasted afterward in your own mouth, was enormously powerful. From that experience, I learned that things can affect us before we understand them, and at a deeper level than we can actually reach with our understanding. I also learned that you respond physically to poetry. Your hair stands on end. Your skin bristles. Your heart goes faster.”
I’ve seen this happen with my own children. I have seen them respond to powerful writing in their gestures and breathing; there is no doubt but that their hearts beat faster. The book that has done it for them, every time, is Treasure Island. I have mentioned that we read it every few years. This explains in part, I think, why it has so captivated them. Each time we’ve read it, the children were a step older than they’d been during the previous go-round. It was clear to me that with each reading, they understood more and more of the language and story, in a kind of time-lapse demonstration of the “again, again” phenomenon.
The first time I read it out loud, Molly was six and would have sat close beside me, stopping me now and then to ask about an unusual word or concept. She was good about that. Paris, at four, would have been playing with toys on the floor and following the story in a hazy way. Violet was less than a year old at the time, so I assume that all she heard was the reassuring blur-blur-blur of her mother’s voice.
Two years later, we returned to the book, and this time Paris reacted to it as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. He was thrilled by the story, so electrified that he kept leaping up to act out the scenes. By the time we got to chapter twenty-five, I couldn’t go two lines without an explosion. It is a very tense chapter. The young hero, Jim Hawkins, is in a tight spot. All alone, he’s facing the wily, wounded coxswain, Israel Hands, who has lately been exposed as a pirate. The two confront one another on the deck of the Hispaniola, which has run aground just off Treasure Island, and as the surf knocks the hull, two dead buccaneers (one in a red cap) slide back and forth on the deck.
“‘There were the two watchmen,’” I read, “‘sure enough, red-cap on his back, as stiff as a handspike, with his arms stretched out like those of a crucifix and his teeth showing through his open lips; Israel Hands propped—’”
Paris vaulted off the sofa. He threw himself onto the floor, his arms rigid and straight out, and bared his teeth.
“Like this?”
We all laughed. Paris cannonballed back into his place.
“‘—Israel Hands propped against the bulwarks, his chin on his chest, his hands lying open before him on the deck, his face as white, under its tan, as a tallow candle—’”
“What’s tallow?” Molly asked.
“Beef fat.”
“Bleah.” She made a face.
“Go on!” Paris cried. “I love this story!”
“‘For a while the ship kept bucking and sidling like a vicious horse, the sails filling, now on one tack, now on another, and the boom swinging to and fro till the mast groaned aloud under the strain—’”
“Psssshhhwww!”
Paris blasted off again, reeling around the room making a noise like a schooner in bad weather, his arms billowing like sails and whacking back and forth like a boom.
“Like this, right? Gnnnarrrr. . . .”
There was no mystery to his feelings about the book, no subtle, veiled inner magic or floating above the story, looking down. He was up to his gunwales in the adventure. It was unbelievably loud.
Would a boy his age have loved the story as much if this were the first time he was hearing it? Maybe. I think not, though: I think that it resonated with such power because somewhere in the back of his mind was an awareness that he’d heard it before when he was too young to grasp its subtleties. Coming to it a second time, Paris already had a feeling of ownership, a preexisting stake in the adventure. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, he was subsumed, surrounded, and transported.
Paris was eleven the next time Treasure Island came around. This time he didn’t leap out of his seat. He had a new and more mature appreciation of the moral predicaments facing Jim Hawkins and his companions. In the charming villain Long John Silver, he saw the difficulty of distinguishing between a man’s apparent nature and the one he really possesses.
Had Paris seen a film version of the story every couple of years, I can’t imagine that he would have had such a profound and deepening series of encounters. As he listened, he had to draw from an inner well to conjure another world, with its smells and sounds and people: the metallic concussion of a spade on dry soil, the cold shock of seawater, the pink, shining, hamlike face of Long John Silver. A child watching a movie doesn’t need to do any of that.
Film is a fabulous art form, but it does have a certain totalitarian aspect: the authorities have decided on the look and feel of everything from the clothes of the characters to the slant of the light to the mood and the music; the viewer’s input is superfluous. It is for that reason that some parents try to keep ahead of Disney, the BBC, Walden Media, and other cinematic interpreters of classic children’s literature. We want our children to taste the full flavor of Peter Pan and Winnie-the-Pooh and Charlotte’s Web in the original, for themselves, before they see the big-screen renditions.
It was hard to keep ahead of Hollywood when my children were little, and with the Internet’s role in family life it’s harder for parents today. A first-grader who’s not ready yet to tackle the Harry Potter books may not be able to avoid seeing the movies, or at least pictures of the actors. Before he’s read a word of J. K. Rowling, in his mind Daniel Radcliffe is Harry, and Maggie Smith will be Professor McGonagall, forever. A story is never wholly yours again, once a movie has colonized your mind’s eye. (Right before the new movie version of A Wrinkle in Time hit theaters in 2018, I rushed to read the book to Flora. It was too late: she had seen the promos, and from her questions, it was clear that she was “seeing” Madeleine L’Engle’s
novel through a lens crafted by the film’s director, Ava DuVernay.)
* * *
IN ONE RESPECT, though, movies and reading aloud—and audiobooks—do have something important in common. They are sometimes accused of being easy shortcuts through the work of appreciating literature. There is some small truth to this, I suppose. When we sit still and watch a movie, it is true that we are passive rather than active. We are in receiving mode. It takes some modest effort to read Louis Sachar’s Holes, whereas it takes only the parking of one’s backside on a comfortable surface to enjoy the story on film.
A person listening to a novel read out loud might appear similarly passive. But it is not so: a story read aloud doesn’t take place on the page, or even in the voice of the reader, but in an esoteric mingling of these things with the mind and the heart of the hearer. To listen to a story is to participate in its realization. Far from being a cheap shortcut, it’s a deep and thoughtful way to engage with writing of all types.
* * *
WHEN WE READ aloud, we introduce small children to books as artifacts, as curiosities, as vessels of wonder and knowledge. They learn how books work: how the pages turn, how meaning flows from left to right, what letters look like and how they can be joined up into words, and words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs.
As time goes on, and children get older, the reading will acquaint them with richer, more varied, more formal types of prose. They will learn to understand figurative devices (“stiff as a handspike,” “a face like tallow”) and to spot puns and rhymes and alliteration. They will know first-person from third-person narration. They will be able to tell the difference between stories told in the present tense and those in the past tense, and they will be familiar with dialogue and dialect. All this discernment will strengthen the cause of independent reading.
Is it cheating, though? Do we undermine young people, even infantilize them, by reading aloud long past the point that they can read for themselves?
No, it isn’t. And no, we don’t. Being read to and reading to oneself are, at heart, two ways of taking in one text. The mechanisms at the neurological level are different. But as an experience the distinction is a bit like the difference between walking and running. Both are good ways to reach a destination. Is it babyish to walk, which takes longer but requires less effort? Is it more mature to run, expending more energy and arriving sooner? There may be various things to consider when you choose between a run and a walk, but maturity doesn’t enter into it. The same is true with reading in its silent and spoken forms. Depending on how we encounter words, our brains perform different functions to make sense of them. “We were never born to read,” as Maryanne Wolf says, but must learn how. Yet our brains seem not to keep close records of how a story makes its way in. Matthew Rubery, the audiobook historian, told me that people who alternate between reading a physical book and listening to an unabridged audio version typically can’t remember which passages they read using one method and which they “read” with the other.
And for people who struggle with reading, what a relief to be freed of the obligation to untangle sentences on their own! For them, hearing literature brought to life by the voice may be their single chance to have a meaningful, nonscreen encounter with Mr. Tumnus or Scheherazade or the Cheshire Cat. It may be the best means of enjoying novels with the ease and totality of their more adept and literate peers.
At school, adults can demand that young people read novels, test them on their comprehension, make them write reports, and expect them to be able to identify themes and motifs. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but for many young people it’s not a system that helps them fall in love with literature, either. Reading novels out loud offers another way in—in the process keeping listeners of all ages connected to books and to long-form narrative when their interest may otherwise have moved to screens.
In a 2016 essay, a middle-school teacher in Wisconsin named Timothy Dolan wrote that, “Each year I have a few students that come to loathe reading and writing. Many times it is due to low reading skills, but not always. They’ve spent so many years simply trying to figure out how to say the words in a text, instead of becoming immersed in the story itself.”
Dolan’s remedy is to read his students captivating, gritty novels such as The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. This brings the material alive for the A students and the C-grade kids, in the same way and at the same time. The effect on the class is both unifying and equalizing. Every student is on the same footing as the story rolls out. “My low readers spend a lot of time deciphering words that are sight words for most grade-level readers,” Dolan wrote. “How can they appreciate the beauty of Ray Bradbury’s writing when so many words are painful obstacles? Reading aloud gives them the opportunity to hear complex texts without the onus being placed on their shoulders.”
As to that question of infantilizing—well, it comes up in the classroom, too. “This year I had a parent question me on the validity of reading aloud with teenagers,” Dolan wrote. “Initially I was offended, but then I remembered back to my first year of teaching. I had wondered the same thing. I couldn’t imagine sitting in front of thirty eighth-graders and with a book having them actually pay attention. But I’ll tell you what, when Ponyboy reads Johnny’s letter at the end of The Outsiders, you can hear a pin drop in my classroom.”
In a recent twist, some teachers are starting to use podcasts and transcripts in a similar way. Students put on headsets and listen to the same program at the same time while following the words on their tablets so that they are getting simultaneous aural and visual versions. High-school teacher Michael Godsey tried the technique using the first season of Serial, the popular podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig. His students were riveted by the real-life story of a dead Baltimore teenager and the former boyfriend who may or may not have killed her. Writing about his classroom experience in the Atlantic, Godsey acknowledged the tension between making young people do the work of reading and letting them listen.
“While I felt guilty the students weren’t reading very much during this unit,” he decided, “their engagement with a relevant and timely story—their eagerness to ask questions, their intrinsic motivation to use critical thinking—seemed to make it worth it, at least temporarily.”
Godsey noticed that his students were much more engaged than usual. They argued with one another, consulted maps, wrote at length in their journals, and seemed eager to talk with adults about what they thought.
Many of them said that reading along with the audio helped with their focus and kept them from “spacing out” while listening. Others, paradoxically, wrote that they were able to multi-task—they could take notes or write on their worksheets and could keep up with the story even with their eyes off the screen. Some explicitly recognized that they could look back and reread something they didn’t understand when they first heard it; others said they read slightly ahead and then could write down a quote while they listened to it. A student with eyesight problems said he appreciates the ability to take reading breaks without stopping his enjoyment of the story. A few students learning English as a second language wrote that they like how they can read the words and—as one student put it—promptly “hear how they’re supposed to sound.”
The headphones-plus-tablet approach may not have quite the same human warmth as a story read by a single voice to everyone at once. It’s more like parallel play, with each student alone and separate. Still, it seems worthwhile. The teacher’s selection of trendy, topical Serial is also a good reminder that to keep teenagers connected to oral storytelling may require some creativity in the choice of material.
That’s true for older teens and adults, too, as Jane Fidler discovered when she took a job teaching remedial English at a Maryland community college. Her classes were full of people who had slipped through the cracks of the public education system. Many of her students were working full-time as well as trying to get a degree. A few of th
em were combat veterans. A lot of them struggled. One of Fidler’s students, a young man who attended class through a day-release program, once came back from spring break without having done his homework because the prison where he lived had been on lockdown.
Most of her kids had never read a book all the way through before they got to community college, Fidler told me. “I say, ‘How did you pass high school?’ They say, ‘I just wrote papers on books without reading them.’”
To get her students interested in fiction, Fidler decided to read them the juiciest, most accessible material she could find: salacious thrillers with short chapters and lots of action.
“In my lower developmental class, we read Sail, by James Patterson [and Howard Roughan],” Fidler said. “It’s a very sexy book about a woman whose husband cheats on her, and she remarries, and he wants to kill her, and my students love it.
“‘Okay,’ I’ll say, ‘take out Sail and we’re going to read chapter twenty-five.’ And I’ll read to them about how Peter Carlyle is two-timing his wife and playing around with his student, Bailey. One student said to me, ‘I was up until four in the morning, finishing this book where you left off!’”
Fidler uses her unorthodox textbooks to teach specific lessons. She gets her students to draw inferences about what’s going to happen to the characters. She explains vocabulary words. “I can help them focus on things that they would not have thought about if they read it on their own. And what I see happening is, when students get to the end of the book, they’ll turn the page and see, ‘Ooh, there’s another book by Patterson, and this one sounds interesting.’ This from kids for whom it is the first book they’ve read! That’s pretty good.”
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