By Ray Petersen — I guess it’s appropriate that today is graduation day at the University of Nizwa, as I’ve been thinking about the enormous academic strides some of my students have made this semester.
I teach a literature class, ‘The Short Story,’ which is a reading and literature evaluation course.
It’s hard not to be enthusiastic about the course content, as it ranges from Aesop’s Fables, through Homer, and on, featuring such stars as Guy de Maupassant, W Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Alan Poe, Frank Stockton Jnr, Ernest Hemingway, Jeffrey Archer, and many, many more.
It’s like being at a literary feast, as the guest of honour.
I have a class composed entirely of young Omani girls, who of course I won’t mention by name, but I want to share their literary awakenings with you, so that you can know that the graduates of today are not only translators, teachers, engineers, nurses and architects of the future, but that we are seeing the potential of these young people to excel in the arts, and for me, after eight years in Oman, this is a watershed.
Albert Einstein wrote, “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” Now, though I have known of that quote for a long time, now it has real meaning for me, as I too am making a quantum leap of sorts.
I don’t doubt that I have always been an effective teacher, but to have my students driving their own ‘intellectual’ awakenings and discoveries, simply takes me to a different place, in terms of satisfaction.
Together, this group has learned to seek, and see, literary themes, to recognise characters, and characteristics, to go beyond the words on the pages, and above all, to find their own expressive vocabularies, and styles of discovery.
These students are a mix of introvert and extrovert, and each has brought their personality ‘to the table.’
And that’s exactly what we do, with everything discussed in an Arthurian Round Table format. I usually lead, but don’t rule, and I certainly don’t make determinations as to whether the students are correct or not.
The fact is, that around our table, you can’t be wrong! I believe that if each of the students can develop greater confidence of expression, then their artistic thought processes will also reveal themselves earlier.
The group is becoming stronger, and more robust, as they move from what occurs in a story, to the behaviour of the characters at different stages of the stories, physically identifying those impeccably wrought stars of the short story, getting inside their heads, and understanding the personalities, the how and why the characters behave as they do.
Of course, it’s all supposition, but then as Goethe wrote, “Personality is everything…”
They have progressed from unravelling Aesop’s Fables, which almost certainly weren’t all Aesop’s work, and dwelt for a time on such characters as ‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’ They even developed the moral of the story to an academic perspective today.
They stepped forward again, and unravelled the thematic multiplicity of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ and the transformation of a musician able to charm even the Greek gods, to a broken shell of a man with nothing to live for.
‘The Lady and the Tiger,’ is a classic open-ended story, in which the reader decides how it ends, but a significant feature of this story is that you feel honour-bound, being trusted to make your own conclusion, to rationalise it through the perspectives of the other characters. It’s amazing how that ‘obligation’ was identified by the class.
Frank Stockton probably never again achieved the same perceptive heights as when he wrote this few hundred words.
The frailties of human nature tend to be hallmarks of de Maupassant’s work, but in ‘The Diamond Necklace,’ he carved his characters so impeccably, in so few words, that the visuals form quickly in the mind.
The characters take life throughout, with their foibles and frailties, with only a few descriptors, the magic being in the interweaving of the characters, their behaviour, and the storyline.
The group tore into the layers of the Mathilde, Loisel, and Madame Forestier, with glee, and demonstrated not only a diversity of views, but genuine credibility in how they saw the characters.
The crowning glory came this week though, as we read and reviewed ‘The Story of an Hour,’ by Kate Chopin, one of my all-time favourites, with lines like, “a sob came up into her throat and shook her, like a child who has cried himself to sleep, continues to sob in its dreams,” and, “there would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.” These are heaven sent, a story each of their own.
And what did these impetuous and daring young women do? They unravelled the story in no time, savouring the delicious irony of death bringing joy, and joy bringing death. Accepting the possibility of the emotional roller-coaster, and the two-edged swords of life.
In such moments, as Robert Musil said, “layer by layer, art strips life bare.” I wish more of you could share, three times a week, the first class of my day, to see what Yeats described as, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” What a way it is, to start the day! I’m proud of my Short Story class, living a new life, every week.
— petersen_ray@hotmail.com
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