Recommended Reading
G.C.S.E. ENGLISH: Tackling Unprepared Passages – Fiction
In this short article I will give some tips and pointers about the value of thinking and writing about short passages of fiction, which you have not previously studied. At GCSE level, many marks can be picked-up by tackling these questions effectively; also, as examples of questions to practice on beforehand, they are excellent means of building confidence for the exam, as well as developing ‘transferable skills’ – skills which can be put to work in all sorts of learning situations where you have to understand and write about something.
For the examination itself, students are presented with a piece of writing, usually taken from a novel or short story that is not one of the ‘set texts’. This means that you have probably not read the passage previously, and almost certainly not studied it before in detail.
An example of a piece of writing presented in one past paper is an extract from Doris Lessing’s book The Grass is Singing, which is set in South Africa. The extract introduces two characters, Mary and Richard, and conveys to the reader the nature of their relationship –and what it leads to.
When I have used this as the basis for one (or more) tuition sessions, what has emerged is that each of the four questions about the extract, set in the exam paper, works as a series of doorways, each one leading further into the world that the writer – Lessing, in this case – has created. By ‘world’ I mean the world of relationships, the ‘inner world’ or mental, emotional and imaginative space of the novel’s characters, and, their more general encompassing human and natural environments, or ‘settings.’
What is astonishing is that how, by posing very simple questions, a well constructed exam paper can help students open up, for themselves, an entire array of rich meanings that are embedded or hidden within the extracted passage. In this exam paper such questions are ‘open questions’, that is, the answers to them aren’t all that specific or fixed, and this allows students to come up with their own way of understanding the author’s ideas, based on their own close reading. This ‘close reading’ is the key to discovering what the whole point of the exercise is: in our present example, the opening instructions on this exam paper say it all:
‘Read carefully the story below.....’
The first question, (referring to specific paragraphs of the extract), is, quite simply:
‘What do you learn about Mary in these lines?’
Now the purpose behind writing this article is not to supply a ‘model answer’ – and I am not including the actual extract from the novel. Instead, I propose to focus on how to engage with past papers as a means to learning something new.
What we can ‘learn about Mary’ depends precisely on our careful reading, because, by paying close attention, we may become aware of some of the narrator’s (author’s) intentions in creating a character - Mary – in such a way that is psychologically convincing to the reader. That is, the reader is drawn more deeply into the story in which Mary is involved, and which also, therefore, reveals significant aspects of Mary’s disposition. A highly gifted writer like Lessing opens a perspective onto her characters’ lives; their histories, how their minds work, what they want, how they relate.... Reading about Mary in the paragraphs in question, we can begin to begin to gain a more sophisticated understanding of what it might be like to be someone else. Also, as readers, we can be intrigued, surprised, puzzled or have our curiosity more strongly provoked by apparently off-the-cuff remarks made by the narrator and woven, apparently casually, into the story-line.
For example, we learn that Mary, on receiving Richard’s proposal of marriage, is gratified because, aside from other reasons, she needs such a proposal ‘to restore her feelings of superiority to men.’ The narrator’s remark here gives Mary’s character (and therefore the novel as a whole) greater complexity, and the general reader - let alone a GCSE student - may have to stop and consider what it is that Lessing is trying to say. So those moments of feeling puzzled or piqued by whatever surprises a writer has in store for us may be, in reality, opportunities to use our sense of being puzzled, for example, to dig deeper into the story and, very importantly, into our own minds – to wake up to how the mind is responding. We can ask ourselves: what do our gut feelings tell us about Mary? Possibly, also, the writer does not want the reader to seize upon opinions or perceptions of their stories or characters that are too simplistic or decided. Maybe, being puzzled or undecided are states of mind that in time allow for the communication of the kind of deeper understanding that writers are aiming for to slowly - and uninterruptedly - develop.
With this in mind, I shall finish this article with a quotation from one of the (justly) most famous letters of the poet John Keats:
‘several things dovetailed in my mind & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…'
(Gittings, 1968: 261).
References
Gittings, R. 1968, 1985: John Keats, Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England.
WJEC: GCSE English, Higher Tier, Paper I, Section A; 10th June 2004
