Chilren of the Resolution (Novel Critique)

Novel

Children of the Resolution (Critique Novel)
by: Gary William Murning

Synopsis

Children of the Resolution is available here – and from all major retailers.  Free sample available here.
It was a time of change and new ideologies, a vision of a more inclusive, fairer future… a time that was destined to shape the lives of many, and fail more than a mere handful.
Viewed retrospectively through the eyes of the now adult Carl Grantham, Children of the Resolution is a story of a child poised between two worlds. Thrown into the revolutionary world of integrated education in 1970s England, the physically disabled Carl finds himself torn between what he expects of himself and what his changing environment will allow.
At heart, a coming-of-age story – Children of the Resolution explores the intricacies of friendship and loss, the subtle fears of childhood and the far less subtle fears of adulthoods possibly never realised.
“Children of the Resolution is more than a novel, it is a commentary on the work of educationalists, practitioners and politicians who see education through their own eyes and experiences and not those of the real participants, our young people.” Lord Willis of Knaresborough.

Analysis

The twist, however is this: after the class have finished writing their secrets down, you ask them to fold the pieces of paper once or twice and to put them  inside a box or a hat (I bring my baseball cap to class just for this purpose). Everyone then gets to pick out a secret from this common repository—the moment a student happens to pick out her own secret, she is asked to refold it and put it back in, and to pick out another one. In the end, everyone should have someone else's secret in her possession.

The final instruction is a simple one, although it never fails to elicit a collective moan of despair from the class: they are now to write, in a page or two, the story behind and around that secret—a story that should be told in the first person, by the person (more accurately, persona) whose secret it supposedly is. The story doesn't have to be complete. It can end in the present or in the past. The important thing is that the secret gets to be revealed—and revealed in a well-described and interesting way.

I usually turn this exercise into an assignment, although once or twice in the past I made my students do it in the classroom—or at least, they wrote their first draft of it in my presence. Whichever it is, the following meeting, I ask someone to begin the session by reading her work out loud in class, and after this, I ask the student who believes it is her secret that has just been told to come up front and tell us her own version of it. Very rarely does it happen that the original owner of the secret is completely in agreement with the way her classmate has narrated it, and it even happens that two or more students believe it is their secret they thought they heard being read. (In any case, this first reactor starts the ball rolling, for now it is her turn to recite her story of the secret she picked out last meeting, and so on...)

The message is brought home: when we write about our own lives, our memories may be very clear and unmistakable inside our minds, but we fail to appreciate the fact that these memories need to be re-imag­ined—"re-imaged"—as it were, so that others may see them, feel them, hear them, taste and smell them, touch them; so that they will become real. A student, remembering what she did last summer, would typically write in an informal composition: "Last summer I stayed with my lola in her big old house in the province." For such a  student, just this sentence is enough to evoke the cherished house inside her mind, probably in all the fond textures of its specificity. But what about us? Is this house real to us? How can  it be if it's not yet been imagined for us¾if it has yet to be written?

The need to communicate is a need that writing, when it is any good, amply fulfills. Ultimately, this activity benefits every student in a quiet and personal way, for the way her secret has been "told" automatically alienates her memory of it from someone's else's imagination of it—and thus makes it clear to her that she needs to do a similar creative "invention," even or especially where her own memories are concerned, which to her may be plain and needing very little elaboration, but which cannot be communicated to her readers except in and as form—except in and as "art."

What I also like about this exercise is that, already, the idea that writing must have a point is made clear by it from the very beginning: a secret is just as good a reason to write as any I can think, and in fact, we might argue that the sudden appearance of insight, the unexpected proffering of an offhand piece of knowledge, the "rare and random descent" of revelation, is invariably the purpose of all literature, whether poetry or prose. It's almost like everything in this world can be seen to harbor in itself a secret—which is another way of saying that metaphors lurk in the shadows of the visible universe, and all we need to do is to look for them.

Czeslaw Milosz, in his beautiful anthology, A Book of Luminous Things, groups some poems under the heading "The Secret of a Thing." In his introduction, he writes that "poetry has always described things surrounding us... but the contemplation of a thing—a reverent and pious approach toward it—is a prerequisite of true art." This activity, I find, is useful in letting students think of writing just in these very same terms: writing as uncanny epiphany, as a respectful attentiveness toward life, as a generous unbosoming of a secret.

A reminder: this, once again, is not a strictly poetic activity, and, indeed, the output one expects of one's students with this exercise is not going to resemble—not even remotely—a poem. But I find it's a very effective means of introducing to my class the idea of poetry or literature as being first and foremost an act of the imagination—an act that is necessarily grounded in experience even as it surpasses it, simply by ordering it and making it more meaningful, more sensorily satisfying than it may have actually been. The poem can come later: in the first place, I prefer to look at this exercise as a "pre-poem"—one out of many I will be making them write.

The question comes wriggling—I can almost feel it—in most of your minds: Just where does an activity such as this fit in one's syllabus for a class on literary types and forms, or in Humanities I (which in the UP comes under the politically correct official description, "Literature, Society and the Individual")? I leave it up to the teacher, in the end. However, in my case, I can think of holding this exercise during a session immediately following a discussion of some contemporary poems¾poems that shouldn't sound too difficult or man­nered in expression, I believe, and, if possible, poems by Filipino writers that talk about secrets. (If I have to be ministerial  about anything in this lecture, it is in regard to this: a good reading list—a good textbook—is nearly half the battle. Since we can only write poems in the way that the poems we have read and liked were written, I will insist that my students read poems that I am convinced they can or should emulate.)