English v Comp Lit

Re my last posting, on rhetorical and serious lit, or attitudes to lit: in the Canadian university where I worked for eleven years there was a department of English and a department of Comparative Literature. The English faculty (or most of the men at any rate -- there were hardly any women) were shabby looking, had scruffy beards and drove old wrecks of cars: you could see the Canadian heritage of Scottish Presbyterianism in their long-suffering faces, lined by years of dutiful service in the trenches of lit. Comp Lit wore expensive, beautifully tailored suits or canary waistcoasts and bow ties; their shoes and briefcases were of the best Italian leather, their conferences were in Rio and Lisbon and they drove sports cars. They favoured clever rhetoric, playful texts and playful theory. They were closed down, as I recall, for financial irregularities and abysmal student ratings.

The rhetorical and the serious

The Introduction to my Penguin Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale says that romance is sometimes considered a little too popular: late in his career Shakespeare's longer-lived contemporary Ben Jonson scoffed at two of Shakespeare's late plays, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest,

mocking the fantastic dimension that makes them distinctive. All these complaints derive from Jonson's contempt for the popularity and conventionality - what he considered the vulgarity - of dramatic romance, and they represent a moral objection. He seems to have felt that Shakespeare was squandering his talent by peddling entertaining fantasies; he believed that fiction ought to be instructive, ought to expose the follies and errors of the society for which it was written by showing 'an image of the times', ought to employ 'deeds and language such as men do use' (Prologue to Every Man in His Humour; composed c. 1604-16). To such a neoclassical sensibility, the moral function of drama depended on a credible representation of familiar experience, an illusion of the world in which spectators could recognize themselves and their own culture. Thus Jonson set Epicoene, or the Silent Woman and The Alchemist in the very London neighbourhoods through which the audience had travelled to the theatre. (Russ McDonald, Introduction to The Winter’s Tale, Penguin 1986, xxxiv)

Strangely, that emphasis on familiar language and experience recall the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, two poets who were precisely not neoclassical.

But whereas Wordsworth followed that agenda in so far as he did write of ordinary people and did avoid the conventional language of much eighteenth century verse, Coleridge and the next generation of Romantics went in for strange tales (‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘Christabel’…) that were closer to Shakespeare's late plays than to Jonson’s.

A ‘moral objection’ is what Leavis and his followers could be said to have had to novels that didn’t deal ‘seriously’ with men and women and society as they were: they had no time for magic, fantasy and the Gothic. Wuthering Heights maybe but no Frankenstein and no Poe. Nor had they any time for tales that declared their conformity to the conventions of tales: no Conan Doyle, no ghosts, no The Avengers, no Dr Who – no popular culture, in fact.

The agenda of the 1960s-70s version of English built on everyday experience and ordinary vernacular language was informed by something of that spirit, even if it didn’t derive directly from Leavis. The enemy was artificiality: genres that looked like genres and didn’t conceal their conventions and artifice; children’s writing that wasn’t ‘sincere’ and ‘authentic’. Strongly influenced by that ideology in my training, I may have tolerated but certainly didn’t encourage those children who enthusiastically wrote long adventure stories and tales of horror, ponies and space. Only when my pupils were describing their streets and neighbours and examining their relationships would I have been happy for my PGCE tutors and teacher mentors to drop in and see what was going on.

But we don’t now agree with Jonson and most of us very much approve of The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Cymbeline. And in the same way, while I still cringe at all the Gothic stuff that’s now so big in school and university English, I now feel there was a dimension missing in the ‘realist’ English of 30-40 years ago. Part of me welcomes the postmodern turn to playfulness with language and genre and to the embracing of artifice: I hugely enjoy Marquez, Calvino and Vonnegut and if teaching now would give my younger pupils (‘Key Stage 3’ the absurd UK jargon – what are the off-key stages, I wonder?) loads of Arthurian legend, classical romance (the Odyssey) and Midsummer Night’s Dream; perhaps even ghost stories.

Richard Lanham wrote a few years ago about the alternation in literary history of periods dominated by homo seriosus (Virgil, Milton, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence) and homo rhetoricus (late Shakespeare, Sterne, Melville, Saul Bellow). We’re certainly now in a more rhetorical era – except that we wouldn’t acknowledge (nor would Lanham, I'm sure) that The Tempest or Much Ado were any the less serious because they were rhetorically playful.

The City Uncovered

I've been watching Evan Davis’s series The City Uncovered (BBC2, about finance) on the laptop with iPlayer. Something about watching television on a computer screen, small or large, seems to make it a different and more powerful experience. Perhaps it’s something to do with sitting much closer to a computer screen than to a TV set; perhaps it’s the sense I have that the things I see on my computer screen are chosen by me in a way that television programmes aren’t.

The City Uncovered was excellent, as is all Davis’s work, in illuminating a complex issue. But what particularly struck me watching these three programmes was how good television documentaries are as film. This is a series about banks and investors but it was visually stunning.

Years ago I think I would have despised this aesthetic treatment of a serious issue that demanded rationality in its handling. Now I don’t. The visuals for the most part add nothing to the logic of the argument, but I don’t find they impede it either. If they’re simply sugaring an unappetising pill, that’s ok. I love the shots of stampeding herds of wildebeest, the Lloyds building seen from the air, Evan Davis arriving outside a big bank on a motorbike or cruising a California highway in an open car, Brooklyn Bridge seen from unusual angles under strange lighting conditions, the customers tucking into their hash browns in a diner in Silicon Valley. The photography/filming is intensely pleasurable in its own right and I think we don’t usually appreciate that it’s as fine as anything we see in celebrated feature films.

Strictly speaking, in order to evaluate Evan’s programme in the critical spirit it calls for one should no doubt listen to the soundtrack only or, better, get hold of the script. That would allow one to address the logos of the programme without distraction. But classical rhetoric tells the public speaker that logos isn’t enough; one has to help the pure argument along so that it gets through to the audience. See documentaries as a rhetorical genre and one can appreciate that changes of scene mark shifts in the argument, that images of boarded-up houses make one feel how mortgage foreclosure has material and personal consequences and that the frenzy of a trading floor drives home Davis’s case that markets habitually go mad. In remembering the programme I'll associate points in the argument with the sights shown on the screen, and this will aid memory.

But mainly I just like it. Certainly, what Evan Davis looks like has got nothing to do with the validity of his case; but I enjoy seeing what he’s like in different situations, face-to-face with a super-rich banker or top Harvard economist and then strolling on a track through a wheat field with a farmer who’s explaining how he decides what he’ll grow next year. This is television, and we simply have to accept if we’re to appreciate it that it’s no good bringing a puritan asceticism to the experience. For television we have to be, in Richard Lanham’s terms, homo rhetoricus, not homo seriosus.

Update, misc

Rather than tackle a single topic I thought I'd post a few days of diary.

I posted an entry last week (8 Nov, Nature and Culture) about a bike ride along the Thames from Hampton Court to Kingston. As the scene had been striking but I hadn’t taken the camera I went out again on Saturday, this time with camera, when an intervening spell of wild and wet weather had been and gone. As it turned out, though, autumn had changed to winter; it was cold and the sky was dull. I've just been looking through the photographs and they’re drab. I conclude -- as so often before, though I never seem to learn -- that it’s a waste of time taking photographs when the light is poor. Which in this country means a lot of the time.

Still reading my Philosophie magazine. In the interests of economy I was going to not renew, but I got so much out of the latest issue that I changed my mind. Partly it’s good for my French which I'm trying to improve (including a conversation class at the French Institute) but also I learn something about philosophy (e.g, this week, Kant and Searle) and constantly come across articles about which I think something like this would go down well with older English secondary students. I may post a couple of extracts -- but I keep saying that and time spent blogging is time not spent reading, drifting or watching the Parliament channel or my unopened DVDs.

In the library today I got Raymond Williams’s book on Drama from Ibsen to Brecht to see what, if anything, he’d say about Pirandello (see earlier post). There is a chapter and he does discuss Six Characters in Search of an Author (see previous posting) but I found it unsatisfying: Williams seems to be saying that Pirandello was making some ‘professional’ (his word) points about the business of theatre; while I can see the things that made him say that (and I hadn’t picked them all up) I felt the play was existentially disturbing.

The Parliament Channel had the Commons debate about the expansion of Heathrow: again, riveting, the part I saw -- in the evening with 20 MPs max in the house. Superb speech -- fine example of rhetoric -- by John Gummer, who used to be the derided Tory minister John Selwyn Gummer. He spoke apparently without notes, with passion and strong arguments.

However, the final government speech, of which I saw part, was unsatisfying: it appeared that the minister didn’t seriously address points that had been made in the debate. I would have preferred at that point to have had him interviewed by a John Humphries (BBC journalist on the morning Today programme). Radio and TV don’t do rhetoric beyond the soundbite; parliamentary debate doesn’t do cross-examination -- except perhaps in committees, though I haven’t seen many of them yet and rather gather the government has too much control over the selection of chairs (I don’t know how members are chosen).

So, a good debate which I'm sure many people besides me would have enjoyed had they watched it -- and better entertainment, to my taste, than anything on the main terrestrial channels. But the Guardian the following morning had almost nothing on it: not even a mention, that I saw, of Gummer’s speech. Maybe the Guardian’s right: the number of us who would sit down and read even a ten minute speech may be minute.

One of our three good English teachersat Bradford Grammar School, Neville Newhouse, used to tell us not to be swayed by speeches we hear but to make a point of reading them, to avoid having our judgment swayed by rhetoric in the bad, restrictive sense. That was an example of the admirable grammar school emphasis on critical rationality: Susan Stebbing’s Clear and Crooked Thinking was much in vogue, I think. For Aristotle, of course, the logic of Gummer’s argument was as much part of his rhetoric as his appeal to the emotions.

Nature and culture

In search of wellbeing, it being a lovely Friday with a forecast of a miserable Saturday and Sunday, and reading that poverty (and by extension, I presume, relative wealth too) ain’t so bad healthwise when it’s borne in green surroundings, I took my endorphins out for a spin down the river from Hampton Court to Kingston. (But unfortunately not my camera.)

The river was doing its classy autumnal stuff: the water was broad, slow and brown, geese and swans performed their ornamental offices, a cormorant provided a spicy note of evil, a grebe brought overtones of fen and mere while ducks diverged on urgent voluntary errands (1); a barge displayed washing, geranium and a cat; and in the trees alongside leaves deferred their final fall for one more day and even the single green parakeet seemed visually, though not auditorily, appropriate.

Little Dorritt (BBC1) is failing to engage me. This isn’t because it isn’t well done: it’s the usual Andrew Davies job, uproariously excessive and sensitive, and avoids what usually sticks in the gullet about Hovis ads and costume dramas (e.g the recent Tess). I don’t find any of the characters appealing, though they’re well acted, and the plot is too complicated. I'll no longer make a special point of watching it.

But it doesn’t matter because I've discovered a new programme that provides gripping viewing for hours on end; in fact, not a programme but an entire continuous channel: the Parliament Channel. Excellent background for ironing, but if I were teaching English these days I'd actively use it: so far I haven’t seen any committee sessions but have appreciated the expert expositions in the Lords. I'd give the kids a current Bill (stripped down), get them to prepare amendments and government defences in groups and debate them; then watch some of the actual debate. Something like that, maybe, if I could make it meaningful. The point being that English teachers should be teachers of rhetoric, in the sense of the deployment of language (spoken and written) to affect states of affairs. Rhetoric isn't the full brief for English, but it should be a big element.

And my disappointment with Love’s Labour’s Lost (see previous posting; no more Peter Hall for me) was made up for last night by Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, ‘new version' (dir. Rupert Goold): tense, funny, surreal, effects-laden, constantly surprising, acted by real actors of whom none could in my book be faulted.

1. Ans: Auden, ‘Look, Stranger’

Feeling, knowing and writing

In Saturday’s Guardian Zadie Smith wrote brilliantly about George Eliot’s Middlemarch
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2281931,00.html .
Here are some quotes and some comments. (I hope I'm not violating anyone's copyright -- this is educational, after all. Well, self-educational at any rate.)

Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing. She had no doubt that she had learned as much from loving her partner George Lewes, for example, as she had from translating Spinoza. When Dorothea truly becomes great (only really in the last third of the novel, when she comes to the aid of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because she has at last recognised the value of emotional experience:

"All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot [. . .] all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance."
….
In order to be attentive to Fred [Vincy], Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, "writer of ideas" has become a term of abuse: we think "Ideas" are the opposite of something we call "Life". It wasn't that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who was wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth.
….
Doesn't she seem to solve the head/heart schism of our literature? Neither as sentimental as our popular novelists, nor as dryly cerebral as our experimentalists. Under the influence of Spinoza, via an understanding of Fred, she thought with her heart and felt with her head. It's a fictional procedure perfectly described by one of her creations, Will Ladislaw:

"To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion - a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."

This seems as good support as any for the argument that literature, or let’s say imaginative writing in the school English classroom, can be a means of setting down a sort of knowledge that is as real as facts. To have ‘no shade of quality' escape one’s awareness is an achievement of cognition, an apprehension of what is actually out there. Feeling is a way of knowing; to which we can add that imaginative writing (fictional and autobiographical writing and poetry) can be a way of articulating that feeling/knowledge, an alternative way to the discursive statement conventionally associated with knowledge.

The poet’s—or the child’s or adolescent’s--quick discernment, instant emotional response (or slow persistent sense) is a knowledge that can’t immediately be stated; it may be able to be stated eventually, after time, or it may not. Such knowledge can still ‘come out’, however, and make itself communicable (and thus more consciously available to the knower herself) through being written into representations of real or imagined experience, i.e. through, for instance, fiction or autobiography or poetry; or film or drawn graphic story.

"All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot [. . .] all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance."

Exactly—and this is relevant for assessment in education: the criterion for the presence of knowledge isn’t only whether we can state it (in answer to a question or in an essay); it’s also whether it functions as ‘a power’ that generates correct perceptions and prevents us seeing things wrongly. To be knowledgeable can be not to be at risk of seeing things wrongly, not to have delusions and misapprehensions; it needn’t just be to be able to say what is true.

One more thing about that quote: Smith says that George Eliot knew she had learned as much from experience as from philosophy. But note that it’s through ‘the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate's lot’ that ‘all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power’; reflection is involved, an effort to represent the experience, at least to oneself internally. In education and specifically in English, talking and writing can be a vehicle for such thought.

It’s that sort of philosophy that lay behind much important innovation in and refreshing of English teaching from the mid-1950s to the 70s. It underpinned in particular a large body of impressive children’s writing and enabled a great many students to be motivated. In the long run, it’s true, many of us who were involved in that movement have concluded that as a rationale for English it wasn’t enough. But that doesn’t mean that what’s replaced it represents progress—in some ways what we have now seems a return to ‘the day of our ignorance’ in which we stumbled about ineffectually before that burst of new thinking.

Part of what was missing is what Zadie Smith leaves out. To write Middlemarch, or to be Ladislaw’s poet, it isn’t enough to have the feeling that amounts to knowledge; you also have to be skilled in engaging with semiotic stuff—words and their multiple and slippery meanings, associations and colourings, syntax, sounds—and make an artefact with it. The arts of rhetoric come into it as well as Romantic theories of expression.

Musical comedy: just say no

I enjoyed a comment I caught on the Today programme while briefly within earshot. A man, I don’t know who, was evidently responding to criticism that people didn’t like the serious plays he wrote or directed or supported but preferred musical comedy:

‘I don’t want to see Oliver just as much as those people don’t want to see my theatre that deals with serious issues.’

Or something like that. I admire, perhaps a bit uneasily, that shameless declaration of ‘elite’ cultural tastes.