Arendt and English

Been re-reading The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. I say re-reading because marginal marks indicate I've read it before, but for all the memory I have of it I might as well not have bothered -- these days I have to make notes if I’m to get anything out of a book.

A big theme in the book is the idea of the public sphere, as opposed to both family and intimate relations on the one hand and, on the other, the general mainly work-based swirlings around that constitute ‘society’, a formation and a notion that have emerged only in modern -- post-Renaissance, scientific etc -- times. In ancient Greece, she says, there were only the prized public sphere of the polis, where men (only) could be fully human, and the despised family or household sphere where women and slaves performed the labour (including that of procreation) necessary to sustain mere animal life. Virtue, honour, morality all related to one’s conduct in the public sphere, one’s action (e.g. in war) and one’s speech (in legislative and judicial deliberation).

It’s surely those features of Greece (and of Rome -- essentially similar in its ideas and values, she says, apart from eventually losing democracy) that made classical education so irrelevant to people of my generation who got a load of it at grammar school. The likes of us were a good two centuries into a world -- society, capitalism, individualism, prizing of intimacy -- to which ancient social structures and values were irrelevant. Horace feeling fulfilled because in his poetry he’d ‘built a monument more lasting than bronze’ -- how could a British teenager be expected to care about that? Or glory in war?

The British ruling class in the 18th and 19th centuries still, it’s true, maintained its adherence to classical ideals: politicians wearing togas in their statues, Parliament seeing itself as the equal of the Roman Senate and so on. But that adherence was already being undermined by the quite different set of ideas, values and preoccupations embodied in the new novels, such as those of Fielding and Richardson.

So, classics being no longer capable of performing its traditional educational function, English had to be invented -- though it took some time for novels to gain the valued position within it that they now, rightly, hold.

Words, not things

When I was at Leeds in the 1980s working on Technical and Vocational Education, one of my bosses was Professor David Layton. He’d written a brilliant book in 1973, Science for the People, which I read, and while clearing out his office before retirement he found he had a spare copy and gave me one, signed. Work I’ve beem doing recently on English made me go back to it.

The subject is the ‘science of common things’, a form of science education developed by Richard Dawes in the 1840s and 50s for the elementary school in his rural parish in King’s Somborne, Hampshire. This was science done on the objects and processes that were familiar to the children from their agricultural environment, their fathers’ work as labourers on the farms and the mothers’ work in the home. Dawes used knowledge from physics and chemistry to supplement the children’s observation and experiment, with the aim of giving them useful knowledge that would make their lives more interesting and their future work both more effective and more meaningful to them. By developing their powers of investigation and reasoning, this education would enhance their self-respect and make them better citizens and Christians. An admirer and collaborator, Henry Moseley, HMI, observed that Dawes's was a curriculum which 'deals with reason rather than with facts, and with things rather than with words'.

Elite education has mostly been concerned with words rather than things, or with abstract form rather than with concrete substance. It struck me how true this was of my own archaic classical education. It was entirely about words and their arrangement. Words, not meanings except the dictionary meaning of items of vocabulary; words and their arrangement rather than their use to affect situations (except the awarding of marks). The making of texts, not doing stuff in the world.

That was the lessons taught by the classics department. English Literature was more meaningful because inevitably more about the meanings of, for instance, characters’ actions.

What my friends on the ‘science side’ got (we were unbelievably specialised from the age of 12) was the sort of science that by 1860 had won the brief battle with Dawes’s science of common things. Grammar school science was very much about abstract structures and very little about the physical and chemical processes one might be involved with in everyday life; in so far as any concrete ‘common things’ found their way into the lab, they were there merely as contingent instances of universal abstract forms and laws.

It has, of course, been this (gentlemanly) prizing of the verbal, the symbolic and the abstract over concrete and specific realities that has confined practical education in England to its permanent low status -- a point when David made insistently throughout his career, and latterly in his one-man campaign for serious education in technology: technology as doing stuff with stuff, that is, not as computers.

The bland youth of Waitrose

I'm struck by the faces of the teenage workforce that helps in Waitrose on evenings and weekends. Or rather, I'm struck by how I'm not struck. The faces seem characterless, unformed, blank, untouched by experience.

Waitrose is generally a middle class supermarket; my branch certainly is, judging not least by the number of Daily Mails they sell. Their teenage help seems to be in the same mould; I'd guess they were students from suburban grammar school sixth forms or a sixth form college. ‘Nice kids, but a bit boring’ is the description that springs to mind.

The contrast is extreme with the cockney teenagers I taught in a central South London borough. Their faces (boys’ particularly) were full of character, Dickensian, mobile, expressive; they looked like clowns, rogues, happy chappies, shrewd geezers, bon viveurs. A caricaturist would have had no trouble with them. They were adult faces without the wear and tear.; they had, you felt, begun real life earlier. In dealing with them you knew where you were by their faces.

What accounts for the class difference in youthful faces? I don’t know but some possibilities occur to me. Is the density of social encounters higher in working class areas? does a person interact with more others in the course of the day? Middle class students certainly do more homework and spent less of their evenings and weekend outside the home (and the sporting venues, music lessons etc to which they’re ferried). Where they aren’t is on the street and in the pubs, shopping centres and arcades. As a working class kid perhaps the range of your encounters is wider: for instance, being out more you might meet more adults other than parents and teachers: uncles and other relatives (extended families) for a start, and then all the shopkeepers, security guards, bar staff, dealers, teenage gangs and police whose domain is public spaces. Perhaps you need a repertoire of facial expressions for the range of situations, along with a stock of verbal responses; you learn to make your face reinforce your words.

Is there something in Bernstein’s ‘restricted code’ idea? If some people’s words express their meaning only in a general and not very differentiated way -- if less of the meaning they want to convey is contained in the words -- they may need to rely more on other channels. These include tone of voice, gesture, stance and facial expression. So in all these you learn to be versatile and, literally, expressive.

Contrast your grammar school student who lives a rather monkish or nunnish existence, isolated for hours in a bedroom at home or head down in imposed silence in a classroom. The semiotic traffic of such a person is relatively less with other individuals and more with symbol systems: written texts, mathematical symbols, diagrams; and at the meaning level with facts and abstractions, concepts and ideas.

The level of sheer life of our bookish student -- the intensity of his or her experience -- may well be no lower than that of our kid on the streets but, involving little interaction with people, has no particular call to find expression in the face. Behind those bland, unformed faces will be a great many exciting young thinkers, dreaming and grappling and interpreting and theorising like mad as they restock the baked beans. Meanwhile the minds of which those animated working class faces seem to be an expression are often, I think -- again relatively -- uninteresting and unformed.

Montaigne on writing

I've been looking at Montaigne’s Essays, because they’re so often mentioned as special. Dipping into one I thought how modern it seemed, yet I knew Montaigne was a French classic and even assumed in my ignorance that he was 17th or even 18th century. Not a bit of it: 1533-92 – a generation before Shakespeare. The Essays are lively, opinionated and personal; they seem to open the way for all sorts of developments in English, many of them centuries later. (I believe the line of transmission was something like Montaigne-Bacon-Dryden-Addison and Steele -- and then there’s no stopping English essayists.)

Here’s a chunk, from ‘On some lines of Virgil’. It’s about writing, one of the themes of this blog – of interest, perhaps, to those concerned with English teaching.

The essay is full of Latin quotes. Montaigne has earlier cited the lines of Virgil mentioned in the title, and he’s just quoted Lucretius. The words he refers to in the first sentence come from both. (It doesn't matter if you don't understand them; the point is the way Montaigne thinks about words. If there’s demand from the classics-thirsty I’ll be pleased to supply the Latin, + the provided translation.)

I'll offer some comments after the passage.

When I chew over those words, rejicit, pascit, inhians, and then molli fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and Lucretius' noble circunfusa mother to Virgil's elegant infusus, I feel contempt for those little sallies and verbal sports which have been born since then. Those fine poets had no need for smart and cunning word-play; their style is full, pregnant with a sustained and natural power. With them not the tail only but everything is epigram: head, breast and feet. Nothing is strained. Nothing drags. Everything progresses steadily on its course: 'Contextus totus virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.' [The whole texture of their work is virile: they were not concerned with little purple passages.] Here is not merely gentle eloquence where nothing offends: it is solid and has sinews; it does not so much please you as invade you and enrapture you. And the stronger the mind the more it enraptures it. When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well but thought well. It is the audacity of the conception which fills the words and makes them soar: 'Pectus est quod dissertum facit.'[It is the mind which makes for good style.] Nowadays when men say judgement they mean style, and rich concepts are but beautiful words.

Descriptions such as these are not produced by skilful hands but by having the subject vividly stamped upon the soul. Gallus writes straightforwardly because his concepts are straightforward. Horace is not satisfied with some superficial vividness; that would betray his sense; he sees further and more clearly into his subject: to describe itself his mind goes fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words and figures of speech; as his concepts surpass the ordinary, it is not ordinary words that he needs…. The same applies here: the sense discovers and begets the words, which cease to be breath but flesh and blood. They signify more than they say….

When I am writing I can well do without the company and memory of my books lest they interfere with my style.… But I cannot free myself from Plutarch so easily. He is so all-embracing, so rich that for all occasions, no matter how extravagant a subject you have chosen, he insinuates himself into your work, lending you a hand generous with riches, an unfailing source of adornments. It irritates me that those who pillage him may also be pillaging me: I cannot spend the slightest time in his company without walking off with a slice of breast or a wing.

For this project of mine it is also appropriate that I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord's Prayer let alone proper French. I might have done it better somewhere else, but this work would then have been less mine: and its main aim and perfection consists in being mine, exactly. I may correct an accidental slip (I am full of them, since I run on regardless) but it would be an act of treachery to remove such imperfections as are commonly and always in me. When it is said to me, or I say to myself. 'Your figures of speech are sown too densely'; 'This word here is pure Gascon'; 'This is a hazardous expression' - I reject no expressions which are used in the streets of France: those who want to fight usage with grammar are silly - 'Here is an ignorant development'; 'Here your argument is paradoxical'; 'This one is too insane'; 'You are often playing about; people will think that you are serious when you are only pretending': 'Yes,' I reply, 'but I correct only careless errors not customary ones. Do I not always talk like that? Am I not portraying myself to the life? If so, that suffices! I have achieved what I wanted to: everyone recognizes me in my book and my book in me.'
Michel de Montaigne (1993/1580-95), The Essays: a selection, translated by M. A. Screech, Penguin Classics, pp.299-302

My reactions:

1. What an independent mind, insisting on displaying himself warts and all, including (in this essay) all sorts about the lusts of old age. He often feels 20th century, his honesty and desire to be open reminding me of, say, Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger.

2. His notion of writing seems to anticipate the Romantics: powerful language comes not from fastidious attention to language (artful rhetorical crafting, as practised by his despised recent writers) but from the pressure of thoughts and intentions.

3. ‘Concepts’, images, thoughts, ideas etc may not in reality have such a definite independent existence prior to their expression in language; nevertheless, Montaigne is onto a truth about our experience of expression. We often have a ‘felt sense’, as someone called it, of something pressing for verbal articulation and then, indeed, we go‘fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words andfigures of speech’, to find the formulation that fits. (Must look up what the French word was that translates ‘concepts’.)

4. On fancy writing, compare the architect Adolf Loos: ‘Ornament is a crime’. King's Cross, not St Pancras. A real modern spirit, there.

5. Like the Romantics (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, e.g.) Montaigne values the language of ‘real life’ over that of books (though he can’t help himself imitating Plutarch).

6. His prizing of the Greek and Latin classics above the moderns. Although it seems that his knowledge of Plutarch, who wrote in Greek, came from a French translation (by Amyot), the power of Plutarch’s ‘concepts’ was such as to shape even a translator’s French into a language of unsurpassed power. For us, so much prose and poetry of quality have been written since antiquity that the ancient writers aren’t such an overwhelming inspiration. But in Montaigne’s time this wasn’t so – if you wanted to experience what language could do at full stretch, you went to Latin (which was Montaigne’s first language: his parents arranged it that Latin was all he was exposed to in his early years).

It wasn’t just a matter of language. As worked out in their writing, the thinking of the Greeks and Romans was more subtle, delicate and intelligent than anything to be found in French and English in the 16th century – or so it was thought. The education of a gentleman could only be in the ancient languages and literatures – what was the alternative?

I’m reminded of a book I read recently, The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy, that’s full of bits of medieval English writing, much of it by educated people. The writing struck me as like that of present-day ten-year-olds. Might write more on that, come to think of it.
Anyway: French as shaped by its native writers on their own offered too thin a resource; when infused with meanings carried across from classical texts, it became strong. (North’s Plutarch had something like a similar influence on English.)