So Michael Gove has corrected all the "culture warriors" such as myself with his customary patronisingly rude imitation of politeness. He is not banning To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men et alia. He is simply requiring that all students at GCSE "cover ... a whole Shakespeare play, poetry from 1789 including the romantics, a 19th-century novel and some fiction or drama written in the British Isles since 1914." After that they can study what they want. War and Peace maybe, or the complete works of James Joyce. After all, English teachers are quite likely to have nearly three hours a week with their students, and they will have very little else to do beyond acquiring an absolutely secure grasp of English grammar (something linguistics professors have been struggling with for decades) and addressing the "shameful" inadequacies in their ability to read and write which will no doubt still be hampering them until Mr Gove's glorious revolution has fully run its course.
There are two key points here, that make me, if anything, more despairing of Mr Gove's attitude to the teaching of English Literature than I was before I read his Telegraph statement. First, it is absolutely clear that he equates genuine engagement with and study of literature with a stamp-collector's quest to "cover" all of it. When he cites "the bests schools'" approach to studying literature it is invariably in the form of a list: "[At] King Solomon Academy, in one of the poorest parts of London, ... all children are expected to read Jane Austen, a Shakespearean pastoral comedy such as As You Like It, and a Shakespearean tragedy alongside George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, William Golding, Erich Maria Remarque and Primo Levi." There is nothing here, or anywhere else, about what children might gain from all of this reading. The key to good literature teaching, clearly, is quantity not quality. So long as you can say that you have "covered" every great classic known to (English) man then you have done literature, and can presumably move on.
Second there is the absolute contempt in which he holds the nation's teachers for whom he is responsible. He presents as "sad" the fact that 190,000 GCSE students last year studied Of Mice and Men whilst only 3,000 studied Pride and Prejudice, Far from the Madding Crowd or Wuthering Heights. Has he ever, I wonder, asked himself why that is?
Teachers, under pressure from all sides to deliver genuine educational outcomes in limited time and in the face of unrelenting pressure and criticism want to deliver those outcomes as efficiently and meaningfully as they can. Students at GCSE need to engage with the novel form: to understand how characters can be developed, themes established and worked through and features such as setting used to engage with those themes and characters. They can get this from studying any of the four novels Mr Gove lists, but they can get it from Of Mice and Men in about half the time that it would take with any of the others.
And would they be missing out anything significant as a result? Frankly, no. Mr Gove professes himself to be "an unabashed Americanophile" but his contempt for Of Mice and Men has clearly clouded him to its literary merits. He "read [it] and loved [it] as a child" but quite obviously does not regard it in the same light as the others he lists. And one has to ask why. Partly the reason, clearly, is that it was not "written in Britain." Then there is the fact that it was not "written before 1900." And finally there is the biggest issue: it is not LONG. A reluctant reader does not have to slave for weeks simply to get to the end of the story. And so for all these reasons he does not see it, or To Kill a Mockingbird, as important literary texts which must be "covered" to ensure an adequate grounding in the classics.
So Mr Gove, who sees an absolute antithesis between the enjoyment and the study of literature, believes the first duty of English teachers to be to teach students the stoic value of persistence in "covering" the maximum range of English Literature. And worse still he condemns as feckless and lazy "culture warriors" anyone who tries instead to engage students with books and bring them into the community of those who, unlike our Education Secretary, read and study literature for the intellectual stimulation, emotional engagement and sheer pleasure that that can bring.
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 May 2014
Monday, 26 May 2014
Of Mice, Mockingbirds and unhappy little men
So, as has been widely reported, a number of texts are being dropped from exam boards' English Literature GCSE syllabuses reportedly following pressure from Michael Gove. There really is no point me entering the (pretty one-sided) debate about how retrograde a step this is for the nation's children. Instead I should like to speculate as to why he should have done such a thing.
The reasons put forward are pretty much what we have come to expect from such an original and forward-looking thinker: that the old syllabuses were not rigorous enough (that bloody word again) and that they did not give sufficient weight to the English cannon of great authors. So pretty much the same reasons as Gove presented for his 1066 and All That history curriculum. The serried ranks of academics telling him those changes were idiotic, counter-intellectual and damaging clearly seemed to spur him on, so we are to get more of the same as regards English Literature. However he does not have the excuse of willful ignorance this time: I learned with astonishment recently that Mr Gove studied English Literature at University.
Nevertheless, English Literature is a subject on which Mr Gove seems to have been uncharacteristically reticent, at least in public. In his great speech of May 2013 (which will surely go down in the annals as the first true evidence that a genius walked amongst us) there is actually very little clear discussion of what was wrong with the then-current English Literature syllabuses. As I see it he presents three main arguments:
1) That Middlemarch is a better book than Twilight
2) That it is "depressing" that so many students study Of Mice and Men, An Inspector Calls, Pygmalion and Hobson's Choice
3) That (except in what he calls "the very best schools") very few students study works from what he calls the Great Tradition of English Literature (capitals his)
Of these, number 1 is clearly specious and not worth spending time discussing, except insofar as to point out that what Twilight resembles above anything else is the 18th Century Gothic horrors satirised by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. The 21st Century does not hold the monopoly on trash.
Leaving aside for now the merits of the texts he lists in 2, clearly it cannot of itself be depressing that large numbers of students study a small number of books. This could, logically, only be depressing were number 3 a genuine concern. Unless he thinks there is something actively bad or dangerous about students engaging with texts that explore the terrible consequences of poverty...
So to number 3. The texts that he implies it is depressing that more 15 and 16-year-olds do not study at school are Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Far from the Madding Crowd and She Stoops to Conquer. An odd collection in many ways.
I can remember little about She Stoops to Conquer, except that it is a pretty lightweight comedy of manners without particularly significant literary merit and no contemporary relevance. The novels cited are all worthy of study, though in very different ways, but I really cannot see their merits as means to engage students in either the detailed study or the passionate engagement with texts. Pride and Prejudice has an ironic detachment of tone that it is clearly possible for readers to miss entirely (or how would Colin Firth be cast as Darcy and then be filmed emerging half-naked from a lake?) Teenagers would, I think, be particularly prone to read both it and Wuthering Heights as the love stories that actually neither truly is, thus entirely missing the point.
What these texts do have in common, and how they differ from the texts Mr Gove finds "depressing" is that they are long, occasionally dull and sometimes difficult for any but the most literate to engage with. Which, it seems, is the attraction. For Mr Gove, the study of literature should be rigorous (read hard work and not particularly enjoyable). Of Mice and Men is not rigorous because it is short and readable.
Yet Of Mice and Men for all its brevity (because of its brevity in fact) richly rewards close study with its efficient characterisation, its narrative foreshadowing and its inspired use of symbolism in the description of setting. It is something students can get their teeth into and find real meat almost straight away. That is why teachers love using it with classes- because taught well it leaves students with a real understanding of what literature can do and a hunger to read more.
There is meat in the longer novels of the Great Tradition... too, but it is often harder to find and you have to chew longer to get to it. And to be frank, sometimes once you get there you discover that it was barely worth the effort. If I want to read something that really engages with the plight of the industrialised working classes I will walk (nay, run) past the entire Dickens canon and reread one of Gove's "depressing" texts, An Inspector Calls. Not because it is an easier or shorter read (though clearly it is) but because it is better.
Yet the only conclusion I can come to is that the question of whether a literary text is any good or not is simply not an issue with Mr Gove. Aside from the patently absurd comparison of Twilight with Middlemarch he presents no meaningful argument as to the comparative literary merit of any of the texts he mentions. The texts he criticises are to be banished because
a) they are short
b) too many students currently read and enjoy them
c) in "the best schools" (whatever they are) students study them at Primary level
None of these is an argument about literary merit or lack thereof.
So why get rid of them? Well, the key is b), I think. These are books students enjoy and get reward from studying. Hence, of course, not RIGOROUS enough.
The picture emerging is of Mr Gove as a very unhappy little man indeed. He studied English Literature at University and apparently reached the conclusion that any text that students enjoy and get reward from studying is to be distrusted.
Listen, Mr Gove, please. Just because you clearly hated studying literature and found it an unpleasant and unrewarding struggle, that does not mean that everyone has to suffer the same torment. Pleasure in studying great books is not inimical with rigour. Short, readable books can be just as worthy of study as long, unreadable ones. And the only sure way to bring about the demise of the Great Tradition of English Literature is to turn it into a masochistic obstacle course that all teenagers must traverse.
The reasons put forward are pretty much what we have come to expect from such an original and forward-looking thinker: that the old syllabuses were not rigorous enough (that bloody word again) and that they did not give sufficient weight to the English cannon of great authors. So pretty much the same reasons as Gove presented for his 1066 and All That history curriculum. The serried ranks of academics telling him those changes were idiotic, counter-intellectual and damaging clearly seemed to spur him on, so we are to get more of the same as regards English Literature. However he does not have the excuse of willful ignorance this time: I learned with astonishment recently that Mr Gove studied English Literature at University.
Nevertheless, English Literature is a subject on which Mr Gove seems to have been uncharacteristically reticent, at least in public. In his great speech of May 2013 (which will surely go down in the annals as the first true evidence that a genius walked amongst us) there is actually very little clear discussion of what was wrong with the then-current English Literature syllabuses. As I see it he presents three main arguments:
1) That Middlemarch is a better book than Twilight
2) That it is "depressing" that so many students study Of Mice and Men, An Inspector Calls, Pygmalion and Hobson's Choice
3) That (except in what he calls "the very best schools") very few students study works from what he calls the Great Tradition of English Literature (capitals his)
Of these, number 1 is clearly specious and not worth spending time discussing, except insofar as to point out that what Twilight resembles above anything else is the 18th Century Gothic horrors satirised by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. The 21st Century does not hold the monopoly on trash.
Leaving aside for now the merits of the texts he lists in 2, clearly it cannot of itself be depressing that large numbers of students study a small number of books. This could, logically, only be depressing were number 3 a genuine concern. Unless he thinks there is something actively bad or dangerous about students engaging with texts that explore the terrible consequences of poverty...
So to number 3. The texts that he implies it is depressing that more 15 and 16-year-olds do not study at school are Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Far from the Madding Crowd and She Stoops to Conquer. An odd collection in many ways.
I can remember little about She Stoops to Conquer, except that it is a pretty lightweight comedy of manners without particularly significant literary merit and no contemporary relevance. The novels cited are all worthy of study, though in very different ways, but I really cannot see their merits as means to engage students in either the detailed study or the passionate engagement with texts. Pride and Prejudice has an ironic detachment of tone that it is clearly possible for readers to miss entirely (or how would Colin Firth be cast as Darcy and then be filmed emerging half-naked from a lake?) Teenagers would, I think, be particularly prone to read both it and Wuthering Heights as the love stories that actually neither truly is, thus entirely missing the point.
What these texts do have in common, and how they differ from the texts Mr Gove finds "depressing" is that they are long, occasionally dull and sometimes difficult for any but the most literate to engage with. Which, it seems, is the attraction. For Mr Gove, the study of literature should be rigorous (read hard work and not particularly enjoyable). Of Mice and Men is not rigorous because it is short and readable.
Yet Of Mice and Men for all its brevity (because of its brevity in fact) richly rewards close study with its efficient characterisation, its narrative foreshadowing and its inspired use of symbolism in the description of setting. It is something students can get their teeth into and find real meat almost straight away. That is why teachers love using it with classes- because taught well it leaves students with a real understanding of what literature can do and a hunger to read more.
There is meat in the longer novels of the Great Tradition... too, but it is often harder to find and you have to chew longer to get to it. And to be frank, sometimes once you get there you discover that it was barely worth the effort. If I want to read something that really engages with the plight of the industrialised working classes I will walk (nay, run) past the entire Dickens canon and reread one of Gove's "depressing" texts, An Inspector Calls. Not because it is an easier or shorter read (though clearly it is) but because it is better.
Yet the only conclusion I can come to is that the question of whether a literary text is any good or not is simply not an issue with Mr Gove. Aside from the patently absurd comparison of Twilight with Middlemarch he presents no meaningful argument as to the comparative literary merit of any of the texts he mentions. The texts he criticises are to be banished because
a) they are short
b) too many students currently read and enjoy them
c) in "the best schools" (whatever they are) students study them at Primary level
None of these is an argument about literary merit or lack thereof.
So why get rid of them? Well, the key is b), I think. These are books students enjoy and get reward from studying. Hence, of course, not RIGOROUS enough.
The picture emerging is of Mr Gove as a very unhappy little man indeed. He studied English Literature at University and apparently reached the conclusion that any text that students enjoy and get reward from studying is to be distrusted.
Listen, Mr Gove, please. Just because you clearly hated studying literature and found it an unpleasant and unrewarding struggle, that does not mean that everyone has to suffer the same torment. Pleasure in studying great books is not inimical with rigour. Short, readable books can be just as worthy of study as long, unreadable ones. And the only sure way to bring about the demise of the Great Tradition of English Literature is to turn it into a masochistic obstacle course that all teenagers must traverse.
Sunday, 20 October 2013
The role of the internet in polarising opinion
In a recent TV programme, Frost on Satire, the American satirist Bill Maher was interviewed and the interviewer mentioned his quotation about the US that, "This country is not overrun with rebels & free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep & conformists." Maher went on to say that communities are often polarised, giving the average American "no reason to leave his echo chamber." The focus of the programme was of course on satire, and Maher was followed by Ian Hislop, who argued (much as I have in a previous post) that the main function of satire is not to change opinion but to validate and harden it. However Maher's comment got me thinking about a wider point about the internet in general.
I'm not sure that anyone predicted it in advance, but what the internet has done almost more than anything else is to provide a platform for vast numbers of people across the world to air their opinions in public. Any news article, any video, indeed almost anything on the internet is now followed by reams of comments, tallies of Facebook likes and Google +1s and streams of Twitter posts. All this, of course, provides an unrivalled opportunity for lively debate and the democratisation of opinion-giving and is thus a GOOD THING (to quote Sellar and Yateman). However, note that I said opinion-giving and not opinion-forming, because like satire I think such stuff will always tend to validate and harden opinion rather than forming it.
You see, the distinguishing feature of such internet-based comment, when compared with almost every form of public comment that predated the internet, is shortness- both of the pieces themselves and of the time taken to write them. Twitter is limited in length of its nature of course, but comment pieces tend to be equally short, and if they are not then they are usually truncated, with a "see more" link that few people probably ever use. Also, such pieces tend to offer a single (often fairly extreme) point of view- hardly surprising since they are generally probably fired off in a fit of rage/enthusiasm/irritation/exasperation. It is rare for a comment to start "You make a number of good points, @fascisttroll, but I would like to pick you up on one detail..."
Indeed it would seem that what the internet has done is to refine the ability of the general public to produce and respond to oneliners. Twitter seems precisely designed to limit each tweet to a single pithily expressed point, and memes can combine text and imagery to produce oneliners that are shorter, more focussed and at least as funny as anything that predated their invention.
However there is a big difference between oneliners and debate. In fact since time immemorial oneliners have been used to end rather than to further debate. You may have heard of the wonderful putdown attributed to Andrew Lang, "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination," but do you have any idea of the subject of the debate in the context of which it was presumably used? Done well, oneliners are of course brilliant, and can demolish an idea in seconds. Who could argue for the more arcane features of traditional English grammar, such as never putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, after Winston Churchill's famous "this is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put"?
Oneliners are of course often used to attack a person's reputation, and where they appear to us justified (the comment about Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them" is a personal favourite) they are brilliant. However they can be cruel too. Churchill was famous for his character assassinations, such as "he was a modest man with much to be modest about," and Mark Twain's comment "I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." is, when you think about it, downright nasty. Best of course is where two artists of the oneliner go head-to-head: when GBS wrote to Churchill "“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one,” Churchill replied "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”
All of which is slightly off-topic of course. And that is fundamentally my point. The internet-based fora for "debate" do not in fact encourage such digression. If anyone started reading this blog entry in the first place they will probably have clicked away by now. The form of communication fostered by such media as Twitter and comment strands is characterised by speed and immediacy. Pieces are produced swiftly to make a single point, and read as quickly, most of the audience having already framed their personal viewpoint and looking for comments either to agree with (handily, you can often click "like" to register your agreement) or fulminate against. This is new: previously the process by which any statement of opinion appeared in the public domain took time. Even newspaper editors had to write their pieces, have them sub-edited, review them, place them on the page and wait fro them to be printed and distributed. Simple members of the public could only "write in" and hope that their piece would appear in the next day's paper at the earliest.
All of which is fine of course, and the internet has indeed democratised the process of opinion-giving to an extent I would never have predicted. No longer do our opinions come solely from politicians interviewed on the evening news or editorials in newspapers.
However there is a form of debate that the internet does not appear as yet to have fomented, and I think that is a shame. This is the sort of debate where contributors take time to formulate subtle and complex statements of opinion and take time also to absorb, consider and reflect on the contributions of others. As a child I attended Quaker meetings with my family and the one "rule" that I remember is that, if someone has spoken, nobody may respond immediately. There has to be a time of silence between contributions for those present to reflect on what has been said. And of course such silence is not encouraged on the internet. Indeed the opposite is often the case. Should you ever have found yourself following a lively interchange of opinions on a comment thread you will know that if you do not respond IMMEDIATELY then the thread will have moved on by the time your response is posted and it will look completely irrelevant.
It may seem a non-sequitor, but there is a relevance here to poetry. There are poems, such as haikus for instance, that are as short as tweets. However even they they were not produced as quickly, and as a result can have a subtlety that tweets never approach, and promote contemplation rather than instant reaction:
"rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart."
And only slightly longer poems can be constructed to engage the reader in a journey of thought which challenges their preconceptions and encourages deep and repeated reflection, often ending in a surprising place. Shakespeare's most famous sonnet begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and draws the reader in by purporting to be a poem about love. Yet by the end he has made the reflective reader think instead about how we form unattainable ideas about people we love, and about the nature and longevity of poetry itself. Show me a comment piece in an internet discussion that does anything similar. Of course, there may be several, but no-one would know, because no-one would have bothered to read to the end, let alone to reread and reflect on the whole piece.
I would like to end on a piece that combines poetry with comment on a political issue and shows the sort of comment that no-one would engage with if it appeared on the internet. And indeed feel free to click away now and scroll through the pages of comments that follow whatever news story is prominent right now.
The piece is Easter, 1916 by WB Yeats and is about the Easter Rising, which many have taken as the start point of the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeats was originally a supporter of the Republicans and had long been in love with Maude Gonne, the estranged wife of John MacBride. Countess Markievicz was a long-time friend, though he is not particularly nice about her at the start of the second stanza.
The point about the poem though is the way that it takes a hugely inflammatory topic (the justifiability of violence in pursuit of a cause) and rather than arguing a single point of view it reflects on a range of issues. Its conclusion, such as it is, is the prescient but hardly simplistic line "a terrible beauty is born."
One of the ways that Yeats "debates" the issues involved is through his use of imagery, particularly in the third stanza. Using the extraordinary power of connotations he causes us to reflect on the image of the stone in the stream. The stone is the vehicle of this image, the tenor being the notion of a band of single-minded revolutionaries living in the midst of a world of more nuanced opinions. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not straightforward here though, and the grounds subtle and complex, so it is really not clear at the end where Yeats' sympathies lie.
All of which might sound, in today's internet-based world, like woolly, waffly pontification without focus and direction. Yet for me Easter 1916 gives more space and encouragement for thought on a range of issues from Irish Republicanism to jihadist terrorism than thousands of oneliner comment thread contributions. Read it yourself, and see if you agree:
Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
I'm not sure that anyone predicted it in advance, but what the internet has done almost more than anything else is to provide a platform for vast numbers of people across the world to air their opinions in public. Any news article, any video, indeed almost anything on the internet is now followed by reams of comments, tallies of Facebook likes and Google +1s and streams of Twitter posts. All this, of course, provides an unrivalled opportunity for lively debate and the democratisation of opinion-giving and is thus a GOOD THING (to quote Sellar and Yateman). However, note that I said opinion-giving and not opinion-forming, because like satire I think such stuff will always tend to validate and harden opinion rather than forming it.
You see, the distinguishing feature of such internet-based comment, when compared with almost every form of public comment that predated the internet, is shortness- both of the pieces themselves and of the time taken to write them. Twitter is limited in length of its nature of course, but comment pieces tend to be equally short, and if they are not then they are usually truncated, with a "see more" link that few people probably ever use. Also, such pieces tend to offer a single (often fairly extreme) point of view- hardly surprising since they are generally probably fired off in a fit of rage/enthusiasm/irritation/exasperation. It is rare for a comment to start "You make a number of good points, @fascisttroll, but I would like to pick you up on one detail..."
Indeed it would seem that what the internet has done is to refine the ability of the general public to produce and respond to oneliners. Twitter seems precisely designed to limit each tweet to a single pithily expressed point, and memes can combine text and imagery to produce oneliners that are shorter, more focussed and at least as funny as anything that predated their invention.
However there is a big difference between oneliners and debate. In fact since time immemorial oneliners have been used to end rather than to further debate. You may have heard of the wonderful putdown attributed to Andrew Lang, "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts… for support rather than illumination," but do you have any idea of the subject of the debate in the context of which it was presumably used? Done well, oneliners are of course brilliant, and can demolish an idea in seconds. Who could argue for the more arcane features of traditional English grammar, such as never putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, after Winston Churchill's famous "this is the sort of criticism up with which I will not put"?
Oneliners are of course often used to attack a person's reputation, and where they appear to us justified (the comment about Nixon: "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears but by diligent hard work, he overcame them" is a personal favourite) they are brilliant. However they can be cruel too. Churchill was famous for his character assassinations, such as "he was a modest man with much to be modest about," and Mark Twain's comment "I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." is, when you think about it, downright nasty. Best of course is where two artists of the oneliner go head-to-head: when GBS wrote to Churchill "“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one,” Churchill replied "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”
All of which is slightly off-topic of course. And that is fundamentally my point. The internet-based fora for "debate" do not in fact encourage such digression. If anyone started reading this blog entry in the first place they will probably have clicked away by now. The form of communication fostered by such media as Twitter and comment strands is characterised by speed and immediacy. Pieces are produced swiftly to make a single point, and read as quickly, most of the audience having already framed their personal viewpoint and looking for comments either to agree with (handily, you can often click "like" to register your agreement) or fulminate against. This is new: previously the process by which any statement of opinion appeared in the public domain took time. Even newspaper editors had to write their pieces, have them sub-edited, review them, place them on the page and wait fro them to be printed and distributed. Simple members of the public could only "write in" and hope that their piece would appear in the next day's paper at the earliest.
All of which is fine of course, and the internet has indeed democratised the process of opinion-giving to an extent I would never have predicted. No longer do our opinions come solely from politicians interviewed on the evening news or editorials in newspapers.
However there is a form of debate that the internet does not appear as yet to have fomented, and I think that is a shame. This is the sort of debate where contributors take time to formulate subtle and complex statements of opinion and take time also to absorb, consider and reflect on the contributions of others. As a child I attended Quaker meetings with my family and the one "rule" that I remember is that, if someone has spoken, nobody may respond immediately. There has to be a time of silence between contributions for those present to reflect on what has been said. And of course such silence is not encouraged on the internet. Indeed the opposite is often the case. Should you ever have found yourself following a lively interchange of opinions on a comment thread you will know that if you do not respond IMMEDIATELY then the thread will have moved on by the time your response is posted and it will look completely irrelevant.
It may seem a non-sequitor, but there is a relevance here to poetry. There are poems, such as haikus for instance, that are as short as tweets. However even they they were not produced as quickly, and as a result can have a subtlety that tweets never approach, and promote contemplation rather than instant reaction:
"rain falls on the grass,
filling the ruts left by
the festival cart."
And only slightly longer poems can be constructed to engage the reader in a journey of thought which challenges their preconceptions and encourages deep and repeated reflection, often ending in a surprising place. Shakespeare's most famous sonnet begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and draws the reader in by purporting to be a poem about love. Yet by the end he has made the reflective reader think instead about how we form unattainable ideas about people we love, and about the nature and longevity of poetry itself. Show me a comment piece in an internet discussion that does anything similar. Of course, there may be several, but no-one would know, because no-one would have bothered to read to the end, let alone to reread and reflect on the whole piece.
I would like to end on a piece that combines poetry with comment on a political issue and shows the sort of comment that no-one would engage with if it appeared on the internet. And indeed feel free to click away now and scroll through the pages of comments that follow whatever news story is prominent right now.
The piece is Easter, 1916 by WB Yeats and is about the Easter Rising, which many have taken as the start point of the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeats was originally a supporter of the Republicans and had long been in love with Maude Gonne, the estranged wife of John MacBride. Countess Markievicz was a long-time friend, though he is not particularly nice about her at the start of the second stanza.
The point about the poem though is the way that it takes a hugely inflammatory topic (the justifiability of violence in pursuit of a cause) and rather than arguing a single point of view it reflects on a range of issues. Its conclusion, such as it is, is the prescient but hardly simplistic line "a terrible beauty is born."
One of the ways that Yeats "debates" the issues involved is through his use of imagery, particularly in the third stanza. Using the extraordinary power of connotations he causes us to reflect on the image of the stone in the stream. The stone is the vehicle of this image, the tenor being the notion of a band of single-minded revolutionaries living in the midst of a world of more nuanced opinions. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not straightforward here though, and the grounds subtle and complex, so it is really not clear at the end where Yeats' sympathies lie.
All of which might sound, in today's internet-based world, like woolly, waffly pontification without focus and direction. Yet for me Easter 1916 gives more space and encouragement for thought on a range of issues from Irish Republicanism to jihadist terrorism than thousands of oneliner comment thread contributions. Read it yourself, and see if you agree:
Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
W. B. Yeats
Sunday, 29 September 2013
What my favourite poets have to say about death
I am not a great reader of poetry, but there are poets I have studied and taught, and written about in this blog (here for instance) who seem able to use language to reveal profound truths about the world. So it is perhaps natural, as I have struggled to come to terms with the death of my wife, that I should consider what my three favourites, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wilfred Owen, have to say about death. They are my favourites on the basis of their unmatched skill in tapping the richness of the connotations of words, whether through imagery or through alliteration, assonance, rhyme and rhythm, but as I frequently used to explain to students it is impossible to separate style and content and in fact all three explore profound concepts about the nature of existence.
So what of death? Of the three, Owen was no doubt most closely acquainted with the realities of death, but it is remarkable in a sense how little he has to say on the topic. His subject, as he explains in the Preface to his poems is "War, and the Pity of War. The poetry is in the Pity." He is much concerned with the dead, writing with elegiac sadness in Anthem for Doomed Youth for instance of the countless thousands who "die as cattle" and with the process of dying, focusing with brutal clarity in poems such as the Sentry or Dulce et Decorum Est on its painful realities.
However it seems that death itself is too vast a concept for someone as thoughtful and perceptive as Owen to attempt to define or even evoke. When he does tackle the subject he seems always to tail off into questions and inconclusiveness and even unfinished sentences. In Asleep, after wondering what has happened to the soldier in death he concludes, "Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!" and the questioning at the end of Futility is profounder still: "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth's sleep at all?"
In Strange Meeting Owen does tackle the subject head-on with a dreamlike evocation of a conversation in some strange pre-Christian vision of hell with a soldier whom he has killed. Yet here too he comes to no conclusions and ends on an unfinished line: "let us sleep now...". Perhaps Owen was more concerned with the horrors of life than the unknowable mysteries of death. In Spring Offensive, having described the many ways in which soldiers die, his thoughts in the end are with "The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,/ ... And crawling slowly back, have by degrees /Regained cool peaceful air in wonder"- namely the survivors- and again he ends with a question: "Why speak they not of comrades that went under?" Here, in asking the question he is perhaps answering it too: what in the end is there to say about death?
Owen ends Exposure with a description of the burial party retrieving the frozen corpses from no-mans-land. Here the half-rhyme of "eyes" and "ice", and the forcing together of the incongruous connotations of those two words combine with the rhythmic uncertainty of the short last line to leave a powerful statement of the inability of Owen to answer his own question:
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens."
As a devout Catholic, Gerard Manley Hopkins would be expected to have more answers on the subject of death than Wilfred Owen who, despite having initially wanted to become a priest does appear to have lost his faith over the course of the War. In most of Hopkins' poems though, death is not a subject he chooses to tackle. In his great poems like God's Grandeur and Hurrahing in Harvest he is so caught up in the magnificence and beauty of the world around him that death is far from his thoughts. However he had darker times too. In his Sonnets of Desolation Hopkins goes perhaps further than anything else I have read in exploring the darkness of despair and fear. His outcry in No worst, there is none is terrifying to anyone who recognises the experience he describes:
"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there."
On the face of it, though, his subject in these sonnets is the fear not of death but of loss of faith. Indeed he ends "No worst, there is none" with what he calls "a comfort serves in a whirlwind," namely that: "All life death does end and each day dies with sleep." Yet I cannot believe that those lines should be taken entirely at face value. Though he claims to see death as a "comfort" I challenge anyone to feel comforted by that last line. And to pursue his cliff image further, when clinging to the face of a precipitous cliff it is death one fears, not loss of faith. It is perhaps impertinent to psychoanalyse Hopkins but it seems to me that, despite what he might overtly say, his crisis of faith in the Sonnets of Desolation was brought about by his inability to find any comfort in the idea of death.
So what of Keats? Like Owen, Keats was acquainted with death He had nursed his mother and his brother Tom through the lingering "white death" of tuberculosis, only to succumb to the disease himself. However like Hopkins, much of his poetry appears inspired by excitement and joy. Some of this, as with Hopkins, is joy in the beauty of nature but Keats also experiences something like exhilaration in the experience of literature itself. He states that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," and nowhere is this clearer than in On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, where he describes the experience of coming across a new translation:
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
and for much of his writing Keats loses himself in magnificent explorations of ancient myths and the creation of worlds of the imagination.
Of course the knowledge of death is always there, and there is a wistfulness in much of Keats' greatest poetry, whether in the mention of the "Gathering swallows [that] twitter in the skies" at the end of Ode to Autumn or the beautifully evocative description of Madeleine's candle in Eve of St Agnes: "Out went the taper as she hurried in;/Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died." Sometimes the idea of death is closer to the surface. Ode on a Grecian Urn, from which the "Beauty is truth" quotation comes, is ostensibly a poem celebrating the eternal constancy of great art, but there is an acute awareness of human mortality too, in lines such as "a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue," and though the poem concludes (of the urn) that "When old age shall this generation waste,/Thou shalt remain," Keats seems at least as concerned with the death of those of us who see the object now as with the object's own eternal life. As a work of art it is described as "Cold Pastoral," and Keats says of the town pictured on on its reverse "thy streets for evermore/Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell/Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."
There are some poems though in which Keats explicitly addresses the idea of death and his feelings about it. The best known of these is perhaps Ode to a Nightingale, which is full of references to death. He remembers Tom's deaths in the line "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" and in describing the flowers amongst which he lies consciously evokes their funereal significance: "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,/Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,/But, in embalmed darkness...". He even admits that he has "been half in love with easeful Death." Yet there is a real ambivalence here too. The eponymous nightingale "was not born for death," and in the end the echo of the funeral service returns but its "plaintive anthem fades/ Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side," losing itself in the returning awareness of the reality and beauty of the poet's actual surroundings. Keats ends the poem with a sense of questioning that echoes Owen: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"
Another Keats poem, Ode on Melancholy is not so much about death itself as about his feelings on the subject, and for me it is one of his most remarkable. The first stanza, even more than the beginning of Nightingale, contemplates suicide and has many of the same references to the dark glamours of the idea. However the stanza begins "No, no," and Keats emphatically rejects suicide as an option, but for a fascinating reason. The problem, he feels, is that "shade to shade will come too drowsily,/And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul," and it is precisely that "wakeful anguish" that the poem goes on to celebrate. He describes melancholy in as graphic and moving a way as I have ever come across, rooting it in a series of profoundly physical experiences:
"But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;"
and concludes that Melancholy (whom he personifies as a mythical goddess) is in the end inseparably close to Beauty, Joy, Pleasure and even Delight. He counsels sufferers to embrace Melancholy in the fullness of its physical force with a truly sensual image, saying of Melancholy's shrine that it is "seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/ Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine."
So Owen, it seems, holds off any conclusive statement about death because the topic is too overwhelmingly rooted in the horror of the life he saw around him. Hopkins was perhaps too frightened, not so much of death itself as of the fact that he feared death, despite his faith. Keats saw death in everything around him and sought to come to an accommodation with it, relishing even the overwhelming physicality of melancholy.
So what of Shakespeare (well, you didn't think I'd write a blog entry like this without mentioning Shakespeare, did you)? Shakespeare certainly does not shy away from the topic, with large numbers of onstage deaths in many of his plays (10 in King Lear alone, plus the blinding of Gloucester). There are also a number of great speeches about death, so surely it ought to be possible to sum up Shakespeare's feelings on the subject.
Well, no. For a start, many of those great speeches turn out not actually to be about death. Macbeth's great "Tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy is more about the futility of life than about death. It is prompted by Macbeth hearing about the death of his wife, but all he has to say on that subject is, "She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word." Antony's famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen," speech in Julius Caesar, for all its powerful evocation of Caesar's death, is in essence a piece of demagogic rabble-rousing and nothing to do with death at all.
So what of Mark Anthony's dying speech then? On the face of it this is a much more straightforward peroration on the nature of death:
"The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
The noblest; and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman,—a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
I can no more."
but on closer examination the speech is much more about Anthony's anxieties about how he will be remembered. This is the character, after all, who a few scenes previously had confessed that "I am Anthony, yet cannot hold this visible shape," and at the moment of his death he makes a last desperate attempt to reassert his sense of who he is.
King Lear, despite the nihilistic greatness of the line "Never, never, never, never, never." faces death by attempting to deny its existence. He dies holding Cordelia in his arms, and though his daughter is clearly dead he asks for her collar to be loosened. His last words are " Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips! /Look there, look there!" and as Macbeth faces his own certain death it is the question of bravery in battle that seems to concern him more than anything else: "Lay on, Macduff,/And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'"
As in so many areas, it is Hamlet that has the most interesting things to say about death. In fact it would seem reasonable to suggest that his famous "To be or not to be" speech can be taken as Shakespeare's definitive pronouncement about death. The speech is full of grandly resonant statements about "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns," contrasting "The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to" with the "sleep" and the "quietus" that is death, though wondering also "what dreams may come" in that "sleep of death."
The speech is a great one, needless to say, and summarises a lot of how we cogitate over the nature of death. However it should not be forgotten that this speech comes near the start of the play, and part of the brilliance of Shakespeare is that his characters always grow and develop, so nothing from the start of any play should be seen as a character's (let alone the author's) definitive statement on the subject. At the start of the play, Hamlet is quite distanced from death. There is no suggestion that he has ever witnessed it himself, and though he is moved by his father's death it seems that it is the rather outré and Gothic descriptions from his father's ghost that get through to him. He is a student, and clearly given to grand philosophical statements. Almost his first speech is to emphasise just how much more authentic and important his grief is than anyone else's:
"Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
To misquote Hamlet himself, "the gentleman doth protest too much methinks ."
Over the course of the play though, Hamlet is forced to confront death, whether of those he has killed, of his fiancee Ophelia, of his mother or of himself. So one can presume that by the end of the play so thoughtful and eloquent a character must surely have something significant to say about death: something more profound and meaningful even than his "To be, or not to be" speech. There is a strong sense also that Shakespeare used Hamlet to voice ideas and thoughts that were in essence his own, so by the end of the play maybe we can hear what Shakespeare actually had to say about death.
So what are Hamlet's last words? How does he (and through him Shakespeare) sum up humankind's attitude to death? Well, we have to wait until (in an echo of Antony) he has ensured that Horatio will protect his reputation once he has gone. We also have to wait until he has, rather bizarrely, pronounced Fortinbras as his successor, but finally comes Hamlet's great statement:
"The rest is silence."
So what of death? Of the three, Owen was no doubt most closely acquainted with the realities of death, but it is remarkable in a sense how little he has to say on the topic. His subject, as he explains in the Preface to his poems is "War, and the Pity of War. The poetry is in the Pity." He is much concerned with the dead, writing with elegiac sadness in Anthem for Doomed Youth for instance of the countless thousands who "die as cattle" and with the process of dying, focusing with brutal clarity in poems such as the Sentry or Dulce et Decorum Est on its painful realities.
However it seems that death itself is too vast a concept for someone as thoughtful and perceptive as Owen to attempt to define or even evoke. When he does tackle the subject he seems always to tail off into questions and inconclusiveness and even unfinished sentences. In Asleep, after wondering what has happened to the soldier in death he concludes, "Who knows? Who hopes? Who troubles? Let it pass!" and the questioning at the end of Futility is profounder still: "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth's sleep at all?"
In Strange Meeting Owen does tackle the subject head-on with a dreamlike evocation of a conversation in some strange pre-Christian vision of hell with a soldier whom he has killed. Yet here too he comes to no conclusions and ends on an unfinished line: "let us sleep now...". Perhaps Owen was more concerned with the horrors of life than the unknowable mysteries of death. In Spring Offensive, having described the many ways in which soldiers die, his thoughts in the end are with "The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,/ ... And crawling slowly back, have by degrees /Regained cool peaceful air in wonder"- namely the survivors- and again he ends with a question: "Why speak they not of comrades that went under?" Here, in asking the question he is perhaps answering it too: what in the end is there to say about death?
Owen ends Exposure with a description of the burial party retrieving the frozen corpses from no-mans-land. Here the half-rhyme of "eyes" and "ice", and the forcing together of the incongruous connotations of those two words combine with the rhythmic uncertainty of the short last line to leave a powerful statement of the inability of Owen to answer his own question:
The burying-party, picks and shovels in their shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens."
As a devout Catholic, Gerard Manley Hopkins would be expected to have more answers on the subject of death than Wilfred Owen who, despite having initially wanted to become a priest does appear to have lost his faith over the course of the War. In most of Hopkins' poems though, death is not a subject he chooses to tackle. In his great poems like God's Grandeur and Hurrahing in Harvest he is so caught up in the magnificence and beauty of the world around him that death is far from his thoughts. However he had darker times too. In his Sonnets of Desolation Hopkins goes perhaps further than anything else I have read in exploring the darkness of despair and fear. His outcry in No worst, there is none is terrifying to anyone who recognises the experience he describes:
"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there."
On the face of it, though, his subject in these sonnets is the fear not of death but of loss of faith. Indeed he ends "No worst, there is none" with what he calls "a comfort serves in a whirlwind," namely that: "All life death does end and each day dies with sleep." Yet I cannot believe that those lines should be taken entirely at face value. Though he claims to see death as a "comfort" I challenge anyone to feel comforted by that last line. And to pursue his cliff image further, when clinging to the face of a precipitous cliff it is death one fears, not loss of faith. It is perhaps impertinent to psychoanalyse Hopkins but it seems to me that, despite what he might overtly say, his crisis of faith in the Sonnets of Desolation was brought about by his inability to find any comfort in the idea of death.
So what of Keats? Like Owen, Keats was acquainted with death He had nursed his mother and his brother Tom through the lingering "white death" of tuberculosis, only to succumb to the disease himself. However like Hopkins, much of his poetry appears inspired by excitement and joy. Some of this, as with Hopkins, is joy in the beauty of nature but Keats also experiences something like exhilaration in the experience of literature itself. He states that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know," and nowhere is this clearer than in On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, where he describes the experience of coming across a new translation:
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
and for much of his writing Keats loses himself in magnificent explorations of ancient myths and the creation of worlds of the imagination.
Of course the knowledge of death is always there, and there is a wistfulness in much of Keats' greatest poetry, whether in the mention of the "Gathering swallows [that] twitter in the skies" at the end of Ode to Autumn or the beautifully evocative description of Madeleine's candle in Eve of St Agnes: "Out went the taper as she hurried in;/Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died." Sometimes the idea of death is closer to the surface. Ode on a Grecian Urn, from which the "Beauty is truth" quotation comes, is ostensibly a poem celebrating the eternal constancy of great art, but there is an acute awareness of human mortality too, in lines such as "a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,/A burning forehead, and a parching tongue," and though the poem concludes (of the urn) that "When old age shall this generation waste,/Thou shalt remain," Keats seems at least as concerned with the death of those of us who see the object now as with the object's own eternal life. As a work of art it is described as "Cold Pastoral," and Keats says of the town pictured on on its reverse "thy streets for evermore/Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell/Why thou art desolate, can e'er return."
There are some poems though in which Keats explicitly addresses the idea of death and his feelings about it. The best known of these is perhaps Ode to a Nightingale, which is full of references to death. He remembers Tom's deaths in the line "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" and in describing the flowers amongst which he lies consciously evokes their funereal significance: "I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,/Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,/But, in embalmed darkness...". He even admits that he has "been half in love with easeful Death." Yet there is a real ambivalence here too. The eponymous nightingale "was not born for death," and in the end the echo of the funeral service returns but its "plaintive anthem fades/ Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side," losing itself in the returning awareness of the reality and beauty of the poet's actual surroundings. Keats ends the poem with a sense of questioning that echoes Owen: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?"
Another Keats poem, Ode on Melancholy is not so much about death itself as about his feelings on the subject, and for me it is one of his most remarkable. The first stanza, even more than the beginning of Nightingale, contemplates suicide and has many of the same references to the dark glamours of the idea. However the stanza begins "No, no," and Keats emphatically rejects suicide as an option, but for a fascinating reason. The problem, he feels, is that "shade to shade will come too drowsily,/And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul," and it is precisely that "wakeful anguish" that the poem goes on to celebrate. He describes melancholy in as graphic and moving a way as I have ever come across, rooting it in a series of profoundly physical experiences:
"But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;"
and concludes that Melancholy (whom he personifies as a mythical goddess) is in the end inseparably close to Beauty, Joy, Pleasure and even Delight. He counsels sufferers to embrace Melancholy in the fullness of its physical force with a truly sensual image, saying of Melancholy's shrine that it is "seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/ Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine."
So Owen, it seems, holds off any conclusive statement about death because the topic is too overwhelmingly rooted in the horror of the life he saw around him. Hopkins was perhaps too frightened, not so much of death itself as of the fact that he feared death, despite his faith. Keats saw death in everything around him and sought to come to an accommodation with it, relishing even the overwhelming physicality of melancholy.
So what of Shakespeare (well, you didn't think I'd write a blog entry like this without mentioning Shakespeare, did you)? Shakespeare certainly does not shy away from the topic, with large numbers of onstage deaths in many of his plays (10 in King Lear alone, plus the blinding of Gloucester). There are also a number of great speeches about death, so surely it ought to be possible to sum up Shakespeare's feelings on the subject.
Well, no. For a start, many of those great speeches turn out not actually to be about death. Macbeth's great "Tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy is more about the futility of life than about death. It is prompted by Macbeth hearing about the death of his wife, but all he has to say on that subject is, "She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word." Antony's famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen," speech in Julius Caesar, for all its powerful evocation of Caesar's death, is in essence a piece of demagogic rabble-rousing and nothing to do with death at all.
So what of Mark Anthony's dying speech then? On the face of it this is a much more straightforward peroration on the nature of death:
"The miserable change now at my end
Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts
In feeding them with those my former fortunes
Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,
The noblest; and do now not basely die,
Not cowardly put off my helmet to
My countryman,—a Roman by a Roman
Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is going;
I can no more."
but on closer examination the speech is much more about Anthony's anxieties about how he will be remembered. This is the character, after all, who a few scenes previously had confessed that "I am Anthony, yet cannot hold this visible shape," and at the moment of his death he makes a last desperate attempt to reassert his sense of who he is.
King Lear, despite the nihilistic greatness of the line "Never, never, never, never, never." faces death by attempting to deny its existence. He dies holding Cordelia in his arms, and though his daughter is clearly dead he asks for her collar to be loosened. His last words are " Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips! /Look there, look there!" and as Macbeth faces his own certain death it is the question of bravery in battle that seems to concern him more than anything else: "Lay on, Macduff,/And damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'"
As in so many areas, it is Hamlet that has the most interesting things to say about death. In fact it would seem reasonable to suggest that his famous "To be or not to be" speech can be taken as Shakespeare's definitive pronouncement about death. The speech is full of grandly resonant statements about "The undiscover'd country from whose bourn/No traveller returns," contrasting "The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to" with the "sleep" and the "quietus" that is death, though wondering also "what dreams may come" in that "sleep of death."
The speech is a great one, needless to say, and summarises a lot of how we cogitate over the nature of death. However it should not be forgotten that this speech comes near the start of the play, and part of the brilliance of Shakespeare is that his characters always grow and develop, so nothing from the start of any play should be seen as a character's (let alone the author's) definitive statement on the subject. At the start of the play, Hamlet is quite distanced from death. There is no suggestion that he has ever witnessed it himself, and though he is moved by his father's death it seems that it is the rather outré and Gothic descriptions from his father's ghost that get through to him. He is a student, and clearly given to grand philosophical statements. Almost his first speech is to emphasise just how much more authentic and important his grief is than anyone else's:
"Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
To misquote Hamlet himself, "the gentleman doth protest too much methinks ."
Over the course of the play though, Hamlet is forced to confront death, whether of those he has killed, of his fiancee Ophelia, of his mother or of himself. So one can presume that by the end of the play so thoughtful and eloquent a character must surely have something significant to say about death: something more profound and meaningful even than his "To be, or not to be" speech. There is a strong sense also that Shakespeare used Hamlet to voice ideas and thoughts that were in essence his own, so by the end of the play maybe we can hear what Shakespeare actually had to say about death.
So what are Hamlet's last words? How does he (and through him Shakespeare) sum up humankind's attitude to death? Well, we have to wait until (in an echo of Antony) he has ensured that Horatio will protect his reputation once he has gone. We also have to wait until he has, rather bizarrely, pronounced Fortinbras as his successor, but finally comes Hamlet's great statement:
"The rest is silence."
Monday, 3 June 2013
Michael Gove- Lord of the gnats
So, according to Michael Gove, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is “considered appropriate for primary children in the best schools,” and schools that get students to study it for GCSE are "pitching expectations so low it is no surprise that reform-minded teachers want change." Leaving aside for now the fact that this is just the latest salvo in his campaign to denigrate the vast majority of schools for which he is responsible let us examine the specifics of the charge.
The first point to make is that if they really are getting students to study Lord of the Flies at Primary level then I really worry about Mr Gove's "best schools." To reduce such a powerful and contemporarily relevant classic of modern literature to a primary school reader would demonstrate a singular lack of understanding, either of the text itself or of the nature of children, because there is simply no way that primary age children could relate to the deeper central messages of the book.
Certainly they could understand it. Like a lot of great literature Lord of the Flies is written with a beautiful simplicity of syntax and vocabulary. No doubt primary age students (particularly those in boarding schools) could relate to its theme of bullying, and perhaps too to the notion of an apparent idyll slowly descending into a dark and terrifying hell. Maybe they would recognise (or be told about) the religious symbolism, with Simon an allegory for the crucified Christ. Maybe too they would see the parody of Coral Island (though I hope to God they wouldn't have had the original forced on them), but I would imagine the teachers in some of the "best" schools would skim over the bitter attack on public-school arrogance that lies at the heart of that parody.
However even if they did notice all these aspects, without in doing so having the book die for them as a story, I think it virtually impossible that primary-age students would understand or could relate to Lord of the Flies' fundamental message. Because it is a text with genuine relevance to our times, and one that such as Mr Gove really should read more closely.
In essence, Lord of the Flies is about the dreadful, corrosive effect of fear on the fundamentals of decent society. Because in the novel, as in Western society since September 2001, it is the fear of the Beast rather than the Beast itself that leads to the breakdown of the central co-operative values of society. As in today's real world that fear leads to increased militarisation (with Jack's hunters transforming themselves into an army), to the destruction of long-treasured values of intellectual debate and free speech (symbolised in the novel by Piggy's glasses and the conch) and to the demonisation of outsiders (Simon is killed because he is not recognised as "one of them" and Ralph and Piggy once ostracised are hunted down like animals). It even leads to today's gruesome fascination with beheading as the ultimate symbol of brutality ("They've sharpened a stick at both ends.")
The horror that sparked all this off- the decaying corpse of the airman- is real, but it was never really the threat to the boys' safety and happiness on the island that they let it become. It was their fear of it, and of the unknown, that led to the terrible spiral of violence, fear and more violence. It was their fear that brutalised them and drowned out all voices of reason and moderation. It was their fear that turned routine prejudice (against Piggy, the grammar-school oik) into murderous hatred and threatened in the end to destroy them all.
The end of the novel, when the British Navy arrives on the island, is generally read as implying that the naval officer simply does not understand the hell into which these boys have descended, demonstrating a lack of imagination comparable with that of the esteemed Mr Gove ("'Fun and games,' said the officer"). That is indeed the dominant reading of the end, but I think there is another way of looking at it too. What marks the naval officer at the end out from the boys is not that he is adult, or that he is in the Navy. What matters is that he has not been caught up in the dark madness the boys' fear created on the island. In his eyes the heinous monsters become again the troupe of frightened, grubby little children that in reality they were all along.
For me, what the book is saying (and how the hell primary-age students are supposed to relate to this God alone knows) is that we need more people like the naval officer in the world. We need people who will step back from the fear and the bombast and the warmongering rhetoric and see things as they really are.
Fanatic terrorists prepared to carry out appalling acts of brutality are (as they have always been) few in number and lacking any sort of widespread support. Being made aware of their activities is as shocking as encountering the decaying, fly-covered corpse of an airman suspended in a tree. Fanatic terrorists (of whatever motivation- these have changed often over the years) are our contemporary world's Beasts. But it is not until we allow our own fundamental values to be corroded by fear of the Beast that it can really harm us. When we destroy the conch and smash Piggy's glasses, when we paint our faces and chant "Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!", when we (not they) "sharpen a stick at both ends," then we have lost. And when, as at the end of the novel, we weep "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy," we need more people who, like the officer, "was moved and a little embarrassed He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance."
What we don't need is more people like Michael Gove, who think Lord of the Flies is nothing more than an adventure story for primary kids.
The first point to make is that if they really are getting students to study Lord of the Flies at Primary level then I really worry about Mr Gove's "best schools." To reduce such a powerful and contemporarily relevant classic of modern literature to a primary school reader would demonstrate a singular lack of understanding, either of the text itself or of the nature of children, because there is simply no way that primary age children could relate to the deeper central messages of the book.
Certainly they could understand it. Like a lot of great literature Lord of the Flies is written with a beautiful simplicity of syntax and vocabulary. No doubt primary age students (particularly those in boarding schools) could relate to its theme of bullying, and perhaps too to the notion of an apparent idyll slowly descending into a dark and terrifying hell. Maybe they would recognise (or be told about) the religious symbolism, with Simon an allegory for the crucified Christ. Maybe too they would see the parody of Coral Island (though I hope to God they wouldn't have had the original forced on them), but I would imagine the teachers in some of the "best" schools would skim over the bitter attack on public-school arrogance that lies at the heart of that parody.
However even if they did notice all these aspects, without in doing so having the book die for them as a story, I think it virtually impossible that primary-age students would understand or could relate to Lord of the Flies' fundamental message. Because it is a text with genuine relevance to our times, and one that such as Mr Gove really should read more closely.
In essence, Lord of the Flies is about the dreadful, corrosive effect of fear on the fundamentals of decent society. Because in the novel, as in Western society since September 2001, it is the fear of the Beast rather than the Beast itself that leads to the breakdown of the central co-operative values of society. As in today's real world that fear leads to increased militarisation (with Jack's hunters transforming themselves into an army), to the destruction of long-treasured values of intellectual debate and free speech (symbolised in the novel by Piggy's glasses and the conch) and to the demonisation of outsiders (Simon is killed because he is not recognised as "one of them" and Ralph and Piggy once ostracised are hunted down like animals). It even leads to today's gruesome fascination with beheading as the ultimate symbol of brutality ("They've sharpened a stick at both ends.")
The horror that sparked all this off- the decaying corpse of the airman- is real, but it was never really the threat to the boys' safety and happiness on the island that they let it become. It was their fear of it, and of the unknown, that led to the terrible spiral of violence, fear and more violence. It was their fear that brutalised them and drowned out all voices of reason and moderation. It was their fear that turned routine prejudice (against Piggy, the grammar-school oik) into murderous hatred and threatened in the end to destroy them all.
The end of the novel, when the British Navy arrives on the island, is generally read as implying that the naval officer simply does not understand the hell into which these boys have descended, demonstrating a lack of imagination comparable with that of the esteemed Mr Gove ("'Fun and games,' said the officer"). That is indeed the dominant reading of the end, but I think there is another way of looking at it too. What marks the naval officer at the end out from the boys is not that he is adult, or that he is in the Navy. What matters is that he has not been caught up in the dark madness the boys' fear created on the island. In his eyes the heinous monsters become again the troupe of frightened, grubby little children that in reality they were all along.
For me, what the book is saying (and how the hell primary-age students are supposed to relate to this God alone knows) is that we need more people like the naval officer in the world. We need people who will step back from the fear and the bombast and the warmongering rhetoric and see things as they really are.
Fanatic terrorists prepared to carry out appalling acts of brutality are (as they have always been) few in number and lacking any sort of widespread support. Being made aware of their activities is as shocking as encountering the decaying, fly-covered corpse of an airman suspended in a tree. Fanatic terrorists (of whatever motivation- these have changed often over the years) are our contemporary world's Beasts. But it is not until we allow our own fundamental values to be corroded by fear of the Beast that it can really harm us. When we destroy the conch and smash Piggy's glasses, when we paint our faces and chant "Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!", when we (not they) "sharpen a stick at both ends," then we have lost. And when, as at the end of the novel, we weep "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy," we need more people who, like the officer, "was moved and a little embarrassed He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance."
What we don't need is more people like Michael Gove, who think Lord of the Flies is nothing more than an adventure story for primary kids.
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Applying literary theory to sporting contests
Why do people watch sport? Not a question you would think was in any way relevant to this blog, unless you believed that great sporting contests share many of the features of great literature.
So to return to the question. For some, of course, the reasons are self-explanatory and nothing to do with literature. There are the active sports(wo)men who study contests to improve their own game or to relate more closely to their role models. Then there are those who define themselves so strongly in terms of their fandom that they would never miss a match in which their team is involved. But what about the rest? What about the millions who routinely tune in to watch sporting contests simply as an alternative to another rerun of The Great Escape on a Saturday afternoon? What do they see in sporting contests that keeps them watching?
It was my sister who first put me onto the notion that sporting contests have much of the same structure and inherent narrative drive as great literature. Not necessarily the same sort of literature for each sport of course. Premier League football matches for me are like soap operas- episodes are scheduled regularly and, though each episode stands more or less alone there is a clear sense too of a narrative with longer timespans. Matches are peopled with a large cast whose key members are instantly familiar and whose onscreen and private lives it is sometimes difficult to untangle. The most exciting episodes end with a cliffhanger but there are frequently long periods which superficially resemble ordinary life (i.e. Sunday kickabouts) but are actually too carefully scripted for that.
Cricket matches are a different sort of literature altogether. More like rambling Victorian novels they seem initially immensely dry and tedious but then draw you in to their intricate web of tension and uncertainty. They are conveniently divided into four volumes, all involving the same characters and each leading into the next, though it is possible to engage with a single volume on its own. Sometimes the narrative is almost unbearably claustrophobic as line and length bowlers seek to pin the batsmen back and the poised, judgemental slip cordon looks on with ill-disguised glee. Occasionally a batsman seeks to break free, challenging the constricting bounds of social acceptability with a four or even a six, but we know that in the end conformity will win through and (s)he will be out. They will allow their defences to be broken down by the relentless accuracy of the jibes directed at them or they may be caught in the very act of social transgression itself and made to slump dejectedly to the poorhouse or debtors' prison that awaits beyond the boundary.
The Tour de France is perhaps closer to a Tarkovsky film, impenetrable to the uninitiated but redolent of pain, desperation and fear. Days follow a relentless, repetitive cycle whereby a small group launch themselves off the front of the peloton, ride themselves into exhaustion through the pitiless beauty of the alpine roads, temporarily burying their differences and working together in desperate, and nearly always doomed, attempt to stay away. In the peloton itself riders take turn at the front, burying themselves (it is a cycling term) to drag the hordes behind them. We see into their faces and can read nothing. Why do they do this? How do they keep going in the face of the pain that is destroying them? We do not know. We cannot know. Yet the road stretches on, relentlessly.
Yet it is tennis that is perhaps the purest example of sporting contest as work of literature. There is a protagonist and an antagonist held together in a fundamental conflict. Action progresses through a series of small conflict-resolution cycles, all set in the framework of the central conflict and building towards a final resolution. The best matches even follow the classic Shakespearean five-act dramatic structure (it's why women's tennis really should be in five sets too).
Of course the question of who is the protagonist and who the antagonist is often a moot one, but focusing on it makes very clear just how similar a tennis match is to a Shakespearean tragedy. You see I don't think it depends on who you support, but rather on what you believe the stakes to be.
Take the recent Murray/Federer match for instance (not a proper five-acter I know, but you can't have everything). Clearly you could see Murray as the protagonist. A tragic story of a nation pinning their collective hopes on a flawed but brilliant hero. Can the truculent Scot conquer his demons and lift the pall of humiliation and despair that has blighted the nation for 76 years? Er, no.
On the other hand you could see Federer as the protagonist. This is the old chief, beaten almost into submission by the young, fit but ultimately soulless pretenders who have sought for so long to topple him from his rightful throne. For long and long he was down. Defeated and destroyed. Made to look old and out of touch and beyond redemption. Yet he has arisen again. Can he drive the barbarians from the gate one last time? Can his guile and his artistry, honed over the long bitter years of his reign, banish the energy drinks and the motivational coaches from his kingdom? Hell yes.
So there you go. I was hooked anyway. Or I would have been if I hadn't been trying to finish my novel at the time.
So to return to the question. For some, of course, the reasons are self-explanatory and nothing to do with literature. There are the active sports(wo)men who study contests to improve their own game or to relate more closely to their role models. Then there are those who define themselves so strongly in terms of their fandom that they would never miss a match in which their team is involved. But what about the rest? What about the millions who routinely tune in to watch sporting contests simply as an alternative to another rerun of The Great Escape on a Saturday afternoon? What do they see in sporting contests that keeps them watching?
It was my sister who first put me onto the notion that sporting contests have much of the same structure and inherent narrative drive as great literature. Not necessarily the same sort of literature for each sport of course. Premier League football matches for me are like soap operas- episodes are scheduled regularly and, though each episode stands more or less alone there is a clear sense too of a narrative with longer timespans. Matches are peopled with a large cast whose key members are instantly familiar and whose onscreen and private lives it is sometimes difficult to untangle. The most exciting episodes end with a cliffhanger but there are frequently long periods which superficially resemble ordinary life (i.e. Sunday kickabouts) but are actually too carefully scripted for that.
Cricket matches are a different sort of literature altogether. More like rambling Victorian novels they seem initially immensely dry and tedious but then draw you in to their intricate web of tension and uncertainty. They are conveniently divided into four volumes, all involving the same characters and each leading into the next, though it is possible to engage with a single volume on its own. Sometimes the narrative is almost unbearably claustrophobic as line and length bowlers seek to pin the batsmen back and the poised, judgemental slip cordon looks on with ill-disguised glee. Occasionally a batsman seeks to break free, challenging the constricting bounds of social acceptability with a four or even a six, but we know that in the end conformity will win through and (s)he will be out. They will allow their defences to be broken down by the relentless accuracy of the jibes directed at them or they may be caught in the very act of social transgression itself and made to slump dejectedly to the poorhouse or debtors' prison that awaits beyond the boundary.
The Tour de France is perhaps closer to a Tarkovsky film, impenetrable to the uninitiated but redolent of pain, desperation and fear. Days follow a relentless, repetitive cycle whereby a small group launch themselves off the front of the peloton, ride themselves into exhaustion through the pitiless beauty of the alpine roads, temporarily burying their differences and working together in desperate, and nearly always doomed, attempt to stay away. In the peloton itself riders take turn at the front, burying themselves (it is a cycling term) to drag the hordes behind them. We see into their faces and can read nothing. Why do they do this? How do they keep going in the face of the pain that is destroying them? We do not know. We cannot know. Yet the road stretches on, relentlessly.
Yet it is tennis that is perhaps the purest example of sporting contest as work of literature. There is a protagonist and an antagonist held together in a fundamental conflict. Action progresses through a series of small conflict-resolution cycles, all set in the framework of the central conflict and building towards a final resolution. The best matches even follow the classic Shakespearean five-act dramatic structure (it's why women's tennis really should be in five sets too).
Of course the question of who is the protagonist and who the antagonist is often a moot one, but focusing on it makes very clear just how similar a tennis match is to a Shakespearean tragedy. You see I don't think it depends on who you support, but rather on what you believe the stakes to be.
Take the recent Murray/Federer match for instance (not a proper five-acter I know, but you can't have everything). Clearly you could see Murray as the protagonist. A tragic story of a nation pinning their collective hopes on a flawed but brilliant hero. Can the truculent Scot conquer his demons and lift the pall of humiliation and despair that has blighted the nation for 76 years? Er, no.
On the other hand you could see Federer as the protagonist. This is the old chief, beaten almost into submission by the young, fit but ultimately soulless pretenders who have sought for so long to topple him from his rightful throne. For long and long he was down. Defeated and destroyed. Made to look old and out of touch and beyond redemption. Yet he has arisen again. Can he drive the barbarians from the gate one last time? Can his guile and his artistry, honed over the long bitter years of his reign, banish the energy drinks and the motivational coaches from his kingdom? Hell yes.
So there you go. I was hooked anyway. Or I would have been if I hadn't been trying to finish my novel at the time.
Friday, 15 June 2012
Whatever happened to satire?
I am far from the first to pose this question of course, but I would like to put it in a slightly longer historical and literary context than is usual. When I was at University I studied an optional unit on 18th Century verse satire. I was the only one to opt for the unit and even at the time I wondered why. Satire may not have been quite as in vogue in the seventies as it had been in the sixties, or would be again in the eighties and nineties, but I was surprised that no one else was interested in learning about its roots (particularly given the alternatives. The Prelude and Lyrical Ballads, anyone?)
Maybe partly this can be explained by how little people generally know about English 18th Century satire. By its nature (dependent as it is on contemporary cultural references) satire dates badly. Most people's exposure to 18th Century satire will have come in one of two forms: either a children's edition of Gulliver's Travels, with all traces of satire surgically removed; or an A level study edition of Rape of the Lock, Pope's prissiest and most genteel offering, where again it is possible to carry out the most detailed dissection without discovering the faintest trace of that jubilant iconoclasm that is satire's greatest joy.
Yet 18th Century satire in English is far from being bland or uninteresting. There is wit, humour and in-jokes that would not be out of place in a Footlights Review but there is also anger- Swift's A Modest Proposal goes further than Frankie Boyle would dare, and much of Gullivers Travels, particularly the voyage to the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos is equally bitter. There are also enormous amounts of downright crudeness, particularly in the works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. It is to him that I owe the understanding that virtually all the swear words I guiltily treasured as a boy, thinking my generation to have invented them, were in common currency in the 18th Century and probably had been for centuries before that. Mind you, the word "dildo" appears to have been something of a neologism, according to his poem Signor Dildo (not one of his best).
So why did the 18th Century see the first and greatest flowering of satire in the sense we now understand it? That was not a question I particularly asked myself at the time, though I could see that it did, and that all satire since (up to and including its last great flowering towards the end of the 20th Century) can in a sense be traced back to that time.
I am no historian, but it is clear that it is the historical and social context that was influential in producing the work, and it was a historical and social context that has resonance today. The country's old certainties had recently been torn apart with the Reformation, then the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Then the new certainties (of Puritanism) that had replaced the old were torn apart by the Restoration of the monarchy. And in this context, so similar to our current context of post-War, post-Thatcher, post-Blair Britain a new breed of rulers emerged. Charles II had always believed himself the rightful King of England, but had for years been cast into the political obscurity of exile. Totally out of touch with the reality both of government and of life in Britain he was, as Ed Milliband should have said, born to rule but not fit to govern. And so he presided over a court with no firm beliefs or commitments to anything but pleasure and networking. It was the first flowering of celebrity culture and thank God Twitter had not yet been invented.
A telling, if probably completely fictitious scene sums it up for me. John Milton, now blind and slaving over Paradise Lost, would get up at 4am to have the Bible read to him by his manservant in Greek. Unfortunately for him this was the time when the Restoration rakes were returning from the brothels and the private parties, and more than once Milton's windows were smashed by drunken proto-Bullingdon boys.
And it turns out this was a perfect breeding ground for satire. Rochester wrote a pretty ribald Satyr on Charles II and a pithier little verse that goes
"God bless our good and gracious King
Whose promise none relies on
Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one."
Satire seemed a natural response to their newfound freedom from church and state, their relish in the coarser joys of life and their sudden understanding that those who led them were just as stupid, selfish and lost as they were themselves.
So if the 18th Century was the perfect breeding ground for satire then why in 2012 are we not awash in it? Well it turns out for a start that satire is not and never has been a particularly effective way of achieving change, because satire is fundamentally an insider's art-form. Most of the twentieth century's best satirists (in the UK at least) came from about as Establishment a background as it is possible to conceive. And the idea of taking the piss (and being prepared to have the piss taken right back) is pretty fundamental to British society, dating right back to Court Jesters and the Lord of Misrule. And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that most of the Tory cabinet allegedly loved Spitting Image. Mind you it still has one of my favourite exchanges ever. Thatcher is at a restaurant, her cabinet sitting around her. She is ordering:
Waitress: And what will you have?
Thatcher: The steak please.
Waitress: And how would you like it?
Thatcher: Raw please.
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?
Thatcher: They'll have the steak too.
See. You smiled. Laughed maybe. You were presented with a visual image of a carnivorous, bloodsucking Margaret Thatcher, treating her entire cabinet like the vegetables they were, and you found it funny. Very British, but hardly revolutionary.
So by 2012 we have progressed to the point where, far from undermining the status quo, satire becomes a means to sustain it. Have I Got News for You, about the closest we have to satire these days, can be used by Boris Johnson to make the people of London elect him as mayor of the fifth largest city in the world. Not because he was clever or politically astute or because they agreed with his policies, but because he didn't mind having the piss taken out of him. So what on earth is the point of satire?
In the end Rochester came to the same conclusion. Much of his greatest work in the end is turned against himself, not the court or King Charles. In some ways my favourite is To the Post Boy if for nothing else then because of the simplicity of the concluding line. Rochester starts by berating the post boy, saying "Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell/A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?" He then outlines the destructive decadence of his own life (made even more poignant if you know the events he is alluding to) and awaits the post boy's response. It is simple and direct. "The readiest way my Lord's by Rochester."
So the conclusion that Rochester reached, I believe, is that the only real value of satire is when the satire is turned on the reader rather than on another. And the trouble is, that doesn't make us laugh, does it. So we aren't interested in it.
Maybe partly this can be explained by how little people generally know about English 18th Century satire. By its nature (dependent as it is on contemporary cultural references) satire dates badly. Most people's exposure to 18th Century satire will have come in one of two forms: either a children's edition of Gulliver's Travels, with all traces of satire surgically removed; or an A level study edition of Rape of the Lock, Pope's prissiest and most genteel offering, where again it is possible to carry out the most detailed dissection without discovering the faintest trace of that jubilant iconoclasm that is satire's greatest joy.
Yet 18th Century satire in English is far from being bland or uninteresting. There is wit, humour and in-jokes that would not be out of place in a Footlights Review but there is also anger- Swift's A Modest Proposal goes further than Frankie Boyle would dare, and much of Gullivers Travels, particularly the voyage to the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos is equally bitter. There are also enormous amounts of downright crudeness, particularly in the works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. It is to him that I owe the understanding that virtually all the swear words I guiltily treasured as a boy, thinking my generation to have invented them, were in common currency in the 18th Century and probably had been for centuries before that. Mind you, the word "dildo" appears to have been something of a neologism, according to his poem Signor Dildo (not one of his best).
So why did the 18th Century see the first and greatest flowering of satire in the sense we now understand it? That was not a question I particularly asked myself at the time, though I could see that it did, and that all satire since (up to and including its last great flowering towards the end of the 20th Century) can in a sense be traced back to that time.
I am no historian, but it is clear that it is the historical and social context that was influential in producing the work, and it was a historical and social context that has resonance today. The country's old certainties had recently been torn apart with the Reformation, then the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Then the new certainties (of Puritanism) that had replaced the old were torn apart by the Restoration of the monarchy. And in this context, so similar to our current context of post-War, post-Thatcher, post-Blair Britain a new breed of rulers emerged. Charles II had always believed himself the rightful King of England, but had for years been cast into the political obscurity of exile. Totally out of touch with the reality both of government and of life in Britain he was, as Ed Milliband should have said, born to rule but not fit to govern. And so he presided over a court with no firm beliefs or commitments to anything but pleasure and networking. It was the first flowering of celebrity culture and thank God Twitter had not yet been invented.
A telling, if probably completely fictitious scene sums it up for me. John Milton, now blind and slaving over Paradise Lost, would get up at 4am to have the Bible read to him by his manservant in Greek. Unfortunately for him this was the time when the Restoration rakes were returning from the brothels and the private parties, and more than once Milton's windows were smashed by drunken proto-Bullingdon boys.
And it turns out this was a perfect breeding ground for satire. Rochester wrote a pretty ribald Satyr on Charles II and a pithier little verse that goes
"God bless our good and gracious King
Whose promise none relies on
Who never said a foolish thing
Nor ever did a wise one."
Satire seemed a natural response to their newfound freedom from church and state, their relish in the coarser joys of life and their sudden understanding that those who led them were just as stupid, selfish and lost as they were themselves.
So if the 18th Century was the perfect breeding ground for satire then why in 2012 are we not awash in it? Well it turns out for a start that satire is not and never has been a particularly effective way of achieving change, because satire is fundamentally an insider's art-form. Most of the twentieth century's best satirists (in the UK at least) came from about as Establishment a background as it is possible to conceive. And the idea of taking the piss (and being prepared to have the piss taken right back) is pretty fundamental to British society, dating right back to Court Jesters and the Lord of Misrule. And so it should perhaps come as no surprise that most of the Tory cabinet allegedly loved Spitting Image. Mind you it still has one of my favourite exchanges ever. Thatcher is at a restaurant, her cabinet sitting around her. She is ordering:
Waitress: And what will you have?
Thatcher: The steak please.
Waitress: And how would you like it?
Thatcher: Raw please.
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?
Thatcher: They'll have the steak too.
See. You smiled. Laughed maybe. You were presented with a visual image of a carnivorous, bloodsucking Margaret Thatcher, treating her entire cabinet like the vegetables they were, and you found it funny. Very British, but hardly revolutionary.
So by 2012 we have progressed to the point where, far from undermining the status quo, satire becomes a means to sustain it. Have I Got News for You, about the closest we have to satire these days, can be used by Boris Johnson to make the people of London elect him as mayor of the fifth largest city in the world. Not because he was clever or politically astute or because they agreed with his policies, but because he didn't mind having the piss taken out of him. So what on earth is the point of satire?
In the end Rochester came to the same conclusion. Much of his greatest work in the end is turned against himself, not the court or King Charles. In some ways my favourite is To the Post Boy if for nothing else then because of the simplicity of the concluding line. Rochester starts by berating the post boy, saying "Son of a whore, God damn you, can you tell/A peerless peer the readiest way to Hell?" He then outlines the destructive decadence of his own life (made even more poignant if you know the events he is alluding to) and awaits the post boy's response. It is simple and direct. "The readiest way my Lord's by Rochester."
So the conclusion that Rochester reached, I believe, is that the only real value of satire is when the satire is turned on the reader rather than on another. And the trouble is, that doesn't make us laugh, does it. So we aren't interested in it.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Symbolism outside literature
I am conscious of going off-piste a little here, but in a previous post I have stated that imagery is central to how we use language and perhaps it is actually more central to how we perceive the world than I previously thought. The last few weeks have furnished me with two examples of where imagery seems to leap at me unbidden, where no language was involved.
The first was intentional. I saw Threshold to the Kingdom by Mark Wallinger at Tate Britain. I don't normally like arty video installations but this was strangely compelling and beautiful. Filmed from a static viewpoint and in ultra slow motion it shows a stream of people coming through the "International Arrivals" gate at Heathrow, over Allegri’s Miserere Mei, Deus. Because of the static viewpoint and slow motion you are compelled to look closely at and consider every element of the scene. Some elements are static and unchanging, like the shimmering reflective gates, the bold lettering above them and the strangely impassive man seated at the desk beside them. The changing elements are of course the passengers and while (nearly) all share common features- the way all stare beyond the camera and progress with flowing rhythm down the screen and out of shot to bottom right- each has individuality and these individualities seem suffused with meaning too. One waves shyly at someone unseen. Another yawns, covering his mouth and casting his eyes downwards. On one occasion a woman dressed in black steps into shot to embrace two others, also in black, and all three stand motionless in the centre of the shot. On another someone starts running, though the ultra slow motion makes her progress still painfully slow. On another occasion a man crosses the stream, holding a cup of coffee. Although only one other is passing at the time it is impossible not to feel tension as a collision seems inevitable and the man with the coffee seems transgressive, his direction of travel all wrong. On several occasions the piece is edited with dissolves, so that passengers slowly fade away whilst still walking. The piece ends with a man with an almost empty baggage trolley who stops centre screen. He consults a scrap of paper, looking concerned and hesitant. Finally he proceeds, but to the left instead of the bottom right.
I challenge anyone to sit through this piece and not see symbolism in it. Some will see the kingdom as the kingdom of Heaven, with a constant slow stream of the dead entering its pearly gates. Others will think of issues around immigration and how welcoming or otherwise our kingdom must appear to others. Others will see a depiction of our lives and the way places such as airports define and segment them. Still others might see the lurking menace of international terrorism- the film as the surveillance footage that catches the last sighting of a suicide bomber. What they see is not the point, and most viewers will not be consciously aware of thinking in such symbolic terms at all, but I am convinced they will.
In the second example the symbolism was certainly not intentional and maybe my wife and I were the only ones to see it. The wreck of the Costa Concordia was a tragedy, but for us it was also powerfully symbolic of the financial crises that have engulfed the world in recent times. Let me explain. Like all modern cruise liners, the Costa Concordia is an impossibly lavish and unreal-looking construction, vastly out of scale with normal human life. Its scale, lavishness and extravagance are very reminiscent to me of the great banks that now dominate our financial system. It was led by a man who seems to have made bombast, arrogance and hubris an art form. He claimed that the rock which sunk the boat was not on his charts and so totally unexpected. However surely anyone with any common sense who has seen the map of the ship's travel and the photos of the coastline of the island would have expected such rocks to be there, whether they were on the charts or not. Cruise liners such as this (like the financial system) are governed by hugely complex and powerful electronic systems and it seems that human common sense had no part to play.
When the ship (like the banks) hit the rocks the captain told the passengers nothing, clearly believing that he was best placed to handle a situation that he (equally clearly) did not understand. Shortly after the wreck we were repeatedly told that he had acted with great skill to bring the ship back to the coast, preventing more loss of life. Presumably we were supposed to be impressed. However when the ship (like the banks) started actually sinking the first response of the captain was to make sure his place in the lifeboat was secure, leaving others to drown. Whilst others were abandoned on the stricken vessel he was being interviewed by Italian TV, his beautiful hair hardly out of place.
Was it just us who saw in all this a powerful symbol for what has happened in the financial and banking sector since 2008? Is it only us who see in Francesco (Love Boat) Schettino a symbol for all those Fred (the Shred) Goodwins out there?
The first was intentional. I saw Threshold to the Kingdom by Mark Wallinger at Tate Britain. I don't normally like arty video installations but this was strangely compelling and beautiful. Filmed from a static viewpoint and in ultra slow motion it shows a stream of people coming through the "International Arrivals" gate at Heathrow, over Allegri’s Miserere Mei, Deus. Because of the static viewpoint and slow motion you are compelled to look closely at and consider every element of the scene. Some elements are static and unchanging, like the shimmering reflective gates, the bold lettering above them and the strangely impassive man seated at the desk beside them. The changing elements are of course the passengers and while (nearly) all share common features- the way all stare beyond the camera and progress with flowing rhythm down the screen and out of shot to bottom right- each has individuality and these individualities seem suffused with meaning too. One waves shyly at someone unseen. Another yawns, covering his mouth and casting his eyes downwards. On one occasion a woman dressed in black steps into shot to embrace two others, also in black, and all three stand motionless in the centre of the shot. On another someone starts running, though the ultra slow motion makes her progress still painfully slow. On another occasion a man crosses the stream, holding a cup of coffee. Although only one other is passing at the time it is impossible not to feel tension as a collision seems inevitable and the man with the coffee seems transgressive, his direction of travel all wrong. On several occasions the piece is edited with dissolves, so that passengers slowly fade away whilst still walking. The piece ends with a man with an almost empty baggage trolley who stops centre screen. He consults a scrap of paper, looking concerned and hesitant. Finally he proceeds, but to the left instead of the bottom right.
I challenge anyone to sit through this piece and not see symbolism in it. Some will see the kingdom as the kingdom of Heaven, with a constant slow stream of the dead entering its pearly gates. Others will think of issues around immigration and how welcoming or otherwise our kingdom must appear to others. Others will see a depiction of our lives and the way places such as airports define and segment them. Still others might see the lurking menace of international terrorism- the film as the surveillance footage that catches the last sighting of a suicide bomber. What they see is not the point, and most viewers will not be consciously aware of thinking in such symbolic terms at all, but I am convinced they will.
In the second example the symbolism was certainly not intentional and maybe my wife and I were the only ones to see it. The wreck of the Costa Concordia was a tragedy, but for us it was also powerfully symbolic of the financial crises that have engulfed the world in recent times. Let me explain. Like all modern cruise liners, the Costa Concordia is an impossibly lavish and unreal-looking construction, vastly out of scale with normal human life. Its scale, lavishness and extravagance are very reminiscent to me of the great banks that now dominate our financial system. It was led by a man who seems to have made bombast, arrogance and hubris an art form. He claimed that the rock which sunk the boat was not on his charts and so totally unexpected. However surely anyone with any common sense who has seen the map of the ship's travel and the photos of the coastline of the island would have expected such rocks to be there, whether they were on the charts or not. Cruise liners such as this (like the financial system) are governed by hugely complex and powerful electronic systems and it seems that human common sense had no part to play.
When the ship (like the banks) hit the rocks the captain told the passengers nothing, clearly believing that he was best placed to handle a situation that he (equally clearly) did not understand. Shortly after the wreck we were repeatedly told that he had acted with great skill to bring the ship back to the coast, preventing more loss of life. Presumably we were supposed to be impressed. However when the ship (like the banks) started actually sinking the first response of the captain was to make sure his place in the lifeboat was secure, leaving others to drown. Whilst others were abandoned on the stricken vessel he was being interviewed by Italian TV, his beautiful hair hardly out of place.
Was it just us who saw in all this a powerful symbol for what has happened in the financial and banking sector since 2008? Is it only us who see in Francesco (Love Boat) Schettino a symbol for all those Fred (the Shred) Goodwins out there?
Friday, 13 January 2012
Literature that promotes war
First World War poetry that condemns the waste and brutality of war is amongst the most powerful, passionate and heartfelt poetry ever written. Modern readers of Owen or Sassoon, Rosenberg, Graves or Blunden would be forgiven for thinking that the relationship between poetry and war is one way: poetry dissects and condemns war. Yet not all poetry is the same. Over the centuries much has been written that actively promotes war and it is interesting to consider how it has done so. In fact poets have used a wide range of techniques and approaches and have produced literature that is often as fine and powerful and moving as that which condemns war.
Not always of course. There is a class of propagandist poetry that I find simplistic, crass and distasteful and I do not believe that this is simply because I have been corrupted by too much Wilfrid Owen. This is 'poetry' which plays on base human (male) emotions. It presents war as a glorious exciting game in which the lucky participant can gain prestige and respect and machismo or, if he ducks out, can be forever branded a coward. Jessie Pope actually entitled one such poem Who's For the Game? and referred to war as "The red crashing game of the fight." This sort of appeal to heroism can make reference to the dangers of war on occasion, as in Henry Newbolt's Vitae Lampada (or "Play up, play up, and play the game") in which "The sand of the Desert is sodden red" because it is framed in the heroic fantasy world of boys' imaginations.
However such poetry can be even more explicit about the shame and ignominy that will be visited on anyone who fails to join in. A classic example is Harold Begbie's Fall In which traces this ignominy in imagination through the reader's entire life. In the first verse he asks "But what will you lack when your mate goes by/With a girl who cuts you dead?" then in the second (of the reader's future children) "But where will you look when they give you the glance/That tells you they know you funked." Finally the reader is asked to imagine an old age when his neighbours are talking about their part in the War and he asks "Will you slink away, as if from a blow/Your old head shamed and bent?"
There is another sort of literature that is less explicit about either the violence of war or the consequences of not participating in it. This is the approach that couches the whole enterprise in a sort of warm glow of nobility and patriotism and glory. A classic example is Rupert Brooke's the Soldier but it is interesting that Owen's 1914, written of course before he went to war, is not that different. It frames the conflict as being on a cosmic scale and having a divine purpose, since "the grain of human Autumn rots" and there is a "need/Of sowings for a new Spring, and blood for seed." It is fascinating to consider whether Brooke's attitudes would have changed as radically as Owen's had he survived to reach Galipoli.
Perhaps two of the most famous passages that promote war are from Shakespeare's Henry V, though it must of course be remembered that this is a character speaking not Shakespeare himself. The "Once more unto the breach" speech emphasises the glorious action and the "This day is called the feast of Crispian" focuses more on the glory that will come afterwards, but what is interesting is the emphasis both give to war as a means of proving and bettering oneself. Both speeches present an opportunity to the listeners to establish and augment not just their sense of self-worth but their very standing in society through the medium of war. In the first Henry tells his listeners to "Be copy now to men of grosser blood,/And teach them how to war," and in the second he goes further. Referring to the soldiers as his "band of brothers" he says
"For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."
This may sound like mere rabble-rousing today but Henry precedes this call with a list of names, all of whom Shakespeare's audience would know had achived preferment and advantage through their exploits at war.
Of course modern warmongers cannot offer such meteoric social advancement and it is extraordinary to compare Henry's speech, as fictionalised by Shakespeare, with those of that great poet of the second World War, Winston Churchill. In his speeches he is absolutely explicit that "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat." What is remarkable on rereading them today is not just their poetry and power but their uncompromising bleakness. He uses much of the same appeal to grand philosphical ideas of nobility as Brooke and the early Owen but puts much more emphasis on the darkness he feels he is combatting, as for instance when he warns that without war "we will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." His praise of the Battle of Britain pilots has, in its "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" has some of the same appeal to simple pride as Henry's "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,/Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named," and he offers the entire population a taste of that heroism in his famous rallying call "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" What is striking however is how little he sugar-coats the pill. His response to the significant victories of late 1942 was "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
What I want to bring out from the Churchill speeches however is the extent to which he understood and learned from the poetry of the First World War. He clearly saw how poetry and great literature had been appropriated by the anti-War lobby and he could no longer rely on either the jingoistic simplifications of Begbie or Pope or the bland philosophising of Brooke. So he used his formidable poetic talents not to disguise the reality of war nor to trivialise it but to bring it alive in his readers' imaginations. This was a risky strategy in retrospect: how many prime ministers today would be prepared to state so starkly how little hope he offered and what bleak and terrifying futures he foresaw? Yet it worked. Read for instance the following rallying call to the British people at a time in 1940 when the prospects for victory looked very slim:
"And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test-a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none."
The essence of his message is both slim and bleak. He is offering little hope to the British people and giving them no real idea of what the future may hold. All that he can give them is poetry, so that is what they get.
As an avowed pacifist, and one who is appalled for instance by what Allied bombers did to Dresden under Churchill's orders, I find it difficult to decide what I feel about Churchill's wartime speeches. That they were great literature is beyond doubt and they are a world away from the pro-War literature of the First World War. It is also possible that without them Britain would have collapsed and Hitler triumphed. Yet they are without doubt pieces of literature that promote War. So how can I with equanimity recognise their power?
Not always of course. There is a class of propagandist poetry that I find simplistic, crass and distasteful and I do not believe that this is simply because I have been corrupted by too much Wilfrid Owen. This is 'poetry' which plays on base human (male) emotions. It presents war as a glorious exciting game in which the lucky participant can gain prestige and respect and machismo or, if he ducks out, can be forever branded a coward. Jessie Pope actually entitled one such poem Who's For the Game? and referred to war as "The red crashing game of the fight." This sort of appeal to heroism can make reference to the dangers of war on occasion, as in Henry Newbolt's Vitae Lampada (or "Play up, play up, and play the game") in which "The sand of the Desert is sodden red" because it is framed in the heroic fantasy world of boys' imaginations.
However such poetry can be even more explicit about the shame and ignominy that will be visited on anyone who fails to join in. A classic example is Harold Begbie's Fall In which traces this ignominy in imagination through the reader's entire life. In the first verse he asks "But what will you lack when your mate goes by/With a girl who cuts you dead?" then in the second (of the reader's future children) "But where will you look when they give you the glance/That tells you they know you funked." Finally the reader is asked to imagine an old age when his neighbours are talking about their part in the War and he asks "Will you slink away, as if from a blow/Your old head shamed and bent?"
There is another sort of literature that is less explicit about either the violence of war or the consequences of not participating in it. This is the approach that couches the whole enterprise in a sort of warm glow of nobility and patriotism and glory. A classic example is Rupert Brooke's the Soldier but it is interesting that Owen's 1914, written of course before he went to war, is not that different. It frames the conflict as being on a cosmic scale and having a divine purpose, since "the grain of human Autumn rots" and there is a "need/Of sowings for a new Spring, and blood for seed." It is fascinating to consider whether Brooke's attitudes would have changed as radically as Owen's had he survived to reach Galipoli.
Perhaps two of the most famous passages that promote war are from Shakespeare's Henry V, though it must of course be remembered that this is a character speaking not Shakespeare himself. The "Once more unto the breach" speech emphasises the glorious action and the "This day is called the feast of Crispian" focuses more on the glory that will come afterwards, but what is interesting is the emphasis both give to war as a means of proving and bettering oneself. Both speeches present an opportunity to the listeners to establish and augment not just their sense of self-worth but their very standing in society through the medium of war. In the first Henry tells his listeners to "Be copy now to men of grosser blood,/And teach them how to war," and in the second he goes further. Referring to the soldiers as his "band of brothers" he says
"For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."
This may sound like mere rabble-rousing today but Henry precedes this call with a list of names, all of whom Shakespeare's audience would know had achived preferment and advantage through their exploits at war.
Of course modern warmongers cannot offer such meteoric social advancement and it is extraordinary to compare Henry's speech, as fictionalised by Shakespeare, with those of that great poet of the second World War, Winston Churchill. In his speeches he is absolutely explicit that "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat." What is remarkable on rereading them today is not just their poetry and power but their uncompromising bleakness. He uses much of the same appeal to grand philosphical ideas of nobility as Brooke and the early Owen but puts much more emphasis on the darkness he feels he is combatting, as for instance when he warns that without war "we will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." His praise of the Battle of Britain pilots has, in its "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" has some of the same appeal to simple pride as Henry's "He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,/Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named," and he offers the entire population a taste of that heroism in his famous rallying call "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" What is striking however is how little he sugar-coats the pill. His response to the significant victories of late 1942 was "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
What I want to bring out from the Churchill speeches however is the extent to which he understood and learned from the poetry of the First World War. He clearly saw how poetry and great literature had been appropriated by the anti-War lobby and he could no longer rely on either the jingoistic simplifications of Begbie or Pope or the bland philosophising of Brooke. So he used his formidable poetic talents not to disguise the reality of war nor to trivialise it but to bring it alive in his readers' imaginations. This was a risky strategy in retrospect: how many prime ministers today would be prepared to state so starkly how little hope he offered and what bleak and terrifying futures he foresaw? Yet it worked. Read for instance the following rallying call to the British people at a time in 1940 when the prospects for victory looked very slim:
"And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test-a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none."
The essence of his message is both slim and bleak. He is offering little hope to the British people and giving them no real idea of what the future may hold. All that he can give them is poetry, so that is what they get.
As an avowed pacifist, and one who is appalled for instance by what Allied bombers did to Dresden under Churchill's orders, I find it difficult to decide what I feel about Churchill's wartime speeches. That they were great literature is beyond doubt and they are a world away from the pro-War literature of the First World War. It is also possible that without them Britain would have collapsed and Hitler triumphed. Yet they are without doubt pieces of literature that promote War. So how can I with equanimity recognise their power?
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Religion in WW1 poetry
The horrors of World War One were inflicted, in the case of England at least, on a society that still clung to the old certainties of Anglican Christianity. Brooke's concept of the "hearts at peace, under an English heaven" (from his poem The Soldier) is one that many would have found comforting and unassailable, at the start of the war at least. This confidence in the sheltering, caring presence of a fundamentally English (or at least British) God can be seen everywhere, from Harold Begbie's confidence in Fall In that "England's call is God's" to the pervasive popular myth of the Angels of Mons.
In a fairly disastrous engagement with the superior German forces in the early days of the war the British forces were outnumbered and many killed. Yet the major legacy of that battle for many was the belief that angels had appeared in the sky and had protected British troops. this story was no doubt seized on by propagandists to strengthen morale, but it clearly had its foundation in a strong belief that God was on the British side and that God would protect His own.
As the interminable trench battles dragged on however, such comforting myths were largely forgotten, replaced in most soldiers' minds by contrasting myths such as that of the crucified soldier. Never conclusively pinned down this was the belief that German soldiers had captured a Canadian and tortured him by crucifying him on a barn door. Again, it is possible that this story too was amplified- maybe even invented- for propaganda reasons. however the fact of its popularity makes plain that soldiers responded to it. Their Christianity had come to be a symbol not of reassurance and protection but of pain and death.
This connection is movingly brought out in Siegfried Sassoon's poem The Redeemer, in which he encounters Christ, but dressed as an English soldier who "faced me, reeling in his weariness,/ Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear." Wilfred Owen too saw the parallel between the suffering Christ and the soldiers in the trenches. In a letter to his mother, written when he was in England training new recruits to be shipped over to the Front he wrote "For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.”
Wilfred Owen had been set on preparing for the priesthood before his life was overturned by his time in France and it is fascinating to see how he struggled to reconcile his faith with the horrors he witnessed. In one of his angriest poems, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, he recounts the story of Abraham and Isaac, a central myth in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths. With few changes from the text of the Authorised version of the Bible he retells the story, but placing it in the setting of the war in France. So in the poem "Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,/And builded parapets and trenches there." Yet the twist he imparts at the end is the truly shocking thing. The original is a symbol not just of Abraham's faith but of God's mercy, for God offers Abraham a ram to sacrifice in the place of his son Isaac. Not so in Owen's poem. The story is the same until the last two lines:
"Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one."
However to me it is not Owen's anger in this poem that is most shocking, but the completeness of his loss of faith in the aptly named Futility. Here Owen takes a simple story of finding a soldier who had died in the night and makes of it a poem that encapsulates the bleakness of a man whose faith has died. Seeing the man lying dead in the mud Owen thinks of how God created man- breathing life into the clay with which he had formed Adam. Even now he cannot bring himself to make his rejection of God complete and he refers to the "kind old sun" instead, but to me the final lines in the poem are unequivocal. As a committed Christian a core tenet would have been that God created man out of the clay, that God breathed life into the world. The half-rhyme of "tall", "toil" and "at all" with its uneasy incompleteness seems to strengthen the desperate hopelessness as he writes
"Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?"
In a fairly disastrous engagement with the superior German forces in the early days of the war the British forces were outnumbered and many killed. Yet the major legacy of that battle for many was the belief that angels had appeared in the sky and had protected British troops. this story was no doubt seized on by propagandists to strengthen morale, but it clearly had its foundation in a strong belief that God was on the British side and that God would protect His own.
As the interminable trench battles dragged on however, such comforting myths were largely forgotten, replaced in most soldiers' minds by contrasting myths such as that of the crucified soldier. Never conclusively pinned down this was the belief that German soldiers had captured a Canadian and tortured him by crucifying him on a barn door. Again, it is possible that this story too was amplified- maybe even invented- for propaganda reasons. however the fact of its popularity makes plain that soldiers responded to it. Their Christianity had come to be a symbol not of reassurance and protection but of pain and death.
This connection is movingly brought out in Siegfried Sassoon's poem The Redeemer, in which he encounters Christ, but dressed as an English soldier who "faced me, reeling in his weariness,/ Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear." Wilfred Owen too saw the parallel between the suffering Christ and the soldiers in the trenches. In a letter to his mother, written when he was in England training new recruits to be shipped over to the Front he wrote "For 14 hours yesterday, I was at work-teaching Christ to lift his cross by the numbers, and how to adjust his crown; and not to imagine he thirst until after the last halt. I attended his Supper to see that there were no complaints; and inspected his feet that they should be worthy of the nails. I see to it that he is dumb, and stands mute before his accusers. With a piece of silver I buy him every day, and with maps I make him familiar with the topography of Golgotha.”
Wilfred Owen had been set on preparing for the priesthood before his life was overturned by his time in France and it is fascinating to see how he struggled to reconcile his faith with the horrors he witnessed. In one of his angriest poems, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, he recounts the story of Abraham and Isaac, a central myth in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths. With few changes from the text of the Authorised version of the Bible he retells the story, but placing it in the setting of the war in France. So in the poem "Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,/And builded parapets and trenches there." Yet the twist he imparts at the end is the truly shocking thing. The original is a symbol not just of Abraham's faith but of God's mercy, for God offers Abraham a ram to sacrifice in the place of his son Isaac. Not so in Owen's poem. The story is the same until the last two lines:
"Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one."
However to me it is not Owen's anger in this poem that is most shocking, but the completeness of his loss of faith in the aptly named Futility. Here Owen takes a simple story of finding a soldier who had died in the night and makes of it a poem that encapsulates the bleakness of a man whose faith has died. Seeing the man lying dead in the mud Owen thinks of how God created man- breathing life into the clay with which he had formed Adam. Even now he cannot bring himself to make his rejection of God complete and he refers to the "kind old sun" instead, but to me the final lines in the poem are unequivocal. As a committed Christian a core tenet would have been that God created man out of the clay, that God breathed life into the world. The half-rhyme of "tall", "toil" and "at all" with its uneasy incompleteness seems to strengthen the desperate hopelessness as he writes
"Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?"
Monday, 2 January 2012
Serendipity in imagery- or how symbols can acquire new resonances
As I have argued in a a previous post the human brain seems particularly inclined to think in terms of imagery- to recognise the grounds of comparison in terms of connotations and allusions between an idea, concept, feeling or thing and the image, or 'vehicle', with which it is presented. Symbols are the purest expression of this tendency, where artists create a vehicle that is rich in connotations and invite the reader to think about grounds of connection with some feeling or some object or person in the real world. Of course over time the field of connotations on which an individual reader calls can change substantially, meaning that symbols can acquire resonances that were unforseen by their orginal creator.
Blake's the Sick Rose is a well known example of such symbolism, and no doubt readers over the years have felt in it uncanny resonances with particular relationships or emotions they have experienced. What Blake would have been unlikely to be able to foresee was how apposite some readers felt it to be as a symbol for AIDs. Tennyson's the Eagle can be read as a simple descriptive poem or as a symbol of autocratic, despotic power. Again it is unlikely that the poet could have foreseen the grounds of connection with Adolf Hitler, sitting alone in his Adlerhorst, plotting to unleash the thunderbolts of his Blitzkrieg on a war-torn Europe.
In both of these poems the new grounds that modern readers see, though unsuspected at the time by the poets, chime well with the presumed original intentions of the authors. What fascinates me is where symbols an author creates take on entirely new resonances that their creators would find surprising, even perverse. If a reader sees in a symbol uncanny resonances with concepts or situations that are divorced entirely from their original context, is there any problem with them doing so? I will present two examples and let you judge.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is an acute and moving satire on the way the idealism of the Russian Revolution descended into the brutal repression of Stalinism. A turning point in the plot is when the windmill that the animals have created with enormous, backbreaking effort has been destroyed in a storm. In the story this is clearly a symbol for the failed industrial policies of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and Napoleon's identification of Snowball as the culprit a reference to Stalin's scapegoating of Trotsky and others.
However for me in autumn 2001 this symbol acquired terrible new resonance. On the 11th September a great tower in the real world came crashing down. As in the novel "a cry of despair broke from every animal's throat. A terrible sight had met their eyes. The windmill was in ruins." What was particularly chilling was the way that almost immediately afterwards the actions of George Bush and the neocons, ably assisted by Tony Blair, so exactly paralleled Napoleon's actions in the novel:
"Napoleon paced to and fro in silence, occasionally snuffing at the ground. His tail had grown rigid and twitched sharply from side to side, a sign in him of intense mental activity. Suddenly he halted as though his mind were made up.
'Comrades,' he said quietly, 'do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!' he suddenly roared in a voice of thunder. 'Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. Comrades, here and now I pronounce the death sentence upon Snowball. 'Animal Hero, Second Class,' and half a bushel of apples to any animal who brings him to justice. A full bushel to anyone who captures him alive!'"
Substitute Saddam Hussein for Snowball and there you have it.
The second example is perhaps even further from the author's intention but I find it fascinating. Dickens' Great Expectations is a perennial favourite, recently reimagined as a BBC drama. This adaptation had some excellent features, though it misrepresented the original in some aspects. A key point in the televised version is that Pip might have brought Magwitch the file because he was frightened, but the bringing of the pie was an act of pure goodness that Magwitch never forgot and chose later to reward. Pleasing as this notion might be it is not there in the text. Pip brings the pie because Magwitch tells him "'You get me a file.' He tilted me again. 'And you get me wittles.' He tilted me again. 'You bring 'em both to me.' He tilted me again. 'Or I'll have your heart and liver out.'"
It is in the character of Magwitch and his treatment by Pip that on my last reading of the novel I began to see a symbol that surprised me with its serendipitous relevance. In the original Magwitch is clearly symbolic of the brutalising effects of Victorian England's penal system and Pip's contempt and disgust for him symbolic of the way polite society sought to sweep any awareness of that world under the carpet. Yet I began to see their relationship as a fascinating symbol of the relationship between the rich West and the colonies of the Third World.
Before you immediately stop reading, just think about this summary of the plot, considering Pip as symbolic of the rich West (us) and Magwitch of the Third World:
Pip (the rich West) comes across Magwitch (the Third World) in a dark and baffling whirlwind of fear and excitement. He provides Magwitch with some leftover food and a file (beads, charity and weapons). Later, in the company of men with guns, he comes across Magwitch in a deadly struggle with another convict (another Third World country). The men make no attempt to understand the nature or causes of the struggle but intervene with force to bring about a sort of peace.
Over the years, Pip benefits massively from wealth that originates from Magwitch (the exploited peoples of the Third World). He fails to recognise the origins of his new-found prosperity but sees it as no more than his due, because of his connection to Miss Havisham (the raddled remnants of a grand aristocratic past). In due course, Magwitch, who has "lived rough that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work." decides he wants to visit Pip (the rich West) to whose benefit he has been breaking his back for years. Here the mood changes and Pip responds with alarm and disgust to the appearance of his benefactor. Pip finds himself "shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance" and experiences "a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night" (the fear and prejudice directed towards the ex-colonial immigrants by people in the West).
There is great pressure to have Magwitch (the immigrants from the old colonies) removed from polite society. There is then a final scene in which the inexplicable conflict between Magwitch and Compeyson flares up again, in a murky, muddy landscape where nothing can be clearly seen (take your pick- the Iran-Iraq war, the Middle East conflicts, any one of a number of brutal sub-Saharan wars).
To make matters worse, a vast amount of money simply disappears into the dark waters of the Thames (the banking crisis).
This reinterpretation of the text is not intended to be taken entirely seriously. If it was I would be far more guilty than any BBC screenplay writer of distorting the original. However it does demonstrate for me the strange protean power of symbols in literature- that we can see in a text connections and symbolic resonances with events, feelings and situations that the author would never have imagined.
Blake's the Sick Rose is a well known example of such symbolism, and no doubt readers over the years have felt in it uncanny resonances with particular relationships or emotions they have experienced. What Blake would have been unlikely to be able to foresee was how apposite some readers felt it to be as a symbol for AIDs. Tennyson's the Eagle can be read as a simple descriptive poem or as a symbol of autocratic, despotic power. Again it is unlikely that the poet could have foreseen the grounds of connection with Adolf Hitler, sitting alone in his Adlerhorst, plotting to unleash the thunderbolts of his Blitzkrieg on a war-torn Europe.
In both of these poems the new grounds that modern readers see, though unsuspected at the time by the poets, chime well with the presumed original intentions of the authors. What fascinates me is where symbols an author creates take on entirely new resonances that their creators would find surprising, even perverse. If a reader sees in a symbol uncanny resonances with concepts or situations that are divorced entirely from their original context, is there any problem with them doing so? I will present two examples and let you judge.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is an acute and moving satire on the way the idealism of the Russian Revolution descended into the brutal repression of Stalinism. A turning point in the plot is when the windmill that the animals have created with enormous, backbreaking effort has been destroyed in a storm. In the story this is clearly a symbol for the failed industrial policies of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and Napoleon's identification of Snowball as the culprit a reference to Stalin's scapegoating of Trotsky and others.
However for me in autumn 2001 this symbol acquired terrible new resonance. On the 11th September a great tower in the real world came crashing down. As in the novel "a cry of despair broke from every animal's throat. A terrible sight had met their eyes. The windmill was in ruins." What was particularly chilling was the way that almost immediately afterwards the actions of George Bush and the neocons, ably assisted by Tony Blair, so exactly paralleled Napoleon's actions in the novel:
"Napoleon paced to and fro in silence, occasionally snuffing at the ground. His tail had grown rigid and twitched sharply from side to side, a sign in him of intense mental activity. Suddenly he halted as though his mind were made up.
'Comrades,' he said quietly, 'do you know who is responsible for this? Do you know the enemy who has come in the night and overthrown our windmill? SNOWBALL!' he suddenly roared in a voice of thunder. 'Snowball has done this thing! In sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. Comrades, here and now I pronounce the death sentence upon Snowball. 'Animal Hero, Second Class,' and half a bushel of apples to any animal who brings him to justice. A full bushel to anyone who captures him alive!'"
Substitute Saddam Hussein for Snowball and there you have it.
The second example is perhaps even further from the author's intention but I find it fascinating. Dickens' Great Expectations is a perennial favourite, recently reimagined as a BBC drama. This adaptation had some excellent features, though it misrepresented the original in some aspects. A key point in the televised version is that Pip might have brought Magwitch the file because he was frightened, but the bringing of the pie was an act of pure goodness that Magwitch never forgot and chose later to reward. Pleasing as this notion might be it is not there in the text. Pip brings the pie because Magwitch tells him "'You get me a file.' He tilted me again. 'And you get me wittles.' He tilted me again. 'You bring 'em both to me.' He tilted me again. 'Or I'll have your heart and liver out.'"
It is in the character of Magwitch and his treatment by Pip that on my last reading of the novel I began to see a symbol that surprised me with its serendipitous relevance. In the original Magwitch is clearly symbolic of the brutalising effects of Victorian England's penal system and Pip's contempt and disgust for him symbolic of the way polite society sought to sweep any awareness of that world under the carpet. Yet I began to see their relationship as a fascinating symbol of the relationship between the rich West and the colonies of the Third World.
Before you immediately stop reading, just think about this summary of the plot, considering Pip as symbolic of the rich West (us) and Magwitch of the Third World:
Pip (the rich West) comes across Magwitch (the Third World) in a dark and baffling whirlwind of fear and excitement. He provides Magwitch with some leftover food and a file (beads, charity and weapons). Later, in the company of men with guns, he comes across Magwitch in a deadly struggle with another convict (another Third World country). The men make no attempt to understand the nature or causes of the struggle but intervene with force to bring about a sort of peace.
Over the years, Pip benefits massively from wealth that originates from Magwitch (the exploited peoples of the Third World). He fails to recognise the origins of his new-found prosperity but sees it as no more than his due, because of his connection to Miss Havisham (the raddled remnants of a grand aristocratic past). In due course, Magwitch, who has "lived rough that you should live smooth; I worked hard that you should be above work." decides he wants to visit Pip (the rich West) to whose benefit he has been breaking his back for years. Here the mood changes and Pip responds with alarm and disgust to the appearance of his benefactor. Pip finds himself "shrinking from him with the strongest repugnance" and experiences "a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night" (the fear and prejudice directed towards the ex-colonial immigrants by people in the West).
There is great pressure to have Magwitch (the immigrants from the old colonies) removed from polite society. There is then a final scene in which the inexplicable conflict between Magwitch and Compeyson flares up again, in a murky, muddy landscape where nothing can be clearly seen (take your pick- the Iran-Iraq war, the Middle East conflicts, any one of a number of brutal sub-Saharan wars).
To make matters worse, a vast amount of money simply disappears into the dark waters of the Thames (the banking crisis).
This reinterpretation of the text is not intended to be taken entirely seriously. If it was I would be far more guilty than any BBC screenplay writer of distorting the original. However it does demonstrate for me the strange protean power of symbols in literature- that we can see in a text connections and symbolic resonances with events, feelings and situations that the author would never have imagined.
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