There have been a number of distressing news stories recently that have called into question public trust in nursing as a caring and compassionate profession. Partly of course this is just one of the Tories' more despicable tactics in their quest to undermine this nation's faith in its National Health Service, and a tactic that some of the tabloids seem more than happy to assist with. It appears that the sight of a large state-run enterprise doing something as important as protecting the nation's health with such success and such overwhelming public support brings out the inherently destructive nastiness of the neo-cons this side of the Atlantic too.
No doubt there is some basis in truth for such stories of medical staff, including nurses, treating vulnerable patients with neither compassion nor dignity. In any organisation as vast as the NHS there are bound to be some whose motivations are twisted, or whom bitterness, despair and the intolerable stresses of their work have transformed into monsters. And given the nature of their work, if even tiny numbers of nurses are or become monsters, then the power they have over the safety, comfort and indeed life of patients at their most vulnerable is frightening.
However for these stories to gain the currency they have there has, I believe, to be more to it than either Tory tabloid vindictiveness or the despicable behaviour of a tiny minority. Is there then something about what nursing has become that allows the general public to believe that nurses are less compassionate, less caring, than they used to be?
I have recently spent a considerable amount of time in hospitals with my wife, culminating in a few days in the Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit where she died. Sitting at her bedside I had a great deal of time to study the nurses and doctors who cared for her and, while I was immensely impressed with the way they did so, I began also to think about how their role has changed over recent years.
The most obvious change is in the very high degree of professionalism, medical expertise and efficiency required of nurses in today's hospitals. Even something as simple as changing a dressing has become a meticulously thought through and elaborately choreographed procedure that ensures that at no point will anything that is to come into contact with the patient's skin touch anything that is not sterile. Maintaining fluid balance is no longer simply a question of periodically checking up whether the patient has passed urine. In patients on close monitoring every millilitre of fluid in or out is recorded and if a patient has gone more than a specified time without passing urine then a nurse will use a small single-purpose ultrasound scanner to measure the contents of their bladder, considering catheterisation if that quantity exceeds a certain preset threshold. Every aspect of the patient's condition is recorded and cross-checked, with doctors paying as much attention to the nursing notes as to their own, and even something as simple as putting up a bag of saline bound around with procedures and safety checks to ensure that no patient receives the wrong interventions.
And of course everything, but everything, is entered into a variety of databases, both physical and electronic. Nurses have to spend a considerable proportion of their time entering, cross-checking and retrieving data. Of course there are those in the swivel-eyed nether reaches of the Tory party who would point to that very fact as prima facie evidence of the schlerotically bureaucratic nature of the NHS, but the nurses can hardly be blamed for their need to record everything. And neither in fact should the NHS itself. Not only do meticulous records help prevent the sort of appalling accidents in treatment that make for one branch of the anti-NHS tabloid stories (War Hero Has Wrong Leg Amputated!), they are also the only sure protection against the rapacious hordes of injury lawyers who haunt the daytime TV schedules. Even in the midst of the appalling horror of witnessing my wife's sudden death I could not help but notice the nervousness of the medical staff on the ward. Was I going to be the one who blighted all of their futures with a long-drawn-out and bitter battle to establish fault? And the meticulous recording of every detail of treatment is the only protection against malicious accusations of malpractice.
Yet even these additional pressures on nurses today are not, I believe, the central issue in their changing relationship with the patients they treat, and those patients' relatives and friends. Busy as they were, the nurses caring for my wife did so with good humour, compassion and genuine humanity. Whilst the procedures they carried out were such as at one time might have been more associated with doctors they carried them out in such a way that my wife was accorded respect, dignity and even affection. And yet, as I watched them, I began to see some of the ways in which the transformation of nursing from a vocation to a highly-skilled profession could be seen by some as inimical with the image of the compassionate, caring nurse.
Perhaps the clearest example of what I am talking about is the issue of post-thrombolytic monitoring. Thrombolysis (from the Greek- 'thrombos' = a clot and 'lysis' = destruction) is what is popularly known as clot-busting. If caught early enough, many of the effects of an ischemic stroke can be lessened by administering thrombolytic drugs, which dissolve every blood clot in the body, including the one which is depriving part of the brain of its blood supply. This is of course a procedure with considerable risk, not least of which is what is called a hemorrhagic transformation, where the blood clot on the brain is replaced by a brain bleed. To guard against this, nurses have to monitor any thrombolysed patient very closely for 24 hours. And this monitoring is not simply a question of blood pressure, temperature and the rest. The nurses actually have to carry out neurological tests every hour ("Raise your right arm for me. And your left. Now make a fist. Push my arm away. Now pull it towards you..." and on, and on, as the exhausted patient stares beseechingly into their eyes, willing them to stop, to let them sleep.)
This monitoring is clearly absolutely vital and a major factor in the successful treatment of strokes that not long ago would have resulted in death or very severe disability. Yet, on the face of it at least, such monitoring is the very opposite of compassionate. Everyone, especially nurses on a Hyper-Acute Stroke Unit, knows that stroke causes exhaustion. Twice I have been with my wife in the aftermath of a stroke and I can tell you that exhaustion is too pallid and commonplace a term to describe what she went through. In the old days, I am sure, compassionate nurses would see a stroke patient so washed-out, so drained with the simple task of taking a sip of water that they would let them sleep for a while. "I'll come back later," they would have said. "She looks exhausted." And now what do they do? At 3 a.m they come to that same exhausted patient's bed, call to them incessantly until the patient drags themselves from the depths of their desperately sought-for sleep and make them do what my wife called those bloody stupid neurological tests. And then again at 4 a.m. And 5...
Surely that can't be compassionate, a part us must inevitably feel as we witness such nursing. Don't you see how tired she is? Just leave her alone, why can't you?
I didn't say it of course, because they were doing exactly the right thing. What sort of compassion would allow a nurse to leave a patient sleeping while unnoticed in the depths of their brain a hemorrhagic transformation was spreading its dark tide of destruction? The old-fashioned "compassionate" style of nursing that engaged with the patient rather than their medical condition might feel more human and soft-focussed and personal, but I know which I would prefer if it was me who was acutely ill and in imminent danger.
And so in fact I have emerged from this terrible experience with a new-found admiration for the functioning of the NHS at the sharp end, and for the professionalism, expertise and (yes) compassion of so many nurses. As the ones in closest contact with the patients dependent on their care it cannot be easy for nurses to carry out procedures that they know to be painful, uncomfortable, or even distressing to a patient at their most frightened and vulnerable. And yet they do so, efficiently professionally and, in the most part, with real humanity because at the root the nursing profession is, more than ever, solidly founded on a basis of true compassion.
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Tuesday, 18 September 2012
More Gove nonsense uncritically accepted
Before I start this post, a caveat and some reassurance. Reassurance first: this will be my last post about the bloody e-bac. For a while anyway. Now the caveat: I simply cannot bring myself actually to read Gove's statement, let alone watch or listen to him making it. If I am therefore guilty of misrepresenting his views please tell me. It is utterly irresponsible of me, I know, to seek to criticise proposals I have not heard at first hand. Perhaps they are infinitely better thought through than I give them credit for. Perhaps Mr Gove has been listening and learning and now actually does understand how education works, and it is the commentators who have got it all wrong. Miracles sometimes happen.
Anyway, there are two aspects of Gove's proposed replacement for GCSE that appear to have gone largely unchallenged thus far. Indeed they seem to have been accepted as truisms and hence beyond dispute. They are these: that his new exams will be more academic; and that they will stop teachers teaching to the tests. However just for a minute, let us examine these two claims.
Mr Gove (it appears) has stated emphatically that his new exams will be more academic, citing as evidence that there will be no more modules or continuous assessment and instead a three hour terminal exam. The only debate that this appears to have engendered is over the question of whether this is fair to the "less academic" students. The primary claim seems to have gone largely unchallenged. However I personally really don't get it. In what universe does academic ability equate with the ability to succeed at a three-hour exam? What proportion of the average academic's working life is spent sitting three-hour exams or doing anything remotely similar? Academic study approximates far more closely to the processes involved in modular and continuous assessment. Academics conduct research, produce papers, interact with other academics, take part in debates and review the work of their peers. These are not dissimilar activities to those students engage in when producing continuous assessment. In science for instance the only part of student assessment that comes anywhere close to the working life of academics is the coursework element in which students carry out a scientific investigation.
So to claim that a three-hour terminal exam is per se more academic than modular or continuous assessment is absurd. When Mr Gove went to school the academic students were the ones who sat the three-hour exams while the non-academic ones did woodwork. However I have news for you Mr Gove: the world has changed since then. We have found better and more sophisticated ways to test academic ability. Except that you seem intent on destroying them.
The second claim is that these exams will stop teachers teaching to the tests. Indeed they will free up teaching time so much as to allow whole vistas of advanced learning to be explored. Again this claim appears, to me, to be going largely unchallenged. However again, I don't get it. We live now in a world where every aspect of schools' success (and indeed survival) is linked to the exam performance of its students. Mr Gove is ratcheting up the "floor target" for exam success at the end of KS4 just as he is forcing down the percentages of students who do succeed and schools caught in this unholy vice face compulsory conversion to academies and/or forced closure. At the same time everyone who feels qualified to pontificate on education (that would be everyone then) is loudly bemoaning the numbers of students who fail to achieve high grades at the end of KS4 and prophesying calamity for those who do. It stands to reason therefore that teachers care, and will continue to care, about the exam performance of their students above and beyond anything else.
So how will the new exams prevent teachers teaching to the tests? Why under the new system will teachers suddenly feel that yes, these exams are the be-all and end-all for my students' achievement and yes, my own career progression and possibly pay will be linked to my students' success in these exams and yes, my school may even be forced to close if the students do not succeed at these exams but no, I am not going to spend as much time preparing my students for these exams as I used to? Can't quite imagine it, can you?
So for a time I wondered why on earth even someone as brazen as Mr Gove might suggest that these exams will prevent teachers teaching to the tests. And then suddenly I got it! He won't tell anyone what's in them. Brilliant! All that teachers and students will be told will be that there's a three-hour exam. That's it. No more details. No practice papers, no mark schemes, no assessment criteria. Just like the old days. See teachers trying to teach to the tests then! No- they'll go back to how it used to be, like when I was at school. Students will get to sit at their desks copying out chapters from old textbooks and when they ask what this has to do with the exam the teacher will simply say, "No idea. Do it anyway," just like they used to when I was at school. Dolores Umbridge would be proud.
So back to my reassurance at the start of this post. This really is the last I will write on this subject, at least for a while. It makes me sick and dizzy just to think about it. Thank God I'm not in education any more.
Anyway, there are two aspects of Gove's proposed replacement for GCSE that appear to have gone largely unchallenged thus far. Indeed they seem to have been accepted as truisms and hence beyond dispute. They are these: that his new exams will be more academic; and that they will stop teachers teaching to the tests. However just for a minute, let us examine these two claims.
Mr Gove (it appears) has stated emphatically that his new exams will be more academic, citing as evidence that there will be no more modules or continuous assessment and instead a three hour terminal exam. The only debate that this appears to have engendered is over the question of whether this is fair to the "less academic" students. The primary claim seems to have gone largely unchallenged. However I personally really don't get it. In what universe does academic ability equate with the ability to succeed at a three-hour exam? What proportion of the average academic's working life is spent sitting three-hour exams or doing anything remotely similar? Academic study approximates far more closely to the processes involved in modular and continuous assessment. Academics conduct research, produce papers, interact with other academics, take part in debates and review the work of their peers. These are not dissimilar activities to those students engage in when producing continuous assessment. In science for instance the only part of student assessment that comes anywhere close to the working life of academics is the coursework element in which students carry out a scientific investigation.
So to claim that a three-hour terminal exam is per se more academic than modular or continuous assessment is absurd. When Mr Gove went to school the academic students were the ones who sat the three-hour exams while the non-academic ones did woodwork. However I have news for you Mr Gove: the world has changed since then. We have found better and more sophisticated ways to test academic ability. Except that you seem intent on destroying them.
The second claim is that these exams will stop teachers teaching to the tests. Indeed they will free up teaching time so much as to allow whole vistas of advanced learning to be explored. Again this claim appears, to me, to be going largely unchallenged. However again, I don't get it. We live now in a world where every aspect of schools' success (and indeed survival) is linked to the exam performance of its students. Mr Gove is ratcheting up the "floor target" for exam success at the end of KS4 just as he is forcing down the percentages of students who do succeed and schools caught in this unholy vice face compulsory conversion to academies and/or forced closure. At the same time everyone who feels qualified to pontificate on education (that would be everyone then) is loudly bemoaning the numbers of students who fail to achieve high grades at the end of KS4 and prophesying calamity for those who do. It stands to reason therefore that teachers care, and will continue to care, about the exam performance of their students above and beyond anything else.
So how will the new exams prevent teachers teaching to the tests? Why under the new system will teachers suddenly feel that yes, these exams are the be-all and end-all for my students' achievement and yes, my own career progression and possibly pay will be linked to my students' success in these exams and yes, my school may even be forced to close if the students do not succeed at these exams but no, I am not going to spend as much time preparing my students for these exams as I used to? Can't quite imagine it, can you?
So for a time I wondered why on earth even someone as brazen as Mr Gove might suggest that these exams will prevent teachers teaching to the tests. And then suddenly I got it! He won't tell anyone what's in them. Brilliant! All that teachers and students will be told will be that there's a three-hour exam. That's it. No more details. No practice papers, no mark schemes, no assessment criteria. Just like the old days. See teachers trying to teach to the tests then! No- they'll go back to how it used to be, like when I was at school. Students will get to sit at their desks copying out chapters from old textbooks and when they ask what this has to do with the exam the teacher will simply say, "No idea. Do it anyway," just like they used to when I was at school. Dolores Umbridge would be proud.
So back to my reassurance at the start of this post. This really is the last I will write on this subject, at least for a while. It makes me sick and dizzy just to think about it. Thank God I'm not in education any more.
Sunday, 16 September 2012
Mea culpa (or why Michael Gove really should be running the WHOLE government)
I made the mistake in my last post of trying to offer a reasoned and thoughtful analysis of what is wrong with Michael Gove's proposals for a return to an O-level type exam system. I'm sorry. It was a schoolboy error and demonstrated my innate inability to understand the basics of Tory philosophy. Reasoned, careful arguments are a sure sign of wet, liberal, Guardian-reading namby-pambyism. I should have known this and I apologise. Sincerely and deeply.
Because of course norm referencing is A GOOD THING. It is only right and proper that a (very small) fixed proportion of society be allowed to succeed whilst others fail. To argue anything else is frankly communist and as discredited as the average MP's expenses return. In fact, I now understand that the principal of norm referencing should indeed be more widely applied. It is frankly scandalous that so many people pass their driving tests, simply because they can drive WELL and not because they can drive BETTER than everyone else. Surely the top 10% of all entrants should pass the driving test and NO MORE. And in case that bothers anyone intending taking their test in the future, don't worry! You never know, it could be that on the day you take your test everyone else is utterly, unadulteratedly crap at driving and just by not killing a pedestrian you'll get through. Driving tests should be COMPETITIVE. It stands to reason. And if you can bump up your chances by nobbling some of the other candidates then so much the better.
It is a well known fact, accepted by all but the most dyed-in-the-wool socialists that competition INEVITABLY leads to improvement. So surely the concept should be applied more widely. Mr Gove has led the way, of course, arguing that all schools should be better than the average (of COURSE they should. It is only swivel-eyed left-leaning mathematicians who argue that by definition nearly 50% of any sample must be below the average) but where he leads others should follow suit. Antibiotics shouldn't be offered to just anyone with a condition susceptible to treatment by antibiotics. That's criterion referencing. It leads to an erosion of standards- everyone knows that. There should be some sort of COMPETITIVE element to the prescription of antibiotics. I don't know- the patients with the top 10% of temperatures that day. It would lend a dynamic element of jeopardy to the visit to the doctor, because presumably you'd have to wait to the end of the day to see if you had come in the top 10%, when (if you had) you would get your antibiotics. Presuming you were still alive to receive them.
Of course the same logic could be applied more widely. It is patently absurd for people to be given disability benefit simply because they meet some criterion, such as that they are physically incapable of working. Would it not make sense that a fixed (and very small) proportion of applicants are given the benefit, thus ensuring that only the most severely disabled get any state support whatever?
Oh no, wait a minute. That is what happens. Of course. Yes. Well, carry on...
Because of course norm referencing is A GOOD THING. It is only right and proper that a (very small) fixed proportion of society be allowed to succeed whilst others fail. To argue anything else is frankly communist and as discredited as the average MP's expenses return. In fact, I now understand that the principal of norm referencing should indeed be more widely applied. It is frankly scandalous that so many people pass their driving tests, simply because they can drive WELL and not because they can drive BETTER than everyone else. Surely the top 10% of all entrants should pass the driving test and NO MORE. And in case that bothers anyone intending taking their test in the future, don't worry! You never know, it could be that on the day you take your test everyone else is utterly, unadulteratedly crap at driving and just by not killing a pedestrian you'll get through. Driving tests should be COMPETITIVE. It stands to reason. And if you can bump up your chances by nobbling some of the other candidates then so much the better.
It is a well known fact, accepted by all but the most dyed-in-the-wool socialists that competition INEVITABLY leads to improvement. So surely the concept should be applied more widely. Mr Gove has led the way, of course, arguing that all schools should be better than the average (of COURSE they should. It is only swivel-eyed left-leaning mathematicians who argue that by definition nearly 50% of any sample must be below the average) but where he leads others should follow suit. Antibiotics shouldn't be offered to just anyone with a condition susceptible to treatment by antibiotics. That's criterion referencing. It leads to an erosion of standards- everyone knows that. There should be some sort of COMPETITIVE element to the prescription of antibiotics. I don't know- the patients with the top 10% of temperatures that day. It would lend a dynamic element of jeopardy to the visit to the doctor, because presumably you'd have to wait to the end of the day to see if you had come in the top 10%, when (if you had) you would get your antibiotics. Presuming you were still alive to receive them.
Of course the same logic could be applied more widely. It is patently absurd for people to be given disability benefit simply because they meet some criterion, such as that they are physically incapable of working. Would it not make sense that a fixed (and very small) proportion of applicants are given the benefit, thus ensuring that only the most severely disabled get any state support whatever?
Oh no, wait a minute. That is what happens. Of course. Yes. Well, carry on...
Michael Gove- another Education Secretary who really doesn't understand education
So we are to have a return to 'tougher' O-level type exams are we? Of course there is a certain logic to making the announcement now. In a piece of news manipulation that would make Alistair Campbell green with envy Gove has managed to discredit overnight an exam system (GCSEs) that has taken decades to develop, involving some of the best minds in education today. Never mind that, because despite being brought in under Thatcher GCSEs were clearly part of a New Labour plot to undermine the glorious traditions of British education, so they had to go. It is instructive to examine the brutal simplicity with which Gove delivered the coup de grace to a system that government (through league tables) has used to define every scintilla of secondary education. There were essentially four steps:
"The system we propose will be tougher, but clearer and fairer. It will be more intelligible to users, better than O Levels, and better than CSE. It will stretch the able more and stretch the average more."
Recognise the rhetoric at all?
However there is something deeper here that, for me, reveals Gove's terrifying lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the exams and assessments with which he is meddling so recklessly. He constantly uses the image of toughness to describe what the GCSEs lack and the O levels had. Indeed it is clear that a restoration of this "toughness" is his prime motivator for undoing the work of his Tory predecessors in developing GCSEs. So what does "toughness" mean in this context?
Well it is pretty clear that what "toughness" means for Gove is limiting the proportion of students who gain the highest grades. He sees the increase in the proportion of students getting top grades in exams as a clear sign of the soft, wet, liberal, all-must-get-prizes lack of rigour that for him clearly lies at the heart of state education. Back in the good old days you see, the proportion of students who got an A was fixed in advance and it meant that only the very, very best could say "I got an A." Now any Tom Dick or Ahmed can boast of a string of A*s that probably puts little Michael's own O level grades somewhat to shame. Why? Lack of rigour, obviously. Lack of toughness.
Oh dear. Oh dear me, no Michael. Listen to your advisers in the DoE (he won't- he never does) and they will explain it to you in simple terms so you can understand. It is NOT about toughness. It's about the difference between norm referencing and criterion referencing.
So what does that mean, I hear you ask (if you have read this far, that is)? These are the sort of terms educational professionals use, and are thus by definition tainted for those such as Michael Gove who believe that educational professionals lie at the root of the problem (his panacea for education being Free Schools set up by parents and employing unqualified teachers). However they are actually quite important, and not really that hard to grasp. To make it simple, here are two examples NOT from education:
Criterion referencing: This is like the driving test. There are a set of predefined standards, achievement of which leads to success. It doesn't matter when you take your test whether everyone else that day has passed or everyone else has failed. If you meet the standard you pass, if you don't you fail.
Norm referencing: This is like an Olympic 1500 meter final. The objective standard (in terms of time) is of no consequence. All that matters is how your individual performance compares to that of the other athletes on the track.
It would be ridiculous to claim that the second system is tougher than the first- if anything it has less objective rigour, as it is possible to win the Olympic men's 1500 meter final in a time of 3 minutes 34 seconds, 8 seconds off the world record, if all the athletes are looking at each other and no one wants to lead from the front.
Yet that is what Gove is saying (and repeating ad nauseam). The new O level system Gove is proposing, will, it appears, be a norm referenced system: "percentages of students achieving the top grades will be limited" apparently. Fine, except of course that this means it cannot also be criterion referenced. That would be like telling a driving test student that yes, they have met all the required standards but, no they are not going to get their driving test because the quota has already been reached.
Criterion referencing in GCSEs is actually a fairly solid guarantor of standards across years and decades. The descriptors of each grade in each subject are a matter of public record, and one can compare descriptors between different years to ensure that a C today is broadly the same as a C in 1989 when the first students took GCSEs. Each year the whole system that administers and assesses exams spends countless thousands of hours ensuring that these criteria are fairly and consistently applied, so that the exam papers do test performance against those criteria, and the exam marking does fairly assess it.
Until this year, that is.
So does it matter that Gove wants to rip all that up and return to a misty-eyed vision of 1950s England? Would there be any problems in returning to a norm referenced system? Well not really, if you didn't mind about a potential unchecked erosion of standards. Because of course under a norm-referenced system, getting an A grade simply means that you were in the top X% of the particular cohort who took that exam. Who might all have been crap. Without criterion referencing there is simply no way to know. If Gove reintroduced a norm referenced system he would GUARANTEE that into the future a certain percentage would achieve each of the top grades. What he could not guarantee (without criterion referencing) was whether that X% were simply the best of a bad lot.
Oh dear, oh dear, Mr Gove. You really don't get any of this, do you? And yet the future of our education system is in your hands.
- Gove put very public pressure on the exam boards and Ofqual not to allow pass rates to increase this year.
- The exam boards and Ofqual duly bowed to the pressure and for thousands of students arbitrarily changed the goalposts after the ball would appear already to have been in the net.
- Gove responded to the furore by telling the Welsh Education Secretary that restoring fairness to this year's marking would fundamentally undermine the credibility of GCSEs.
- Gove announced that GCSEs were now not fit for purpose.
"The system we propose will be tougher, but clearer and fairer. It will be more intelligible to users, better than O Levels, and better than CSE. It will stretch the able more and stretch the average more."
Recognise the rhetoric at all?
However there is something deeper here that, for me, reveals Gove's terrifying lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the exams and assessments with which he is meddling so recklessly. He constantly uses the image of toughness to describe what the GCSEs lack and the O levels had. Indeed it is clear that a restoration of this "toughness" is his prime motivator for undoing the work of his Tory predecessors in developing GCSEs. So what does "toughness" mean in this context?
Well it is pretty clear that what "toughness" means for Gove is limiting the proportion of students who gain the highest grades. He sees the increase in the proportion of students getting top grades in exams as a clear sign of the soft, wet, liberal, all-must-get-prizes lack of rigour that for him clearly lies at the heart of state education. Back in the good old days you see, the proportion of students who got an A was fixed in advance and it meant that only the very, very best could say "I got an A." Now any Tom Dick or Ahmed can boast of a string of A*s that probably puts little Michael's own O level grades somewhat to shame. Why? Lack of rigour, obviously. Lack of toughness.
Oh dear. Oh dear me, no Michael. Listen to your advisers in the DoE (he won't- he never does) and they will explain it to you in simple terms so you can understand. It is NOT about toughness. It's about the difference between norm referencing and criterion referencing.
So what does that mean, I hear you ask (if you have read this far, that is)? These are the sort of terms educational professionals use, and are thus by definition tainted for those such as Michael Gove who believe that educational professionals lie at the root of the problem (his panacea for education being Free Schools set up by parents and employing unqualified teachers). However they are actually quite important, and not really that hard to grasp. To make it simple, here are two examples NOT from education:
Criterion referencing: This is like the driving test. There are a set of predefined standards, achievement of which leads to success. It doesn't matter when you take your test whether everyone else that day has passed or everyone else has failed. If you meet the standard you pass, if you don't you fail.
Norm referencing: This is like an Olympic 1500 meter final. The objective standard (in terms of time) is of no consequence. All that matters is how your individual performance compares to that of the other athletes on the track.
It would be ridiculous to claim that the second system is tougher than the first- if anything it has less objective rigour, as it is possible to win the Olympic men's 1500 meter final in a time of 3 minutes 34 seconds, 8 seconds off the world record, if all the athletes are looking at each other and no one wants to lead from the front.
Yet that is what Gove is saying (and repeating ad nauseam). The new O level system Gove is proposing, will, it appears, be a norm referenced system: "percentages of students achieving the top grades will be limited" apparently. Fine, except of course that this means it cannot also be criterion referenced. That would be like telling a driving test student that yes, they have met all the required standards but, no they are not going to get their driving test because the quota has already been reached.
Criterion referencing in GCSEs is actually a fairly solid guarantor of standards across years and decades. The descriptors of each grade in each subject are a matter of public record, and one can compare descriptors between different years to ensure that a C today is broadly the same as a C in 1989 when the first students took GCSEs. Each year the whole system that administers and assesses exams spends countless thousands of hours ensuring that these criteria are fairly and consistently applied, so that the exam papers do test performance against those criteria, and the exam marking does fairly assess it.
Until this year, that is.
So does it matter that Gove wants to rip all that up and return to a misty-eyed vision of 1950s England? Would there be any problems in returning to a norm referenced system? Well not really, if you didn't mind about a potential unchecked erosion of standards. Because of course under a norm-referenced system, getting an A grade simply means that you were in the top X% of the particular cohort who took that exam. Who might all have been crap. Without criterion referencing there is simply no way to know. If Gove reintroduced a norm referenced system he would GUARANTEE that into the future a certain percentage would achieve each of the top grades. What he could not guarantee (without criterion referencing) was whether that X% were simply the best of a bad lot.
Oh dear, oh dear, Mr Gove. You really don't get any of this, do you? And yet the future of our education system is in your hands.
Sunday, 12 August 2012
The unpleasant myth of grade inflation
We are coming to the time for an annual ritual to be played out in England and Wales: just as thousands of nervous teenagers are opening envelopes containing their exam results, politicians and the tabloid press compete with each other to denigrate those students' achievement in ever more strident terms, bemoaning the appalling decline in standards exemplified by the despicable phenomenon of grade inflation. This year, allegedly, it will be different, because the lovely Mr Gove has trumped everyone by issuing an edict that over-performance will be eradicated by norm-referencing the A level results (just like the old days), to ensure that no more students achieve the top grades than did last year. The exams are of course criterion-referenced these days, setting a carefully thought-through benchmark for each grade, but that is not good enough for Mr Gove, because it leads to grade inflation and that,as we are incessantly told, is a bad thing. Essentially an analogy for what he has done would be for a driver to take the driving test only to be told that, whilst they drove extremely well, too many other drivers had already passed their driving test this month, so they would be failed.
So what does grade inflation mean, and does it exist? Well, it depends how you look at it. Without question far larger numbers of students achieve high grades than used to be the case and the proportion doing so has increased steadily for decades. It is unlikely that today's students are significantly cleverer (or stupider, come to that) than previous generations, so it would appear reasonable to assume that the exams have got easier. This assumption is particularly easy for those in their middle years to swallow, since it chimes with their heartfelt belief that the exams they did must have been harder than any that are done these days. Seeking to justify that view, some look at contemporary exam papers set for 16-year-olds and find that, astonishingly, they can do them EASILY! It does not appear to occur to some that they may possibly have acquired some skills and knowledge in the decades since they were 16 themselves so the comparison is not a fair one. Many may also over-estimate their ability to answer the exam questions well enough to achieve a good grade. The best exam questions are open-ended and often deceptively simple at first glance.
Other more apparently rigorous studies have given contemporary 16-year-olds 1950s O-level papers to sit and found that they COULD NOT DO THEM! See- grade inflation. And it's a bad thing. Of course this is hardly a fair test either. How could a 16-year-old possibly expect to do well at an exam paper for which they have not been prepared, covering areas of the curriculum they have no knowledge of and testing skills (like fact regurgitation) that they have never practised? How well do you think 1950s 16-year-olds would have done with a 21st Century exam paper?
So any direct comparison of contemporary and historical exams is problematic. For what it is worth, my own experience would not tend to suggest that 21st Century exam papers are less challenging. I was one of those who did extremely well under the old exams (from back in the days when they were PROPER EXAMS). I have also taught contemporary teenagers and helped them prepare for today's exams. It is hard to remember with any certainty, but I am sure that in English Literature for instance, whilst I knew large sections of the texts I had to study off by heart, my understanding of any of them was really pretty superficial, and well below what I would expect from the top students these days.
But grade inflation still exists, surely. Just look at the numbers: it must exist.
Well yes, but only in the same way that age inflation exists. Life expectancy in this country is another thing that has increased steadily over many decades, yet I can't remember the last time anyone bemoaned the phenomenon of age inflation. I don't remember hearing Tory MPs demanding that years be made longer to stamp out the evils of age inflation. No. everyone accepts without question that increased life expectancy is a benign outcome of improved nutrition, housing, sanitation and healthcare.
Or to take a more topical example: athletic performance. It is not only that world records are on a consistent downward trend- more and more athletes are achieving benchmarks once seen as the pinnacle of human ability. Roger Bannister's four-minute mark for the mile has been achieved by athletes aged 16 and 42 and in the recent Olympics 100m final all eight runners would have broken the once unimaginable 10-second mark had Asafa Powell not pulled up injured.
So there you go, speed inflation too. Yet I don't hear calls for the 100 metres to be lengthened. Why not? Because everyone accepts that modern athletes perform better because they are far, far better prepared. Their fitness, training, nutrition, psychology and equipment are all much better and so they run faster.
So to return to the issue of grade inflation. I would argue very strongly indeed that the reason more students achieve the higher grades these days is simple: they are better prepared for the exams. In my day one had very little idea prior to the exam what one was really being tested on or how one's success (or otherwise) would be judged. Exam preparation (from memory) amounted to revising lists of dates/ quotations/ formulae/ molecular weights and trying to work out what the questions were going to be.
Contemporary students in every bog-standard comprehensive in the land are infinitely better prepared than that. Everything possible is done to ensure that they understand the actual criteria for success. They will have self-assessed and peer-assessed trial exam papers, using the published grade criteria, so that they have a precise understanding of what makes the difference between a C and a D or an A and an A* (in my day, I had not the faintest clue, by the way). They will have looked at exemplar answers, not to learn and copy them (these days that would get you nowhere, though again, in my day...) but to help them understand what makes for an effective answer to a particular question. They will have been given (or will have bought) revision materials of a quality and scope unheard of in my day. They will have benefited from revision timetables, revision classes and probably Easter holiday revision schools too. All that on top of a quality of teaching across their school career far in excess of anything I received. I was in a grammar school and then a prestigious Oxbridge-feeding direct grant school but distinctly remember teachers falling asleep at their desks, handing out sheets of maths problems and then sitting back to read the newspaper, or regaling us with incessant stories of their wartime escapades. I have never, in 25 years in inner London comprehensives, seen that degree of laxity. So yes, students nowadays will have benefited throughout their school careers from afar higher quality of teaching than used to be the case.
All of this is analogous to the sort of careful preparation we have been hearing about over the last few days of the London Olympics. Contemporary students may not be quite as scientifically pepared for their event as the GB cycling team, because not every teacher is a Dave Brailsford, but they are certainly a hell of a lot better prepared than I and my generation were. There are those of course who see this as somehow cheating (Mr Gove being clearly one of them). Students shouldn't be so carefully prepared. Exams should test their native wit and intelligence (whatever they are) and teachers who attend training courses run by exam boards are despicable cads. So presumably, although every aspect of a school's success is now utterly dependent on its students' success in exams, schools and teachers should return to the laissez-faire attitudes of my (and my generation's) teachers, most of whom clearly had a very hazy notion indeed of how to prepare their students effectively for the exams they would be sitting. Because of course in those days it really didn't matter. The tyranny of the league table had not been dreamt up, and if lots of students failed, well there were jobs for them in the factories/ docks/ mines/ shops (delete as appropriate) and frankly, it was probably the best place for them.
So please, stop pretending that grade inflation means that the exams we took were much, much harder than those today's students take. By all means introduce improved discrimination at the top end, to distinguish between those whose performance is, by historical standards, exemplary. Speculate if you wish on how well you or your generation would have done in your exams had you been as well prepared as today's youngsters are- it's like wondering what sort of time Roger Bannister or Jesse Owens would have been capable of had they benefited from modern training and nutrition regimes and been running on modern tracks with modern footwear. But don't denigrate the performance of today's youngsters. Those who succeed will have worked hard for their success. Probably much harder than you ever did.
So what does grade inflation mean, and does it exist? Well, it depends how you look at it. Without question far larger numbers of students achieve high grades than used to be the case and the proportion doing so has increased steadily for decades. It is unlikely that today's students are significantly cleverer (or stupider, come to that) than previous generations, so it would appear reasonable to assume that the exams have got easier. This assumption is particularly easy for those in their middle years to swallow, since it chimes with their heartfelt belief that the exams they did must have been harder than any that are done these days. Seeking to justify that view, some look at contemporary exam papers set for 16-year-olds and find that, astonishingly, they can do them EASILY! It does not appear to occur to some that they may possibly have acquired some skills and knowledge in the decades since they were 16 themselves so the comparison is not a fair one. Many may also over-estimate their ability to answer the exam questions well enough to achieve a good grade. The best exam questions are open-ended and often deceptively simple at first glance.
Other more apparently rigorous studies have given contemporary 16-year-olds 1950s O-level papers to sit and found that they COULD NOT DO THEM! See- grade inflation. And it's a bad thing. Of course this is hardly a fair test either. How could a 16-year-old possibly expect to do well at an exam paper for which they have not been prepared, covering areas of the curriculum they have no knowledge of and testing skills (like fact regurgitation) that they have never practised? How well do you think 1950s 16-year-olds would have done with a 21st Century exam paper?
So any direct comparison of contemporary and historical exams is problematic. For what it is worth, my own experience would not tend to suggest that 21st Century exam papers are less challenging. I was one of those who did extremely well under the old exams (from back in the days when they were PROPER EXAMS). I have also taught contemporary teenagers and helped them prepare for today's exams. It is hard to remember with any certainty, but I am sure that in English Literature for instance, whilst I knew large sections of the texts I had to study off by heart, my understanding of any of them was really pretty superficial, and well below what I would expect from the top students these days.
But grade inflation still exists, surely. Just look at the numbers: it must exist.
Well yes, but only in the same way that age inflation exists. Life expectancy in this country is another thing that has increased steadily over many decades, yet I can't remember the last time anyone bemoaned the phenomenon of age inflation. I don't remember hearing Tory MPs demanding that years be made longer to stamp out the evils of age inflation. No. everyone accepts without question that increased life expectancy is a benign outcome of improved nutrition, housing, sanitation and healthcare.
Or to take a more topical example: athletic performance. It is not only that world records are on a consistent downward trend- more and more athletes are achieving benchmarks once seen as the pinnacle of human ability. Roger Bannister's four-minute mark for the mile has been achieved by athletes aged 16 and 42 and in the recent Olympics 100m final all eight runners would have broken the once unimaginable 10-second mark had Asafa Powell not pulled up injured.
So there you go, speed inflation too. Yet I don't hear calls for the 100 metres to be lengthened. Why not? Because everyone accepts that modern athletes perform better because they are far, far better prepared. Their fitness, training, nutrition, psychology and equipment are all much better and so they run faster.
So to return to the issue of grade inflation. I would argue very strongly indeed that the reason more students achieve the higher grades these days is simple: they are better prepared for the exams. In my day one had very little idea prior to the exam what one was really being tested on or how one's success (or otherwise) would be judged. Exam preparation (from memory) amounted to revising lists of dates/ quotations/ formulae/ molecular weights and trying to work out what the questions were going to be.
Contemporary students in every bog-standard comprehensive in the land are infinitely better prepared than that. Everything possible is done to ensure that they understand the actual criteria for success. They will have self-assessed and peer-assessed trial exam papers, using the published grade criteria, so that they have a precise understanding of what makes the difference between a C and a D or an A and an A* (in my day, I had not the faintest clue, by the way). They will have looked at exemplar answers, not to learn and copy them (these days that would get you nowhere, though again, in my day...) but to help them understand what makes for an effective answer to a particular question. They will have been given (or will have bought) revision materials of a quality and scope unheard of in my day. They will have benefited from revision timetables, revision classes and probably Easter holiday revision schools too. All that on top of a quality of teaching across their school career far in excess of anything I received. I was in a grammar school and then a prestigious Oxbridge-feeding direct grant school but distinctly remember teachers falling asleep at their desks, handing out sheets of maths problems and then sitting back to read the newspaper, or regaling us with incessant stories of their wartime escapades. I have never, in 25 years in inner London comprehensives, seen that degree of laxity. So yes, students nowadays will have benefited throughout their school careers from afar higher quality of teaching than used to be the case.
All of this is analogous to the sort of careful preparation we have been hearing about over the last few days of the London Olympics. Contemporary students may not be quite as scientifically pepared for their event as the GB cycling team, because not every teacher is a Dave Brailsford, but they are certainly a hell of a lot better prepared than I and my generation were. There are those of course who see this as somehow cheating (Mr Gove being clearly one of them). Students shouldn't be so carefully prepared. Exams should test their native wit and intelligence (whatever they are) and teachers who attend training courses run by exam boards are despicable cads. So presumably, although every aspect of a school's success is now utterly dependent on its students' success in exams, schools and teachers should return to the laissez-faire attitudes of my (and my generation's) teachers, most of whom clearly had a very hazy notion indeed of how to prepare their students effectively for the exams they would be sitting. Because of course in those days it really didn't matter. The tyranny of the league table had not been dreamt up, and if lots of students failed, well there were jobs for them in the factories/ docks/ mines/ shops (delete as appropriate) and frankly, it was probably the best place for them.
So please, stop pretending that grade inflation means that the exams we took were much, much harder than those today's students take. By all means introduce improved discrimination at the top end, to distinguish between those whose performance is, by historical standards, exemplary. Speculate if you wish on how well you or your generation would have done in your exams had you been as well prepared as today's youngsters are- it's like wondering what sort of time Roger Bannister or Jesse Owens would have been capable of had they benefited from modern training and nutrition regimes and been running on modern tracks with modern footwear. But don't denigrate the performance of today's youngsters. Those who succeed will have worked hard for their success. Probably much harder than you ever did.
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
The internet and social discourse
The internet has transformed modes of social discourse. There's a truism if ever there was one, surely. Blogging, twitter, social networks and forums are so integrated into everyone's consciousness that it seems inconceivable that they have been around for less than a generation. And repeatedly we hear how they have utterly transformed the ways humans interact, ushering in a new, interconnected age.
Well yes, but I am firmly of the view expressed in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. The ways human beings interact, established over millennia, can't have changed over such a short period of time, can they?
Part of the issue is that we seem poorly equipped actually to get a clear understanding of the scale on which the internet operates. It has been suggested that humans struggle to establish a meaningful concept of a number even as big as 100, so an internet with a total number of users in the billions is simply too big for us to come close to conceptualising. The same is true of distance. We have evolved to have pretty good understanding of distances up to maybe 15 miles- the distance we can see, or can easily walk in a day- but beyond that we struggle. Aeroplanes and high-speed trains don't help of course and even cars compress distances to the extent that it is hard to remember just how far it is between places. We repeat frequently that it is a small world, but no it isn't. Try walking round it.
However what the internet does allow us to do is to tune out these problematic issues of scale. The process of engaging with computers provides an illusory but comforting sense of privacy and intimacy- of things happening on a human scale. Occasionally it is disrupted of course, such as when someone with whom one is conversing on an internet forum says that it is too late to address an issue right now when in fact it is 8am and you are just wondering what to have for breakfast. The same uncomfortable jolt comes when someone shares a link on FaceBook and as you click on it you see that 37,942 others 'like' this.
Fundamentally though, the internet allows us to pretend that we are in communication with others at an entirely human scale- it is what makes it so seductive. And what happens as a result, I believe, is that we simply replicate ancient structures of social interaction through the medium of high-speed broadband. The clues are in the words we use to describe the process, many of which point us in some surprising directions.
Take the word 'blog' for instance. It covers a multitude of sins but its etymological origins, from the log a sea captain used to keep, points to one of the purposes of weblogs. They provide a record of a journey. At the time of writing it is of course impossible for a sea captain to tell what may or may not be important to record, but he (pretty much exclusively 'he' in those days) has to record it anyway. So logs can be repetitive and mundane, leavened with the occasional touch of humour and seasoned with plenty of shipboard gossip, or they can chronicle momentous, turbulent and life-changing events.
Not all blogs are like that of course. Celebrities, authors, actors and the like blog to enhance their 'platform.' Again it is interesting that a word has been chosen from another era, because the means and the motivation are actually very similar to Charles Dickens' when he took to the platform in theatres around the country to recite from his books and impress his audiences with his wit, erudition and presence. So today those who wish to be heard take to a platform of their own creation. It is much easier than in Dicken's day because you don't need to book a theatre or print show-bills. On the other hand there are so many platforms around that it becomes like Hyde Park corner on a busy bank holiday with about as much chance of establishing an audience that actually sticks around.
Another form of internet-based discourse is what used to be called chatrooms. Of course that word barely exists any more and I think it is interesting to ponder on why that it is. The reason I think is simple: the concept of chatrooms has no real world equivalent. Who builds a special room simply for people to chat in? And if they did, who would go to it? So the word chatroom has largely been replaced by the word 'forum,' and that of course has a much more august and ancient pedigree.
I have been to the forum in Pompeii and was struck by how big, but also how open, unadorned and lacking in any focal point the Roman forum was. However it was not until I started participating in internet forums that I began to get a clear sense of what Roman forums must have been like. Initially baffling, they are in fact a demonstration of the functioning of a chaotic and noisy form of democracy. There are generally many threads of conversations going on and participants can stick with one for a while then wander off and participate in others. Some will rant and declaim and get excitable but other participants in their conversations will generally drift away, or perhaps call the harassed moderators to eject the excitable ones from the forum. Not everyone has equal status of course, and some stalk the forums sporting their imperial togas of five-figure post counts. Occasionally one of these makes an announcement, though it is rare for this to have any significant effect on the myriad conversations that proceed all around them.
Nevertheless, despite the apparent chaos, forums do generally reach vague sorts of consensus, at least over the key issues they discuss. I lived in rural India for two years and participated in a couple of village forums, called to address some issue of concern. It was utterly unlike any sort of European concept of what such meetings are like- there was no chairman, no agenda, little effort to keep the discussion to one issue and no vote at the end. I was baffled to the extent that I never even knew at the end what decision (s) had been taken, but in retrospect what those meetings were very like was internet forums.
The most interesting of all though, in terms of replicating social structures, is Twitter. For years I refused to engage in Twitter, scoffing at it as the verbal effluence of self-indulgent wankers with too much time on their hands. It won't last, I repeated sagely. It's a flash in the pan. I was wrong of course. Even kids are starting to use Twitter and that means it probably will last. But why?
Again, the clue for me is in the name. Because actually Twitter replicates social structures that pre-date the development of humanity itself. Birds such as starlings or sparrows (like many other social animals) twitter incessantly when they come together. A host of the latter or a murmuration of the former raises a din that it is hard to ignore. At first listening it comes across as a cacophony, with each participant simply making incessant noise to the extent that one wonders how any of them can bear it. Yet the twittering has a purpose of course. Some of it is self-promotion, with each participant vying to show how loud and tuneful (substitute hip and witty) they are. Some is for reassurance, so each can hear a constant stream of tweets from those around them, making them feel secure and wanted. Some, no doubt, is the transmission of gossip (if only we knew enough bird-language to follow it) with great strings of participants retweeting particularly loud or tuneful tweets they have heard. These trends can ripple through the flock so that briefly every way you turn you hear them, but generally they die away quickly into the background hubbub.
All this of course provides a backdrop that seems to instil each participant with a sense of belonging in a wide variety of different fluid and overlapping networks, all part of a vaguely glimpsed whole that is of itself too big for any participant to develop a meaningful concept of it. Some participants are particularly loud and forceful of course, and many other participants always have half an ear cocked for their particular tweets in the (to an outsider) incomprehensible cacophony of noise. Those alpha participants with a particularly strident (or tuneful) voice can have their every tweet amplified across the flock, but that does of course make them a target too, because the flock does not accept a leader.
And just occasionally the alarm is raised. When danger is at hand it only takes one participant to spot it and tweet about it and with the speed of thought suddenly the whole tone of discourse of the flock can change. Some will continue their mundane twittering as if nothing had happened but the more alert participants retweet and amplify until soon the flock is tweeting with something very like a single voice. And that can be a very impressive thing to witness.
Well yes, but I am firmly of the view expressed in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. The ways human beings interact, established over millennia, can't have changed over such a short period of time, can they?
Part of the issue is that we seem poorly equipped actually to get a clear understanding of the scale on which the internet operates. It has been suggested that humans struggle to establish a meaningful concept of a number even as big as 100, so an internet with a total number of users in the billions is simply too big for us to come close to conceptualising. The same is true of distance. We have evolved to have pretty good understanding of distances up to maybe 15 miles- the distance we can see, or can easily walk in a day- but beyond that we struggle. Aeroplanes and high-speed trains don't help of course and even cars compress distances to the extent that it is hard to remember just how far it is between places. We repeat frequently that it is a small world, but no it isn't. Try walking round it.
However what the internet does allow us to do is to tune out these problematic issues of scale. The process of engaging with computers provides an illusory but comforting sense of privacy and intimacy- of things happening on a human scale. Occasionally it is disrupted of course, such as when someone with whom one is conversing on an internet forum says that it is too late to address an issue right now when in fact it is 8am and you are just wondering what to have for breakfast. The same uncomfortable jolt comes when someone shares a link on FaceBook and as you click on it you see that 37,942 others 'like' this.
Fundamentally though, the internet allows us to pretend that we are in communication with others at an entirely human scale- it is what makes it so seductive. And what happens as a result, I believe, is that we simply replicate ancient structures of social interaction through the medium of high-speed broadband. The clues are in the words we use to describe the process, many of which point us in some surprising directions.
Take the word 'blog' for instance. It covers a multitude of sins but its etymological origins, from the log a sea captain used to keep, points to one of the purposes of weblogs. They provide a record of a journey. At the time of writing it is of course impossible for a sea captain to tell what may or may not be important to record, but he (pretty much exclusively 'he' in those days) has to record it anyway. So logs can be repetitive and mundane, leavened with the occasional touch of humour and seasoned with plenty of shipboard gossip, or they can chronicle momentous, turbulent and life-changing events.
Not all blogs are like that of course. Celebrities, authors, actors and the like blog to enhance their 'platform.' Again it is interesting that a word has been chosen from another era, because the means and the motivation are actually very similar to Charles Dickens' when he took to the platform in theatres around the country to recite from his books and impress his audiences with his wit, erudition and presence. So today those who wish to be heard take to a platform of their own creation. It is much easier than in Dicken's day because you don't need to book a theatre or print show-bills. On the other hand there are so many platforms around that it becomes like Hyde Park corner on a busy bank holiday with about as much chance of establishing an audience that actually sticks around.
Another form of internet-based discourse is what used to be called chatrooms. Of course that word barely exists any more and I think it is interesting to ponder on why that it is. The reason I think is simple: the concept of chatrooms has no real world equivalent. Who builds a special room simply for people to chat in? And if they did, who would go to it? So the word chatroom has largely been replaced by the word 'forum,' and that of course has a much more august and ancient pedigree.
I have been to the forum in Pompeii and was struck by how big, but also how open, unadorned and lacking in any focal point the Roman forum was. However it was not until I started participating in internet forums that I began to get a clear sense of what Roman forums must have been like. Initially baffling, they are in fact a demonstration of the functioning of a chaotic and noisy form of democracy. There are generally many threads of conversations going on and participants can stick with one for a while then wander off and participate in others. Some will rant and declaim and get excitable but other participants in their conversations will generally drift away, or perhaps call the harassed moderators to eject the excitable ones from the forum. Not everyone has equal status of course, and some stalk the forums sporting their imperial togas of five-figure post counts. Occasionally one of these makes an announcement, though it is rare for this to have any significant effect on the myriad conversations that proceed all around them.
Nevertheless, despite the apparent chaos, forums do generally reach vague sorts of consensus, at least over the key issues they discuss. I lived in rural India for two years and participated in a couple of village forums, called to address some issue of concern. It was utterly unlike any sort of European concept of what such meetings are like- there was no chairman, no agenda, little effort to keep the discussion to one issue and no vote at the end. I was baffled to the extent that I never even knew at the end what decision (s) had been taken, but in retrospect what those meetings were very like was internet forums.
The most interesting of all though, in terms of replicating social structures, is Twitter. For years I refused to engage in Twitter, scoffing at it as the verbal effluence of self-indulgent wankers with too much time on their hands. It won't last, I repeated sagely. It's a flash in the pan. I was wrong of course. Even kids are starting to use Twitter and that means it probably will last. But why?
Again, the clue for me is in the name. Because actually Twitter replicates social structures that pre-date the development of humanity itself. Birds such as starlings or sparrows (like many other social animals) twitter incessantly when they come together. A host of the latter or a murmuration of the former raises a din that it is hard to ignore. At first listening it comes across as a cacophony, with each participant simply making incessant noise to the extent that one wonders how any of them can bear it. Yet the twittering has a purpose of course. Some of it is self-promotion, with each participant vying to show how loud and tuneful (substitute hip and witty) they are. Some is for reassurance, so each can hear a constant stream of tweets from those around them, making them feel secure and wanted. Some, no doubt, is the transmission of gossip (if only we knew enough bird-language to follow it) with great strings of participants retweeting particularly loud or tuneful tweets they have heard. These trends can ripple through the flock so that briefly every way you turn you hear them, but generally they die away quickly into the background hubbub.
All this of course provides a backdrop that seems to instil each participant with a sense of belonging in a wide variety of different fluid and overlapping networks, all part of a vaguely glimpsed whole that is of itself too big for any participant to develop a meaningful concept of it. Some participants are particularly loud and forceful of course, and many other participants always have half an ear cocked for their particular tweets in the (to an outsider) incomprehensible cacophony of noise. Those alpha participants with a particularly strident (or tuneful) voice can have their every tweet amplified across the flock, but that does of course make them a target too, because the flock does not accept a leader.
And just occasionally the alarm is raised. When danger is at hand it only takes one participant to spot it and tweet about it and with the speed of thought suddenly the whole tone of discourse of the flock can change. Some will continue their mundane twittering as if nothing had happened but the more alert participants retweet and amplify until soon the flock is tweeting with something very like a single voice. And that can be a very impressive thing to witness.
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.
Monday, 9 July 2012
Online writing forums and the development of the writer's 'voice'
Online writing forums are wonderful things. Really they are. I use Absolute Write a lot but I am sure there are tons more. Sure they eat up time and lots of the writing is mediocre and some of the opinions and advice unhelpful. But these problems are massively outweighed by the tremendous benefits of putting writers in touch with each other, letting creativity and talent magnify and grow and feed off each other.
Well sort of. Because inherent in these forums (fora? I'll settle for forums) are a series of contradictions for an aspirant writer to navigate. There's the tension between mutual congratulation and one-upmanship for instance. Almost by definition the people who contribute the most to these forums are those who have yet to achieve real success as writers. This provides for a sense of community certainly, and there is a lot of genuine emphasis on mutual support. On the other hand it is very hard not to seek weaknesses in everyone else's work, simply because it makes you feel better, and as the phenomenon of internet trolling has shown, the distance that the internet provides does allow for a higher degree of cruelty than would be possible in a face-to-face encounter. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes that sort of directness is the only thing to make you realise that what you have submitted is actually pretty shit.
Another tension is around the reasons people spend their time on these forums. On the one hand they are an invaluable tool in the service of a writer wishing to improve their style, both by having their work critted and by critting that of others. On the other it is perfectly clear that being on the forum is a guilty pleasure for most- something they do when they should be working. They become big online societies like any other, with their humour, their letting off steam, their politics and their feuds. All fascinating to absorb yourself in and a great way to put off writing.
But for me the biggest contradiction is around the issue of 'voice.' For those not in the writing and/or reading world (though why on earth you would read this if you weren't...) voice is the indefinable but essential quality of an author's writing that sets them apart and makes them unique. Without a distinctive and powerful voice, one is told on these forums, no agent will consider your work.
And yet these online communities have also worked to instil a conformity in writing style that I am sure is orders of magnitude greater than any that existed before. At the moment the received wisdom is that sparseness and leanness is what you want. Cut down the adverbs and adjectives. Pleonasms are beyond the pale (and if you had to look up 'pleonasms' then don't worry, so did I. It means a formulation involving redundant words, like 'burning fire.')
It goes beyond this though. Wherever you look on these forums you will get the same sort of (excellent) advice: don't have your character 'walk quickly' out of the room if they can 'stride' or 'storm' or even 'hurry' out. Each of these contains the sense of 'walk quickly' but does so in a single word, and conveys something more too. And while you're at it, don't bother to have them 'stride purposefully' because the idea of purposefulness is inherent in the verb stride. You can't stride hesitantly. The same people will go over whole passages for you and point out entire sentences that are redundant or could be subsumed in a single phrase, or even word. Pretty soon you end up being able to do it yourself.
Now I have nothing against this sort of advice at all. It is excellent and the internet permits it to spread with the speed and efficacy of an air-born virus. The thing is, how is the ubiquity of a similar set of pieces of advice consistent with the development of a unique 'voice'?
Well to return to a theme I have explored in a number of posts (imagery for instance, or symbols) I think the key is in the image we use to describe what we mean here: the image of a human voice, telling a story. I think our species is hard-wired to respond to the sound of a voice telling a story. For millenia before literacy was widespread it was how we engaged with fiction and I think it has become a process akin to telepathy. I know that sounds far-fetched, but it is instructive for instance actually to listen to children telling each other stories. The spoken words transcribed are often close to meaningless yet everyone present gets the story completely. In the same way, when I used to read a book to a class (up to A level, even) I would begin to see students round the room dropping their texts and simply listening. And for the first time the story would really make sense to them.
Because if you listen to a piece of writing being read to you by someone who really gets it then, unbeknownst to you, all sorts of things beyond the words themselves somehow get communicated too, bypassing your conscious mind perhaps, but no less powerful for all that. The challenge for a writer of course is to imbue the words themselves with that same magic, so that the reader's internal voice can give them the same cues that you no doubt would if you were reading the text aloud to them.
And that is where the real value of these online forums lies. You see when you read your own writing then the voice you hear it read in is your own, and you get it (or hopefully you do. If you don't then stick it in the bin NOW). And if your friends or family read your work then they will hear it in your voice too, and will unconsciously imbue it with the meaning they know you see in it. But if another contributor to an online forum reads it, then they have no extraneous 'voice' of yours to read it in, so the words have to stand absolutely by themselves. And if they don't, then those same contributors will not hesitate to tell you.
And it can be a salutary lesson to learn. Except of course I should cut out the 'to learn' bit, because that's redundant, isn't it?
Well sort of. Because inherent in these forums (fora? I'll settle for forums) are a series of contradictions for an aspirant writer to navigate. There's the tension between mutual congratulation and one-upmanship for instance. Almost by definition the people who contribute the most to these forums are those who have yet to achieve real success as writers. This provides for a sense of community certainly, and there is a lot of genuine emphasis on mutual support. On the other hand it is very hard not to seek weaknesses in everyone else's work, simply because it makes you feel better, and as the phenomenon of internet trolling has shown, the distance that the internet provides does allow for a higher degree of cruelty than would be possible in a face-to-face encounter. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes that sort of directness is the only thing to make you realise that what you have submitted is actually pretty shit.
Another tension is around the reasons people spend their time on these forums. On the one hand they are an invaluable tool in the service of a writer wishing to improve their style, both by having their work critted and by critting that of others. On the other it is perfectly clear that being on the forum is a guilty pleasure for most- something they do when they should be working. They become big online societies like any other, with their humour, their letting off steam, their politics and their feuds. All fascinating to absorb yourself in and a great way to put off writing.
But for me the biggest contradiction is around the issue of 'voice.' For those not in the writing and/or reading world (though why on earth you would read this if you weren't...) voice is the indefinable but essential quality of an author's writing that sets them apart and makes them unique. Without a distinctive and powerful voice, one is told on these forums, no agent will consider your work.
And yet these online communities have also worked to instil a conformity in writing style that I am sure is orders of magnitude greater than any that existed before. At the moment the received wisdom is that sparseness and leanness is what you want. Cut down the adverbs and adjectives. Pleonasms are beyond the pale (and if you had to look up 'pleonasms' then don't worry, so did I. It means a formulation involving redundant words, like 'burning fire.')
It goes beyond this though. Wherever you look on these forums you will get the same sort of (excellent) advice: don't have your character 'walk quickly' out of the room if they can 'stride' or 'storm' or even 'hurry' out. Each of these contains the sense of 'walk quickly' but does so in a single word, and conveys something more too. And while you're at it, don't bother to have them 'stride purposefully' because the idea of purposefulness is inherent in the verb stride. You can't stride hesitantly. The same people will go over whole passages for you and point out entire sentences that are redundant or could be subsumed in a single phrase, or even word. Pretty soon you end up being able to do it yourself.
Now I have nothing against this sort of advice at all. It is excellent and the internet permits it to spread with the speed and efficacy of an air-born virus. The thing is, how is the ubiquity of a similar set of pieces of advice consistent with the development of a unique 'voice'?
Well to return to a theme I have explored in a number of posts (imagery for instance, or symbols) I think the key is in the image we use to describe what we mean here: the image of a human voice, telling a story. I think our species is hard-wired to respond to the sound of a voice telling a story. For millenia before literacy was widespread it was how we engaged with fiction and I think it has become a process akin to telepathy. I know that sounds far-fetched, but it is instructive for instance actually to listen to children telling each other stories. The spoken words transcribed are often close to meaningless yet everyone present gets the story completely. In the same way, when I used to read a book to a class (up to A level, even) I would begin to see students round the room dropping their texts and simply listening. And for the first time the story would really make sense to them.
Because if you listen to a piece of writing being read to you by someone who really gets it then, unbeknownst to you, all sorts of things beyond the words themselves somehow get communicated too, bypassing your conscious mind perhaps, but no less powerful for all that. The challenge for a writer of course is to imbue the words themselves with that same magic, so that the reader's internal voice can give them the same cues that you no doubt would if you were reading the text aloud to them.
And that is where the real value of these online forums lies. You see when you read your own writing then the voice you hear it read in is your own, and you get it (or hopefully you do. If you don't then stick it in the bin NOW). And if your friends or family read your work then they will hear it in your voice too, and will unconsciously imbue it with the meaning they know you see in it. But if another contributor to an online forum reads it, then they have no extraneous 'voice' of yours to read it in, so the words have to stand absolutely by themselves. And if they don't, then those same contributors will not hesitate to tell you.
And it can be a salutary lesson to learn. Except of course I should cut out the 'to learn' bit, because that's redundant, isn't it?
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.
Monday, 30 April 2012
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
As someone who has spent a considerable portion of my life writing and teaching about literature and the creative process it was with some trepidation that I launched on my attempt to become an active participant myself- to become a writer. I enjoy the process of writing, but it is for me virtually impossible to apply the same analytical and evaluative approach to my own writing that I apply so freely to others'.
The thing is that the creative and analytical thought processes are clearly different and engage entirely different parts of the mind. Truly effective creative writing, I firmly believe, arises largely from the unconscious process of the brain over which we exercise conscious control at our peril. As a writer you know what it is when those unconscious processes take over. Time seems to disappear and you simply vanish into the world of your creation, emerging after some unspecified period with repetitive strain injury, an urgent need to relieve yourself and no clear sense of what you have just written. That doesn't happen often of course (that bloody man of Porlock with his constant Facebook status updates), but it is when the best work is produced.
The quandary then is that when you reread later with an analytical frame of mind it can be easy to spot that a passage (or an entire novel!) is not as good as you had hoped, but impossible to rewrite it in a way that retains its original fluency. So, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea I generally just tinker- frightened to change too much and lose too much, yet frightened too that what I have written actually needs far more radical surgery.
And then there are all those small but irritating issues about research and the need for accuracy. Here again the devil is on one side, the deep blue sea on the other. I personally cannot stand those books where the author has clearly spent many hours in the British Library and is DAMN WELL going to shoehorn in the results of their research at every possible opportunity. On the other hand it can be equally irritating to read in a novel something that you KNOW is wrong. Like the description of a scene you are familiar with in real life, when you know for a fact that the character could not possibly have seen that building from there (or whatever).
One such small (but for me irritating) dilemma emerged around the title of my novel and the quotation from which it comes. The title is An Absence of War and it comes from (what I thought to be) a Spinoza quotation:
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
Lovely, I thought, and so appositely summing up the central themes of my book. Only Spinoza didn't actually write that. It is an incredibly loose translation that has somehow gained common currency and been attributed to him. What he actually wrote (in Latin) was something closer to:
"For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done."
Not quite so snappy. Or as lovely. Actually quite profoundly different. Still, I didn't want to lose the title. So I added a prologue, and tried to weasel in the meaning of the 'quote' as I had originally felt it, without misquoting a great philosopher. Here is that prologue. I will leave you to judge whether it works.
Prologue
It happened again last night. I woke in the cold grey of the dawn, struggling for breath, my mind a confused jumble of tortured images, of shattered fragments of suffocating dreams. In the empty hours while others sleep I relive those days, those weeks, those months. No matter how far I go, they always pull me back.
TV and the internet parade their endless images of death and destruction, of devastated towns and their traumatised inhabitants. I watch streams of refugees wheeling their pitiful collections of household treasures in ramshackle carts past the burnt out wrecks of armoured vehicles. I see reporters in flak jackets, picking their way through the shattered wreckage of a family home; hear politicians intone their platitudes about the need for reconstruction, for a political solution.
Yet as I lie awake it is Germany I see, in the autumn and winter of 1945. I see a hand, its fingernails blackened, its skin grey with dust. I see a throat, slashed across in vivid red. I see a man slumping down to the floor in front of me; see his body shaken by the motion of the truck; see a girl clutching a package tightly between thin hands.
And words from those days still speak to me across the years. Words spoken by a man I once called my friend— kümmern uns um die Nummer eins: look after number one. Words forged in heavy black steel on the gateway to hell— Jedem das Seine: to everyone that which they deserve.
And more than anything I hear a voice. The voice of a young boy, his whoop of joy echoing through the empty ward of an abandoned hospital, tearing my heart with its belief in a better world.
-----
Unable to sleep I lay listening to the World Service, so often my companion in those dead hours before daylight brings me fully back to the present day. A reporter had returned to some benighted region of our war-torn planet to see how the people there were dealing with the aftermath of conflict. He spoke of recrimination and reprisals, of hardship and deprivation. The cameras of the world have moved on, he said, but for the people the ending of hostilities has brought little respite.
It was the Jewish philosopher Spinoza who first said that peace is not simply an absence of war. It is many years now since the ending of the war that ripped my childhood world apart. Yet still I wonder when peace will truly come.
The thing is that the creative and analytical thought processes are clearly different and engage entirely different parts of the mind. Truly effective creative writing, I firmly believe, arises largely from the unconscious process of the brain over which we exercise conscious control at our peril. As a writer you know what it is when those unconscious processes take over. Time seems to disappear and you simply vanish into the world of your creation, emerging after some unspecified period with repetitive strain injury, an urgent need to relieve yourself and no clear sense of what you have just written. That doesn't happen often of course (that bloody man of Porlock with his constant Facebook status updates), but it is when the best work is produced.
The quandary then is that when you reread later with an analytical frame of mind it can be easy to spot that a passage (or an entire novel!) is not as good as you had hoped, but impossible to rewrite it in a way that retains its original fluency. So, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea I generally just tinker- frightened to change too much and lose too much, yet frightened too that what I have written actually needs far more radical surgery.
And then there are all those small but irritating issues about research and the need for accuracy. Here again the devil is on one side, the deep blue sea on the other. I personally cannot stand those books where the author has clearly spent many hours in the British Library and is DAMN WELL going to shoehorn in the results of their research at every possible opportunity. On the other hand it can be equally irritating to read in a novel something that you KNOW is wrong. Like the description of a scene you are familiar with in real life, when you know for a fact that the character could not possibly have seen that building from there (or whatever).
One such small (but for me irritating) dilemma emerged around the title of my novel and the quotation from which it comes. The title is An Absence of War and it comes from (what I thought to be) a Spinoza quotation:
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
Lovely, I thought, and so appositely summing up the central themes of my book. Only Spinoza didn't actually write that. It is an incredibly loose translation that has somehow gained common currency and been attributed to him. What he actually wrote (in Latin) was something closer to:
"For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done."
Not quite so snappy. Or as lovely. Actually quite profoundly different. Still, I didn't want to lose the title. So I added a prologue, and tried to weasel in the meaning of the 'quote' as I had originally felt it, without misquoting a great philosopher. Here is that prologue. I will leave you to judge whether it works.
#####
Prologue
It happened again last night. I woke in the cold grey of the dawn, struggling for breath, my mind a confused jumble of tortured images, of shattered fragments of suffocating dreams. In the empty hours while others sleep I relive those days, those weeks, those months. No matter how far I go, they always pull me back.
TV and the internet parade their endless images of death and destruction, of devastated towns and their traumatised inhabitants. I watch streams of refugees wheeling their pitiful collections of household treasures in ramshackle carts past the burnt out wrecks of armoured vehicles. I see reporters in flak jackets, picking their way through the shattered wreckage of a family home; hear politicians intone their platitudes about the need for reconstruction, for a political solution.
Yet as I lie awake it is Germany I see, in the autumn and winter of 1945. I see a hand, its fingernails blackened, its skin grey with dust. I see a throat, slashed across in vivid red. I see a man slumping down to the floor in front of me; see his body shaken by the motion of the truck; see a girl clutching a package tightly between thin hands.
And words from those days still speak to me across the years. Words spoken by a man I once called my friend— kümmern uns um die Nummer eins: look after number one. Words forged in heavy black steel on the gateway to hell— Jedem das Seine: to everyone that which they deserve.
And more than anything I hear a voice. The voice of a young boy, his whoop of joy echoing through the empty ward of an abandoned hospital, tearing my heart with its belief in a better world.
-----
Unable to sleep I lay listening to the World Service, so often my companion in those dead hours before daylight brings me fully back to the present day. A reporter had returned to some benighted region of our war-torn planet to see how the people there were dealing with the aftermath of conflict. He spoke of recrimination and reprisals, of hardship and deprivation. The cameras of the world have moved on, he said, but for the people the ending of hostilities has brought little respite.
It was the Jewish philosopher Spinoza who first said that peace is not simply an absence of war. It is many years now since the ending of the war that ripped my childhood world apart. Yet still I wonder when peace will truly come.
Monday, 19 March 2012
The process of writing- characters
There is a notion often expressed by novelists (and would-be novelists) these days that what they do with characters is to create them and then 'watch what they do.' Ray Bradbury puts it like this: "First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!" There are writers who have suggested even that while they were writing their novel they wanted to write a particular scene but 'the characters wouldn't let me.'
When I came across this notion my first reaction was to dismiss it as something between New Age twaddle and the desperate attempts of writers to convince themselves they are artists (darling!) rather than craftsmen/women. Since a novel's characters have no existence outside the writer's mind (until the novel is read of course, when they acquire an existence in any reader's mind), how can they behave or react in any way except how the author decides they should behave or react? How can they 'lead' the author? Most of all, how can they take independent, autonomous decisions about their actions?
Of course this notion of characters having a life independent of their creator is a long-established one. There is an element of it even I believe in that most level-headed of novelists, Jane Austen. In her famous quotation about Emma:
"I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like"
what is interesting is her choice of the verb "take." It is as if Austen feels that Emma already exists and she is going to choose to put her in her novel. Novelists such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne often write about their creations as if they have an independent life and exist outside their imaginations and surely neither Fielding nor Sterne nor Austen could be declared guilty of New Age twaddle. Also none takes themselves so seriously as to create such a notion for their own aggrandizement.
It is therefore an idea that is worthy of serious consideration. What is interesting about it is of course the notion that the novelist is not entirely in control of what they write. Gustave Flaubert expresses this idea beautifully in the quote:
"C'est comme un homme qui a l'oreille juste et qui joue faux du violon; ses doigts se refusent a reproduire juste le son dont il a conscience"
("It is like a violinist whose ear is true but who plays badly; his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.")
I find an echo in this of L P Hartley's advice that "it's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about". Both to me suggest that in their writing a novelist should tap into ideas and areas of consciousness over which they do not have complete conscious control, and that frustration arises when they cannot successfully do so.
Of course this reminds me of an idea I have explored in a previous post, that the successful writer can use the incredible power of the unconscious mind in their writing. As I said in that post, Incognito- the Secret Life of the Brain has opened my eyes to the range and power of the abilities of the unconscious brain. We like to think that the higher order mental functions are entirely under the control of our conscious minds, or to put it another way that writers know what they are doing when they write. However it seems clear that the conscious mind is often 'the last to know' when the unconscious parts of the mind have been working away at some complex and subtle problem for a considerable time and have come up with a brilliant and creative answer.
So perhaps this idea of characters who 'tell the author what to write' is simply another way of describing the functioning of the unconscious mind. As I have said in many previous posts human beings seem strongly predisposed to think in symbols. What better symbol is there for an author of the complex functioning of their own unconscious mind than a character they themselves have created. So when their characters 'speak to them' perhaps it is simply their own unconscious mind they are listening to.
When I came across this notion my first reaction was to dismiss it as something between New Age twaddle and the desperate attempts of writers to convince themselves they are artists (darling!) rather than craftsmen/women. Since a novel's characters have no existence outside the writer's mind (until the novel is read of course, when they acquire an existence in any reader's mind), how can they behave or react in any way except how the author decides they should behave or react? How can they 'lead' the author? Most of all, how can they take independent, autonomous decisions about their actions?
Of course this notion of characters having a life independent of their creator is a long-established one. There is an element of it even I believe in that most level-headed of novelists, Jane Austen. In her famous quotation about Emma:
"I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like"
what is interesting is her choice of the verb "take." It is as if Austen feels that Emma already exists and she is going to choose to put her in her novel. Novelists such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne often write about their creations as if they have an independent life and exist outside their imaginations and surely neither Fielding nor Sterne nor Austen could be declared guilty of New Age twaddle. Also none takes themselves so seriously as to create such a notion for their own aggrandizement.
It is therefore an idea that is worthy of serious consideration. What is interesting about it is of course the notion that the novelist is not entirely in control of what they write. Gustave Flaubert expresses this idea beautifully in the quote:
"C'est comme un homme qui a l'oreille juste et qui joue faux du violon; ses doigts se refusent a reproduire juste le son dont il a conscience"
("It is like a violinist whose ear is true but who plays badly; his fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.")
I find an echo in this of L P Hartley's advice that "it's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about". Both to me suggest that in their writing a novelist should tap into ideas and areas of consciousness over which they do not have complete conscious control, and that frustration arises when they cannot successfully do so.
Of course this reminds me of an idea I have explored in a previous post, that the successful writer can use the incredible power of the unconscious mind in their writing. As I said in that post, Incognito- the Secret Life of the Brain has opened my eyes to the range and power of the abilities of the unconscious brain. We like to think that the higher order mental functions are entirely under the control of our conscious minds, or to put it another way that writers know what they are doing when they write. However it seems clear that the conscious mind is often 'the last to know' when the unconscious parts of the mind have been working away at some complex and subtle problem for a considerable time and have come up with a brilliant and creative answer.
So perhaps this idea of characters who 'tell the author what to write' is simply another way of describing the functioning of the unconscious mind. As I have said in many previous posts human beings seem strongly predisposed to think in symbols. What better symbol is there for an author of the complex functioning of their own unconscious mind than a character they themselves have created. So when their characters 'speak to them' perhaps it is simply their own unconscious mind they are listening to.
Wednesday, 14 March 2012
The process of writing
At a creative writing masterclass recently I was told that a great novel is not written but edited. Get you first draft down quickly, we were told, but then accept that by the time you have finished editing it probably less than 25% of the original will be left. Someone asked if that was always the case and the workshop leader, a very successful novelist, said perhaps if the first draft had been written extremely slowly and carefully then more of it would survive the editing process.
That got me thinking about the process of writing, and whether speed and fluency or meticulous care is more likely to produce works of genius. The problem is that there are examples on both sides, to the extent that I can see no clear conclusion. In poetry, Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth is a shining example of the value of redrafting and editing. I liked to show students images of Owen's various drafts of this poem, complete with Sassoon's suggestions (the 'Doomed' of the title was one). One such draft is below:
That got me thinking about the process of writing, and whether speed and fluency or meticulous care is more likely to produce works of genius. The problem is that there are examples on both sides, to the extent that I can see no clear conclusion. In poetry, Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth is a shining example of the value of redrafting and editing. I liked to show students images of Owen's various drafts of this poem, complete with Sassoon's suggestions (the 'Doomed' of the title was one). One such draft is below:
and it demonstrates wonderfully the creative mind at work. On the other hand John Keats' On the Grasshopper and the Cricket was reputedly written in a pub on Green Lanes in a competition with Leigh Hunt to write a sonnet against the clock.
The world of novels presents similar extremes. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake took seventeen years to write; Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol six weeks. Perhaps neither is the greatest novel ever written, and there is unquestionably a difference in length, but each has been hailed at one time or another as a work of genius.
As to my favourite author, although evidence on the subject is scant I am inclined to think that Shakespeare tended more towards the speedy and fluent than the meticulous and painstaking. He was clearly a very busy man and play-scripts would have to have been produced to a strict schedule with first nights looming. There are also fairly frequent internal inconsistencies, plot holes and loose ends that a more careful editing process would surely have eliminated. I am therefore inclined to think that Shakespeare, like Dickens or Keats, wrote fast.
So how can two such radically different approaches each lead to works of genius? Perhaps the answer lies in ideas explored in Incognito-The Secret Lives of the Brain and elsewhere. It seems that our unconscious mind is capable of greater complexity and creativity of thought than we may sometimes suspect. The advice we were given, that it is editing not writing that creates great literature, is predicated on the idea that it is the conscious mind- the dominant partner in the editing process- that is the key to greatness. Certainly the idea has some merit. In writing Anthem for Doomed Youth Owen, I believe, wrote from the heart (or under the direction of his unconscious mind, which means the same) but then harnessed his conscious mind, and Sassoon's, to look critically at what he had written and to improve it beyond measure. Keats had no time for that, and it was through harnessing the immense creativity of his unconscious mind that he wrote his sonnet.
Dickens, I am sure, cannot have had complete control from his conscious mind as he wrote. Many of his great novels were written as weekly serials and I am sure that a lot of the time he was flying by the seat of his pants (to use an anachronistic metaphor) in writing them. Kate Perugini said of him that "He had no doubt a strong natural instinct for art" and for me that is simply a description of someone harnessing their unconscious mind to create great literature.
Of course the picture gets muddle when you factor in notions of 'the Great Artist.' On the one hand the idea must be preserved of the creative genius who suffers for his art, so a Stephen King or a Terry Pratchett, who can churn out novels with the efficiency of a production line is derided in comparison with a Vikram Seth, who confirmed in 2009 that his sequel to A Suitable Boy would be published in 2013. On the other hand, some seem to feel, the truly great artist should be above the whole tedious business of editing, so that every stoned-out rambling should be preserved unedited and unspoilt for all eternity.
For me, as so often, it is Shakespeare who provides the model of true genius. A craftsman rather than an 'artist' he worked against the clock, writing quickly to pay the bills. And to do so he called upon the immense wealth and creativity of his unconscious mind. I see him staring blankly out of the window and then bending over the page and scribbling "To be or not to be, that is the question..." the beauty of the words forming naturally and instinctively in his mind and in his hand as he writes.
OK it's a cliché, but it's one I like to think might represent the truth.
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?
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