contents - University of Leicester [PDF]

Jan 15, 2013 - Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and life before Ted, by Andrew. Wilson, reviewed by Gerald Gibbs. 69.

28 downloads 4 Views 3MB Size

Recommend Stories


Blackboard - University of Leicester
You have survived, EVERY SINGLE bad day so far. Anonymous

University of Leicester
In the end only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you

February 2001 - University of Leicester [PDF]
Feb 4, 2001 - Musical for his performance in the show, sent a personal message to the University of Leicester Theatre wishing the company ... University, when Professor David Phillips OBE,. Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College, ... Dr

Leicester
Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you. Walt Whitman

Leicester Lowdown
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. Rumi

Management Structure University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust
Learn to light a candle in the darkest moments of someone’s life. Be the light that helps others see; i

leicester -bedford
We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone. Ronald Reagan

BRIEF CONTENTS [PDF]
HOWARD MOSS, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? 526. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun. (Sonnet No. 130) 527.

BRIEF CONTENTS [PDF]
HOWARD MOSS, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day? 526. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun. (Sonnet No. 130) 527.

Contents - ANU Press [PDF]
others, like those of Rafael Lara Martinez and Silvia Lucinda .... formed part of the volume Cuentos de. Barro, Narrativa ...... García Márquez. Some viewers may have noticed the signs on the streets of Havana in David. Bradbury's recent film, Fond

Idea Transcript


SUMMER 2013

THE USE OF ENGLISH

VOLUME 64.3

CONTENTS Editorial: Jane Campion

1

The Two Shakespeares: David Hopkins

4

Shakespeare and Cultural Literacy: Catherine M.S. Alexander

23

Not Laughing At Teacher: Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: Samuel Cutting

32

Inspiration in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella I: Thomas Day

38

Decoding Keats: Poem Choices at GCSE and A-Level: Peter Cash

41

‘I should want nothing more’: a brief account of Edward Thomas’s ‘As the team’s head-brass’: Ian Brinton

49

In Praise of the Short Story: Jenny Stevens

52

Comparing Colonial and Post-Colonial Fiction: Robert Jeffcoate

57

Reviews Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir, by Gerald Hughes, reviewed by Gerald Gibbs

67

Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and life before Ted, by Andrew Wilson, reviewed by Gerald Gibbs

69

Dear Mr Howard: the Changing of Modern English, by Michael Wallerstein; The Liza Doolittle Syndrome, by Michael Wallerstein, reviewed by John Haddon

71

The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann, edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard, reviewed by John Constable

74

Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion, Andrew Delahunty and Sheila Dignen, reviewed by Pamela Bickley

79

Recently Published Key Stage 3 Fiction, reviewed by Students of the Bristol PGCE English Method course 2012–13

81

About the Contributors

89

Betty Haigh Shakespeare Prize Competition

91

Charles Dickens Prize Competition

92

THE USE OF ENGLISH

Contributions and books for review for The Use of English should be sent to: The English Association, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH Email: [email protected] A contributors’ guide for The Use of English is available from the English Association. Material should be accompanied by a stamped, addressed envelope or international reply coupons to the appropriate value. Two copies of submitted material with a disk or electronic version should be sent. Where articles are refereed, referees’ comments will usually be forwarded to authors. Three issues per year: Autumn, Spring and Summer. £34 ($68) individuals / £53 ($106) institutions The English Association University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH Tel: 0116 229 7622 Fax: 0116 229 7623 Email: [email protected] www.le.ac.uk/engassoc ISSN: 0042-1243

© The English Association 2013 Printed in Great Britain

Editorial This time of year always prompts reflection. As the pupils exit the room for the last time there is often a mixture of emotions. Some are overtly grateful for the help provided, the planning and marking, the effort to make lessons engaging, inspiring, and stimulating; some are just relieved, of course, that it’s all over and they’ve made it through unscathed; and some are overwhelmed by the seeming finality and the looming threat of the exams. My emotions are always mixed too: some gratitude to those who have worked hard and seemed enthusiastic all the while; some relief too at another class safely through the twists and turns of specifications; and an occasional overwhelming sense of panic about those same exams. The days and weeks that follow are generally a good opportunity to take stock: What was particularly successful? What was not? Which texts did classes really enjoy and engage with? What would I do differently next time? With the seemingly relentless and wholesale change, while Ofqual contemplates removing speaking and listening assessment from our year 10’s GCSE courses; while GCSEs are reformed; while our key stage 3 programmes are being revised; while the shape of A-levels remains unclear, it is perhaps comforting that at the end of it all we might still be considering which texts to teach and how. We might still find ourselves drawn back to old favourites and seeking out the new challenges that unfamiliar texts might provide. Summer is a good time, therefore, to refocus on literature, and in this issue that is exactly what we do. I hope that the articles here might inspire teachers to tackle a new text or rethink an old one. Coverage here spans all three key stages and includes drama, poetry and prose. Firstly, the drama: David Hopkins’s article, that was originally a talk to sixth form students, asks us to reconsider the way that we read Shakespeare by reflecting on the two pictures of Shakespeare that have been established in our culture, and how these pictures inform reception and criticism of the plays. His piece focuses on Macbeth and Othello specifically, but the characterisation of what Hopkins calls ‘Shakespeare 1’

2

THE USE OF ENGLISH

and ‘Shakespeare 2’ are useful portraits to inform the study of any Shakespeare play with an A-level group. Against the backdrop of educational, political and sociological debates about culture, Catherine Alexander considers Shakespeare’s current status as a cultural figure. She offers up for debate two lists of knowledge about Shakespeare that gives access to our cultural heritage: ‘what culturally literate English people need to know’ and a selective list of quotations from Hamlet. In his article, Samuel Cutting addresses some of the difficulties of teaching comedy, and modern comedy at that, reflecting on his experience of teaching Alan Bennett’s The History Boys for the first time. In addition, Cutting considers how the characterisation of the teachers Irwin and Hector inevitably makes us reflect on our own teaching methods and style. In anticipation of Creative Writing A-level, Thomas Day’s article might provoke pause for thought as he pits Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella Sonnet I’ against David Morley’s representation of writing poetry in the Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Peter Cash considers the place of Keats on today’s key stage 4 and 5 syllabuses and through an exegesis of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ considers the extent to which students might be expected to engage with the sexually explicit nature of Keats’ poetry. Finally for poetry, Ian Brinton considers Edward Thomas’s poem ‘As the team’s head-brass’ and the poet’s concern with movement and stasis. In prose, Jenny Stevens makes a very good case for teaching short stories and suggests why Kate Chopin’s ‘The Unexpected’ might provide a valuable text for study with a year 9 group preparing for GCSE. Finally, in his wide-ranging article, Robert Jeffcoate invites us to see colonial and post-colonial fiction ‘together’ in order to challenge Edward Said’s juxtaposition of outsider imperialism and insider resistance. Reviews in this issue include further works on the Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. There are also reviews of two recent books by Michael Wallerstein that might prove of use to teachers of English Language. I am delighted again to be able to bring a range of short reviews of contemporary children’s fiction suitable for teaching at KS3 by the PGCE students on the English course at Bristol University. Looking forward, the next two issues will both be linked with English Association conferences. The first in the Autumn will complement the ‘All

EDITORIAL

3

Change at A-Level’ conference to be held on Saturday 5th October, 2013, focussing on A-level reform. Contributions will represent a range of views about reform from both the secondary and higher education sectors. The second will complement the English Association’s major contribution to the events marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War: an international conference on the British Poetry of the First World War to be held at Wadham College, Oxford on 5th-7th September 2014. The Use of English issue will focus in particular on the teaching of poetry of the Great War in secondary schools. Contributions for The Use of English should be sent to: Editor, The Use of English The English Association University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH Email: [email protected]

Jane Campion, Editor

4

THE USE OF ENGLISH

The Two Shakespeares David Hopkins Author’s note: This essay is a revised and expanded version of a talk first given to Sixth Form students and their teachers at Bishop Wordsworth’s School, and South Wilts Grammar School for Girls, Salisbury in 2009, and subsequently to several groups of undergraduates at the University of Bristol. The two Shakespearian ‘set books’ being studied by the Salisbury Sixth Formers were Macbeth and Othello. The purpose of the talk was to encourage members of the audience to consider their local engagement with particular Shakespearian texts in the light of the larger (and conflicting) assumptions about Shakespeare’s art that have been current from the writer’s own day to the present. The main suggestion was that the questions one asks, and the kinds of answers one might expect, about details in the plays are complicatedly intertwined—in ways that are not always clearly acknowledged—with the general expectations that we all bring to our study of Shakespeare. The talk thus, I hope, raises issues that are relevant to all study of Shakespeare, at both school and university level. What kind of a writer was William Shakespeare? What is distinctive about his way of constructing his plots, creating his characters, exploring his themes, using the English language? And how do the answers we might give to these questions affect the ways that we might respond to the plays, whether in the study (as readers or literary critics) or in the theatre (as performers or members of an audience)? The only evidence we can appeal to for such answers is, of course, contained in the plays themselves. Shakespeare wrote no prefaces or autobiography. None of his letters or diaries have survived. And even if they had, they wouldn’t necessarily illuminate what he actually did in the act of composition, since artists aren’t always able or willing to describe in cold prose what they have achieved (or failed to achieve) in the heat of inspiration. As D. H. Lawrence wisely said: ‘Never trust the artist; trust the tale’.

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

5

But drawing general conclusions about Shakespeare’s artistic character and cast of mind from the plays isn’t a simple, one-way, matter. As with any area of intellectual enquiry, such a process is likely to involve both inductive and deductive elements. We partly, that is, build up our sense of what Shakespeare is like as a whole from our cumulative experience of countless particulars we have encountered when reading and seeing the plays. Equally importantly (but in ways we are often perhaps less ready to recognise), we also interpret the particulars we encounter in our reading and theatre-going in the light of our larger assumptions about what kind of a writer we think Shakespeare is. I want in this talk to offer some thoughts about the general assumptions about Shakespeare that readers and playgoers have brought to their experience of Shakespeare’s plays which have then caused them to interpret his plots, characters, ideas, and language in strikingly different ways. I want to suggest that, historically, two radically different pictures have been painted, or stories told about, the kind of an artist Shakespeare was. I’ll begin by sketching out these two different pictures—which I shall simply call ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’—in general terms. Then I’ll suggest some of the implications of these two pictures for the interpretation of specific Shakespeare plays, including two of the tragedies, Macbeth and Othello, which for many readers and playgoers lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s artistic achievement. Before I do that, I want to make a few important preliminary points. First, the two conceptions of Shakespeare are not the products of any particular historical period, but have both coexisted from Shakespeare’s own lifetime to the present.1 In different periods, to be sure, one or other of the conceptions has been in the ascendant. But both have co-existed from the start. Secondly, though ‘Shakespeare 1’ presents Shakespeare in an apparently more critical light than ‘Shakespeare 2’, advocates of ‘Shakespeare 1’ have by no means always thought less highly of Shakespeare than supporters of ‘Shakespeare 2’. Advocates of ‘Shakespeare 1’ have, indeed, included some of the critics who did most to establish the reputation of Shakespeare as our greatest writer, when that fact was by no means taken for granted. The two views are thus better thought of as two rival descriptions of what Shakespeare is like than as two different valuations of Shakespeare’s worth. Thirdly, not all readers have adhered to one or other description, or have stressed every element within that description, to the same degree. What I offer are the ‘Two Shakespeares’ in their most extreme forms. Fourthly, as the record shows,

6

THE USE OF ENGLISH

it is possible for one critic to oscillate between ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’ on different occasions. What, then, are the characteristics of my ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’? I’ll now give a sketch of each in turn. ************** Proponents of ‘Shakespeare 1’ believe that Shakespeare’s writing is extremely variable not just in style, but in quality. At his best moments, they argue, there’s no-one to touch him. In his finest scenes and speeches, he commands our attention in a spellbinding way, and offers more profound insights into human nature than are to be found in the work of any other English writer. And his dramatic narratives always make us ‘anxious for the event’: we always want to find out how things will turn out in the end. But on many occasions his writing is feeble, melodramatic, turgid, or obscure. His comic scenes are often tedious, or tasteless. His bad writing, moreover, cannot always be explained by considerations of characterization or dramatic situation. This may, of course, sometimes be the case. For example, the ‘forced and unnatural metaphors’ uttered by Macbeth when he’s describing how he killed Duncan’s grooms (‘Here lay Duncan,/His silver skin laced with his golden blood’) were thought by one leading advocate of ‘Shakespeare 1’, Samuel Johnson, to have been deliberately put into Macbeth’s mouth by Shakespeare as ‘a mark of artifice and dissimulation to show the difference between the studied language of hypocrisy and the natural outcries of sudden passion’. But often one has to blame the writer for stylistic lapses rather than his character. In Act II of Richard II John of Gaunt [=Ghent, the place of his birth], an aged aristocrat who wishes, on his deathbed, to impart some urgent advice to King Richard (who has recently exiled Gaunt’s son) responds, when asked by the King ‘how is’t with aged Gaunt?’: Oh how that name befits my composition! Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old. Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast; And who abstains from meat that is not gaunt? For sleeping England long time have I watch’d, Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt. The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast—I mean, my children’s looks; And therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt. Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb inherits naught but bones.

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

7

What dying man, the advocate of ‘Shakespeare 1’ asks, would pun so tediously and protractedly on his own name?2 Puns may, elsewhere in Shakespeare, have a genuinely profound or witty effect. But here, surely, they merely represent the default weakness for punning that is to be found everywhere in the literature of Shakespeare’s day, and for which he seems to have had a particular personal weakness? Shakespeare’s interest in, and grip on, the material which he’s dramatizing, proponents of ‘Shakespeare 1’ believe, is intermittent and patchy. When he’s on top form, he can terrify, amuse, and move us with a power and directness that is unsurpassed in the world’s literature. But at other times it seems that he couldn’t care less. He sometimes changes his characters’ nature in mid-stream, forgets what they’ve said earlier in a play, and, when he’s got into a hopeless mess with his plot, cobbles together a (kind of) solution with a series of unconvincing contrivances which might temporarily pull the wool over the audience’s eyes in a good production, but which don’t actually stand up to a moment’s serious scrutiny. He’s constantly going off at tangents and getting interested in side-issues. He takes bits of motivation and explanation from his sources which don’t seem to square with his own dramatic design. Sometimes characters offer explanations of what’s going on (without obviously being shown up as doing so mistakenly) which don’t seem to tally with what we’ve seen for ourselves on stage. When Hamlet—to take one example among thousands—refers to death as ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns’ are we meant to forget, or are we to suppose that he has forgotten, that he’s seen his father’s ghost only a few minutes before? Shakespeare, advocates of ‘Shakespeare 1’ maintain, is also very puzzling in his handling of political, social, and moral issues. This is a problem, it’s important to emphasize, not because one expects Shakespeare to endorse any particular moral point of view, or to make his own moral point of view explicitly clear—and certainly not because Shakespeare should have always had his good characters triumph and his evil characters defeated. It’s more that Shakespeare frequently leaves us morally confused, or invites us, disconcertingly, to become complicit with attitudes or characters whose wickedness he has earlier devastatingly exposed, without showing any awareness that he’s changed tack. Shakespeare’s language, moreover, is often impenetrably obscure. This is sometimes, of course, simply because he uses expressions and idioms which were common in his day but which history has rendered obsolete. But the problem goes further than that. Shakespeare’s verbal imagination,

8

THE USE OF ENGLISH

it seems, was so fertile that his mind was, so to speak, always tumbling over itself. He thus was constantly using words and phrases in unusual senses (or even, on occasion, making them up altogether), sometimes without fully seeming to understand his own thought-processes, or exactly where he was going. His metaphors often seem to change in mid-stream. ‘Before one idea has burst its shell,’ noted Charles Lamb, ‘another is hatched out and clamorous for disclosure’. It’s not just that Shakespeare’s meaning isn’t directly ‘translatable’ into ‘equivalents’ of the terms he’s used: that, of course, is true of all poets. It’s that his sense is often simply unclear. People often quote Hamlet’s ‘When we have shuffled off this mortal coil’. But how many know what it means? My students often think that Hamlet is talking about escaping from a ‘coil’ of rope, like the escapologist Houdini. But that meaning of ‘coil’ didn’t come into use till long after Shakespeare’s time, when the word meant something like ‘noise’ or ‘hubbub’. But how can you ‘shuffle off’ ‘noise’? Shakespeare never seems to have produced proper ‘texts’ of his works. What existed were hand-written acting scripts (the property of Shakespeare’s company) which were cut or expanded for particular productions. Sometimes bits of rough draft were left in the text, uncorrected. In Act IV Scene iii of Julius Caesar, for example, Brutus is told of the death of his wife—twice—and has apparently forgotten the first piece of news when he hears the second! Shakespeare seems to have two goes at writing the scene, and simply omitted to delete one of them. A number of Shakespeare’s other texts, as the scholar Ernst Honigmann has recently demonstrated, seem to have other ‘first thoughts’ that were left undeleted when he added his second.3 All the early editions of Shakespeare’s works are riddled with mistakes (some of which render the text momentarily incomprehensible), and contain interventions of various kinds by hands other than that of Shakespeare—compositors [typesetters], actors, other dramatists. So, to conclude. Advocates of ‘Shakespeare 1’ see him as an inspired but messy improviser, whose unparalleled insights into human nature and whose unsurpassed linguistic powers go hand-in-hand with (and are inextricable from) intermittent inspiration, verbal obscurity, tedious wordplay, sloppy construction, carelessness over details of plotting, disregard for producing finished ‘texts’, and frequent lack of concern for coherent moral focus or consistent psychological explanation. In his famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, drawing on a line by the Greek poet Archilochus (‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’), divided the world’s

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

9

thinkers and writers into two categories: ‘hedgehogs’ who ‘relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent and articulate, in terms of which they understand, think, and feel’, and ‘foxes’, who ‘pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle’. The thought of such ‘foxes’ ‘is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, allembracing...unitary vision’. For believers in ‘Shakespeare 1’ (who include Berlin himself) Shakespeare comes emphatically into the ‘fox’ category. (It might be added here as a postscript that there is some common ground between the responses just summarized under ‘Shakespeare 1’ and those of the so-called ‘New Historicist’ and ‘Cultural Materialist’ critics of recent years. But whereas the ‘mainstream’ proponents of ‘Shakespeare 1’ have described Shakespeare’s disjunctions and apparent uncertainties of focus as defects of his art, the New Historicists and Cultural Materialists—true to the tenets of the Marxist tradition from which their work derives—have seen the ‘faultlines’ in his texts not in ‘aesthetic’ terms, but as revelatory of the ideological conflicts—and particularly those conflicts resulting from the exercise of power by the ruling classes—of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. ‘New Historicists’ have tended to stress the degree to which Shakespeare was trapped within the power-systems of his day, whereas Cultural Materialists have tended to take a more optimistic view, seeing tendencies within Shakespeare which offer resistance to the dominant authorities.) ************** Advocates of ‘Shakespeare 2’ come in various forms. What they have in common is a resistance to any suggestion that Shakespeare’s plays have anything (or at least, anything substantial) that one might want to call ‘faults’. One group of ‘Shakespeare 2’ critics need not detain us long. They might actually be equally labelled ‘soft hearted advocates of Shakespeare 1’. They effectively accept the picture of Shakespeare offered by ‘Shakespeare 1’ critics, but say that the ‘faults’ listed by those in the ‘Shakespeare 1’ camp aren’t really important, and pale into insignificance when we are experiencing Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre. Shakespeare, they say, was a working dramatist whose main concern was to please his audiences, and when we see the plays performed we are quite prepared, if the main action is absorbing enough, to accept all sorts

10

THE USE OF ENGLISH

of contrivance and obscurity which might bother us if we were reading the plays and subjecting them to detailed analysis in the study. But the mainstream of ‘Shakespeare 2’ critics offer more thoroughgoing resistance to any suggestion that Shakespeare’s plays—or, at least, his best plays—have faults. There are, they concede, differences of quality within the Shakespearian corpus, but these are mainly distinctions between Shakespeare’s ‘immature’ and ‘mature’ works, and (once he’d arrived at full maturity) between his ‘major’ plays and a few (like Timon of Athens) which fall below his customary standard or which (like Pericles) were written in collaboration with others (that is now also thought to be true of Timon). Once Shakespeare had got into his stride, mainstream proponents of ‘Shakespeare 2’ believe, there was no split between his inspiration and his artistry, and the latter was a perfect expression of the former. Any so-called ‘bad’ writing in Shakespeare’s mature plays can be interpreted as performing some necessary function in his larger design, and can often be explained as a lapse in the character speaking, rather than the dramatist who has given him his words. Shakespeare’s puns are often the vehicle for the articulation of complex and telling ambiguities of thought, or strange states of mind. Shakespeare’s apparently feeble comic scenes either provide necessary relief, or telling commentary on the play’s main action. Shakespeare’s characters are puzzling not because Shakespeare has drawn them confusingly, but because his knowledge of human nature is so profound that he registers complexities and subtleties in the human heart and mind beyond our everyday understanding. Sometimes we have to accept in his plays coincidences or fortuitous happenings which would be implausible if they occurred in real life, but which if correctly understood can be seen as necessary dramatic contrivances for the working out of Shakespeare’s profound insights. We must simply suspend our disbelief. Moreover, features of Shakespeare’s plays that seem strange often cease to be so when we are aware of beliefs or assumptions which are foreign to us, but would have seemed self-evident to Shakespeare’s audience. Shakespeare’s plays, advocates of ‘Shakespeare 2’ believe, are morally complex rather than morally confused. What is good about them is precisely that they don’t allow us to remain fixed or settled in any single point of view, or sympathize exclusively with any single character or set of characters. Shakespeare constantly challenges our conventional notions of right and wrong, undermining our habitual moral certainties, and causing us to examine our stock assumptions. Indeed, some advocates of

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

11

‘Shakespeare 2’ think of Shakespeare as writing deliberately ‘interrogative’ or ‘exploratory’ dramas in which the dramatist deliberately leaves the audience uncertain about important moral dilemmas and sympathies, and purposefully ‘problematizes’ the default assumptions and beliefs of his audience.4 Shakespeare’s language is difficult, and apparently obscure, advocates of ‘Shakespeare 2’ argue, because it is so innovative and so compressed. One cannot expect to be able to paraphrase a Shakespeare speech while preserving its full meaning. Nor should one expect his metaphors to work according to strict logic. Shakespeare constantly uses words in new or strange meanings, which seem to operate outside the realm of ordinary rationality or clarity. One should not assume that, since Shakespeare never supervised the early editions of his works, he didn’t care what happened to them. Shakespeare’s plays were, we should remember, the property of the theatrical company in which he was a shareholder, not his own, to do what he liked with. The Sonnets, moreover, show that he had a very powerful sense of how poetry can make its subject matter immortal. And there may, moreover, be evidence that Shakespeare wanted his plays to be read as well as performed. Some have suggested that he prepared longer ‘reading texts’ of plays that would, he knew, be performed on the stage in shortened versions.5 The texts of Shakespeare’s plays, have, to be sure, sometimes come down to us in imperfectly and inaccurately transmitted forms. But there is, arguably, some evidence that, at least on occasion, he revised his works with some care. Scholarship has, anyway, sorted out most of the obscurities and errors in the early texts. So: advocates of ‘Shakespeare 2’ believe that Shakespeare, once he had arrived at full artistic maturity, wrote (with a few minor exceptions) plays whose artistry—whether that is understood as the crafting of ‘organically coherent’ dramas, or as ‘interrogative’ thoughtprovocations—was fully in line with their profundity of insight into human nature—a profundity which always insists on the ‘problematic’ nature of all moral and religious beliefs, and ethical issues. Once one has mastered the plays’ conventions, has made due allowance for beliefs and assumptions which Shakespeare would have shared with his contemporaries, and has become accustomed to their author’s complex, rich, and innovative use of language, Shakespeare’s total mastery of his art becomes apparent. **************

12

THE USE OF ENGLISH

A play of Shakespeare’s which has regularly provoked particularly sharp disagreement between advocates of ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’ (especially with regard to the coherence of its plot and moral attitudes) is The Merchant of Venice, and, since it offers a particularly clear illustration of the ways in which the two approaches come into conflict when applied to a particular play, I want to look briefly at that play before turning to Macbeth and Othello. I’ll briefly sketch the main plot of The Merchant of Venice, for those of you who don’t know the play. Bassanio, a young Venetian, needs money in order to finance his wooing of Portia, a beautiful and wealthy young woman with whom he is in love. To assist him, his friend Antonio (the Merchant of the play’s title) enters into a bond with the Jewish moneylender, Shylock. Shylock, who hates Antonio, lends him the money, but on condition that if it is not repaid on time, he will be entitled to take a pound of Antonio’s flesh. The bond becomes forfeit, Shylock duly demands his pound of flesh, and the case is brought to court. But the situation is saved by Portia who, disguised as a young lawyer, points out that Shylock’s bond had merely stipulated a pound of flesh and no blood. If any of Antonio’s blood is shed, Shylock will forfeit both his property and his life. Shylock is thus defeated. He is fined, and compelled to convert to Christianity. Portia and Bassanio are married, and Lorenzo (a friend of Antonio and Bassanio), and Jessica (Shylock’s daughter), who have eloped together, learn that they will inherit Shylock’s wealth. The play’s overall structure—culminating in the celebrated trial scene at which Shylock is outwitted—suggests that it was designed as a comedy, in which a happy solution emerges from potential disaster, and a series of beautiful and sympathetic Christians triumph over a spiteful and avaricious Jew, who has been the remorseless butt of the Christians’ contempt throughout. But at various points in the play we seem to be allowed more inwardness and sympathy with Shylock than such a description would suggest. When told, for example, that Jessica, after eloping with Lorenzo, has bought a pet monkey with a ring she has stolen from him, Shylock exclaims: Thou torturest me...It was my turkis [turquoise], I had it of Leah [presumably his wife, of whom no other mention is made, and who one therefore presumes has died] when I was a bachelor.

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

13

And when Salerio, a friend of Antonio and Bassanio, jeers at Shylock, confident that he won’t insist on his bond, Shylock disabuses him, replying famously: He hath disgrac’d me, and hind’red me half a million, laugh’d at my losses, mock’d at my gains, scorn’d my nation, thwarted my bargains, cool’d my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian’s is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? These lines reverberate in the memory, so that when, in the trial scene, Portia delivers her equally famous lines— The quality of mercy is not strain’d, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath— we surely find ourselves asking, ‘Fine sentiments, but what mercy is being shown here to Shylock? He is, surely, being led to his own destruction by an underhand trick’? Interestingly, there seem to have been, historically, a number of different ways of playing the character of Shylock in the theatre, each answering to aspects of Shakespeare’s depiction. In Shakespeare’s own day, and for over a century afterwards, Shylock seems to have been presented as a comic villain, with a grotesque red wig and beard: the marks of a stock stage Jew. Then, in 1741, the actor Charles Macklin changed the performance tradition radically, making Shylock ‘believable, malevolent and terrifying, but also capable of exciting sympathy’.6 On seeing this performance, the poet Alexander Pope is said to have come out with a spontaneous epigram: ‘This is the Jew/That Shakespeare drew’. (Johann Zoffany’s marvellous painting of Macklin in the role of Shylock is part of the Maugham collection at the Royal National Theatre, and is currently displayed at the Holbourne Museum, Bath.) Later, in 1814, the celebrated actor Edmund Kean shifted the emphasis again, presenting Shylock as a

14

THE USE OF ENGLISH

sympathetic figure, whose behaviour was the direct, and excusable, product of the prejudice and contempt with which he had been treated. How do we explain such mixed responses to the play? One explanation (likely to be favoured by advocates of ‘Shakespeare 1’) might go something like this. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare set out to write an orthodox (and rather conventionally and unpleasantly antisemitic) play, in which a vile Jew was defeated by a set of admirable Christians. But as he set to work, he got more interested in his situation and characters than could be easily accommodated within such a simplistic scheme. He portrayed some of the Christians’ behaviour (particularly Salerio and Solanio’s remorselessly racist baiting of Shylock) in a distinctly dubious light—without, however, ever making it quite clear that we’re intended to disapprove of it. And he got more interested in the suffering and ill-treatment suffered by Shylock than really squared with his originally intended role as stereotypical comic villain. So Shakespeare leaves us at the end of the play with very mixed and troubling feelings. There doesn’t, however, seem to be any clearly or consistently signalled irony at the Christians’ expense. It doesn’t, for example, seem to be Shakespeare’s point, exactly, that when advocating the quality of mercy, Portia is to be regarded as a rank hypocrite. We seem to be being invited to approve of, and to relish, the nobility and beauty of her sentiments. So we can’t quite read or experience the play as a satiric comedy, in which normal stereotypes are reversed, and the Christians’ behaviour is submitted to corrosive irony. On the other hand, the glimpses we have had into Shylock’s inner torment prevent us from in any way simply rejoicing at his downfall. We are too conscious of the injustice he has suffered from the beginning, an injustice which is being redoubled in the trial scene, where those in charge seem to be making up the rules at Shylock’s expense as they go along. It’s not just that our feelings at the end of the play are complex or mixed. It’s more that we aren’t quite sure where we’re supposed to stand, or where Shakespeare is intending us to stand. There is, after all, a world of difference between a play in which opposing and contradictory views are held by the playwright in focused and coherent tension or equipoise, and one in which they simply co-exist, without any clear authorial ‘placing’, shaping, or control. (A view of the play similar to that just sketched is assumed as self-evident in a recent review by the musicologist Charles Rosen, who describes The Merchant of Venice, without further qualification or apology, as ‘relentlessly antisemitic except for the one famous passage where Shylock protests his humanity’.7)

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

15

The proponent of ‘Shakespeare 2’ will retort that the confusion in which the play leaves us is precisely the point: Shakespeare has deliberately given us different perspectives on the action—he has, as modern critical jargon would have it, ‘problematized’ the situation, deliberately leaving us unsure as to where we should stand, or upon whom the irony most rebounds. The fact that Shylock has been, and can be, portrayed in such different ways is a sign not of Shakespeare’s lack of control, but of the play’s multi-faceted richness. No single production will bring out everything that is there: each will stress a different facet of Shakespeare’s complex portrayal. It is a strength, not a weakness, that Shakespeare doesn’t tell us, or signal clearly to us, what we must think. He is concerned to explore and to disconcert, rather than to preach. He deliberately withholds explicit comment, or even an unequivocal signalling of his intentions by clear dramatic shaping. ************** Of the two tragedies which we are now going to consider, Macbeth seems, on the face of it, to have provoked much less interpretative disagreement, of the kind that we have seen about The Merchant of Venice, than Othello. There have, to be sure, been some disputes about the authorship of some parts of the play’s text. In the First Folio of 1623, which contains the only text of Macbeth to have come down from Shakespeare’s day, cues are provided in the scenes involving Hecate to two songs from The Witch, a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas Middleton. This has suggested to some scholars that Middleton’s hand is to be found more extensively in Shakespeare’s play, or that Middleton acted as a reviser or adapter of Shakespeare’s text. Such suggestions, though, have been powerfully contested. Middleton’s songs, it has been argued, were probably interpolated in performances by Shakespeare’s company after Shakespeare’s death, and Middleton’s hand is not otherwise to be seen in the text of Macbeth.8 Another area of controversy in Macbeth criticism relates to the scene (II, iii) in which the porter opens the gate of Macbeth’s castle on the night of Duncan’s murder, imagining himself as ‘the porter of Hell Gate’. Some critics, in both the ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’ traditions, have felt that this scene is an unwanted excrescence, put in to give the company clown something to do. But, generally speaking, Macbeth has been praised for its conciseness and coherence, and is sometimes said to be the play of Shakespeare’s that most nearly approaches the concentration and focus of a Greek tragedy. And a few major verbal glitches in the First Folio text have been resolved

16

THE USE OF ENGLISH

by ingenious editorial emendations, in ways that have commanded general assent. Perhaps the most notable of these is Nicholas Rowe’s alteration of the First Folio’s ‘I dare do all that doth become a man;/Who dares no more is none’ to ‘I dare do all that doth become a man;/Who dares do more is none’—a reading that has been accepted by virtually all subsequent editors. The plot of Macbeth, however, is perhaps a little less plain sailing, on closer examination, than it might seem at first sight. There is, for a start, the vexed question of Macbeth’s children—or lack of them. One of the appendices to A. C. Bradley’s account of Macbeth in his book Shakespearian Tragedy (1904) is famously entitled ‘How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?’ This title was used by L. C. Knights, in a pamphlet published in 1933, to indicate just the kind of pedantic, nit-picking, question that one shouldn’t ask about a Shakespeare play. But one, surely, needs to have some sort of answer to Bradley’s question if one is to make sense of Macbeth? Near the beginning of the play, you’ll remember, Lady Macbeth invokes the powers of darkness to ‘Come to my woman’s breasts/And take my milk for gall’, and, a little later, declares: ‘I have given suck, and know/How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me’. But later, when the news is brought to Macduff that Macbeth has slaughtered Macduff’s wife and children, and Malcolm responds by saying ‘Let’s make us med’cines of our great revenge/To cure this deadly grief’, Macduff responds: ‘He has no children’. To whom is Macduff referring? Is he thinking of Malcolm, and saying something like: ‘Malcolm’s got no children, and if he did, he wouldn’t be exhorting me to revenge, when I’m trying to come to terms with the appalling fact that mine have been killed’. Or is he referring to Macbeth? If so, does he mean: ‘Macbeth has no children; if he had, he couldn’t possibly have treated mine so brutally’? Or does he mean, more chillingly: ‘Macbeth has no children; if he had, I could slaughter them, just as he’s slaughtered mine’. Surely any actor playing the part of Macduff has to decide between these alternatives, if he is to deliver the line intelligibly? He has, that is, to have some kind of answer in his mind to the question, how many children had Lady Macbeth? But the play provides no certain evidence on the matter. That might seem like a relatively minor issue. But it raises the larger question of how brutal and primitive a drama we are dealing with. Macbeth is often described as if it were a rather simple Christian morality play: a story of evil countered, and eventually defeated, by the forces of light. Duncan seems, at the beginning of the play to be an almost saintly king, who has ‘borne his faculties so meek’ that the very angels would protest at his murder. But we might remember that he responds with lip-

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

17

smacking relish when he hears that Macbeth has ‘unseam’d’ the rebel Macdonwald ‘from the nave to the chops’ (that is, ripped his whole body open in one continuous gash from his navel to his jaws). And in his final encounter with Macduff, Macbeth seems to attain an heroic grandeur of almost Homeric proportions (‘Blow wind, come wrack,/At least we’ll die with harness on our back’) that makes Malcolm’s dismissal of him as a mere ‘butcher’ seem less than fully satisfactory. Indeed, some critics have seen the whole final scene of Macbeth as a distinctly glib and inadequate ending to such a disturbing play. Are we convinced that, with the installation of Malcolm as king, all will be well? Or was the scene inserted by Shakespeare (shortly, we may remember, after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot) as a sop to James I, warning all would-be usurpers that they are destined for the same sticky end as Macbeth? Those of you that know Roman Polanski’s film version of the play will remember that it ends by Donalbain (Duncan’s other son) visiting the witches. The suggestion seems to be that the cycle of evil is about to begin again, that Malcolm’s cheerily confident rhetoric is out of step with the chilling vision that the main course of the play has presented. Polanski seems to feel that Shakespeare’s ending is out of kilter with what he’s given us before, and needs (as they used to say in the Restoration) ‘correcting’.

************** But such worries about Macbeth might seem as nothing in comparison with those concerning both the plot and language of Othello, where, if you read different critics, you might think you were reading accounts of two different works altogether. According to one account, Othello is the story of a noble, but somewhat insecure, Moorish general, whose ensign Iago, motivated by sexual jealousy and resentment at having been passed over for promotion, insinuates doubts in Othello’s mind about the fidelity of his wife, Desdemona. Othello succumbs to Iago’s insidious temptation, is led into a fit of jealousy and eventually kills his wife. But when Iago’s villainy is discovered, Othello realizes the enormity of his crime, reveals his newfound self-knowledge in soliloquy, and nobly commits suicide. Other critics, however, summarize the plot of Othello very differently. In their account, Othello is the story of a vain and grandiloquent braggart, who, when offered unmotivated and impertinent insinuations by his lieutenant of his wife’s supposed infidelity, proves all-too-ready to accept them, and to entertain vile and utterly unjustified thoughts about her

18

THE USE OF ENGLISH

conduct. He then kills her in the most revolting way imaginable, gloating over the beauty of her body as he is about to smother her (an act which he claims is committed for her own good), and then has the effrontery to make a dying oration in which he justifies his conduct and pretends that his nobility (which he doesn’t seem to realize was phoney from the start) has survived intact to the last. But there is, perhaps, a third possibility, which might appeal to believers in ‘Shakesepeare 1’: that Shakespeare intended to depict the noble moor of the first story, but did so in such a partial and unconvincing way that it fails to persuade us. He also gave Iago purported explanations of his own conduct which convince no-one, and leave the audience uncertain about whether they were offered seriously in the first place. Iago’s motivation thus remains mysterious, and therefore very frightening—a fact reinforced by his devilish wit which often has audiences laughing with him conspiratorially, albeit a little uneasily. And no-one seems able to counteract his insinuations. Desdemona persists in tactlessly pressing Cassio’s suit when she can (or should be able to) see that it is driving Othello mad. And Emilia, Iago’s otherwise shrewd and commonsensical wife, falls for the ruse of the handkerchief, purloining it for Iago, even while suspecting he might be up to some mischief with it. The effect of all this is extraordinarily bewildering and perplexing. We have no real sense of why things are happening, or what (if anything) could have been done to prevent them. Appallingly loathsome thoughts and actions emerge from mysterious regions, and are neither countered, explained, nor justified. What is one to make of such wildly different responses? Rather than answering that question directly, I’d like to finish by reading some passages from what I think is one of the most interesting and provocative pieces of literary criticism from the ‘Shakespeare 1’ school. It directly concerns Othello. It’s not very well known. But I think it’s both a lively illustration of the ‘Shakespeare 1’ approach in action, and that it offers some suggestive thoughts about Othello which I’d like to leave you to ponder. It’s a little sketch by George Bernard Shaw, published in 1910, entitled ‘A Dressing Room Secret’. The situation is that a costumier is dressing various characters for a Shakespeare Ball. The person being dressed up as Iago is very uneasy. He doesn’t feel right in his costume. He says he doesn’t look the character. The costumier ventures to say that that’s not surprising, because Iago isn’t really a consistent character at all. And then a little bust of Shakespeare, on a shelf above the dressing table, starts to talk. It agrees with the costumier, and tries to explain why:

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES ‘I made a mess of Iago because villains are such infernally dull and disagreeable people that I never could go through with them. I can stand five minutes of a villain, like Don John in—in—oh, whats its name?—you know—that box office play with the comic constable in it [Much Ado about Nothing]. But if I had to spread a villain out and make his part a big one, I always ended, in spite of myself, by making him rather a pleasant sort of chap. I used to feel very bad about it. It was all right as long as they were doing reasonably pleasant things; but when it came to making them commit all sorts of murders and tell all sorts of lies and do all sorts of mischief, I felt ashamed. I had no right to do it.’ .................................... ‘I started on you with quite a clear notion of drawing the most detestable sort of man I know: a fellow who goes in for being frank and genial, unpretentious and second rate, content to be a satellite of men with more style, but who is loathsomely coarse, and has that stupid sort of selfishness that makes a man incapable of understanding the mischief his dirty tricks may do, or refraining from them if there is the most wretched trifle to be gained by them. But my contempt and loathing for the creature—what was worse, the intense boredom of him—beat me before I got into the second act. The really true and natural things he said were so sickeningly coarse that I couldn’t go on fouling my play with them. He began to be clever and witty in spite of me. Then it was all up. It was Richard III all over again. I made him a humorous dog. I went further: I gave him my own divine contempt for the follies of mankind and for himself, instead of his own proper infernal envy of man’s divinity. That sort of thing was always happening to me. Some plays it improved; but it knocked the bottom out of Othello. It doesnt amuse really sensible people to see a woman strangled by mistake. Of course some people would go anywhere to see a women strangled, mistake or no mistake; but such riff-raff are no use to me, though their money is as good as anyone else’s.’

19

20

THE USE OF ENGLISH

‘Shakespeare’s’ problems with Iago were, he says, related to his larger difficulties in writing his play: ‘I remember the play you were in...I let myself go on the verse: thundering good stuff it was: you could hear the souls of the people crying out in the mere sound of the lines. I didn’t bother about the sense—just flung about all the splendid words I could find. Oh, it was noble, I tell you: drums and trumpets; and the Propontick and the Hellespont; and a malignant and a turbaned Turk in Aleppo; and eyes that dropt tears as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinal gum: the most impossible, far-fetched nonsense; but such music! Well, I started that play with two frightful villains, one male and one female...I had a tremendous notion of a supersubtle and utterly corrupt Venetian lady who was to drive Othello to despair by betraying him. It’s all in the first act. But I weakened on it. She turned amiable on my hands, in spite of me. Besides, I saw that it wasn’t necessary—that I could get a far more smashing effect by making her quite innocent. I yielded to the temptation: I never could resist an effect...the change turned the play into a farce....What I call a farce is a play in which the misunderstandings are not natural but mechanical. By making Desdemona a decent poor devil of an honest woman, and Othello a really superior sort of man, I took away all natural reason for his jealousy. To make the situation natural I must either have made her a bad woman as I originally intended, or him a jealous, treacherous, selfish man, like Leontes in The [Winter’s] Tale. But I couldn’t belittle Othello in that way; so, like a fool, I belittled him the other way, by making him the dupe of a farcical trick with a handkerchief that wouldn’t have held water off stage for five minutes.’ Irresponsible Shavian fun at Shakespeare’s expense? Or is Shaw responding (in, of course, a deliberately teasing and provocative way) to troubling features of Othello that might well disturb any attentive reader in the course of his or her study of the play? When Shaw makes his ‘Shakespeare’ say that he originally intended to portray Desdemona as ‘a supersubtle and utterly corrupt Venetian lady who was to drive Othello to despair by betraying him’, he is perhaps remembering the strangely

THE TWO SHAKESPEARES

21

disconcerting parting shot which Desdemona’s father Brabantio delivers to Othello as he leaves the stage in Act I Scene iii:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: She has deceived her father, and may thee. ************** I ought now to come clean, and to make clear what I imagine many of you have been suspecting for some time (and which my ending with Shaw will have confirmed): that I believe that ‘Shakespeare 1’ offers, in broad terms at least, a generally more convincing description of Shakespeare’s leading characteristics than ‘Shakespeare 2’. That’s an unfashionable stance to take at present, and you—like some of my own students and colleagues— may well not be willing to share it. But the choice between ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’ is, I believe, one on which all readers and playgoers need to have a view. And that view will affect all their responses to Shakespearian drama. The choice does not have to be a simple or absolute one. As I mentioned earlier, not all believers in either ‘Shakespeare’ have held their belief in an equally ‘hard line’ form. Some critics have, indeed, oscillated between the two according to the occasion or their mood of the moment. And, with regard to any particular detail in any play, the evidence may run contrary to the general model of Shakespeare to which one is most drawn. But I hope that this talk might have suggested that, in broad terms, if not in every detail and every instance, the choice between ‘Shakespeare 1’ and ‘Shakespeare 2’ is one which can’t really be avoided, and which every reader, playgoer, actor, or director has to make for him or her self.

References 1.

The following accounts fall broadly under the ‘Shakespeare 1’ head: Ben Jonson, in Timber (1640); John Dryden, in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668); Alexander Pope, Preface to The Works of Shakespeare (1725); Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Works of Shakespeare (1765); A. C. Bradley, Lecture II, in Shakespearean Tragedy (1904); George Bernard Shaw, in ‘A Dressing Room Secret’ (1910); H. A. Mason, Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love (1970); A. L. French, Shakespeare and the Critics (1972); Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Culture and Value (1980); George Steiner, ‘A Reading Against Shakespeare’, in No Passion Spent (1996). The following subscribe to one or other version of the ‘Shakespeare 2’ model: Ben Jonson, in ‘To the Memory of...Mr William Shakespeare’ (1623); S. T. Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria (1817) and in his various lectures on Shakespeare; A. W. Schlegel, in his Lectures on Dramatic

22

THE USE OF ENGLISH Art and Literature (1808-11); G. Wilson Knight, in The Wheel of Fire (1930); F. R. Leavis in The Common Pursuit (1952); Norman Rabkin, in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (1981); Graham Bradshaw in Shakespeare’s Scepticism (1987). It is a moot point, for reasons suggested in my talk, which of the two models are embraced by Jonathan Dollimore’s cultural-materialist account in Radical Tragedy (3rd edn, 2010).

2.

Alexander Pope, however, considered the lines to be so faulty that they were probably not by Shakespeare at all, and relegated them to the foot of the page in his edition. For a fully argued defence of his decision, see A. D. J. Brown, 1995. ‘Alexander Pope’s Edition of Shakespeare: An Introduction’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Bristol, (available online at: http://www.adjb.net/ popes_shakespeare/), Chapter 4.

3.

E. A. J. Honigmann (2005). ‘Shakespeare’s Deletions and False Starts,’ Review of English Studies, 223, 37-48.

4.

For this approach, see, notably Graham Bradshaw, 1987. Scepticism (Brighton).

5.

On this topic, see Lukas Erne (2003). (Cambridge).

6.

Jane Martineau et al. (2003). Shakespeare in Art (London: Merrell), p. 126. Zoffany’s picture is reproduced on p. 127.

7.

New York Review of Books, 9 June 2011.

8.

See Brian Vickers (2010). ‘Disintegrated: Did Middleton Adapt Macbeth?’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 2010, pp. 13-14.

Shakespeare’s

Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist

23

Shakespeare and Cultural Literacy Catherine M.S. Alexander I When I was at grammar school in the 1960s one of the teachers ran a club, ‘The Philistines’, for the sixth form. With the explicit intention of civilising us, the optional and extra-curricular club took us to the theatre, ballet and art galleries which were then broadly agreed to be ‘culture’. I guess I first came across ‘culture’ as a political idea rather than an afterschool activity when, at about the same time, I read Anthony Crosland’s Future of Socialism and grappled with his discussion of individual liberty and his contention that a gain in social justice would not lead to a cultural loss.1 Now, over fifty years since its first publication, it is clear to see Crosland’s influence on the New Labour project and equally clear, in his concluding socialist vision, to see an elision of culture and what many, then and now, would see as a middle class life style: We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing-hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating-houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure-gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places, better designs for furniture and pottery and women’s clothes, statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum (pp. 402-3). Much of his polemic was concerned with the public sponsorship of culture and the arts that takes state responsibility well beyond the practical

24

THE USE OF ENGLISH

provision of education and welfare and in the twenty-first century his socialist aspiration has become an expectation and, indeed, a demand as was made clear by Liz Forgan on January 15th 2013 when she left her position as the Chair of the Arts Council. She was widely reported to have expressed the view, in the context of government cuts, that the arts are a state service that should be actively promoted through the school curriculum. She was echoing the report of the 2009 Cultural and Learning Consortium (now progressed as the Cultural Learning Alliance and then as now with Arts Council representatives) whose first of ten key recommendations concerned the role of the state: Central government and its agencies should recognise and promote cultural learning as a key element within the curriculum; as of core value in cross-curricular learning; and as the best way to fulfil the commitment to universal cultural entitlement for all children and young people, the Every Child Matters/Youth Matters vision and the Children’s Plan.2 Remarkably quickly ‘culture’ has become a somewhat ill-defined component of the curriculum to be transmitted explicitly in schools. My first professional encounter with a specific rather than implicit link between culture and education was in the early eighties when I was the Head of a large London comprehensive school and actively involved with the attempts by the then DES and my LEA to promote multicultural education. Courses and day-schools considered the languages, history, social structures and practices of the ethnic groups in the borough’s schools (in my case largely Afro-Caribbean and Greek Cypriot) and discussed how the curriculum could reflect and celebrate these differences. Powered by the best of motives to shift ‘culture’ from aesthetics to ethics (to paraphrase the ideas of Langston Hughes) the outcome was never the less sometimes confrontational or, at least oppositional: the indigenous culture was assumed to be monolithic yet, while often condemned, was largely unexplored. In practice the curriculum content was little changed and the tangible outcomes were in school organisation, teaching style, discipline and pastoral care and I became involved, for example, in NFER research that explored whether learning in setted, streamed or mixed ability classes best served different cultural groups. The debate about culture and the curriculum then shifted from race to gender and became engaged with the process of achieving equality of opportunity without a stringent analysis of what, in cultural terms, that opportunity might be. Implicit in these shifts was a

SHAKESPEARE AND CULTURAL LITERACY

25

redefinition of ‘culture’ as, to quote Hobsbawm, ‘the critically evaluative bourgeois sense of the word [gave] way to “culture” in the purely descriptive anthropological sense.’3 Shakespeare, perceived by some as a representative of a sexist, racist, white, male elite, sat uncomfortably in these movements and I recall a major row when Shakespeare received as much opprobrium as the exam board that set the question ‘Was Richard III as black as he’s painted?’ I use these personal examples partly as a shorthand reminder of the contentious issues that surround ‘culture’—class, politics, race, gender, education, the state—but largely because they are the issues that form the substance of much of the criticism levelled at the work of E.D. Hirsch and that he has found it necessary to address and defend firstly in Cultural Literacy: what every American needs to know and subsequently in The Knowledge Deficit: closing the shocking education gap for American children.4 His concern is that despite the huge and often successful efforts made to teach children the mechanics of reading, many disadvantaged young people (particularly those from non-English speaking homes) have their disadvantages reinforced because they lack cultural knowledge to comprehend what they read. Needless to say, such an ostensibly simple idea (despite the support of the clearly presented educational research of the problem that is an impressive feature of both books) has been attacked because of his contention that there can be a national or mainstream or traditional culture (which he is careful to say is not constant), that is valuable to transmit yet doesn’t require the uncritical acceptance of conservative values. Hirsch is equally careful to make a case that cultural competence does not reinforce a dominant monoculture and argues that while a child may be able to decode a passage (i.e., read) she cannot understand it without the ability to infer and ‘fill in the gaps’; to bring knowledge to aid comprehension. He concludes Cultural Literacy with a list of 5,000 dates, titles, names and phrases that he believes the culturally literate American should recognise and understand, and so in addition to the social critique—all those issues of class, race, politics and so on—he is condemned for being Gradgrindian, for focusing on facts rather than skills. His ideas crossed the Atlantic some years ago but have only recently come to public attention. A couple of months after his appointment as Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove gave verbal evidence to parliament’s Education Committee and expressed his concern that, ‘In effect, rich thick kids do better than poor clever children, and when they arrive at school, the situation as they go through gets worse.’5 His reference was to research

26

THE USE OF ENGLISH

by Leon Feinstein at the Institute of Education but it’s the same argument that underpins Hirsch’s work. More recently, as Gove has announced plans for curriculum reform that will have a greater focus on knowledge than skills, the press and media have drawn attention to the Hirsch influence, to ‘Cultural Literacy’ and his list, and a polarity has developed with forcibly expressed opinions. I’m reminded of the blunt observation of one of the most intimidating headteachers in literature, Miss Mackay in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: ‘Culture cannot compensate for the lack of hard knowledge’.6 And the headline grabbing sound-bite ‘The pub quiz curriculum’ that was the NUT’s response to Gove’s proposed history curriculum is an equally blunt reaction (if ignorant of what many would regard as a handy life skill). This points, in part, to the enduring difficulties surrounding a definition of culture. For some it remains the characteristics and values of the birth group or community; while for others it implies a competence or knowledge that goes beyond this boundary. Both are open to charges of prescription, exclusivity and elitism. The terms of the debate are fluid; culture is a site of meaning contested politically, educationally and socially with a growing terminology (cultural meaning, cultural capitalism, cultural competence, cultural curriculum, cultural value and so on) that is equally contentious. But rather than enter the argument (other than to comment that proponents of a cultural curriculum tend to privilege the arts over, say, languages or science and to promote personal experience and active learning) it is worth noting the areas of consensus. There is agreement that ‘culture’ is acquired rather than inherent and can therefore be taught and learned. The acquisition of culture is perceived to be of benefit to the individual but is of equal importance (and this is true for commentators on both the left and right) for its economic value and benefit to society. Hirsch’s conclusion to Cultural Literacy makes this explicit: I hope that in our future debates about the extensive curriculum, the participants will keep clearly in view the high stakes involved in their deliberations: breaking the cycle of illiteracy for deprived children; raising the living standard of families who have been illiterate; making our country more competitive in international markets; achieving greater social justice; enabling all citizens to participate in the political process; bringing us closer to the Ciceronian ideal of universal public discourse—in short, achieving fundamental goals of the Founders at the birth of the republic. (p.145)

SHAKESPEARE AND CULTURAL LITERACY

27

II The purpose of this brief paper is neither to endorse nor condemn Hirsch’s purpose and vision (nor, indeed that of Crosland, Gove or the Cultural Learning Alliance) but to look pragmatically at how part of his solution might translate to the UK. The bulk of his volumes is devoted to evidence and educational theory, practice and research into attainment and reading skill but it is his practical examples that best make his point. Using passages that might be said to represent mainstream US culture— sports reports, history and the Constitution—he demonstrates how ‘cultural illiteracy’ (ignorance of points of reference, contexts or the knowledge deficit) is a barrier to comprehension. One of his most striking examples is an accessible prose passage about the conclusion of the American Civil War that was set to community college students many of whom found it extremely difficult to understand because of their ignorance of the identities of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. An English equivalent might be, say, a passage about the Second World War rendered inaccessible through ignorance of the identities of Churchill, Montgomery or Harris; or, to shift to literature, reading Yeats without knowledge of Maud Gonne or Easter 1916; or, to get to the point, aspiring to cultural literacy in Shakespeare without knowledge of the Globe, Blackfriars or James I. Shakespeare’s cultural position is much less contested than in the eighties: he is the National Poet, was the Man of the Millennium, a role secured and reinforced through the funding of theatres and their education departments, the National Curriculum, and the pioneering work of key practitioners, and as a cultural figure is the fashionable subject of recent academic research.7 There is greater consensus that he is worth knowing. I set myself a series of questions: what might we expect a culturally literate young person (or adult) to know about Shakespeare? What knowledge is required to be able to converse confidently with others, to recognise reference and allusion, to process contextual information, share vocabulary, or understand key features of content and style? What information will facilitate cultural access and participation, socially, educationally or vocationally? I’m not asking how or when or even why Shakespeare should be taught or assessed but quite simply attempting to identify the key words or phrases, the markers, that indicate cultural competence. This is not the same as the skills required to pass examinations, study a text or engage in literary appreciation but is the knowledge required to access cultural heritage. Some may find the following Hirsch-style list too basic or reductionist but having taught Shakespeare from primary school to post-graduate level I am very aware

28

THE USE OF ENGLISH

how easy it is to take knowledge for granted and to assume an acquaintance with facts. Hirsch’s list, headed ‘What Literate Americans Know’, includes scientific terms, geographical names, historical events, dates, famous people and what he calls ‘patriotic lore’ (p.146). It also contains approximately sixtynine (or one per cent) of entries that could be described as Shakespearian; titles, characters and brief quotations. A prefatory note explains that literature is a special case and points out that information possessed by literate persons does not necessarily indicate knowledge of a text: Judy Garland and Bert Lahr have fixed our conception of The Wizard of Oz more vividly than Frank Baum. Only a small proportion of literate people can name the Shakespeare plays in which Falstaff appears, yet they know who he is. (p.147) I’ve been mindful of that note in compiling the list that follows so the inclusion of a character or title does not necessarily indicate knowledge of role or play. I found the inclusion of practitioners problematic; few would now argue that a knowledge of Shakespeare on the stage (or film or the new media) is less important than Shakespeare on the page but I suspect there is less consensus about who should be included. Key figures such as David Garrick, Charles Kean, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry have had major roles in the performance—even the survival—of Shakespeare but I decided to confine myself to twentieth and twenty-first century figures. Hirsch’s list includes quotations (‘There is a tide in the affairs of men,’ ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all’, for example) but I’ve chosen to deal with them separately. As well as needing to ‘know stuff’ the culturally literate person should be able to ‘speak Shakespeare’ and recognise quotation, reference, allusion, lyric, parody, even elements of the Olympic opening ceremony. I don’t mean the sort of speaking that Bernard Levin so famously identified in the much reproduced passage from Enthusiasms in 1983 (‘if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger’ and so on),8 where the phrases are so common and familiar that any awareness of quoting or connection with their author is probably unrecognised and certainly not a conscious signifier. Nor, however, do I mean the sort of pedantic knowledge that can identify ‘I have not slept one wink’ as originating in Cymbeline (3.4.103) or know that ‘Mad world! mad kings! mad composition!’ comes from King John (2.1.561). I was looking for

SHAKESPEARE AND CULTURAL LITERACY

29

quotations that might be used intentionally with a recognition of their Shakespearian origin but the list quickly became unmanageable and I chose to confine myself to perhaps the best known play, Hamlet. I suspect this second list is more contentious but I offer them both to encourage debate and should be grateful for any response. The lists:

Shakespeare: what culturally literate English people need to know 1564—1616 (Shakespeare’s dates)

Comedy Cordelia 1603 (the death of Elizabeth I and David Tennant the accession of James I) Desdemona 1605 (the Gunpowder Plot) Epilogue 1623 (the publication of the First Folio Fool Folio) Genre A Midsummer Night’s Dream Ghost Act Globe Actor Hamlet Anne Hathaway Hamlet Antony Henry V Antony and Cleopatra History Ariel Iago As You Like It Iambic pentameter Audience Ian Mckellen Banquo John Gielgud Baz Luhrmann Judi Dench Ben Jonson Julius Caesar Blackfriars Katherina / Katherine / Kate Blank verse Kenneth Branagh Bottom King James I Boy actor King Lear Brutus Lady Macbeth Caliban Laurence Olivier Cast Macbeth Character Macbeth Christopher Marlowe Malvolio Chorus Masque Cleopatra Miranda

30 Oberon Ophelia Orlando Othello Patron Paul Robeson Peggy Ashcroft Peter Hall Play Plot Polonius Portia Prologue Prospero Quarto Queen Elizabeth I Rhyme Rhythm

THE USE OF ENGLISH Richard III Role Romeo and Juliet Rosalind Sam Wanamaker Shylock Sonnet Soliloquy Stage Stratford upon Avon The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest The Winter’s Tale Titania Toby Belch Tragedy Witches

Speaking Shakespeare: quotations from Hamlet For this relief much thanks. A little more than kin, and less than kind. O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt. Frailty, thy name is woman. In my mind’s eye, Horatio. He was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again. More in sorrow than in anger. The primrose path of dalliance. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. To thine own self be true. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Murder most foul. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. The time is out of joint. Brevity is the soul of wit. Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither. I am but mad north-north-west. I know a hawk from a handsaw. O! What a rogue and peasant slave am I.

SHAKESPEARE AND CULTURAL LITERACY

31

The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. To be or not to be: that is the question ... Get thee to a nunnery. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. A king of shreds and patches. I must be cruel only to be kind. How all occasions do inform against me. When sorrows come they come not in single spies, / But in battalions. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. Sweets to the sweet. There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come ... A hit, a very palpable hit. The rest is silence. Good- night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

References 1.

Anthony Crosland (2006) The Future of Socialism, 1956 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956; repr. London: Constable), p. 197 ff.

2.

http://www.culturallearningalliance.org.uk/background.aspx. Accessed 24.01.13. The recommendation refers to the DfE Green Paper, 2003, and Policy Paper, 2007.

3.

Eric Hobsbawm (2013) Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century (London: Little, Brown).

4.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (1988) Cultural Literacy: what every American needs to know (New York: Vintage) and (2007) The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children (New York: Houghton Mifflin).

5.

Minutes of Evidence, Examination of Witnesses, 28th July, 2010, Q 41 http:// www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmeduc/395-i/395i04. Accessed 26.01.13.

6.

Muriel Spark (1965) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Harmondsworth: Penguin) p.66.

7.

See, for example, the recently completed project funded by the AHRC and led by Prof Kate McLuskie at the Shakespeare Institute, ‘Interrogating Cultural Value in 21st Century England: the case of Shakespeare’, the forthcoming book based on the project, Shakespeare and Cultural Value (Manchester: Manchester University Press), and the essays in Shakespeare Survey 64: Shakespeare as Cultural Catalyst (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

8.

Bernard Levin (1983) Enthusiasms (London: Jonathan Cape) pp. 167-8.

32

THE USE OF ENGLISH

Not Laughing At Teacher: Alan Bennett’s The History Boys Samuel Cutting A new term, a change in syllabus and a new text to teach. Deep breaths and fervent resource-making all round. The switch in dramatic genres from tragedy to comedy for the AQA spec felt a little abrupt, and perhaps even a little puzzling, considering that modern comedy has much less in the way of firm generic conventions than tragedy. No debating whether or not the Shakespearean protagonist experiences anagnorisis, or how a modern play might present ideas of catharsis and pathos. The replacement question, even in its most basic form—‘how and why is this comic?’—feels a little rootless, perhaps unwieldy. Part of the concern I had about teaching ‘comedy’ was that the basis of humour can be tricky to define. The emotional responses of an audience in a tragedy are, arguably, slow-burning—a gradual journey to the climax of pathos, from which students can reflect, discuss and refute their varying sympathies and perspectives. Comedy, on the other hand, relies on the involuntary reaction, the comic line, the moment of laughter, which then subsides until the next gag comes along. The resonance of this laughter, not only why we laugh but also the consequences of it, is something many students have never been asked to analyse before. So many of my questions in the initial few weeks of teaching comedy returned the frustrated answer ‘It just is funny!’ Sometimes, the problem is less not being to explain why something is funny, than not finding it funny at all. A second and more fundamental issue is the too-obvious need for students to laugh at the text you’re studying. If you don’t laugh in the first place, how can you be expected to write an essay on it? It is for this reason that the department I teach in avoided a comedy of manners such as The Importance of Being Earnest; often the argument that students ‘wouldn’t get it’ is construed as

THE HISTORY BOYS

33

cowardice, or worse, laziness, but in this case it seems the opposite was true—Wilde was the easy choice, rather than tackling a more modern author with little or no critical tradition. That said, I confess I was at a loss when asked to think about possible modern comedy, and it is a genre I think a lot of English teachers of my generation might feel less secure in than others. Suddenly, AQA’s decision to switch is looking positively necessary. So, in the slow days of the summer term, we decided on Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. A great play, well-received, and one that would obviously ‘speak to students’. Relying on theatre critics’ reviews for some of our initial discussion was helpful, although not always. Michael Billington suggested that the play ‘defied categorisation’ and it seemed that talking about this text in terms of genre could be at once challenging but also confusing to A-level students ‘doing’ comedy for the first time. What intrigued me was the need in critics to articulate the ‘something else’ in the work which wasn’t merely funny: in the words of critics, the play became ‘a comedy of ideas’1 or ‘moving…as well as funny’2. ‘Behind the almost ceaseless laughter’ wrote Billington in a later review—‘lies a hymn to the joys of language’3. In this, there was a growing sense of a definition for comedy in the modern era, and for Bennett’s comedy specifically; that is, a work that interrogates the problematic, the disturbing or the troubling issues in life through highlighting the innately comic, absurd or ridiculous energies which act within them. We began to see that some more established theories of the genre such as Frye’s conception of ‘green worlds’ in Shakespeare, or the subverting of the given ‘exposition—complication—resolution’ dramatic structure might provide interesting perspectives on modern comedy. One of the first things we did was to try and put Bennett in the context of its comic forebears, such as the farce of Fawlty Towers and the self-aware cultural stereotypes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. This also meant some clips of Beyond the Fringe, but just as importantly the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth (I am indebted to my head of department for this quite inspired suggestion). Students quickly got the sense that modern comedy, whichever structures, patterns or dramatic conventions it might adhere to, was often about the use of laughter in combatting and understanding the serious, whether as antidote, subversion or destruction. The combination of ‘seriousness’ and ‘silliness’—Bennett said of rehearsals for the play ‘it’s a serious business but it’s also quite silly and I like being silly’4—became the central spine for discussion, and the

34

THE USE OF ENGLISH

episodic, sketch-like nature of the scenes meant students could write a stand-alone analysis before considering the text as a whole. In addressing the ‘seriousness’ of the play, one of the major avenues for discussion was Irwin, the new teacher brought in to help boost the boys’ performance in preparation for Oxbridge examinations. His rather sinister opening scene was stripped from the film adaptation, removing a huge part of the political message inherent in The History Boys. As many students had already seen the adaptation, part of beginning the text was to address this strange start to an ostensibly comic play:

Irwin: This is a tricky one. The effect of the bill will be to abolish trial by jury in at least half the cases that currently come before the courts and will to a significant extent abolish the presumption of innocence. […] I would try not to be shrill or earnest. An amused tolerance always comes over best, particularly on television. Paradox works well and mists up the windows which is handy. ‘The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom’ type thing.

Perhaps most disconcerting for an audience here is the ease with which the anonymising language of politics comes to this character, even to the point where unimportant specifics are dismissed with an aloof ‘etc. etc.’ With this scene, the performance of the teacher is made analogous to the performance of the spin doctor; the latter, too, happens behind closed doors, to a select group who must carefully heed the message of the arbiter at the front of the room, in order to the pass the media and public relations ‘examination’. As Irwin punctuates his cold manipulation with the ominous ‘Back to school’, our watching of the world of the play is condemned from the start; the nostalgia of the classroom, the manner of ‘looking back’ at an ideal, Bennett seems to suggest, means we fail to see the dangers to our personal freedom in the present. The first scene is utterly serious, sobering even, and ironically strikes the first blow in the debate between Hector’s liberal-humanist conception of education and Irwin’s utilitarian one; the natural destination of Irwin’s teaching method which helps the boys to Oxbridge success is, Bennett suggests, the

THE HISTORY BOYS

35

manipulation of an entire populace through aphorism, euphemism and selective truth. That said, Bennett avoids the temptation to have Dakin follow in Irwin’s footsteps, neatly ignoring the well-trodden path of Oxbridge students into politics, thus leaving the end of the play, as well as the perspective on Oxford and Cambridge, more open and optimistic, with Hector’s own desire to ‘Pass it on’ acting as partial antidote to the teacher -turned-government advisor. The New York Times, though, recognised that this was less a play about the dubious merits of a liberal arts education than a play about ‘presentation over substance—the ascendancy of spin’ in Thatcher’s England. Dakin’s desire to impress Irwin may be played for laughs in terms of hierarchy and power, moving as we do from the student’s mispronouncing Nietzsche as ‘Knee-shaw’ to his reckless sexual approach to Irwin at the end of the play, but the ideological or political influence of Irwin’s method, when explicit, relies on a much darker humour. When Dakin remarks of Irwin’s method ‘history is fucking’ he does so with the smugness of a clever, rebellious adolescent: when he later says ‘Turning facts on their heads. It’s like a game’ it is chillingly naïve, the words of an obedient manipulator of truth. It was these sorts of discussions about Irwin, about how his destination as a character and the ideological subtext fitted with his role as a teacher that led me to a small professional crisis of my own, albeit on a very different scale to the one Hector suffers. Teaching this play, one can’t help but continually evaluate and re-evaluate the nature of one’s own performance in the classroom, especially in the face of lines like ‘All literature is consolation’. It doesn’t help that I am relatively young for a teacher, not far off Irwin in age or looks, lacking the firm moustache for ‘classroom control’ as Bennett’s ridiculous Headmaster would have. I was lucky to have a very mature and able class, who either didn’t think my own selfish parallel important, or didn’t want to draw it, and their discussions about whether they would prefer Irwin’s lessons or Hector’s, and the educational merits of both, were well-conceived and strictly hypothetical. Irwin, however, stayed with me. In the months after teaching the play, now moving into exam texts and practice questions, I find myself sounding exactly like Irwin and chastising myself for it, despite it being a necessary way of preparing for the exam. The gobbet gets marks; the ‘wrong end of the stick is the right one’; the end is the quantifiable and profitable result of carefully applied means. Did I want to go on resembling a character who, in an isolated reference to the play in the London Review of Books, is termed a ‘paradox-mongering media don’5?

36

THE USE OF ENGLISH

As with any text close to who we are, or what we think we are, perspective is required. It’s perhaps part of the romantic disposition of teachers of English that we imagine ourselves in terms of the characters that we read about. The necessary perspective for this play arrives, ironically, through mimicking Posner’s ‘sense of detachment’ that he learns from Irwin and is praised for at his interview. One of the few academically rigorous critical responses to the play spends some time identifying what it calls the ‘ironic similarities’6 between Bennett and Irwin. Such parallels are intentional; indeed, Posner, Hector and Irwin are all versions of Bennett himself, as his lucid introduction to the play suggests. That Bennett dramatises the conflict between these two pedagogical perspectives allows him to comment on changing attitudes in education, but also to suggest that every teacher is at least part-Irwin, part-Hector. That Bennett doesn’t quite allow us to wholly sympathise with one or the other is obviously an important part of the way education is presented in the play. Professionally and personally, we must remember that these are constructs of teachers, which at first naturally turn us inward, to dissect our own performances, what our classes must think of us; our own ‘teacher’ identities. ‘How much am I Irwin? How much Hector?’ we might ask, paranoid, knowing that we are hopefully a comfortable mixture of the two. Instead, though, Bennett’s overall concerns must turn our view outwards, into the distance, at the social and cultural ramifications of what we do, and how we do it. The point of Irwin’s character—and the major concern of the play—is to make us understand that the way we teach is very much linked to our own personal ideology. Hector’s accident is not only sobering because it is the death of an important figure in the boys’ lives and a vivid classroom persona, but also of the sanctity of understanding, the dictum that ‘All knowledge is precious, whether or not it serves the slightest human use’. With Irwin’s final appearance in a wheelchair, calling back to the inevitable, dangerous future of the play, we think again about the foundations of a production in which so much of our laughter stems from the manipulation of knowledge through performance. It is no wonder, then, that The History Boys leads us to ask ourselves questions about the way we manipulate, know and perform to our students on a daily basis, as well as asking our students to alter their own burgeoning understanding of dramatic comedy.

THE HISTORY BOYS

37

References 1.

Peter Marks (2006). ‘History Boys Earns All A’s’, The Washington Post. Monday, April 24.

2.

Charles Spencer (2004). ‘School's back with Bennett at his best’, Daily Telegraph. May 19.

3.

Michael Billington (2004). ‘The History Boys’. The Guardian. May 19.

4.

Alan Bennett interview cited in Thomas Hescott (2004). History Boys Workpack. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/sites/all/libraries/files/documents/ history_boys.pdf

5.

G. Wheatcroft (2011). ‘The First New War: Crimea: The Last Crusade by Orlando Figes’, The London Review of Books Vol. 33 No. 16 25 August. Pp.22-25 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/geoffrey-wheatcroft/the-first-new-war.

6.

John J. Stinson (2006/07). ‘Bennett's The History Boys: Unnoticed Ironies Lead to Critical Neglect’, Connotations 16.1-3: 219-45. Available at http:// www.connotations.uni-tuebingen.de/stinson01613.htm.

38

THE USE OF ENGLISH

Inspiration in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella I Thomas Day Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain: Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain: Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay, Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows, And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite – ‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’

Sidney’s sonnet, the first in his sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591), may well confound some of the current credos of Creative Writing which put the lie to inspiration and its opposites. It’s a meditation on, and a recollection of, the causes and effects of writer’s block. The speaker, Astrophel (who seems like a thinnish mask for the poet himself), searching for a form of expression adequate to his unrequited love in the hope that it will gain him his lady’s pity and thus her favour, scours his bookshelves for poetic exemplars he might learn from—for a crutch, in other words. But he can only hobble hopelessly around the arid (though simultaneously cluttered) wasteland of literature that excessive book learning brings, parched of those necessary drops of original thinking that enable the true poem. His music is slack, as is implied by the extra footed hexameter line; although maybe in that we also have the seed of what will ultimately distinguish his poem from others’, the pentameter being

ASTROPHEL AND STELLA

39

the conventional metrical form of the sonnet, and the meter which Sidney adopts throughout most of the rest of the sequence. The ‘intolerable wrestle/With words and meanings’ as T. S. Eliot called it, the agony of writing that has the poet-speaker metaphorically flagellating himself in frustration, is finally assuaged as Stella transmutes into Muse, supplying the speaker with the impetus needed to clinch the poem. And he too transmutes, delivered of his creation like a woman giving birth, with an attendant intimation of sexual union that eliminates the initial gulf of separation between the lover and his beloved, so also uniting the writer and his hoped-for reader. Sidney suggests that the creation of a poem is an involuntary process rather than a conscious act of will on the poet’s part. He is ‘helpless in [his] throes’, the poem, and the associated pain involved in its writing, no more controllable than the pain of labour. That is, if you have a poem in you then it will out, however doubtful that seems during its gestation. Moreover, Sidney’s/Astrophel’s brainchildren issue from his ‘truant’ pen like miscreant schoolboys who cannot be controlled or mastered, just as creativity cannot: ‘Invention’ flees from the disciplinarian schoolmistress ‘step-dame Study’ who is further figured as an unnatural, non-blood relation, as if to underline that poetry is in the blood, in the genes— you’ve either got poetic talent or you haven’t. And we are to hear what is ‘true’ in the ‘truant’; what seems studied in poetry, in the double sense of too premeditated and too erudite, is false. All this, one feels, would come as anathema to those who have sought to establish Creative Writing as a modern day university discipline, who are almost professionally obliged to maintain that poetry is learnable and teachable, or at least that poets can be helped to find their way, that they are not as ‘helpless’ as Sidney would have it. David Morley, poet and professor of Creative Writing, tells us (in The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (2007)), contra Sidney, that ‘Inspiration does not exist’, advising the aspirant poet to put his faith in ‘calculation and design’ instead, and not to lose heart ‘even if the poem...feels somewhat forced and artificial’. Morley is equally sceptical about writer’s block, which he argues ‘tends to be a metaphor for deliberated inaction or a kind of panicky inertia’. For him good writing is never achieved through finding excuses not to do it; it comes through constant practice. What ‘feels like inspiration’ to the writer ‘is really the symptom of developing a habit of mind. It has nothing to do with a divine wind blowing through you, or the Muse using you as a medium’. The kind of writer who abstains from setting anything down in the belief that there is a natural gestation period

40

THE USE OF ENGLISH

at the end of which the words will come flooding forth strikes Morley as ‘precious and repressive’. And others’ feet are not strangers in the way of Morley’s poet, who will never ‘become a good writer unless [h]e become[s] a great reader’. But I wonder if in Sidney’s sonnet the secret of poetry lies closer than it seems to Morley’s sense of it as no great secret. At one level the Muse’s rebuke to the speaker is not a rebuke at all, but a projection or sublimation of the speaker’s chastisement of himself in the two previous clauses. And therefore a justification: he had to go through the agony of not being able to write in order to eventually find that he can. Creativity, then, is like a divine wind blowing through him, a divine meaning of the secular ‘grace’ he hoped to obtain from his lady—akin to the grace revealed to the limping Jacob after his intolerable wrestle. Yet there’s an important sense in which the Muse is an anti-Muse too, an antidote to the panicky inertia that has him biting his pen and neurotically beating himself up, possessed of Morley’s demystifying pragmatism. ‘“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”’: ‘Stop fussing, stop being so precious and repressive, and just get on with it’. Though that wouldn’t, as I hear it, entail a tone of corrective chastisement; rather, something softer, more loving, parental rather than schoolmasterly or professorial, earthly not ethereal: something that comes from the heart, along the lines of, ‘Silly old fool, stop worrying, ploughing on is all a writer can ever hope to do’. No great secret, but nevertheless a lesson that the poet never truly learns, or only by trial and error.

41

Decoding Keats: Poem Choices at GCSE and A-Level Peter Cash During that summer of 1966, I sat my Ordinary Level examination in English Literature. The texts which I studied were Shakespeare Twelfth Night, Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd and a selection of long poems: Wordsworth ‘Michael’, Byron ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, Keats ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, Browning ‘Abt Vogler’, Arnold ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, Thompson ‘The Hound of Heaven’, Brooke ‘Grantchester’. One sign of the times is that each one of those long poems contains more lines than the complete selections of short poems which OCR required Year 11 to study for GCSE English Literature between 2002 and 2011. Another sign is that each of OCR’s GCSE poems (2002-2011) is deliberately accessible to and appropriate for 15/16-year-old boys and girls in a way in which ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ isn’t. In 2010, I was therefore very interested to discover that, on the International GCSE syllabus, Subject Code 0486, increasingly favoured by independent schools, one of the options in Section B (Poetry) was a selection of Keats’ poems which included ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ and ‘Bright Star’. Today, I notice that Edexcel’s IGCSE Poetry Anthology, Subject Code 4ET0, still includes ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’; in addition, I see that AQA’s AS-level English Literature B: Aspects of Narrative, Subject Code 2746, specifies ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘Lamia’ and ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. My thought is that Edexcel and AQA might perhaps be more circumspect/more prudent about the poems which they specify, for here are poems which invite evasiveness by the teacher and risk incomplete comprehension by the cohorts of pupils. My O-Level teacher of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ taught the poem as if it was not about anything: that is, he ignored its content and concentrated solely on its style. As is well known, Keats’ major poems share an easily identifiable theme: the evanescence of human joy—for which sexual bliss, when it is not being directly equated with that joy, is often a metaphor. In ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, Keats explores the tension between such warmth

42

THE USE OF ENGLISH

and the bleak, cold reality of the world which will inevitably impinge upon and extinguish it. In 1966, my teacher attempted no such obvious exegesis. Instead, he confined himself to self-contained analyses of Keats’ descriptive powers as they are exercised in Stanza I, Stanza II, Stanza XXIV, Stanza XXX, Stanzas XL and Stanza XLI. I think we came away with the belief that each Spenserian stanza was purely a vehicle for the poet’s presentation of sense-impressions. Between 1966 and 1968, I proceeded to study Keats’ poetry to A-level and in the process purchased the hardback copy of M. R. Ridley’s book Keats’ Craftsmanship from which I am reading now. On p 171, Ridley (who published his book in 1933) quotes correspondence between two of Keats’ friends: Richard Woodhouse (1788-1834) and John Taylor. In a letter to Taylor, Woodhouse (20th September 1819) comments on the subject-matter of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and fears that it may lack ‘a decent side’: As the Poem was orig’y written, we innocent ones (ladies & myself) might very well have supposed that Porphyro, when acquainted with Madeline’s love for him, & when ‘he arose, Etherial flush’d &c. &c. (turn to it) set himself at once to persuade her to go off with him & succeeded, & went over ‘Dartmoor black’ (now changed for some other place) to be married in right honest chaste & sober wise. But, as it is now altered, as soon as M. has confessed her love, P. winds by degrees his arm around her, presses breast to breast, & acts all the acts of a bonafide husband, while she fancies she is only playing the part of Wife in a dream. This alteration is of about 3 stanzas [sic]; and tho’ there are no improper expressions but all is left to inference, and tho’ profanely speaking, the Interest on the reader’s imagination is greatly heightened, yet I do appreciate it will render the poem unfit for ladies, & indeed scarcely to be mentioned to them among the ‘things that are’. At Woodhouse’s expense, there is a delicious irony which this essay will explore. Keats began ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ very early in 1819—as if, in fact, he wanted the poem to be completed for St Agnes’ Eve itself on 20th January. Above, however, Woodhouse is concerned by an ‘alteration’ which Keats had made to the manuscript in September of that year. The situation for

DECODING KEATS

43

the stanza is that Porphyro, having gained access to Madeline’s chamber, is poised over her bed; he has serenaded her with an ancient lay ‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’ (of which more in due course) and has thereby intensified her sexual longing: ‘she uttered a soft moan’/‘she panted quick’ (Stanza XXXIII). On St Agnes’ Eve, Madeline, already in the mood for love, undergoes ‘a painful change’ (Stanza XXXIV); this phrase refers not to the loss of her virginity, but to a proleptic realisation that she cannot live in ‘eternal woe’ (Stanza XXXV). Madeline understands that she cannot stay in a state of permanent frustration: that is, be without the experience of sexual delight/joy. This being so, she is entirely receptive to any proposal which Porphyro may now make.... What exercises Woodhouse, outrages his sense of decency, is that Keats alters Stanza XXXV/Stanza XXXVI from ‘Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear! Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.’ Beyond a mortal man impassioned far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven’s deep repose; Into her dream he melted, as the rose Blendeth its odour with the violet Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows.... to ‘Give me that voice again, my Porphyro, Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!’ See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow Have zoned her, heart to heart—loud, loud the dark winds blow. For on the midnight came a tempest fell. More sooth for that his close rejoinder flows Into her burning ear—and still the spell Unbroken guards her in serene repose. With her wild dream he mingled as a rose Marryeth its odour to a violet. Still, still she dreams—louder the frost-wind blows.... In Woodhouse’s imagination, the ‘alteration’ is from a metaphorical description of a dream (in which Porphyro appears to Madeline) to a

44

THE USE OF ENGLISH

literal description of sexual contact between them. Rather than (as he supposes) persuade her to go off with him to a chapel across the black moor and enter there into a state of holy, ‘chaste & sober’ matrimony, Porphyro proposes something else. He insinuates his arms around her and presses his chest to her bosom; from the revised description, Woodhouse (‘& acts all the acts of a bonafide husband’) infers that they consummate their relationship there and then. In his imagination, this is hot stuff not fit for ‘innocent ones’ such as himself and ‘ladies’. Of course, the great irony at Woodhouse’s expense is that the original version of Stanza XXXVI, whilst it may be less literal, is much hotter and less ‘decent’ stuff (which may well account for Keats’ decision to try out a second draft). What Keats has done is encode into his language a graphic description of sexual intercourse—and, what’s more, encode it presumably in order to satisfy his publisher’s demand for decorum. Decoded, the narrative is as follows: in response to Madeline’s entreaties, Porphyro ‘arose’ [= became erect]; ‘flushed’, he took on the characteristics of ‘a throbbing star’ [= became engorged]. In due course, he ‘melted’ [= ejaculated]; famously, that ‘solution sweet’ is not an answer to a logistical problem, but a metonym for his semen. As Woodhouse notes of the replacement stanza, ‘there are no improper expressions but all is left to inference’. So poetic is this coded account that we may even infer that Porphyro melts into Madeline’s vaginal rose and that his ‘solution’, if not a ‘perfume’ (Keats’ original noun here), still has a pleasant ‘odour’. What kind of exegesis, I now wonder, was expected of my O-level teacher in 1966? Are we to believe that the Cambridge exam board of the day was still thankful for Richard Woodhouse (a publisher of 1819) and heaving a censor’s sigh of relief that Keats’ original Stanza XXXVI, with its apparent chastity of language, had been restored to all editions? Even if such naiveté was an excuse then, what are we to make now of exam boards which include ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ on a GCSE syllabus? In 2008, IGCSE set this question: 23 Explore some of the ways in which Keats makes memorable for you the story of Madeline and Porphyro in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. Refer closely to the poem as you answer. Are IGCSE teachers expected to essay a candid exegesis of Stanza XXXVI or instead content themselves (as mine did) with explaining worthily why Stanzas I, II, XXIV, XXX, XL and XLI are just as or even more ‘memorable’? During my own career, I taught Keats’ poetry to A-level on more than one

DECODING KEATS

45

occasion: e.g. 1999, 2006. On those occasions, I was able to explain ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and two other poems fully and without noting in my students any degrees of embarrassment or incomprehension. After all, it is just possible that my A-Level/A2-Level classes included some 17/18year-olds for whom Porphyro and Madeline’s experience may even have found a resonance in their own recreational activities.1 The situation which affects another poem of 1819 (April) poses an even larger problem for the IGCSE syllabus-maker and does so for the same reason. In Stanza XXXIII of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, Porphyro takes up a lute and plays a traditional French song entitled ‘La Belle Dame Sans Mercy’. In selecting this ancient ‘ditty’, he is choosing to regale his lover with one of the ballads which the French troubadours sang on their travels through Provence in the thirteenth century. The significance of this particular ‘ditty’ is that it concentrates upon the mercilessness with which beautiful women treat men; in his ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Keats appropriates Alain Chartier’s title in order to explain exactly what this mercilessness entails. It turns out that it is nothing so vague as inconstant or unkind behaviour.... No, it is nothing less specific than the pain of male sexual frustration/male sexual longing for which all beautiful women are responsible. In ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, then, Keats’ aim is to describe the condition of male lovelornness which results from the recurring desire to achieve sexual satisfaction. From a swift read-through, one might struggle to gather this impression; at first glance, the poem reads as if it is a simple ballad in which the balladeer has done no more than inquire after a knight’s feelings and receive Feste’s answer that he has been ‘slain by a fair cruel maid’. Put this way, Keats’ ballad amounts to no more than an adolescent lament about women’s cruelty to men—set, what’s more, in a fairy-tale land where this cruelty seems not to matter too much. It is only when a reader grasps that Keats has encoded into his innocent quatrains graphic descriptions of sexual experience that the ballad becomes more precise, more realistic; indeed, once certain quatrains have been decoded, the poem becomes nothing less than an anatomy of the sexual act and its emotional consequences. In other words, it is not merely a clinical analysis of the act, an exercise in poetic bio-mechanics; rather, it takes its motivation from Keats’ profound sense that he cannot have sex without suffering both emotional and psychological disturbance. In short, his ballad is a lyrical poem because—in spite of its code—he is writing about the repercussions of such intimacy for his own sense of personal identity.

46

THE USE OF ENGLISH

Decoded, the ballad presents us with an effective description of Porphyro’s experience in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. In Quatrain V, Keats’ young knight recounts how he made a flower-chain for his lady’s ‘fragrant zone’. Immediately after this vaginal image, he is as explicit as he dare be about their embrace: She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan. Much as Madeline—in Stanza XXXIII of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’—listened to Porphyro’s dreamy rendition of the song and then both ‘uttered a soft moan’ and ‘panted quick’, the beautiful lady in his ballad looks up at her lover and makes ‘sweet moan’ in anticipation of her orgasm. Quatrain VI attempts to analyse the knight’s experience of this embrace. For his part, he sets her on his ‘pacing steed’ (an obviously phallic image) and is thereafter so overwhelmed by the physical sensation that he ‘nothing else saw all day long’. No wonder: for her part, the beautiful lady—something of a sexual athlete—puts herself into non-missionary positions where penetration becomes more comfortable for both of them: ‘for sidelong she would bend and sing a faery’s song’. Sing a faery’s song! As you do.... What is more, Keats attempts in Quatrain VII to suggest the effects of aphrodisiacs upon the knight and his lady. In this scenario, it is the woman who is feeding the man ‘roots of relish sweet, and honey wild, and manna dew’ in much the same way that Porphyro— in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’—fed Madeline from his sweet-trolley (Stanza XXX). In other words, Keats is here endeavouring to suggest the physical temptation of female flesh. Twice in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, Keats essays allegorical descriptions of sexual intercourse; twice in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, he represents this experience in a another codified form where ‘fragrant zone’ becomes ‘elfin grot’ (her vaginal cave) and the beautiful woman’s sexual ecstasies (previously, her ‘sweet moans’) become sighs ‘full sore’. Afterwards, Keats asks us to imagine that the knight and his lady fall asleep; it is on waking from his romantic dream that the knight—but not the lady— begins to suffer ‘woe’. Keats is extremely precise about the nature of male woe, a condition which can ‘ail’ a man and leave him ‘palely loitering’; this paleness, this ‘woe begone’ condition, is a direct and dramatic symptom of post-coital desolation—for which Keats frames the metaphor/metonym ‘on the cold hill side’. For that pale and empty feeling immediately after orgasm, Keats repeats this metaphor; it is ‘on the cold hill’s side’ that a man—in the period after sex—finds himself

DECODING KEATS

47

longing to repeat the act and experience the sensation again. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is an analysis of male physiology: once a knight has experienced sexual ecstasy, he becomes enslaved (‘in thrall’ in Quatrain X) to the desire to enjoy it again. It is in this sense that every beautiful woman, every ‘belle dame’, is a woman without mercy (‘sans merci’) because her physical allure cannot help but keep arousing in a man this insatiable desire for sexual fulfilment. Given his position in the canon, Keats invites exam boards to specify his work. Boards must, however, choose his poems cautiously or else students may find themselves being encouraged to appreciate these poems for inaccurate reasons. In 2008, IGCSE also set this question: 24 In what ways does Keats powerfully convey his feelings to you in ‘Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art?’ Support your ideas with details from the poem. It is unlikely that, in the GCSE exam answer, the expected ‘details from the poem’ will be anything like as explicit as the physiological details that the poem goes into. In this sonnet, Keats’ aim is to articulate his intense passion for Fanny Brawne, his next-door neighbour in Hampstead to whom he was betrothed at the end of his life: ‘I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a heathen’ (To Fanny Brawne, 25th July 1819). The love-poem takes the shape of a direct address to a ‘star’ in order to give both cosmic scale and cosmic permanence to this passion. In the octave, Keats describes the precise sense in which he does not wish to be like the star: Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night.... He does not wish to exist in glorious isolation (‘in lone splendour’). Despite its romantic associations, he sees nothing attractive in the solitary life of a hermit, not least because—to extend the metaphor and complete the rhyme-scheme of the octave—such a star would find itself shining upon ‘the moving waters at their priestlike task of pure ablution’: in other words, being ‘steadfast’ in its pursuit of an unappealing celibacy (‘priestlike’, ‘pure’). No, Keats is not interested in worshipping Fanny from afar: No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

48

THE USE OF ENGLISH Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

At the beginning of the sestet, he re-directs the movement of his argument by means of that rhetorical ‘No’ and then defines for us the sense of steadfastness in which he—as an ardent lover—is actively interested. In his antithesis, he uses ‘still’ twice and ‘ever’ thrice in an endeavour to stress that the steadfastness which he wants approximates to a permanent condition of physical closeness, an ongoing state of sexual arousal—for which he finds an exquisite oxymoron ‘sweet unrest’. In his adolescent fantasy, Keats wishes himself ‘for ever’ in bed with his ‘fair love’, his cheek in contact with her naked breast—so that, whenever he is awoken by its ‘soft fall and swell’, he finds himself in a state of sexual readiness/erect. His ideal joy is to ‘live ever’ in this improbable position. Failing that, he will come to orgasm/‘swoon to death’: in other words, his only imaginable alternative is to ejaculate—for which ‘to die’ is a traditional metaphor. Physical closeness to Fanny2 is such a powerful experience that it could easily overwhelm him in this way; it could bring about his ‘death’ because it would bring an end to the only condition— unrestful though it is—in which he wants to live. Not for the first time, the surface-texture of a Keats poem is designed to dignify that close proximity with female flesh in which he loved to exult. Decoded, ‘Bright Star’—like ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘La Belle Dame’—reveals a tension between an idealised presentation of love and the graphic physicality which lies beneath it.

References 1.

I taught my A-level classes from Keats: Selected Poems and Letters (Heinemann Poetry Bookshelf, 1995). On p. 284, the editor Sandra Anstey refers to this textual debate.

2.

Keats would not have slept with Fanny Brawne. His first-hand experience of female flesh would have been with prostitutes.

49

‘I should want nothing more’: A brief account of Edward Thomas’s ‘As the team’s headbrass’ Ian Brinton The morbid and yet compulsive nature of the nympholept’s Orphic glance was well-known to Edward Thomas, that walker of the southern counties whose restlessness drove him to seek out places that had, by virtue of being placed in his own past, become talismanic. Recognition of the untouchable nature of a world that is gone may well have prompted his own suicidal thoughts as recorded both by Helen Thomas’s recollections of their life at Berryfield Cottage near Petersfield and his own fictionalised account of ‘The Attempt’ in Light and Twilight. Helen Thomas recorded the ‘terrible days when I did not know where he was’ and vividly recalled the ‘days of silence and brooding despair’ which culminated in his storming out of the house armed with an old revolver that he kept in a drawer. When Thomas fictionalised the incident in ‘The Attempt’ he focussed upon both the act of suicide and what it might mean to embrace death: Death he had never feared or understood; he feared very much the pain and the fear that would awake with it. He had never in his life seen a dead human body or come in any way near death. Death was an idea tinged with poetry in his mind—a kingly thing which was once only at any man’s call. After it came annihilation. The attraction of this death-wish was connected to a world of the past in which Morgan Traheron, the protagonist of the short story, could contemplate his own lost childhood in which ‘he hid himself in the folds of his

50

THE USE OF ENGLISH

mother’s dress or her warm bosom, where he could shut out everything save the bright patterns floating on the gloom under his closed eyelids.’ Thomas’s life before the outbreak of war was obsessively bound to a sense of time as he struggled to write the reviews which provided the mainstay of his income whilst keeping at bay the alluring air of ‘a time / Long past and irrecoverable’ (‘Sedge-Warblers’). To exist in a timeless moment, to allow the sensations of the present to radiate outwards from a sharply perceived sense of the ‘here’ and ‘now’, held in stasis, was an image to which Thomas returned throughout his two years of writing poetry. Most famously, of course, in the much-anthologised ‘Adlestrop’, written in January 1915, the clarity of the blackbird’s song, contextualised by juxtaposition with the hissing of the steam and the clearing of a man’s throat, acts as a pebble in a still pond leaving the poet at the centre of a widening circle of sound: And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Thomas’s obsession with movement and stasis, the ‘Fixed and free’ (‘Words’), led not only to the immense walking tours and the five house-moves between 1900 and 1906 but also to the compulsive concern for note-books, as if every small moment must be firmly recorded so as to be retrievably available. Some fortnight after writing ‘Adlestrop’ Thomas wrote ‘Ambition’ in which the train’s movement is preceded by the noise of the woodpecker and the owl and there ‘was Elysium in that happy hour’. It is as though time stands still for a moment: A train that roared along raised after it And carried with it a motionless white bower Of purest cloud, from end to end close-knit, So fair it touched the roar with silence. The association of railways with troop-movements gives to this image a particular force and the suspended sense of time in ‘motionless’ is worth comparing with Thomas’s contemplation of movement and stillness in the later poem from May 1916, ‘As the team’s head-brass’. Having enlisted with the Artists’ Rifles in July 1915, Thomas was based at High Beech in Essex before being moved to Hare Hall camp where he acted as a map-reading instructor; the poem was composed a few weeks

AS THE TEAM’S HEAD-BRASS

51

before he applied for a commission in the Royal Artillery, acceptance into which would lead him to France in the early months of the following year and his death in April 1917. Introducing a focus upon both place and time’s movement the opening line is dramatic: As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn We are caught for a moment in mid-action with ‘As’ and the flashing of sunlight on the brasses commands attention although the heralding nature of this call is immediately thrown into relief by the lovers who ‘disappeared into the wood.’ The picture the poet then constructs for us is one in which he sits, as though trapped, while the ploughman narrows the field of charlock with unstoppable purpose (‘One minute and an interval of ten, / A minute more and the same interval.’). The air of menace, time running out for the still man in a changing landscape, is emphasised as the horses turn ‘Instead of treading me down’ and the ploughman leans over him, clearly recognising his army uniform, to ask the question uppermost in Thomas’s mind, ‘Have you been out?’ The stillness of the moment, words poured into a seemingly halted present, centres upon the most important question of all concerning life and death. The ironic stance of the poet who thinks that he could ‘spare an arm’, whilst recognising that for the compulsive walker the loss of a leg would be a forced retirement into an elm-tree bower my prison, is brought abruptly to a sobering awareness of the blank face of death: irony is left behind as the poet realises that with the loss of his head ‘I should want nothing more’. The suspension of time held by the conversation is broken by little less than a platitude as the ploughman concludes that ‘If we could see all all might seem good’ and the movement begins again. The lovers reappear and the field is travelled one more time by the ‘ploughshare and the stumbling team’. Two weeks after writing the poem Thomas wrote to Eleanor Farjeon that he had been trying for that commission with the Royal Artillery referred to earlier ‘but without military influence it looks as if I might have a long wait’. By mid-August he was writing to Robert Frost that ‘This waiting troubles me. I really want to be out’ and the propulsion forward to the Front was set in progress. Going back to ‘Ambition’ that poem’s conclusion breaks the spell-bound gaze as ‘the end fell like a bell’ and The bower was scattered; far off the train roared.

52

THE USE OF ENGLISH

In Praise of the Short Story Jenny Stevens The short story has long been considered the Cinderella genre: the literary form on which aspiring novelists cut their teeth—a kind of Twitter version of better things to come. Such a view can also be detected in the secondary curriculum. Choosing a collection of stories over a novel is often regarded as the shirker’s controlled assessment option and singleauthor short story collections are noticeably under-represented in prescribed text lists. When the genre does make an appearance, it tends to be in the form of exam boards’ own anthologies which, once embedded in departmental schemes of work, can soon lose their sparkle. Yet short stories remain one of the cornerstones of English teaching: easily accommodated into the timespan of a single lesson and providing an accessible introduction to the kind of literary analysis required at key stages 4 and 5. A good short short story will always punch above its weight; its very brevity invites sustained close reading and lends itself to detailed examination of narrative structure and viewpoint. Some of the very shortest stories will have the distilled qualities of the prose poem, memorably defined by Huysmans’ fictional aesthete, Des Esseintes, as ‘the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art’.1 Texts such as these might well be chosen as curriculum shortcuts, but studied with the concentration they deserve, they can provide as much ‘stretch and challenge’ as much lengthier prose fictions. Close study of a skilfully-crafted story in the final stages of Year 9 can be especially helpful in easing students into the next key stage of English and for preparing the way for the assessment objectives which, for better or worse, they will need to grasp if they are to succeed at GCSE and A-level. One short story author who goes down well with this age-group is Kate Chopin. The only American to make it onto the English Literary Heritage list for key stage 3 (but unaccountably displaced by Congreve at key stage 4), Chopin’s accounts of nineteenth-century women negotiating their

IN PRAISE OF THE SHORT STORY

53

place in a society where marriage and child-bearing are the only realistic prospects open to them, never fail to engage my all-female classes. One particular favourite is ‘The Unexpected’.2 Taking just under ten minutes to read aloud, the story captures an epiphanic moment in the life of Dorothea, a middle-class young woman engaged to be married to the handsome and eligible Randall. The story focuses on the young man’s return after an enforced separation, prolonged by his illness. Shocked by Randall’s ‘hideous transformation’(180) and repelled by his feverish desire that she should marry him with all speed to secure his name and fortune, Dorothea takes to her bicycle and, as if fleeing from the grim reaper himself, escapes from the suffocating presence of her consumptive husband-to-be. My first experience of teaching ‘The Unexpected’ was back in the 1990s, when it headed a Heinemann short story collection prescribed for GCSE. Approaching it from a staunchly feminist perspective, I led (some might say frog-marched) my students into investing all their sympathies in Dorothea. Meanwhile, just along the corridor, a male colleague was taking a somewhat different approach. His class, while understanding the predicament and feelings of the young woman, was equally sympathetic towards the feverish and frightened Randall, desperately holding on to his warm, healthy beloved as if to life itself. Exam season looming, students began to compare notes, grew alarmed by the conflicting interpretations—and panicked. As relatively seasoned professionals, my colleague and I managed to turn a minor crisis into a learning opportunity. We swopped classes, engaged with the ‘alternative’ perspective and an essential lesson was learnt: texts, however slight, can sustain multiple readings. Guiding students to analyse and articulate how their individual responses to reading come about through a writer’s choice of language and structure is one of the most challenging aspects of teaching literature at key stages 3 and 4. The language of ‘The Unexpected’ is extraordinarily condensed and evocative, with a directness and accessibilty which enables students new to close reading to enter the detailed world of the narrative. One of the most striking aspects of the story is Chopin’s merging of the vocabularies of passion and death. Asking pairs of students to place in separate columns words and phrases from the text which they think are associated with illness/death and those associated with life/passion is a simple, yet revealing, exercise. They start off confidently. Words such as ‘feverish’ and ‘wasted’ are neatly filed under ’death’; ‘quiver’ and ‘clasp’ under passion. As they make their way

54

THE USE OF ENGLISH

through the story, though, they start to run into difficulties, as the language of love and the language of the sick-room come into collision, driving home Dorothea’s dilemma and evoking the physical disgust she experiences while in the company of a man whose ‘breath was feverish and tainted’(180). A relatively simple activity, it is nonetheless one which demonstrates how just a few well-chosen words can have a forceful impact on the reader. This type of focused reading can provide an excellent kickstart to imaginative writing. As Susan Hill has suggested the ‘best short stories are perfect examples of how to write—how to make few words do the work of many, how to encapsulate and to crystallise’.3 Getting really close up to a text such as Chopin’s not only develops close-reading skills, it can also make students more reflective about their own use of language. Moreover, a unit of work which involves a literary text in both reading and writing processes assists in breaking down the perceived barrier between ‘language’ and ‘literature’, encouraging candidates to consider the titles of their GCSE examination courses in a questioning frame of mind. Attempting to emulate the economy and intensity of Chopin’s prose can show students that, in a short piece of writing, every syllable counts and that word limits are there to improve their prose style (and not, as they sometimes think, to alleviate the teacher’s marking burden). Recreative writing based on texts such as ‘The Unexpected’ can sometimes take the form of an ‘updating’ of the original. Not only does this allow students to explore the desires and anxieties of their own generation, it obliges them to do so through the lens of another. Put more squarely into exam-speak: it requires them to ‘relate texts to their social, cultural and historical contexts’. This aspect of GCSE English Literature can often prove taxing for teachers, tedious for learners and exasperating for examiners. Examiner reports quite rightly criticize the broad generalizations about ‘patriarchal society’, trotted out to meet the requirements of AO4, often regardless of whether the society in question is Shakespeare’s or Steinbeck’s. Yet our students’ shortcomings in this area are by no means entirely of their own making. Pressure of time, a lack of appropriately pitched resources and an over-reliance on ‘one-sizefits-all’ material can all militate against students gaining any first-hand sense of the situatedness of a text. It goes without saying that showing is preferable to telling when it comes to matters contextual and Chopin’s story provides an excellent opportunity to examine a work in its original material setting. ‘The Unexpected’ first appeared in an issue of Vogue in September 1895. Not

IN PRAISE OF THE SHORT STORY

55

only did my class of teenage girls perk up considerably at the mention of a fashion magazine (albeit one more than a century behind the times), they were genuinely intrigued that a text they were reading as part of their literature programme had started out in such a journal. Chopin’s story takes up a little over one page of the magazine, and is accompanied by a stylish six-drawing cartoon of a fashionably dressed woman, reading while seated in a park, who is confronted by a rather comic looking tiger; she feeds him a pack of gum and makes her escape as the beast struggles to un-stick his jaws. Verging on the surreal, the cartoon strip puts the title of the story into a quirkily comic framework, raising questions for students about how far illustration colours the way a narrative is read and interpreted. Moving on from the story’s immediate context, students also surveyed the front cover of the edition in which it appeared. Vogue covers of the 1890s featured images of two seated female figures on either side of the heading; one is engrossed in fixing her hair in front of a hand mirror, the other is engrossed in reading—a double perspective which invites students to evaluate the journal’s stance on the role of women in society. Below this standard header is the individual image for the week. In the issue carrying ‘The Unexpected’, it depicts two women talking together on a park bench; one is conventionally dressed, the other wears the collar and tie of the New Woman. At the foot of the page, the following snippet of script appears: ONE: ‘Would you marry for love or for money?’ THE OTHER: ‘I would love to marry for money.’ As the speakers are not identified, students have to make up their own minds as to who delivers the subversive shift of noun to verb—highly pertinent for Chopin’s story, of course. Looking further into the volume, we come across an article on ‘Winter cycling gowns and silver-mounted bicycles’, which puts Dorothea’s escape into the countryside on her ‘wheel’ vividly into context. While accessing an 1890s issue of Vogue was fairly labour-intensive, the effort paid dividends. By looking closely at just a few of its pages, students acquired first-hand knowledge of periodical fiction, fin-de-siècle feminism and the early years of an iconic publication still flourishing today. Teaching at key stage 4 and 5 involves managing courses that can often feel over-weighted, both with skills and content, while increased emphasis on comparison (often to no convincing end) has meant that it is

56

THE USE OF ENGLISH

a relative rarity for students to concentrate for any stretch of time on a single text. At a time when English teachers wait with bated breath for the reforms of GCSE and A-level, those of us charged with making sure that Year 9 pupils are ready to meet the changes, should set time aside for the short story, confident that less can sometimes be more.

References

1.

J.-K. Huysmans (1959). Against Nature (London: Penguin), p. 199.

2.

Kate Chopin (1895). ‘The Unexpected’, in Vogue (Sept 19, 1895), 180-1. The Vogue archive can be accessed through the ProQuest database (subscription only). Front covers of 1890s Vogue are available free on Google Images.

3.

Susan Hill (2008, July 12). ‘The Week in Books’, in the Guardian. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/12/ saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview3

57

Comparing Colonial and PostColonial Fiction Robert Jeffcoate Comparing texts is a well-established pedagogy, though not without its critics, and the distinction between colonial and post-colonial fiction invites its use. In practice, however, this too raises questions—over the nature of the distinction and the purpose of the comparisons. Does the distinction, for example, refer simply to a historical demarcation or to differences in authorship, content, setting or point of view or some combination of these? I, in what follows, treat the distinction as primarily historical and reserve the labels for texts set in former European colonies and dealing at least to some extent with the colonial or post-colonial experience. Others, however, while broadly observing the historical division, identify colonial fiction, first and foremost, with the work of Western ‘outsiders’, occasionally regardless of setting or content, and post-colonial fiction with that of colonised ‘insiders’ both before and after independence, depending on their perceived point of view. The most influential of these others has been Edward Said in his two works of cultural criticism, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. His understanding of the purpose of comparing colonial and post-colonial fiction, and of what the process of doing so should involve, also differs from mine. For him ‘contrapuntal’ reading is required. Initially he defines this, unexceptionably, as ‘moving beyond insularity and provincialism…to see several cultures and literatures together’, in the manner of his specialism, comparative literature. His subsequent argument, however, indicates that he has a more specific OED definition of ‘contrapuntal’ in mind: ‘[emphasizing] by juxtaposition the contrast between’—in his case, between the ‘consolidated’ imperialist ‘vision’ shared by ‘the great canonical texts’ of the colonial period and the ‘resistance’ to that vision to be found in the ‘enormously exciting, varied texts’ written by post-colonial insiders.1 This juxtaposition is one of the distinguishing features of the

58

THE USE OF ENGLISH

post-colonialist approach to literature whose founding father Said is generally taken to be, not entirely to his own satisfaction. Starting like him from the open-minded position of simply seeing the two categories together, I have found both, however defined, to be considerably more ‘varied’ than he allows. The differences within them— indeed within the work of individual authors—and the continuities between them, suggest that his stark opposition of outsider imperialism and insider resistance misrepresents both them and their relationship. His contrapuntal reading also only operates in one direction. He implies that the anti-imperialism of insider fiction confers upon it a moral superiority which can be used to expose the frailties of ‘the great canonical texts’. Although, unlike some of his followers, disputing neither the ‘greatness’ of these nor the existence of universally valid criteria for making such judgements, he disregards the possibility of reversing the comparison and using them as touchstones in evaluating the artistic merit of the work of insiders. Simply ‘seeing’ colonial and post-colonial fiction ‘together’, without preconceptions, is a good starting-point for students too. Thereafter they should be encouraged to make comparisons within as well as between categories, to bear in mind artistic form and value as well as subject content and point of view, and to ensure that they are reciprocal. One aim would then be that they should feel confident enough to evaluate Said’s juxtaposition of outsider imperialism and insider resistance critically. To be able to do this they will need to familiarise themselves with alternative perspectives to the still dominant post-colonialist position. Unfortunately these are thin on the ground. One which is refreshingly accessible, unlike the often obscure writing of the post-colonialists, is that of Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Whilst not taking explicit issue with Said or concerning herself directly with colonial fiction, she takes a very different view of the Western novel. For her and her female students in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the classics of European and American fiction, far from facilitating the spread of Western imperialism as Said and his followers maintain, are quintessentially ‘democratic’ by virtue of the ‘multivocality’ intrinsic to them, their life-affirming openness and the importance they attach to the individual’s ‘right to choose’.2 Nafisi’s argument is refreshing because of the part students play in it. They play no part at all in post-colonialist discourse, despite its being a product of academic institutions.

COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL FICTION

59

I share the Iranians’ view. To demonstrate its contribution to my arriving at a different conclusion from Said, and to exemplify what an alternative version of comparative reading to his might look like, I have put together a short case study of fiction set in Africa and the Indian sub-continent, all of which has either been prescribed for A-level in recent years or would not be out of place if it were. I begin with two ‘great canonical texts’ from the period of high Empire published in book form within a year of one another: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, long an A-level fixture, and Kipling’s Kim, which has never, so far as I remember, been honoured in this way, notwithstanding its undisputed artistic qualities. The principal question I have posed myself, and by implication putative students, is: are these two texts really marred by imperialism and its attendant frailties as postcolonialists allege? Could two texts differ more in their representation of the colonial experience? Whereas Kim is a buoyantly optimistic celebration of cultural diversity and interethnic friendship within the unchallenged Raj, Heart of Darkness presents a grim portrait of Africa, including 'the noble enterprise' undertaken there by Europeans, and appears deeply pessimistic about the prospects for relationships between black and white. Striking too is the contrast between the vibrant multivocality of Kim in which indigenous voices predominate and the inchoate multivocality of Heart of Darkness in which they are barely articulated. A partial explanation for these contrasts is the very different relationship the two authors had to their vividly re-created settings. Whereas Kipling was almost an insider to the Raj, Conrad never saw himself as anything other than an outsider to his colonial ports of call. Whether their opinions of imperialism, in so far as they inform their fiction, differed so sharply has, however, been disputed—a reflection of the ambiguities in both texts. A useful catalyst for a discussion of Conrad’s position is Chinua Achebe’s description of Heart of Darkness in a lecture in the United States in 1975 as ‘an offensive and deplorable book’, and its author as a ‘thoroughgoing racist’, because of its ‘dehumanization of Africa and Africans’.3 The images of the continent and its indigenous inhabitants are, without doubt, overwhelmingly negative but the ‘darkness’ is more widely distributed than Achebe recognises, infiltrating the ‘sepulchral city’ where Kurtz’s company is based and even the narrative frame aboard a yawl on the Thames. Moreover, Conrad was committed to fictional truth-telling, stating in his preface that the novella represented ‘experience’ pushed ‘only very little’ ‘beyond the facts of the case’. Fictionally, of course, the

60

THE USE OF ENGLISH

African experience is Marlow’s, one of his ‘inconclusive’ experiences, the narrator of the frame suggests, or alternatively perhaps, in his own words on his first appearance in Youth, one of ‘those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence’. His conclusion, in so far as there is one, appears to be that his search for Kurtz became a moral quest with ambivalent outcomes. Of only one does he seem certain: the ‘glimpsed truth’ that the ‘horror’ resides in the ‘darkness’ of the human heart. Achebe’s failure to recognise the novella’s complexity is compounded by his failure to draw in any other examples of Conrad’s fiction to support the racism allegation—Youth, for example, set, like a third of his work, in the Malay archipelago, or An Outpost of Progress, the second novella inspired by his four months in the Congo and also, according to him, ‘true enough in its essentials’. It is a more straightforward narrative than Heart of Darkness, more direct in its criticism of imperialism and more accommodating of individual African voices. Said, to his credit, recognises both the greatness and complexity of Heart of Darkness and the need to draw the fiction of the East as well as Conrad’s Latin American novel Nostromo, with its penetrating analysis of neo-colonialism, into any discussion of his views. Said’s accusation is not that Conrad was a racist but that his colonial fiction is both anti-imperialist and imperialist—imperialist because it is dominated by Europeans and limits African, Asian and American natives to anonymous or minor roles, thereby failing to recognise that they might be capable of governing themselves in ‘a fully realised alternative’ to empire. The predominance of Europeans might, however, simply be a reflection of Conrad’s outsider status; and anti-colonial voices are, in fact, to be found, particularly in the fiction of the East, as are fully developed native characters and glimmers of a non-racist alternative to empire.4 To argue that he was an imperialist by default because his work is devoid of ‘a fully realised alternative’ is not only anachronistic but to misunderstand what kind of novelist he was and even what a novel, as opposed to a polemic, does best. Said makes a similar criticism of Kim. Whilst acknowledging its ‘great aesthetic merit’, as well as Kipling’s skill in rendering India (a judgement shared by Indian writers from Nirad Chaudhuri to Salman Rushdie) and getting ‘under the skin of others with some sympathy’, it is for him, above all, a ‘master work of imperialism’ and hence ‘profoundly embarrassing’.

COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL FICTION

61

By this, he insists, he does not mean that it is ‘a political tract’ but that it assumes ‘a basically uncontested empire’, which affects the way the plot develops and characters are presented. Said’s preoccupation with the ideology of empire leads him, in my view, to privilege minor characters and episodes, such as the encounter with ‘the old soldier’ who fought for the British during the Mutiny, over major ones and what is now largely of historical interest, the sub-plot of the Great Game, over what has endured—the Lama’s quest (so unlike Marlow’s) and Kim’s picaresque part in it.5 The values inherent in their pilgrimage underpin the novel’s ‘great aesthetic merit’ and help to explain its continuing resonance for readers worldwide. The first of these is its multiculturalism, as manifested, for example, in the linguistic exuberance with which it depicts the rich panorama of Upper India, and the second its appeal to a common humanity, as epitomised by Kim’s interethnic friendships and the Lama’s egalitarian philosophy which recognises ‘neither black nor white’. It is the voices and views of Kim and his native friends that prevail, not those of the sahibs, who are confined to minor roles, almost always seen from a distance and sometimes judged critically. Its optimistic embrace of cultural diversity and interethnic friendship sets Kim far apart from the ‘lawlessness of a populace of all races and colours’ referred to in Nostromo and delivers an implicit rebuff to the racial segregation and discrimination institutionalised by the Raj. Said misses the novel’s ambiguity and open-endedness too—crucially, the questions it raises over the dictum ‘Once a Sahib, always a Sahib’, and to what extent Kim actually is one. His cultural indeterminacy is emphasised from the outset. He is said to be ‘English’ (although his parentage is later revealed to be Irish) but ‘a white boy…who is not a white boy’; an orphan ‘looked after’ by a ‘half-caste woman’ who smokes opium and claims to be ‘his mother’s sister’; who can pass as a Eurasian, a low-caste Hindu or a Muslim; who calls the Punjab ‘my country’ and the inhabitants of ‘this great and beautiful land’ my ‘people’. He is a cultural hybrid, born in one culture and brought up in another, alternately insider and outsider to each, a multicultural man in the making (and very different in his hybridity from Kurtz ‘going native’). His quest for his self-identity—‘What am I?’ ‘Who is Kim?’—is never conclusively resolved beyond ‘I am only Kim…an insignificant person in all the roaring whirl of India…in the middle of [this] …great and wonderful world’. Whether he returns to his parental culture in the end or continues to ‘borrow right and left-handedly from all the

62

THE USE OF ENGLISH

customs of the country he knew and loved’, the reader is not told. Surprisingly, Said makes little of Kipling’s earlier Anglo-Indian stories, a selection from which should be required reading for students. They constitute a major part of his fictional output and are closer in mood to Conrad’s darker vision in their slant on multiethnic India than Kim. They range from ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, a powerful parable of imperialism, to one of Kipling’s most poignant ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’ about the friendship between a sahib and the young son of his Muslim servant. Two with a particular bearing on Kim are ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’, a wholly Indian story about a high-caste Hindu who renounces fame and worldly goods to become a sannyasi, the Hindu equivalent of Kim’s Lama, and ‘Lispeth’, whose main Indian character reappears in Kim, one of a number of stories about sexual relationships between British men and Indian women.6 Heart of Darkness and Kim, and the rest of Conrad’s and Kipling’s colonial fiction, demonstrate, for me, just how diverse, and how far from projecting a ‘consolidated’ imperialist ‘vision’, the genre is. Early novels by African and Indian novelists cast doubt on Said’s other conclusion— that ‘resistance’ to empire is the defining characteristic of the indigenous response—and indeed over the view of fiction it posits. To illustrate my doubts, I have chosen the work of R.K. Narayan, an apolitical writer whose work straddled the colonial-post-colonial divide, and two Africans from a later generation who have made their opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism plain in their non-fiction, Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. To them I have added two other A-Level novels because of their relationship with Heart of Darkness—V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Achebe and Ngugi are singled out for praise by Said but he is hostile to Naipaul, in common with Achebe and other post-colonialist critics, and ignores Narayan, of whom Achebe is an admirer. Narayan is underrated by many post-colonialists precisely because he does not fit the resistance-to-empire straitjacket. Life in Malgudi, the fictional south Indian town where almost all his work is set, carries on after independence much as it did before, with little reference to the presence or absence of the British. Nationalist characters, views and events naturally figure in his colonial novels, not as subjects for him to take sides on, however, rather as subjects to be observed, typically with his characteristic irony. The one novel in which they play a major role is Waiting for the Mahatma. Mostly colonial in setting but composed after

COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL FICTION

63

independence, it exemplifies the even-handed multivocality of Narayan’s work well. Gandhi is treated respectfully but his nationalist campaign is not spared the irony. Sriram, the male protagonist, joins because he is attracted to Bharati, one of the mahatma’s young female followers, and his contribution, painting ‘Quit India’ wherever he can in the Mempi hills, is frustrated by loyalists painting ‘Don’t’ in front. When he climbs up to 4,000 feet to paint the message on the gate of a British-owned estate, the proprietor, Mr Mathieson, one of a small number of variously portrayed British characters in Narayan’s fiction, invites him in for an amicable discussion, assuring him afterwards that he will keep the painted injunction as a ‘souvenir’, even though he has no intention of obeying it. Something of the same even-handedness distinguishes the first two novels in Achebe’s Igbo trilogy, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Their presentation of tribal culture and its encounter with British officialdom and Christian missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is fictionalised from a range of viewpoints and leavened by a sense of humour reminiscent of Narayan’s. African and European characters are clearly individualised and generous use is made of indigenous language and oral tradition to create a fully-rounded portrait of beliefs, customs and rites, from which inhumane practices like slavery, child sacrifice and wife-beating are not excluded. Although it would be reasonable to deduce from the two novels that colonialism certainly did cause ‘things’ to ‘fall apart’, it is never implied that it brought no benefits. It ended child sacrifice and tribal wars, for example, and dispelled superstitions. Furthermore, missionaries and district commissioners are not caricatured or demonised and friendships between them and Africans are sympathetically delineated. Ngugi’s novels are not without cross-cultural appeal either. Their feeling for nature, portrayal of everyday village life, explorations of the themes of ‘loyalty’ and ‘betrayal’ and attempted syncretisation of Christianity and Gikuyu beliefs are all suggestive of wider human sympathies. The multivocality of his fiction is, however, compromised by its tendentiousness. A novel can, of course, be both multivocal and make political points—through satire and irony, for example—and we expect a serious one to be based on an ideology or system of ideas. We do not, however, expect it to become, as Said implies in his comment on Kim, ‘a political tract’, a Marxist tract in Ngugi’s case. His fiction is further diminished by its failure to acknowledge the multiethnic composition of Kenyan society. Despite his espousal of pan-African goals, it is almost exclusively preoccupied with his interpretation of the Mau Mau rebellion

64

THE USE OF ENGLISH

among the Gikuyu and the betrayal of its legacy after independence. Other tribal groups (together with the controversial topic of tribalism) are ignored or marginalised, as are the country’s ethnic minorities—Arabs, Asians and Europeans. ‘Kenya is a black people's country' is a slogan seemingly endorsed in both A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood. Arundathi Roy’s The God of Small Things and VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River are political novels with different targets from Ngugi which do not resemble tracts while certainly having ideological foundations. They also furnish examples of the continuities between colonial and post-colonial fiction. Set among the Christians of Kerala, far away from Kipling’s Upper India, The God of Small Things makes bedtime reading of The Jungle Books an important ritual in the novel’s central relationship between Ammu and her twin children, Rahel and Estha—‘We be of one blood, ye and I’—and, like Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets, highlights issues of cultural hybridity and interethnic relationships foreshadowed in Kim and Kipling’s AngloIndian tales. The link with Heart of Darkness is even stronger. The phrase is quoted no less than fourteen times, thereby perhaps supporting a ‘symbol of existence’ interpretation of its meaning rather than one limited to Africa or colonialism. Though associated with an abandoned house once belonging to an Englishman who had, like Kurtz, ‘gone native’ and later committed suicide, the ‘darkness’ is firmly located in post-colonial brutality, corruption and hypocrisy and in the pre-colonial oppressions of caste and gender. A Bend in the River is the closest to the original of the various reimaginings of Heart of Darkness since it provided the epigraph for TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men almost ninety years ago. Naipaul is persona non grata to many post-colonialists for what Said refers to as ‘the shallow calculation…that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs’.7 Achebe takes particular exception to A Bend in the River’s caustic depiction of life in an anonymous West African state (identifiable as Mobutu’s Zaire in the 1970s) and by implication in much of postcolonial Africa. As in Conrad, however, the pessimism of the novel, and of Naipaul’s fiction as a whole in that decade, runs deeper. The first-person narrator Salim’s contemplation of ‘the sadness of the continent’ rests, in his words, on his ‘quiet and profound conviction about the vanity of all human endeavour’, an echo perhaps of the ‘cruel futility of things’ discerned in Nostromo. Moreover, depiction of African countries ‘going to the dogs’ after independence is ubiquitous in indigenous fiction too, including that of Achebe and Ngugi.

COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL FICTION

65

Continuities with 'the great canonical texts' are also apparent in theirs, as several of their evocative titles attest - Things Fall Apart (Yeats), No Longer at Ease (Eliot), Weep Not Child (Whitman), A Grain of Wheat (Authorised Version of the Bible). Achebe gives his determination to tell 'a different story ... from the inside' to Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, another novel in his list of literary anathemas for its unflattering portrayal of Africa and Africans, as a motivating force behind his own work. But the deliberate echoes and parallels of Conrad and Cary in it do not read like contradictions to me. Obi, the main character in No Longer at Ease, for example, appears more like a reincarnation of Mr Johnson than a rebuttal. Ngugi's opinion of Conrad at least is more favourable. Whilst critical of the ‘bourgeois’ ‘ambivalence towards imperialism’ in Nostromo, he acknowledges its greatness, modelled A Grain of Wheat on Under Western Eyes and echoes Heart of Darkness in The River Between. His racism charge is reserved, surprisingly to me, for The Jungle Books, and, among other white writers about Kenya, two of the most sensitive, Elspeth Huxley and Karen Blixen.8 Some post-colonialists have argued that it is in the choice and use of language and experiments with form that examples of insider resistance are to be found. The evidence to support this argument is at best patchy. Ngugi’s commitment to anti-imperialist resistance led him to abandon the colonial language for his native Gikuyu but Achebe argued in favour of English as a unifying factor in post-colonial Nigeria and criticised Ngugi for representing the issue as a matter of either/or and, more generally, for his ‘Manichean vision of the world’ in which there are only two options, imperialism and anti-imperialism. Narayan chose English as ‘a medium for presenting our cultural heritage’, whereas Conrad, for whom it was a third language, insisted that it chose him. Many Indian and African writers with the same objective as Narayan have, like Achebe, used local idioms and varieties of the English language such as pidgin, alongside snatches of vernacular ones, to represent indigenous speech patterns and cultural traditions in conversation and story-telling. In so doing, they are following in the footsteps of Kipling and other colonial outsiders, like Cary and Huxley in the case of Africa (no doubt with more authentic results), and indeed of the many British, Irish and American novelists of the colonial period who attempted to incorporate ‘the real language of men’ into their dialogue or narrative. Similarly, such formal innovations as insiders have experimented with need to be seen within the context of those pioneered by the ‘great canonical texts’. Otherwise, all the post-colonial novels I have discussed, and the

66

THE USE OF ENGLISH

overwhelming majority I have read, are written in ‘international Standard English’, realist in form and readily comprehensible to the general reader. My second conclusion, then, is that resistance to imperialism is rarely evident in indigenous post-colonial fiction and, when present, as in the case of Ngugi, can detract from its artistic quality.9 Students will, of course, come to their own conclusions about this and the other issues I have raised.

References 1.

Edward Said (1994) Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage) pp 49, 71, 789, 88, 90.

2.

Azar Nafisi (2003) Reading Lolita in Tehran (London: Fourth Estate) pp 132, 187-8, 268, 307.

3.

Achebe’s lecture was later published in 1988 as ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ in Hopes and Impediments (London: Heinemann). For updated versions of his views, see (2001) Home and Exile (London: Canongate) and (2011) The Education of a British-Protected Child (London: Penguin Books).

4.

Said’s views on Conrad and Heart of Darkness are dispersed throughout Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. See the indexes of both books. For my response, see also R. Jeffcoate (2010) Love And Marriage Across The ‘Borderline’: A journey through the multiethnic classics The Use Of English 62(1) pp 50-1.

5.

For Said’s discussion of Kim, see Culture and Imperialism op.cit pp 159-96 and his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition.

6.

All the stories mentioned in this paragraph can be found in Kipling, R (1987) Selected Stories (London: Penguin Books). For my discussion of Kipling’s stories of interethnic love, see note (4) above.

7.

Said (1994) op.cit. p 339.

8.

For Achebe’s views, see note 3 above; for Ngugi’s, see (1981) Writers in Politics (London: Heinemann), (1986) Decolonising the Mind (London: Heinemann) and (2011) Dreams in a Time of War (London: Vintage).

9.

The first part of this conclusion is supported by one recent survey: King, B (2004) The Internationalization of English Literature 1948-2000 (Oxford University Press).

67

Reviews Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir, by Gerald Hughes (Robson Press, £16.99) The reminiscences of Ted Hughes’ brother, Gerald, make a valuable addition to the study of the poet’s life. Not as important as the Hughes/ Sagar correspondence, which I reviewed in the previous edition, but full of valuable insights, as well as three rather splendid, previously unpublished poems. Gerald looks back on the time he, Ted and sister Olwyn were growing up in Mytholmroyd—‘Time wasted with non-essentials, when it could and should have been spent with loved ones’—and he paints a vivid picture of life in a Yorkshire village in the ‘thirties, his ‘best personal effort to take hold of a few of the past’s memorable moments, when we were joined with it, and part of it, and knew it, and is my way of touching it, however briefly, before it, too, is lost’. We share their Mam’s memory of the bright star that shone through the window of the bedroom when Ted was born; we learn that their Granny loved the poems of Edward Thomas, who wrote so beautifully about the English countryside, and persuaded the grandchildren to read them to her; their Mam was a bit of a poet, and wrote a saga in verse of three mice named Olwyna, Edwyna and Geraldine! The photograph of the six young men who lost their lives in the First World War was displayed in the house—the photograph that was to be the subject on one of Ted’s mostanthologised poems, with the warning: ‘to regard this photograph might well dement.’ We meet the old lady who told the children the story of the fox cub, orphaned when its mother was caught in trap, that became the subject of a story in ‘Difficulties of a Bridegroom’—and a favourite among the pupils I taught. In 1938 the family moved to Mexborough, where the Saturday morning pictures in the local ‘flea pit’ seized Ted and Gerald’s imagination, resulting in an early poem, ending: ‘Knee-deep in blood where he had to paddle, Stood Diamond Ace with an empty saddle’. Ted often took family experiences as his subject: in ‘Wolf-Watching’ there’s his ‘Anthem for Doomed youth’, imagining his father’s experiences in the Trenches. And

68

THE USE OF ENGLISH

Gerald shares Ted’s thoughts on his time in Cambridge: ‘Sometimes I think Cambridge is wonderful. At others, a ditch full of clear, clear water where all the frogs have died. It’s a bird without feathers, a purse without money, an old, dry apple. All the gutters run pure claret. There’s something in the air, I think, which keeps people very awake!’ If you are looking for gossip about Sylvia and Assia you will be disappointed: by this time Gerald had emigrated to Australia; but this comment on Ted’s reaction to Sylvia’s death is moving: ‘Ted talking passionately about the circumstances surrounding Sylvia’ actual suicide, the failure of someone to get there in time, the fact that he believed she had wanted to be rescued’. And this, at first glance light-hearted, but possibly an image of extreme frustration: Sylvia told a friend how annoying she found Ted’s habit, at bedtimes, of ‘knotting his clothes up in unknottable balls and hurling them about the floor of the room’, but adding, ‘other than these minor foibles he is extremely good-natured, thoughtful, and almost normal’. This needs to be set against Ted’s earlier comment in a letter to Gerald: ‘Marriage is my medium. You have no idea what a happy life Sylvia and I lead.’ Gerald’s book leaves us with a moving picture of his brother, and the three poems are an added bonus. Ted’s poem about a fishing expedition with his son Nicholas provides the epitaph on his memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey: immediately below T. S. Eliot’s ‘the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living’, are these words:

So we found the end of our journey So we stood, alive in the river of light Among the creatures of light, creatures of light. Gerald Gibbs

REVIEWS

69

Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and life before Ted, by Andrew Wilson (Simon and Schuster, £20) Emotions surrounding the life and death of Sylvia Plath in 1963 still run high. This new biography by Andrew Wilson concentrates on her university days and boyfriends, covering previously largely unresearched areas of her life, and deserves a place alongside the classic texts: Al Alvarez’ The Savage God, Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, and Richard Hayman’s The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. I was concerned about the choice of title—would Ted have approved, I wondered, and then read that ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ is the title of one of her many unpublished poems, and only available on a ‘Neurotic poems’ website. As so often when reading Sylvia’s poems, the content makes you sit back in amazement, and only on reflection do you realise that this is a jewel of a villanelle, which draws on an early relationship, when love made ‘the stars go waltzing in blue and red’, and coruscates around her fear that the relationship will end badly: two of the refrains are ‘I made you up inside my head’ and, ‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.’ Wilson brings to vivid life the relationships that failed, stories previously obscured by ‘the dark, hunky presence’ of Ted. From early times at Smith College Sylvia saw herself as the Ariel spirit set free from the rock by Prospero, the father/lover figure’ that she met in one of her earliest visits to the theatre, ’The Tempest’. To Robert Lowell she was ‘hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another “poetess”’ but ‘one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines.’ Andrew Wilson strips away the myths to give us glimpses of the real woman. We see her as the relatively poor scholarship girl at Smith’s, taking demeaning holiday jobs as a home-help, seeking the perfect relationship, even though, as she wrote to a friend, ‘I have a deep, latent envy of men, and anger insidious, malignant, latent’. A colleague described her as ‘a time bomb that seemed always about to explode’, and she saw herself as a ‘Lorelei’, a siren who attracted men ‘with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand’. As Wilson notes, ‘the disparity between her imagination—or what could be called the spirit of Ariel—and the real world could only grow more extensive over time’. The courses Sylvia opted for at Smith had a great influence on her thinking: Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky in particular centred often upon death: Zarathustra advised: ‘die at the right time’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ centres around ways to commit patricide. As Ivan says, in the final section: ‘Who does not desire his father’s death?’ Dostoyevsky’s use

70

THE USE OF ENGLISH

of doubles in his novels was the basis for one of Sylvia’s theses. As Dostoyevsky noted, ‘patricidal desire seeps from one character to another’. Early in the book Wilson has made much of the ambiguous relationship between Sylvia and her father. Wilson tells us a great deal about her boyfriends, and the continuing correspondence they kept going long after physical relationships had ended. One these boyfriends, Eddie Cohen, an amazing conflation of Agony Aunt and Sex Therapist, was a frequent adviser, and diagnosed her as having borderline personality disorder—‘an unstable sense of identity, highly volatile mood swings, intense but problematic friendships and relationships, suicidal thoughts and attempts.’ None of her therapists was anything like as acute in the diagnosis. There is much in this biography that is new: tantalising quotations from unpublished poems, previously excised sections from journals and letters, new information about electro-convulsive therapy, and the insulin injections that were a terrifying part of her treatment. And the poignant ending, with Sylvia rushing to Paris to tell Richard Sassoon that she wanted to marry him, only to find that he had moved on to Spain, and her return to Ted on the rebound, is new and compelling. In one of her last letters to her mother, Sylvia quoted from Racine’s ‘Phaedre’: ‘dans le fond des forets votre image me suit’ as if to define the fear, and attraction, of the relationship with Ted. And death following her into the darkness. The book ends with the familiar picture of Sylvia, alone with the children in a freezing cold flat, leaving them milk and tucking them up in bed, then going down to the kitchen, taping up all the possible escape routes for air, putting her head on a cushion beside the gas fire, and turning it on. In ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, this tragic closure is foretold: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade Exit seraphim and Satan’s men. So young, so talented, so much yet to give: fifty years on, and it still breaks my heart.

Gerald Gibbs

REVIEWS

71

Dear Mr Howard: the Changing of Modern English, by Michael Wallerstein (Edgeways, £4.80) The Liza Doolittle Syndrome, by Michael Wallerstein, (Edgeways, £4.80) Describing changes in the English language isn’t necessarily the same as complaining about them, but it often is. There is a long tradition of such complaint going back to at least the sixteenth century and developed particularly in the eighteenth century with the rise of a doctrine or doctrines of ‘correctness’ (a much-contested category). A number of things might be meant by saying that the language is declining, and there are a number of motives that might inform the complaint. The concern might be with the loss of meaning of individual words, largely through ignorance of their etymology; or narrowing of the range of synonyms, leading to reduction of the ability to make fine distinctions; or reduction of possibilities of grammatical articulation, leading to a loss of clarity in relating of ideas to one another. Some uses of language may be regretted as evidence of poor thinking, insincere emotion, or deliberate obfuscation and misdirection; others as symptomatic of disliked social attitudes or characteristics of an emerging or growing class or sector of society. Possible motives for complaining include: a belief in a connection between grammatical and ethical and societal propriety; concern for clarity and integrity of thought; aesthetic preference for certain forms and usages; nostalgia; or even plain, if unacknowledged, snobbery. The root motive might be a sense that sublunary things have a built-in tendency to deteriorate without strenuous upkeep, or that the integrity of the language is threatened by foreign pollution. And there’s the further question of what the complainer seeks to do by complaining: whether to raise awareness, to encourage and facilitate reform, or merely to let off steam (out of exasperation or for the sheer pleasure of complaining). Or even to display conscious superiority to certain persons. I think it’s fair to say that something of nearly all of this can be found in these two short books (81 and 66 pages respectively) by Michael Wallerstein. The first came out in 2003 and is still available; the second was published last year. The considerable strength of Dear Mr Howard (a response to a 2002 piece by Philip Howard in The Times) is its insistence that the significant and worrying changes in contemporary English are not the misuses of individual words or other offences against ‘correctness’ but changes in

72

THE USE OF ENGLISH

‘the underlying, “invisible”, grammatical and semantic structures’, ‘in the grammatical and semantic forms, covering not merely the sentence but the whole text, including dialogic structures’, in ‘a great reduction of subordination, especially of non-finite phrases’. He finds again and again what he takes to be evidence of ‘reduction of linguistic potential’—a growing inability to get certain kinds of distinctions and relations clearly stated. An early example is the use of like as subordinator, which ‘destroys the difference between comparison (“It looks like bad luck”) and supposition (“It looks as though it were bad luck”)’. He discusses, inter alia, the use and misuse of particles and prepositions, the apparent ‘difficulty in maintaining a consistent time/tense perspective through a sentence which has any kind of subordination especially where the subordinate clause is conditional or concessive’; the failure to understand the subjunctive; the failure to distinguish between countable (fewer) and uncountable (less), between animate and inanimate in the use of relative pronouns, between shall and will, and between this and that in anaphoric constructions; the abandonment (in The Liza Doolittle Syndrome he says fear) of the passive; and the failure to topicalise sentences clearly. The lack of syntactical awareness he also finds informing certain patterns of intonation: ‘The highlighting of elements by means of voice tone has diminished enormously....The tonic accent tends to be shifted always to the final word in the clause, regardless of meaning.’ (I think that is something that teachers who hear students reading older texts aloud will readily recognise.) All of this is very useful. It’s late in Dear Mister Howard that Wallerstein makes his first reference to the Eliza Doolittle Syndrome (LDS), a notion which dominates the latter pamphlet (a series of twenty-nine pieces, some very short, under such very specific headings as ‘Failure of sequence with auxiliary verbs’, ‘Intrusive “to”’, and ‘Striving for gentility and status’). This ‘syndrome’ relates to ‘the rise to positions of power and authority by lower-class’ of whom he says: They have modified their provincial and lower-class accents but have, very largely retained the grammar and, above all, attitudes to grammar and speech of their origins. They are perfectly satisfied that they have ‘arrived’ and are smugly sure that their speech and grammar are correct; this they then impose on all others... I’m not convinced that the ‘syndrome’ metaphor is particularly helpful, as it can have the effect of putting a number of disparate elements on an equal footing and attributing them all to the same cause. In both books

REVIEWS

73

Wallerstein has a great deal to say about pronunciation, especially as a register of class and attitude and as evidence of failure to grasp etymology (teachers might think of the widespread appearance of past/oral). Irritating as mispronunciation can be—and our irritation can too easily distract us from attending to what is being said—it does not limit communication in the same way or to the same extent that syntactic errors and inadequacies can, but it appears here on an equal footing. (Does the use of the glottal stop in any way detract from the cogency of what is being said? One of the most educated men I know consistently uses it.) The feeling that it is all of a piece is very tempting, but maybe it needs to be teased out a little more. More seriously, Wallerstein’s intense dislike of much of what he describes leads to expressions that make it too easy for readers, especially of The Liza Doolittle Syndrome, to take offence and so to disregard the thrust of his argument. He can at times sound too like the Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells whom he specifically disowns. Unsurprisingly, it’s possible to question some of his specific judgments— whether, for instance, expressions such as ‘England’s Queen’ and ‘London’s East End’ are really to be regretted, or whether something that is strictly speaking ambiguous from a grammatical point of view (‘The elephants are on the train’) is ambiguous in the actual situation in which it is used. And there’s the question of what is the appropriate method for dealing with these matters; it’s arguable that he relies too heavily on his own reading and impressions: when, for instance, he writes that ‘I have not studied the records [which records?] closely, but I suspect that there have been, and are still, some quite serious misunderstandings created by these differences in adverbial semantics and syntax’, it might be objected that such claims must be backed up by statistical investigation, not left to individual or even shared impressions. (This would be to take the argument out of judgment and into ‘science’, which has its own problems.) And very occasionally, he is simply wrong (iconic, annoying as its current use might be to some of us, can’t be reduced to ‘eye-catching’). But the books are certainly worth some attention, especially Dear Mr Howard. A better book might have been produced by a carefully ordered combination of the two—but not a better resource. The books have various advantages for classroom use: they are short and cheap; they offer a multitude of examples, incisively analysed; they draw attention to a wide range of kinds of change; and they are contentious, full of attitude. They could be an invaluable classroom resource for teachers who are not

74

THE USE OF ENGLISH

too tightly tied to their A level syllabuses. Examples could be extracted for discussion (the paired columns of expressions in American and British English, for instance); and various ober dicta might be made the grounds of investigation. Students might consider whether there have been any gains in expressive force in recent changes (Wallerstein mentions, I think, only one). The books are particularly useful in providing examples to discuss in relation to the often-heard ‘Oh, we know what they mean, so why are you making a fuss about it?’ and under-examined notions of the primacy of usage, to which Daniel Defoe’s objection is still cogent: ‘’Tis true, Custom is allow’d to be our best Authority for Words, and ’tis fit it should be so; but Reason must be the Judge of Sense in Language, and Custom can never prevail over it.’ Behind such reasoning and judgment must lie1 the belief that Wallerstein expresses in these words: a person’s and a culture’s conceptual range—including their moral range—is, not exactly determined, but typified by their linguistic resources. If we don’t believe something like this, why are we concerned with teaching English?

Notes 1.

My grammar-checker wants this to be lay. Wallerstein has some amusing and telling remarks about grammar-checkers.

John Haddon

The Palm Beach Effect: Reflections on Michael Hofmann, edited by André Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard (CB Editions, £10) Exactly what, besides a phrase from Michael Hofmann, is The Palm Beach Effect? It could be sunstroke. ‘I wonder’, writes Tony Williams in ‘Hofmania’, ‘if people remember where they were when Michael Hofmann first made them gurgle with delight. For me it was on the down escalator in Mothercare in Sheffield.’ Other contributors seem to have

REVIEWS

75

been affected. For David Wheatley, not normally given to hyperbole, Hofmann is ‘contemporary poetry’s most flitting and elusive ghost, the white whale of our lost alternative to all that is provincial and small in a tawdry world, our impossible strong enchanter’. James Lasdun, almost as fevered, calls him ‘the Sherlock Holmes of British poetry: preternaturally attuned to reality, somewhat inclined to disappear, and...several leagues ahead of everyone else.’ And André Naffis-Sahely, recalling a meeting with the poet, thinks of him as ‘brought by the wind, taken back by it: the soft-spoken wunderkind of despair.’ But ‘Wunderkind’, I am glad to report, is a poem. The editors of this varied, informative, sometimes eccentric symposium aimed to avoid ‘the tedium of pedestrian scholarship’, and they succeeded, preferring what Hofmann, in his own collection of essays, calls the ‘swift, provisional, personal response’. After all, as Stephen Romer observes here, ‘the personal—being personal, as much as getting personal, is a credo of his work’. Hofmann’s candour is notorious, especially in Acrimony (1986), which ends with nineteen poems about his relationship with his father, the novelist Gert Hofmann; but also in Approximately Nowhere (1999), his last, less widely known collection, which also ends with a series of revelations, this time about his marriage and separation. ‘When I hear the words ‘confessional poetry’, I reach for my Anne Sexton’, says Dennis O’Driscoll, acquitting Hofmann of the charge, but on the questionable grounds that he has used the confessional form, not (as Sexton) sensationally, but as ‘a vehicle for dispassionate truth’. Romer is more cautious, arguing that his use of personal material, ‘often involving others, recognizably friends or lovers or relatives’, raises questions ‘that every poet (and every reader) must decide for him or her self.’ Acrimony is Hofmann’s most assured production; it is also his most contested. ‘There had been other famous sequences to fathers’, says Stephen Romer, ‘but nothing quite prepares for the honesty, passion, anger, dismay—and wit—of “My Father’s House.”’ For Julian Stannard, co -editor of this volume, its object is political, ‘to un-mask the patriarch and sabotage filial obligation’, while O’Driscoll sees its motive as more private, characterizing the poems as ‘sharp, cool and unforgiving’. ‘Suffice it to say’, he goes on darkly, ‘that I am in no doubt as to the appropriateness of the book’s title.’1 Tessa Hadley takes a fresh approach. She concedes that the son’s protests against the father—‘the disgusts and resentments, the wounded amour propre, that he can’t get expressed in his father’s actual presence (the very existence of the poems in itself is evidence of

76

THE USE OF ENGLISH

the intimidation)’—may appear over-earnest, ‘even peevish’. But acrimony, she argues, is the subject of the poems, not their content. ‘Hofmann steps almost with a shrug into the well-used space where so many writers have been before him.’ She cites ‘The Means of Production’, in which the father has for once ‘acceded’ to the son’s demand for conversation, but then puts on his ‘black armband’ and takes his blood pressure, ‘as though in the presence of an unacceptable risk’. ‘The lovely joke-picture of that last image’, she suggests, ‘is actually the right spirit of the poems’. This is a bitter, rueful, knockabout comedy of a relationship, in which both characters play out, as people do, their exaggerated roles.2 In Behind the Lines, she reminds us, Hofmann cites Brodsky’s remark that ‘the poet is never, in the final analysis, a victim’. The novelist, one might add, provided the poet with his subject-matter, and Hofmann makes the most of it. And as others have suggested, he does so with techniques more typical of prose-fiction than of lyric poetry. ‘It is a poetry of accumulated detail’, says Romer, ‘a poetry of surfaces, patient, content to explore, eschewing metaphor and the grand gesture, profoundly metonymic’. One reviewer was surprised that he had chosen poetry as a medium at all. It has of course a straightforward narrative, from ‘Day of Reckoning’ (where Hofmann is eight) to ‘Old Firm’—close to the present—in which ‘A sudden thunderstorm/turned us into a family group’; and its key events: his abandonment at thirteen or fourteen, ‘jettisoned’ in England by his parents (‘The Machine that Cried’), and the discovery, suggested in ‘Giro Account’ but announced by his mother in the poem that follows, ‘And the Teeth of the Children Are Set on Edge’, of the father’s adultery. But this is merely framework. Hofmann has written of the ‘reference points of hands and heads and flowers and grass and snow and shadow’ in Ian Hamilton’s The Visit, and it is just such a series that affords these poems their unity and cumulative power. Hofmann is anything but dispassionate, especially on the subject of his father. His list of complaints, when he gets round to it in ‘Author, Author’, runs into four pages, and it could easily, one feels, have been much longer. In ‘Errant’, the father takes up gardening: Dressed in grey from top to toe, with a grey beard, grey face, grey felt country hat, you disappear into the garden with a shovel like a one-man death squad...

REVIEWS

77

This is pure comedy, and we relish it; but in ‘Fine Adjustments’, on a visit home, I need calm, something to tranquillize me after the sudden storm between us that left me shaking, and with sticky palms...It only happens here [...] The mood constantly changes, and no wonder, for as Tessa Hadley says, ‘Writing will never get to the bottom of this big old subject, or to its end: the son’s contest with his father, the father’s struggle with his son, the more or less violent transfer of authority passed down through the generations of men.’ ‘Old Firm’, the concluding poem, ends on a question, as does ‘Author, Author’: I ask myself what sort of consummation is available? Fight; talk literature and politics; get drunk together? Kiss him goodnight, as though half my life had never happened? Much has been made of the fact, wittily adverted to in the title ‘Author, Author’, that father and son are both writers, perhaps rivals; but for the poet, this is incidental. His chief complaint, first aired in ‘The Nomad, my Father’ in Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), is that his father neglects him. Who could have said we belonged together, my father and my self, out walking, our hands held behind our backs in the way Goethe recommended? Here, early in the sequence, Hofmann looks back ruefully to childhood, to a time before the discord of the present. ‘I wanted to share your life’, he says, ‘Live with you in your half-house in Ljubljana,/your second address: talk and read books;/meet your girl-friends’. And it is here (‘My Father’s House Has Many Mansions’) that we meet the recurring, symbolic figure of hand and arm, as in the often quoted conclusion of ‘Fine Adjustments’: It was a fugitive childhood. Aged four, I was chased round and round the table by my father, who fell and broke his arm he was going to raise against me. It plays a part in ‘The Means of Production’, where the father puts on his black armband, and where we also hear that ‘your family/has been held at arm’s length’; and in the thrilling ‘Vortex’:

78

THE USE OF ENGLISH Where was our high-water mark? Was it the glorious oriental scimitar in the Metropolitan Museum in New York? Nothing for a pussyfooting shake-hands grip: your hand had to be a fist already to hold it... I wondered why the jewels were all clustered on scabbard and hilt and basketed hand-guard, why there were none on the sword itself. I could only guess that the blade leapt out to protect them, like a strong father his family [...]

In ‘Fine Adjustments’, the ‘sudden storm’ between father and son left the latter ‘shaking,/and with sticky palms’; and now, as we turn to ‘Vortex’, we see the full implications of this figure: that a handshake, a recognition both of what they share and what divides them, is really the only ‘consummation’ available. We have seen the hand that reaches out, and the hand raised to strike; but perhaps the saddest moment of the sequence is in the opening lines of ‘Fine Adjustments’: By now, it is almost my father’s arm, a man’s arm, that lifts the cigarettes to my mouth [...] It’s a splendid achievement, and something of a touchstone; only in Approximately Nowhere does Hofmann come anywhere near matching it. Jamie McKendrick stands up for its successor, Corona, Corona (1993), nicely describing the poems about the father-son conflict (‘Marvin Gaye’ and ‘The Late Richard Dadd’) as ‘autobiography by other means’; but he doesn’t convince me that the poems in which Hofmann figures as the flâneur, the ‘stroller round the metropolis’ with ‘a leisurely sense of his own apartness’, contain more than the ‘descriptive virtuosity’ he finds in them. Tony Williams is surely right to say that, whereas the best of his work ‘is produced more or less compulsively’, Corona, Corona ‘seems willed, a book that someone deliberated over.’ The urgency behind ‘My Father’s House’ is felt once more in Approximately Nowhere, first in the tender elegies for Gert Hofmann, ‘Last Walk’ and ‘Endstation, Erding’ and ‘Zirbelstrasse’, each of them a headlong single sentence; then in the poems about his marriage, especially perhaps in ‘Malvern Road’, again one sentence, opening with the heartstopping It’s only a short walk, and we’ll never make it, the street where we first set up house— and closing, in tortured syntax, with the recall ‘of your recurring dream/ where you whimpered comfort to your phantom baby boy/you didn’t

REVIEWS

79

have and said you’d mind him, as now,/to my shame, you have and you do.’ The first full-length study of Michael Hofmann, The Palm Beach Effect is already indispensable. Beside the essays of Stephen Romer (much more than a memoir) and Tessa Hadley, there are valuable things by Rosanna Warren, on the dangers for Hofmann of too much detail, and James Buchan, who raises a question about the liberties he takes as a translator. Mark Ford, in ‘Michael Hofmann’s London’, shows him to be as much a poet of place as Betjeman. Michael Schmidt, for his part, contributes a baffling poem about a vampire; and a prize of some sort should go to the ex-student from Hofmann’s creative writing class in Gainesville, Florida, who says appreciatively, in the memoir ‘Give the Moment’, that ‘For better or for worse, Michael treated me like I knew what I was doing.’ Notes 1.

O’Driscoll writes: ‘The extent of [Gert Hofmann’s] disapproval and hurt was evident when, after a reading by the novelist in September 1985, I asked him about the poems (by then disseminated widely in literary magazines) that would soon be gathered in Acrimony’.

2.

In ‘Return to the Fatherland’, published in The Listener (8 November 1990) the day after transmission of the BBC TV documentary ‘My Father’s House’, Michael Hofmann wrote of ‘my ancient resentments, and the humour and detachment with which I view them’.

John Constable

Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion, Andrew Delahunty and Sheila Dignen (OUP, £20) Perhaps the obvious question raised by a reference work such as this is whether it can offer anything that a swift internet search might not. Succinct explanation of Greek mythology or folklore and legend is readily accessible online, along with complete concordances to Shakespeare and the Bible. In fact, this Dictionary offers far more: most references here are accompanied by one or more illustrative quotations, some from fiction, others from journalism. Delving into the nature of literary allusion

80

THE USE OF ENGLISH

in this way demonstrates its potential for richness and complexity. The citations indicate how far certain phrases or characters have remained in the collective memory, or might be drawn upon for events of significance: Watching the tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s towering statue in Baghdad was a true Ozymandias moment. Opinion Journal (WSJ): Extra 2003 In a secular age it might seem surprising to see quite how many biblical echoes simmer away in the language of politics, journalism or advertising. Incongruity and bathos can result: Aer Rianta has apparently undergone a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion and is offering comfort, space, new bars and restaurants, and a dazzling array of food from across the globe before passengers fly off to their holiday destination. The Sunday Business Post 2001 Forging an analogy between Saul of Tarsus and holiday flights is curious. Some writers wittily exploit their allusion to the full: His silhouette against the window was like something Praxiteles might have knocked up for personal consumption. Lauren Henderson, The Black Rubber Dress, 1997 The editors’ choice of literary quotations often reveals how effective allusion can be as a form of literary shorthand: Arabella ascended the stairs, softly opened the door of the first bedroom, and peeped in. Finding that her shorn Samson was asleep she entered to the bedside and started regarding him. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure 1895 Hardy’s reference to Samson and Delilah might evoke any (or all) of the following connotations: that Jude has fallen prey to a manipulative seductress; that she will betray him to his enemies; that, blinded, he will exert heroic revenge. Or, Hardy’s intention may be wholly ironic. A judicious choice of allusion might be a useful means of teaching students that allusions are not a straightforward mathematical equation where x=y, but that various suggestions might simultaneously hover in the imagination. Hyperbole or incongruity introduce a degree of comedy here, too. A spectacular example might be the dichotomy between the narcissistic aesthete of Wilde’s novel and the world of sport:

REVIEWS

81

Hopkins is the Dorian Gray of boxing; he never seems to get old. Boxing Insider2004 The volume includes a useful Thematic Index which provides opportunities for fruitful cross-reference, although there are some anomalies in the listings for love and sexuality. ‘Lovers’ include, acceptably enough, David and Bathsheba, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, Paolo and Francesca yet, curiously, ‘Adultery’ is less evenhanded, citing only Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hester Prynne—and 007. The volume is particularly strong on Greek mythology and the obscurer realms of the Old Testament. The guiding principle has been to identify the most commonly used references, so the resourceful Jehoshabeath is an intriguing inclusion. Much-quoted phrases, from ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ to ‘perfidious Albion’ are explained and contextualised. Overall, the range is impressive, particularly in the sweep from myth and legend to contemporary media, or from the apocalyptic to the Swaffham Tinker.

Pamela Bickley

You Against Me, by Jenny Downham (David Fickling Books, £6.99) This is a very sensitive and tense novel about sexual abuse, right and wrong, loyalty and first loves. The language used is accessible and the themes in the text make it a thought-provoking read, suitable for mature teens and even adults. The two protagonists—18 year old male Mikey and 15 year old female Ellie—are written well; their internal struggles with what is happening around them are candid and sincere. The story starts with Mikey trying to keep his family together: keeping an eye on his alcoholic mother, looking after his two younger sisters Karyn (15) and Holly (8) and finding a way to make his dream of being a chef in London come true. But when Karyn claims to have been raped, his previous attempts to keep the family together are all brushed aside to seek revenge on the boy who did it. Ellie Parker, on the other hand, seems to have come from an idyllic life. Her parents are rich and happy together and she has a bright and promising future ahead of her. But when it’s her older brother Tom who

82

THE USE OF ENGLISH

is accused of raping Karyn, she feels torn apart. She has to do everything she can to defend her brother, right? When Ellie and Mikey meet, their lives take an even more surprising turn. A Romeo-Juliet love story begins to blossom and it all points to tragedy. Can they make their relationship work when so much hangs in the balance? The novel soon becomes a question of loyalty and truth: what really happened between Tom and Karyn? How well do the two protagonists really know their families? Ellie soon realises that she has to choose between her family and Mikey…and between what’s right and wrong. The novel deals with the issue of sexual abuse in a sensitive and honest manner, exploring contemporary gender issues in the process, such as the ‘blame’ that often falls on young women who dress or behave in a certain manner and the severity of the accusation and its impact if it is unfounded. Downham’s novel is a harrowing and tense read and produces sympathy for the two leads: they are never portrayed as faultless or as heroes and the difficult decision Ellie faces is one that really examines the lines between loyalty and truth. Overall, Downham’s book is gripping and sensitive. It's a book about loyalty and the choices that come with it. But mostly, it's a book about love and courage.

Tabatha Sheehan

Changeling, by Philippa Gregory (Simon & Schuster, £6.99) It is 1453, Castle Sant Angelo, Rome. Luca Vero is a handsome seventeenyear-old novice priest who is accused of heresy after he questions the authenticity of the crucifix relics. His only way out is to accept a mission where he uses his calculating mind to help find out and eliminate the fears of Christendom. Guided only by sealed orders, Luca and his two companions, Brother Peter (priest) and Freize (servant), are sent to travel across the country to make inquiries into the evils that have been casting shadows.

REVIEWS

83

Meanwhile, at the Castle of Lucretili: Isolde Lucretili, a pretty seventeenyear-old, is facing a life without a beloved father and without any of the riches that she was promised in his will. She is given only two choices by her greedy brother: marriage or a nunnery. Therefore, Isolde is forced to become Lady Abbess and take the vow of chastity within the nunnery. Trapped with only her companion Ishraq for comfort, strange things start to occur among her nuns such as sleep walking, strange visions and showing the bleeding of the crucifixes wounds. Thus, Luca receives his first investigation. As Isolde and Luca grow closer together, they are forced to face the darkest fears of the medieval world. As they embark on their journey they will be sure to encounter dark magic, werewolves and madness; however, what they will not see coming is how their own destinies and love will entwine on their journey to find the secrets of the Order of Darkness. Luca’s heroic character throughout the book still has his own past to contend with. However his determination and loyalty to the church are what keep him fighting for justice. Isolde is determined to take back what rightfully is hers, refusing to be under the rule of men and fighting the sexism of the time. With Luca’s past and Isolde’s limitations, will either of them be able to achieve their goals? Philippa Gregory, the queen of historical fiction, brings this historical story to life. Hitting hard on engaging themes, such as religion, magic, friendships, sexism, racism and even love, what more could you want? Each character has a specific role to play and a reflection of contextual issues surrounding them at the time. Gregory captures both boys and girls, with a sense of adventure, investigations and heroism; and a sense of love, loss and strong determination. The relationships between Luca and Freize; Isolde and Ishraq; and Luca and Isolde show surviving friendships and developing loves throughout the book, allowing the reader to follow these characters through their adventures. Overall, Philippa Gregory’s Changeling is a fascinating read as it follows the adventures undertaken by Luca and Isolde as they battle with dark magic, madness, betrayal and long lasting love. Jess Ponfield

84

THE USE OF ENGLISH

The House of Silk, by Anthony Horrowitz (Orion, £7.99) The House of Silk is a modern addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Written from the perspective of Dr Watson, it is set in the same 19th Century London of the originals, and it aims to replicate the atmosphere and language style of that era. The story begins with a short preface by Dr Watson where he introduces himself, the reason for his writing the story and how he first came to meet Sherlock Holmes. He finishes by forebodingly telling the reader, ‘it is no exaggeration to suggest that they (the contents of the story) would tear apart the entire fabric of society,’ if released in their proper time, and so they are being placed in a vault for 100 years to prevent them being read too early. The reader, then, is placed in the position of holding the last Sherlock Holmes story taken directly from the time it was written, and left wondering what is to come. Sherlock Holmes is introduced to the reader through the lens of Dr Watson, who continually eulogises about Holmes’ great intellect and capacity for solving crimes. There are numerous points where Holmes tells characters he has just met intricate details of their life and history, and then shows them what gave it away through minor details in how they look, the books in their study, the tan lines on their faces and so on. The plot itself begins with an art dealer coming to Holmes and asking for his help with some paintings that have been stolen, but then quickly escalates to his investigation of two murders (for one of which he himself is partly culpable), and his discovery of ‘The House of Silk,’ an organisation shrouded in utmost secrecy. The story canters along taking Holmes and Watson around the world, through several death-defying moments and numerous chances for Holmes’s detective skills to be employed. Horowitz writes this all with a great deal of excitement, and draws the reader into a world of subterfuge, violence and high London society. I really enjoyed The House of Silk, and felt that Horowitz combined a compelling narrative with some quite adult themes to great effect. His long descriptions of London and various shady characters could be easily utilised in a classroom to look at aspects of language analysis, though the length of the novel may hinder its use for a whole class. If I were to use this with a class, I would probably use The House of Silk to inform the

REVIEWS

85

reading of the original Sherlock Holmes books rather than read it in its own right. Matthew Clemas

A Medal for Leroy, by Michael Morpurgo (HarperCollins, £10.99) Dipping in and out of different times and narrative voices, the book spans both World Wars and is based on the true story of Walter Tull, the first black soldier to serve in the British army and whose courage in saving three other men went unrecognised by higher ranks as a result of racial prejudices. Growing up in 1940’s London, Michael is not so bothered that the other children call him ‘Poodle’ on account of his frizzy black hair. This probably has something to do with his mother being French. She came over in the war while her own country was occupied by the Germans. Most of the differences between him and the others have to do with the fact that his mother is French. Except one. The big one. The others have dads. Michael does have a dad; he’s the man in the smart pilot uniform behind the glass of the photograph on old Aunty Snowdrop and Aunty Pish’s mantelpiece. Always polished, always perfectly positioned. Like the medals his dad won for bravery in the war. His Scottish Aunties are a bit odd and very old, but they adopted his dad as a baby and grieve his loss still. So does Michael’s Maman. Nobody talks about him much and Michael doesn’t want to upset anyone by asking. Although death is not new to Michael, it is strange and upsetting when old Aunty Snowdrop dies. She leaves Michael the photograph of his father which he discovers is not alone in the frame—a thin notebook lies behind it! Opening it up and beginning to read, Michael learns about his past and who he really is for the first time from the voice of his Aunty Snowdrop and her retelling of her love with a black British soldier in the first world war. Michael’s Grandfather. The novel presents resolutions reached as family secrets are unearthed, delivers posthumous recognition of extreme bravery and addresses the injustice of prejudices on both race and gender levels that still survive

86

THE USE OF ENGLISH

today. Important ideas of acceptance and diversity are presented well ‘I was from Barbados, from Scotland and from France. How rare was that! How special was that!’ as well as interesting ideas of what constitutes a ‘normal’ family. The relatively brief and light treatment of war is grounded very well by the real life context given in the informative, factual ‘Afterward’ and works to add depth to the likeable characters in the fiction. Hannah Shah

Trash, by Andy Mulligan (David Fickling Books, £5.99) The story centres around the actions of three boys (Raphael, Gardo and Rat). Whilst the storytelling could captivate a reader of any age, it is particularly suitable for a young adult audience, drawing stark contrasts between the experience of western life and the everyday realities of growing up on a dumpsite in the developing world. Mulligan draws upon key elements of traditional adventure story and fairy tale, building suspense and dramatic tension as the overlooked heroes of this modern-day fable uncover a mystery that promises to elevate them from their humble beginnings and restore justice as they claim victory over their oppressors. However, as the preface to this novel reminds us, the Behala dumpsite is no ‘once upon a time’, it is based upon the author’s personal encounters in the Philippines. The adventures of Raphael, Gardo and Rat might be fictional, but their lives are representative of thousands of children who live in the real world, in the 21st century. Trash explores how a chance discovery can change a life. After a lifetime of searching for value in the things that other people throw away, Raphael happens upon a bag that propels him and two other ‘dumpsite boys’ into a dangerous adventure across their city. This novel is at once shocking and enthralling, presenting its reader with an experience of harrowing poverty through the eyes of the charismatic Raphael, protective Gardo and quietly enterprising Rat. These characters describe their situation with an acceptance that highlights all that is

REVIEWS

87

unacceptable in the world around them. The story is fast paced and frequently switches perspective with chapter openings such as ‘Raphael again’ telling the reader who is relating each section. The central characters follow clues, break codes and uncover secrets as they rush to discover the truth of what they have found. We, too, piece together their personalities and allegiances from the sections of narrative relayed by each individual. This is a mystery novel unlike others. It tackles questions of poverty, wealth, justice and truth whilst propelling us towards an astonishingly cinematic climax. Mulligan forces his young readers to search for their own beliefs and formulate personal opinions about the events and situations he describes. Will Raphael, Gardo and Rat find the answers that they crave? Are the methods that they employ acceptable? Can they possibly triumph in a world that has discarded them amongst the trash? Nichi McCawley

Grimm Tales for Young and Old, by Philip Pullman (Penguin, £8.99) As in the title, this book could be read by anyone, and certainly anyone at secondary school. Its broad appeal is due to every tale finishing with a brief note on the text from Pullman: whilst younger readers would probably skip these and focus on the stories, they may well be the most interesting part of the book for older readers. The book is an anthology of Grimm’s fairy tales re-written by Philip Pullman. As such, a summary of the plot(s) here would be impossible. That said, there are certain similarities in all the tales, so a look at one of them, ‘The Three Snake Leaves’ (p. 86) would be worthwhile. The story starts with a poor young man distinguishing himself in battle, and as a result marrying the princess of the kingdom. The princess, however, has made it a condition of marriage that he who marries her must, if she dies first, then kill himself—‘After all, if he really loves me [...] why would he want to go on living?’ she says.(p. 86) Predictably, she

88

THE USE OF ENGLISH

then dies, and the young man is locked in her tomb with her, left to starve to death. At this point, a snake slithers into the tomb, which the prince kills in defence of the corpse. After a while, another snake arrives, puts some leaves on the wounds of the first snake, thereby bringing it back to life, and they slither off together. The prince realises the power of these magic leaves and uses them to resurrect his dead bride. Unfortunately, however, now she’s back to life she no longer loves him. She conceals this fact until they go on a sea voyage, before strangling him to death, aided by the captain of their ship. Her plan is to return to the king, her father, and both explain away the death as accidental and commend the captain such that the murderous pair can be married. But do they get away with it? This tale is typical of the type in several ways. Firstly, as a fairy tale, it is short on details—we are never given names for any of the characters, for example, and the events described above are told succinctly in just over five pages. It also features the key characters of young man, princess, king, and what we could call a ‘working man’ (be it ship’s captain, as here, or miller, cobbler, tailor, etc.). At least one of these, and usually more, appear in almost every tale in the book. Furthermore, there is the improbable plot twist: the arrival of the three magic leaves, and the way they are introduced, is fairly standard for a fairly tale but from an objective point of view seems quite bizarre, and all the more so for the matter-of-fact way it is written. Finally, there is the happy ending. One can rely on the tales to end with the wicked characters dying (often in a quite unusual way—in this story they are put to sea in a leaky boat in a storm), and the good characters living happily ever after. As for whether or not to recommend the book, there is certainly other fiction on the bookshelves more likely to grab a reader than this. I wrote earlier that older readers would enjoy the commentary by Pullman, and younger readers would enjoy mainly the tales themselves. Let us say, then, that if a secondary school student does not enjoy the commentary addendums then they are unlikely to enjoy the book as a whole a great deal. Put briefly, this book would be good for someone who enjoys reading quite a lot already. For the less voracious reader some of Pullman’s other work is much more immediately gripping.

Sam Wilson

89

About the contributors Catherine Alexander is a former Lecturer at the Shakespeare Institute, and a widely published author and editor of books on Shakespeare, most recently The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Last Plays (Cambridge University Press 2009). She is a Trustee of the English Association. Pamela Bickley taught for many years in the English department at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently teaching A-Level English Literature in London. She is co-authoring Arden Shakespeare's Essential Guide to Text and Interpretation. Ian Brinton is Reviews Editor of Tears in the Fence. His most recent publication is An Andrew Crozier Reader (Carcanet) and he is currently working on an edition of Andrew Crozier’s prose for Shearsman. Peter Cash was Head of English at Newcastle-under-Lyme School 19852009 and is a Fellow of the English Association. He is a regular contributor to the English Association's online Bookmarks series. John Constable is a regular reviewer for The Use of English. Samuel Cutting teaches English at Central Sussex College, Haywards Heath and is currently completing an MA at University College London. He writes articles for both teachers and students on English Language and Literature, as well as a blog of reviews, criticism and creative writing (http://samcutting.wordpress.com/). Thomas Day is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. He has published many essays and articles on poetry, and is currently writing a book on the work of Geoffrey Hill. Gerald Gibbs taught English in secondary schools in Derby and Burtonupon Trent for 44 years. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association. John Haddon is a regular reviewer for The Use of English and the author of Teaching Reading Shakespeare (Routledge, 2009) and The Comedy of Forgiveness: Readings in Shakespeare and Dickens (Brynmill Press, 2012).

90

THE USE OF ENGLISH

David Hopkins is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. His teaching of a wide range of literature from the Renaissance to the twentieth century has been informed by his particular interests in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury English poetry, in the influence of the Greek and Roman Classics on English literature, in poets as critics, and in poetic translation. He is the author of books on Dryden and on Milton's Paradise Lost, the editor of The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets, and the co-editor of Dryden's poetry in the Longman Annotated Poets series. His Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics from Shakespeare to Pope (2010) will be reissued in paperback by Oxford University Press early in 2014. Robert Jeffcoate is a retired English teacher. He taught in primary and secondary schools and in higher education. He also worked in educational research. Jenny Stevens is a former Head of English and has taught at both secondary and undergraduate level. She currently combines teaching English part-time with educational consultancy work and is the co-author of Arden Shakespeare’s Essential Guide to Text and Interpretation.

91

THE BETTY HAIGH SHAKESPEARE PRIZE COMPETITION The competition is open to any sixth form student of English literature. Students are asked to submit an essay of not more than 3000 words on the Shakespeare topic of their choice.

Essays may be either original or previously prepared. They should preferably be typed, with the student’s name and school address clearly indicated. Each entry should be accompanied by a certificate of authentication signed by a teacher to indicate that it is the student’s original unaided work. Certificates are available from the English Association office or via the EA website: www.le.ac.uk/engassoc Entries should be sent to: Betty Haigh Shakespeare Prize Competition, The English Association, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH.

Closing date for entries is: 30 April 2012

The winner of the 2013 competition will receive a book and the winning essay will appear in the Association’s Newsletter.

92

THE USE OF ENGLISH

The Charles This year’s competition is based on the minor characters that Dickens was so famous for creating. The competition is open to to UK students aged between 14 and 16, or students abroad who are taking UK examinations (GCSE or IGCSE).

Mrs Gamp, Martin Chuzzlewit

Mr Wackford Squeers, Nicholas Nickleby

First Prize £150 Two Runners-up £50 each Closing date for entries 1st May 2013 Word limit 1500-3000 words Entries may be word-processed or hand written and may be submitted electronically or by post.  [email protected]  Dickens Prize The English Association University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH

93

Dickens Prize  Choose

a minor character who interests you, preferably from a book you have read.

 Try to find a description of him/her in

a scene in which he/she is closely involved.  Using this as a starting point, write

about the character .  Write

critically, describing your reactions and assessing the impact that this character has on the novel. Mr Bumble, Oliver Twist

Below are a few hints that may guide you in your writing: 

What role does he/she play in the novel? (Keep this part brief, no more than about 50 words.)



What makes memorable?



Does this character have a distinctive feature?



How do you think this character creates the mood or humour of a scene?



Do any illustrations convey your idea of this character?



What advice would you give to an actor portraying this character?

this

character

Continued on page 94

Dick Swiveller, The Old Curiosity Shop

94

THE USE OF ENGLISH

Here are a few more illustrations and extracts from a range of Dickens’ novels. The Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer was about his own age, but one of the queerest-looking boys that Oliver had ever seen. He was a snub-nosed, flatbrowed, common-faced boy enough, and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had got about him the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age, with rather bow-legs and little sharp ugly eyes.

Mr Micawber in David Copperfield I went in and found there a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face, which he turned full upon me. His clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing shirt-collar on. He carried a jaunty sort of a stick, with a large pair of rusty tassels to it; and a quizzing-glass hung outside his coat – for ornament, I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it, and couldn't see anything when he did.

Miss Havisham in Great Expectations She had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about.

Smile Life

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile

Get in touch

© Copyright 2015 - 2024 PDFFOX.COM - All rights reserved.