Hildegarde

Cathy asks what the inner city kids in Philadelphia are being taught–all I can say is that if they’re at all like my bottom-remedial students, the answer is:  nothing.

Conservatives who complain that inner city students are being denied the classics because they’re being fed a diet of “grievance literature” are missing the point.

Grievance literature would be a step up.  What they’re mostly being fed is:  nothing.

Which brings me back around to something one of the posters made me think of the other day.

Robert says we should assign more popular genre fiction in elementary school and high school in order to get kids interested in reading.  Gail says she tried to give her students “Araby.”

What is it that we actually teach these days in “English” classes not aimed at the top ten percent of our students?

Well, to the extent that we do “classics” at all, they tend to begin and end in  Edgar  Allan  Poe.   There’s nothing particularly wrong with Poe.  He’s a truly bad writer in some ways, and an interestingly good one in others, and if you approach his work the right way you can teach a lot about the formal aspects of poetry and the construction of plot and the place of emotion in fiction.

But my kids don’t get any of that.   If they’ve been assigned Poe, it’s because the curriculum committee of the English department thinks they’d be willing to read it because it’s “scary.” 

Poe also, interestingly enough, manages to skirt most of the hot button issues for high schools these days–it’s unusual for one of his characters to smoke, and descriptions of food are minimal, so he isn’t promoting unhealthy eating.  The relationships between men and women lack the overarching context of most nineteenth century fiction, and that avoids a whole nest of worms.

Do worms have nests?  Where the hell does that phrase come from?

Okay, I haven’t had enough caffeine this morning.  Yet.

But–Poe, and the relationships between men and women.

My kids have heard about sexism, and about how women were oppressed in all kinds of ways before the modern era.   They couldn’t vote!   Horrors!  Of course, most of my kids don’t vote, wouldn’t vote, and declare that politics just bores them, so the lesson is less striking than it might be otherwise.

But the big kicker is this–most of my kids have never heard of a time when a baby born out of wedlock was shunned as “illegitimate.”

They’ve heard that it used to be hard for women to get divorced, and that women used to be looked down on for having sex when they weren’t married, but this is nowhere near the kind of leap that the thing about babies is.  This entire culture has become extremely relaxed about sex in most ways, but the slut stigma still exists for girls.  They know what that is.

What hits them like a truck is the information that a child born out of wedlock beore the era in which they’re living generally did not have the right to use her father’s name, did not have the right to any child support from that father, and did not have the right to inherit anything her father might leave when he died.

Take that further and tell them that illegitimate children, as adults, were often denied ordination in various religious denominations, entry into some Roman Catholic religious orders (nuns and monks both), and election to public office (because nobody would vote for them).  Tell them that parents objected to their children marrying somebody who was born illegitimate.

Tell them all that and then watch them hit a mental wall.  Assuming you can get it through to them at all–and I’ve gotten pretty good at it–they get indignant very fast.  Why is everybody punishing the baby?   The baby didn’t do anything wrong!

If shared cultural references are necessary to being able to read, so is a developed understanding that not everything you’re familiar in your life has always been the way it is now.

My kids have no sense whatsoever that the very America they’re living in used to have different rules than it does now.   They’re aware that people do things differently in different countries, but if the people who decided to drill that into their heads thought they’d become more tolerant and openminded as a result, it didn’t work.   Instead, my kids treat other countries with about the same interest as they treat Mars–yeah, out there somehwere people do really weird things, it’s none of their business.

But let me bring up an incident that happened in one of my classes.  I’m pretty sure I referred to it in the very early days of this blog, but it’s going to stick with me for as long as I live, so I  think I’ll repeat it.

I was trying to get my class to analyze a poem by Langston Hughes called “Theme for English  B.”  I gave them some general pointers–for instance, that the word for “English essay” in the old days used to be “English theme”–and then  I figured they’d be sure to know what the rest of the thing was saying, because, you know, they’re supposed to get all that stuff about racism and oppression in high school these days.

It got to the part where the narrator goes back to his room in the Harlem Y, and I asked the kids why he did that.  Columbia is a residential university.  There were dorms right on campus.  Why was Hughes living in the Y?  And in Harlem rather than in Morningside Heights?

I got nowhere.   Not even a guess in the right direction.  When I pointed out that the narrator, being black, wouldn’t have been allowed to live in white dorms, I got tootal shock.  There was a time when black people wouldn’t be allowed to live in the dorms because they were black?  Seriously?   Wasn’t that against the law?

They have no shared cultural references, but they have no shared historical references, either.  What they read in high school–and what the textbooks for college freshman English courses increasingly provide–is a diet of long and short memoirs, plus a few pieces of fiction the faculty thinks they might find relevant. 

And they can’t read.  They really, really, really can’t read.

Phonics can only do so much.

So–John says there’s “no longer an adult canon” and Michael asks if most people knew Shakespeare’s references anyway…

So let’s start there.

First, there is still definitely an adult canon.  A canon isn’t just a set of books everybody decides they want to know, or even that a bunch of people in power decide everyone has to know.

A canon is a vocabulary–it’s a language in which the people of a culture speak. 

And it’s not necessary that the people be able to read to speak it, either.   I don’t know about rural peasants in Shakespeare’s time, but his plays were wildly popular with the urban–and illiterate–lower classes, who picked up their cultural vocabulary in church and in (again) fairy tales.

We have a great deal of really wonderful art because the literate upper classes knew just how important it was that the illiterate lower classes be able to understand that canon, or at least the basic ideas and images of it.

They would, of course, have called that saving their souls.

But no culture in history has ever been able to survive for long without a shared cultural vocabulary, and this culture (meaning American, now) would fall apart in a heartbeat without it.

For better or for worse, we have spent the last century embarked on a great experiment to prove the whole of human history wrong–to prove that it is possible to take people of different races, ethnicities, religions and personal histories and make them into a single self-identified nation.

We took seven thousand years of “identity is blood and soil” and said, “nope, don’t have to do that, that’s the stupid way, we can do it better.”

What makes Americans Americans is a shared cultural vocabulary.  And most Americans have it.  It may not be the canon as traditionally understood–I’d make a good case for why it’s desperately important that every American know who and what Superman is–but it’s a canon nevertheless.

We’ve spent the last forty years or so pretending that this is not true, and that it does not matter what kids learn while they’re growing up, in school or out, but we’ve done it while keeping a dirty little secret.

The higher you want to go up the ladder of success and power in this country, the more of that canon you’d better know. 

A black kid with an absent father and a crack addicted mother who wants to sell her to a pimp for drugs is at more of a disadvantage because her school didn’t teach her fairy tales and the Federalist Papers than because of anything else in her background.

I used to tell my children that the most important thing was to make sure they knew how to read, because if you could read you could always find out for yourself what you needed to know.

An at least glancing acquaintance with an at least skeletal component of the canon is necessary to being able to read.   It’s impossible to get through the op-ed page of the daily New York Times without a singularly vast array of cultural knowledge, and not just the highbrow stuff, either.

Most of us have this culural vocabulary so deeply embedded in our minds by the time we’re adults that we don’t think of it as anything anybody has to learn in the first place.   We blow past references without even realizing they’re references because we know them so well, they feel “obvious,” or automatic.

And even distinctly low-brow, mass-trash stuff–stuff meant to sell to people who know virtually nothing–automatically assumes a fairly broad cultural vocabulary.  It was one of the shocks of my life when I realized that a solid majority of my students didn’t understand the lyrics to half the rock and pop songs they declared they  loved. 

Go look at the lyrics to a song called “Love Story” by Taylor Swift.

We no longer teach a defined canon of works in elementary and high schools because we’ve decided not to teach it.  That decision is not a force of nature against which we cannot hope to prevail, but a choice. 

As to that cable television service with the one hundred channels–most of them are showing the same things over and over again in different orders.   CSI versions alone appear on more than a dozen different channels on my cable system, the mini-true crime documentaries (American  Justice, Cold Case Files, Forensic Files, City Confidential) show up on A&E, Bravo, ID, Sleuth, Tru TV, and Bio, among others. 

A country without a shared cultural vocabulary is at best a mess of warring factions.  This country without a shared cultural vocabulary is a country on the brink of a civil war.

But the act is that we have such a shared cultural vocabulary.  We’ve just given up making sure that our least privilieged citizens acquire it. 

And to change that, I don’t think we need to change the schools–it would e nice, and it would help, but it seems to me to be too much trouble to bother.

We do need to start being honest about what an enormous disadvantage it is for a kid to walk into a college classroom–where we say we’re determined to put him–without it.

I was, interestingly enough, thinking just what Mique was–that the people who were actually here during the election have a far different take on the Palin situation than the people who weren’t.  I’ll just leave it at this–I think it’s probably not a good idea to take the ramblings of the more infuriating members of RAM all that seriously, and that as far as I’m concerned, Palin didn’t get slammed nearly hard enough.  

But let’s take a look for a minute at the kind of thing that I get into knots over, given a large  population of Ignorant and Proud of It students to consider when I actually teach introduction to literature.

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading a Terry  Pratchett novel called Witches Abroad.  I think  I mentioned it.

Pratchett novels are often full of references so esoteric, they make your head spin, and the novels are definitely better experiences if you get all or most of these. 

In Witches Abroad, the actualy esoteric references are minimal, but there are still references, lots of them, and if you don’t get them, the book is going to be completely mystifying to you.

But those references should be general–they’re the kind of thing that people like those of us here tend to think that “everybody” knows.   They’re the kind of thing that when  I say my kids have no context, people automatically (and without realizing it) except in their minds in a category called “but she doesn’t mean that kind of thing.”

What you have to know a lot about to understand Witches Abroad is…fairy tales.

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.  Cinderella.  The three little pigs.  Frog princes returned to human form by a princess’s kiss.   Fairy godmothers.  Rapunzel.  Sleeping Beauty.

Pratchett is not an expository writer.  He gives you minimal prose and lots of dialogue, not a whole lot of glimpses into the way his character’s heads work from the inside, just straightfoward plot and dialogue, so that the entire meaning of the book (or of some of them) endes up being lodged in the references.

If you don’t get the references, you may get a few good laughs–Pratchett can be very funny–but you’ll have no idea what the hell the book is actually about. 

Pratchett’s best book is called Small Gods, and it’s definitely one of the three I’d have with me on a desert island if I was going to be stranded for life.  It’s one of the most interesting takes on religion I’ve ever read, and probably the best  Christian novel I’ve ever read, and that in spite of the fact that Pratchett is a fairly straightforward and outfront atheist in his private life.

Witches Abroad is not as dense or complex as that, but it’s an interesting take on the kind of people who “want to make you happy whether you want to be or not.”

It’s also an interesting take on how narrative–or thinking in narrative–can warp and ruin people’s lives.

And it is, as is most Pratchett, very funny.

But.

The chances are good that I’m not going to be able to use this book any more successfully than I have been able to use Small  Gods, and for the very same reason–a solid majority of my kids won’t know the fairy tales.

And no.  I’m really not exaggerating.

For many years, I gave a classroom exercise in point of view by asking my kids to retell the story of the three little pigs from the point of view of the wolf, or Cinderella from the point of view of the ugly stepsisters.  I had to give it up, because the exercise is useless when performed by people who have never heard the original story, or who have only heard it in class right before I ask them to write, because I tell it to them.

Think about this for a minute.

How is anybody supposed to be able to teach literature to students with no shared culture at all–at least, no culture they share across generations.

Forget trying to explain “Bartleby the  Scrivener” or “A Rose for Miss Emily.”  They’d find it nearly impossible to decipher Poe or Twain.  And if they have been taught one of these novels–say, Huckleberry Finn–in high school, they’ve been given a standard spiel about politics or race as an explanation of what the book “means.”

And politics and race are the good news.  At least an explanation like that connects the book to the real world.  Too often, what they get is an endless boring stream of “spot that symbol!” blather, sort of a game show approach to reading fiction.

I think it was W.H. Auden who is supposed to have been asked what children should read in school, and to have answered, “it doesn’t matter, as long as they all read the same thing.”

And I get that, but I think it does matter at least to this extent–we need to give our chidren at leas some experiences to share with ourselves.   I should think fairy tales would be right at the top of that list.  

By now, I think everybody reading this must be aware that I’m not much interested in the iea of doing this through the schools.  I think schools are a bad place to do it in, for a lot of reasons.

But surely there’s got to be some way, outside of controlling the institutions, that we could make sure every six year old knows the story of Cinderella, or of the three little pigs.

If we could find a way to get the basic bible stories out there–Adam and Eve, Noah and the Arc, even Sodom and Gomorrah; and yes, to atheist children as well as Protestant ones, if only to make Shakespeare comprehensible–that would be even better.

That’s actually a term in Roman Catholic theology.  It refers to the state of someone who, no matter how determined to know Christ, cannot do so–originally, because he was living in a place the Gospel had not been brought to and so had never heard of it, but later also applied to people who have had experiences of the church so horrendous that they can’t get past them (like, I presume, the victims of priest pedophilia).

But it’s a good term for this discussion, for a number of reasons.

Let me start by pointing out that I would have fel the same way about Sarah  Palin–as she presented herself during the campaign–if she hadn’t been running for anything at all.

It has nothing to do with what schools she went to, or whether she’s for or against abortion, or has a large family. 

It certainly has nothing to do with whether she hunts.  Practically everybody I know up here hunts.  For some families in the far northwest corner, it’s the only way they get meat in the winter.

In fact, what bothered me about Palin wasn’t even her ignorance.   Ignorance is a disability, but it’s curable if you want to cure it.

What bothered me about Palin was that she didn’t want to cure it. 

In fact, she made it perfectly plain that she had no intention of doing anything to cure it, that she was just peased as punch to be bone ignorance, because that made her a “regular person,” and that anybody who pointed out what she didn’t know was just practicing “gotcha journalism.”

Sorry, but there’s no place for me in a party that is willing to take somebody with that atitude and present it to the country as something to emulate. 

I also think that most of what you think were complaints about her “lifestyle” were in fact just code discussions for this attitude. 

If the Republicans had nominated a garage mechanic from Duluth who’d responded to his lack of knowledge on the necessary subjects by going, “gee, okay, let me WORK on that,” and then gone ahead and worked on it, I’d have thought the experiement was admirable.

But it looked to me as if the Republicans didn’t want that garage mechanic.  What they wanted was somebody who would do just what Palin did–parade her ignorance as a badge of honor and declare the superiority of stupid over intelligent, ignorant over educated. 

For what it’s worth,  I don’t think Palin got slammed any worse than Clinton did during the run-up to the impeachment.  At least, I’m sure that there were no U.S. Congressmen giving backyard firearms demonstrations meant to “prove” that she’d killed someone.

And I don’t think that this is peculiarly the function of American politics.  Nothing Palin was slammed with looked worse than what I used to read in the British tabloids about  British politicians on a regular basis–or what you could read about President  Bush in supposed respectable German newspapers right through the end of the administration.

And the country vindicated my faith in it, so I’m not going to have a complete meltdown here.

But this started as a discussion about ignorance, and it’s ignorance–and not politics–I wanted to talk about.

I don’t have a “damn the audience” attitude.  I’m simply not willing to cater to people who think the standard of value should be whatever they’ve managed to pick u with the least amount of effort.  

That attitude–and the attitude that everything should be brought down to that level ifit is to be valid as art–is more dangerous than Sarah Palin’s lack of knowledge about Russia could ever have been.

In the meantime, I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, which was a huge best seller, is funny as hell–and would require an education much better than mine to catch all the references he uses.

You don’t have to cater to stupid to write a successful novel, even for the popular market.

You do have to accept the fact that there are some audiences not worth having.

Back during the election, before I started writing this blog, I was contributing on a regular basis to a Usenet newsgroup I still contribute to on and off, and I was keeping my mouth shut on at least one point.  I know, I’m n ot all that good at keeping my mouth shut.  But in this case a number of people had made me annoyed, and since I knew those same people would be heartily in favor of my opinions on at least one subject, there were a few things I didn’t say so that I didn’t get drafted onto a side I wasn’t interested in being on.

It occurs to me that that paragraph probably makes no sense.  Bear with me.

Mique says that intellectuals exhibited “ugly” behavior during the last election, especially in their behavior to the Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.

I say that the single ugliest thing in American culture today is represented perfectly by  Sarah  Palin herself. 

Whether she is in fact what she chose to represent in public,  I have no way to know.  But what she chose to represent in public is the single worst thing about  American culture.

Note I said culture, not politics.  It’s not the politics I’m referring to.

God, yes, Michael Moore is a jerk.  I don’t know if he’s an intellectual–I’d say not–but he’s definitely unattractive.  On the other hand, what he does in his documentaries is neither better nor worse than what Ben Stein did in Expelled,  his movie about evolution, or what Michelle Bachman does every time she opens her mouth on national TV.

Palin, however, was the living, breathing embodiment of what George  W. Bush only pretended to be–yucka, yucka, yucka, looka me! I’m a stupid, ignorant hick and I’m proud of it! 

Republicans can be intellectuals, obviously.  There are a lot of Republican intellectuals out there.  The modern conservative movement was started by probably the most widely recognized public intellectual of his time, Willian F. Buckley, Jr. 

And you want to talk about “damn the audience?”  Buckley’s resonse to people who complained that he used too many big words was–look them up. 

I  don’t know how we got from William F. Buckley to  Sarah  Palin, but I’m not the only one unwilling to sign on to the latter.   Hell, during the election and after, a whole slew of very prominnent Republicans ditched support of the McCain ticket because they didn’t like what they saw in Palin–including Buckley’s own son, and such long-time party stalwarts as Regan speecwriter Peggy Noonan.  

The party of William F. Buckley, Jr, is one I could belong to–although I disagree with about half the platform; but then, I disagree with about half the platform for the Democrats, too.

The party of  Sarah  Palin has no room for me in it.  That “down home” “just folks” “don’t you just hate smart people, they’re all such snobs” attitude is a declaration of war against every single thing I think is valuable and important in an adult human life. 

And please remember, “just folks” is not the same thing as “ordinary people.”  There are plenty of ordinary people out there without that kind of attitude to life and learning and ambition.

Somebody here called what I’m talking about “anti-intellectualism,” and that’s certainly some of it.  But what I’m talking about goes far beyond anti-intellectualism. 

What this is is a mulish refusal to accept that there are any valid standards in the world that cannot be met by all us “just folks,” and when people say there are, well, they’re just being “elitists” and those aren’t real standards anyway, they’re just snobby pretentions.

I’m a dentist and you’re an evolutionary biologist with degrees in biology from MIT and Johns Hopkins and sixteen years of work in the field?   Well,  I don’t care–I know just as much about evolution as you do!

You’ve spent the last twenty years of your life living in England while I’ve been checking groceries here in Macawanee, Kansas all my life?  It doesn’t matter, I know just as much about the English National Health Service as you do!

This is “anti-intellectualism” only if you define the term to mean “opposition to anything that takes any thinking whatsoever.”

Yes, goodness knows, there are “intellectuals” who are jerks.

I’d still much rather have somebody erring on the side of jerky intellectualism than somebody witht the attitudes above.  Your intellectual pretentions might actually get you to read something someday that might kick start your brain into thinking better.  Wallowing in smug, self-satisfied ignorance is a potentially terminal condition.

I don’t care what Sarah  Palin’s political positions were–they could have been left or right, moderate or extreme–I could never vote for her, because in voting for her I would be voting to elevate that attitude to an almost official status.

Sarah Palin is a lot more dangerous, and destructive, than Michael Moore could be even if he were trying.

And if you’re going to ask me how a country founded by intellectuals–because Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin and even Hamilton were the intellectuals of their time–got to just this place, I couldn’t begin to tell you.

So,  I was thinking about yesterday’s post, and I want to clarify a few things.

First is that I never suggested that writers should add references deliberately for the sake of adding references.

In fact,  I thought I was stressing, over and over again, that the writer should write in the way that is natural to him.   I agree with Lymaree that the best luck a writer can have is to have a style that works on many different levels for different people–although  I do think that that works more consistently in film than in prose–but the bottom line, for me, is that the writer be true to himself.

I certainly do not think that there is any virtue in being obscure for the sake of being obscure, but I also don’t think there is any virtue in being accessible for the sake of being accessible. 

But what I really object to is the idea that the standards for “good” books should be set by the least intelligent, least educated, least diligent readers among us, the same people who made life miserable for the nerds and the geeks when we were all children.

Sorry, guys, but they had their run.  Books are my place.  And in my place, the standards of good and bad, right and wrong, cool and uncool, are set by people like me.

If you don’ think that’s a lot of what’s going on in all the arguments about “intellectual elites” and all the rest of it, you’re crazy.   Virtually every writer I know–and a fair number of the academics in the humanities, come to think of it–has a string of horror stories about childhood, all centered on that relentless imposition of mediocrity that is the standard American primary and secondary school.

Hell, it was that way for me in New England where, if there’s a need for budget cuts, the schools eliminate sports long before they eliminate academic programs.   I can only imagine what it was like for my friend from Mississippi, who grew up in a place where football was all that mattered for a boy and dating a football player was all that mattered for a girl–and the coach taught math because, let’s face it, it was more important to have somebody on staff who understood footbal than somebody who understood algebra.

We talk about conformity a lot, but the problem isn’t conformity, it’s what we’re asked to conform to.  And it outlives high school by a long shot.   Every politician, actor, filmmaker, novelist, journalist, you name it, is required to pay repeated abeissance to the Absolute Wonderfulness of the American small town and the people who live in it.

If they don’t, they not only get branded as “elites,” but if they’re prominent enough they get a nice little stretch on the FoxNews cycle. 

This came up, a couple of years ago, on a forum I sometimes contribute to, when I pointed out to a gentleman that if I had thought that staying home with my children and not having a career was the better path, I’d have chosen that one.  Since I didn’t, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I was just sighing and envious of Mrs. Homemaker, getting to opt out of the workforce like that and spending all her time with her family.

I  arranged by life to make sure I spent as much time as possible with my children–and given what I do, that was a lot of time–but to do nothing else for twenty years would have driven me crazy.

And it isn’t just that.  I’ve had a very expensive education.  I  think women who have that and ditch it all to go back home and “nest” are doing something at least ethically, if not morally, wrong, at least in cases where there’s no extraordinary circumstance (like the death or disability of a child).

Why is it that we’re compelled, so often, to pretend that we admire the average, the mediocre, the unambitious–that the highest standard we aspire to is to be “just folks”?

I don’t want to be “just folks.”  I never did.  Life with a big, ethnic, anti-intellectual family is not My Big Fat Greek Wedding, it’s a horror story that absolutely refuses to go away when you grow up and leave it.  

I think people have a right to do what makes them happy–well, short of serial murder or raping children–but  I don’t think that they have a right to demand that I even pretend to denigrate my own decisions in order to elevate theirs to cultural stardom.

Here’s what I think the truth is–there are significant things to be done in this world, and they will not be done by “just folks.”  Curing cancer, devising a better method to teach mathematics to  recalcitrant twelve year olds, making the next really spectacular movie or writing the next really significant novel–all those things take intelligence, ambition, drive, talent and the determination not to be just like everybody else.

Of course we need plumbers and electricians as well as surgeons and novelists–but you know what?  Plumbers and electricians don’t have to be “just folks” either.   The problem with “just folks” is not that they’re stupid, but that they’re ignorant and proud of it.

I write what I write the way I write it because that’s how I write.  When I add a reference, it’s not because I’m thinking of ways to be obscure, it’s because that’s what came into my head.

I  walked out on Small Townville a long time ago, and the last thing I want is to import the values of ST into the world I walked out of it for.

Before I get down to the actual discussion, I’d like to point out something.

This is the way I write this blog:  I get up in the morning, work on my fiction while drinking vast amounts of very strongly brewed tea and then, when I’m done, I access the WordPad page.

Then I sit down and type whatever comes into my head.   Just like that.  I don’t think it over first (which ought to be obvious from some of these posts).   I don’t write it out and then edit it.   I rarely change words or fix sentences.

What you see here is the way my mind works, left to itself, with no help at all.   The vocabulary is the vocabulary my mind uses, without trying.  The sentence structure is the sentence structure my mind uses.   This is the way I think.

I’ve spend virtually my entire life, from fairly early childhood, being accused of using “big words” and being a “phony” because I’m trying to “put on airs” by sounding “all snobby.” 

I’ve actually tried to fix this in myself on and off over the years, only to run into the same roadblock each time:  I’ve got no idea what other people think are “big words.”  When  I try not to use them, I fail, because I invariably think that something isn’t a “big word” that my accusers think is very big indeed–like, say, “invariably.”

I bring this up because of what should be obvious–there is nothing a writer can write that will not lose him some audience.

In my case, I literally can’t sound like myself without losing a hefty chunk of audience, and it’s not because I’m importing a deliberately “fancy” vocabulary to put some people off. 

But it’s not just the vocabulary.   Take the basic techniques of fiction.   We’ve gone into the problem with third person multiple viewpoint in fiction before.  It’s a very basic technique, not something fancy and esoteric, and I honestly don’t think that people who can’t recognize it can really be said to be able to read.

But a lot of people aren’t able to recognize it, and are angry and confused when a writer uses it.   The writer has the choice of ditching one of the oldest and most useful techniques in fiction or losing some audience.

I  agree with Robert on at least some things–no, writing 25 word sentences isn’t automatically better than writing short ones (and contemporary literary fiction adheres riigdly to the short-sentence formula), and using lots of references isn’t automatically better than using fewer.

But anybody who produces a first rate work of fiction is going to lose a lot of audience to the simple fact most people won’t get most of it, and don’t want to.

I’ve taught Small Gods to classrooms full of students who declare that they don’t understand a word of it–and when I point out the Crucifixion scene have no idea what I’m talking about.  I mean, they know Jesus had something to do with dying on a cross, but what’s that supposed to be about anyway, and why should they care?

I’ve taught Gaudy Night to classrooms full of students who found it completely boring and didn’t understand a word of it, and the same with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

These are not difficult books written for highbrow audiences.

Just how far down into the depths of least common denominator is an author required to go not to lose audience? 

And will anybody notice that long before he gets to the bottom of that particular pit, he’d have lost that part of his audence known as me?

I did get both the references to Space Invaders and the Almanach de Gotha.  Any truly well-educated reader would get both, as he’d get both the references to Alisoun and truth, justice and the American way. 

The point of referenes is not to create a puzzle, any more than the point of vocabulary is to send the reader to the dictionary–the point of refenes is in the assmption that everybody who reads the book gets them without thinking about them.

Yeats didn’t write “The Second  Coming” as a puzzle he hoped the reader would work out.  He wrote it under the assumption that the reader wouldn’t have to think twice about the references, because the reader would already know them just as clearly and automatically as he knew his own name.

And, in fact, I did know them the first time I read that poem, and I never had to sit down and “work out” what it meant, and the first time I saw The Exorcist I knew immediately that the film was referencing the poem, which told me something about the meaning of the film I might not have known otherwise.

All writers use references.  All of them.  No writer could create a work of fiction without them.  Films are full of them, including films meant to be light comedies or mass-cult horror fests.  Mel Brooks is as full of references as Woody Allen is.  Maybe more.

What is “a good book for John” may not be “a good book for Mary,” but what is a good book is a good book irrespective of whether either of them “likes” it.

And it is definitely not the mark of a good book that its author carefully and meticulously dumbed down the entire project so that it wouldn’t upset the fragile little egos of his least educated and most determinedly slothful potential audience.

End of rant.

Ack.

I still don’t know how to say this.

Let me try to start here.

First, all art functions–all of it.  That doesn’t mant that art is its function in any particular society at any particular time.  Medieval church art functioned as catechism, as a teaching tool for a populace that could not read, but painting is not “about” providing catechetal lessons. 

But even though an art is not “about” its function in any particular society, any art that ceased to have any function for anybody in a society would cease to be practiced.   If it didn’t die out altogether, it would become a museum exhibit, the kind of thing that is taught at school and encountered nowhere else, or  almost nowhere else.

You don’t need huge masses of people, or anything like a majority, of a society to keep an art alive, although the more people who have the better the chances of an art’s survival.   And an art doesn’t have to serve the same function in the same society at all times.

For the great mass of history, poetry served the kind of function now taken up by the novel, or by film.  Now it seems to function as a specialty taste for a small and rarified group of people who all know each other, read each other’s books and come to each other’s readings.

Or maybe not.  Most people, after all, find themselves deeply involved with poetry in this society at this time.  It’s just that they don’t call it poetry.  They call it “lyrics.”

So painting might be a better example–the function of painting as it was understood in, say, the eighteenth century, is now the function of photography, and the “New York Art  Scene,” as Lymaree put it a while back, looks to the rest of us like a little collective delusion.

The second thing is that the health and general level of achievement in an art depends heavily on the knowledgability of the available audience.

Robert scoffs at writing that uses lots of references–it’s just a puzzle, he says.  But the simple fact is that no writer could write anything without using at least some references.  References are a kind of shorthand.  If the writer can use references and be confident that his audience will recognize them without effort, he can say a lot more in a lot fewer words, and say it more effectively.

To take a very low-level example:  there was a movie out last year called Knowing, in which aliens come to take one boy an one girl child off the earth before the earth explodes in a cosmic disaster (the sun goes nova?  something like that). 

The aliens take the children to another planet and put them down in a field.  At the far end of the field, there is a tree.  The children run towards it, and it’s obviously an apple tree.

Understanding the end of that movie requires understanding a reference–but trying to make that end without the reference would have been a mess.  It could have been done, of course, but it would have required a lot of set-up and explanation, and the impact of the ending would have been greatly decreased.

Shakespeare didn’t expect his audiences to get hold of copies of his plays and study them for hidden references.  He expected them to know, and his expectations were largely fulfilled.   The same is true of that Yeats poem, “The Second Coming.”  I understood what it meant the first time I read it because I knew the references before I saw them in the poem.  They weren’t strange or obscure to me.

And the poem says much more with the references than it could say without them, because the references imply entire narratives of connection.   That apple tree at the end of Knowing, and the children’s mad rush towards it, mean not only that the children are in paradise but that they’re about to lose that paradise.  It’s also at least possibly a conjecture about how the original of that story came to be.

An artist whose audience has little in the way of breadth and depth of cultural literacy, or one whose audience is composed of people from various cultural traditions who do not share such breadth and depth in any one tradition, is automatically restricted in the art he is able to create–or, at least, that he is able to create and present successfully.

George Steiner had half  a valid point in “Archives of  Eden.”  Democratic societies are not fertile soil for the greatest of art, for two reasons.   The first is the democratic assumption–that the standard of anything, art or food or make of car, should be how many people like and want it.  The second is that to present anything that cannot be enjoyed by “most” people is automatically to engage in “elitism,” and to be a snob and therefore morally as well as politically unacceptable as a human being.

But the fact is that the best of anything–automobiles, corned beef hash recipes, books, music–is unlikely to be appreciated by “everybody,” or even by a majority.   All human endeavors have internal logics against which various particular instances of them can be judged. 

And, interestingly enough, practitioners of the various arts often have a spookily similar take on them.   I wish  I could find the reference to the experiment that was done in Africa in, I think, the early  Seventies, where the mebers of various African tribes who were unfamiliar with Western music were presented with a sest of works (Beethoven, Bach and Mozart as well as rock and roll and jazz).  The ordinary members of the tribes basically thought verything they were hearing was n oise, and liked, if anything, some of the rock and roll.  The tribal musicians, however, were able to rate the music in an order much like classical music devotees in the West.   The internal logic of music is the same the world over, because it’s about something in the music, not something in individual “taste.” 

The knowledgable audience for an art doesn’t have to be vast, but it does have to exist, if an artist is to do the best work.   Without such an audience, an artist will only do the best work if he doesn’t care if anybody notices or not, and artists are notorious for wanting to communicate on an almost obsessive basis.

(A note, by the way–when I say “artist,” I mean any artist–poet, novelist, composer, painter, sculpter, choreographer.  Last time I got started on this, somebody, I  forget who, seemed to think I meant only painters, or maybe painters and sculptors.)

The democratic assumption has its drawbacks, and one of those drawbacks is a mass resentment of any proejct–arts or otherwise–that isn’t immediately accessible to everybody. 

But there isn’t a single field anywhere where the best of it can be understood and appreciated by everybody.   Recognizing the best always requires education and experience and a certain amount of work.  It is never effotless.

I’d like to start by pointing out that nobody asked me who I thought was “a great writer.”  The term of choice was “admired as a writer.”  If you’d asked me who I thought was a great writer, the answers would be significantly different.  But if I’m asked who I admire as a writer, I’m going to talk about the writing.

And the truth is, as I’ve said before, that I’m not much interested in plot, and that I don’t read novels or plays or even g to movies for plot.  There are a limited number of possible plots.   They’ve all been done to death already, with nothing new to come on that front, ever, except some changes of setting and a few twists added by technology.  I don’t see the point.

But that brings me to the place I thought I’d be at about a week and a half ago, which is to the book I’m reading–actually, a compendium of three books and a long essay–by Yvor Winters, called In Defense of  Reason.

I’m nearing the end, which means I’m in the middle of book three, called The Anatomy of Nonsense. And even if this collection had done nothing else for me, it introduced me to an American poet named Jones Very, and to an early poem by Wallace Stevens called “Sunday Morning.” 

Very is interesting for a couple of reasons, only one of which is that he wrote very fine poetry.  He was also a contemporary of Emerson and Thoreau, and a New  Englander born (like Hawthorne) in Salem, but the crisis in Calvinism made him not opt for the Romantic delusion but to become more Calvinistic.  Which, considering the internal contradictions of Calvinism, must have been an interesting balancing act, psychologically and morally.  But I recommend to any of you a poem called “the  Still-Born.”

That said, the interesting thing, to me, about this book (okay, collection of books, I don’t know what to call it) is the fact that it’s written by a man who assumes that discussion about literature will be of a certain kind, and that the concerns about literature will be of a certain nature, and who therefore proceeds without explaining why he is doing what he is doing.

This is actually the kind of dicussion about literature I was hoping to find when I first went to college, and mostly didn’t.   Winters was not a New Critic, and didn’t have much patience for them, but even the New Critics were going out of fashion when I got to Poughkeepsie.

There are also a few hints here about something I wish  I knew more about:   Winters says that his study of literature made it obvious to him that God must exist, but he says elsehere that he is neither a Christian nor capable of being one.  Since these volumes were mostly put out in the 1930s–and since he shows no signs of going in for  Buddhism or that kind of thing–I’d really like to know what form this belief in God took.  

What he does do, what the purpose of each of these collected volumes is, is to stand up for absolute values and absolute truth.  The “nonsense” in The Anatomy of Nonsense stands for relativism, hedonism and the Romantic impulse.  That’s how I ended up learning about Jones Very.  In the second of these volumes, called Maule’s  Curse, Winters compares the New England Transcendentalists, and especially Emerson, to Very and  Very’s resurgent Calvinism.

I agree with Robert that we have, at the moment, exchanged one ossified system for another, but what should have happened, what u sually has happened, historicaly, when a system ossifies, is not just that it breaks down but that it resurgence not of a new system but of a new form of an old one.

The Victorians didn’t invent “Victorian morality.”  They discarded both the looseness of Renaissance morals and the rigidities of early Protestantism to constuct a newly workable framework for the Christian consensus. 

They even managed to keep several of the things the Enlightenment did right–like a commitment to the use of reason in human affairs, the investigation of the material world by material means, and the sea-change that made government more a matter of parliaments than of kings.

Or Queens.  One of the most depressingly disappointing experiences of m life was to finally find, about five years or so ago, a good biography of Victoria, only to find that–the strenuous efforts of the writer notwithstanding–she seems to have been a largely mediocre woman who was simply in the right place at the right time.

Winters points out that Deism, in itself, was the seed of the Romantic revolt, because Deism assumed not only what I’d always been taught–that God made the universe and established its laws, and then ceased to be at all interested in its day to day operations–but that,  God being good, the creatures and the laws he made must also be good.  Therefore, the nature of man must be, at base, also good, and man could make himself happy by learning to understand “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and following them.

For Winters, the study of literature is an essentially moral project not because literature will make us better men and women but because literature is one of the ways, and the chief way for most people, that human beings ask and attempt to answer moral questions.

I am, I think, making a mess of things here in ways that I can’t begin to unravel, but I think what  I’m getting to comes down to this:

The Victorian dispensation was a reaction to the moral and social excesses of the eras that proceeded it, and most immediately to Romanticism. 

That reaction, and the establishment (or re-establishment) of conventional and rule-bound morality was accomplished by the middle class.

But “middle class” here means not what we take it to mean here in America in the 21st century, but by what we now call the “upper middle class”-by the very people the  Republian party likes to call “the elites”–not the very rich, but the liberally educated members of the gentlemen’s professions, the owners of substantial business enterprises.

The Sixties was, in a sense, the resurgence of the Romatic revolt against reason.  If history repeats itself, then we should be seeing a return of conventional moral strictures in precisely those people and places–the Gold  Coast of Connecticut, Westchester County, the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.–who are now so enthusastically championing the exact opposite thing.

In a way, of course, the moral strictures have reappeared–but where they should have reappared to enforce compliance with an old code, they’ve reappeared to enforce compliance with a new one.

And, of course, it’s not working.  When the middle classes of Victoria’s reign lowered the boom on Romantic moral laxness, they were influential not only because they were an “elite,” but because the rules they wanted to enforce had always been generally accepted to be valid, even if honored mostly in the breach.

That meant that the classes under the middle respected the rules even if they couldn’t or wouldn’t always follow them–but in that respect came at least attempts at compliance, and in those attempts came a reformation of society that lasted over a hundred years and gave us some of the most important intellectual and cultural work ever produced on this earth.

The new moral strictures of America’s upper middle class today, however, are laregly foreign not only to the public at large but even to themselves–the exception being the enormous importance placed on commitment to work almost bove all other things. 

Winters didn’t live long enough to see any of this, but I wonder what he would have thought of it.

So–where to start.

Lymaree says I should meet more contemporary artists.  But I wasn’t thinking about contemporary artists.  I was thinking about the historical record, and how many great painters, poets and composers have been distinctly Bohemian–think of Paris in the twenties, San Francisco in the Fifties, the New England Transcendentalists, the circles of Byron, Shelley,  Blake, Coleridge and even George Eliot.

It’s really remarkable how consistantly the Bohemian theme arises when you look at high art movements across time, and how many of the people who seem on the surface to be conventional are not (for instance,  Somerset Maugham).  And, like I said, the stereotype goes back at least to classical Athens and persists today.

But I also don’t think that it’s a matter of politics, one way or the other.   You couldn’t figure out my politics from the writers I admire, mostly because I admire writers as writers, not for what it is they’re saying, assuming they’re saying anything.

And quite a few people whose ideas I agree with  I know are really terrible writers. 

Some of the writers I admire as writers are opaque as to their political or philosophical convictions–think Jane Austen, and J.D. Salinger–others are not opaque but objectionable, like both Louis Frederick Celine and Jose Saramago.  Norman Mailer is a stunning writer and a complete idiot in virtually every other way.  The same is true–although somewhat less true–of the Hemingway of the early short stories. 

I’m closer–politically–to Ayn Rand than to any of these people, and I know she’s God awful as a writer.  In fact, cringingly awful. 

The closest I can come to a writer whom I admire as a writer and whose ideas I mostly agree with–and then I only agree with about two thirds of them–is the essayist who goes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple.  He writes such clean and elegant prose it’s astonishing, and he’s better at the sheer writing than anybody else I can think of who’s working today. 

But I’d admire that writing even if Dalrymple were producing Communist tracts.   Which is why I admire George Steiner as a writer–at least of nonfiction–even though his ideas drive me up the wall at least half the time.

But I think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the Romantic critique of civilization was a coherent one, and that when Bohemia first recognzed itself as a separate and conscious movement, it had a logical rationale for what it was doing that was not entirely wrong.

Rousseau declared that human beings were naturally good and that society corrupted them.  He was wrong, but he was responding to something real.

Manners are what human beings devise to express morals in their everyday lives.  Manners stand in for a set of assumptions about the nature of being human–and therefore about what one human being owes to another in recognition of their shared humanity–and allow men and women to go about their daily business without having to always judge and figure what themoral thing to do would be in each separate encounter.

There’s nothing wrong with this, nor is there anything wrong with the fact that the particular customs devised as the stand-in are largely arbitrary.  If your society thinks that human beings are little less than angels and should be respected accordingly, it might demand that you tip your hat when you pass a fellow human , or that you bow deeply, or that you get down on your knees and kiss his shows.  The particular custom doesn’t really matter much, as long as everybody understands that it’s meant to express your respect.

The problem with manners is the problem with all things human.  They become detached from their original purpose over time, and begin to be nothing more than rote habits observed for their own sake.

Once manners get to this point, they can become stultifying instead of liberating.  For one thing, once they’ve been detached from their original purpose, they tend to attach themselves to a whole slew of really bad ideas, and always the same bad ideas:  to hierarchies of prejudice, to the human tendency to label some human beings humans and others less so, to the whole messy competitiveness that shows its most annoying ace in high school clique cultures. 

Bohemianism as it first self-consciously understood itself was a protest against empty formalism that really was empty formalism, but its approach to that protest was to attack the principles that had originally provided a foundation for that formalism.  

I think there is always danger of such formalism, and of the ossification it threatens.  I even spent part of the morning looking at this

http://www.slate.com/id/2223479/

which showed up as a link on Arts and Letters Daily this morning.  These days, it isn’t priests and ministers who police our manners, and through them our morality, it’s psyhiatrists nd psychologists.  We now talk in medical terminology about until very recently we considered problems in philosophy.

By the way–shopaholics, Ritalin, and “post traumatic embitterment disorder” are all good reasons to resist scientism. 

But it seems to me that I am living in a strange period.  Aomost all the old systems of manners that I remember from my growing up have disappeared, as have many of the moral  principles that once provided their foundation. 

What should have happened was some kind of cyclic resurgence and regeneration of morals–that is, after all, h ow we got the Victorians after the depredations of both the Renaissance and he Reformation.  And yes, I know they both had good parts, too.

For some reason, though, we seem to have skipped the resurgence and regeneration part and gone directly to the dessicated formalism, and like all formalisms, what we’ve got lacks coherence or even logic.

Why is a psychologist who takes his patient’s desire to reject homosexual practice for heterosexual guilty of malpractice, while one who takes his patient’s desire to reject his physical maleness just doing the right thing?  Logically, either both these psychologists should be guilty of malpractice or neither should be. 

But formalistic systems of manners are never self-aware enough to ask questions like this, and they tend to treat such questions hurled by dissenters as proof that the dissenters are deeply morally flawed. 

Or, in our case, crazy.