Things I learnt.
Should you rush off
now and read Alan Garner?
No, he’s my author,
find your own.
As I wrote 3 posts ago, the book that shakes your world, and goes on doing so, may put
your best friend to
sleep. It’s a valuable lesson. Why a thin book about three teenagers and a set
of plates should have been so disturbing, and remain so decades later, after
repeated re-readings, is probably unanswerable.
I think there is an
objective argument to be made for the quality of his prose and his stature as a
stylist. I doubt I would have ‘understood’ Heaney’s ‘Do not waver into
Language/ Do not Waver in it’ if it weren’t for Garner’s books. I don’t think I
would have been so receptive to Basil Bunting or Geoffrey Hill without him
either and I don’t see those two as in anyway superior. I admire the man’s
integrity, his willingness to hold his line, to follow the grain in the wood to
where it took him. I am grateful for the way he never patronised me as his
reader. All of which I suspect goes for
Bunting and Hill as well.
In the Smoke that Thunders, Garner claims to
have been offered two absolute pieces of advice by his Grandfather: If someone
else can do the job better, let them; Take as
long as the job needs.
They seem true though
difficult to put in practice.
Although initially heading
towards a life of classical scholarship, he makes the point in his fiction and
in his other writing that Greek rationality and Logic are not the only path to
understanding. They are one way, and they are essential in some cases, but at
other times stories, myths, songs, the poetry inherent in the texture of
language itself, the interaction of story and landscape, are powerful tools for
a different kind of understanding, a different, not lesser, way of thinking.
The work he did preparing Strandloper may
have crystalized this. As long as the myth or the story isn’t trivialised, or
made redundant by a desire to please the audience at all costs, the myth, poem
and story are ways of thinking through and in language. ‘Through’ here means both
‘by means of’ and ‘by way of travelling through’.
But for this to work, there’s
an element of necessary surrender on the part of the reader. An initial
humility and a willingness to pay attention which are both unfashionable. And
sadly, it’s the opposite to the way reading is taught in most literary
programs. There are pragmatic reasons for including books in schools. They are
ways of developing the ability to read, write and think in language. But how
could you teach the real power and pleasure of reading, if you start by
teaching reluctant readers to resist?
The lie that
underwrites 'critical literacy', that somehow it empowers readers and protects
them from the invidious ideological work of the text, (never the poem, the play
or the novel, always the text, as though there was no important difference
between The Waste Land and a Macdonald’s advert), is a complete contradiction not
only of common sense but of the way people who love and value books, read. It’s
a bunker mentality in which critic and student sit in their fox hole sniping at
any text that approaches them, having decided in advance what is important and
what is acceptable based on their preferred version of the world, or, in the
case of students, their teacher or lecturer’s preferred version.
Critical literacy, as
often taught and practised, is the arrogant victory of the mindless and
unthinking who are too scared to risk the discovery that the world is much more
complicated (and interesting) than their own ghetto mentality. It destroys the
way story and poem work for reasons based on a ludicrous misunderstanding of
the way story and poem work. As a way of
reading it is no more admirable or intelligent than the mindless use of badly
written books to pass the time and it doesn’t even offer the pleasure of the
latter.
The new national
Australian Senior English Literature syllabus makes the same mistake. Let us discuss ‘representations’,
let us talk about the way ‘Aesthetic’ features ‘position readers’. There is no sense that literature is an art
form. Or that ignorance of the history of that art form, a contested and
infinitely debatable list of practitioners and products, renders any statement
about the value or quality of a work of art instantly irrelevant. It is a little more than an institutionalised,
theoretically justified version of the currently fashionable cult of ignorance.
In an academic context, it should be unforgiveable.
The new syllabus compounds
this by assessing literary knowledge through an ‘unseen exam’ in which students
are expected to ‘know’ a book well enough to answer previously unseen questions
without having the book present. It should be obvious to anyone that this is a self defeating way of assessing any kind of genuine response to literature. It doesn’t even assess students' memory of the
book; it assesses their memory of their teachers’ best guess at what the topics
are going to be. And so another generation of student readers will have the
oxygen supply cut off to their brains.
Whether literary
education has any value in regard to understanding how books works is still a
moot point. Which is why there must always be free public libraries. There are always
books waiting to be read. Readers will find their way to them, regardless of
the way literature is used or abused in educational institutions. Someone is
always going to be saying,..’read this’. Literary education is well on its way
to becoming redundant and irrelevant and few will mourn its eventual passing.
What did I learn from
Alan Garner?
Do not waver into
Language
Do not waver in it.
And
Treasure the texts
that rattle your world, not the ones that lull you to sleep by telling you what
you already knew or wanted to hear.
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