The Place of Language in the Study of Literature
The last time I was invited to speak to the members of this learned Council – three and a half years ago – it was on the general theme of the decline of literacy. Not realizing before I spoke how critical the position of English had become in the schools and in some universities, I spoke with a certain rhetorical exuberance and figurative panache. This time I want to talk turkey – cold turkey; and take as my text a statement made by David Jones (painter, poet, calligrapher):
‘No material is dead that has been given the imprint of man’s mind.’
Language is the beginning and end of literature. Without language there is no literature; without a sense of language there is no way of entering into the life of literature. If we are to study literature well, there is no end to what we can profitably know about language; a lifetime is too short for that mastery – not only the meanings of words, but the shapes language assumes in bodying forth, in uttering, in giving outness to what the speaker or writer means: for it is persons, not words, that mean. Whenever, without awareness appropriately attuned, we encounter a work of literature – that is, a shapely instance of language excellently used – we encounter something that is at once mysterious and familiar: for to be able to manage language justly and inventively is the specific mark of our humanity.
For the purposes of our discussion I take the term ‘literature’ to apply, not simply to anything written or printed whatever, but in some more restricted sense to apply to those writings that may be regarded as excellent sustained feats of language-in-action – ‘Monuments of their own magnificence’, which, according to Yeats is the only singing school for poets. This would include poems, novels, plays (without being too fussy for a start about their order of excellence as long as the lower orders were not taken to represent the whole class), a certain discursive and reflective works – e.g. Browne’s Religio Medici, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Sherrington’s Man on his Nature, certain biographies and a few autobiographies. For convenience I shall speak of any member of the class as a ‘poem’ to refer to a special concentration on the resources of language; but sometimes it will be clear that I am using ‘poem’ and ‘poet’ in a narrower and more usual sense – the correct distinctions being between verse and prose, poetry and science.
Rainer Maria Rilke said that ‘In art, as in life, there are no classes for beginners: we are expected to do the most difficult things right at the start.’ Of the most difficult things we have to do right at the start, speaking is one, reading is another, writing is yet another – and those three are all inextricably intertwined. This is the appalling difficulty that confronts us in our work as instructors in literature: we cannot begin with elementary examples of art because there are no such things. Our inquiry deals primarily not with phenomena but with linguistic events seen as modes of life; our judgments and recognitions have to be our own judgments and recognitions, even though other people may somehow bring us to them. The works we are studying – our ‘material’ – when it is presented to us printed on the page, exists only potentially; we have literally to bring it into existence (short of actually making it), we have to bring it to life, give it substance in our minds before there is anything to study. There is no point in trying to provide first the equipment for inquiry or application – called ‘skills’ – and then expecting a sense of language to grow out of that; the beginning has already begun.
Yet language superlatively used does cast a commanding spell, it can be counted on to send a reader in search of what he needs to refine his attention and discrimination and to give him an informed sense of what is actually happening. But the very nature of speaking or writing is inseparable from two of our most distinctive characters as human beings – imagination and language, the two being inseparable; both are dynamic and integrative, and both are seriously misrepresented – and can even be inhibited – if they are ‘explained’ conceptually in causal-temporal diagrams and analogies. The difficulty in understanding the nature and process of language is not so much that it is elusive, as that it is too accessible: we do it all the time and find it difficult to watch our own doing of it. Beginning to get the hang of language is almost the beginning of a child’s conscious mental activity; language is imbedded in life right from the beginning, and right from the beginning language is complex, shy, and intractable. In the several early years of life there is nothing we spend so much time and attention coming to terms with; for it is not merely a means of ‘communicating’, an instrument that we learn to use; it is also highly evocative and speaks to us (as it were) from primordial depths of recognition; we know in our bones right from the start that language is of our nature and that it also discovers to us our own peculiar nature. Literature in some form – language ordered with a mysterious fineness – a voice repeating chants and rimes, making songs and evocative phrases, magical incantations, the sudden charm or menace of a word or a phrase crisp in the mind – these are part of our dawning sense of language, speaking to us commandingly in rhythms and patterns, haunting us with what is not yet known and perhaps never can be known.
I had a little nut tree,
Nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg
And a golden pear.
Grey goose and gander
Waft your wings together,
And carry the good king’s daughter
Over the one-strang river.
‘Look, it’s a heron!’ – the crystal of a dream that haunted most of Edwin Muir’s early life; or a phrase that Coleridge recalled years after first meeting it – ‘We buried the ship’s carpenter in the sedges under the clift of a hill.’
About the nature of language we know very little for certain; there are some theories, most of them more plausible than convincing. We know that language works, but we know little about how it works, or how we make it work. Much of the working is below the level of conscious attention, and only a person with a special flair for introspection and for drawing inferences from the actual use of language in a highly developed state is likely to be able to see what connexions there are (for example) between imagination and language, between the physical characteristics of wording and the state of mind that could be supposed to have induced it in precisely that form and substance. In this area we need to move very cautiously and patiently, choosing our descriptive and analogical account of the activity of language with great care; for inappropriate terms and analogies – especially mechanistic and behavioural ones – can block our thinking, and will radiate like an infection to destroy our perception of the way language works, of what in any instance is actually going on, of the quality of linguistic events and the ordering of them.
That altogether, as I see it, is the obstacle that confronts us. If we are to reflect upon language in a heuristic ode we must be prepared to surmount the obstacle without losing the integrity of our thinking or the strictness of our direction; we must surmount the obstacle not try to outflank it. If we try to outflank it, we shall probably find ourselves converting literature into a pretext for free uninformed discussion on contemporary obsessions – war, sex, communism, the rights of women, even education.
Our first need in coming into touch with literature is to hear what it is saying and in what voice; listening attentively as though we expected the poem to have no more explicit meaning than a piece of music. The desired relation of a reader to what he is reading is not ‘interest’, for that refers to content: it’s something more like what Quakers call ‘concern’ – in this case a concern both for the integrity of the poem and for the integrity and rightness of our cognitive grasp of it. Coleridge captures this requirement in his often misquoted – or rather, half-quoted – statement on dramatic illusion, in which he counsels us to invoke ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith.’ Whoever or whatever secures that poetic faith – whether it is the poem itself, or the reader, or some discreet helper – it is essential that it be established; certainly not as deliberate make-believe, but as a commitment-for-the-time-being to the life of the poem. So, in listening, we need to let the speaking be at the right pace, so that we catch the inflection of a voice speaking inventively; for usually in a poem we overhear a voice, speaking (it may be) to itself, probably not to us, and certainly not at us. Until we are finely attuned to the mode of language being uttered – and for this we have a remarkable sharpness of discrimination – we are in no position even to say that the work exists, that it has any reality of life. We need to cultivate a sense that language is as direct and clear as a gesture, disposing itself deftly in space as a dance does, or the configurations of a piece of contrapuntal music; for the drama of language can have a sparse linear symmetry. Language asks to be directly grasped, having tactual qualities as distinct as the feel of fur or silk or broken glass or the skin of the cheek; grasped simply and lightly enough that we sense every slight fluctuation in its movement, its space, its heart-beat and breath-length. For when language passes into the symbolic mode and moves towards the condition of music it becomes, characteristically, not sonorous only but taut, not mellifluous but broken, above all capable of swift unprepared change.
If literature did not more than tell us about life, there shouldn’t (one would suppose) be any difficulty in studying literature. But, even though literature can at times render the feeling of life more sharply than we are ever likely to experience it ourselves, literature is not life. And there is real difficulty, not in the difference between literature and life, but because no clear distinction is possible between the functions of a work of literature and the functions of language, or between the functions of language and the functions of the intellectual-emotional complex that we call (alternatively) the mind or a person. There are other awkwardnesses about this seamless process. We cannot first ‘learn language’ and then – fully equipped – advance upon literature; and if we subdivide learning lf language into isolated compartments such as word-recognition, spelling, grammar, syntax, and the like, there is little assurance that that will take us far towards grasping literature or language for what it is. So we must begin with works of literature, relying upon the response of our natural endowment to establish what kind of ‘feel’ literature has.
Literature can be ‘used’ in various ways, not all of them profitable. Best of all, it can be read for delight. But it can also be read as a record of personal experience that can be vicariously shared; it can be used as a stimulus for emotions that have little or nothing to do with the writing that incites them; it can be read as a record of historical, social, and political events in the past, or in the present, or as accounts of strange places and people and events that would otherwise never come our way. Certainly some fairly reliable factual information can be distilled from literature, and in some sense a person’s experience can be enlarged and extended by reading. But those seem to me matters of secondary importance if we are thinking of the ways the study of language and literature combine to induce processes of exceptional educational value.
At every level – in school, in university, to first year students, to final year honours students, to graduate students – my prime concern in the study of literature has always been to try to imprint the fascination of language, and to help cultivate to the full the ability to read perceptively and to write exactly and with an eloquent spareness. For I believe that it is much easier to be learned than to be literate. The first step towards discovering the life of literature is the grace of reading with delight – a very different matter from reading for fun. I try first of all to clear away all talk about ‘creativity’, and to concentrate on poetry – that highest and most direct and complex form of wording – treating it as a craft, as making (which is what the word poiesis quite simply means), to find out how writings are made, and to pay very close attention to what poems do – the shape and amplitude of utterances (which are the irreducible units of meaningful language); the dynamics of syntax (the muscular and nervous way words can move and hold together); the drama – the pure action – of language as it traces out the activity of the speaker’s mind and feeling (for, if the writing does not sound like a speaking voice, it is ill writing). I try to persuade people to listen, to hear what is happening, to learn in their reading to rely upon the remarkable perspicuity we all bring to our judgment of what a person meant by saying something in a certain way. The sense of language is like a fine ear for music: capable of minute discriminations, aware of what is actually happening in the wording of it, aware too of the ways language has been used and can be used and so – as in music – guessing what may happen and savouring the way it actually turns out.
I am sure that much of the trouble we have in studying, and teaching literature can be traced to two sources: an inert or defective sense of language, and a nagging insistence upon talking about literature without coming to the living substance of particular works of literature as though they were individual persons. The second defect is a direct product of the first: for without a refined sense of language the mind cannot be held in sustained touch with a work of literature. To put it another way, we aren’t sure what to do with literature, or what can be done with it when we are ‘teaching’ it. For lack of direct and sustained contact with the works of literature themselves, we assume that both literature and the language can be taken for granted, simply because they are in some sense accessible to everybody. We assume that because we can in some sense ‘read’ we can read literature as it wants to be read; that because we can talk (and we do talk, even if we do nothing else) we know something about the nature and functions of language; that because we can in some sense ‘write’, we know something about how and why writings get made. There is no escaping the fact that the study of literature all comes back to the reading and writing that is informed and enlarged by a sense of language; and that unless it does, there is not much more virtue to studying literature than to reading weekend supplements or comic books.
Let me consider these questions purely from the point of view of an instructor confronted by students of a certain kind, and see whether we can evolve some principles of procedure. To make literature and language a central point of emphasis in education, and a peculiarly privileged and potent force in education, we need to engage very complex and subtle processes that are themselves in some way intimately involved in a whole seamless process of consciousness and in the growth and definition of our minds: for language is rooted not only in speaking, but also in remembering, perceiving, knowing, recognizing, judging, discriminating. The quality of our knowing of language is a direct function of the quality of mind we bring to it: to perceive accurately we have to qualify. And in devising schemes of training in those aspects of language that we can separate out for special attention – e.g. spelling and grammar – we need to be sure that these are organically related to the central process of language, and that those special studies will from the start clarify and reinforce the sense of language – that we do not look at them as preliminary equipment needed to use language correctly, but as an instrument for the progressive discovery of the nature of language itself. For example, to withhold grammar from somebody learning to use language, to neglect to provide – deftly and with a just emphasis – a detailed description of the elements and functions of language, is like telling a bird-watcher that he must go to work without binoculars and without a Petersen’s Guide.
As a university instructor I find, more and more, that I cannot assume very much about the mental furniture that my students bring to the study of literature; least of all do I find that I can assume much refinement in the sense of language. This could be dismaying when – as has been the case in the last few years – I have been dealing mostly with students who are in the third or fourth year of Honours English or are engaged in graduate work in English. I find that I have to address myself at once – no matter what the alleged subject-matter of the course – to making sure that my students are reading as perceptively as their individual endowments and stage of development allow, and that their writing does not systematically block their line of sight or inhibit their thinking. Refinement in reading and writing is a process that can be carried to any level; advances are made in noticeable steps (rather than by linear upward movement) and the changes are often surprisingly large and swift and are usually irreversible; they depend very little upon ‘skills’ but a great deal upon discoveries of intellectual and emotional clarity and confidence. I am distressed to find that some of my students have little taste for literature, and little enthusiasm for studying it; some are committed and work hard, but too often with a cheerless conformity doing what they suppose they are ‘expected to do’ – applying certain ‘techniques’ even though the application of those ‘techniques’ brings little enjoyment, refreshment, or sense of discovery. In a very real sense, nothing happens when they read a poem or a novel; in a very real sense there is nothing there. I exaggerate, of course, to make a point. Even that can change very quickly too; I am amazed how often an apparently inert and lack-lustre student will suddenly grasp the elements and nature of literature at a level of discrimination and active response that one might have guessed would take a few years – rather than a few weeks – to reach.
On the whole, I am encouraged to find that as soon as students begin to discover how language works, as soon as the monotonous, opaque surface of a printed page dissolves under the eye and ear to let out the patterned energy and impetuous shape of a self-declarative utterance, there is a feeling of release and discovery, a sense of infinite possibilities and subtleties suddenly disclosed. Then there are some facts to deal with – the facts of mind that are the only realities of our enterprise. Then there is something to talk about with some prospect of directing and fertilising reflection for the attention can be turned back upon the vitality and order of the wording itself, to minute and patient detail if need be, knowing that there is no end to nourishing reflection upon a great work of art. We find that the attention refines itself to meet the demands of the original, that the ‘knowledge’ involved is like getting to know a person, and that that ‘knowledge’ – usually beyond precise specification – can be sharp, accurate, respectful, charged with wonder. We also quickly find that the work of literature itself rebukes us if we wander from the point into discourse inappropriately superficial, or irrelevant, or merely plausible. It seems to me a great pity that such a discovery should, for many students, be delayed until they have almost come to the end of their undergraduate career. Couldn’t we begin a little sooner to establish something as direct and simple-minded as that?
To call up such a recognition of the nature and function of literature, and to arm it with the learned perception that makes a person master of his thinking rather than a victim of the accidents of background and of his variable attention – that is a very tall order. Yet I find that, once the ear is engaged, once people listen to language, they are astonished to find how much is accessible that was not accessible before, to what an extent they can rely upon their own perceptions and judgments, to what an extent they can discover what they literally had never seen before. This is not to be wondered at. Learning to perceive exactly what is going on in a piece of writing is not at all like learning tight-rope walking or how to play rapid passages of double-stopping on the violin: it is a progressive disclosure to us of what we already know from long practice and experience in speaking, from listening to other people speak, discerning what a person means as much – or more – from tone, inflection, gesture, pace, facial expression, as from the semantic content of the words uttered. This discriminate perception, carried now to a level of awareness at which it may not have operated before, becomes a discovery of capacities inherent in one’s nature, abilities released in the way an Eskimo sculptor – or Leonardo – cuts away the stone to release the form embedded in it.
The first step is to engage the ear – essential to a generation that has been taught to read rapidly by eye and is therefore inclined to have very little or no sensory feel of language. Out of that comes the sense of the ‘poem’ as something living, self-contained, self-declarative; it stands ‘out there,’ with its own existence, life, and integrity; knowable but not concerned to be known; a vital event that can be entered into and experienced, re-experienced. Then the opaque surfaces break up; language begins to become rhythmic, declaring itself in its shapely movement as a dancer does, disclosing itself as energy shaped by deftly interposed limits. We begin to be aware of different ways of going; centres of force emerge as poles around which other elements are ordered like iron filings in a magnetic field; arcs of phrasing – that is of significant shaping – begin to emerge, some of short compass, some longer, and eventually the sense of the single encompassing arc or sphere of the whole poem, its enclosedness, its resonance. The function of metaphor becomes more acute – the collision of elements that refuse to give up their identities – not merely as a figure of speech but on a much larger scale, often embracing a whole work; and also on the basic function out of which poetry works – out of which probably the whole of language works. The sense of multiple meanings, implications, and functions clustering and organized over words and phrases (like harmonics or upper partials) become acute, and a complex verbal drama – a pattern of pure psychic action – begins to unfold. Particularly the attention is drawn to feeling (as psychic energy) and to feeling-tone rather than to meaning, and to the imprint of complex feeling that words and passages can declare. Words and images achieve a controlling complexity of feeling that can be accounted for only by reference to the poem itself and to what has come together there – by whatever means – in a dynamic unity. Very quickly there develops a sense of what it is good to ask questions of, to inquire into, to reflect upon, not for purposes of interpretation (which is after all only a marginal consideration) but for purposes of realizing (making real) what in the language is going on. Once that begins to happen the standard formulated generalisations and expectations – historical, biographical, and critical – slip into the background, or can be seen more often than not to be at best approximate and at worst simply wrong or useless. Then the bonds between literature and a life that often is more intense than we are ever sure of encountering become clear, and works of literature become accessible, and are knowable as experience, not as possessions.
Then we begin to discover in what sense literature is an extension of those parts of our lives most intimate, most internal, most valuable; and how from that awareness literature can clarify our lives, not by offering us examples of behavior or precepts of action but by restoring us to the capacity for ‘states of more than usual feeling with a more than usual sense of order’ – which is also our birthright. It restores to us also a sense – like what it feels like to ‘feel good’ – of the way our minds actually work, of the commerce of feeling as a key to perceiving, knowing, remembering, discerning, discriminating. It is, I believe, only in this area – however we are to get into it – that the study of language and literature can claim a position of peculiar value and privilege in our educational endeavour.
This sort of thing is not easy to explain to politicians or to those whose business it is to draw up plans and schemes for others to implement. It is indeed difficult to explain to anybody; the only sound argument is when it happens. Fortunately we can be confident that it can happen, because it calls upon capacities that we all have. In any case, the transformation of perceptions, feelings, things, events into language – in some sense the transformation of life into words and back again from words into life – is an incredible achievement. It should not be possible; nevertheless, we do it all the time.
So much for the apocalypse. Now for the cold turkey – because what I should like to recommend is a bit like abrupt withdrawal from an addition. I begin with certain axioms.
(a) Reading for delight can begin at any time – the sooner the better. But the study of literature can proceed only from a developed sense of language.
(b) The reason for studying literature – as an educational endeavour – is that it allows a peculiarly concentrated opportunity to strike at the most fertile and vulnerable roots of education: the purpose of which I take to be, to encourage and accelerate the growth of full capacity of the mental, intellectual, and emotional potential of each individual.
(c) The choice of what is to be taught, and what is to be read, at any stage of development, must be guided by a clear sense of the part it can play in the overarching educational purpose, a prescribed process that for about twelve years few young people can escape.
(d) In studying any aspect of language or literature, it is well for the emphasis to fall on function – asking first ‘What is it doing?’ rather than ‘What does it mean?’ (even though at some points we must ask searchingly ‘What exactly is meant?’).
(e) Artists, poets, are makers (as the Greek word implies); they are like craftsmen who work sometimes perhaps in a sort of dream, but who are always guided by something like a sense of touch. We must assume that they know what they are doing; we must be confident that their writing – if we read it appropriately – will tell us what they are doing.
(f) The terms, analogies, premisses, definitions, and axioms that are used in any subsidiary part of literary studies must be consistent with a philosophy that embraces a profound understanding of perception, the mind, the language as evidenced by the most heightened and complex instances of perceiving, knowing, and wording – evidence seldom found in stable and examinable from anywhere except in works of literature.
Let me consider a possible sequence of studies, that could run parallel to the development of writing and to an increasingly acute and cultivated sense of language; all the phrases to some extent interweaving once the rudimentary stages are surmounted; each study reacting upon the other special studies and subsuming them; the discernibly separate studies so interinanimating each other that it is neither appropriate nor accurate to think of any of them as ‘skills’. Yet ‘sequence’ is probably not the right word, for all these phrases – except the most rudimentary kind of reading and writing – would become cumulative and increasingly refined in resonant parallel with the development of perceptive reading and fluent heuristic writing. Perhaps each entry should, in the Chinese manner, be numbered ‘one’ so that we don’t think of any one of them as inferior to any other or unworthy of serious attention and minute exploration.
Reading aloud – first listening; then reading aloud and listening to peers read aloud. This for ear-training to establish the relation (and gap) between spoken and written language, and to establish (as a basis of sensory engagement and discrimination) the tactual sensation of language in the larynx, mouth, tongue, lips, and facial musculature.
Spelling – not simply for unambiguous accuracy in rendering and distinguishing words, but as a way into the sound, accentuation, construction, origin, and history of words; the construction of related and cognate forms, and the divergencies in the histories of their uses and meanings; together with (for example) clues to the use of prepositions appropriate to compound words and idiomatic usage (the incorrect use of prepositions always being a mark of questionable literacy).
Grammar and parsing – to develop accuracy in functional classification, and to provide a descriptive terminology in which verbal functions in actual speech and writing can be minutely examined (to show grounds or causes of inadequate or undesirable usage, and to give access to the ways of well-managed language).
Syntax, punctuation, and analysis – to show how locutions hold together and work together, and how they can fall apart; punctuation as a demarcation of logical relations, and also as a systematic notation indicating meaningful articulation; the functional effects and limits of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs (of various kinds and voices), conjunctive and enclitic words; the vocal implications of complex subordination; the control of adhesion, pace, dynamics, and trajectory by the deft choice of verbs; paticiples as alternatives to abstract nouns; the relation of ‘attitude of mind’ to the nerves and muscles of written and spoken language (here the list becomes infinite).
Prose and verse as two harmonies – not that one (prose?) is normal and standard, the other (verse?) a fancy alternative, but that each tends to have its own peculiar voice and excellence; the tendency of technical-discursive thought to find itself in prose, and of rhythmic-symbolic feeling to embody itself in verse, but how not all verse is poetry, and not all prose is ‘science’; the limits of each harmony; how we begin with verse as more memorable than prose (being patterned and pointed), and how the nature of poetry is clearly declared by highly developed poetry and why – to begin with – we should always choose good poetry and not worry if it isn’t as readily intelligible as a comic strip or as easy to see though as a TV advertisement.
Prosody – the study of the shaping and containing principles deftly interposed upon expressive energy to induce an inseparable marriage of ‘form’ and ‘content’; the interaction of syllable, quantitative, and accentual principles in verse in English (as compared with other languages); auditory and rhythmic characteristics of various kinds of verse; the relation between metre and rhythm; hearing tests; sight-reading of difficult and complex texts; identification of elements of verse by ear; the analysis of prose rhythms.
Expository prose – its limits and constraints; the strains involved in trying to turn language into something like a mathematical notation.
In general, I find it useful to demonstrate the dynamics of language in terms of psychic energy flowing outward from a centre and finding its body in the resistance of deftly interposed and more or less intricately patterned restraints. This keeps constantly in mind the first principle of language; that it is always shaped and articulated from inside outward, and that there is no way of inducing internal energy through the manipulation of externals. This explains the difficulty we have in devising suitable exercises for writing at any level. It also explains why an account of the genesis of a poem (even if we have the evidence for such an account) tells us little or nothing about the nature and integral existence of the poem. But as long as we are thinking in terms of energy, and ‘from the inside outward’, we can draw accurate and refined inferences about the forces disposed in a poem, the obstacles successively surmounted, the patterns of organizing force and value, without the questionable pursuit of ‘causes’ in biography, ideas, social and historical circumstances, generalized psychology, or para-scientific analogies of ‘communication’.
At every point, especially in the rudimentary stages but at no point to be neglected it is essential, to encourage writing and to see that instructors mark it carefully and perceptively in order to reinforce the sense of craftsmanship in handling language as though language were somehow curiously sensory and physical; and to show how language can be commanded best when we respect language as having a will of its own and find out how we can induce it to go its own way for us. ‘Marking’ of this quality is not only extremely laborious and time-consuming – which is why on the whole we neglect it – but it also requires of the marker a very refined sense of language if the teacher is to go beyond mere ‘correctness’ to show how writing is not a matter of transcribing the contents of the mind but a way of discovering what needs to get said. Particularly we need to cultivate the ability to revise carefully and radically, drawing upon a different way of mind from that in which the first draft was made. We need to recognize that there is nothing automatically sacred about a first draft; we need also to recognize that a first draft almost invariably includes the vital germ of what is to be uttered, but that it often takes a sharp eye to spot it.
In practice, we need to make a clear distinction between what can properly be called ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ and what can be seen as a symptomatic sign that something is not right-for-the-purpose; we need to demonstrate the improvements in thinking that can occur when ‘rules’ are treated, not as rigid precepts (for they are in fact only generalizations from sound practice), but as instruments for spotting (and amending) inadequacies; we need to demonstrate levels of usage and the way a sense of the usage proper to any level can enrich the stylistic repertoire. We need to be able to demonstrate the many tricks of rhetorical sleight-of-hand and the gross evasions of propagandist usage. We need to throw attention on the separateness of written makings, how they stand on their own feet, and speak in their own voice. To have, or to be able to arouse, ‘interest’ in the subject matter is a minor consideration; to cast a spell through the transfiguration of the voice is the important thing – to play Tom Piper’s whistle; and this can be done as compellingly in a pellucid unmannered prose and a quiet voice as in sonorous periods magniloquently delivered; and even the handling of technical detail with a light and affectionate touch can cast a very special spell. All this helps to encourage a delight in virtuosity when we come across it in our reading or listening, or when we are tempted to try our own hand in practice.
Once the emphasis is on writing, we can show how the physique of writing is altered by attitude of mind – e.g. impersonal and passive uses, cliches, easy ways out, the excitement of inventive precision – not simply by one’s ‘interest’ in a subject but by one’s ‘concern’ for the quality of writing, by the dramatizing of the act of writing, the whiplash of precision, finely rendered tone, economy. (The special pleasure of writing in a shapely hand should not be ignored; it too can have its affect on style.) We can evolve exercises in altering style; by rewriting something into one’s own voice, by converting discourse into dialogue, by rewriting in another person’s manner or for some other assumed purpose. This throws emphasis upon the distinctive characteristics of speech, pronunciation, pace, inflection, implied mental landscape. The other advantage of gaining craftsmanlike practice in writing is that it becomes possible to infer from a piece of writing what made it what it is and not otherwise – in terms of the writing, not of biography or of the assumed reason for writing. The reason for making such inferences of ‘intension’ is that we can then look at the work as ‘something made’. The better the work the more difficult it is to see it as a ‘making’ because good work leaves no scaffolding and no outer traces of how it came to be – it simply is, as though it had found its final form inevitably. And in drawing these inferences we need to establish firm axioms about the nature of poem, and about how and why a poet works, in the form of prototypes that can be adjusted ‘downward’ to accommodate anomalous or incompletely realized instances. (This involves holding in question crude analogies of ‘communication’ and ‘audience appeal’, assumptions based on general or mass response, and the extrapolation of axioms that are at home only in forms of deliberate persuasion.)
At all stages the use of a good dictionary constructed on historical principles, giving derivations, variations of usage, and examples of actual usage, will encourage a connoisseur’s sense of words and the possible functions of language. In such a dictionary we can trace the subtle transformations in meaning that some forms of a word will undergo but not others, and to explore the impulses that guide the incessant word-making activities of a Coleridge, a Donne, or a Hopkins. Perhaps there could well be a copy of the big Oxford English Dictionary in all schools for use in (say) Grade IX and above. We can explore with increasing subtlety and precision what happens – both to the text and to ourselves – as we resolve difficulties and questions by analysis and yet refrain from ‘interpreting’ or translating the whole text. On the whole I find it advisable to withhold or redirect answers to the question ‘What’s it all about?’ so that the impression is not given (as it is far too often given) that there are correct and portable things to be said about any work of literature, and that these are the things to be remembered and repeated. The method of inquiry is always shaped by the conceivable end of the inquiry.
As far as examinations go, these (I think) should be adjusted – in the same way that ‘teaching’ can be – to the student’s actual capacity of intellect and emotion. Examinations can be used in two ways, and both are needed, not simply as tests of achievement or to be sure that students have ‘done their work’, but to provide educational opportunities that do not occur in other conditions.
(A) One kind of examination tests accuracy in matters that can be declared unequivocally correct or incorrect: e.g. spelling, elementary grammar, derivations and meanings of words, punctuation (even though that involves almost a philosophy of its own), the logical coherence of series of statements, the derivation of conclusions from evidence. This is the one area in which we can safely proceed in a mounting sequence from rudimentary to very advanced, or – contrary to the progress appropriate to works of art – from simple to complex. Ability in these separate areas can at first be isolated to some extent, but as soon as possible all these facets should be engaged in larger acts of writing, and carried into refined practice in revision.
(B) For testing acuity of perception, firmness of recognition, a sense of possible relations, a sense of distinctive style (as read or written), the cultivation of a fine ear: these should be tested separately and ‘marked’ differently, because in this area the facts are mostly psychic events, not subject to proof by demonstration, and therefore – even though they can be substantial and precise – cannot properly be considered as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ in any common meaning of those terms. These are qualitative tests that induce ability to manage a refined order of language, and will show to what level an individual can be expected to advance. In this area, ‘marking’ cannot possibly be by rote or formula; the quality of the marking will depend upon the quality of the marker, upon the reliability of his discernment and judgment particularly in spotting and directing potential as yet unrealized. This sort of test will show who is to be encouraged, who is redeemable, who has a taste or flair for inducing and sustaining a very special organization of mind and attention. Naturally we wish to bring to the highest state of development the capacity of each individual, but we need to recognize that for many reasons a considerable number will never advance beyond the level of workmanlike competence. Yet that level is a high level that at present we seem to achieve only with our most talented students. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with the development of these faculties, beginning at an early age; the development can be very rapid, yet is easily blunted or deflected, and is at any stage difficult to cultivate without the guidance of a perceptive instructor or mentor. If it is politically or socially expedient to keep silence upon the obvious fact that not all people are equally endowed as speakers and writers, then perhaps we should keep silence in order to ensure that standards of instruction in English are not set at a level that precludes their deployment as a major paedagogic force.
As far as the analysis of poems and works of literature is concerned in the higher grades, we should by all means discourage the view that literature presents us with a series of ‘problems’ all of which are patient of technical ‘solution’; that given a handful of analytical formulae, catchphrases, and ‘approaches’ anybody, regardless of the quality of his perception, can come to terms with any work of literature. I see little virtue in handling ‘tools of research’ except under perceptive and experienced guidance; and I see no virtue at all in encouraging young persons to repeat judgments and interpretations that are not based on their own direct perception. We can help to refine perception: we can show what we ourselves perceive: we are not entitled to say that judgments should be held. Analysis (which is properly the patient loosening and resolving of mysteries and ignorances) has its own narcotic attractions and is extremely difficult to hold in direct touch with a poem. If conducted more or less at random – that is, without a shrewd sense of what is profitably analysable – drifts with fatal ease into exploitation of what is easily analysable. Analysis that is not firmly controlled by the integrity of the poem itself may produce results useful for non-literary purposes, but it will not necessarily illuminate the poem or enlarge the study of language and literature. Analysis ineptly applied can undermine the sense of language and withhold the commanding life of literature itself.
With I propose is a method, a way of getting to do things; it is not a ‘technique’ (the attractions of ‘techniques’ being that they can be applied without regard to the quality of the person applying them). It engages analysis selectively, almost surreptitiously, and is not dominantly analytical; it is an unformulated way of letting each piece of work adjust our methodical resources to its needs. It is an attempt to allow the student, at any stage of development, to establish in his mind, through an acute sense of language, a direct grasp of a work of literature and to discover what his cognitive relation to that work might be and what he might suitably ‘do with’ that relation. It is a way of entering the universe of literature and feeling at home there, by insisting that we must begin each process of inquiry in an act of direct and substantial knowing. From an act of knowing, perceptive and engaging, a process of getting-to-know-more-fully-and-deeply can proceed – a process that can be subserved by analysis, but to which analysis is ancillary; for the products of analysis have to be forgotten or driven into the back of the mind, or somehow put in their place, so that the poem (when we reread it) can call forward from our minds what it needs, with the emphasis that the poem needs. The way into literature is through recognition, by ear; by placing the commanding authority in the poem-as-knowable rather than in ourselves as aggressively insisting-on-knowing; through the vicarious reenactment of the particular drama of a particular making – a process that bears to life a relation that is recognisably direct and envigorating though beyond definition or prediction.
I think of poets as people who are haunted by words and rhythms and who have a passion for making, and have nerves tough enough to see the making through to the point where they say ‘That’s it. I can no more.’ David Jones (from whom I took my opening quotation and title) has some good things to say about poets and artists, being both himself. ‘It is axiomatic,’ he says, ‘that the function of the artist is to make things sub specie aeternitatis (i.e. with the look of eternity on them). There is no help – he must work within the limits of his love. There must be no mugging-up, no ‘ought to know’ or ‘try to feel’; for only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis.’ The same can be said for a good reader, and also for the good critic who begins by faithfully reconstructing in his mind what the maker has made: their work too must have ‘the look of eternity’; we should learn how to read for keeps. And about reading poetry, he goes on: ‘You can’t get the sound unless you observe the score ... Each word is meant to do its own work, but each word cannot do its work unless it is given due attention.’ And as for study, reflection, scholarship, criticism – ‘In a sense all disciplines are warnings ‘This is the way to make the thing, that way won’t do at all.’ Hence the importance of assuming – if only vicariously and as best we can – that we too are capable of making; at least then we can recognize in our own work what way won’t do at all; and recognize too that from a certain point in the making – usually the beginning – there is no turning back; and when, by luck or grace, we come to the end, recognize with a sense of delight that ‘This is now made.’
In the making, the compass needle swings to ‘rightness’. We confuse ourselves when we talk too much about ‘beauty’ and ‘creativity’ and ‘inspiration’. Poetry – all art – is much more direct, more physical, more accessible, and in its clear economy much more astonishing than those words suggest. Very few have the specific bundle of reflexes and attainments that make a poet, and not all who call themselves poets actually succeed in making anything that has ‘the look of eternity’ to it – for that takes more submissiveness than most of us can command. But when makings of a true order are before us, we tend to recognize that they are speaking to us from an order that we acknowledge as our own even though we may seldom attain it. There is no better way of coming to terms with poems than by imagining – no matter how outrageous the assumption may be – that we could have written them ourselves, and yet recognizing with special astringency that we could not conceivably have made them and that that is part of the power they exercise over us. For it is salutary to care about things that are not projections of ourselves and of our own desires.
Some poets are capable of a wide, brilliant, sustained revelation; some manage to embody only a few small incisive glimpses of life that may do little more than delight us for the moment, yet be precious, haunting the memory like some ambiguous gesture of tenderness or regret. Not all poems are of comparable stature; but the universe of poetry is one, and the imagination is one. So it is that poems of any age can speak to us directly, in a contemporary voice. For paedagogic purposes we can always find variety enough in works of distinction. There is no such thing as an elementary poem. We betray our purpose if we settle for the easy viability of the commonplace.
If, as teachers, we wish to disclose the nature and vitality of language and the subtle intricacies implicit in all uses of language, we must ‘start at the top’, concentrating on works of the highest quality: at least we can then be certain that we are dealing with what we are looking for. But there are many valuable writings that do not warrant detailed study. We don’t need to teach everything; many things are better not taught at all; and at all costs we must not deprive anybody of the intense pleasure of discovering important works and writers for himself. Surely we can somehow beguile the young into reading for themselves, for delight, with nobody plucking at their elbows. We have not enough time to pay serious attention to anything except works of the highest order, and among those the works that will disclose clearly and forcibly – if anything can – what we want to disclose, the marvelous precision and order of language. Many works of literature will not stand such close scrutiny, and many writings simply are not capable of inducing the activities of mind that we seek to induce. We should never, through a desire to be topical or staunchly national, be deflected into exaggerating the quality or the paedagogic durability of the works of literature we choose to teach. We are not in the promotion business. As teachers of English we are trying to educate, to bring young people to a progressive act of self-discovery through their most distinctive birthright – the miraculous gift of language.