I have been thinking about why I find reading literature to be so important that I have dedicated my working life to getting folks reading the greatest and hardest books written. Why does reading Virginia Woolf matter in a world where cities are being occupied by outraged citizens whose ability to make a decent living is being systematically undermined? How is a six-month study of Joyce justified when people are risking their lives to bring down tyrants and murderous autocrats? Why discuss poetry as the ice bergs are melting and the ocean is rising?
I read to understand myself and others. Immersion in a work of literary merit cracks open my petty struggles and limited focus on daily events. Reading a great work of literature reminds me to aspire, and gives me company in the struggle for meaning. Reading widely about the experience of people in different times, countries, skins, faiths, worlds sharpens my understanding of my own narrow perspective and slowly, painfully helps me expand. Reading newspapers, magazines and other forms of media with a critical eye allows me a glimpse of the forces that inform our society and progress—or lack of…
I am also thinking about how literacy is more than a skill. Literacy—the ability to read and write—is not simply decoding but also the on-going development of increased understanding and analytical ability. There has been much attention paid recently to the low level of literacy in many developed countries. Deborah Orr in this week’s Guardian article commented on the correlation between those participating in this summer’s riots and their educational disengagement (see Guardian 27.10.11 G2 magazine—Read all about it: Britain’s shameful literacy crisis). Alongside the discovery that more than two thirds of the rioters are classified as special needs and at least one third had been excluded from school the previous year, Orr observes that of all the stores looted in Clapham Junction, Waterstone’s remained untouched. “Those rioters …probably didn’t even see Waterstone’s. Bookshops don’t even register, because they offer nothing that is wanted. To me, that seems like a miserable omission from a life, and an ignominious, debilitating exclusion from a civilized culture.”
I agree with Orr’s assessment—but realize how hard it is to explain to someone who is not a strong reader why it is worth the effort. I struggle to explain why reading Ulysses is worth the effort—though I KNOW it is. But it is for me: and thus I find myself constantly revisiting the question of Why Read to really make deeply sure that it is not just my means of satisfaction that drives me forward into these studies of Milton and Dante. So today I think about the gorgeous moments of the last two months in our studies of Frankenstein and the Divine Comedy. Moments when we suddenly understood where we have come from and why we still struggle to define the relationship between the Creator and the Created. I think of our conversation around Measure for Measure and how this unleashed a new awareness of the complex relationship between authority and sexuality.
Reading and discussion of great literature exposes the truths we build our lives on—and then allows us the opportunity to explore these truths and re-define them. And that is a powerful-even revolutionary–act.
In the immediate wake of the riots, much was made of a particularly telling detail of the huge disturbance that took place in London’s Clapham Junction. Nearly all of the shops on that stretch of road were attacked. Many were broken into. Some were stripped bare. A shop that sold party accessories and donated part of its profit each year to worldwide children’s charities was set ablaze and gutted. One shop, however, was untouched – a bookshop.
Simon, the manager of Black’s, the camping shop across the road, told the London Evening Standard’s David Cohen: “They smashed our window, ripped the plasma TVs off our walls, took all our jackets and rucksacks. I saw them go into Claire’s Accessories, break into NatWest, liberate our neighbours Toni & Guy of hair products. They carted off iPods from Currys, clothes from Debenhams, mobile phones from Carphone Warehouse. I was horrified. But Waterstone’s, directly opposite us, was untouched. For the looters it was as if it did not exist.”
At the time, I thought that this observation was bang-on. Because I never use betting shops, or print shops, I simply don’t see them. Bookshops, I always notice, because I love reading. Bookies are a different matter, because I never go into one and place a bet.
Those rioters at Clapham Junction, to generalise, probably didn’t even see Waterstone’s. Bookshops don’t even register, because they offer nothing that is wanted. To me, that seems like a miserable omission from a life, and an ignominious, debilitating exclusion from a civilised culture.
On Twitter, however, a comment suggesting that if the rioters had nicked a few books they “might learn something” was retweeted time and time again, for days, as if it was the acme of wit. There seemed to be little understanding that the tweet was cruel, superior, patronising; that it mocked the afflicted and blamed the victims of an education system that left swaths of people not just unable to read, but unable even to register the existence of a shop that sold literature. Failure on that scale is not individual. It is systemic.
This week’s report from the Ministry of Justice rejects the government’s theory that gang membership lay at the root of the riots. Background analysis suggests instead that the predominant feature of the rioters was something else. Among young people arrested during the riots, more than two-thirds were classed as having special educational needs and one third had been excluded from school in the past year. Just as our prisons teem with people who cannot read properly, so for those terrible nights did the streets of our cities.
The tragedy is worsened by the fact that Britain has finally had its longstanding difficulties with literacy rubbed in its face just as the money to tackle the problem is ebbing away. I feel so angry that this failure has been ignored or denied for such a long time, even though it has been apparent for many years. The left, on the whole, has spent the last decade excusing an education system that lets down the people whom it is supposed to care for most. Even now, much rhetoric suggests – wrongly – that all is well, apart from the withdrawal of educational maintenance allowance, and the establishment of a few “free schools”.
I became aware of the state system’s problems with teaching literacy when my own son, and a number of his friends, were not learning to read and write at primary school, but were instead becoming hostile to reading and writing, in a school setting that saw this as unremarkable and untroubling. Looking into the matter further, I found great cause for concern.
On international comparisons, British literacy rates were remarkably poor, and were declining rather than improving. The Daily Mail was splashing critical headlines about the same subject, and the whole thing was dismissed on the left as rightwing “scaremongering”.
In 2006, I suggested in the Independent that one secondary in my locale, whose boast was that “47% of pupils passed five GCSEs at A* to C”, could be more accurately described as churning out 53% of pupils who were “functionally illiterate”. Peter Wilby, in the New Statesman, dismissed this as “a preposterous statement” with “no basis in knowledge” and “daft”. The pass rate I quoted, he argued, was the same as that at his own grammar school, 45 years before.
Wilby’s own assertion, that an inner-city comprehensive on special measures was performing to the same standard as a grammar school, half a century ago, seemed much more preposterous to me. It was also considerably more dangerous in its own complacency than mine was in its despairing and urgent hyperbole.
Yet, the complacency continued. As recently as 2009, Edward Leigh, of the public accounts committee (PAC), produced a damning report on literacy in England, which was rebutted forcefully. Leigh told the BBC that “anyone who believed the government could meet its target of 95% adult literacy and numeracy was living in cloud cuckoo land”. This, when “even doing so would only bring England to the level currently achieved by the top 25% of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries”.
In response to the PAC report, Barry Sheerman, Labour chairman of the Commons’ schools select committee, said it was a “thin piece of work”, based on little evidence. “To make sweeping generalisations about adult literacy and numeracy,” he added, “does a disservice to everyone, learners and teachers, across the country.”
At that time, the Labour government was still insisting that primary schools were fine. Any problems in the system started at secondary school, and academies were there to sort that out.
We’re not much further forward now, although at last it is acknowledged that far too many children start secondary education with their primary education very much incomplete. And now, here we are, living in a country that can muster whole gangs of people who don’t even appear to register the existence of bookshops, let alone consider books to be objects worth stealing.
Yet the parliamentary opposition feels it can truthfully insist that this is the consequence of cuts that were announced months rather than years before the riots occurred. Labour has said sorry for a number of mistakes it made during its time in opposition. It would do well to apologise for its inadequate and blustering denials of the depth of Britain’s literacy crisis as well, and start coming up with some plans that would decisively address this baleful problem. I’d certainly be glad to mark my cross against that.
“Things–even people–have a way of leaking into each other” I explain, “like flavours when you cook.”–Midnight’s Children pg. 37 Saleem our narrator is trying to explain to his demanding audience why so many fragments of stories of others must be told before he is even born into his own…and hitting upon a vein of relational truth.
Due to illness, vacations and life’s accidents, the Midnight’s Children Salon (both afternoon and evening sections) will be starting on November 3rd. There are three or four spaces remaining in both groups- please use the events page to register or contact me for enquires…
It was a very good salon and I really don’t think I would have taken on this huge and mysterious work without you. It was definitely worth going through the whole work—it is wonderful to actually experience real learning again as I know I did throughout the Divine Comedy (it got so much easier!).
I liked going round and having everyone pick out their passages—I think this worked well. I also think it could work well to identify anyone’s particular knowledge of an area and ask them as appropriate, to provide some background.
I also liked the probing questions you asked about why Dante would have spent so long on a topic or what he was trying to convey. Your questions do help guide the conversation especially when we—as always—manage to veer away a bit.
Thank you so much for your time and guidance through the work—that afternoon in the yard when the weather was divine, the food was abundant, and the conversation was intellectual I just had to pinch myself.
To the Lighthouse
• One night intensive November 4th 5-10 PM with potluck dinner £40 (two spaces remaining)
Hamlet *DATE CHANGE*
• Starting week of November 14th ; 4 meetings afternoon and evening sessions available
The Odyssey
• Starting week of November 14th; 4 meetings afternoon and evening sessions available
*Please vote now for particular sessions (day of the week, afternoon or evening) for The Odyssey Salon and the Hamlet Salon…send me your preference and I will confirm the study sessions on October 25th (so vote before then!).
Just emerging from a six month study of Dante’s Divine Comedy and a wonderful weekend in Paris studying short stories one night and Milton’s Paradise Lost the next. The energy is building toward Ulysses starting January…if you are interested in taking on this galloping, huge and wild work, Hamlet and The Odyssey are important scaffolds to deepen your Joycean pleasure.
Previous Salon studies of this work have probed the nature of memory both personal and societal. In the book, Rushdie, through his narrator, considers how memory is both shaped and inflected by the individual which in turn changes how history reports its story. Here is Rushdie considering how immigrants, in particular Indian writers, have a unique view of their home history:
” As Richard Wright found long ago in America, black and white descriptions of society are no longer compatible. Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems. It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, ‘modern’ world out of an old, legend haunted civilization, an old culture which we have brought into the heart of a newer one. But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these Islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’.
What?!? No mention of Hamlet??
“…the rest is silence…” Or Antigonus in Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by bear.”
I have to agree however that Dickens does get the emotions well-aligned in his death scenes. Bathed with pathos…
What makes for a great literary death scene? This is the question I and the other four judges of the 2012 Wellcome Trust book prize for medicine in literature have been pondering in advance of an event at the Cheltenham festival.
I find many famous death scenes more ludicrous than lachrymose. As with Oscar Wilde’s comment on the death of Dickens’s Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the passing of the awful Tullivers in Mill on the Floss, dragged down clutching one another as the river deliciously finishes them off. More consciously designed to wring laughter out of tragedy, the suicide of Ronald Nimkin in Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint takes some beating, with Nimkins’s magnificent farewell note to his mother: “Mrs Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.”
To write a genuinely moving death scene is a challenge for any author. The temptation to retreat into cliché is powerful. For me, the best and most affecting death is that of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. I remember my wife reading this to me out loud as I drove along a motorway. We were both in tears, as he says his farewell to his errant son, Nelson, and then runs out of words, and life itself – “enough. Maybe. Enough.”
But death is a matter of personal taste. The other judges were eclectic in their choices. Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, admired the scenes in Sebastian Junger’s A Perfect Storm. At the end of the chapter that seals the fate of the six men on board, Junger writes: “The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water.” “The details of death by drowning,” Highfield says, “are so rich and dispassionately drawn that they feel chillingly true.”
Meanwhile, Erica Wagner chose the death of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. “A typhus epidemic is raging through Lowood school, but Helen actually has consumption, which leads Jane to believe she won’t die (she thinks if you just take it easy your consumption will go away). So the death is an extra shock.”
Chair of the judges, Vivienne Parry, chose Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. While commenting that “Dickens spins out Nell’s decline for many chapters until I’m personally ready to shoot the girl myself”, she also argues that “we are only able to scoff because so few of us have experienced the death of a child, whereas it was a common experience in Victorian families.”
The fifth choice, from Joanna Bourke, is the death of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Who else is in the first rank for last things?
There are two Salons coming this month- Measure for Measure starting next weekend, and Hamlet a few weeks later–that ask participants for the patience and diligence necessary to enjoy Shakespeare’s works.
This writer captures some of the reasons why the work is worthwhile…so come join us as we make our way through these provocative plays…
I sincerely hope that someone younger than me reads this column and that, as summer wanes, some of you are returning to hallowed halls of learning with joyful expectations. Despite my painful, mixed feelings about being droned at by the professoriate, I’ll admit it’s one way to learn useful stuff. Self-taught or other-taught are better than remaining ignorant. Bliss is more likely in the presence of wisdom. I favor whatever might lift you above the nether regions of fads, claptrap and superstition.
Education is not immune to fads, of course, but certain durable principles persist. Good writing, for example. Without words to contain thoughts and conventions for arranging those words, we can’t communicate, preserve and transmit culture. Without culture, we might as well live alone in the forest like weasels or tigers, where only small numbers of the strongest and most merciless survive; and those only briefly. In civilized societies, nerds can survive, even thrive. In the modern techno-world, it can be persuasively argued that the geeks have inherited the earth.
Consequently, I harbor pro-nerd bias. We can’t all conquer foes with broadswords, amass fortunes, win the hearts of every pretty woman and the admiration of every mighty man. We can’t all ascend to the top of the pyramid. We can all understand great drama, however, and thus understand the grandeur and infinite sorrow of the human condition. In that regard, everyone fluent in English should read Shakespeare. The Bard’s 17th-century idioms and archaic stage conventions aren’t easy reading, I’ll admit. But everyone should wade through a few of his plays, for the following reasons.
1. It’s essential to know that it’s possible to write that well because somebody actually did it.
2. The rest of us can scribble and mumble but the Bard’s shining example can help us to polish our own deliveries. Woo a lover with poetry and she’ll respect the effort even if you have spinach stuck in your teeth. Berate a swindler in iambic pentameter and he’ll think twice about swindling you again.
3. Modern stagecraft has better lighting and modern cinema displays more thrilling special effects, but Shakespeare understood and expressed universal emotions better than anyone else ever has.
4. Exquisite language, vivid imagery and elegant cadences will never become obsolete. Understand the master and you understand profound, eternal truths.
Examples:
Shakespeare said, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ And let slip the dogs of war!” A modern warrior might say, “Let’s bomb those bums back into the Stone Age.”
Shakespeare said, “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I.” A contemporary might whine, ” What a wicked, wicked dink I am. What a loser.”
Shakespeare: “My salad days, when I was green in judgement.” Ordinary schmo: “I had lotsa fun when I was a kid, even though I was sorta dumb.”
Shakespearean villain facing a tragic end: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Modern sourpuss: “Life sucks.”
Shakespeare: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.” Modern private eye: “That guy looks like a sleaze bag.”
Shakespeare’s amorous young man: “But soft! What light at yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!” Modern teenager: “Gee, yer cute. Can’t stop thinkin’ ’bout cha.”
Shakespeare’s King Lear wishing ill upon an ungrateful daughter: “Create her child of spleen, that it may live to be a thwart disnatured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, with cadent tears fret channels in all her cheeks, turn all her mother’s pains and benefits to laughter and contempt, that she may feel how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” Today’s disillusioned father would say: “I’ve slaved and sacrificed for you, sent you to the best schools and you’re nothing but a spoiled brat. If you don’t stop hanging around with those loafers and get your grades up, I’ll take back your T-Bird.”
This article titled “Read all about it: Britain’s shameful literacy crisis” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Wednesday 26th October 2011 19.30 UTC
