The death of fiction?

A sequel of sorts to the previous post, prompted by a piece in the Globe and Mail. Ignore for a moment that the author begins his narrative while he’s doing a poo and focus on his argument for the resistance that his students display to reading long books:

English teachers have held on to the 19th- and 20th-century novel with grasping, wrenching fingers. I’ve been one of them, and truthfully I’m not sure why. The novel is a distinctly Western convention, and a new one at that – it arrived two centuries after the printing press. The Industrial Revolution increased leisure time, so longer pieces became more attractive – and writers benefited from being paid by the word. While a teen’s reading material 100 years ago might have been as narrow as a few books on a bedroom shelf, a student in my class today has an endless range of possibilities.

All true; and moreover, the notion that novels written in English could be the subject of serious academic study, on a par with Greek and Latin classics, is even newer. But if its period of cultural ascendancy is at an end, we have the problem of a period of transition. Older people will hold that knowledge of Austen, Dickens and Updike is a crucial part of our culture, even if they haven’t actually read them; the young can’t even be bothered to pretend. I don’t know if Hirsch has a prescribed list of novelists that must be “known”, but this does again suggest that by the time anyone has identified such a canon, the goalposts will have moved. 

ED Hirsch and his unknown knowns

Suddenly the name of ED Hirsch is popping up all over the place. Doesn’t ring any bells? He promotes an educational theory that he calls Cultural Literacy, which revolves around elements of knowledge that students are expected to have acquired by a specific stage in their learning, to enable them to function in the modern world. It sounds pretty good so far, especially to a grumpy old sod whose preferred leisure activity is banging his head against the floor in response to the slack-jawed idiocy of some of the contestants on Pointless, but particularly those who identify themselves as students.

However, even a moment’s thought reveals two serious objections to Hirsch’s ideas. One is that it has the potential to turn education into a vast, Gradgrindian exercise in knowledge dumping, with no time allocated for real understanding. Did you ever collect Panini stickers? Do you remember going through someone else’s collection and muttering “Got that... got that... got that... haven’t got that...” I’m sure that’s not what Hirsch had in mind, but when his system is allied to the league table approach of British education, that’s what you’re going to get. The other problem, of course, is the question of who actually decides what these all-important facts should be, and what educational (or political or moral or social or economic) criteria they use to reach their decisions. And at the same time, what precisely do they mean by “knowing” a subject? For example, the right-of-centre think tank Civitas argues that by the end of his or her first year of education, a child should be expected to know about English Civil War. Which I think is wonderful, because this means that from the age of six, kids will be well versed in the ideas of the Levellers and the Diggers and the Putney Debates, and from then on it’s a doddle to get into the fine tradition of British dissent, of John Wilkes, of Tom Paine, Peterloo, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the Rebecca riots, the Suffragettes, the Kinder trespass, the Jarrow marches, the 43 Group, the Committee of 100, Grosvenor Square, the Miss World protests, Greenham Common, the Poll Tax riots, Swampy, Brian Haw, Occupy St Paul’s and... Do you reckon maybe they didn’t think this one through?

In any case, if every single schoolchild did end up knowing about every single subject on the list, sharp-elbowed middle-class parents would insist on their own offspring knowing more. If the kid next door knows about acorns, Mexico and Henry Moore (all on the Civitas year one list), yours needs to know conkers, Bolivia and Degas. Until you find out that the brat down the road knows mistletoe, Honduras and Bernini. And ultimately, it’s the same kids as it always was who get left behind.

However desirable it is for members of a society to have a common corpus of knowledge, its actual components will ultimately be pretty arbitrary unless there happens to be a dominant ideology (overt or otherwise) behind their selection. Of course, if I were in charge, I’d insist that every three-year-old had an intensive knowledge of spin bowling, tapas, the novels of Douglas Coupland and the first three Velvet Underground albums. (I’ve always thought Loaded is overrated.) Because, seriously, how can you cope in the modern world, let alone go on Pointless, without knowing stuff like that?

PS: If you really want arbitrary, check out this list of the six best novels since 1919. How many of them should a child have read by the end of school, Dr Hirsch?

PPS: And you are still reading my Infinite Jest Blog, aren’t you? That’s OK then.

Professor Stephen Graham: “very silly” (allegedly)

Context determines much about how we perceive art; graffiti is an eyesore until it’s determined to be by Banksy or John Lydon, at which point it goes into a gallery or becomes appropriate raw material for academics to ponder. And that 120-year-old Ecce Homo fresco in a church in Zaragoza is rather more famous now it’s been, um, restored by a parishioner and, I guess, a bit more valuable as well.

So I was immediately sceptical when nice residents of a nice street in a nicer bit of Newcastle claimed to be discombobulated that their nice cars had been vandalised with words such as “VERY SILLY” and “ARBITRARY”, spelled correctly and all. The Daily Mail in its wisdom has decided that the culprit is one Stephen Graham, a professor at Newcastle University where he focuses on cities, technology and surveillance; here he is on the subject of London’s Olympic lockdown. I should stress that Graham has been arrested and charged, but not convicted of any offence, so someone at the Mail should really get a major bollocking some time this morning; but still, I’d guess that having one’s Merc or BMW etched with what may be the initial notes for a groundbreaking thesis on ostentatious consumption by the bourgeoisie of North-East England would double its resale value at least. If I were a well-off car-owner in Jesmond, I’d be slipping Professor Graham a research grant to enable him to scratch a bit deeper.

In defence of stylish exclusion

There were verbalcuffs at the Edinburgh Book Festival last weekend, with Irvine Welsh grabbing the biggest, splashiest headlines as he accused the Booker Prize of squeezing out British regional and vernacular voices in favour of the posh and the exotic. His wingman was another Scottish author, Alan Bissett, who argued that “protectionism for local cultures is sometimes necessary” but then appeared to contradict himself:

I worry how style can exclude. You think about the people who are not convinced by literature and find it for a small elite… Style risks becoming fetishised and it becomes stylish people talking to one another.

Well, yes, but if you’re reading from outside a particular regional tradition, such as the urban Scots of Bissett and Welsh and James Kelman, does that style not have the potential to exclude as well?  Especially if it’s protected; what are we talking about, Celtic quotas in the Booker shortlist? And how much effort should an author put into reaching out to the excluded and the unconvinced? If style – fetishised or not, whether it derives from Hampstead or Hampden Park – is such a barrier, maybe we should all write in the manner of government websites, with clarity and ease of comprehension the only criterion that matters a damn. Which would of course not only disqualify from consideration the kinds of book that tend to win the Booker Prize but also those that offer a gateway into what Bissett would describe as “local cultures”. I’m guessing that Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave is the sort of book that Bissett and Welsh would hold up in opposition to the consciously stylish Hampstead tendency, but I found it pretty bloody exclusive when I first read it at the age of 12 or so; I didn’t talk that way, didn’t know anyone who worked down t’pit, didn’t feel any particular desire to train a bird of prey. For the first few pages I wasn’t really sure what was going on. But I persevered and became utterly absorbed in Billy Casper’s world and remember sobbing myself to sleep after I’d finished. And if I hadn’t believed there might be something for me there, I might not have pushed on with Joyce or Nabokov or BS Johnson. I’m not saying that writing must be challenging to be good, but for every reader welcomed in by a writer who goes out of his way not to exclude, there will be another who just gets bored by the blandness of it all. Inclusiveness also excludes.

And in any case, is there really such a thing as style-free writing? I’ve seen the prose of Magnus Mills described as such, but the apparent blank artlessness he offers is surely a style in itself. Or is it just a euphemism for mainstream fiction, where function takes precedence over form? In a recent piece about the film-maker Christopher Nolan, David Bordwell confronts those who take issue with his sometimes clunky story-telling style:

Can you be a good writer without writing particularly well? I think so. James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other significant novelists had many virtues, but elegant prose was not among them. In popular fiction we treasure flawless wordsmiths like PG Wodehouse and Rex Stout and Patricia Highsmith, but we tolerate bland or clumsy style if a gripping plot and vivid characters keep us turning the pages. From Burroughs and Doyle to Stieg Larsson and Michael Crichton, we forgive a lot.

I’m guessing that in the last sentence he means Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle rather than William S and Roddy, but you never know, do you?

On a vaguely similar note, the annual to-me-to-you about whether exams have been dumbed down up or sideways prompted me to take a look at some recent GCSE papers. One English exam from last year had a practical criticism component, comparing two poems about social outsiders. No problem there, except that the examiners were helpful enough to define three apparently difficult words therein; namely “chide”, “gibber” and “dissuade”. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on the first two; but if candidates can’t work out unaided that “dissuade” is pretty much the opposite of “persuade”, I don’t think their grasp of English – as distinct from their ability to regurgitate what the teacher has told them is going to come up in the exam – is all that great. Sorry, is that too exclusive? Too stylish, maybe?

And while I’ve got you, I’ll just reiterate my response to Rachel Cooke’s description of Ian McEwan as “the nearest thing to EL James that literary fiction has right now”. Eh?

New nods and updated winks

In a piece of research that will startle very few, mathematicians at Dartmouth College have shown that modern writers are far less influenced by “the classics” than their predecessors were. Well, yes, um, maybe. Of course, nobody reads Walter Scott any more; or, more to the point, nobody feels the need to pretend to have read Walter Scott any more. The canon is still there, but like a football team or the cast of The Archers, the list of names has changed; so we get that slew of novels about Henry James a few years ago, or maybe Martin Amis rehashing his fanboy schtick about Saul Bellow.

So writers are still influenced by writers, but they’re different writers. What’s really changed is that the references aren’t just to writing. A Victorian author might have expected readers to pick up on references to Shakespeare or Virgil or the King James Bible; her 21st-century successor will pack in nods to the Zapruder film or Ricky Villa’s goal in 1981 or the structure of DNA or Donna Summer’s sighs in ‘Love To Love You Baby’. And writers already have the ability to offer their product in formats that can include not just references to those memes, but actual pieces of footage and audio embedded in the words – and the academics at Dartmouth will have to work out a completely new method of textual analysis to pick that up.

In fact, pretty soon there will come a time when Literature – as the name for a discrete academic discipline – will fail to do its job. What’s going to replace it? Media Studies has been pretty much discredited. Any thoughts?

Birth, school, work, #Klout

After I deployed those Klout-related ramblings, I was wondering why employers and marketers are starting to pay so much attention to a metric that is apparently so easy to manipulate by retweeting gossip about Pudsey the dog or getting on the right side of someone on that bloody Observer list. And I realised that Klout doesn’t really measure the subject’s online influence – instead, it measures the subject’s desire for online influence, even if it’s an ersatz version of the same. Today, in the decadent West, what few jobs there are involve selling the abstract ideas that we call brands, so the ability and inclination to game one’s own Klout score 20 points higher than it really should be is something of a marketable skill, one that potential employers will hope you can apply to the ethereal gewgaws that they’re trying to flog. They know your enormous Klout score is utter bullshit; and they want a slice of that bullshit.

Similarly, there has been much grumbling over the past couple of decades about the increasing pointlessness of examinations. Exams don’t measure what people know about English or maths or physics any more! They just measure how good people are at passing exams! Which is, in fact, entirely what they want to do. Most employers don’t give a toss whether you can calculate the surface area of a sphere or explain why “a slice of that bullshit” is stretching a metaphor just a little too far. Instead, they want to see the alacrity with which you’ll jump over barrels and through hoops of their devising. “Raise our Klout score,” they bellow, and you only need to respond: “How high?”