The Creating Word: Papers from an International Conference on the Learning and Teaching of English in the 1980s

THE CREATING WORD

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THE CREATING WORD Papers from an International Conference on the Learning and Teaching of English in the 1980s

Edited with an Introduction by Patricia Demers

The University of Alberta Press

Introduction © Patricia Demers 1986 © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1986 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1986 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Published simultaneously in North America by THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS 141 Athabasca Hall Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2E8 Printed in Hong Kong Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data The Creating Word: an International Conference on the Learning and Teaching of English in the 1980s (1983: University of Alberta) The creating word Conference held October 1983 at the University of Alberta. ISBN 0-88864-092-7 1. English philology—Study and teaching— Congresses. I. Demers, Patricia, 1946— II. Title. PE13.C73 1983 420'.7 C85-091017-X

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors

1

vi vii

Introduction

1

Rhetoric and Rightness: Some Fallacies in a Science of Language Jacques Barzun

7

2 Construing and Deconstructing M. H. Abrams

30

3 The Literary Transaction Louise M. Rosenblatt

66

4

86

The Teaching of Poetry Robin Skelton

5 Seizing the Shining Reality: the Novel in the Classroom Norman Page

101

6 Teaching the Novel: the Creative Word in Great Expectations Rowland McMaster

116

7

134

Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught? Rudy Wiebe

8 Writing: Self-Consciousness and a Change in Reality? 146 John Dixon 9 What Is Language for?: a Functional View of the Language Arts Martha King

158

10

Language, Literature and the Computer Keith Smillie

177

11

Canadian Literature in the Secondary Curriculum Susan Jacket

197

Index

211 V

Acknowledgements Many agencies and individuals assisted in the organization of the conference and in the production of this volume. Among them are the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Alberta Education and the Minister of Education, the Honourable David King, Alberta Culture and its Director of Film and Literary Arts, John Patrick Gillese, and at the University of Alberta, the President, Myer Horowitz, the Vice-President (Research), Gordin Kaplan, the Dean of Arts, Terrence White, the Dean of Education, Robert Patterson, and the Conference Fund. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to the regular and special members of the joint-faculty Continuing English Program Committee at the University of Alberta: Fred Clandfield, David Dillon, James Forrest, Henry Hargreaves, Margaret Iveson, Marion Jenkinson, Maurice Legris, Glenn Martin, Kenneth Nixon, John Oster, Noel Parker-Jervis, James Shaw and Muriel Whitaker. The editor and publishers wish to thank Doubleday & Company, Inc., for permission to reproduce 'My Papa's Waltz', copyright 1942 by Hearst Magazines Inc. from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke.

VI

Notes on the Contributors M. H. Abrams is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. An authority on European Romanticism, he is the author of The Mirror and the Lamp, The Milk of Paradise and Natural Super naturalism. He is also the general editor of the distinguished Norton Anthology of English Literature. Jacques Barzun is literary adviser for Charles Scribner's Sons and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University. He is renowned as an educator and cultural historian, with such diverse publications as Teacher in America, Berlioz and his Century, The American University, Clio and the Doctors, Science: the Glorious Entertainment and Simple and Direct: a Rhetoric for Writers. John Dixon is former Professor at Breton Hall College of Education. He is a founding member of the National Association for the Teaching of English in the United Kingdom. His books include Growth through English, Patterns of Language, Explorations in the Teachings of English and Education 16—19: the Role of English and Communication. Susan Jackel teaches in the interdisciplinary Canadian Studies Program at the University of Alberta. As well as publishing a series of articles on Canadian literature and history, she is the author of A Flannel Shirt and Liberty: British Emigrant Gentlewomen in the Canadian West 1880-1914. Martha King is Professor Emeritus of Educational Theory and Practice at Ohio State University. Among her numerous publications are Teaching Critical Reading to Elementary School Children and The Language Arts in the Elementary School: a Forum for Focus. Rowland McMaster is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. He has published editions of Dickens's Great Expectations vii

viii

Notes on the Contributors

and Little Dorrit as well as many articles on Victorian literature and, with his wife, Juliet McMaster, The English Novel from Sterne to James. Norman Page is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. In addition to numerous articles on Victorian literature, he has written critical studies about many novelists, among them Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. Louise M. Rosenblatt is Professor Emeritus of English Education at New York University. An acknowledged educator, she is widely known for such books as Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Robin Skelton is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He is the author of critical studies of poetry, such as J. M. Synge, The Poetic Pattern and Poetic Truth, and of several volumes of his own poems, among them Callsigns and Spellcraft. Keith Smillie is Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He worked for several years in Ottawa as a statistician and mathematician for private industry and the federal government. His main interests are the historical development and use of programming languages, the history of computation, and mathematics and science education. Rudy Wiebe is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. He has received the Governor General's Award for The Temptations of Big Bear and has written or edited eighteen books of fiction, non-fiction and drama, many based on the history and people of western Canada.

Introduction When the members of the Continuing English Program Committee, the organizers of this conference, were casting their nets and ranging in mental zodiacs to find a name for the whole enterprise, one suggestion was the reversal of Pope's apocalyptic gloom at the close of The Dunciad (IV.654). From 'Chaos' and 'Universal Darkness' we extracted, transformed and ceremoniously christened 'The Creating Word'. Not entirely motivated by whimsical licence, we hoped by this happy transformation to pin up our colours as teachers of English. Unlike the imprisoning educators Pope satirized, who 'hang one jingling padlock on the mind' (162) and think it confinement to keep their charges 'in the pale of words till death' (160), we decided to celebrate the capacity of the word to illumine and liberate, engage and transcend, unburden and connect. Also prominent in our plans was the need to involve English teachers at all levels - elementary, secondary and university teachers uniting to affirm our interdependence. If this sounds like the rosy palaver of numerous other meetings and symposia, 'The Creating Word' did have its own distinguishing features. The specific focus on the 1980s was not merely a gratuitous phrase. With computer literacy appearing as a goal in many curricula, imported critical theories evacuating meaning from texts, new emphasis being placed on the nature and variety of reader response, and a closer scrutiny being given to the act, stages and revelations of writing itself, the present seemed the best of times to weigh and consider. We were not hoping for a collection of Jeremiahs or Qoheleths, but admittedly the prospect of a Daniel or a Solomon, a Deborah or a Judith, was tantalizing. So diverse were the voices we heard, yet so strong a chorus did they form about the primacy of the English teacher's role, that we are grateful for the opportunity to present some of the outstanding papers here.* * Limitations of space have meant that not all of the papers could be included.

1

2

Introduction

A certain humility too must accompany the decision to publish conference papers. Jacques Barzun's 'recommendation' of beginning all composition classes with a reading of the grand, speechless debate between Thaumaste and Panurge sent me scurrying back to the source, only to be reminded of how neatly Rabelais drives home the ludicrousness of the confrontation by having the flabbergasted Englishman mention — with utter seriousness - that he is going to have the gestures and grunts printed. Thaumaste adduces two reasons for the project: to convince readers that it was not mere foolery ('affin que Ton ne pense que ce ayent este mocqueries') and to allow everyone to learn as he has ('a ce que chascun y apreigne comme je ayfaict'). If it is possible to divorce a satirist's letter and spirit, I would like to appropriate those intentions for this volume. Setting current vogues or predicaments in historical perspective is one of the many common ideas linking these papers. Not to be dismissed as the windy academic's evasion of the present in favour of sentimentalized or obsessive allusions to the past, this task is fundamental to any human undertaking: to try to comprehend where and what we are in light of where and what we have been. How eloquently Jacques Barzun maps the terrain of contemporary views about rhetoric. By tracing the stages through which language has been defined as a science and then as a living organism, he fashions a unique 'cultural drama'. It is a task for which Barzun - dramaturgic pedagogue par excellence - is eminently suited, having once described himself as 'an old, corrugated teacher of history'. From the vantage of 'a long-time observer of evolving critical movements and counter-movements', M. H. Abrams surveys the predominant innovation in literary theory and practice since the late 1960s, deconstruction. Paying strict attention to the works of its main proponent, Jacques Derrida, he notes the differences between this radical alternative for making sense of texts and the now old New Criticism. While admiring Derrida's erudition and skill as an 'equilibrist', Abrams remains a logician shrewd enough to point out deconstruction's 'intrinsic anomaly' and a teacher of literature committed to the claim that his subject is not a series of 'un-authored . . . illusions'. From a variety of perches all the speakers describe their specific fields by reference to the changing, at times controversial, views they accommodate. Louise M. Rosenblatt explains how the ideas

Introduction

3

of John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, among others, forecast and relate to her transactional theory, which could release us 'from the deconstructionist's focus on the text as an autonomous . . . entity and . . . from the subjectivism that concentrates on the reader's response'. In the domain of teaching poetry, in particular, Robin Skelton has witty fun with 'the established Star System' as a way of encouraging us not always to teach as we have been taught. Norman Page cites 'reception theory' as 'one of the more promising of recent developments' in the teaching of the novel; this shift to the reader signals the change from the nineteenthcentury preoccupation with the author and from the New Criticism's concern with the text. Rowland McMaster comes clean and confesses to promoting 'no avant garde theory of language, no new methodology studded all over with hard terms and jargon'; what he offers instead is a paradigm for celebrating Dickens's 'transcendent gift for language' which shows how the novelist's art encloses 'the syntactical rhythms, motifs and associations of the fairy tale' within the contrasting adult world of 'experience weighed and put in perspective'. As a teacher of creative writing, novelist Rudy Wiebe points to the crucial awareness of the myriad ways in which experience can be rendered literary as one of the most demanding lessons he can give his students; his historical precedent is the practice of his own mentor, F. M. Salter. Drawing on his experience as a teacher in the inner city of London and, more recently, as a researcher in the field of student narratives, John Dixon offers examples of the 'profound shift in consciousness' that sympathetically fostered adolescent writing, from its early to late stages, can contain; grounded in the tradition of 'the schooling of consciousness', Dixon's case is a compelling one for the necessity to look more intuitively and encouragingly at these youthful documents. Martha King blends a helpful dose of current scholarship and keen observation to exhibit the natural ways children develop 'language learning stratgegies', and uses this foundation to caution about 'the discrepancy between what is known about 'language learning strategies', and uses this foundation to language is used and taught in primary schools'. A computer scientist, Keith Smillie describes the terrific diminution in size, bulk and price of the computer, from the electronic versions of the forties to the microforms of the 1980s, but, as he sees it, there has also been a corresponding 'decline in standards of literacy and in

4

Introduction

the esteem in which good literature is held'. Relying on his personal and long-considered sense of the 'poverty of technology', he laments the fact that computer literacy has become 'the educational catch phrase of the decade'. Canadian content - in this country, at least- is another contemporary shibboleth. Susan Jackel reflects on its implications, especially for high-school curricula, by measuring the distance we have come from Egerton Ryerson's national readers, to the 'cosmetic Canadianization' of the 1950s and 1960s, to today's full-fledged but nonetheless problematic endorsement. This economic and political history, she argues, is important as the prelude to the new phase of reading and teaching Canadian literature which she rightly terms 'an adventure of the first order, for students and teachers alike'. This sense of journey- to the interior and the heart- is another shared theme in these papers about the aptness and perplexity, disclosures and playfulness of the word. A sampling of the metaphors and definitions used to describe words, or language, or literature might demonstrate the varied but converging routes of the journey. Jacques Barzun calls language 'a work of collective art' and exhorts us to become enlightened conservationists tending this 'human handiwork'. In every part of his explanation of literature as 'a human document' M. H. Abrams stresses the need for a compassionate response from a fellow mortal to 'a fictional presentation of thinking, acting and feeling characters who are enough like ourselves to engage us in their experiences, in language which is expressed and ordered by a human author in a way that moves and delights the human reader'. When Louise M. Rosenblatt refers to a text as 'a set of signs that permit us to call forth a sequence of fused cognitive and affective states of mind', she is not suggesting that such a response is always automatic, but rather, she challenges us to provide the situations where young readers can freely and confidently 'enter into the lives of the characters they are carving out of their own inner resources in transaction with the text'. Such resources are essential in writing as well as reading, John Dixon reminds us, 'because of the tacit links with the inner stories we are telling every day of our lives'. The most strategic bridge, of course, remains the one that we build between ourselves and our students. Precisely because of the nature of our subject, we English teachers end up teaching ourselves. And whether our influence is momentary or longlasting, it is the initial filter or lens through which our students'

Introduction

5

responses to the text are directed. Hearing and now reading these papers have made me even more aware of the delicate equipoise involved in the task of helping, correcting and leading along with listening, responding and understanding. Although I am still sufficiently Thomistic to look upon the teacher as an essential cause, a leader in the discursive, reasoning process ('motor essentialis\ as the De Magistro expresses it), I think the Augustinian emphasis on a fraternal bond linking pupils and teacher is equally important. Writing about 'the influence of a sympathetic mind', the one-time grammarian observed: When our pupils are affected by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell in each other and thus they speak within us what they hear, while we after a fashion learn in them what we teach. (The Instruction of the Uninstructed, ch. 12) Such a mingling of Thomistic and Augustinian notions might baffle the theologian, but it is one with which readers of this volume will, I hope, readily concur. The University of Alberta August 1984

PATRICIA DEMERS

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1

Rhetoric and Rightness: Some Fallacies in a Science of Language1 JACQUES BARZUN I

As I looked over the impressive programme of this Conference, I noted with pleasure that some of the distinguished participants would discuss the use of rhetoric in teaching composition and literature. For this use has had a long and, until our century, successful tradition. The craft of criticism, too, has often in the past come within the purview of rhetoric, making it altogether an influential branch of learning. Then the subject fell on evil days: rhetoric seemed to be no more than a bag of tricks taught and used mechanically. The dismissive phrase 'mere rhetoric' meant words without substance. Applied to literature, it meant verbal effects without thought or feeling behind them. Today, rhetoric has made a comeback, but with a shift of object. Although the ancient word rhetor means 'I speak', what interests the modern rhetorician is not the speaker, but the listener or the reader. Rhetoric now goes in for analysis and interpretation - and not just of texts; it seeks to probe into all our convictions. 'The new rhetoric', says one devotee, 'is not part of literature; it is concerned with the effective use of informal reasoning in all fields.' 2 Indeed, it claims a revolutionary influence on philosophy, psychology, and ethics. You do not have to look very far to find books and articles entitled 'the Rhetoric of this' and the 'Rhetoric of that', the this and the that being far removed from language. Since it is now the audience, the receiver, that is being studied for his impressions and responses, we may 7

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The Creating Word

sooner expect a work on 'The Rhetoric of Rheumatism' than any return to the kind of textbook formerly called Grammar and Rhetoric, which taught the principles of writing exposition, description, narrative, and argument. In these conditions, it is likely that whatever benefits we are to gain from the new Rhetoric, it will not help us in the predicaments of the class in composition. They are acute and they now gravely affect business, government, publishing, and society at large. Everywhere, one hears dismay about the state of literacy- literacy in both senses: the bare ability to read and write and the developed ability to read and write well and understand texts. So far no theory, no analysis, no system has brought relief. That discouraging fact has been observable for fifty years or more, and many contributory causes have been named. But I believe an important one has been overlooked, of which I should like to give a sketch. I have in mind the assumptions about language and rhetoric that have been accepted all this while as valid and useful. It may be that the trouble lies in these ideas as they have been translated into action. The chief of these assumptions is: 'behold! we are scientists'. In a widely used little book called Rhetorical Criticism, we are told at the outset: 'All intellection aspires to the condition of physics.'3 And the author goes on to blame older rhetoricians for being naive and lacking rigorous methods - methods only now discovered. True, the author notes some differences between physical scientists and workers in literature, but these differences come after 'scientific' method has been established as the indispensable base. This same assumption has prevailed in the study and teaching of language for nearly a century, so that by now the doctrines of theorists are taken not as tenable ideas but as matters of fact. The steps by which these teachings gained power over the common mind forms an instructive episode in cultural history. Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the comparative study of European languages led to discovering family relationships, chains of etymology, and regularities in the change of sounds. Grimm's findings about the shifting of consonants was an achievement regarded as comparable to a discovery in physics and it was called Grimm's law. The linguists of that time, or philologists, as they were called, referred to their work as 'scientific'. They meant it was scholarly, methodical, not fanciful but based on sources. In every European

Rhetoric and Rightness

9

tongue, the phrase 'scientific work' meant just that. After all, the root meaning of science is simply knowledge. But by 1865, when Max Miiller, the transplanted German lecturing at Oxford, offered a course on the 'science of language', something had happened to the key word. Thanks to the agitation about Darwinism, science and scientist had become objects of worship; the older terms naturalist, natural philosopher, went out of use, and the conviction spread that nothing was true or sure except the findings of physical science. The adjective scientific became a judgment of value and a source of pride.4 That was Act I of the cultural drama. Act II could be predicted. It was the scramble on the part of every scholarly discipline to earn or snatch the label scientific. Historians, sociologists, psychologists, philologists, educators, grammarians, even roadbuilders and mechanics - all crowned themselves scientific in the new sense of purveying certainty. In subjects related to language, this scientism was reinforced toward the end of the nineteenth century by an important social revolution: the new free public schools were turning out their products on a national scale. The resulting enlargement of the reading public led to the creation of the penny newspaper and other forms of popular literature, and this in turn drew attention to common speech, as against the rhetoric of high literature. This shift, moreover, coincided with the replacement of the classics curriculum by the new sciences, which were touted as modern, concrete, lively, and practical, whereas the traditional subjects and their literary sources were called antiquarian and unpractical. 5 The old grammar was denounced as not only schoolmarmish but unscientific, because it followed the outline and terminology of Latin grammar. The English scholar Henry Sweet, the model of Shaw's Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, published in 1891 a New English Grammar professing to be the first scientific one.6 The word meant that the grammar would describe the workings of English, not prescribe any forms or usages. Henceforth there might be regularities in language but there would be no rules. The efforts of the earlier philologists - Grimm's law, Verner's law and similar findings - were replaced by direct, present-day observation of the spoken tongue. Accordingly, French, German, American, Scandinavian scholars began to go on their travels - at home - to observe and describe. This resolve and this endless field trip felt like an emancipation, as if these new

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scientists were at long last approaching raw nature, grappling with reality instead of convention. We are now in the third act of this drama featuring Science as heroine, and we see that besides her magnificent conquests offstage, this young actress has overawed the rest of the cast. They keep on trying to prove they are her blood relatives, first cousins with the true family likeness; and yet their words suggest that they are never quite convinced - or convincing. But the third act goes on and on and may well prove interminable. In any case, it gives the sense of an anticlimax after the great scrimmage at the turn of the century; for then it did seem as if every kind of knowledge were going to be reshaped in the same mould and come out - all of it set forever, eternal bronze.

II

Meanwhile, the public had begun to learn the tenets of the new scientific grammar. Its first lesson about language is that it is a part of nature. A language is a living thing - except, of course, when it is dead.7 One sign of its life is that it is changing all the time, and the first commandment is that no change must be interfered with; for, on the one hand, linguistic change cannot be resisted and, on the other, to repress change would thwart or stunt life. When the linguistic authorities write for the general public, they always speak with contempt and derision of attempts to guide, improve, or straighten out the language. They also tend to deny that during the life of a language it is at times better - more uniform, elegant, flexible - than at other times. For whatever happens to it is not disorder and decay but necessary evolution, as in the animal and vegetable world. Language wriggles and wiggles in perpetual adaptation, and no stage can be called better or worse: it is as it has to be. The linguist here is playing two roles. As would-be scientist he refuses to utter value judgements, and as professional man he is saying: 'hands off my subject matter. If you meddle with it, the bloom of fresh changes and their discovery will be taken from me forever'. This twofold doctrine has captured the minds of those who struggle to impart the rudiments of good speech and good writing in the schools. It shapes the classroom behaviour of teacher and

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taught, their common law being laissez-faire: 'one word is as good as another; though this phrasing isn't favoured by some, many people use it: so go ahead; you're entitled to use the speechways you were brought up in; for - who knows! - your odd way of pronouncing or writing may in time become the usual way- that's how language grows and thrives'. These attitudes and precepts would be sound if linguistics were a natural science and if science were meant to control teaching. But the analogy with science is false. Language is not a living species that evolves by necessity. Only the speakers are alive. Without themselves perishing, they can kill a language by merely being conquered and taking up their alien masters' speech, as has often happened in history. Besides, the vaunted scientific description of a language is only an approximation. What the observer records is vocabulary, some grammatical forms, and some pronunciations. The actual speech of a whole people is beyond the reach of accurate description. It changes and breaks down every minute. Many of us some of the time, and some of us all the time, speak in incoherent fragments, with irrelevant words and noises thrown in, free from any recurring bonds of grammar. Pronunciation, too, varies endlessly, not only from person to person but within each person's utterance at different times. And so far as I know, no one studying language has ever measured speed and spacing, which so strongly affect meaning and receptivity.8 It would be as easy to record the stream of thought of a multitude - or of a single person - as to ascertain the actual, fluid reality of a nation's speech. What is in fact done is to make up a schema from the partial data that we can catch on paper or on tape, and learn from it what we can. The results have been remarkable and of immense value. We know much more than was ever previously known about dialects, phonetics, slang, and the many other facets of that wonderful creation, language. Philology, linguistics, is a vast and splendid human achievement. It is only a pity that the posture of science was adopted for the latter phase of that achievement, instead of the more modest mode of intelligent inquiry. For there is more to say about the damage caused by the fallacious comparison of language to a living organism and of linguistics to a natural science. Consider: from supposing that in language events occur by cosmic necessity, a foolish faith has grown that a new word is created when it is needed, that an old

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one disappears when it is no longer useful, that the success - that is, the currency - of a new vocable corresponds to its merit and utility; in short, that all works toward the best of all possible outcomes. The more changes in language the more life, and about life we should feel joyful and congratulatory. If some convenient or subtle verbal distinction is blurred by ignorant misuse, cheer up — there are as many good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. That spirit cannot help affecting the student and his teacher in their joint efforts to improve verbal expression. The one is complacent about his careless error; the other is afraid to condemn it for fear of precipitating a cardiac arrest in the life of the mother tongue. No fault is serious because no fault is really a fault. This principle has been put by a leading authority in unforgettable words: 'No native speaker can make a mistake.' He is only fiddling with what belongs to him by birthright, giving it the kick of expanded life. The author of this view, Professor Allen Walker Read, is a colleague and esteemed friend of mine, but in the words I have quoted he speaks for the false religion of 'Bow Down and Hands Off' miscalled science of language. Turn now for a moment to reflect on what we might expect if indeed we had a natural science of language. First, it would cover with increasing precision all parts of the subject - grammar, syntax, vocabulary, pronunciation and their various aspects. Then, the terminology would be clear, uniform, and universally accepted; there would be fixed units, known variables, and measurement of their functional relations. The upshot would be: prediction, that is: within well-defined limits, the observed phenomena of language could be counted on to occur. It takes no long pondering to see that language gives no foothold to any of these expectations. The terminology is individual and chaotic. The variety of languages does not favor universal systems, and the darling feature— so-called life— which means change, defies exact mapping. Once upon a time, the phoneme was touted as the proof that a social science could boast a true scientific unit, but it soon lost its claim: the phoneme is elusive, localized, impermanent, and defined in half a dozen different ways, one of them asserting that 'it is not a sound but a bundle of relevant sound features'.9 The conclusion is inescapable: language, like history, like the human mind, is part of the domain of chance. New words do not appear when needed; centuries pass without their creation.

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13

Existing words do drop out when still needed and clearly used. The success of new coinages depends on vogue, which is largely accidental, like the success of a play or a book. As with books, again, a popular novelty suddenly dies, with or without competition, with or without replacement. It is this strictly human waywardness, in speaking as in writing, that makes it foolish to look upon language as an oracle that will infallibly tell us what is right. Professor Read's maxim, that a native speaker cannot make a mistake, is refuted by the evidence of common practice. Native speakers do not believe him, for they frequently correct themselves and sometimes each other: they are conscious of having made a mistake. Then, too, babies are native speakers and the plentiful mistakes they make are steadily corrected by their parents, by themselves, and by the rest of the community, until all parties decide that the infant (which means 'non-speaker') has at last learned to speak right. This enforcement of a norm has gone on since speech itself began and for all languages everywhere. The only interruption has come recently in Western societies, where it is now thought proper to stop correcting children as early instead of as late as possible. Lastly, one might ask why in Professor Read's permissiveness only native speakers are granted a right to play fast and loose with the language. Foreigners have imposed their stumblings and their happy turns of phrase on English for 1500 years; they have, as we say, enriched the mother tongue. Why should the grafting and the mangling stop at the borders of nationality? It doesn't sound hospitable, democratic; it is in fact unAmerican: a free-for-all should be a free for all. One further twist: central to the scientific analogy is the notion of language as a thing alive. To speak of it as such and call its vagaries evolution is to speak in metaphors. But these particular metaphors — alas — can be used equally well to turn the linguistic imperatives upside down. For example, as a living thing, language must be pruned like a tree, must be tamed and castrated like the horse; its nature must be forcibly modified to produce superior hybrids; it must be doctored to cure its diseases and put off its death. Such suggestions are calculated to horrify the scientific guardians; their notion of life does not include disease. They are in fact rather like armchair environmentalists proclaiming the rights of wild life to continue unmolested in its present state. But this is to

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say that far from being detached scientists, limiting themselves to description and classification, they prescribe as well. And what they prescribe is that others should not prescribe. The motive is social and political, on a high-minded level. They are defending the natural democracy of linguistic choices. To declare some better and some worse is an elitist pretension. They are sure it will fail in the long run; and in the long run the free competition of speechways in the marketplace will prove most advantageous for society and for language itself.

III

Now some may think that I have imagined, or at least over-stated, the connection between the would-be science and present-day illiteracy, as well as that between the linguist's peculiar presciptiveness and a socio-political animus. Anyone so minded has only to consult the literature that teachers of English have read - and written - for the last half century. As a result of linguistic doctrine, thirty years ago, the National Council of Teachers of English in the US passed a resolution to express 'support for the scientific study of the English language', and recommended that teacher training include 'instruction in the methods, results, and applications of that study'. The primary aim was 'to free school teaching from wasteful and harmful practices'. The ultimate aim was to teach 'the standard English discovered by descriptive research'.10 (Please dwell a moment on the idea that an English teacher's language must first be discovered by research.) Twenty-three years later, science had taken a further step. The same Council passed another resolution affirming 'The Students' Right to Their Own Language' and giving as the ground of that right another piece of research: 'language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect had any validity. . . . The belief leads to false advice for speakers and writers and immoral advice for humans'. 11 Strong language. But forget the political intent, good or bad, of these declarations; it is a topic for another discussion. The point here is solely the compounding of science with a prescriptive pedagogy, of science with social aims and moral advice. A still more recent example shows the crusading spirit undiminished. If you look up 'Dictionary' in the latest edition of the

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15

Encyclop&dia Britannica, you will find the linguist-author pointing out that 'certain words commonly called obscene have [usually] been omitted [from dictionaries], and thus irrational taboos have been strengthened. If the sex words were given in their alphabetical place, . . . the false attitudes in society would be cleansed'.12 With one stroke, our scientist disposes of the category 'obscene' words are only so-called- and with another, he will cleanse society of attitudes he has decided are false. Yet this free-handed prescribing for our good does not keep him from regretting in another paragraph that the Americans have the habit of rushing to the dictionary to find out what is right. He prefers the English, who adopt a more laissez-faire attitude. On this point he is a poor sociologist, or he would know that the influence of class in child-rearing achieves in England what is not done in the United States. I need hardly add that not all linguists show so much mental confusion— or such unconscious humor. For what this last witness tells us in effect is that a modern dictionary should not be used too frequently for guidance about words; its use should be to painlessly remove social taboos. And the public, which after all pays for the dictionary making and publishing, should buy the book not in order to help Johnny spell and think straight, but in order to own a scientific description of current usage in its fullness, from Brooklyn to Vancouver. This incoherent group of notions and metaphors, bugbears and warnings forms the intellectual estate of teachers of English, of foreign languages, and of anything else called 'language arts'.13 As individuals they may possess a good or a poor command of the mother tongue, a gift for teaching it or a rank inability to do so. But the creed of linguistics they possess alike, for it is easily grasped and retained; indeed, its cliches have become part of contemporary culture. It makes quite clear to teachers what the Council resolution meant by the 'wasteful and harmful practices' that science should fumigate out of the classroom. Those are the practices of correcting language and inculcating grammatical rules. Now no one who grew up in the bad old times or who has read the grammars and rhetorics of those days can deny that the rules were too numerous, not very liberal in spirit, and sometimes totally unjustifiable. It was certainly absurd to make war against splitting an infinitive and ending a sentence with a preposition,

16

The Creating Word

and it was misguided to promote genteelism. Yet it is curious to note with what passion millions of English speakers, when they read or write today, still worship these preferences and prohibitions-just as they keep rushing to the dictionary. It often seems as if there were in most people a deep desire for more rules, more guideposts in the difficult art of saying what one means. And now that the harmful and wasteful practices are antiseptically extinct, the people still expect that their offspring will develop adequate means of self-expression. What can those who teach these children possibly do? The struggle toward clear utterance takes place mainly on two portions of the terrain vocabulary and grammar: more exact words (but respect dialect and misusage) and words better put together (but rules are made to be broken). How can anything be done under such prescriptions? As to words, doing anything at all seems very difficult. For the pussyfooting about labeling right or wrong, about dialect or standard, is complicated by another sophisticated dictum: 'A word has no fixed meaning; a word can mean anything, depending on the context.' This half truth is supposed to show that the sense of words can be disregarded pretty freely. So runs the argument that a relativist in morals has no morals, because he tells you that he relates his moral ideas to the situation he meets. But if, as stated, the context of a word determines its meaning, a given word does not lack fixed meanings; it has a series of fixed meanings, each dictated by its context. The whole art of writing is to fix meanings clearly and economically by mutual adjustment, by artful con-text.14 If the teacher, already beset by scientific ideas, does not see through this further beclouding of the language question, the chances are poor that help about vocabulary will be forthcoming in class. Perhaps the only addition to the students' means of expression will be jargon— I mean jargon of the modern kind, full of abstract nouns - because jargon can seem to be saying something without pointing to anything definite. That jargon is deliberately spread in schools was confirmed by a study, done at the University of Chicago, by Professor Joseph Williams of the English Department. It showed that school teachers in that city gave high grades for written work that sounded like bureaucratic prose and low grades to what was put in simple and concrete terms: rhetoric upside down.

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What about grammar? The very name these days denotes a predicament. The descriptive grammars since the time of Henry Sweet have been much too extensive and complicated to teach. Every advance in research has added to the number and variety of elements, coupled with new theories of meaning and function leading to long unresolved debates. All that these efforts have contributed to the classroom is the destruction of the old terminology, plus another memorable cliche: 'English is not Latin.' It follows that a grammatical framework resembling the Latin is taboo, which leaves the field open for divergent systems and their tangled terminologies. Phonological, generative, structuralist, transformationist, 'grammar of sets', and other labels have been attached to school grammars, all intricate and all taking for granted what I quote from a good specimen: 'the central concern of this book is with the system or systems of English Grammar, not with errors that are made or might be made. . . . There is no reason to be horrified by bad sentences. All of us make bad sentences in speaking, and great care and sensitivity must be used in correcting anyone in any circumstances'.15 Armed with these cautions and injunctions, our teacher of grammar is deemed intellectually and morally equipped for removing illiteracy. But modern grammars tax more than the moral sense. One 'transformational' grammar, several hundred pages thick, is dense reading for any adult, even in its adaptation for the young. Here is how it explains to ninth-graders the switch from active to passive voice: 'The passive transformation applies only to kernel sentences which contain a transitive verb and its object. In this transformation, the object becomes subject and be and the participle morpheme are inserted before the verb. The subject optionally appears at the end after the preposition by" To make it all clear, the text adds: 'We can state the rule in this way: NPi + Aux + VT + NP2 NP2 + Aux + be + participle + VT + (by + NP1).'16

That grammar and its rivals try conscientiously to be complete, yet they all leave out one essential element: pedagogy, the art of teaching. It is an omission observable in many other subjects. The compulsory up-to-date-ness of science has tended everywhere to blot out the knowledge that beginners must begin at the beginning. Learners can only learn by starting from the simple;

18

The Creating Word

hence subjects must be artificially simplified; if need be, falsified. The refinements, the exceptions to rules first given out as absolute, the depths discoverable by advanced analysis can only come after a basis, however rough, has been solidly laid. One cannot refine or deepen what does not yet exist. It is like wanting to carve the ornament before the pillar is built. Yet that futile attempt has been made again and again in our time by would-be school reformers invoking science. It produced two colossal blunders: the look-and-say method of teaching reading and the new math. Both put at the beginning what is reachable only at the end, and I have accordingly named the errorpreposterism. Trying to teach writing in accordance with the results of linguistics, right or wrong, is preposterism in excelsis.17 IV

But enough of negatives. Polemical work is good only for clearing the ground. Let me rather ask: What then is language, if it is not a live creature restlessly evolving or an autonomous piece of machinery? It is a work of art, a collective work of art, a work of collective art. The English language in particular is a monumental work, which induces awe in anyone who reflects on its past. English goes back, by way of the Indo-Germanic tongues of Europe, to a time beyond the birth of Sanskrit and to the presumed original of all the languages of the West. English has repeatedly strengthened its vocabulary by drawing on these languages in their later forms, as well as on others outside their kin. And it has domesticated these borrowings while rubbing down its own structures and inflexions, making itself the most flexible as well as the richest language on earth. Millions of minds have collaborated in this perfecting— an anonymous, democratic achievement of the first magnitude. No other language comes close to possessing the same merits. As the young William James put this comparison in a vivid image when studying in Dresden — 'German' (he said) 'is without any of the modern improvements.' 18 The modern improvements have come both by addition and by subtraction, of course- by changes. But it is far from true that all the changes have come from ignorance or mindlessness. Loving attention, solicitude for needs, intense care about logic and art have been lavished on the English language. By whom? by public

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speakers and writers- men and women who combined an esthetic with a practical interest in the instrument of their thought. The work of writers, aided by that of printers and publishers, has given permanence to happy innovation. The linguists are at fault when they dismiss the written word and make a fetish of the spoken. If they consorted more with good books they would find how much of the speech they record originated in written 'literature, including the law and the sciences - terse idioms, metaphors buried in words, short cuts in syntax, as well as innumerable bright sayings, now cliches and platitudes. The bearing of this unbroken history is that language belongs as much to the realm of esthetics as to any other. Scholarship may study language as a use of certain organs, as a system of symbols, or as a social institution and draw conclusions about physique, class, nationality, obscenity, morals, or whatever. But when it studies sounds, forms, and meanings it is working in the domain of esthetic criticism. That is why it is always proper to pass judgement on the current language, reprove its misuse, and defend its subtleties and distinctions when these appear to be ignored. Speakers and writers have a vested interest in the merits of the tongue they work with, exactly like other professionals who guard their investments and privileges when threatened. On hearing this, you may think that I am about to launch into a eulogy of our contemporary literary artists and represent them as fighting a rearguard action against the array of scientific linguists. Not at all. Modern writers have done as much damage to rhetoric and its teaching as the scientificos. If on the one side I can quote the famous linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who said: 'Linguists naturally have no respect for words',19 I can quote on the other the French poet Apollinaire — an adult friend of my childhood days — who was more than half serious when he said to me: 'You see, if I want to, I can make archipelago mean blotting paper.' Besides wanting to amuse, he was asserting the power of the poet to join words in untried ways that revigorate them and mark the difference from newspaper prose. Anticipating the title of this Conference, Apollinaire was preaching 'The Creating Word'. A worthy aim, unquestionably, but this creativeness as practiced by poets, novelists, and critics during the past hundred years has overshot its goal. By riotous excess it has destroyed the very standard by which original creation can be appreciated, leaving the western languages battered and depleted.

20

The Creating Word

Let me repeat: the creative word can defeat itself, because novelty can only be felt in relation to a perceived norm, just as rhythmic freedom and invention can only be felt against a regular meter. When the norm is obscured by heedless and endless violations, these earn diminishing returns until all interest disappears. Archipelago may evoke blotting paper the first time artistry makes the mind jump the gap, but after a myriad imitations, no odd couplings will evoke anything at all. Recollect what we have been offered during the period in question: poems in which words and syntax formed puzzles that had to be deciphered, sometimes with the author's help in notes footnote poetry. Some poems repaid the effort; the bulk of the rest were strictly undecipherable, because there were no unambiguous clues to the jumble. Bad poetry, yes, but meanwhile the blurring of grammatical and lexical sense had gone one step further. Next consider the novelists and playwrights. Both profess to work in the midst of life and duly use the words they hear around them. But what they hear is the slovenly, fractured utterance of our daily lives. If to create 'reality' writers confine themselves to this language, they record the timely confusion, but at the cost of individual style and permanence. Some novelists, it is true, make up an artificial idiom to counter the poverty of phonographic realism. Hemingway at one end of the scale and Faulkner at the other are examples of the stark and the poetic kinds of artificial prose. Beyond them we have Woolf's stream of consciousness and Joyce's Finneganese, both widely and variously copied. And close by, the latter-day critics and theorists of literature, thick with jargon and top-heavy in syntax, find fulfillment, like their colleagues in poetry and fiction, in scorning the common tongue. They are sure that only the offbeat and difficult has any chance of being true — or at least of gaining attention. Paradox is piled on pedantry when those who undertake to expound literature decline to make themselves understood. From the point of view of the conscientious rhetorician, these several ways of sabotaging the language put modern writers in the same class with the scientific linguists. By precept and example and with the best intentions - art and 'science' have done their best to further defacement and deformation. The rhetorician can only say: 'a plague on both your houses'. That mild curse must not be mistaken. It does not express

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regret at change, nor a desire for purity. Change is bound to occur and purity in our highly mixed languages is meaningless. But over the centuries, leading writers and grammarians have felt the responsibility of keeping the means of expression in good repair. Earlier ages have been as innovative, have believed no less than we in the 'creating word', but in their creations and borrowings they kept in mind the spirit of the language and its serviceability. They instinctively resisted confusion; our respected authorities and models wantonly promote it - and are at once copied by the advertisers, the media, and the schools. If you want to see how Finnegans Wake reaches the infant mind, look at a newsletter devoted to gifted children. It features a contest called Spallenge, a new word cleverly made from 'Spin-Off' and 'Challenge', and which incites to the creation of other new words on the same plan. These novelties are called 'sqwords' - two words squeezed together. Twenty-two gifted children have won the privilege of seeing their name and address in print in the current newsletter by contributing such creations as picalad (from pickle and salad), Greethology (from Greek and mythology), trivicted (from tried and convicted), treqf (from tree and leaf), and authustrated (from author and illustrated). 20 The adult inventors of this pastime evidently fail to see that it negates the very motive of language, which is self-expression, that is, wanting to utter a thought. When the teachers of language, already crippled as I have shown, find literature giving the example of disorder and pedagogy also revelling in it, no one should be surprised that composition is impossible to teach and that students leave school unable to speak or to write clearly, not sure of what they read, and virtual invalids in the act of thinking. Remedial classes in college attempt a patch-up job as to writing; and the press tells us that 'Classes in How to Think Spring Up Around the Nation.'21 These are signs, not of the failure of schools as such, but of the damage inflicted on language in the ways I have sketched. For although it is possible to think without words, one can do so only for a short space of time. Continuity and recall of thought need visible marks - on sand or wood, wax or paper - in short, writing. Language grows from new thought, and language in turn conditions later thought. The science of linguistics could not last an afternoon without the written word. A single bond ties together thought, speech, and verbal composition. In writings we see our

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The Creating Word

thoughts take a sharp outline, which discloses the gaps between and the flaws within them. No thought worth very much will come from a mind unfurnished with words or capable only of crude combinations. Remember 'Spallenge'. What were the teachers or the children thinking about when they took pride in the compound treaf or authustrated? Does anyone say 'tree leaf or 'author illustrated'? Is there any earthly need for either expression? And supposing there were, would the collapsed syllables convey it? At what cost of guesswork and with what feelings on the part of the puzzled reader or listener? It is safe to say that no concern for him occurred at any point, and it is this thought-less-ness that must somehow be cured.22 V

How is it to be done? You will not expect me in a few concluding minutes to outline a grammar and rhetoric adapted to our sad situation. Yet it would not be enough for me to say: Follow principles exactly opposite to those I have reviewed. The advice would be sound but not concrete. So I shall venture to suggest a number of positive beliefs about language that may assist judgement as well as teaching. First, despite the Teachers' Council resolution, there is such a thing as standard English. Even the linguists' dictionaries have to say so, though how, on their principles, they know what is or is not standard, remains a mystery. But never mind. Whoever professes to instruct should recognize standard at sight and know when someone makes a mistake - in vocabulary, idiom, or grammar. That mistakes are possible may have to be shown. This is easily done. Let me illustrate. In a notorious conversation manual of the 1880s for Portuguese speakers who wanted to learn English, all the sentences sound like this: 'Apply you at the study during that you are young.' 'Since you not go out, I shall go out nor I neither.'23 It is clear that the author knew no English; he used a dictionary with which he transliterated as well as he could.24 The point of quoting him is double: though his remarks are not English they are in English words; and we understand him perfectly well. He 'gets across', but it remains a mistake to say: 'during that you are young' and the rest of his oddities. Note this too: the common idea that the test of good writing is

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'effective communication' is erroneous. Senhor Caroline 'communicates effectively' but 'he writ no language' and would be a ridiculous model. The mystique of'communication' is overdone in any case. Among the peoples of the earth most of the trillions of words emitted every minute are not for communication; they are for self-expression. The speaker wants to utter and cares little whether the listener follows - as is shown by the fact that when the speaker stops he stays absorbed in his own train of thought, waiting for an opening to resume speech. That some communication takes place in the world is an occasional miracle brought about not by free desire but by sheer necessity. The free desire is for self-expression. Language is anchored so deep in our feelings that when they stir we must speak. Likewise it is mixed feelings that prevent expression. This accounts for the young student's saying that he has nothing to write about, and for what the professional calls writer's block. But when the feelings are strong and clear, they require language that fits the meaning and is esthetically pleasing. That double goal inspired the makers of language itself. With the material of words as with any other, the work cannot be made right without a strenuous effort of thought, a continual choice and compromise among conflicting demands — sound, sense, lucidity, precision, force, and all the other qualities of style. The practical test - does it communicate? - is indeed relevant, at the end. The test varies with the occasion and the audience, but intrinsic rightness does not. Rightness is what satisfies the writer for the sake of his own mind. It makes his thought into an object and confirms his sense of power over language. If the student is not taught to feel that need and that pride, he will be comfortable with the language of Senhor Carolino, which communicates delightfully, though with not one of the qualities that language must have. This argument, I know, is unfamiliar, so I must amplify it a little. Unless language is regarded as a work of art and spoken about as we speak about painting and music, there is no good reason for demanding the virtues of good writing. 'Effective communication' yields just the minimum that will get by. Right now, most ordinary students think they communicate well enough for their needs - and they do. Obviously, communicating gives them no motive to slave away at writing themes and satisfying our pernickety demands, no reasons for preferring

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The Creating Word

idiomatic speech, precise diction, economical syntax, varied rhythm, homogeneous tone, adroit linkage and transitions - in short, no reason for good writing. On the ground of mere communication I had no answer to the student who, on seeing his paper blue pencilled, cried out to me: 'You knew what I meant all the time!' He was right. So he had to be told - in suitably softened form - 'Yes, I understood you, but without pleasure or interest. You bored me and offended me aesthetically. You were massacring the language. You showed me nothing but a dull and sullen mind.' Some may object that it is hard enough to get plain decent writing and speech out of average students without asking for 'art'. The rejoinder is that plain and decent, simple and direct are already Art- and difficult. Since we are not afraid to teach Art in another sense- music and drawing- why should we cast the art of language in a separate and unequal role? On the same principle, I think the word language should be kept to its proper use. Mathematics is not a language; neither is music, nor the Morse code, nor the dance movements of honey bees. The title of R. P. Blackmur's essays Language as Gesture is a deplorable concession to the craze for metaphor, suggesting as it does its counterpart, 'Gesture as Language'. These catchwords repeat the fallacy of equating language with communication, while forgetting that language was developed to improve on gesture. Language is language - a unique, un comparable creation, and until we readopt this fruitful tautology as our guide to thought and action, we shall continue to fail in both. Perhaps all composition classes should begin by reading chapters 18 and 19 in Book II of Rabelais, where the great English scholar, Thaumaste, debates against Panurge entirely by making signs with his arms and hands. He only confesses himself beaten when Panurge thumbs his nose at him and with his fingers distorts his face into a hideous grimace. What should I recommend next? The two main branches of a practical rhetoric, we said, are grammar and vocabulary. The grammar, as artificial as possible, should make familiar the traditional names derived from the bad old Latin-shaped grammar. Those names persist, one here, one there, even in the most moderne grammars, and it is observable that people to whom the whole set of terms is second nature not only have learned to write pretty well, but can also help others analyse their troubles. Speak then of subject and object, not 'head word', or 'catenative' or the

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dozens of other new labels. A schematic grammar described in less than twenty pages may be found in the Tibbetts' book What's Happening to American English?25 (Scribner, 1978). The role of grammar is to make conscious the ways in which a given language unites meaning and function, which is why grammar is so difficult for those who already know the language. It is notorious that students who succeed in passing just one semester of Latin go on to do better work in English: the inflected forms have objectified for them the grammatical relations. As for vocabulary, experience shows that a well-directed study of words can become the means of straight thinking and breed a desire to work at writing. For everything about words can arouse curiosity — form, meaning, origin, usage, connotation, idiom, logic, inconsistency. Just think of the power in the little word or, which can offer a choice between two different things and also express identity between two namings. In fact, until anesthetized by bad teaching, children give a good deal of private thought to words, seek out their system, or impose one by analogies of their own devising.26 This propensity must be cultivated. By making the student conscious of the uses and abuses, merits and demerits of colloquialism, slang, dialect, and technical terms, the whole subject of tone and style is opened up. The only imperatives are: no jargon, no metaphors, no pretentiousness masquerading as creativity. In truth, when one is learning a craft, creativity is out of place and always safely postponed. Of course, in order to generate this interest, the teacher must possess it first and be copious in examples and details. The teacher must have an intuitive knowledge of what a student can write about and avoid the paralyzing make-believe topics so often handed out. Finally, the teacher must be able to judge writing at sight. Mr Rudolf Flesch has done good work in drawing attention to the failure of the schools, but his test of a good sentence by the number of words in it is anti-aesthetic and harmful. A teacher's effort should be on the contrary to raise composition from the usual machine-gun effect of short declarative sentences to the longer complex forms. Hemingway is good in his place but a poor model, because he leaves the coordination and subordination of ideas unexpressed. Being a good judge of writing will also enable a teacher to choose wisely the readings without which the right use of words cannot be learned. These readings had better not be from the

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The Creating Word

flavourless prose anthologized for Freshman English, nor from the works of contemporaries who, as the misnomer has it, 'experiment'. Some of the readings should go back to earlier styles, so that strangeness itself can instruct. And since the first such assignment will probably raise questions - aren't living writers good enough for us? aren't we alive and writing now?- the teacher must be armed with answers, and not to those questions alone. Explanations are due the apprentice to any trade or art, including the promise: 'you will see later why I say: "Do this" '. Also needing to be discussed are the prevailing ideas of 'scientific' and 'democratic' linguistics and of 'experimentation' and 'creativity'. The standard language will have to be shown not only as a product of both art and accident but also as the most democratic mode of expression, since it permits anyone with a little effort to enter into the largest, richest treasury of thought- as compared with the narrow, closed-in world of a dialect or jargon. The delicate test of usage, too, needs to be linked with its two conditions which are regularly forgotten: Time and Judgement. The new use of a word or use of a new word may be widespread, but it does not become governing usage until time passes and approval strikes — no one can predict when. 'Hand me them pliers' has been said in English for 600 years and it is not yet standard usage. A writer who is conscious and conscientious has time to consider or reconsider his diction. Until the evidence is overwhelming, he can decline to use hopefully in the new manner or cohort to mean companion. Besides exercising his craftsman's right to vote on issues of language, his resistance has desirable by-products. First, his repeated use of the old form or meaning may help stop the loss of a useful distinction. He is not being a temperamental conservative, he is an enlightened conservationist. No one has yet shown why language alone of all human handiwork should not be tended and kept in working order by the use of intelligence. Think once more of what we owe to the deliberate action of poets, bellettrists, printers and publishers. In the second place, the conscious writer who resists is saving himself the trouble that surely awaits him in his own writing if he follows sloppy ways. If, for example, he helps hopefully to thrive in the meaning 'it is hoped,' the next step is that fearfully will come to be used for it is feared, regretfully for regrettably (both already on record), and the same kind of confusion will ensue as that which

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overtook disinterested and uninterested- regrettably. It is true of any art that doing one clearly possible thing entails or requires doing another, which is why art is both free of fixed rules and not so free as it seems. One might therefore say that the ultimate lesson of rhetoric, the lesson the young writer has to learn, is that the word in itself creates difficulties before it can create anything worthy to be called The Creating Word.

NOTES 1. This paper offered to the Conference on 'The Creating Word' at the University of Alberta was intended to raise a few large and urgent questions for discussion. Since the topics I took up ranged from modern rhetoric and linguistics to lexicography and the teaching of English, I was prepared for doubts and objections. But when a few of these were expressed I confess to being surprised by their tenor. On the one hand, I was rebuked for not doing 'a systematic critique' of contemporary theories of language: 'You didn't mention Chomsky; you didn't mention Saussure.' On the other, I was told by a teacher of linguistics that none of the leaders in her discipline held the views I attributed to the movement as a whole. Perhaps, she said, the results I noted came 'not from the scientific theory but from its appliance' (sic). And a third found it poor judgement on my part to quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica and Professor Allen Walker Read, 'not an original thinker'. It was evident that these critics were interested in one subject and I in another. They seemed to share the academic assumption that the present state of theory constitutes the whole of a field of study, and moreover that it exists in a vacuum. Such a belief may help concentration and spur scholarly production, but it does not afford a clear view of its intellectual bearings. To those listeners whose vision was less narrowed down, it was plain that my concern was not with theories and doctrines as such, but with their cultural consequences. I was describing attitudes, habits of thought that had, I believed, come from certain quarters and influenced language, writing, teaching, and mores in the western world since the 1890s. My aim, in short, was to set a contemporary predicament in historical perspective. It followed that I must bring together elements of many kinds, establish broad continuities, and point out lasting effects. In such a plan, the latest twist in one or another theory is of little moment, whereas evidence about educated opinion from ordinary sources (including an encyclopaedia) is of immediate relevance. Given the generous reception that greeted the paper on its delivery, I cannot regret my choice of subject matter, however much I regret having disappointed those who were looking for another. That other has of late been repeatedly treated by competent hands, whereas my subject, to the best of my knowledge, has been neglected. This circumstance seemed to me to invite curiosity and justify a first attempt at investigation. For this printed version of the paper I have added as footnotes a number of

28

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

The Creating Word remarks that were deleted from the original draft to keep it within an hour's speaking time. Encyclop&dia Britannica, art. 'Rhetoric', vol. 15 (Chicago, 1983) p. 805. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: a Study in Method (Madison, Wis.) p. 2. In 1924,1 took as an undergraduate the last course that Franz Boas gave in Columbia University. It was called 'Science of Language 101' and it offered a comparative study of six primitive languages. In conversation with Boas, who had been a physicist before revolutionizing anthropology, he made it clear that for him 'science' bore the old meaning of rigorous scholarship; linguistics was not physics and could never express its findings in mathematics. It is only fair to say that the teaching of those literary sources had become the reverse of humanistic, precisely in order to seem scientific. Thus a play of Euripides would be presented to the student as the most important 'because it contained nearly every irregularity in the Greek language'. (Told me by Nicholas Murray Butler, who graduated from college in 1882.) Part I, Preface, p. iii of the Oxford (Clarendon Press) edn, 1891/1940. This either/or classification makes it hard to place medieval Latin. For over a thousand years it served the needs of religion, government, science, the law, education, history, philosophy, poetry, and drama, and yet it was not the spoken language of any population, while its users were spread out over all Europe. Living or dead? Someone in my hearing asked what a certain tree was. The answer clearly sounded: T think it's Mount Nash.' It took a repetition and some puzzled thought to arrive at 'mountain ash'. Quoted from Fowkes in Mario Pei, Glossary of Linguistic Terminology (New York, 1966) p. 200. Quoted in A. and C. Tibbett, What's Happening to American English? (New York, 1978) p. 108. Ibid., p. 118. Op. cit., vol. 5 (Macropedia) p. 722. I have attended an English class in a good public school where the next assignment was 'to make a dictionary'. Each pupil would choose half a dozen simple words and, after listening carefully to the way family and friends used and pronounced these words, would turn in a scientific lexicographer's entry for each. It should be added that a good many words carry a single meaning all by themselves - for example, cheesecloth, appendicitis, incompatible, and in fact all the words in the dictionary that receive but one definition and are unsuited to figurative use. The author is Ralph B. Long and the work cited is The System of English Grammar (Chicago, 1971) pp. vi—vii. Yet in spite of his detachment, the same author believed that although 'scholarly traditional grammar has been ignored pretty much in the States' and 'traditionalists have no gimmicks and do not claim to be 'scientific' in some decisive new way, . . . traditional analysis remains the best grammatical analysis available'. 'Grammar Can Help in Composition Courses' in College Composition and Communication (Dec. 1967) p. 226. Quoted in Tibbett, op. cit., p. 128.

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17. It will be remembered that the subtitle of my remarks mentions 'fallacies in a science of language'. The point at issue is the effect of the scientific claim and its concomitants, not the merit of any one theory. It is scientism again that has inspired other mechanical operations upon language — Basic English, phonetic spelling, Esperantos and Interlinguas, new alphabets for learning, machine translation, and the teaching of foreign languages phrase by phrase in endless series. The Hands Off advocates are not always consistent and some obviously care more for theory and method than for language itself. Thus Henry Sweet actually thought that 'in a perfect language there would be one distinct form, and only one, to express each separate grammatical meaning' (op. cit., 42). He apparently had no notion of the flexibility and subtlety given by apparent duplications; it is they that make for the perfection of English. In the same mechanical vein, information theorists analyse 'structures' of letters and words by probability statistics, disregarding meaning as if the structures had nothing to do with our getting the message. For my part, as a writer and teacher, I have found the descriptive scholars — Sweet, Jespersen, F. Brunot — more useful than the theorists, with the exception of Roman Jakobson, whose refutations of Saussure and the psychological determinists are singularly persuasive. (See, for example, his 'Quest for the Essence of Language', Diogenes, 51, 21—37.) 18. The Letters of William James, vol. 1 (New York, 1920) p. 87; 27 May 1867. 19. 'Linguistic Aspects of Science', (University of Chicago Press, 1939) p. 4. 20. The Gifted Children Newsletter, vol. 4, no. 10, Oct. 1983. 21. New York Times, 21 Apr. 1981. Sec also Science, vol. 156, no. 3776, pp. 743ff. 22. An interesting case of listener's plight recently occurred in London, where the noted mime Jean-Louis Barrault had to cut short his French-language solo performance when the audience interrupted him with loud protests. The thousand or so persons had come to see 'The Language of the Body', which included commentary in French. Some spectators felt baffled and shouted. One cried out, I am very angry. I cannot understand and I want to understand' (New York Times, 2 Nov. 1983). 23. Pedro Carolino, New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English, reprinted as English as She Is Spoke, ed. James Millington (New York, 1884). 24. In fact, his phrasing follows a French original, not Portuguese: . . .pendant que vous etes jeune . . . ni moi non plus, etc.

25. Op. cit., pp. 143-59. 26. I knew a child who, when out sailing with his father, would ask: 'When do we ank?' The word anchor sounded to him patterned on sail-sailor, run-runner, burn-burner, and the like.

2

Construing and Deconstructing1 M. H. ABRAMS

This age of critical discourse about literature is the best of times or it is the worst of times, depending on one's point of view; but there's no denying that it is a very diverse and lively time. Never before have the presuppositions and procedures of literary criticism been put so drastically into question, and never have we been presented with such radical alternatives for conceiving and making sense of literary texts. Among the competing theories that have come to the fore only within the last several decades we find reader-response criticism (itself divisible into a variety of subspecies), reception-criticism, anxiety-of-influence criticism, structuralist criticism, semiotic criticism, and - most ominous to many traditional ears — deconstructive criticism. It was not many years ago that announcements of jobs for professors of English and other literatures began to be supplemented by requests for professors of literary criticism. Now we find increasing requests for professors of the theory of criticism - professors, that is, whose profession is meta-criticism. The new theories are diverse in principles and procedures, but in their radical forms they converge in claims that have evoked indignation from many traditional critics. One claim is that it is impossible even to identify anything called 'literature' by establishing boundaries, or specifying features, which set it off from other forms of writing. Another and related claim is that criticism is in no way attendant upon, or subordinate in function to the literature which, over the centuries since Aristotle, critics have set themselves to classify, analyse, and elucidate; criticism, it is now often said, is a mode of writing which doesn't discover, but 'produces' the meanings of the texts that it engages, hence is 30

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equally entitled to be 'creative'. Most dismaying to traditionalists is the claim, diversely argued, that no text, either in its component passages or as an entity, has a stably determinable meaning, and therefore that there is no right way to interpret it; all attempts to read a text are doomed to be misreadings. Among these innovations in literary theory and practice, the signs are that deconstruction, based primarily on writings of Jacques Derrida since the late 1960s, will be predominant. Within the last ten years deconstructive criticism has generated a flood of books and articles which exemplify it, describe it, attack it, or defend it; the articles appear not only in several journals devoted primarily to deconstruction, but increasingly in the most staid of publications, including the alleged stronghold of the critical establishment, PMLA. Its focal centre in America has been Yale University, whose faculty includes those exponents whom their colleague, Geoffrey Hartman, has genially labelled 'boa deconstructors' - especially Derrida himself, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller. Radiating from that centre, the movement has captivated, in varying degree, a number of younger teachers of literature, and many among the brightest of graduate students, including some who have written their theses under my direction. By J. S. Mill's maxim that the opinions of bright people between twenty and thirty years of age are the best index to the intellectual tendencies of the next era, it seems probable that the heritage of deconstruction will be prominent in literary criticism for some time to come. I shall try to locate the deconstructive enterprise on the map of literary theory by sketching its overlap with, as well as its radical departures from traditional treatments of literature. It is impossible to do so except from some point of view. I shall try to make allowances for mine, which is that of a traditionalist who has staked whatever he has taught or written about literature, and about literary and intellectual history, on the confidence that he has been able to interpret the textual passages he cited with a determinacy and an accuracy sufficient to the purpose at hand. I

One must approach deconstructive literary criticism by way of the writings of Jacques Derrida, the founder, namer, and prime exemplar of deconstruction-in-general. To be brief about so

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protean, oblique, and tactically agile a writer cannot escape being selective and reductive. It seems fair to say, however, that in terms of the traditional demarcations among disciplines, Derrida (though he has commented on some literary texts) is to be accounted a philosopher, not a literary critic, and that his writings undertake to reveal the foundations presupposed by all precedent Western philosophies and ways of thinking, to 'undermine' or 'subvert' these foundations by showing that they are illusions engendered by desire for an impossible certainty and security, and to show the consequences for writing and thinking when their supposed foundations are thus undermined. Some commentators on Derrida have remarked in passing that Derrida's conclusions resemble the skeptical conclusions of David Hume. I want to pursue this comparison; not, however, in order to show that, despite his anti-metaphysical stance, Derrida ends in the classical metaphysical position called radical skepticism, but in order to bring out some interesting analogues between the procedures of these two very diverse thinkers. These analogues will highlight aspects of Derrida's dealings with language, emulated by his followers in literary criticism, which are inadequately stressed, both by proponents who assert that Derrida has totally revolutionized the way we must from now on read texts and by opponents who assert that Derrida cancels all criteria of valid interpretation, in an anarchical surrender to textual 'freeplay'. We can parallel three moments in the overall procedures of Hume and Derrida: 1. The point of departure in Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is that 'nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions', which consist of'impressions' that are 'immediately present to our consciousness' and the 'ideas' that are the fainter replica of these impressions.2 Beginning with these as the sole givens which can be known with certainty, Hume proceeds to show that, in all reasoning and knowledge concerning 'matters of fact', we can never get outside the sense-impressions which were his starting point, nor establish the certainty of any connections between the single sense-impressions which constitute immediate awareness. He thus disintegrates all grounds for certain knowledge about the identity of any two impressions separated in time, about the existence of material objects in an external world, about the relation of cause and effect between any two occurrences, and

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about the reality even of'personal identity' or a conscious 'self. All these entities and relations, Hume contends, since they cannot be established by demonstrative reasoning from his premised single impressions, are the products of the 'imagination' and of 'custom', and have the status not of knowledge but merely of 'fallacies', 'fictions', or 'illusions'. To Derrida's way of thinking, Hume's starting point in thehicet nunc of a non-mediated, hence certainly known, perception would be a classic example of the way Western philosophy, in all its forms, is based on a 'presence', or indubitable founding element independent of language; so that Hume's skeptical conclusions from this given, to Derrida, would be merely a negative counterpart of the cognitive dogmatism that it challenges. As Derrida has put it: Perception is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language, from the system of reference.3 Hence, he declares, 'I don't believe that anything like perception exists.' Instead of positing a foundational given, Derrida establishes a point of view. 'The axial proposition of this essay', he declares in Of Grammatology, is 'that there is nothing outside the text' [il n'y a rien hors du texte? or alternatively, 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte'].4 This assertion is not offered either as the point of departure or as the result of a philosophical demonstration. It functions as an announcement of where Derrida takes his stand, and that is, within the workings of language itself, in order to show us what standard philosophical problems, premises, and intellection look like, when viewed from this stance and point of vantage. In many of its consequences, nonetheless, Derrida's counterphilosophical linguistic ploy converges with those of Hume's skeptical philosophy. Hume, premising only single impressions, showed that there is no way to establish identity or causal connections among impressions, nor to match impressions to material objects, a world, or a self to which we have access independently of impressions. Derrida, taking his stand within language, disperses the seemingly determinate meanings of terms such as 'identity', 'cause', 'material objects', 'the external world', 'the self, and shows that there is no way to match such terms to a

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reality to which we have access independently of the language we use to represent it. Derrida's way of carrying out his project is to offer 'readings' of passages in Western thinkers, from Plato to the ordinarylanguage philosopher, John Austin, in order to reveal their common 'logocentrism'. This term denominates his claim that Western philosophical discourse - and indeed all modes of discourse, since none can escape the use of terms whose significance is 'sedimented' by their role in the history of philosophy- is predicated on the existence of a logos. The logos is Derrida's overall term for an absolute, or foundation, or ground, whose full self-certifying 'presence' is assumed to be given in a direct cognitive encounter which is itself unconditioned by the linguistic system which incorporates it, yet relies on it as a foundation. Such a presence, for example, is sometimes posited as an immediately known intention or state of consciousness in a speaker while speaking, or as an essence, or as a Platonic Form accessible to mental vision, or as a referent known in its own being; in any case, it constitutes a 'transcendental signified' which, though inevitably represented by a signifier, is regarded as an unmediated something that is unaffected by the signifying system which represents it. Derrida's readings are oriented toward showing that any philosophical text can be shown to rely on a ground which is indispensable to its argument, its references, and its conclusions, but turns out to be itself groundless, hence suspended over an 'abyss'. Derrida's view, furthermore, is that a logos-centred philosophy is a voice-centred philosophy. In consequence, one of his characteristic procedures, often misunderstood, is to overcome Western 'phonocentrism' (the reliance on the speaking voice as the linguistic model) by positing an admittedly nonexisting 'arche-ecriture', or 'writing-in-general'. By asserting the 'priority' of writing (in the sense of writing-in-general) both to speech and to writing (in the ordinary sense of putting words on paper), Derrida is not claiming that the invention of writing preceded speech in history; he is deploying a device designed to get us to substitute for the philosophical idiom of speaking the alternative idiom of writing, in which we are less prone to the illusion, as he conceives it, that a speaker in the presence of a listener knows what he means independently of the words in which he expresses it, or that he establishes the meaning of what

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he says to the listener by communicating his unmediated intention in uttering it. From his elected stance within language, Derrida replaces the view that language developed by a matching of words to the given world by positing an internal linguistic principle of differance. This term, like 'writing-in-general', is offered as a heuristic fiction, in which the 'a' in the written form, Derrida tells us, indicates the conflation of the incompatible senses of the French word differer as 'to differ' and 'to defer'. In accordance with the insight of the linguist, Saussure, that both a signifier and what it signifies are constituted, not by their inherent features, but by a network of 'differences' from other signifiers and signifieds, Derrida posits differance as generating internally the differential verbal signs, while deferring the presence of what they signify through endless substitutions of signifiers whose ultimate arrest in a determinate and stable meaning or reference never is, but is always about to be. For according to Derrida, in the lack of any possible 'transcendental', or extra-linguistic reference unconditioned by the differential economy of language, there is no stopping the play of meanings. In one of Derrida's formulations: 'The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad injinitum. '5 Or, in another of his punning, deliberately contrarious terms, which in this case exploits a false etymology, any text, under radical inquisition, 'disseminates': it sows its seed, and in that process loses its seeming semantic determinacy, by scattering into a regress which inevitably involves an 'aporia' — that is, a deadlock between incompatible meanings which are 'undecidable', in that we lack any certain ground for choosing between them. 2. Having reached his skeptical conclusions, Hume finds himself, he tells us, in a condition of 'melancholy' and 'despair', 'affrighted and confounded with that forelorn solitude, in which I am plac'd in my philosophy'.6 Hume's solitude is beyond solipsism, for the solipsist is certain at least of the reality of his conscious self, while Hume is reduced to knowing only present perceptions which yield no implication of a conscious self which knows. From this dire condition he finds himself rescued, not by further reasoning, but by the peremptory intrusion of a life-force'an absolute and uncontrollable necessity' that he calls 'nature'. Nature herself . . . cures me of this philosophical melancholy

36

The Creating Word and delirium. ... I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Hume finds that he cannot live in accordance with his skeptical philosophy; yet his impulse to philosophical reasoning is no less compelling than his instinct to participate in human society in accordance with its shared beliefs. As a consequence, Hume finds himself living (and recommends that others should also live) a double life: the life of human society, and the life of the reason which disintegrates all the beliefs on which social life is based into fictions and illusions: 'Here then I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin'd to live, and talk, and act like other people in the common affairs of life.' Yet 'in all the incidents of life we ought still to preserve our skepticism. If we believe, that fire warms, or water refreshes, 'tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise'.7 Derrida's conduct of language is analogous to Hume's double mode of necessarily continuing to live in accordance with shared beliefs that he is rationally compelled to subvert. Derrida describes the deconstructive enterprise as a deliberate and sustained duplexity- 'a double gesture, a double science, a double writing'.8 And in reading texts there is a double procedure, 'two interpretations of interpretation', which play a simultaneous role in life, and which, though irreconcilable, permit no option between them: There are more than enough indications today to suggest that these two interpretations of interpretation — which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously [meme si nous les vivons simultanement] and reconcile them in an obscure economy - together share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the human sciences. For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing. . .9 We mistake Derrida's own procedure if we overlook the fact

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that his deconstructive readings of philosophical passages involve both these interpretive modes, and consist of a deliberately double-reading - we may denominate them as reading (1) and reading (2) - which are distinguishable, even if they are irreconcilable, sometimes concurrent, and always interdependent. Reading (1) finds a passage lisible' and understandable, and makes out, according to a procedure that he shares with common readers, the determinate meanings of the sentences he cites. (For convenience let us say that in reading (1), he construes the passage.) Reading (2), which he calls a 'critical reading', or an 'active interpretation', goes on to disseminate the meanings it has already construed. Derrida accounts for the possibility of reading (1) by atttributing to differance the production of the 'effect' in language of a fundamental presence - not a real presence, or free-standing existent, but one which is simply a 'function' of the differential play- as well as the production of all the other 'effects' on which the common practice of reading depends, including the 'effects' of a conscious intention, of a specific speech act, and of a determinate meaning or reference.10 In this way, he explains, 'the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains to be read'.11 And this standard reading and understanding, though only an initial 'stage', is indispensable to the process of deconstruction. For example: most of Derrida's Of Grammatology presents readings of selected passages from Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Language. In great part Derrida, with no lack of assurance, construes these passages as conveying determinate meanings, and with tacit confidence that his own readers will assent to his construal — a confidence I find well-founded, because Derrida is an uncommonly proficient and meticulous reader of texts in the standard fashion. In this process, he attributes the writing of the Essay to an individual named 'Rousseau', and has no hesitation in specifying what 'Rousseau affirms . . . unambiguously', or what 'Rousseau says . . . clearly in the Essay' and 'also invariably says . . .elsewhere' (pp. 173, 184), nor in attributing what the text says to Rousseau's 'intention' to say it, or to what it is that 'Rousseau wishes to say.' In the course of this reading ( 1 ) , Derrida paraphrases Rousseau's assertions and identifies recurrent 'themes' in variant phrasings of the same assertion (p. 195; see also p. 133); undertakes to establish the time of his life in which

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Rousseau wrote the Essay on the basis of two kinds of evidence which he describes as either 'internal' or 'external' to the Essay itself (pp. 171, 192); and, though he detects'massive borrowings' in the Essay from earlier writers, affirms the essential 'originality' of Rousseau as a theorist of language (pp. 98, 272, 281). Derrida also accepts as accurate some interpretations of Rousseau's text by earlier commentators, but corrects others which he describes, politely, as the result of 'hasty reading' (pp. 189, 243). And he is able to find Rousseau's text 'readable' in this fashion because the language that Derrida has inherited, despite some historical changes, is one that he possesses in common with Rousseau; as Derrida puts it: 'Rousseau drew upon a language that was already there— and which is found to be somewhat our own, thus assuring us of a certain minimum readability of French literature' (p. 160). Thus far, Derrida's reading proceeds in a way that is congruent with the theories of many current philosophers that communication depends on our inheritance of a shared language and shared linguistic practices or conventions, and that when, by applying the practice we share with a writer, we have recognized what he intended to say, then we have understood him correctly. Many of these philosophers also agree with Derrida that there is no extra-linguistic, non-conventional foundation for our linguistic practice which certifies its rules and their application and guarantees the correctness of a reader's interpretation; in justifying an interpretation, when we have exhausted appeals to shared, though contingent, linguistic and social conventions, as Wittgenstein puts it, 'the spade turns'. Derrida's radical innovation does not, therefore, consist in his claim that no such foundation exists, but in his further claim that such a foundation, though nonexistent, is nevertheless indispensable, and that in its absence, there is no stopping the continuing dissemination of construed meanings into undecidability. In accordance with this view, Derrida designates his reading (1) — the determinate construal of the 'legibility' of passages in Rousseau - as no more than a 'strategic' phase which, though indispensable, remains 'provisional' to a further 'critical,' or deconstructive reading (pp. 99, 149). One of Derrida's moves in this critical reading is to identify strata, or 'strands' in Rousseau's text which, when read determinately, turn out to be mutually contradictory (pp. 200, 237, 240, 245). A number of earlier commentators, of course, have found Rousseau's linguistic and

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social theories to be incoherent or contradictory, but have regarded this feature as a logical fault, or else as assimilable to an overall direction of his thinking. Derrida, however, regards such self-contradictions not as logical mistakes which Rousseau could have avoided, but as inescapable features not only in Rousseau's text but in all Western texts, since all rely on a fixed logocentric ground yet are purely conventional and differential in their economy. In his critical 'sub-reading' of Rousseau's texts, Derrida asserts that their determinate reading always leaves an inescapable and ungovernable 'excess' or 'surplus' of signification, which are both the indices and result of the fact that 'the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely'; a critical reading must aim at detecting the 'relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command . . .' (p. 158). Derrida's reading (2) of Rousseau thus repeatedly uncovers opposed meanings between what Rousseau 'wishes to say' and what 'he says without wishing to say it', or between what Rousseau 'declares' and what the text 'describes' without Rousseau's wishing to say it (pp. 200, 229, 238). What Rousseau declares and wishes to say is what is construed by a standard reading; what the text ungovernably goes on, unbeknownst to the writer, to say, is what gets disclosed by a deeper deconstructive reading. Derrida's commentary on John Austin, an ordinary-language philosopher who disclaims any extra-linguistic foundation for the functioning of language, couches Derrida's views in terms which bring them closer to the idiom familiar to Anglo-American philosophers. In discussing Austin's theory of a performative speechact, Derrida points out that all words and verbal sequences are 'iterable', or repeatable in diverse linguistic and social circumstances, with a consequent diversity both in the nature of the speech-act and the signification of its words. Derrida construes Austin to make the claim that the total verbal and social context, in a clear case, establishes for certain the nature and communicative success of a speech-act. "Derrida's counter-claim is that we never find an absolutely clear case, in that we can never know for certain that all the necessary and sufficient conditions for determining a specific and successful performative have in fact been satisfied. (In Derrida's parlance, no context is ever 'saturated', so as to make it 'entirely certain', or 'exhaustively

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determinable', which is 'the sense required by Austin'.) 12 He stresses especially Austin's reiterated references to the intention of the speaker - necessary, for example, in order to determine a speaker's sincerity and seriousness - as a condition for the success of a speech-act. The speaker's intention, Derrida asserts, is a condition whose fulfilment neither the speaker nor his auditor can know with certainty, and one which cannot control, or 'master' the play of meaning. Derrida's conclusion is that there can be no 'communication', as he puts it, 'that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable', and no way of achieving certainty about the 'purity', in the sense of 'the absolutely singular uniqueness of a speech act'.13 To this conclusion Austin himself would surely agree. Language, as a shared conventional practice, cannot provide grounds for absolute certainty in communication; even in the clearest case, it always remains possible that we have got an interpretation wrong. Language nonetheless is adequate for communicating determinate meanings, in that the shared regularities of that practice can provide, in particular circumstances, a warranted assurance about what someone has undertaken to say. For Derrida, however, it is a matter of all-or-nothing; there is no intermediate position on which a determinate interpretation can rest, for if no meanings are absolutely certain and stable, then all meanings are unstable and undecidable. 'Semantic communication', or the successful achievement of a performative or other speech-act, is indeed an 'effect'; but it is, he says, 'only an effect', and as such incapable of arresting the dispersal of signification in 'a dissemination irreducible to polysemy' ,14 In the process of his critical reading, Derrida identifies various features of a philosophical text which inescapably 'exceed' the limits of what its writer set out to assert. One of these features is the use in the argument of key equivocations which cannot be used to specify one meaning without involving the opposed meaning. In Rousseau's theory of language, for example, the argument turns on the duplicitous word 'supplement' (meaning both something added to what is itself complete, and something required to complete what is unsufficient); in reading other authors, Derrida identifies other Janus-faced terms such as pharmakon and hymen. Another feature is the presumed reliance of a text on a logical argument which turns out to involve non-logical 'rhetorical' moves. Prominent in Derrida's analysis of the inher-

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ent rhetoricity of philosophical reasoning is the disclosure of the role of indispensable metaphors which are assumed to be merely convenient substitutes for literal or 'proper' meanings, yet are irreducible to literal meanings except by applying an opposition, metaphoric/literal, which is itself a consequence of the philosophy which presupposes it. A third feature is the unavoidable use in a text of what are presumed to be exclusive oppositions; Derrida undertakes to undermine such oppositions by showing that their boundaries are constantly transgressed, in that each of the terms crosses over into the domain of its opponent term. Prominent among the many unsustainable oppositions to which Derrida draws our attention is that of inside/outside, or internal/external, as applied to what is within or outside the mind, or within or outside the system of linguistic signs, or within or outside a text (a book, a poem, or an essaiy) which is ostensibly complete in itself. Derrida's view of the: untenability of the distinction between what is inside or outside a text has had, as we shall see, an especially important impact on the procedures of deconstructive literary criticism. 'What used to be called a text', Derrida says, has 'boundaries', which were thought to demarcate 'the supposed end and beginning of a. work, the unity of a corpus', and held to constitute a ' "whole", perfectly autonomous'; such a designation, however, applies only on the condition that 'we accept the entire conventional system of legalities that organizes, in literature, the framed unity of the corpus', including the 'unity of the author's name . . . registration of the copyright, etc'.15 Derrida's double-reading, reading (1) and reading (2), in fact produces two texts. One is the text, such as Rousseau's Essay, which he reads by accepting, in a provisiional way, the standard conventions and legalities that establish as its boundaries the opening and closing lines of its printed form. Text (2) is produced 'by a sort of overrun [debordement] that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a "text", of what I still call a "text", for strategic reasons'. This second text is 'no longer a finished corpus of writing' by a particular author, bu t a text as an aspect of textuality in general of' a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other tham itself, to other differential traces'. Text (2), however, does not simply annul the constraints and borders that function in the reading of text (1) for, though it 'overruns all the limits assigned to i t so far', it does so not by 'submerging or

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drowning them in an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather making them more complex. . .'.16 This last quotation brings out what commentators overlook who claim that Derrida's emphasis on 'freeplay' in language is equivalent to 'anything goes in interpretation', and that is, his repeated emphasis that a deconstructive reading (2) does not cancel the role of intention and of the other conventions and legalities that operate in a determinate reading of a limited text, but merely 'reinscribe' them, as he puts it, so as to reveal their status as no more than 'effects' of the differential play.17 Derrida insists that the standard mode of 'doubling commentary' - a commentary, that is, which simply undertakes to say what it is that the author undertook to say- 'should no doubt have its place in a critical reading'. To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies [i.e., of reading (1)] is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production [i.e., reading (2)] would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything.... 1 8 The deliberate anomaly of Derrida's double interpretive procedure, however, is patent. He cannot demonstrate the impossibility of a standard reading except by going through the stage of manifesting its possibility; a text must be read determinately in order to be disseminated into an undecidability that never strikes completely free of its initial determination; deconstruction can only subvert the meanings of a text that has always already been construed. And even if a reader has been persuaded that Derrida has truly discovered a force in language (seemingly unsuspected, or at least unexploited, before the writings of Nietzsche) which compels him to overrun all the constraints and borders of standard construal, he has no option except to begin by construing a text, including Derrida's own text; or more precisely, his only option is whether or not to read French, or English, or any other natural language. 3. In addition to subverting all the convictions of our common life and common thought, then to asserting the inescapable need for a double life and double thinking, there is a third moment in Hume's epistemology which has an analogue in Derrida's theory

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of language. This is the moment when Hume turns his skepticism back upon itself, by what he calls 'a reflex act of the mind' upon 'the nature of our understanding, and our reasoning'. In doing so he finds himself involved in 'manifest absurdities' and 'manifold contradictions', including the absurdity that his skeptical argument has no recourse except to use reason itself in order 'to prove the fallaciousness and imbecility of reason'. Hence 'the understanding . . . entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in [skeptical] philosophy or common life'.19 As the only reasonable way to cope with the diverse illogicalities of his philosophical and his social life, Hume recommends that we replace 'the force of reason and conviction' by an attitude of insouciance- 'a serious good-humor'd disposition' and a 'careless' [i.e. carefree] conduct of philosophy, and a diffidence about the conclusions reached by that philosophy. 'A true skeptic will be diffident of his philosophical doubts, as well as of his philosophical conviction.'20 In a parallel way, Derrida turns deconstruction back upon itself. Since, he says, it has no option except to take all 'the resources of subversion' from the logocentric system that it subverts, 'deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work'. Even to designate the play of writing as incomprehensible by the categories of 'the classical logos' and 'the law of identity' cannot escape reference to the logocentric logic that it flouts; and 'for the rest', he allows, 'deconstruction must borrow its resources from the logic it deconstructs'. In addition, as Derrida says, his own deconstructive 'production is necessarily a text'.21 Hence in his writing about writing, Derrida has no option except to 'communicate' his views in language intended to be understood determinately by his readers, knowing that, to the extent that his own text is understood, it becomes a victim of the dissemination it asserts. The 'work of deconstruction', then, forced to use linguistic tools which are themselves deconstructed by the work they perform, in a play of illogicalities which can't be named except by the logic it undermines, cannot escape the 'closure' of logocentrism; it can only provide the 'crevice through which the yet unnamable glimmer beyond the crevice can be glimpsed'. And to this glimpse of what Derrida can only designate by terms borrowed from the logocentric system - 'the freeplay of the world . . . genetic indeterminacy, the seminal adventure of the trace' — he recommends that we assume an attitude. This is not, in

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his case, Hume's attitude of urbane 'carelessness', but a Nietzschean attitude of gaiety: a 'joyous affirmation' which is 'without nostalgia', 'with a certain laughter and with a certain dance'.22 Where, according to Derrida, does deconstruction leave both our ordinary use of language and the philosophical and other specialized uses of language? Apparently, pretty much where they are now. He disclaims any possibility of a superior truth which would allow us to replace, or even radically to reform, our current linguistic procedures. 'Deconstruction', he insists, 'has nothing to do with destruction.' 'I believe in the necessity of scientific work in the classical sense, I believe in the necessity of everything which is being done.'23 He does not, he says, 'destroy' or set out to 'discard' concepts; he merely 'situates' or 'reinscribes' them in an alternative system of differance, in order to reveal that they indeed function, but only as 'effects' which lack absolute foundation in an ontological given. What he can be said to reveal, in a change of vocabulary, is that the communicative efficacy of language rests on no other or better ground than that both writers and readers tacitly accept and apply the regularities and limits of an inherited social and linguistic contract. II

Derrida has attracted little sustained comment from English and American philosophers, and that comment has been, with few exceptions, dismissive. One reason is that Derrida's writings, in addition to being abstruse, variable in procedure, and inveterately paradoxical in the give-yet-take of their 'double gestures', are also outlandish. I do not mean only in the sense that they employ what, to the mainstream Anglo-American philosopher, is the foreign idiom of Continental philosophy from Hegel through Heidegger. They are outlandish also because there is an antic as well as a sober side to Derrida's philosophical writings. He likes to give rein to his inventive playfulness in order to tease, or outrage, philosophers who regard the status and role of philosophy with what he takes to be excessive seriousness. He is fond — increasingly in recent publications — of exploiting Janus-faced neologisms, deliberately far-fetched analogues, bizarre puns, invented etymologies, straight-faced and often sexual jokes, and dexterous

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play with his own signature, and also of intercalating incongruous texts by diverse authors, in order to shake, shock, or beguile us out of our ordinary assurance about the enabling conditions that establish the limits of a textual entity or yield a determinate and stable interpretation. It is not on Anglo-American philosophy, but on its literary criticism that Derrida has had a strong and increasing effect. Some reasons for this specialized direction of influence are obvious. Derrida's examples of textual readings became widely available to English readers in the 1970s, when what was called the 'New Criticism' was some forty years old. The New Criticism was only the most prominent mode of a procedure that had dominated literary criticism for almost a half-century, namely, the elaborate explication, or 'close reading', of individual literary texts, each regarded as an integral and self-sufficient whole. A representative New Critic defined a literary work as a text which, in contradistinction to 'utilitarian' discourse, uses a language which is metaphorical and 'ambiguous' (that is, polysemous, multiply meaningful) rather than literal and univocal, to form a structure which is a free-standing organization of ironies and paradoxes, instead of a logically ordered sequence of referential assertions. By the mid-1970s this once-innovative critical procedure had come to seem confining, predictable, stale. The very features of what Derrida calls his 'style' of philosophical reading which made him seem alien to Anglo-American philosophers- his reliance on the elaborate analysis of particular texts, his stress on the covert role of metaphor and other rhetorical figures, his dissemination of ostensibly univocal meanings into paradoxes and aporias — had made his writings seem to Anglo-American critics to be familiar, yet generative of radically novel discoveries. Far from offering his style of reading philosophical texts as a model for literary criticism, however, Derrida has emphasized its subversion of the metaphysical concepts and presuppositions that occur in all modes of discourse without exception: there are no features, metaphorical or other, which distinguish a specifically literary use of language; and dissemination, he insists, is 'irreducible' to polysemy (a set of determinate meanings), for dissemination is an 'overloading' of meanings in an uncontrollable 'spread' which cannot be specified as a finite set of determinate signifieds.24 Critical followers of Derrida have nonetheless assimilated deconstruction to pre-existing critical assumptions and

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procedures. The result has been in various degrees to domesticate, naturalize, and nationalize Derrida's subversivenesswithout-limit, by accommodating it to a closer reading of individual works which serve to show, as Paul de Man has put it, that new-critical close readings 'were not nearly close enough'.25 The process is well under way of a rival deconstructive reading of each work in the literary canon which had earlier been explicated by one or another New Critic. What we tend to blanket as deconstructive criticism is in fact highly diverse, ranging from an echoing of distinctive Derridean terms- 'presence', 'absence', 'difference', 'effacement', 'aporia' in the process of largely traditional explication, through foregrounding the explicit or implied occurrence in a work of a Derridean theme (especially the theme of writing, or inscription, or decoding), to a radical use of Derridean strategies to explode into dissemination both the integrity and the significance of the literary text that it undertakes to explicate. Instead of generalizing, I shall analyse a single example of the radical type - the reading of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' by one of the 'boa deconstructors', J. Hillis Miller, in an essay of 1979 entitled 'On Edge: the Cross ways of Contemporary Criticism'. I choose this instance because Miller presents his reading explicitly 'to exemplify', as he says, the deconstructive mode of literary interpretation; 26 because the poem is only eight lines long, so that we can have the entire text before us as we go along; because Miller takes care to specify some of the theoretical underpinning of his enterprise, and is a lucid and lively expositor of its results — and also, I admit, because some of these results will be so startling to oldreaders as to inject drama into my presentation. My intention is not polemical, but expository, to bring into view some of the unexpressed, as well as explicit, procedures in this instance of radical literary deconstruction; if my tone is now and then quizzical, it is because it would be both disingenuous and futile to try to conceal my own convictions about the limits of a sound interpretation.

III A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

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No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. The 'battle' between the earlier, metaphysic-bound reading and the deconstructive reading, Miller says, is joined in the alternating answers they offer to the question 'What does this given poem or passage mean?' (p. 20). Early on in giving his answer to this question, Miller shows that the poem means to him very much what I and other oldreaders have hitherto taken it to mean. I quote from Miller's deft and lucid exposition of this moment in his deconstructive double-reading: This beautiful, moving, and apparently simple poem was written [by Wordsworth] at Goslar in Germany in the late fall or early winter of 1798-1799 . . . To have no human fears is the same thing as to have a sealed spirit. Both of these are defined by the speaker's false assumption that Lucy will not grow old or die.27 . . . the shift from past to present tense [between stanza 1 and stanza 2] opposes then to now, ignorance to knowledge, life to death. The speaker has moved across the line from ignorance to knowledge through the experience of Lucy's death. The poem expresses both eloquently restrained grief for that death and the calm of mature knowledge. Before, he was innocent. His spirit was sealed from knowledge as though he were asleep, closed in on himself. . . . Lucy seemed so much alive . . . that she could not possibly be touched by time, reach old age, and die. . . . Then Lucy seemed an invulnerable young 'thing'; now she is truly a thing, closed in on herself, like a stone . . . unable to move of her own free will, but unwillingly and unwittingly moved by the daily rotation of the earth, (pp. 20-3) Insofar Miller, with no want of assurance, has read the text, in its parts and as a whole, as having determinate meanings. He has, to use my term, construed the text, and gone on to explicate the

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implied purport of these meanings in ways closely tied to the construal. Here are some features of Miller's reading (1): 1. He accepts the historical evidence that the poem was written by an individual, William Wordsworth, during a particular span of time, 1798-99. And in the assurance with which he construes the poem, it seems that Miller assumes, as standard readers do, that Wordsworth deployed an acquired expertise in the practice of the English language and of short lyric poems, and that he wrote his text so as to be understandable by readers who in turn inherit, hence share, his competence in the practice of the language and the conventions of the lyric. 2. By implicit reference to this common practice, Miller takes it that, whatever its intended thematic relation to other Lucy poems, Wordsworth undertook to write a poem, beginning with the words 'A slumber' and ending with the words 'and trees', which can be understood as an entity complete in itself. 3. Miller takes the two sentences which constitute the poem to be the utterance of a particular lyric speaker, the I of the text, and to be about a girl, who is referred to by the pronoun 'she'. And he takes the tense of the verbs in the first sentence-stanza ('did . . . seal,' 'had', 'seemed') as signifying an event in the past, and the tense of the verbs in the second sentence-stanza ('has . . . now', 'hears', 'sees') as signifying a state of affairs in the present - the sustained 'now', that is, of the speaker's utterance. 4. He takes the three clauses in the first sentence, although they lack explicit connectives, to be related in such a way that the assertions in the second and third clause make more specific, and give reasons for, the assertion in the first clause, 'A slumber did my spirit seal.' As Miller puts it, perhaps a bit flatly, 'the second line . . . repeats the first, and then lines three and four say it over again' (p. 21). Miller also takes the assertions in the first sentence plainly to imply that the girl was then alive, and the assertions in the second sentence (augmented by the stanza-break) to imply that the girl is now dead. 5. So far, I think, most standard readers of the poem will concur. Miller also goes on to specify the lyric speaker's state of feeling, now that the girl is dead. Since the second stanza does not advert to the speaker's own feelings, but leaves them to be

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inferred from the terms with which he asserts a state of affairs, the text allows standard readers considerable room for variance in this aspect of interpretation. 28 Miller's statement on this issue seems to me sensitive and apt: 'The poem expresses both eloquently restrained grief for that death and the calm of mature knowledge' (p. 22). 6. Note also that Miller reads the poem as a verbal presentation of a human experience which, as he says, is both 'beautiful' and 'moving'; that is, its presentation is ordered- especially in the sharp division of the stanzas between the situation then and the situation now- so as to effect an emotional response in the reader. That experience might be specified as the shocking discovery, by a particular person in a particularized instance, of the awful suddenness, unexpectedness, and finality of death. These are features of Miller's reading of Wordsworth's lyric, phase one: the determination of specific meanings in the poem read as an entity. Phase two, the deconstructive reading, follows from Miller's claim that, since literature is not 'grounded in something outside language', the determinate bounds of its meanings are 'undermined by the text itself, in a 'play of tropes' that 'leaves an unassimilable residue or remnant of meaning . . . making a movement of sense beyond any unifying boundaries' (p. 19). The intrinsic anomaly of the deconstructive procedure is apparent: in claiming that a determinate interpretation is made impossible by the text, Miller has already shown that it is possible, for he deconstructs a text that he has already determinately construed. We find the same double-reading - the first performed, but declared to be in some sense impossible, the second held to be made necessary by the text itself - in Paul de Man, whose deconstructive criticism is often said to be closest in its 'rigour' to the model of reading established by Derrida himself. As it happens, in an essay of 1969 entitled 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', de Man dealt with this very poem by Wordsworth; and he there construes the text in a way that, for all its difference in idiom, emphasis, and nuance, we in turn can construe as approximating the way that Miller does, and I do, and almost all traditional readers do. In the two stanzas, we can point to the successive description of two stages of

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De Man also reads the poem as the utterance of its first-person speaker whose responses we can infer from the way he describes the situation then and the situation now: The stance of the speaker, who exists in the 'now,' is that of a subject whose insight is no longer in doubt. . . . First there was error, then the death occurred, and now an insight into the rocky barrenness of the human predicament prevails.29 In this early essay de Man goes on to describe the poem he has so read as, in a special sense, an 'allegory'. He thus opens the way to the intricate deconstructive strategy exemplified in his later Allegories of Reading (1979). 'The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction.' But such a reading engenders a second-order 'narrative' which he calls an 'allegory' - of which the tenor, by the inherent nature of discourse, is invariably the undecidability of the text itself: 'Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading.'30 To return to Miller's engagement with Wordsworth's text: I shall first list some of the significations into which (forced, he asserts, by an 'inassimilable residue' in the text itself) he disperses the meaning that he has already construed as 'apparently simple'; I shall then go on to inquire into the operations which enable him to arrive at these multiplex and self-conflicting significations. 1. 'An obscure sexual drama is enacted in this poem. This drama is a major carrier of its allegorical significance' (p. 25). Miller explains that he applies 'allegorical in the technical sense in which that term is used by Walter Benjamin or by Paul de Man', with temporal reference to 'the interaction of two emblematic times', that of stanza one and that of stanza two (P. 23).

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2. 'The possession of Lucy alive and seemingly immortal is a replacement for [Wordsworth's] lost mother', who had died when he was eight years old. It follows that Lucy's 'imagined death is a re-enactment of the death of the mother', hence a re-enactment of the loss of 'that direct filial bond to nature' which his mother, while alive, had established for him (p. 26). 3. 'Lucy was [line 3] a virgin "thing".' In fact she was, in Miller's account, a very young virgin thing, in that she was viewed by the adult and knowledgeable male 'speaker of the poem' as possessing a 'prepubertal innocence'. Consonantly Miller interprets 'the touch of earthly years', line 4, to be 'a form of sexual appropriation', and simultaneously, since time is the death-bringing aspect of nature ('earthly years'), that touch'is the ultimate dispossession which is death'. Yet, since Lucy had died so young as to be intact, 'to be touched by earthly years is a way to be sexually penetrated while still remaining virgin' (p. 28). 4. 'The speaker of the poem' [signified by ' 1'] is not, as it initially seemed, 'the opposite of Lucy, male to her female, adult knowledge to her prepubertal innocence'. In Miller's disseminative reading of the speaker's temporal transition to knowledge in the second stanza, he becomes 'the displaced representative of both the penetrated and the penetrator, of both Lucy herself [thus also of the mother whom Lucy has replaced] and of her unravishing ravisher, nature or death'. 'The speaker's movement to knowledge,' Miller remarks, 'as his consciousness becomes dispersed, loses its "I" ' (p. 28). The I-as-construed, we can add, is dispersed not only into a he (the knowledgeable male), but also into a 'she', a 'they' (Lucy and Wordsworth's mother), and, as the representative of nature, an 'it'. 5. 'Lucy is both the virgin child and the missing mother. . . . Male and female, however, come together in the earth, and so Lucy and the speaker are "the same". . . . The two women, mother and girl child, have jumped over the male generation in the middle. They have erased its power of mastery, its power of logical understanding, which is the male power par excellence' (pp. 28-9). 6. Climactically, in his deconstructive second-reading, Miller discovers that the poem enacts one version of a constantly repeated Occidental

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drama of the lost sun. Lucy's name of course means light. To possess her would be a means of rejoining the lost source of light, the father sun as logos, as head power and fount of meaning. . . . Her actual death is the loss both of light and of the source of light. It is the loss of the logos, leaving the poet and his words groundless. ... As groundless, the movement is, precisely, alogical. (pp. 30-1) The poem thus allegorically re-enacts the inescapable dilemma of our logocentric language, and that is, the reliance on a ground outside the system of language which is always needed, always relied on, but never available.31 From this ultimate alogicality stem the diverse aporias Miller has tracked. As he puts it: Whatever track the reader follows through the poem he arrives at blank contradictions. . . . The reader is caught in an unstable oscillation unsatisfying to the mind and incapable of being grounded in anything outside the activity of the poem itself, (pp. 28-9) IV

Now, what are the interpretive moves by which Miller deconstructs his initial construal of the poem into this bewildering diversity of clashing significations? In a preliminary way, we can describe these moves as designed to convert the text-as-construed into a pre-text for a supervenient over-reading that Miller calls 'allegorical'. There are of course precedents for this tactic in pre-deconstructive explications of literary texts. The oldfashioned close reader, however, undertook to over-read a text in a way that would enlarge and complicate the significance of the text-as-construed into a richer integrity; the novelty of Miller's deconstruction is that in his over-reading he 'undermines', as he says, the text, then detonates the mine so as to explode the construed meaning into what he calls, in one of his essays, 'an undecidability among contradictory alternatives of meaning'. Miller's first move is to identify in Wordsworth's poem an 'interrelated set of binary oppositions. These seem to be genuinely exclusive oppositions, with a distinct uncrossable boundary between them' (p. 20). He lists almost a score of such oppositions;

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among the more obvious ones are 'slumber as against waking; male as against female; sealed up as against open; . . . past as against present; . . . self-propulsion as against exterior compulsion; . . . life as against death'. About such linguistic oppositions Miller, following the example of Derrida, makes a radical claim. This is not the assertion, valid for standard readers, that the boundary between such opposed terms is not a sharp line, but a zone, and that the locus of this boundary is not fixed, but may shift between one utterance and another. Miller's claim is that the seeming boundary between each pair of these terms dissolves into what he calls an inevitable 'structure of chiasmus'; that as a result there is 'a constant slipping of entities across borders into their opposites' so as to effect 'a perpetual reversal of properties'; and that this 'cross over' is forced on the reader by a 'residue' of meaning within the text of Wordsworth's poem itself (pp. 27,31). When we examine Miller's demonstrations of these crossovers and reversals, however, we find, I think, that they are not enforced by a residue of meaning in the two sentences of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber', but only by these sentences after they have been supplemented by meanings that he has culled from diverse other texts. Miller acquires these supplementary meanings by his next move; that is, he dissolves the 'unifying boundaries' of the poem as a linguistic entity so as to merge the eight-line text into the textuality constituted by all of Wordsworth's writings, taken together. ('His writing,' Miller explains, '. . . is what is meant here by "Wordsworth",' p. 26.) This manoeuvre frees 'A Slumber' from the limitations involved in the linguistic practice by which Miller himself had already read the text as a specific parole by a specified lyric speaker. Miller is now licensed, for example, to attribute to the I' in line one, initially construed as a particular speaker, and the 'she' in line three and elsewhere, initially construed as a particular girl, any further significances he discovers by construing, explicating, and over-reading passages that occur elsewhere in Wordsworth's total oeuvre. By way of brief example: Miller reads 'other texts both in poetry and prose' as providing evidence that Wordsworth (whom he now identifies with the unspecified I of the poem) 'had as a child, and even as a young man, a strong conviction of his immortality', and that this conviction 'was associated with a strong sense of participation in a nature both enduringly material, therefore immortal, and at the same time enduringly spiritual, therefore

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also immortal' (p. 22). Miller reads other passages in Wordsworth as evidence that 'nature for Wordsworth was strongly personified', though 'oddly, personified as both male and female, as both father and mother'. He cites as one instance of the latter type of personification the passage of The Prelude in which the 'Infant Babe', learning to perceive the world in the security of his mother's arms, and in the assurance of her nurturing love, comes to feel in his veins The gravitation and the filial bond Of nature, that connect him with the world. Miller interprets this statement to signify that the 'earth was [to Wordsworth] the maternal face and body'. In other episodes in The Prelude and elsewhere, on the other hand, nature is 'a frightening male spirit threatening to punish the poet for wrongdoing', hence representative of his father. Miller points out that 'Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight, his father when he was thirteen', leaving Wordsworth feeling abandoned by the death of the former and irrationally guilty for the death of the latter. He then cites another passage, this time not directly from Wordsworth but from his sister Dorothy's Journal, in which she describes how she and her brother lay down in a trench, and Wordsworth 'thought that it would be sweet thus to lie so in the grave, to hear thepeaceful sounds of the earth and just to know that our dear friends were near'; this remark Miller identifies with Wordsworth's 'fantasy' of Lucy lying in the earth in stanza two of 'A Slumber' (pp. 25-7). It is only by conflating the reference and relations of the 'I' and 'she' in 'A Slumber' with these and other passages that Miller is able to attribute to Wordsworth's text the oscillating, contrarious meanings that Lucy alive was a replacement for the lost mother, while her death re-enacts the death of the mother, hence of the loss of the 'filial bond to nature' which his mother had established for him; and the further meaning that Wordsworth's only hope for re-establishing the bond that connected him to the world is to die without dying, to be dead, in his grave, and yet still alive, bound to maternal nature by way of a surrogate mother, a girl who remains herself both alive and dead, still available in life and yet already taken by Nature, (p. 27)

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And it is only by merging the reference of the 'I' with other passages, interpreted as expressing Wordsworth's sense of participation in an enduring, immortal nature, or as signifying Wordsworth's experience of a nature which is male and his father as well as female and his mother, that Miller achieves the further range of simultaneous but incompatible meanings that the speaker of the poem rather than being the opposite of Lucy, male to her female ... is the displaced representative ... of both Lucy herself and of her unravishing ravisher, nature or death, (p. 28) It might seem that Miller acts on the interpretive principle that whenever Wordsworth uses a narrative 'I' or 'she' in a poem, the pronouns inescapably carry with them reference to everything the author has said, in any of his texts, about himself and any female persons, and about their relations to each other and to nature. In fact, however, Miller's procedure is constrained in various ways. It is constrained by Miller's tacit requirement of some connection to partial aspects of the text as initially construed, as well as by his tacit reliance on plausible bridges for the crossovers between the 'I' and 'she' and the various personages and relationships that he finds, or infers, in Wordsworth's writings. These are primarily doctrinal bridges, whose validity Miller takes for granted, which serve to warrant his 'allegorical' reading - in other words, to underwrite his over-readings of the text of 'A Slumber'. Some underwriters remain implicit in Miller's essay. He relies throughout, of course, on the views, terms, and strategies of Derrida. He patently accepts Freud's doctrines about the unconscious attitudes of a male to his mother, father, and lover, and the disguised manifestations of these attitudes in the mode of symbolic displacements, condensations, and inversions. And in his discussion of Wordsworth's lyric as simultaneously affirming and erasing 'male mastery' and the male 'power of logical understanding,' Miller manifests a heightened consciousness of the relations of men to women in a patriarchal society, as delineated in recent feminist criticism. Some of his connective bridges, however, Miller explicitly identifies; and one of these is Martin Heidegger's assertions about the use of the word 'thing' in German. I want to dwell on this reference for a moment, as representative of the way Miller both

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discovers and corroborates some startling aspects of the allegorical significance of'A Slumber' as 'an obscure sexual drama'. Miller cites (and construes determinately) a passage in which Heidegger points out that in German, we do not call a man a thing (Der Mensch ist kein Ding); and that 'only a stone, a clod of earth, a piece of wood are for us such mere things'. We do, however, 'speak of a young girl who is faced with a task too difficult for her as being a young thing, still too young for it (eine noch zu junges Ding)' (pp. 23—4). This is a striking quotation, with its parallel (of the sort Miller is often and impressively able to introduce) between Heidegger's 'a stone, a clod of earth, a piece of wood' and Wordsworth's triad, 'with rocks and stones and trees'. As Miller implies, this sexual a-symmetry in the application of the term 'young thing' applies to English as well as German. Among speakers of English, women, even more than men, are apt to refer to inexperienced or innocent girls, but not to inexperienced or innocent boys, as 'young things'. On this feature of the language Miller largely relies for important elements in his sexual drama. By referring to her as 'a thing', the speaker invests the girl with a virginal innocence - a 'prepubertal innocence,' in fact - which nature tries, only half in vain, to violate; by the same epithet, he implicitly stresses his own male difference, and claims superiority over the young virgin in knowledge, experience, physical attributes, and logical power; only to have the oppositions dissolved and the claims controverted by implications derived from crisscrossing 'A Slumber' with other texts in Wordsworth. There comes to mind a familiar folk song in English, not cited by Miller, whose parallel to Miller's disseminative secondreading of 'A Slumber' seems a good deal closer than the German passage in Heidegger. In this song the term 'young thing' is again and again applied to a girl who resists (or seems to resist) the advances of an importunate and experienced male. Her age- or rather ages - are compatible with her being prepubertal, nubile, and maternal too: Did she tell you her age, Billy boy, Billy boy, Did she tell you her age, charming Billy? She's three times six, four times seven, Twenty-eight and near eleven, She's a young thing, and cannot leave her mother.

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In the concluding stanza the young thing is represented as vulnerable, acquiescent, yet unpenetrated by her lover: Did she light you up to bed, Billy boy, Billy boy, Did she light you up to bed, charming Billy? Yes, she lit me up to bed, But she shook her dainty head, She's a young thing, and cannot leave her mother.32 Now, what is the relevance of the gender-specific uses of'young thing', whether in German or English, to the third line of Wordsworth's poem- which doesn't call the girl a 'young thing' at all, nor even simply 'a thing', but that term as qualified by a clause which Miller had initially construed to signify that she was a thing so vital 'that she could not possibly be touched by time, reach old age, and die'? To oldreaders like myself, they have no relevance whatever. But to a second-order reading which has deliberately cut itself free from the limitations in construing the poem as a specific lyric parole, such uses help to endow the text with a diversity of clashing sexual significations. There remains the last feature that I have listed in Miller's deconstructive reading of'A Slumber', the discovery of a general aporia that underlies and necessitates all the local aporias; and to track down this discovery requires us to identify a final interpretive operation. This move (already suggested by Miller's reference to the use of junges Ding in German, and by his comment [p. 29] that Wordsworth's 'identifying the earth with a maternal presence' repeats a trope that exists 'in the Western tradition generally') is to dissolve linguistic boundaries so as to merge 'A Slumber' not only with Wordsworth's other writings, but into the textuality constituted by all Occidental languages taken together. In this all-embracing linguistic context, by way of the etymological link between 'Lucy' (a name not mentioned in the poem) and the Latin lux, or light, the death of the girl is read as enacting 'a constantly repeated Occidental drama of the lost sun . . . the father sun as logos, as head power and fount of meaning' (p. 30). The implicit warrant for this over-reading of the 'she' in 'A Slumber' is a remarkable essay by Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy'. There Derrida undertakes to show that metaphysics is inescapably metaphorics, yet that the founding metaphors of philosophy are irreducible. All attempts to

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specify the literal meaning, in implicit opposition to which a metaphor is identified as metaphoric, and all attempts to translate a metaphor into the literal meaning for which it is held to be a substitute, are incoherent and self-defeating, since the very distinction between metaphoric and literal meaning is a product of the philosophical system it purports to found, or 'subsume'. Derrida stresses especially the reliance of traditional philosophical systems on metaphors, or 'tropes', in which terms for visual sense-perception in the presence or absence of light are applied in what purports to be the mental or intellectual realm. Philosophers claim, for example, that they see the meaning or truth of a proposition, or they distinguish clear and distinct from obscure ideas, or they appeal to contemplative vision and to the natural light of reason; all are instances of standing at gaze before something which compels belief, in the way that we are supposedly compelled to believe in the presence of a thing perceived by our sense of sight. Such mental tropes, like their visual correlates, must assume a source of light, which is ultimately the sun; and with his customary wit, Derrida names this key trope (that is, 'turn') of Western thought- which as metaphor is also an instance of what are traditionally called 'flowers of rhetoric' — the 'heliotrope'; that is, a kind of sunflower of rhetoric. But the visible sun, itself ever turning, rises only to set again; similarly, the philosophical tropes turn to follow their analogous sun, which appears only to disappear, yet as the source of light is the necessary condition for the very opposition between seeing and not-seeing, hence between presence and absence. The sun thus serves Derrida himself as a prime trope for the founding presence, or logos, which by our logocentric language is ever-needed and always-lost. Miller, it is evident, has plucked Derrida's heliotrope and carried it over, via the un-named Lucy, into the text of Wordsworth's poem. (Derrida himself remarked, possibly by way of warning, that 'the heliotrope may always become a dried flower in a book';33 it may become, that is, a straw-flower.) As a radically deconstructive critic of literature, Miller knows in advance that any literary text, no less than any metaphysical text, must be an allegorical or 'tropological' vehicle whose ultimate tenor is its constitutional lack of a required ground. And by ingeniously transplanting the heliotrope, he is indeed enabled to read the death of the 'she' in Wordsworth's short lyric as an allegory for

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'the loss of the logos, leaving the poet and his words groundless' (P-30).

V

Miller introduces his exemplary analysis of Wordsworth's poem in the middle of an essay which begins and ends with a discussion of literary study in the university, and in the course of this discussion he raises a pressing issue for the teaching of literature. He divides the 'modes of teaching literature and writing about it' into two kinds. One kind is the deconstructive 'mode of literary study I have tried to exemplify'; the other comprehends all the more traditional modes. And, he declares, 'both can and should be incorporated into college and university curricula' (pp. 18-19, 32). I am not at all opposed to incorporating deconstructive theory and deconstructive critical practice as subjects for study in university curricula. They have become the focus of the kind of vigorous controversy which keeps a discipline from becoming routine and moribund, and have had the salutary result of compelling traditionalists to re-examine the presuppositions of their procedures and the grounds of their convictions. The question is: when, and in what way, to introduce this subject? Miller's answer is to incorporate it at all stages, 'from basic courses in reading and writing up to the most advanced graduate seminars'. The basic courses are presumably freshman and sophomore courses. Such early and reiterative presentation of the subject would seem to rest on the conviction that Derrida's theory, which deconstructs the possibility of philosophical truth, is itself the truth about philosophy, and furthermore, a theory capable of being taught before students have read the philosophy on which it admittedly depends even as it puts that philosophy to radical question. And how are we to introduce Derrida's theory and practice of deconstructing texts to novices at the same time that we are trying to teach them to write texts that will say, precisely and accurately, what they mean, and to construe, precisely and accurately, the texts that they read? In his sustained 'double gestures' Derrida is an equilibrist who maintains a precarious poise on a tightrope between subverting and denying, between deconstructing and destroying, between under-

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standing communicative 'effects' and dissolving the foundations on which the effects rely, between deploying interpretive norms and disclaiming their power to 'master' a text, between decisively rejecting wrong readings and declaring the impossibility of a right reading, between meticulously construing a text as determinate and disseminating the text into a scatter of undecidabilities. In this process Derrida is also a logical prestidigitator who acknowledges and uses, as a logocentric effect, the logic of noncontradiction, yet converts its either/or into a simultaneous neither/nor and both/and, in a double gesture of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, of giving and taking back and regiving with a difference. I find it difficult to imagine a population of teachers of composition and reading who are so philosophically adept and pedagogically deft that they will be able to keep novices from converting this delicate equilibristic art into a set of crude dogmas; or from replacing an esteem for the positive powers of language by an inveterate suspicion of the perfidy of language; or from falling either into the extreme of a paralysis of discoursive indecision, or into the opposite extreme of interpretive abandon, on the principle that, since both of us lack a foundation in presence, my misreading is as good as your misreading. Miller's recommendation to teach deconstruction as a subject to advanced students - after, it is to be hoped, a student has become competent at construing a variety of texts, and knowledgeable about traditional modes of literary criticism, and has also achieved the philosophical sophistication to understand the historical position and the duplexities of Derridean deconstruction - seems to me unobjectionable. No student of literature, in fact, can afford simply to ignore deconstruction; for the time being, it is the focus of the most basic and interesting literary debate. And it is only fair to add that, if a graduate student elects to adopt, in whole or part, this strategy for liberating reading from traditional constraints, it offers, in our institutional arrangements for hiring and advancing faculty, certain practical advantages. It guarantees the discovery of new significations in old and muchcriticized works of literature, hence is eminently publishable; and while, because of the built-in conservatism of many literary departments, it still incurs institutional risks, it increasingly holds out the promise of institutional rewards. As a long-time observer of evolving critical movements and counter-movements, I am not disposed to cavil with this latest

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innovation; I do want, however, to express a few caveats. In appraising the old against the new mode of teaching and writing about literature, Hillis Miller declares that the old mode, since it is 'controlled by the presupposition of some centre', 'already knows what it is going to find', while the deconstructive mode 'is more open to the inexhaustible strangeness of literary texts' (p. 32). I recognize the justness of the second clause in this claim, but not of the first. As Miller's reading of 'A Slumber' demonstrates, deconstruction has indeed proved its ability to find strange meanings that make the most ingenious explorations of new-critical oldreaders seem unadventurous - although it should be noted that deconstructive readings are adjudged to be strange only by tacit reference to the meanings of the text as already construed. But surely it is deconstructive criticism, much more than traditional criticism, which is vulnerable to Miller's charge, in his first clause, that 'it always knows what it is going to find'. Whatever their presuppositions, traditional modes of reading have amply demonstrated the ability to find highly diverse structures of meaning in a range of works from Wordsworth's 'A Slumber' through Shakespeare's King Lear, George Eliot's Middlemarch, and the rhymes of Ogden Nash. But as Miller himself describes deconstruction, 'it attempts to show that in a given work of literature, in a different way in each case', following out 'the play of tropes leads to ... the experience of an aporia or boggling of the mind' (p. 19). This presupposition makes a deconstructive reading not merely goal-oriented, but singlegoal-oriented. The critic knows before he begins to read what, by deep linguistic necessity, he is going to find — that is, an aporia — and sure enough, given the freedom of interpretive manoeuvre that deconstruction is designed to grant him, he finds one. The readers of radically deconstructive critics soon learn to expect that invariable discovery. So one of my caveats is this: for all the surprising new readings achieved en route, I don't see how Derrida's counter-philosophical strategy, when transposed to the criticism of literature, can avoid reducing the variousness of literary works to an allegorical narrative with an invariable plot. Another caveat: to be successful in his chosen metier, the apprentice needs to approximate the proven strengths of the masters of deconstruction: their wide-ranging and quite traditional learning, for example; their quick eye for unexpected similarities in what is taken to be different and of differences in

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what seems to be the same; their ingenuity at finding openings into the linguistic substructure of a work and resourcefulness at inventing diverse tactics in the undeviating deconstructive quest; and not least, the deftness, wit, and word-play which often endow their critical writings with their own kind of literary value. My third warning is this: Derrida is careful to point out, as I have said, that deconstruction does not destroy, and cannot replace, traditional humanistic pursuits, including presumably literary criticism; nor can it, as his own theory and practice demonstrate, dispense with a determinate construal of a text, as a necessary stage toward disseminating what has been so construed. Above all, then, the young practitioner needs to be sure that he establishes his credentials (as Derrida, Miller, de Man, and other adepts have impressively established theirs) as a proficient, acute, and sensitive construer and explicator of texts in the primary mode of literary understanding. Otherwise, as traditional literary readings may degenerate into exercises in pedantry, so deconstructive readings may become a display of modish terminology which never engages with anything recognizable as a work of literature. My final point has to do with the difference between traditional and deconstructive motives for reading literature, and the distinctive values that each reading provides. To read a text in the traditional way, as a work of literature, is to read it as a human document - a fictional presentation of thinking, acting, and feeling characters who are enough like ourselves to engage us in their experiences, in language which is expressed and ordered by a human author in a way that moves and delights the human reader. Deconstructive critics, if they acknowledge such features at all, treat them as un-authored, linguistically generated illusions, or 'effects'. Literature has survived over the millennia by being read as a presentation of human characters and matters of human interest, pleasure, and concern. It is far from obvious that the values in such a reading can for long be replaced by the value, however appealing in its initial novelty, of reading literature as the tropological vehicle for a set of conundrums without solutions. I am reassured, however, by the stubborn capacity of construed texts to survive their second-order deconstruction. When, for example, I turn back from Miller's essay to Wordsworth's 'A Slumber', I find that it still offers itself, not as a regress of dreadlocked 'double-binds', but as what Wordsworth's friend

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Coleridge found it to be when he called it a 'sublime elegy', and what Miller himself at first found it to be, when he described it as a 'beautiful' and 'moving' poem - beautiful in the terse economy, justness, and ordering of its verbal expression, and moving in that it presents a human being at the moment in which he communicates the discovery, in a shocking instance, of the suddenness, unexpectedness, and finality of death. Let's put the text to trial: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this paper, delivered at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, will be published in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, edited by Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer, forthcoming from Cornell University Press. 2. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1928) pp. 67, 73, 197,265. 3. Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugene Donato (Baltimore, 1970), 'Discussion,' p. 272. 4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1976) p. 163; see also p. 158. 5. 'Structure, Sign, and Play', p. 249. See also Derrida, Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (Chicago and London, 1981) p. 5. 6. Hume, Treatise, p. 264. 7. Ibid., pp. 265, 183, 269-270. 8. Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', Glyph, I (1977) p. 195. 9. Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play', pp. 264—5. 10. See, for example, 'Structure, Sign, and Play', 'Discussion', pp. 270-1; 'Signature Event Context', pp. 174, 193; Dissemination, pp. 43—4. 11. 'Differance', in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, translated by David B. Allison (Evanston, Illinois, 1973) p. 156. 12. 'Signature Event Context', pp. 174, 192. See also Derrida, 'Living On: Border Lines', in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1979) p. 78: 'Hence no context is saturable any more. . . . No meaning

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can be fixed or decided upon.' And p. 81: 'No meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation.' 13. 'Signature Event Context, pp. 172, 186, 191. 14. Ibid., pp. 174, 193, 195. 15. 'Living On: Border Lines', pp. 83, 142. 16. Ibid., pp. 83-4. 17. E.g., OfGrammatology, p. 243: Rousseau's'declared intention is not annulled . . . but rather inscribed within a system it no longer dominates'. 'Signature Event Context', p. 192: In 'a differential typology of forms of iteration . . . the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance'. 18. Of Grammatology, p. 158. Derrida adds (pp. 158-9) that the exigencies of standard interpretive commentary, though an 'indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading'. A critical reading, however, which recognizes that, in the inescapable lack of a 'natural presence', a text 'has never been anything but writing' - that is, 'substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references' - 'opens' meaning and language, as he puts it, 'to infinity'. 19. Hume, Treatise, pp. 182, 186-7, 267. Hume's idiom for describing his dilemmas at times converges with that favoured by Derrida. For example, he declares in The Treatise that in reconsidering his section on the self, or personal identity, he finds himself 'involv'd in such a labyrinth, that ... I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent', and ends in the undecidability of what Derrida calls the 'double bind' of an 'aporia': 'In short there are two principles, which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them' ('Appendix', pp. 633, 636). 20. Ibid., pp. 270, 273. 21. Of Grammatology, pp. 24, 314, 164; also 'Structure, Sign, and Play', pp. 250—75: 'We have no language — no syntax and no lexicon — which is alien to this history [of metaphysics]; we cannot utter a single deconstructive proposition which has not slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. . . . Every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics.' 22. Ibid., p. 14; 'Structure, Sign, and Play', p. 264; 'Differance', p. 159. 23. 'Structure, Sign, and Play', 'Discussion', p. 271. 24. 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy', New Literary History, vI (1974) pp. 48-9; 'Living On', p. 91; Dissemination, pp. 25-6. See also 'Signature, Event, Context', pp. 173, 181, 188, 195. 25. Paul de Man, 'Introduction' to the issue on the topic, 'The Rhetoric of Romanticism,' in Studies in Romanticism, xviii (1979) p. 498. 26. J. Hillis Miller, 'On Edge: the Crossways of Contemporary Criticism', Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, xxxii (Jan. 1979) p. 32. All the succeeding page references in the text are to this essay. 27. Miller identifies the 'she' referred to in the poem as 'Lucy' on the standard ground that we have convincing reasons to believe that Wordsworth intended 'A Slumber' to be one of a group of five short lyrics — what Miller calls 'the Lucy poems as a group' (p. 26). In the other four poems, the girl is

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28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

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named as 'Lucy', and Lucy, as one of the poems puts it, 'is in her grave, and, oh,/ the difference to me!' The disagreement about 'A Slumber' between Cleanth Brooks and F. W. Bateson (which E. D. Hirsch has publicized and made a notable interpretive crux) has to do solely with this issue. (See E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation [New Haven and London, 1967] pp. 227—30.) Both readers construe the text as signifying that a girl who was alive in stanza one is dead in stanza two; their disagreement is about what we are to infer about the speaker's state of mind from the terms in which he represents the circumstances of her death. Brooks says that the closing lines 'suggest . . . [his] agonized shock at the loved one's present lack of motion . . . her utter and horrible inertness'; Bateson claims that his 'mood' mounts to 'the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines. . . . Lucy is actually more alive now that she is dead, because she is now a part of the life of Nature, and not just a human "thing" '. J. H. Miller's description of the state of mind of the lyric speaker seems to me much more attuned to what he says than either of these extreme versions. Almost all of the many critics who have written about 'A Slumber' agree with Miller's construal of the basic situation- a lyric speaker confronting the fact that a girl who seemed invulnerable to aging and death is now dead; they differ mainly in their explication of the overtones and significance of the presented facts. The one drastic divergence I know of is that proposed by Hugh Sykes Davies, in 'Another New Poem by Wordsworth,' Essays in Criticism, xv (1965) pp. 135—61. Davies argues against the evidence that Wordsworth intended 'A Slumber' to be one of the Lucy group, and suggests that Wordsworth intended the 'she' in the third line to refer back to 'spirit' in the first line; hence that the text is to be construed as a poem about a trance-state of the speaker's own spirit. Such a reading seems to me to be not impossible, but extremely unlikely. What Davies' essay does serve to indicate is that no construal of a poem can, by reference to an infallible criterion, be absolutely certain; it is a matter of adequate assurance, as confirmed by the consensus of other competent readers. Paul de Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969) pp. 205-6. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London, 1979) p. 205; see also p. 131. As Miller puts it, the poem instances the way in which, in any 'given work of literature . . . metaphysical assumptions are both present and at the same time undermined by the text itself ('On Edge', p. 19). From The Abelard Folk Song Book, edited by Abner Graboff (New York and London, 1958).

33. Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy', New Literary History, vi (1974) p. 74.

3

The Literary Transaction LOUISE M. ROSENBLATT

Current controversies over theories of literature have great importance for the future of literature teaching in our schools, colleges, and universities. My purpose is to sketch for you some basic aspects of my transactional theory of literature and its implications for teaching. I term it 'the transactional theory', to differentiate it both from traditional approaches and from other so-called 'reader-response' theories. Professor M. H. Abrams, in his essay on 'Construing and Deconstructing' (see above, pp. 30-65), has offered us various caveats against what he fears to be the imminent predominance of the deconstructionists. I heartily agree with his warnings about the limitations and dangers of their theories and practices, and would perhaps advance further philosophic, cultural, and political reasons for that position. Deconstructionists seem to me basically anti-humanist. Their semiotic and literary doctrines, which make language a closed system, ultimately deny an actual reader in an actual reading situation. For them, the reader becomes simply the locus, the crossroad, where different linguistic codes and conventions converge. Preoccupied with the overlaps and oppositions between the deconstructionist approach and the traditional approach of the New Critics and the literary historians, Professor Abrams has unfortunately neglected other alternative theories. A highly esteemed literary historian and a sensitive reader of texts, he has nevertheless been content mainly to demonstrate that the deconstructionists must still start with a traditional 'determinate' interpretation. Perhaps he is willing to settle for this because, ironically, the deconstructionists have come full circle and share with the traditionalists a neglect of the reader and a concentration on the text. Although Professor Abrams has admitted the 66

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possibility of variant readings of a text, like the others he has not done full justice to the nature of the reading act that produces a poem. I

Professor Abrams discusses a deconstructionist interpretation of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' (quoted above, pp. 46-7) in which a loved one, seen in the first stanza as immune to death, is in the second shown to be dead. It happens that still other readings of that text are treated in my book, The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Cleanth Brooks is there quoted as saying that the poet 'attempts to suggest something of the lover's agonized shock at the loved one's present lack of motion - of his response to her utter and horrible inertness. . . . She is touched by earthly time in its most powerful and horrible image'. A quotation from F. W. Bateson, on the contrary, reports, instead of two contrasting moods in the two stanzas, 'a single mood mounting to a climax in the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines . . . the grander dead-Lucy has become involved in the sublime processes of nature'. 1 Now, Professor Abrams sees these variant readings and those of the deconstructionists and others, as a separate, and minor, issue: 'Since the second stanza does not advert to the speaker's own feelings, but leaves them to be inferred from the terms in which he asserts a state of affairs, the text allows standard readers considerable room for variance in this aspect of interpretation.' Referring to Brooks' and Bateson's readings, he says, 'Both readers construe the text as signifying that the girl who was alive in stanza one is dead in stanza two; their disagreement is about what we are to infer about the speaker's state of mind from the terms in which he represents the circumstances of her death.' The various critics, we are told, 'differ mainly in their explication of the overtones and significance of the presented facts' (above, p. 65 n.28). Emphasis on agreement in construal of'the presented facts' obscures recognition that each reading constitutes a different poem, a point with which Professor Abrams might agree. But my concern is with the theoretical implications, intended or not, that flow from the tendency to separate the inferred situation from the attitudes and feelings aroused. This formulation does not

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acknowledge that a poem depends on a special mode of reading. Many prevalent teaching practices result from failure to understand this. Such a separation of aspects is not true to the reading act as it is carried on by experienced readers, especially of a lyric poem. Such an analytical approach might apply to the reading of, say, a medical report— a construal of the facts, from which an inference concerning the patient's general state of health might be drawn. But evoking a lyric poem with Wordsworth's text is not like reading a medical report. 'Poetry', said the philosopher George Santayana, 'cannot be spread upon things like butter.' 2 To read Wordsworth's text as a lyric poem is not first to construe the bread of facts on which to spread the butter, or perhaps jam, of'overtones and significance'. Wordsworth's text is a set of signs that permit us to call forth a sequence of fused cognitive and affective states of mind that we call a lyric poem. We 'infer' at the same time the 'overtones and significance' of, and the 'fact' of, the girl's death. In the process that produces a poem, becoming aware of the overtones and attitudes is an integral part of inferring the state of affairs. The text of Theodore Roethke's 'My Papa's Waltz' provides another illustration of this aspect of the reading process: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother's countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.3

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Over the years, I have found that competent adult readers have reported very varied experiences in relation to this text. There has usually been no disagreement about the situation - a man recalling a childhood episode when he danced with his father. Yet readers, from the very first line, tended to make very different poems from this text, some positive in feeling, some negative, some ambivalent, with many shades in-between. Some readers have felt mainly pain at the adult's obtuse roughness. Still others have shared a child's breathlessly mingled pleasure and strain. In short, although agreeing on the basic situation, each reader has had a different experience and made a different, a personal, poem. This text offers a rather clear instance of the openness that is inherent in all texts, especially those which are considered potentially 'literary'. Questions about the 'correctness' of the readings have often been raised. What was Roethke's intention? The answer, of course, is that even if Roethke has somewhere stated his intention, or if his biography suggests a particular autobiographical intention, we should still have to depend on our own reading of the text to decide whether it actually fulfils that intention. Some want to legislate that the author's is the only 'meaning'. We usually do want to know the author's intention, and we seek to infer it from the text. But this often becomes a problem for the scholar's biographical and historical research into the transaction between writer and environment that produced the text. We are grateful to the scholars who seek to tell us what Shakespeare's contemporaries might have made of his plays. But meanwhile, so long as we do not claim that ours is Shakespeare's interpretation, we can as twentieth-century individuals still participate in his great imagined world of characters, actions and poetry. We can compare what we and others have made of the text, say, of Hamlet. It is unrealistic to assume a single 'correct' reading — even the author's is one among others. Let me reassure you, however, that I do not urge that we accept all readings of a text. There can be better or poorer readings. Such judgements would have to be based on agreed-upon criteria- e.g. that the better reading encompasses most, or all, of the elements of the text, or that meanings for which there can be shown no basis in the text should be rejected.4 Clearly, there is no poem encapsulated ready-made in Roethke's or Wordsworth's text, waiting to impress itself on the

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blank surface of readers' minds, or to be extracted from it. Nor were the poems arbitrarily projected on to the text by its readers. Texts, precious though they may be, remain merely marks, squiggles on parchment or paper until a reader, the author or someone else, makes meaning out of them. 'Text' requires a reader, and similarly 'reader' implies a text. A poem or a story or a play — or for that matter, a scientific report or a legal brief emerges from a coming-together of a particular text and a particular reader at a particular time under particular circumstances. It is necessary to make a distinction between the text and 'the meaning' that a particular reader evokes from it during the reading. The text is a set of signs. The poem or play is an event in time; it is the evocation that happens through a coming-together of a reader and a text. To emphasize their reciprocal relationship, I term it a. transaction. I shall seek to describe the process of making the poem, the evocation, that becomes the object of our response and the subject of our interpretation.

II Theories of literature are based, explicitly or implicitly, on assumptions about our relation to 'reality', about the nature of knowledge, and about the nature of language. The deconstructionists, we have been reminded (above, p. 34ff) see us as caught, to use Nietzsche's phrase, in 'the prison-house of language'. Unable to believe in an absolute unmediated reality, they see an extreme relativism as the only alternative. Language becomes a groundless, self-contained arbitrary system. Texts, if not grounded in something outside language, become open to all deconstructive operations. However, rejection of the idea of a transcendental, unmediated reality need not lead to such extreme relativism. This is demonstrated by the philosophy of John Dewey, whose thinking has affiliations with that of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and George Herbert Mead, and whose ideas are having a highly-deserved contemporary revival. Dewey, as early as 1896, had sought to counteract the dualism that spoke, for example, of an 'interaction' with the environment, implying separate, selfcontained entities acting on one another.5 Instead of seeing

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human beings as passively receiving the environmental stimuli, he saw humans and nature as aspects of a total situation. The organism, he pointed out, by its preoccupations or interests, shapes or modifies the very environmental stimuli to which it responds. In 1949, he proposed the term 'transaction' to designate such a reciprocal relationship.6 Such a transactional view has been increasingly reinforced in this century by ecologists' stress on our two-way relationship with nature, and by current philosophy of science, which admits the observer to be an explicit factor in any observation or proposition.7 The transactional view also refutes the deconstructionists' notions of language as a self-contained, ungrounded system. The dyadic formulation of the great French linguist, de Saussure, stressing the relation between the signifier and the signified, the word and its object, lent itself to conceiving language simply as an ungrounded code, an abstract, arbitrary system. In contrast, Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory offers a triadic formulation - sign, object, interpretant. 'A sign', Peirce wrote, 'is in a conjoint relation to the thing denoted and to the mind. . . . The sign is related to its object only in consequence of a mental association, and depends upon a habit.'8 This triadic model, by providing for the human factor, offers a matrix for understanding the reading process. Peirce's triadic formulation is supported by contemporary psychologists' work on language. Werner and Kaplan, in their study of symbol formation, for example, arrive at the conclusion that a word, a vocalization, acquires meaning for a child becomes a verbal symbol — when the word and its object, its referent, are linked with, become incorporated into, the same 'organismic state'.9 William James, in his great work on psychology reminds us that 'as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking',10 and offers us the inspired metaphor of the stream of thought or the stream of consciousness. Hence, James points out, our thoughts - not only our thoughts of the objects in the world that our words point to, but also our thoughts of the very relationships among them — carry a kinaesthetic and affective halo, or penumbra. 'If we speak objectively,' says James, 'it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own.'11 This rich experiential aura of language is different for each of

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us. As L. S. Vygotsky pointed out, in contrast to the lexical meaning of a word, its 'sense' is 'the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. . . . the dictionary meaning of a word is only a stone in the edifice of sense'.12 Thus we must view language as an intermingling of cognitive and affective elements, an internal merging of sound, feeling, and ideas. The linguists may abstract out and describe a language system, but language, to use contemporary jargon, is never 'contextindependent'. We recognize it as a socially-generated, public system of communication. Nevertheless language is always internalized by individual human beings in transactions with particular environments. Hence there is the public, lexical meaning of a word, and there is the individual private sense of it. For the young child, the word, 'cat', is as much an attribute of the creature as its fur or its pointed ears. The child learns to 'decontextualize' the word, to sort out its reference to a class, but this rests, as Vygotsky reminds us, on a personal, experiential base. Some have used the image of an iceberg for this, with the tip of the iceberg representing the public or referential or denotative aspect of meaning.13 For the individual, language can be conceived as a kind of reservoir, the residue of past experiences with words in life situations (among which we can include acts of reading). As we seek to make meaning in speech, reading, or writing, this reservoir is all that we have to draw on, to choose from. William James termed this element of choice 'selective attention.' Consciousness, he tells us, 'is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks. . . '.14 Consciousness consists in 'the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention'.15 Thus while language activity implies an intermingled kinaesthetic, cognitive, affective, associational matrix, what is brought into awareness, what is pushed into the fringes of consciousness or ignored, depends on the process of selective attention. Thinking involves both selection from what is presented to consciousness and organization of these elements into meaning. The process of reading a text can be understood, then, as a process of thinking, of selecting and synthesizing elements from the linguistic reservoir in order to organize meaning. The verbal

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signs arouse certain organismic states, alert certain areas of memory, stir up certain ranges of feelings, from which relevant elements can be selected. An underlying assumption is that the set of verbal symbols can give rise to some kind of reasonably coherent meaning. One seeks to develop a general feeling or tentative principle, no matter how vague at first, that will guide selection from the multiple inner alternatives resonating to each word or phrase of the text. As the eyes encounter the unfolding text, one seeks syntactic and semantic cues on which to base expectations about what is forthcoming. Possibilities open up concerning diction, syntax, ideas, subject, themes, concerning the general kind of'meaning' that may be developed. Each additional sentence will signal certain possibilities and exclude others, thus shaping and revising the selecting, organizing impulse. (We shall return to this guiding or directing principle later.) If the text offers elements that cannot be assimilated into the emerging synthesis, it is revised: if necessary, a complete rereading occurs. Thus the reader carries on a complex self-correcting process of selection and synthesis, the arousal and fulfillment (or frustration) of expectations, the construction of a growing 'meaning,' until the final synthesis or organization, more or less coherent, is achieved, whether it be scientific report or literary work of art. This general outline of the reading process is still incomplete, however, precisely because it does not provide for the important distinction between the reading process that produces a scientific report and the reading process from which emerges a literary work of art. In the past, the tendency generally has been to assume that such a distinction depends entirely on the texts involved. The character of the 'work' has been held to inhere entirely in the text. Such classifications ignore the contribution of the reader. We cannot look at the text and predict the nature of the resulting 'work'. We must also postulate a particular kind of relationship between the text and the reader before we can assume, for instance, that a poem or novel, rather than a statement of facts, will be evoked. The preceding sketch of the reading process includes the development of a guiding impulse or principle of selection. An essential element of this is the reader's adoption of a predominant stance, a selective attitude toward what the verbal signs are stirring up in the stream of consciousness. A stance reflects the reader's purpose. The reading-event must fall some-

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where in the continuum between two poles, determined by whether the reader adopts what I term 'the aesthetic' stance or 'the efferent' stance. The kind of reading in which the focus of attention is predominantly on what is to be carried away or retained after the reading event, I term 'efferent' (after the Latin efferre, to carry away). An extreme example is the mother whose child has swallowed a poisonous liquid and who is hurriedly reading the label on the bottle. Here, surely, we see an illustration of James's point about 'selective attention' and our capacity to push into the periphery of awareness those elements of consciousness that do not serve our present interests. The mother's attention is focused on learning what is to be done as soon as the reading ends. She ignores her own state of physical tension, her own emotions, her past association with the words, attending only to what they point to, their barest public referents. Reading a newspaper, a textbook, or a legal brief would usually provide a similar, though less extreme, instance of the predominantly efferent stance. In efferent reading, we focus attention mainly on the public 'tip of the iceberg' of sense. The 'aesthetic' stance dominates the other half of the continuum. In this kind of reading, the reader adopts an attitude of readiness to attend to what is being lived through during the reading-event. The reader's guiding principle of selection includes awareness not only of what the verbal symbols point to, their public referents, but also the rest of'the iceberg', what is stirred up in consciousness as the result of past psychological events involving those words and those referents. These, as we have seen, may include anything from muscular tensions to images to feelings to associations. Probably even before we had brought Wordsworth's or Roethke's text within reading distance, the arrangement of black marks on the page, the uneven lines, the broad margins, had signaled to us that we should read this as a poem — that, in other words, we should adopt the aesthetic stance and make a poem. We did not need first to read it 'literally', efferently, seeking facts, and then go back and add the overtones and feelings and associations and attitudes that made it a poem. As experienced readers, we opened the shutters of our attention wide enough to include not only the public or 'literal' meaning of the words, but those words impregnated with the personal aura they have

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acquired for us through past encounters in literature and in life. Also our broadened focus of attention permitted us to hear the sound of the words in the inner ear, to feel the rhythms of the verse, to sense the recurrence of the rhymes. By the time the first lines had been read, a framework for what was to follow had already probably been created. Because of a mixture of past experiences and present preoccupations, and perhaps because of such factors as assumptions about child rearing, a guiding principle of selection may already have crystallized, giving greater weight to either pleasant or unpleasant overtones. In the reading of Roethke's text, it becomes apparent, kinaesthetic and affective overtones and prior social and moral attitudes suffused the sense of what was seen as happening and determined the significance of the lived-through poem for each reader. Only a definite act of attention will set in motion the (to a great extent subliminal) process of selection and synthesis which evokes the felt experience, the poem or story. No matter how great the potentialities of the text, the reader can make a poem or play or novel only by paying selective attention to the multiple funded overtones of past experiences, simple though they may be, in order to create, in the two-way relationship with a text, a new, perhaps more complex, experience. Thus, one of the earliest and most important steps in any reading event is the selection of either a predominantly efferent or a predominantly aesthetic stance toward the transaction with the text. 'Predominantly', since, although many readings may fall near the polar extremes, many others may fall nearer the centre of the continuum. Some may be predominantly efferent, but with subordinate awareness of qualitative or affective elements; some may be predominantly aesthetic, with varying degrees of attention to, for instance, information being acquired. Of course, after the aesthetic reading, the reader may find that much has been retained even though retention was not the primary purpose. The distinction rests on what the reader makes happen during the reading event. Yet, it may still be objected, does not the text dictate the stance inevitably to be adopted, once the reader's eye meets the page? The answer is: any text can be read either efferently or aesthetically. For example, the writers of 'found' poems take texts evidently written for efferent reading such as classified advertisements, and, by breaking them into segments, signal the reader to

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adopt an aesthetic stance, to extend attention to the sound of the words in the inner ear and to their kinaesthetic and emotive reverberations, and thus to make a poem. Conversely, texts written as novels, poems, or plays can be read efferently, as biographical, historical, or linguistic documents. The reader who approaches Roethke's text, for example, with the purpose of scanning the verse or seeing whether it offers evidence concerning the socio-economic status of the family will adopt a predominantly efferent stance. There will be no need to attend to feelings and overtones; in fact, they would be irrelevant and confusing. Sometimes a reader comes to a text with an already set purpose or predominant stance. Otherwise, experienced readers usually seek automatically to adopt the stance appropriate to the presumed or inferred intentions of the author. The text from which we seek information, the text that argues for a position, that recounts historical events, that analyses the factors in a problem, is usually best served by a predominantly efferent stance. The medical student reading the description of the symptoms of a disease, for example, must centre attention on the information and must actively ignore, push into the fringes of awareness, any hypochondriacal physical or emotional responses. The experienced reader senses cues as to the appropriate stance. Sometimes the title is sufficient. Often the text alerts us. We have noted the perhaps most obvious example, the broad margins and uneven lines that signal the reader to adopt an aesthetic stance and produce a poem. Similarly, the conventions of the text of a play, with its brief indications of scene and setting, its bare dialogue, preceded by the names of the speakers, and with rare descriptive remarks inserted by the author, signal the need for a particularly intense activity on the part of the reader. The opening sentences of a prose narrative (if the title or blurb has not already informed us it is a novel), usually offer cues of tense, of tone, of setting, of action and dialogue, that lead us to focus on the lived-through evocation rather than to read efferently. The expert reader has learned to respond automatically to those signs, but many still do not realize that such cues require a decided shift of attention in one or another direction. The importance of recognizing that each transaction between reader and text is a unique event becomes apparent. Not only the nature of the text and the nature of the experience of life and

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language the reader brings to it, but also the circumstances under which the particular reading is taking place, affect the transaction. Probably much reading hovers near the middle of the continuum, with either the public or private dimensions of the reading experience dominant, yet with some attention to the other dimensions. All readings, as we have seen, involve both cognitive and affective elements. Hence the reader needs to learn to clarify the purpose of the reading-act, and to handle selectively the multiple reverberations from the verbal symbols in accordance with the circumstances and purpose of the particular reading event. Much ineffective or countereffective reading occurs because of confusion of stance: e.g. the reader carried away by the aesthetic appeal of advertisements or political articles when an impersonal efferent appraisal is required, or the student who exclaimed after reading the first line of Dickinson's 'I heard a fly buzz when I died' 'That's ridiculous! Dead people don't speak!' Bringing to the reciprocal interplay with the text the residue of past experiences, sensitive to the circumstances and purposes of the particular transaction, the competent reader adopts a stance at some point in the efferent-aesthetic continuum, and selectively organizes the stuff of memory, thought, and feeling into an evocation presumably corresponding to the text. This understanding of the reading process puts into perspective the text-oriented preoccupation of reading experts with such matters as 'decoding', or poststructuralists with verbal and literary 'conventions'. Language is, of course, essential — its lexicon, its syntax, its semantic nuances, its conventions, efferent and aesthetic. But it is equally crucial to see that these all derive their importance from their part in the total reading transaction, and should be seen as subordinate to the reader's purposive making of meaning.

III 'Reader-response criticism' has won many exponents in recent years. Although they affirm the importance of the reader, their Achilles' heel is that they have usually neglected or ignored the question: 'Response - to what?' Hence they either make the reader all-important or they implicitly join the traditionalists, the

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structuralists, and the deconstructionists in their preoccupation with the text. It remains an object to be analysed or a static stimulus presumably embodying the work. However, we have seen that the work actually is to be found only in transactions between the text and particular readers - its author or some other reader. Thus far, I have focused on this one aspect of the reading event, the evocation of the 'work'. Now it is possible to understand that we 'respond' to the very work that we have evoked. Moreover, our response has its beginnings during the actual reading transaction. Concurrent with the organizing and reorganizing activities of the reader is a stream of responses to the ideas, images, situations, characters, events, being shaped. These responses are sometimes subliminal, sometimes peripheral, sometimes conscious. There may be a sense of pleasure in our own creative activity, a perception of pleasant or awkward sound and movement in the words, an awareness of tensions about what is to follow, a feeling of approval or disapproval of the characters and their behaviour. We may be aware of a contrast between the assumptions or expectations about life that we brought to the reading and the attitudes, beliefs, moral codes, social situations we are living through, participating in, in the world created in transaction with the text. Just as the evocation is the object of our responses, so the subject of interpretation is not the text, but the structure of thought and feeling that the reader has conjured up during the transaction with the text. Interpretation becomes an effort to report on the nature of the evoked work, and to explain its significance to the reader. This involves reflection on the experience, a recapturing of its intellectual and emotional quality. The reader tries to make articulate, not simply the sequence of ideas, emotions, characters, actions, but also the ways in which the different parts of the experience were related. Recalling the evocation, the reader becomes aware of the assumptions about the world and society, about human behaviour, about moral values that make it possible to 'make sense' of the experience. Sometimes the text offers explicit sources for seeing, for example, causal relationships, as in the effect of Othello's jealousy on his actions, and sometimes linkages are provided by assumptions the reader brings to the transaction, as in many of the psychological explanations of Hamlet's behaviour toward Ophelia or toward his mother. The various interpretations of poems cited earlier, we can now

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see, were reports on the experiences specific readers had called forth from Wordsworth's or Roethke's texts. We can at least agree that the evocation should, on the one hand, ideally encompass all elements of the text and, on the other, not project meanings for which the text offers no support. This leads us to look back from the evocation to the text. Thus, although the three types of readings of Roethke's text that I mentioned earlier seem equally to organize all elements of the text, another interpretation that I have encountered, and that stressed primarily an image of marital discord, could be shown to focus on some few elements and ignore others. An effort to make the reference to 'death' symbolically important also was rejected for the same reason. Similarly, the discussions of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' (cited above, pp. 47-59, 65) can be understood as reports by the various critics of their respective evocations, as efforts to describe the emotional and intellectual experiences organized during the transaction with the text, and to formulate the ideas or concepts of life, death, and nature that were drawn upon in interrelating the sequence of experienced images and thoughts. Again, the principle that the evocation should be supported by the text led me to reject Bateson's reading, which made extrinsic information about Wordsworth's pantheistic beliefs the basis for an interpretation that admittedly neglected some parts of the text.16 What the reader brings to the text is an essential element in the efferent as well as the aesthetic reading. Past experiences, prior knowledge, social and psychological assumptions, surrounding circumstances, may play an important role in the making of meaning even with the seemingly most objective or impersonal or logical of texts (witness controversies over interpretations of legal decisions, or of the Constitution of the United States, to say nothing of the writings of Darwin or Marx or Freud). Nevertheless, since the aim in efferent reading is to eliminate the personal and emphasize the public, referential, testable interpretations, there is greater possibility for the kind of consensus in construing the literal meaning that we have found not decisive for aesthetic readings. The transactional theory saves us, on the one hand, from the deconstructionist's focus on the text as an autonomous semiotic entity of unbounded potentialities and, on the other hand, from the subjectivism that concentrates on the reader's response.

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Concentration on the reader alone becomes psychology, biography, social history. Concentration on analysis of the text in isolation becomes linguistics or semantics. The emergence of meaning in the transaction between reader and text places upon us the responsibility of doing justice to the intricate and often unpredictable contributions of both reader and text. And the differences between the nature of the transactions in efferent and aesthetic reading become of paramount importance. The aesthetic evocation should be central to all forms of 'literary' activity. We have seen how evocation, response, interpretation flow from the lived-through creation of the literary work of art. Like all other kinds of experience, the evoked work can be approached from many points of view. But criticism, textual analysis, study of historical or biographical context, social or moral applications, or any other kind of analysis will merit being considered literary activities only if they make the evoked work their starting points. This entails recognition of the role of the literary critic, the literary analyst, the literary historian as, first of all, a reader.17

IV The view of the reading process that I have sketched has implications for the whole educational spectrum, from elementary through graduate school, and across the disciplines. Much of the lack of success in the teaching of reading in general and literature in particular in our American schools is due, I believe, to the weaknesses of the underlying models or theories of reading. All reading should be purposive, and stance reflects purpose. Yet the habit of adopting an appropriate stance in reading has not been fostered. Indeed, teaching methods have often been extremely confusing on this score (as when basal readers or college anthologies offer stories and poems, but only questions requiring efferent reading are asked about them). Despite a preoccupation with the informative aspects of reading, i.e. a bias toward the efferent, there is widespread dissatisfaction with the results of the teaching of even this type of reading. Overemphasis on fragmented 'reading skills' and 'decoding' has led to neglect of the transactional thinking process required for achievement of meaning. Predominantly efferent

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reading, we have seen, demands its own kind of selective handling of inner personal feelings and associations, and assimilation and accommodation of the emerging structure of thought to past knowledge and experience. In the efferent transaction, young readers need to learn to shut out irrelevant private or personal ideas, feelings, associations, and to focus on the public meanings to be organized for retention after the close of the reading act. High school and college English departments have a responsibility toward promoting continuing growth in the capacity for efferent reading. Perhaps even more important, we should take the initiative in making our colleagues in other departments aware of their responsibility for teaching efferent reading in their respective disciplines. We in English departments have quite rightly felt the teaching of literature to be our special province. The paradox is, alas, that while we have often presented texts of great aesthetic potentiality to our students, we have depended too much on the texts alone to generate the aesthetic stance. The evocation of the literary work of art has been too much taken for granted. With the concerns of the literary critic, the literary historian, the literary analyst as our models and goals, the 'study of literature' has tended to hurry the reader away from the evocation to focus on efferent concerns: recall of details, paraphrases, summaries, categorization of genres, analyses of verbal technique, of plot. Young readers have thus been led to approach literary texts with attention focused on what would be required after the reading, rather than on creating an aesthetic experience. The prime requirement is to provide a situation, an atmosphere in which young readers will feel sufficiently free and self-confident to engage fully in the process of building the intangible structure of ideas, feelings, sensations, moods, that is a literary work of art. They need to concentrate on the thoughts, the feelings, the scenes they are living through. They need to enter into the lives of the characters they are carving out of their own inner resources in transaction with the text. I am under no illusion that all we have to do is tell students they are free to respond in this way. Students enter our classes bringing attitudes shaped by years of reading texts with attention fixed on building up answers to the efferently-oriented analytic questions that will be asked after the reading. Hence, there have to be vigorous efforts to create the conditions for aesthetic spontaneity.

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Respect for what each reader has actively made of the cues offered by the text engenders self-respect and confidence. A personally lived-through evocation, no matter how incomplete, can be the starting point for growth in reading ability. After the reading, the aim is first of all to help readers recapture, savour, deepen the lived-through experience, and to reflect on, organize, and elaborate their concurrent responses to it. Reflection can illuminate the kind of event that has been lived through in transaction with the text, the manner of world that has been conjured up. As these are clarified, it is possible to return to the text and discover what in the author's words and techniques led to these experiences. It becomes possible, also, to understand the relationship between the evocation and the experiences and assumptions that the reader brought to the transaction. If the teacher must ask questions, they should be, to begin with, as open-ended as possible. What did the readers make of the text? What moved them, surprised them, annoyed them, seemed credible, seemed unlikely? What did they see, hear, feel? What kinds of personalities, situations, did they participate in? Students can indeed be convinced that we mean it when we say that literary texts have been written to provide personally meaningful experiences. Keeping the qualitative, experiential work in mind, readers can then return naturally to the text. What elements of the text relate to or support the particular aspects of their evocation that they have noted? What verbal traits contributed to the qualities, the movement, the structure, of the experienced work? What moods, what attitudes toward characters, what tensions of suspense, reverberated to particular verbal phrases, patterns, repetitions? Literary conventions, critical terminology, 'analysis' of plot, character, metaphor, symbol —such concepts are vacuous without recognition of the basic, the primary, aesthetic convention, the aesthetic stance that links words and their referents with their experiential base. Reflection on the evocation, especially when reinforced by interchange with others, can develop self-criticism through the discovery that others have assimilated verbal elements that one has ignored or understressed. Or it may become apparent that some readers have had experiences that cannot be related to the text. Close reading requires close attention both to the text and to one's personal links with it.

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Interchange with others can also be an important means of developing perspective not only on the work we have evoked, but on ourselves. The simple discovery of how differently others in a group have lived through Roethke's text, for example, has provided insights into the attitudes of mind and the preoccupations that each reader brought to the text. Discussions of contrasting evocations and responses have revealed differing assumptions about psychology, human relations, and moral issues. Marcel Proust has termed the writer's work 'a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself'.18 That kind of enlargement of understanding, of expansion of horizon through reading is an ultimate justification or goal of the teaching of literature. In our culture, with its obsession with the mechanical, the quantitative, the technological, the analytic, the scientific, such enrichment through literature will happen only if it is actively fostered, through understanding of both the aesthetic and the efferent modes of experience. In the teaching of literature, then, the prime task is first of all to create the atmosphere for, to eliminate pressures against, the aesthetic reading from which emerges the literary work of art. Then we can carry out our desire to help individuals grow in their capacity to have more and more personally stimulating, challenging, enriching transactions with texts. When this happens, we find that our old concerns with analysis, with literary conventions, with classificatory genres, with literary history, cease to be empty exercises engaged in for their own sakes, and take their places in the dynamics of the readers' efforts to grow in understanding of themselves and their relation to the author through the text. V

It has been possible only to sketch the transactional theory of reading in broadest strokes. It offers, I have attempted to suggest, a theoretically-sound critical approach to the text without destroying the possibility of'determinate' readings and without sacrificing the humanistic values of literature in our culture. We should not forget that the current preoccupation in some quarters with

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theories of literature is a legacy of the reaction in the late 1960s and early 1970s against the teaching of literature in our colleges and universities as formalist and elitist. We need not agree with those who took advantage of the situation to use literature for their own political purposes.19 Yet there is no doubt that serious concern with good and great literature has become the business of a very small fraction of our society, writing for one another and benefiting from the esoteric specializations that set them - and literature- off from the common reader. Actually, the patterns of teaching associated with the New Critics and traditional literary history still prevail in many, perhaps, most, colleges and schools. We may feel that these approaches at least implicitly honour the humanistic values of the text. But our rejection of deconstructionist and other extremes does not justify an uncritical clinging to traditional teaching practices, whose lack of sound theoretical basis precipitated the present confusion. Nor can defenders of the traditional claim to have succeeded in producing a wide reading public - or even a wide college-educated reading public - for 'good' literature. If we as teachers hope to rescue the art of literature from its dwindling importance in our culture, we must make our primary and continuing concern the fostering of vital relationships between individual readers and texts. With the aesthetic transaction as the fulcrum, readers-and reader-criticscan range as far as they wish, bringing to bear on the aesthetic event ever wider and richer circles of semiotic, social, ethical, and philosophic contexts. NOTES 1. Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem (Carbondale, 111., 1978) p. 116. These interpretations are cited from E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn., 1967), in which he argues that the author's is the only acceptable meaning of the text. See note 16, below. 2. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets (Cambridge, Mass., 1922), p. 9. 3. Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems (Garden City, N.Y., 1966) p. 45. 4. Rosenblatt, op. cit., Chapter 6, presents a fuller exposition of the approach to the problem of validity in interpretation suggested here, and elaborates the idea of cultural communities that develop 'a common set of criteria' (p. 128). 5. John Dewey, 'The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology', Psychological Review, 3 (July 1896) 357-70, reprinted as 'The Unit of Behavior' in Philosophy and Civilization (New York, 1963).

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6. John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and the Known (Boston, 1949) p. 69ff and passim. 7. Stephen Toulmin, 'Death of the Spectator', in The Return to Cosmology (Berkeley, 1982) p. 237ff; C. F. Weizsacker, The Unity of Nature (New York, 1980). 8. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vols iii-iv, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., 1933) 3.360. 9. Heinz Werner and Bernard Kaplan, Symbol Formation (New York, 1963) p. 18. 10. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. i (New York, 1950) p. 242. 11. Ibid., p. 245. 12. L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, ed. and tr. Eugenia Hanfman and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass., 1962) p. 3. 13. Elizabeth Bates, The Emergence of Symbols (New York, 1979) p. 66. 14. James, op. cit., p. 284. 15. Ibid., p. 288. 16. Hirsch, op. cit., 227ff, basing his argument on extrinsic biographical information, prefers Bateson's interpretation of Wordsworth's text as closer to the author's intention, despite the fact, as he concedes, that 'Bateson fails to emphasize the negative implications in the poem' and 'in spite of the implausibility of Bateson's reading'. I argue, op. cit., p. 117, that a poet's typical attitudes do not necessarily apply to a particular text, that the poet could write a poem about the initial shock of a loved one's death, even though he might later, in other texts, find consolation in a pantheistic view of death, and that any interpretation must, above all, honour the text. 17. Cf. Rosenblatt, op. cit., ch. 7, 'Interpretation, Evaluation, Criticism.' See also Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (New York, 1983) chs3,4, and 5. 18. Marcel Proust,Maxims, ed. and tr. Justin O'Brien (New York, 1948) p. 209. 19. See Louise M. Rosenblatt, review of The Politics of Literature, ed. Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter, in The English Journal, 63 (March 1974) 110-11.

4

The Teaching of Poetry ROBIN SKELTON

When the indefatigable James Boswell asked Johnson, 'What is Poetry?' the sage replied, 'Why, sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.' A great many people have attempted to define poetry, and none have wholly succeeded. Consequently those of us who teach poetry are teaching something that is apparently indefinable. If we are wise we approach the problem with caution. I well remember a young woman saying to me that she had dropped out of her first-year English class because the teacher had analysed a poem of John Donne so thoroughly that he had destroyed it for her. This young woman went on to write and publish poetry of her own. I remember another student asking querulously, 'Does it really matter who the Dark Lady of the Sonnets was?' My own answer was 'No', but some teachers would have replied in the affirmative. A third question I have heard is, 'Did Yeats influence Synge or Synge influence Yeats?' The answer to that one is easy. They influenced each other. But the following question, 'Does it matter?' is harder to deal with. Teachers teach as they have been taught. Most of us were taught poetry from three points of view which I will label as the historical, the exegetical, and the genealogical. Let me look at the historical approach first of all. History may not be, as Henry Ford suggested, bunk, but there is a lot of bunkum in it. The history of poetry is not as tidy as our text books pretend. Periods do not follow each other neatly. Styles do not fit into time-frames comfortably. Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote Jacobean drama in the middle of the nineteenth century. William Empson wrote metaphysical poetry in the twentieth. Cavalier poetry is to be found in the reigns of Charles the First, Charles the Second, Queen Anne, Queen Victoria, and Edward 86

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the Seventh. If we split poetry up into periods and attempt to characterize those periods in terms of style we face confusion. We also find ourselves, in an effort to keep the picture neat, ignoring some of the most interesting poets because they were not characteristic of their period, because they were mavericks. It is only in recent years that some of these mavericks have begun to receive adequate attention. I am thinking of Thomas Hardy, of William Blake, of Christopher Smart, of Clough. Others are still largely ignored. I have seen very little criticism of James (B.V.) Thomson who is formidably interesting and powerful, with a fine violent imagination and great ironic gifts. We are, you may say, teaching the great movements of poetry, the shifts in balance, the alterations of social attitude. It is important to see how Pope and Swift reflected and exploited attitudes of their time. The frivolity of the Restoration poets reflected a certain narrow and pleasure-loving society. Tennyson expressed something central to the mood and beliefs of his times, whereas Clough did not. Fitzgerald's version of Omar Khayyam is a sport, an entertaining oddity. It is with Omar Khayyam that we hit upon a snag in the historical approach. If we are studying the history of poetry in society, the way in which poetry mirrors society, then we should pay special attention to those poets who reflected the sentiments of the time so effectively that they became best-sellers. This would be most embarrassing, though not without interest. We would find ourselves studying Francis Quarles rather than Donne or Vaughan. We would be obliged to read that intolerable but vastly popular poemFestus, which ran to almost countless editions in the nineteenth century. We would retain Byron, but lose Keats. We would keep Tennyson, but lose Blake and Smart. Pope we would keep, and Swift, but we would lose Traherne. As has been pointed out many times, history is a rearrangement of past happenings to suit the interests and prejudices of the historian. It is fascinating to compare a Fenian history of Ireland with a British one. It is also fascinating to compare different histories of poetry written in English. Each generation rewrites history. In so doing it also reshapes what I have called the genealogy of poetry. In 1900 you would not find John Donne looming very large in your history book. In 1930 John Donne loomed very large indeed. All this may seem irrelevant to my subject, which is the

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teaching of poetry, but it is, I think, important to question our conventional methods, our survey courses in particular. T. S. Eliot makes a remark in his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent which has had some influence upon us all, but not perhaps enough. I am sure you will recall his writing'. . . if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged'. Poetry certainly does not work this way. Robert Graves, for example, owes more to Ben Jonson and John Skelton than to the poetic generation preceding him. Eliot also stated: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of the European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. This has been generally recognized as a most perceptive, indeed profound, statement. It is one that we should take to heart when we teach the history of poetry. It is frequent for students, faced with a poem by Milton, to wonder what so long-dead a poet has to do with our century. The student wants to know what is happening now, today. Could we not reverse normal practice? Could we not begin our course or our lesson with a poem of this century and then move backwards, showing how our modern

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poem relates to earlier work, showing how, say, Robert Frost is doing the same sort of thing in his dramatic monologues as Browning, and then proceeding further to other and earlier dramatic monologues, ending up, perhaps, with Shakespeare and Marlowe? Could we not, perhaps, cut right across the centuries, worrying less about the line of descent than the similarity of endeavour, and juxtapose a passage from Auden with a passage from Martin Tupper (there are similarities in both style and intent), a poem by Edward Thomas with one by John Clare? Would we not then be approaching poetry more nearly? I think we might. I also think our students might find it entertaining to spot the similarities and differences. Moreover, we would have sidestepped that awful question about influences. We cannot, after all, know whether or not Swinburne was influenced by Crashaw, but we can certainly see similarities. Their really bad lines in particular are usually bad for the same reasons. We must, and I admit I am preaching here, release ourselves from the bondage of the contrived syllabus. There are problems, of course, and I have heard people object that the kind of teaching I envisage would make the giving of examinations difficult, and would certainly lead to examinations being so different from each other as to make it impossible to regard the grade given in one course as equivalent to the grade given in another. I have always held that as teachers we must never permit ourselves to avoid instruction in any subject simply because it is not examinable. Comparing poems in the fashion I suggest does, however, present us with another problem. How can we compare, say, Roy Campbell, Charles Churchill, Pope and Dryden? The similarities are those of form and intent, and these are two aspects of poetry that are commonly neglected in favour of exploring imagery, symbolism, and the poem's message. The exegetical approach has dominated the teaching of poetry ever since I. A. Richards produced his Practical Criticism, and rightly famous critics such as Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, and Wilson Knight have emphasized the importance of probing imagery and symbolism to discover the true, as distinct from the ostensible, message of the poem. There is, of course, nothing wrong in this, but it has led to some distressing consequences. It has led, indeed, to our concentrating our attention upon poems that present us with problems to analyse. It has led us to the creation of whole critical industries devoted to the work of Yeats, Pound, Blake and Eliot. The David

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Jones industry is growing, also, as is the Robert Lowell industry. There is not, we should note, an industry devoted to the work of Herrick or A. E. Housman, although it seems to me that these poets produced a number of the most skilled and moving lyrics in the language. They are considered, however, to be minor, and the word 'minor' is often taken to mean 'without complexity'. Of course, it is clear that one cannot talk about a Herrick lyric for forty minutes, whereas a late lyric of Yeats could easily occupy twice that time. We are, indeed, in danger of transmitting to our students the notion that the best poetry is the most obscure because we find it difficult to deal with poems that require no interpretation. We can discuss them in terms of their relationship to the taste of their times, and we can entertain with sketches of the poet's life, for everyone loves gossip, but that is almost all we think we can do. The short, lucid, delicate lyric eludes us, and yet, surely, it is in the short lyric that we most nearly approach what has been called 'pure poetry,' though that phrase, like the word 'poetry' itself, has never been satisfactorily defined. Once we decide that we must turn our attention to 'pure poetry' or, perhaps, to the poems themselves rather than to the intellectual messages they present, their relationship to their times, and the part they played in the emotional lives of their authors, we face difficulties. It is obvious that a great many of our most successful poems are short on content. I think immediately of Lander's charming 'Jenny Kissed Me', of 'Wild West Wind When Wilt Thou Blow', of some other lyrics of Landor and Cotton, of Sir James Chamberlayne's 'Dedication', surely one of the most sweet and humble lyrics in the language. Moreover, a large number of these poems were composed by that great writer Anonymous, and sometimes even by that other great writer, Traditional, though he or she was more adept in music than in verse. If we start thinking in these terms we are of course threatening the established Star System. It will no longer be necessary to oblige students to read the whole of Pope. The Essay on Man, that monumental bore, could be forgotten for a start. One could read Auden without having to plough through The Age of Anxiety; one could avoid Paradise Regained and almost all Kipling. The time saved could be spent on the few but brilliant achievements of such writers as Idris Davies, Charlotte Mew, Phelps Putnam, and Frances Cornford — to list a few names that come immediately to mind. But we cannot surely teach without some kind of

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framework. If we are to abandon the historical approach and the star system, with what can we replace them? My answer is, I hope, obvious. We can replace them with the genre system. Let us collect and compare instances of satire, epigram, elegy, ode, even compare examples of different usages of such forms as the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina. Let us look at ballads from the earliest days to the present. Let us teach and study the structures of poems as well as their content. Let us remember, too, that dictum of Addison's that we must instruct through delight. Most people do not contemplate the study of prosody and verse techniques with delight. They do not, indeed, contemplate it at all. They do not thrill to the term Epanorthosis; the word 'acatalectic' has no meaning for them; and they would be hard put to it to recall the rules for a villanelle. This is largely because they have never become involved in the making of verse, and have only analysed it, and verse analysis can be extremely tedious if one does not intend to use the results. I would like at least some of the time spent in teaching poetry to be utilized along the lines laid down by that perspicacious educator Wackford Squeers. The Squeers Principle was simple. Once you can spell it, do it. Admittedly Squeers could not spell 'windows,' but his windows were washed. So, let us make our students understand the heroic couplet more fully by requiring them to write some. They will do it badly. They will get it wrong. But if they are allowed to be frivolous, to make a game of it, they will learn more about the way the couplet works, and appreciate Pope more fully than by simply staring at the text and making little marks on it. Nor should we restrict ourselves to requiring metrical or rhyming exercises. We should suggest parodies. This may sound difficult, but it is not. Anyone with a reasonable ear can imitate Housman and that is why there are so many parodies of him. Browning is extremely easy to mock. It does not matter much if the results of this exercise are terrible; the student has been obliged to try and get within the poetry, has been obliged to use his or her imagination in a fashion similar to that employed by the poet. I firmly believe that imitation and parody are more efficient modes of teaching than most. Recently, in giving a course on Innovations in Twentieth Century Poetry, I decided not to set an examination, which is merely an obstacle course that rewards the fleet of wit. I decided not to set essays, for that would mean that my students would only study a couple of my topics at all thoroughly. I made them write parodies

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or imitations. I was delighted at the results. One student, who was notorious for distrusting obscurity, turned in a Pound Canto that could well have come from the pen of the master. Another added a splendid page to Finnegans Wake (which I insist on regarding as poetry). It was great fun. And it was, I believe, good teaching. This was, of course, an advanced class. I would not wish Pound on average high school students, though I'm not at all sure that they might not enjoy some passages from Finnegans Wake. I felt, at the end of this course, that those students had taught themselves a great deal that I could not have taught them by the usual methods of lecture and discussion. Parody and Imitation are not, of course, new devices. In earlier centuries teachers of Classics would require their students to write verse in imitation of Horace or other authors, both in Greek or Latin and in English. And in the teaching of other arts imitation is used very frequently indeed. One does not have to parody or imitate specific poems to get students to understand the way poems work. One can extract particular lines that illustrate techniques and use these. One might, for example, ask students to use the trick Pope uses in his famous line 'Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux', by constructing another line whose alliteration follows the same pattern. Such a line might be the absurd command 'Sound serpent, sitar, zither, xylophone!' It would be a rather odd musical sound that emerged, but constructing the line does give one a real appreciation of Pope's cunning. One can play many games of this kind, some easy and some difficult; all, however, force the student to manipulate language in a way that makes the poets' manipulations intelligible and interesting. In playing this kind of game one is not teaching poetry, perhaps. One is teaching some of the tricks of verse, and of a kind of verse which is not fashionable at present. The great majority of contemporary poets writing in English concentrate upon free verse, and regard metrical verse and the use of rhyming and chiming devices as old fashioned. Nevertheless we must remember that it was Pound who said One should write vers libre only when one must; that is to say, only when the 'thing' builds up a rhythm more beautiful than that of set metres, or more real, more a part of the emotion of the 'thing', more germane, intimate, interpretative than the measure of regular accentual verse.

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We must also recall Eliot's statements that 'Only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form' and 'Novers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.' If we are to teach poetry that is presented in free verse, we must emphasize this viewpoint. An interesting exercise is to write out a free verse poem as if it were prose and then ask the students to put in the line breaks and the spacing. The discussion of the different solutions to this problem can be illuminating. Another trick is to ask the students to relineate a passage of free verse. Frequently they will discover, without any pressure from the teacher, that there are metrical passages in much free verse, that a good deal of it is based upon the regular repetition of a chosen number of stressed syllables, and that Eliot was correct when he advised that The ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in the freest verse, to advance menacingly as we doze and withdraw as we rouse. Poetry is, as I maintained in a book I published almost thirty years ago, 'patterned speech', among other things, and when students perceive the many patterns possible and play with them, they can become fascinated by this aspect of poetry. You may think that I am overemphasizing the importance of teaching verse structure. You may feel that a good deal of verse is not poetry at all, and that therefore the study of verse is not of the first importance. You may be right. Certainly one does not regard the Barrack Room Ballads of Kipling as great poetry though they are certainly skilled verse, and a very large percentage of existing sonnets are unbelievably boring. It is not that I wish to turn students of poetry into verse technicians, but that I want to give them a clear and inward sense of the way in which rhythmic and other patterns create a medium for the poetic vision. I well remember Louis MacNeice once telling me that when he felt his flow of poetry was drying up he would set himself the task of writing in a particular metre, and that, after a while, the metre itself would so hypnotize or charm him that images, thoughts, symbols, would begin to make themselves heard, and so the practice of verse would lead to real poetic creation. W. S. Graham, similarly, kept a journal for many months, jotting down stray thoughts, news items, gossip, and reflections, using the medium of

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a three-stress line; from this journal, eventually, arose one of his finest long poems, 'The Dark Dialogues'. I am not suggesting that our versifying students will inevitably produce poems, though some certainly may. Nor am I suggesting that the only way to study poetry is to attempt to make it. I am trying simply to express my conviction that the current belief that one should not teach versecraft is wrong. Examples of the making of verse should be shown to the students. They should be given evidence that poetry is a craft as well as an art. Quite a number of poets' worksheets have been reproduced in recent years, and it is fascinating to see how poems grow and alter over, say, ten or up to twenty drafts, and puzzle out the reasons for the revisions. While I am opposed to the superficial biographical approach, I am enthusiastic about the study of the way in which a poem is made. We all know that some of Wordsworth's poetry was inspired by his sister's observations. Let us set a Wordsworth poem alongside the relevant passage from Dorothy Wordsworth. Some of David Gascoyne's poems were inspired by surrealist paintings; let us look at the paintings he used. Let us set Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts' alongside Brueghel's Icarus, which is described in the poem. When a poet writes to the tune of a particular song, such as 'The Streets of Laredo', or 'Frankie and Johnny' (and both tunes have been used by poets), let us play the music. Maybe we should even sing the poem. I am trying, you see, to make the poem come alive in more ways than one. I am trying to get inside it, to see how it is made, and not merely to explain what it means. One of my own sighting shots at a definition of poetry is: highly patterned speech which conveys more than it states. It is a clumsy definition, but no one who has ever heard the lines 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree/ Where Alph the sacred river ran/ through caverns measureless to man/down to a sunless sea' can reasonably maintain that the sound does not convey something additional to the sense, and something of importance to the poem. This brings me, clearly, to the business of poetry as a spoken art. Our students must be given the opportunity to listen to poetry, and, if humanly possible, should be encouraged to speak it themselves. I admit that many of the recordings of poets reading their own poems are unimpressive and some, such as Eliot's rendition of the Four Quartets, are downright soporific. Nevertheless there are some fine performers among our poets. In Canada

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we are fortunate in having on record readings by Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn MacEwen. England gives us superb readings by Ted Hughes, and the late Theodore Roethke was one of the finest of American readers. The live poetry reading is also important, but, again, some poets should never be let loose on a platform. It is as well to find out whether or not they are good performers before you invite them to visit your student audience. If one can contrive it, it is also valuable to hear two readers presenting the same poem. One can easily manage this with Shakespeare, of course; there are almost countless recordings of the great speeches. It requires a little effort to produce other multiple renditions, but no one could fail to be fascinated by the difference between Auden's performance of his poem 'As I Walked Out One Evening' and that by Dylan Thomas. There are many ways of reading any given poem, and it is fascinating to decide which most nearly expresses the poem's true character. We have very few recordings of Yeats. One of them is 'The Lake Isle of Inisfree'. You or I would read it, I think, gently. Yeats positively trumpeted it. Was Yeats, in this instance, wrong? I think he was, just as I think Auden was wrong in his performance of 'As I Walked Out One Evening'. We must educate the ear as well as the intelligence and the imagination if we are to get at the heart of poetry and prevent our students from thinking, as many of them do think, that poetry is merely a tiresomely complicated way of saying something that could have been more lucidly said in ordinary language. Mind you, the students are not always wrong about this. Some of Pound's Cantos leap immediately to mind. This brings me to another point. When it comes to judging the effectiveness of a particular poet, everyone is right, for we are speaking of personal reactions. The student who says Gray's 'Elegy' is boring is entirely correct. He or she has been bored. All we can do is say, 'It may be boring to you, but I enjoy it, and I'm going to tell you what I find in it that pleases me.' I fear that all too often we treat the so-called great poems of our literature with too much reverence. They are only great if they convince us. Of course, it is true that the ideal, the fully informed, reader will perceive a poem's structure and message more clearly than another, and if, say, Northrop Frye tells us a poem is good we had better take it very seriously indeed. But we must also remember that Frye is of one generation and our students are of another. We should recall that one poetic generation found John Skelton nasty

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and John Donne intolerable. We should recall that Longfellow was once regarded as a very great poet indeed and Whitman as a verbose eccentric of no consequence. Let us, therefore, permit doubt while encouraging enthusiasm. I did not mock the student who once told me that the most wonderful poem she had ever read was 'The Lady of Shalott', and I was not unduly upset when another student confided that he thought Spenser was unreadable. An honest reaction is worth a hundred specious opinions. One of the ways to promote a degree of honesty is to give students two or three poems without the author's names, and to tell them that, in your view, not all the poems are good, or even that one is downright bad. The students can then argue about it. Some will, of course, attempt to say a certain poem is good because they suspect that you like it, but it is easy to avoid that trap. Most will, however, honestly try to judge what is in front of them. It can also be interesting, not to ask if the poems are good, but to ask if the students like them. It is not quite the same question. I know, for example, that Paradise Lost is good, but I dislike it heartily, and wild horses would not get me to read The Faerie Queene again, although I recognize it as an extraordinary achievement. We tend, in much of our teaching, to assume that we know about poetry and the students don't, and that therefore we must instruct them authoritatively. It may be true that we know about poetry. It is not true that the students don't. The appreciation of poetry involves an intuitive as well as a rational process, and our students are just as intuitive as we are and sometimes more so, for they have not yet been inhibited by education. I have myself learned a great deal from my students. They have shown me subtleties and nuances that I had not perceived. They have corrected my judgements. On one occasion, seeking to present them with a poem they could not possibly have read before, I gave them one of my own poems to analyse. The consequence was that they obliged me entirely to rewrite two lines. I wonder what would happen if we adopted the view that a poem is never completed but only abandoned. It runs counter to the view that in the good poem no word can be altered without damaging the whole, but if we look coldly at some of our most famous poems we do have difficulties in suppressing our sense of the ridiculous. Consider Burns's famous line, 'My love is like a red, red rose'. That line always troubled me. The colour of the

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lady's face is a little too vivid for me. I sought an explanation and decided that either the booze or the flu might be responsible. 'My love is like a red red rose / Especially around the nose'. Dare we suggest that his love might be like a rose in its delicacy and perfection of form. We might rewrite it as 'My love is radiant as a rose' or 'My dear is delicate as a rose', retaining a little of the alliteration and evading the surface absurdity of the image. Consider 'Kubla Khan' and the line 'as if the earth in fast thick pants were breathing'. It was my English teacher at Grammar School, Tom Pay, who suggested that this might be a reference to underwear. Can we, dare we, improve upon Coleridge? Wordsworth is, of course, fair game. Nobody can read 'Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman' without giggling. Nevertheless, I do not suggest that we should consider tampering with truly bad poetry. It sometimes has a glory all of its own, as has that superb but anonymous couplet from a poem on the death of Queen Victoria, 'Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes / Into the tomb the Great Queen dashes'. The great McGonigall and Julia Moore, the sweet singer of Michigan, must be left alone. No cosmetic trickery should be allowed to stain the natural bloom of absurdity. My suggestion is that we should, whenever we or our students find a flaw in a poem of some quality, attempt to improve it. We may not succeed, but the struggle results in our achieving a quite precise understanding of what is wrong, or possibly right, in the original. Knocking poems about may seem an odd way to teach the understanding and appreciation of poetry, but it is after all what the poets themselves do all the time. Compare the original version of The Waste Land with the completed version. Compare the first and second versions of The Prelude. The desperation poets feel when they find themselves entangled in a maze of possibilities is well illustrated by the third draft of Ann Sexton's excellent poem 'Wallflower'. It is headed 'A Bad Poem That I Wrote Anyhow'. It went through six more drafts before it was completed - or abandoned. You may feel that, in presenting you with the Squeers Principle and these other suggestions, I am talking more about something we have learned to call Creative Writing than about the teaching of poetry. Admittedly several of the approaches I have suggested are used in some Poetry Workshops, though by no means all. I am of the opinion, however, that the separation of the study of poetry

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into two quite distinct disciplines is unfortunate. It is often necessary for many reasons, but it is unfortunate. The student who has attempted to write a sonnet, with or without success, approaches Shakespeare's sonnets, or Milton's, or Donne's, with a kind of understanding that cannot be achieved any other way. Indeed, over the years it has been my experience that those students who combine poetry workshops with a course in literary criticism are usually among the most perceptive in analysing, not only verse structure, but also imagery, symbolism, diction, and everything else. They perceive subtleties more quickly, and have a clearer understanding of the relationship of form to content, of sound to sense. It is equally true that students in Poetry Workshops benefit enormously from studying the works of other poets of different periods and generations. They can see not only how a poet has used the language, but why he or she used it in that particular fashion and learn new skills of their own as a result. Creative Writing students may never become great writers - though some of them obviously do become well known - but they certainly become informed and perceptive readers. Of course, the kind of teaching programme I have outlined does call for a good deal of expertise on the part of the teacher, and many teachers, as I have said, know very little about verse structure or prosodic analysis, have forgotten all they were taught about phonetics, are incapable of speaking a poem effectively, and, in universities, are often so wedded to their own particular periods that nothing outside those periods interests them. I well remember being faced by an eminent British historian, when I was a young teacher, with the question, delivered in a menacing contralto, 'And what is your period?' I could not answer her. I still could not answer her. And the question troubles me. It points to a kind of specialization that may result in excellent and exciting scholarship, but may also result in a narrowness of viewpoint that is harmful to the teaching of poetry as a whole. One cannot, after all, fully appreciate Pound without an understanding of Whitman and Browning, among others. One cannot, in my view, perceive exactly what Byron was doing in Don Juan without using Auden and MacNeice as a kind of hindsight. Moreover, it is necessary to have at least some knowledge of the poets of other countries and traditions. One cannot fully comprehend Synge without Petrarch or Petrarch without Synge. Dante and Thomas Kinsella shed a

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good deal of light on each other. Ben Jonson and Martial are, one might say, relatives, as are Milton and du Bartas. I am dropping too many names. There are, of course, a great many names to drop, and contemplation of the quantity of poets and poems we wish to bring to our students is positively discombobulating. How can we teach them all these glorious things and also give them the kind of inward understanding that I suggest is essential, by means of exercises, imitations, and verbal games? Where is the time to come from? There is never enough time. That we must accept. We should, however, realize that teaching is not a matter of filling up sacks with poetical produce until they bulge and strain, but of breaking open doors to treasure houses, and breaking open as many doors as possible. I think it was Osbert Sitwell who wrote of himself in Who's Who, 'Educated at Eton and Oxford; mainly self educated.' We should take as our most important task that of teaching students to educate themselves. We should teach them how to explore as we have explored, and realize that they, like most of us, are likely to learn more after their days of formal education are over than during them. We must, too, give them a firm sense that poetry is a living and meaningful activity, that it is a response to living and an enhancement of life, and that it is everywhere about us. We cannot, of course, do this unless we show our students the work that is being written in our own time and in our own place. I have so far deliberately avoided mentioning the names of any Canadian poets. The vast majority of Canadian poets of significance are still alive. Indeed, of the 120 poets represented in the New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, 87 are still writing, and the anthology does not include the work of any poet under thirty years old. Canadian poetry cannot, as yet, be made the material for the kind of vast historical survey course with which we are familiar. There wasn't a great deal of it worth looking at until the twentieth century. It cannot easily be treated genealogically in terms of Canadian ancestry for contemporary work. It can, however, partly because of this, be used most effectively to show how poets respond to the world with which we are familiar, how they come to terms with it, explore it, glorify it, deride it. Because we do not as yet have a traditional Star System that obliges us to include this poet and forces us to omit that one, there is no series of conventional judgements to mislead us. We may all have different opinions without facing the posthumous irritation

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of critics of the past. A colleague of mine and I were discussing recently who were the most significant of living Canadian poets. We came up with very different lists. If we had asked ourselves who were the most significant poets of another place and period, I suspect that we might have agreed almost wholly. I am not about to give you my list. In any case, it alters a little every time a new batch of books is published — and so it should. But I am suggesting that if we want our students to experience the living excitement of poetry we must introduce them to the work of Canadian writers. We must get those poets who can read their work effectively into our schools and universities. We must provide our students with Canadian poetry magazines and we should, I think, discuss the contents of those magazines. It is an absurdity to teach our students to appreciate only the poets of the past, and to allow the quantity of wonderful poetry written in other centuries to prevent our exploring the work written in our own lifetimes. I am, you observe, preaching again. I cannot help it. I feel strongly that we must look again at the conventional way of teaching poetry in schools and universities and attempt something of a revolution. We may teach history if we wish, but we must make it clear that we are teaching history and not poetry. We may survey the philosophical attitudes of the poets, but we must make it clear that we are teaching viewpoints and opinions and not poetry. If we are to teach poetry we must, I believe, escape from the bondage of the historically orientated syllabus, look askance at narrow specialization, and bring every aspect of poetry into the classroom, the seminar, the lecture hall. We must give our students the opportunity to learn something of poetry from the inside, both something of its craft and something of its emotional vitality. We must open the gates, not fill the sacks. I have spent the greater part of my life in teaching and writing poetry. If I have been somewhat intemperate and eccentric in this talk, I hope that this may excuse my enthusiasm.

5 Seizing the Shining Reality: the Novel in the Classroom NORMAN PAGE 'We should not discuss any art,' wrote John Crowe Ransom in 1950, 'except in the presence of its shining reality, for fear that theory, which in this case is of spreading habit, will take us too far from our object and cause us to betray it.' To which we may respond: all well and good; but also, all too often, easier said than done. To seize the 'shining reality' of a Shakespeare sonnet, a Chopin prelude, a Cezanne still life may not baffle us; but what are we to do when confronted with a Dickens novel, a Wagner opera, a Gothic cathedral? The first and the biggest problem in teaching the novel arises from its scale and amplitude. I suppose it takes most of us just about as long to read Middlemarch or Bleak House as to sit through the Ring cycle; and the question inevitably arises, wherein does the 'shining reality' of these great works of art reside? Is it something of which the reader or listener is continuously, or intermittently, aware during the process of reading or performance? or something that comes into existence only after the experience is concluded? Is the reality of Bleak House, for instance, something that inheres in every page and every phrase of that novel, or something related to a mental construction made by the reader and completed only after the last sentence of the book has been read? Or is it perhaps both? And, if so, is the totality simply the sum of all the local impressions? 'Have you read Bleak House?' we say; and also, 'Do you know Bleak House?' For most practical purposes the two questions may amount to much the same thing; but they draw attention to different activities. The first reminds us that reading is a process, involving 101

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eye-movements and the licking of fingertips to turn over pages as well as the creation of mental images, the 'hearing' of unspoken dialogue, and other complex forms of behaviour. The second refers to possession, to something we carry with us like a snapshot (though like a snapshot it can in time grow faint and become frayed around the edges, or even become completely lost). These same problems - arising, as I say, from the scale and amplitude of the novel - bedevilled the criticism of fiction for a very long time; and I think it is worth reviewing very briefly the history of novel-criticism because it exemplifies rather strikingly the same entirely understandable failures to come to grips with the material that have often characterized the teaching of this form of literature. As every undergraduate knows, when the novel emerged in England in the eighteenth century its appearance was not triumphant but shamefaced; it was less the honoured guest at the feast of literature than the not very respectable poor relation. Authors, indeed, felt so little confidence in what they were up to that they deliberately blurred the divisions between fiction and non-fiction: Defoe passed off his stories as memoirs, Richardson found himself launched on a novel when he had intended a manual of letter-writing, Fielding called himself a historian and his best novel a history; and none showed much inclination even to mention the words novel, novelist, or fiction. Traditional morality had much to do with this: if Satan is the father of lies, what does that make the maker of fictions? But more to our present purpose, there was a marked unease, continuing well into the nineteenth century, at the lack of precedents. Since the novel was, literally, a new thing, it could not be judged, as could nearly every other literary genre, by the yardstick of ancient models. When Dr Johnson discusses Richardson and Fielding, or Sir Walter Scott reviews Emma, even when the Victorian critics review Dickens or Hardy, one senses that they are making up the rules as they go along. No doubt this is the reason why a great deal of early novel-criticism, even that in the respected and influential weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies, is so bad, or simply so unhelpful and irrelevant. Characteristically, and with some honourable exceptions, these reviewers filled their generous allocation of space by resorting to two devices: plot-summaries and long quotations. One has some sympathy with them, for in a fumbling kind of way they were trying by these means to do justice to the

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two aspects of a work of fiction that I have already touched on: the nature of its wholeness or entirety, and the quiddity or thisness of each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence. But their method has little to recommend it, for it helps very little in telling the reader why, say, Jane Eyre or Tess of the d'Urbervilles is unique and inimitable, or how such books should be read. When the study of English, including the English novel, became institutionalized, all too often academic critics avoided the real problem by resorting to a literary history of amiable generalizations; and it is only relatively recently that the texts of novels have begun to receive the kind of attention that had been given considerably earlier to poetry and poetic drama. Practical criticism in England in the 1920s and after, and the New Criticism in America a generation later, alike and for their own good reasons showed a marked preference for the short poem and generally fought shy of the novel. (In its neglect of prose, Anglo-American criticism lagged well behind that of the Continent: probably the influence of Flaubert as a self-advertising stylist of a kind that has no parallel among Victorian novelists had something to do with it, as did the pedagogical tradition in France of the lecture expliquee.) The development of F. R. Leavis as a critic is in some ways representative: energetic from about 1930 in demonstrating how poems should be read, it was not until the late 1940s that he turned his attention to the novel. It is significant that the title Language of Fiction had not been appropriated for a study of style until David Lodge's influential book published in 1966. In any case, practical criticism, promulgated in the interwar period as a pedagogical as well as a critical technique, was ill-equipped to deal with fiction. In Revaluation (1936), Leavis restated the principle on which practical criticism rests: In dealing with individual poets the rule of the critic is, or should (I think) be, to work as much as possible in terms of particular analysis — analysis of poems or passages — and to say nothing that cannot be related immediately to judgments about producible texts, (pp. 2-3) Both the strengths and weaknesses of the approach are to be detected in this sentence: the empirical method, properly intolerant of pretentious or banal generalizations that keep their

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distance from actual works of literature, can itself be exclusive or intolerant ('producible texts' amounting to texts the critic is prepared to produce), and the reference to 'poems or passages' hints at the limitations of the method when it comes to dealing with longer works such as novels. More forcefully than anyone else, I think, Ian Watt has stated the objections to critical evaluation by means of close examination of self-contained extracts: . . . both its pedagogical effects and its basic methodological assumptions seem to me to be open to serious question. For many reasons. Its air of objectivity confers a spurious authority on a process that is often only a rationalisation of an unexamined judgment, and that must always be to some extent subjective; its exclusion of historical factors seems to authorise a more general anti-historicism; and - though this objection is perhaps less generally accepted - it contains an inherent critical bias in the assumption that the part is a complete enough reflection of the literary whole to be profitably appreciated and discussed in isolation from its context. Watt goes on to argue that the techniques of practical criticism tend to favour certain kinds of writing, those that are 'richly concrete in themselves, stylistically brilliant, or composed in relatively small units', and that these techniques are better equipped to deal with verse than with prose, and notably ill-equipped to deal with extended forms such as the novel. Certainly until the middle of the twentieth century some of the best critics had ignored the novel, and much criticism of fiction (and again the same is no less true of teaching of the novel) had displayed a marked centrifugal tendency — by which I mean that it was likely to take the first available opportunity to leave the substance of the novel itself and to concern itself with such dubious abstractions as plot and character; in other words, to avoid examination of the novel in favour of talk about the novel. At its most extreme and banal, this method hardly rose above the level of gossip or self-indulgent speculation and romancing, and many a classroom has echoed to debates on such absorbing topics as whether one would rather be trapped in an elevator with Jane Eyre or Becky Sharp. This attitude to the novel is nicely parodied in a poem by George Khairallah:

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Lucinda can't read poetry. She's good, Sort of, at novels, though. The words, you know, Don't sort of get in like Lucinda's way. And then the story, well, you know, about Real people, fall in love, like that, and all, Sort of makes you think, Lucinda thinks. The truism that a novel, as much as a lyric poem, consists of language was disregarded: understandably so, since it is much easier to talk about your favourite Dickens heroine than to examine Dickens's language in a disciplined and purposeful way. To reverse that centrifugal tendency, to direct attention at the very stuff of the novel-text, word and image, syntax and allusion, the smaller and larger patterns of a writer's art, has been the task of some of the best recent novel-criticism, and should be our aim in teaching the novel. The last twenty years have gone far towards making good the inadequacies of past criticism, and some of the leading critics of our time, such as J. Hillis Miller in the United States and Frank Kermode in England, have engaged strenuously in an examination of the question: what precisely is involved in reading a novel? I want to suggest that this is a question not only for critics and theorists but for teachers, since 'teaching the novel' involves a similar concern: how are we to help our students to 'read' a novel in the fullest sense? What is involved is clearly quite different from reading a newspaper or a textbook on biology or economics; it is also, in spite of common elements, different from reading a poem or a play, or even a biography or an autobiography. In his most recent book, Essays on Fiction (1983), Kermode suggests that what is needed at the present time is not histories of literature but histories of reading- not, I think, because histories of literature are not important but because they have tended to monopolize the field and we should now redress the balance of a scholarly and pedagogical tradition in which much attention has been paid to books and authors but little to that third indispensable element in the literary experience, the reader. The flourishing in the 1970s and 1980s of what is somewhat grandiosely referred to as 'reception theory' seems to me one of the more promising of recent developments in critical thinking and method, and is evidence of a serious attempt to challenge the widespread implicit assumption that books are written, and exist,

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in a kind of vacuum, and to assert the significance and complexity of the reader's role. Like many such developments, this is not much more than a formalizing and elaborating of what some of the shrewdest critics have always taken for granted; but it has something to tell us, I believe, as teachers of the novel. Terry Eagleton has recently written: . . . one might very roughly periodize the history of modern literary theory in three stages: a preoccupation with the author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century); an exclusive concern with the text (New Criticism); and a marked shift of attention to the reader over recent years. The reader has always been the most underprivileged of this trio - strangely, since without him or her there would be no literary texts at all. Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves; they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author. Not all of us, I suspect, would go all the way with Eagleton, especially in the final sentence of my quotation (for one thing, isn't the author his own first reader, for whom the 'processes of signification' are not merely inert and potential but already 'materialized'?). But it is good to be reminded that the reader's unspectacular occupation, silent and passive though it appear to the outside world - and how many teachers of physics or business studies are likely to take novel-reading very seriously as an intellectual pursuit? - is an active and even a creative affair. Any illustration I can offer as to what constitutes this kind of reading must necessarily be small-scale; but a glance at the opening of a familiar novel may make clearer what is involved and what our students need to be made aware of as implicit in the reader's role: the reader, that is, who is not simply allowing his eyes to follow the lines of print but is responding as fully as possible to a complex work of art. There are novels such as Moby Dick and Mrs. Dalloway and The Rainbow that seem to demand, more or less aggressively, the kind of attention we might give to a long and rather difficult poem. I shall resist the temptation to select such an example, which all too obviously makes heavy demands on the skill and effort that the reader is able and prepared to bring to the task of interpretation (for in spite of genre-prejudices, including the curious mixture of

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hostility and panic with which university freshmen regard poetry courses, none of the novels I have mentioned is self-evidently an easier read than, say, Childe Harold or the Idylls of the King). I shall take instead what most people (I imagine) would regard as a typical mid-Victorian novel, familiar, approachable, relatively undemanding, and making no obvious pretensions to complexity or obscurity. Here are the first two sentences of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, published in 1860: A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships - laden with the fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal - are borne along to the town of St Ogg's, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river brink, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Without straining for over-ingenuity, we can, I think, identify at least ten elements in moving towards an understanding of those ten lines of George Eliot's text. (I call them 'elements' rather than 'stages' because the order in which they receive attention will vary from one reader to another and several may compete simultaneously for attention.) 1. Few readers will experience difficulty in readily attaching a meaning to George Eliot's words. There are novelists who delight in teasing the reader by using unfamiliar language (Beckett, for instance, will send most of us hurrying to the dictionary to look out such jaw-breaking rarities as aeruginous, argonautic, and acathisia), but George Eliot is not one of them. 2. Equally readily, most readers will recognize this as a piece of scene-painting: the novelist is providing the verbal equivalent of what the theatre and the cinema render by visual means — though that is to put it misleadingly, since 'equivalence' is not at all what is in question and the whole issue is a highly complex one. What different readers will do with the information provided will vary a good deal: probably some will

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instinctively or conscientiously construct a mental picture, while others will be content to note that a certain kind of landscape is in question. A glance at George Eliot's manuscript shows that, having first written 'green background', she sharpened the phrase to read 'low wooded hill'; so it looks as though she for her part worked hard to give as much precision as possible to these verbal aids to mental picture-making. 3. More experienced readers will recognize this as an example of mimetic art or as belonging to a tradition of realism, perhaps even in historical terms as mainstream Victorian fiction. Though it would obviously be rash to make long-term predictions on the basis of two sentences, it seems unlikely that a story that begins thus will turn out to be fairy-tale or allegory: those ships moving up the river to St Ogg's are likely to be carrying no demon lovers or Count Draculas. 4. At the same time, the passage plainly belongs to fiction and not history or biography, for the two place-names mentioned, Floss and St Ogg's, are to be found on no map and constitute unmistakable signals that the realism of method will accommodate imaginary places and persons. If we had mistakenly supposed that the book we had picked up was a work of history or biography, on encountering the reference to St Ogg's we might well have exclaimed, 'Now where the heck is that?' But the novel-reader is more tolerant and his contract with the author more permissive. 5. Even the most impercipient reader will be aware that the writer is in no hurry and, even if the title, size and weight of the volume he is holding have not already told him as much, that this is unlikely to be a short story and very likely to be a long story narrated in leisurely fashion. So far, the various recognitions have been superficial and even unconscious; but we can see that, in reading only two sentences, the reader has in fact learned or surmised a good deal that applies to the book as a whole, and that quite an extensive set of expectations has been set up in his mind. A few novelists, such as Sterne and Beckett, will of course delight in disappointing the expectations they have aroused: Tristram Shandy hardly lives up to the promises of its title-page, and Beckett, having begun a novel (Watt) in more or less realistic terms, blandly but uncompromisingly informs us that 'Haemophilia is ... an exclusively male disorder. But not in

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this work.' These, however, are eccentric exceptions to the general rule and call for a more flexible and tentative response. Let us continue with some of the observations that a more careful reading will yield: 6. In these few lines, one part of speech is unusually prominent: the adjective. Indeed, there is hardly a noun without its accompanying adjective, and at times we may seem to be getting too much of a good thing ('On this mighty tide the black ships — laden with \he fresh-scented fir-planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seeds, or with the dark glitter of coal . . . ' ) . Moreover, these epithets are (I suspect quite consciously on George Eliot's part) making a wide-ranging appeal to different senses and different kinds of perception: to colour (green, black, red, purple), to size or extent (wide, broadening, mighty, broad, low), to odour (fresh-scented), to the senses of shape and weight (rounded sacks, fluted roofs), and so forth. It is interesting to consider just why George Eliot writes in this way, and how this mannerism of style relates both to her mimetic purpose (that is, to the kind of fiction she chooses to write) and to her theme and tone in this novel (for example, the nostalgic savouring of the past in all its commonplace but treasured circumstantiality). 7. If we look again at George Eliot's first sentence, there is something rather odd about it: A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. The absence of a main verb in a sentence that occupies such a prominent place can scarcely be accidental. As for the second sentence, it is odd in another way: running to 73 words, it is almost certainly a good deal longer than the average for this novel or for George Eliot's work as a whole. Moreover, both sentences use not the normal past tense of narrative but the present tense. All these features of style provoke us to seek explanations, for divergences from the norm in the hands of a great writer are rarely without significance. Any interpretation of these features that we may come up with can be only provisional and may need to be abandoned or at least revised

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in the light of later reading; thus, by the end of the short opening chapter, George Eliot modulates her narrative from the present to the past tense and at the same time reveals that she has been playing a trick on the reader, for what we were given was the present tense not of ongoing action or experience but of dreams and of memories relived. 8. After reading The Waste Land we read certain Victorian novels differently; and the more advanced student will prick up his ears at the mention in George Eliot's novel of rivers and tides and plains and ships going up and down. As in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend a few years later, if the river in this novel is part of the realistic setting, it is also a potent and pervasive symbol and part of a pattern of water-imagery that runs, trickles and flows throughout the book and ends by quite literally overwhelming it and its main characters. As a matter of biographical fact we know that George Eliot conceived the book backwards, beginning with the end. Gordon Haight, her biographer, writes: George Eliot's earliest allusion to The Mill on the Floss is found in a brief entry in her Journal, 12 January 1859: 'We went into town today and looked in the Annual Register for cases of inundation.' She copied into her Commonplace Book several passages, mostly of 1771, describing ships driven on to flooded fields, bridges washed away, and a family rescued from the upper storey of their house- all of which appear in the final pages of the novel. That 'inundation' is foreshadowed in the very first words of the novel - in her beginning is her end - and though no reader can know this for sure on a first reading, the skilled and experienced reader will at least be alive to the possibility that the river is more than just a geographical feature. 9. There is one important element in these opening sentences that I have not yet touched on, though it is suggested by the most striking phrases in the ten lines. This is the highly emotional metaphor (its intensity the more striking by contrast with the prevailing topographical and inventorial mode) of 'the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace'. I don't think it is going too far to say that these phrases tell us what kind of book is to follow. This is, George Eliot tells

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us in her opening sentence, to be a love story; and the meeting and mingling of fresh water and salt water symbolize the loving union that Maggie is to seek and at last to find in death by drowning. Of all the epithets that George Eliot might have used in this context, the two she actually uses, loving and impetuous, most aptly describe her heroine. And it is certainly no coincidence that embrace and love, now no longer metaphorical but triumphantly literal, make their appearance in the last sentence of the last chapter: The boat reappeared - but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted - living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together. There is a sense in which the reader is required to hold the opening sentence of the novel in his mind during all the days or weeks of reading, its meaning completed only when the reading of the novel itself is complete. 10. - and last - is the feature of these sentences that is the most obvious of all, and perhaps for that reason most easily overlooked. They stand at the beginning of a paragraph, which stands at the beginning of a chapter, which stands at the beginning of a 'Book' (one of seven into which the novel is divided), which in the original edition stood at the beginning of the first of three volumes, which constituted the novel. These divisions are anything but arbitrary, and to emphasize their importance the author gave each of the seven books, and each of the fifty-eight chapters, as well as the novel itself, its own title. I don't intend to explore possible numerological significances (though I think they can sometimes be of great interest); but I think it is obvious that no reader turning over the pages can be unaware of the ground-plan or architecture of the work, and that sentences or passages that are placed, for instance, at the beginning or end of a chapter acquire thereby a bonus of meaning. We inevitably recognize them as enjoying a special status, and respond to them accordingly. When Charlotte Bronte begins the final chapter ofJane Eyre with the famous words, 'Reader, I married him', and when E. M. Forster opens Chapter 5 of The Longest Journey with the

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wholly surprising statement that 'Gerald died that afternoon', the placing of these sentences is part of their meaning. It will not have escaped your attention that I have spent about a quarter of an hour in discussing, quite sketchily, two sentences by George Eliot. One could hardly begin to do full justice to them in less than an hour or two; and you may very reasonably object that at that rate it would take a good many years to get through the discussion of a 600-page novel. However, things are not quite as bad as they seem; for the student who has examined these sentences somewhat on the lines I have been indicating will have learned something not only about The Mill on the Floss but about what can and should be involved in reading a novel, and will be ready to read not only this but many other novels more profitably. I think my example will have made it clear that such a reading is at its best a highly agile and flexible activity and makes heavy demands on the reader's concentration and responsiveness. In the sense in which we are now speaking of it, reading a novel is a very different matter, involving very different techniques, from perusing an article in Time magazine or a paperback on, say, the Watergate affair. What is in question is a response to specifically literary language used in the context of a long and elaborately constructed work by a writer who in this case was not only formidably intelligent and exceptionally well-informed but acutely conscious of the problems of her art; and that response requires the constant recognition and interpretation of signals of many different kinds, many of which have no parallels in the more humdrum kinds of prose that we all encounter daily. It also requires a fairly intense quality of attention - this is not (thank goodness) the kind of prose that can be quickly gutted by the eager graduates of a speed-reading course - as well as considerable powers of retention, since repetitions of many kinds (of word, image, allusion, and syntactical structure, for instance) often constitute part of the pattern or rhythm of a novel and the competent reader is often required to relate one part of the text to another. (We have seen in The Mill on the Floss an extreme but not unique instance of this, the story's conclusion echoing and completing its opening.) The reader whose activity I have been describing, then, cannot very well avoid doing two things simultaneously. He reads on doggedly from sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter,

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moving through the story, the text and the physical book like a traveller moving along a road. But just as the traveller may at the same time look around him and from hints and observations- and sometimes even by glancing over his shoulder— build up a sense of the totality of the landscape, the reader also performs a task that is non-sequential, or at least much less strictly sequential than his progress through the text. A good deal of the time he is not so much making confident interpretations as constructing hypotheses (is it possible that George Eliot is using the present tense for this or that reason? is the river just a river or something more resonant in its associations?), and confirming, modifying, or rejecting these provisional interpretations as fresh evidence presents itself. It has been said, strikingly if not altogether truly, that we cannot read poems but only re-read them; and most good novels certainly yield up more of their meaning on re-reading, while some (Jane Austen's Emma is a familiar case in point) can hardly be understood at a single reading. Here again is a respect in which the teacher of literature has to resist, consciously and strenuously, the cultural currents of our time: students who treat books like teabags, to be used once and then discarded, may have considerable difficulty in grasping that the classic, including the modern classic, is by definition a text that the individual as well as the community finds it worthwhile to return to. If the kind of reading habits I have been describing are indeed the ones our students should be acquiring, there is an important implication that bears on the choice of texts for study. We ought not to be afraid of confronting students with the best, for the finest works of literature alone will make the demands and provide the discipline that entitle the study of literature to be considered a vital part of a liberal education, and not just the modern equivalent of the Victorian young lady's elegant accomplishments, like embroidery or playing the harp. I do not believe that we should temper the literary wind to the culturally shorn teenager; if our students wish to read second- or third-rate novels they can probably do so without our help, and if they do not encounter great writing in school, college or university courses, most of them will hardly do so anywhere else. By 'the best', I must quickly add, I do not mean exclusively the time-hallowed works of the mighty dead; there are living authors, such as this month's (October 1983) Nobel prizewinner William Golding, who amply

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repay the same kind of attention that it is proper to bring to George Eliot or Dickens (and how indicative it is of a profound shift in attitudes, by the way, that the last two English-language authors to receive that prize have been not poets but novelists). In making our choice of texts from the work of major authors, classic and modern, let us not be timid: Hard Times is a favourite academic text not because it represents the best of Dickens - on the contrary, it represents almost the worst- but because it is the shortest of his novels. Such pedagogical faintheartedness does no honour to a great writer, or to ourselves, and in any case is liable to misfire. When I was fifteen I was given A Tale of Two Cities to study at school. As it happened I had discovered Dickens several years earlier on my own account, and had read over and over again the first two hundred pages of David Copperfield in a shabby red Everyman's Library edition (I suppose I stuck at that point because my interest in David's experiences ceased as soon as he passed my own age). I am quite sure that it was David Copperfield and not A Tale of Two Cities that has kept me reading Dickens for the rest of my life. Teaching the novel, then, like all teaching of literature, is largely a matter of teaching how to read. And this means resisting the insidious and recurring temptation to use a novel as a springboard for some other kind of enquiry: social history, say, or popular psychology. There often seems to be something apologetic and defensive in the reasons that are given for studying novels, and in any case the claim that, say, we can learn history from novels does not really stand up to scrutiny. If what one is really after is to acquire information about the Poor Law or rural depopulation, Oliver Twist and Tess of the d'Urbervilles might not be the best places to go. Novelists rarely have the training or the inclination to be social scientists or social historians, and often have axes to grind that may compel us to question their findings. Great literature is not watered-down social history or philosophy or psychology, and we recognize this when we are prepared to ridicule the Victorian enthusiasm for little suede-bound books with titles like One Hundred Great Thoughts from George Eliot and to treat such enterprises as irrelevant (I certainly haven't noticed anyone giving us the great thoughts of James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence). What literature does offer is language used with supreme fineness and power; and in an age when the debasement of language, in public as well as private life, is so far advanced and

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continuing daily, there can be no more important task for education than to draw attention to, and to conduct an informed and sustained examination of, examples of language at its best. Many of our students, as we all know, suffer from linguistic malnutrition: they operate within a woefully limited code of expression, oral and written, and are often at least partially deaf to such delightful resources of language as wit, irony, parody, or true eloquence (not to be confused with the flatulent and fraudulent insincerities of politicians). With a full orchestra available to them, they can only play, and hear, a tin whistle. Earlier generations, with Matthew Arnold as their most distinguished spokesman, prescribed a diet of poetry as a cure for such ills, and John Stuart Mill got more out of reading Wordsworth than most of us get out of a psychiatrist; but in our time the novel has come of age and ought to have a prominent place in any scheme for teaching literature. To return, finally, to the point from which I started. John Crowe Ransom's words of over thirty years ago seem to me to have lost none of their force in an age in which the fashionable tyrants of Paris and New Haven would have us, as students of literature, go in for a kind of intellectual ballooning, soaring high into the upper atmosphere of abstraction and theorizing. But if we ask wherein lies the 'shining reality' of the novel, the answer must be that its existence is twofold. When we are caught up in the process of reading a novel, we are open to the local and immediate impact of the text in all its aspects; each narrative twist or climax, each descriptive touch, each line of dialogue. At least a part of us is so caught up. For at the same time and all the time, another part of the reader's mind stands back and sees every chapter and every sentence in relation to what precedes and follows them, until at last the pattern, the figure in the carpet, is perceived. As we have seen (and there are obvious implications for the methodology of teaching) one or two sentences can provide a key to issues that permeate a whole book; and it seems to me more fruitful to adopt such a technique, which takes us irresistibly into the novel, than to start with such questions as 'What do we think of Maggie Tulliver?' which are likely to tempt us to move away from the novel. Fortified by such an approach, we need not be apologetic about the novel as a subject of study, for the intellectual and imaginative demands it makes will not be inferior to those made by any other form of literature.

6

Teaching the Novel: the Creative Word in Great Expectations ROWLAND McMASTER

'He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.' This pronouncement from Ecclesiastes is manifestly too painful for us, as academic conference-goers, to confront in all its dimensions, so let us look instead at its appropriateness to Great Expectations, the story of a youth who aspires to knowledge, manners, and social respectability as a means to love. In pursuing these aspirations, Pip learns to be vocationally useless, acquires the manners of a snob, and displays his status in such ways as writing a stiffly condescending letter to his tailor. As for love, he becomes ashamed of those who love him and ashamed of himself for feeling ashamed. His club, The Finches of the Grove, gives an idea of his social aspiration and achievement, and how modern it sounds: We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. (270)1 So again with the love of Pip's life, Estella, whose disdainful sexuality provokes the urgency of his aspirations: 'I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death' (297). Not just in the outcome, where Pip learns that his pretensions to status rest on a criminal's labour, 116

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but throughout, Pip is in varying degrees aware that his life is a whited sepulchre. He is a Pharisee, living out the Pharisee's prayer, 'God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are,' and Dickens underscores the analogy by quoting the parable of the Pharisee at Magwitch's death: 'O Lord, be merciful to him a sinner' (456). In the psychologically shrewd, step-by-step articulation of Pip's snobbery and the need it so luminously establishes for charity, the novel never falters. It presents a great theme and handles it superbly. How are we to handle the teaching of it? With its bizarre characters, its geometrically arranged parallels, its coincidences, its five alternative endings (two major ones and three additional minor variations in wording), and its exploitation of inherited conventions from art, literature, the stage, and language, it provides plenty of material not only for conventional discussions of theme, plot, character and style, but for more exploratory examination — examination which may have the desirable effect of undermining some conventional notions of what a novel is. When we get down to the words, however, we confront Dickens in the concrete. We experience a verbal power, range, music and sophistication justifying the claim that he is the Shakespeare of the English novel. It is Dickens's language in Great Expectations that I intend to discuss. And I may as well come clean and confess that though the conference is 'On the Learning and Teaching of English in the 1980s', I shall be applying no avant garde theory of language, no new methodology studded all over with hard terms and jargon, and shall more or less assume that my author says what he means and means what he says. At worst the approach can do little harm, and, things being what they are, it may do students some good. From the beginning, Dickens had a transcendent gift for language. By the time he wrote Great Expectations, he also had the Shakespearian power of assimilating all the details of his work into a richly resonant and organically unified vision. The fact that Great Expectations began as an idea for a short story and that it developed in the highly concentrated mode of weekly instalments perhaps contributed to its lean economy, its structural tightness, and its singular unity of tone. He had tried many narrative voices in his earlier novels, the facetious editorial mode in Pickwick, the mode of omniscient narrator in others, the first-person autobiographical mode in David Copperfield, and a combination of omnis-

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cient narrator and first-person narrative by one of the characters in Bleak House. For Great Expectations, he returns to first-person narration, but with a much more critical and concentrated attention to the mind and moral outlook of the narrator. Pip is never let off as he meditates on his career, and his meditative consciousness, in rich, regulated, ingeniously varied, but essentially harmonious prose, makes the book sing. Graham Greene, for example, draws attention to the personal music of Great Expectations, 'the delicate and exact poetic cadences, the music of memory, that so influenced Proust', a marvellous achievement of tone, 'the tone of Dickens's secret prose, that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen' 2 . Dickens had a remarkable ear for language, an ear that enabled him to orchestrate the conventions of expression that exist within a language, conventions associated with levels of class or education, with regions or professions and their attitudes, with modes of literature, high, low, dignified, racy, pedantic. And to these we can add echoes of particular works and passages of literature, either studied and savoured, or simply inherited as part of the language's texture. The opening chapter of Great Expectations, one of Dickens's best, is an excellent example of his power of modulation, and it is a true opening in carrying so much of the novel latent within it. My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip. The opening is adult and controlled in being calm, plain, incisive and explanatory ('So I called myself Pip'). Its repetitions suggest a faint self mockery. 'So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip' is short, rhythmic, suggestive of the child's sense of things, but at the same time the paragraph's whole tone is sophisticated, the expression of an experienced and adult mind looking back. These few words fix our attention, as the chapter does repeatedly, on a major preoccupation of the whole novel: identity, and the whole bundle of components understood and not understood that mysteriously make it up. The paragraph that follows is direct in its description of the letters on the tombstone of Pip's parents, but childishly fanciful in

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the conclusions drawn by the young Pip looking at them: 'From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above", I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly' (1). Again the experience is childish, the recording narration indulgent, amused, sophisticated. The next paragraph expands our view from the gravestone to the cold, bleak setting of the marshland graveyard and 'the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry'. Then: 'Hold your noise!' cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. 'Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!' A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin. (2) The shock needs little comment, but 'started up from among the graves' suggests the unarticulated reason Pip is already stricken with dread among all those dead bodies. It's as though the terrible man is one of them (and when he leaves later, you notice Pip says 'he looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people stretching up cautiously out of their graves to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in' [4—5]). In the larger scheme of the novel, just as here in miniature, dread powers, ideas, and monsters are always threatening to emerge from the grave of the dead past, from the dark corners of the mind where they have been repressed, from dark stairways in rotting buildings, and, in the figure of Orlick, who rises 'from the ooze', from the dark primordial, unfathomable abyss. (129) The language now has no suggestion of poise and reflection. Its race of inpouring impressions has no time even for a verb: 'A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.' The syntax suggests a rush of unassimilated impressions by its lengthening series of adjectival phrases linked by the coordinating conjunction 'and'; its participles both describing the fearful man and suggesting hurry and action: 'soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints'.

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Then a tumble of verbs: 'who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled'. Shock, sensation, speed - not reasoning, ordering, or subordinating, but merely co-ordinating. But the syntax is subtly doing something else at the same time. The words of the novel exist within a language, an array of conventional structures - and here the syntax is echoing the familiar incremental rhythms of fairy tale and nursery rhyme. We have been plunged back into the culture and sensibility of childhood and the dark horrors of nurses' stories. 'If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptance of that phrase)', says Dickens in The Uncommercial Traveller, T suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.' And he recalls how his own nurse, taking 'a fiendish enjoyment' in his terrors, would begin the story of Captain Murderer (a version of Bluebeard), 'as a sort of introductory overture - by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan'.3 That set of associations, suggested in the syntax, strikes deeper still in the convict's demand for food and a file to remove his leg-irons: 'You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at the old battery over yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open. I am a-keeping that young man from harming of you at the present moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?'

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I said that I would get him the file. (4) Here again is magnificently complex music. Vivid, concrete, and violent as suits the fearful man, and in dialect as befits his class and lack of education. However, though Magwitch may be a mere varmint, his natural powers of rhetoric are superb. Consider those terrible triplets: 'tore out, roasted and ate', or 'getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver', and Magwitch's relentless destruction of the child's sense of the private and secure place in awfully knowing parallel clauses: 'may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up'. Here again is the language of nurses' tales, of supernaturally insidious monsters who, despite all obstacle, can softly creep and creep and tear one open. Then the stroke of genius, turning the young man from a hypothesis to a present menace: 'wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside'. The dread of being eaten is pervasive in fairy tale, of course, but Pip has more than literary association to frighten him. Magwitch, licking his lips, has already declared, 'You young dog, . . . what fat cheeks you ha' got. . . . Darn me if I couldn't eat 'em' (2-3). And the motif depressingly continues at the Christmas dinner when Pumblechook turns to moralizing on the subject of pork: If you'd been born a squeaker. . . . Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his frock to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of it! (25-6) Having established the bond of human community by giving food and drink to the convict, it is perhaps natural that Pip should include Magwitch in his anxious fantasy as the dinner guests and soldiers anticipate the hunt: 'As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge, enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was' (31). As modulation into the syntactical rhythms, motifs and associations of fairy tale provides a suitable expression for the infant Pip's perception of the world, the language of the adult Pip

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recording it all provides a sophisticated contrast and enclosure, a sense of experience weighed and put in perspective. Consider Pip's introduction to class-consciousness under Estella's scorn: 'I took the opportunity of being alone in the court-yard to look at my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of these accessories was not favourable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages' (60). There are three elements in this language: the register of fact, 'coarse hands and common boots'; a newly acquired taint of snobbery in the bloated circumlocution, 'vulgar appendages'; but also the urbane consciousness of the older Pip expecting the reader to savour, and therefore judge, the genteel inflation of language - not 'I disliked them', but 'My opinion of those accessories was not favourable.' Word and action often show a like comic incongruity, as when Pip the elder resorts to the polysyllabic language of gentility to describe his young blacksmith's amazement at Herbert's high-class savoir-faire in the ethics, ritual and style of boxing: 'Stop a minute, though,' he said, wheeling round before we had gone many paces. 'I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!' In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair, slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach. The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore hit out at him, and was going to hit out again, when he said, 'Aha! Would you?' and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled within my limited experience. 'Laws of the game!' said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to his right. 'Regular rules!' Here, he skipped from his right leg on to his left. 'Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries!' Here, he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I looked helplessly at him. I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but, I felt morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. . .

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My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly fore-shortened. (88—9) 'A most irritating manner', 'to be regarded in the light of a liberty', 'obtruded on my attention', 'a face exceedingly foreshortened' - though a country boy's reactions are being recorded, the language is that of adult facetiousness, musically echoed later when, having been re-introduced to Herbert, Pip thinks in awe 'of having laid a young insurer on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his responsible head open' (179). As Pip grows into a young man, the infection of snobbery displays itself in his grave affectation of tony language, as in the freezing letter he writes to his tailor, Trabb, after a humiliating encounter with 'that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy': 'I wrote ... to Mr. Trabb by next day's post to say that Mr. Pip must decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed to the best interests of society as to employ a boy who excited loathing in every respectable mind.' (242) Unlike in other ways, Great Expectations is like Pride and Prejudice in not only presenting a symphonic interplay of distinguishing styles but in making style and the act of writing subjects of comment and contemplation. Words often exercise a treacherous autonomy and power, cutting grooves, as it were, in which responses to the world are channelled willy nilly. Chapter Seven, which dwells on these ideas, begins with Pip, an infant semiologist, again reading the family tombstones: My construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read 'Wife of the Above' as a complimentary reference to my father's exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations had been referred to as 'Below,' I have no doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my notions of the theological positions to which my catechism bound me at all accurate; for I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was to 'walk in the same all the days of my life' laid me under an obligation always to go through the

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village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the wheelwright's or up by the mill. The activity of interpretation continues into Pip's spelling and Joe's scholarship: ' "Why, here's a J", said Joe, "and a O equal to anythink! Here's a J and a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe" ', from which Pip concludes 'that Joe's education, like steam, was yet in its infancy' (43—4). Joe, too, has a preoccupation with epitaphs, having struck out, 'like a horse-shoe complete, in a single blow,' an epitaph for his brutal father: 'Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart', an epitaph never inscribed on stone, because 'poetry costs money, cut it how you will, small or large,' but engraved indelibly in Joe's mind (45). Magwitch has a similar awe for words. Though he is barely literate, he carries about the world a little Bible, 'stolen from some court of justice', and serving 'as a sort of legal spell or charm' for taking people's oaths (328). And when he sees Pip's books, he says, 'You shall read 'em to me, dear boy! And if they're in foreign languages wot I don't understand, I shall be just as proud as if I did' (316). For a reverse example, where the words are intelligible but remote from experience, consider Mr. Pocket, whose household management is a disaster: he 'was a most delightful lecturer on domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes' (267). Even the very young Pip has a glimmering of the treachery of words and the fact that the act of representation involves difficult, virtually inexplicable choices of style. As he says, 'I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as my eyes had seen it, I should not be understood' (6). Goaded by Pumblechook and his sister, he desperately reaches for a higher truth: 'She was sitting,' I answered, 'in a black velvet coach.' Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another - as they well might — and both repeated, 'In a black velvet coach?' 'Yes,' said I. 'And Miss Estella - that's her niece, I think handed her in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine, because she told me to.' . . . [Note that in this aristocratic fancy, Pip already gives himself the position of lackey.]

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'What did you play at, boy?' 'We played with flags,' I said. (I beg to observe that I think of myself with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this occasion.) 'Flags!' echoed my sister. 'Yes,' said I. 'Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out at the coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.' 'Swords!' repeated my sister. 'Where did you get swords from?' 'Out of a cupboard,' said I. 'And I saw pistols in it— and jam - and pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all lighted up with candles.' 'That's true, mum,' said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. (66-7) Even this wild, poetic vision returns through the subject of style to the theme of the book: ' "There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe, after some rumination, "namely, that lies is lies. . . . Don't you tell no more of'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap" ' (69). Untroubled by Faustian aspirations, the natural and unelaborated man as opposed to the increasingly polished, civilized and alienated Pip, Joe is a moral centre or reference point in the novel. He belongs to a motif in literature going back to Shakespeare, Erasmus, the middle ages, Christ, Socrates and Heraclitus, who observed that much learning does not teach wisdom. Or as St. Paul put it, 'if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world let him become a fool that he may be wise' .4 The wise fool, of course, is one of Dickens's favourite figures. Young Pip sees Joe as an easy-going, foolish, dear fellow' (6). 'I always treated him', says Pip, 'as a larger species of child, and as no more than my equal' (7). Pip's sister sees them both as 'mooncalfs' (50) and declares Joe's to be 'a fool's head' (67). The aggressively precise and cynical Jaggers looks at them 'as one who recognized in Joe the village idiot, and in [Pip] his keeper' (139). Joe's simplicity is registered in his dialect and incoherence verging on grammatical ruin as manifested in his conversation with Jaggers on the announcement of Pip's expectations:

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'Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you mean to say -' Here, to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe's suddenly working round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic purpose. 'Which I meantersay,' cried Joe, 'that if you come into my place bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if you're a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay and stand or fall by!' (139) Joe, however, is not just occasionally incoherent; he is a victim of language, of the tyrannical power of style. His epitaph, 'Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart', is a mischievous genie let out of Joe's creative lamp, ready to dominate him, whenever style seems called for. Miss Havisham, for example, asks if Pip likes his trade (Joe, you will remember, cannot bring himself to answer her except through Pip), and Pip, already exquisitely embarrassed by Joe's behaviour, sees the demon approaching: 'Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip . . . that it were the wish of your own hart.' (I saw the idea suddenly break upon him that he would adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on to say) 'And there weren't no objection on your part, and Pip it were the great wish of your hart!' (98) Pip comes to see Joe's epitaph as a conversational will-o'-thewisp. When Pip is ill, Joe indulges in this quicksand of explanation: 'For, as I says to Biddy when the news of your being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the post, and being formerly single he is now married though underpaid for a deal of walking and shoe-leather, but wealth were not a object on his part, and marriage were the great wish of his hart —' 'It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what you said to Biddy.' (459-60) And finally, Joe tells of Orlick's assault on Pumblechook: 'a

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Englishman's 'ouse is his castle, and castles must not be busted 'cept when done in war time. And wotsume'er the failings on his part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart' (462). Joe, however, has other rhetorical powers, chiefly rhythmic, and aided by a series of co-ordinate clauses: 'Is it Pumblechook's house that has been broken into, then?' 'That's it, Pip' said Joe: 'and they took his till, and they took his cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to perwent his crying out.' (462) Some particular words excite Joe to rhythm, 'rampage', for example, as he explains that Pip's sister is out to thrash him: ' "She sot down", said Joe, "and she got up, and she made a grab at Tickler, and she ram-paged out. That's what she did," said Joe, slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at it; "she ram-paged out, Pip'" (7). And later, rising into philosophy after Mrs. Joe throws a fit of hysterics: 'On the rampage, Pip, and off the rampage, Pip; such is life!' (113). The state of Pip's relationship with Joe can be traced in the formality of Joe's speech. As he nurses the helpless Pip back to health after Magwitch's death, Joe falls back into the language of affection and community, 'Dear old Pip, old chap', but as Pip gets stronger, to Pip's terrible remorse, Joe adopts the respectful, 'Sir', again: 'I feel thankful that I have been ill, Joe,' I said. 'Dear old Pip, old chap, you're a'most come round, sir.' 'It has been a memorable time for me, Joe.' 'Likewise for myself, sir,' Joe returned. 'We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There were days once, I know, that I did for a while forget; but I never shall forget these.' 'Pip,' said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, 'there has been larks. And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us — have been.' (467) In an earlier London episode, following Pip's embarrassment at

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Joe's table manners, Joe gives one of the most dignified speeches in the English novel. I can do no better than to quote the analysis of it by my colleague, Norman Page, in his book, Speech in the English Novel: In the early part of the chapter, the comic absurdity of [Joe's] language, and its contrast to the middle-class English of Pip, are stressed: 'Which you have that growed,' said Joe, 'and that swelled, and that gentle-folked ... as to be sure you are a honour to your king and country.' However, indications of uneducated usage virtually disappear later in the scene, in a monologue of some length in which Joe's natural dignity and sensitivity are manifested: 'You won't find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won't find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt apron, sticking to the old work. . .' [221] As the tone of the scene deepens and Joe is seen not as a buffoon but as a man with a fine moral nature, his language undergoes a corresponding change: the irregular grammatical forms and mispronunciations disappear, and his sentences take on new structures and rhythms. 5 I have already suggested Magwitch's religious and social awe for the printed word. As with Joe, his pronunciation and grammar communicate character. And he has his own anxieties about style that rather parody Pip's pretensions: 'Dear boy, and Pip's comrade, you two may count upon me always having a genteel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been since that half minute when I was betrayed into lowness' [That is, his cursing society from 'the judge in his wig to the colonist a-stirring up the dust' (326)], muzzled I am at the present time, muzzled I ever will be' (334). If we look at Magwitch's narrative of his life in Chapter forty-two,

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we can see that besides tricks of vocabulary, grammar and dialect, Magwitch's vividness of speech stems from concrete accumulation: 'carted here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. . . . Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could ... a bit of a poacher, a bit of a labourer, a bit of a waggoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don't pay and lead to trouble' (340-1). Or again, 'Compeyson's business was the swindling, handwriting forging, stolen bank-note passing, and such-like' (342). But besides the verbs and catalogues, Magwitch achieves vividness with a Dickensian flare for eccentric detail, as in his account of his education: 'A deserting soldier in a traveller's rest, what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read; and a travelling giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me to write' (341). As Joe rises to a height of genuine dignity with a simplified and normalized speech, Magwitch achieves a touching effect of quiet acceptance on the escape down the river, emphasized by a sentiment that smacks more of conventional poetry than Magwitch's usual vein of speech: ' "I was a-thinking through my smoke just then that we can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can't no more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it's run through my fingers and gone, you see!" holding up his dripping hand' (433). Speech in Great Expectations, thoroughly dealt with, would tempt one to many more explorations: of Pumblechook's pomposity and repetitive 'May I?' for example; of Wopsle's lugubrious histrionic vein; of Mrs. Gargery's explosive shrewishness; of Jaggers's belligerent but circumspect court-room style, and so on. I will, however, limit myself to one more instance. Dickens has often been named as an early contributor to the stream-ofconsciousness style - in the speeches of Mr. Jingle of Pickwick Papers, for example. One of my favourites of this sort is Old Bill Barley, the gout-ridden, rum-sodden, bed-bound old sailor, father of Herbert's Clara. Except for loud percussion passages from his stick on the floor above, 'as if a giant with a wooden leg were trying to bore it through the ceiling' (372), he lies there dying, talking to himself, adding his own little instrumentation to the great symphonic score of Great Expectations: 'Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley. Here's old Bill Barley, Bless your eyes.

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Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder, here's your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you' (372). To conclude, I should like to enlarge the notion of language a little to include some recurrent images and motifs that contribute to the surrealistic effect of Great Expectations. It is a book about guilt and dreadful secrets, about a moral claustrophobia reflected in Miss Havisham's blacked-out rooms where spiders and blotchy things scuttle about the decayed wedding cake. Light and dark, mists and mud, suggest states and degrees of moral enlightenment, often ironically, as when Pip says of leaving his village for London, 'the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me' (157). As in the works of Kafka, external and internal, surroundings and personality, become curiously blended. As Pip devotes himself to his supposed expectations, submitting himself to the twisted desires of Miss Havisham and Estella, rejecting his roots and those who love him, Miss Havisham's house becomes a spatial rendering of his mind too. The candles . . . burnt with the steady dullness of artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked round at them, and at the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped clock, and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon the table and the ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly reflection thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I saw in everything the construction that my mind had come to, repeated and thrown back to me. My thoughts passed into the great room across the landing where the table was spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in the falls of the cobwebs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the spiders on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their little quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and pausings of the beetles on the floor. (299). The polish, respectability and apparent lucidity of the speaking voice in Great Expectations is threatened constantly by scuttling beasts and looming monsters emerging from a black abyss. When we first meet Pip the threat is externalized - the gibbet and the ghostly pirate call out to him, the stars call, 'Stop thief!' (13), the gates, banks and dykes cry, 'A boy with somebody-else's pork pie! Stop him!' and the cattle knowingly comment, 'Holloa, young

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thief!' (15). As he grows, he broods repeatedly on 'the guiltily coarse and common thing it was to be on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts' (77). With his head full of George Barnwell, he believes somehow he must have had a hand in the attack upon his sister (118). He would like to keep these claims all down and distant: 'My comfort,' he says of his acquaintance with Magwitch, 'was that it happened a long time ago, and that he had doubtless been transported a long way off, and that he was dead to me, and might be veritably dead into the bargain' (144—5). Pip's guilt is like the ineradicable spot that comes of handling Bluebeard's key in that the taint of prison and crime keeps 'starting out' he says, 'like a stain that was faded but not gone' (260). That image from the first chapter, of the dead coming sinisterly to life, becomes a leading motif of the book. The horrible thing coming out of the dark, the actual dark and the dark of Pip's mind, occurs most powerfully in the scene of Magwitch's return, Pip holding his light out over the dark staircase as Magwitch, the revenant, climbs up from below. Pip thinks of him as a 'wicked spirit' who 'had sent . . . messengers to mine' (320), as 'some terrible beast' (316), and comments, 'I had seen him down in the ditch, tearing and fighting like a wild beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into the light of the fire a half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary night' (320). Pip's attempts to disguise Magwitch, he says, are like putting 'rouge upon the dead, so awful was the manner in which everything in him that it was most desirable to repress started through that thin layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head' (331). And Pip, in fact, comes to think of Magwitch as the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein made up of miscellaneous bits of corpses, but he puts the association in an involuted way that identifies himself also with the monster: 'The imaginery student', he says, 'pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me' (332-3). What Pip learns, what brings him back to reality, is that he and Magwitch are, in an essential way, akin, that despite all his attempts at repression and respectability, he too, like Magwitch, is a fallen human creature. He takes his place by Magwitch's side, his repugnance melted away: 'I only saw in him', he says, 'a much

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better man than I had been to Joe' (441). The darkness he feared is assimilated, and he learns the lesson of the parable of the Pharisee. 'The fairy tale', says Carl Jung, 'makes it clear that it is possible for a man to attain totality, to become whole, only with the co-operation of the spirit of darkness, indeed that the latter is actually a causa instrumentalis of redemption and individuation.'6 His comment is clearly apropos for Great Expectations, which has a Shakespearian way of combining the social and familiar with the peculiar primitive force of myth, folk-lore and fairy tale, and of using language of extraordinary sophistication to achieve the fusion. I have dwelt on the language of Great Expectations, its syntax, narration, speech, and poetic expressiveness in order to stress Dickens's special virtuosity, but I have an ulterior motive, of course. Alarmed by the illiteracy of students, people often suppose, rather too facilely, that quick drill in grammar and composition will set all straight. We who teach English, on the other hand, keep insisting that drill in grammar and composition is a good thing but that it is more effectively pursued when accompanied by literature of high accomplishment. Yet we ourselves seem often to allow the two to drift into separate compartments and therefore fall short of our aim. At least when I ask students reading novels to analyse a paragraph or two, a good number of them look blank, surprised and helpless. If poetry were in question, I think they might expect the exercise more- regard it as heartless, perhaps, but feel that such depressing things were prone to happen in the world from time to time. I speak mainly of the general run of undergraduates, though I have known the occasional graduate student, even in English, to stand aghast or make a mess of such an exercise. As for reading the passage aloud, if Dante could hear them attempt it, I'm sure even his prolific fancy would recognize that he had missed one of the horrors of the damned. The one skill depends, of course, on the other. And from my experience I conclude we often allow ourselves to miss the wholeness of our intention in dealing with language. Here in Great Expectations, arguably the greatest novel of the greatest novelist in English, we have ample and glorious material to rectify any such omission and to increase our own and our students' pleasure by coming to understand with some precision the grounds of our pleasure. As Joe says of his analytical reading, 'when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, "Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe", how interesting reading is!' (44)

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NOTES 1. Page references are to my edition of Great Expectations (1965; rpt. Toronto, 1980). 2. Graham Greene, 'The Young Dickens', from The Lost Childhood and Other Essays, reprinted in George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr (eds.), The Dickens Critics (Ithaca, 1961) pp. 245-7. 3. Dickens, 'Nurses Stories', The Uncommercial Traveller, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens Edition (London, 1958) pp. 150-3. 4. I Corinthians, 3:18. 5. Norman Page, Speech in the English Novel (London, 1973) p. 111. 6. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London, 1959) pp. 251-2.

7

Creative Writing: Can It Be Taught? RUDY WIEBE

For 21 years I have been working in creative writing classrooms in schools, colleges and universities, both in the United States and Canada; if I don't think that creative writing can be taught, I'm either a charlatan or an idiot. Now it is quite likely that persons (perhaps even academics) exist who believe me to be either, or both, but I would here like to explain that the teacher who showed me it could be taught was Dr F. M. Salter, for some time the head of the English Department at this university. Salter was an academic par excellence; he came to Alberta from New Brunswick as a lecturer in English in 1922, then worked as a graduate scholar with John Manley on the great Chicago edition of The Canterbury Tales. He went on to become a world expert on the medieval cycle of Chester plays, and actually discovered and later published one of the missing texts by a marvellously rational procedure of literary sleuthing. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was an academic of world stature read his Alexander Lectures, given at the University of Toronto in 1954 and published as Medieval Drama in Chester. This man began the writing courses at the University of Alberta in 1939 and he taught them until his death in 1962; it was my great fortune to be in his class on both Shakespeare and creative writing - a superb combination - and to have him as a supervisor for my master's thesis. If he felt an argument or a sentence had to be taken apart, he could shave your work so fine, so quickly and so completely that before you were quite aware of what was happening your idea or sentence would have disappeared. Can creative writing be taught? Let us not be silly. 134

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The true question behind the title of this talk is: how does the mind know? How can the mind know what it has not known before? As thoughtful persons, and especially as professional teachers, I am sure we have considered this often, and at length; it is a question fundamental to all philosophic inquiry. How do we learn, or, to turn it around, how can we teach? At universities, and especially in humanistic departments, it is often assumed that teaching - helping minds to know what they have not known before - basically requires that someone get up in front of others exactly as I am now before you- and talk: telling people, in words, what they have perhaps never heard before, or if they have, they've forgotten, or they need to be reminded of it in as boring or as brilliant a manner as possible so that now for a little while at least they will again know. I'm not sure which helps us to remember better, to hear a totally boring or totally brilliant speaker, though I know which is more pleasant. It seems to me that this method of teaching- talking- developed in the Middle Ages when books were not available and only a few people actually could know what many others wanted to be informed of. Is lecturing really of much point in the 1980s world of massive libraries and computer and tv screens? It's certainly much easier to find facts or opinions in a library than to wait for a professor to give them to you standing or sitting here, talking, talking. Do I, by hearing something said (if I actually do hear it and am not really absent, that is, asleep or thinking of several other things), have I learned anything at all? Is repetition of facts or ideas or opinions from one mouth to another ear, things told me which I may or may not accept as believable, is that teaching? Can there be any teaching at all without learning to do? It is, for example, generally supposed that in English courses at universities one is taught the basics of textual criticism: now, can textual criticism be taught by talking and listening only? What is the mind's way of knowing? Anything? Any child can ask a sage an unanswerable question. At this point I would like to follow John Dewey's enlightening comment on philosophic inquiry: he said that philosophy progresses not by solving problems but by abandoning them. I will abandon the question of 'how does the mind know' for an answer to a different, but not unrelated, question that I think I do know. That is, Salter taught me how to learn to write in the only way I know: by giving me trust, the benefit of his critical mind, and expecting me to

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apply myself to the task. Literature, he said, gives us endless examples of good and great writing, so get acquainted with it and then try to do some yourself. He talked in class, yes, he even gave formal lectures on prosody, the principles of all great art - unity, balance, consistency, style, etc., etc. (these have been published in a book called The Way of the Maker, quite idiosyncratic and enlightening) but in 1956 he also told me that over the years he had tried various experiments: one year he talked only about punctuation and spelling and the origins and history of language, another year he lectured on the great themes of human life, birth, love, death etc., and once he did the most complicated and scientific analysis of rhythm and style by means of stressed and unstressed syllables, an analysis of seven centuries of English prose in which he confessed he had gotten lost himself. But the learning results, he confessed, were pretty much the same: some students wrote well and better, some wrote poorly and did not improve much. That made him happy: it was as it should be because it seemed to him it wasn't so much what he said as what they wanted to and did write that gradually made them better writers. I have sometimes wondered how many of us as academics would dare to teach this way: give our students a series of texts and outstanding examples of critical essays and then simply ask them to write an essay, as Salter asked us to write a story or poem, every week? Would the students who come so diligently to our classes learn to be good critics? Better critics? Perhaps this method of teaching is not tried because, as we all know, it is a great deal easier for a professor to talk all week than to intelligently read and write his own critical comments on twenty or thirty papers. In the workshop method of learning to write better, the text that is discussed is the students' own writing. Whatever each student writes is multicopied and given to everyone as well as the instructor to read before the class meets. When the class does meet, each text is commented on in all seriousness, as if it were as important as any canonized Shakespeare or Dickens. If it isn't quite that good, discussion should reveal it, and every student is expected to take part because (a) each one wants his own work dealt with as seriously and (b) a major part of every writer's job is to be critical of what she herself has written. The instructor, of course, hands back a copy to the student on which specific, and usually very detailed comments have been made. In such a class

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process of comment and discussion and invariable argument and sometimes drastic disagreement and occasional consensus of either censure or praise, both writer and discussants and instructor (so-called) are really being taught all they will ever be taught: exactly as much as they want to learn. And what they have learned is revealed in the only possible way: by what they themselves write. In many ways learning to write is like learning to play the piano, or sing well, or build a chest of drawers. You learn best by doing. I don't think you can ever teach anyone how to have a verbal or visual or auditory imagination, any more than you can teach someone to sing who is tone-deaf, or someone to play hockey who has no muscular coordination, or someone to build wellfitting drawers who has no eye to judge dimension; but verbal imagination is not at all rare. Most people have a good deal of it, as most people can sing or move with relative coordination, and if they have the basic equipment the most important step is that it be developed through practice. Most children speak words, some of them have great verbal and narrative dexterity - more so than most teachers want to allow them in class, be it said - and the problem is not that they don't have imagination but rather that the educational system often forces that dexterity and imagination into certain rigid patterns. Imagination is really like a muscle: the more you are encouraged to use it, the stronger it gets; after a time certain things become imaginable which you could not have dreamed before. We would call ridiculous a weightlifting coach who did nothing but talk and talk endlessly to his weightlifter about the nature of muscles, the best techniques of lifting, the nature of weights and the strength of barbell rods and then, on the day of the games, suddenly expected him to benchpress 120 kilos. Good writing is very much like that: the gifts for doing it are not at all rare (as the gifts for lifting at least ten or fifteen kilos are not rare), but by mostly talking about it [after all, every time you tell your students to write something you get a stack of papers up to your nose, and reading and commenting intelligently on all that - time, time, who has time?], by mostly talking, by hemming their writing in with all those absolute rules of grammar and good usage and formal writing [after all, schools are for learning how to do things correctly — sometimes I think that if any of us had had to learn how to walk correctly we would all still be squirming about on our bellies], by talking so much about the so-called essential characteristics of 'the well-written story' - that

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is, plot, character, theme, setting, dialogue etc., all those dreary characteristics - talking out all this stuff about writing that is perhaps true in its detail becomes stultifying, nay, constipating, to all those quite natural urges of story telling with which we indulge ourselves a hundred times a day. Every child tells small stories, almost endlessly. Then why is it often so hard to learn to write them? Sometimes the most natural spoken-story tellers cannot write them at all. One major reason, I believe, is that we make them afraid of mechanical mistakes like spelling or grammar, technicalities which can be drilled and learned in another way but which inhibit rather than develop a child's natural abilities if included too much in the larger discipline of getting the story down. There is a further point to be made. When we emphasize the rarity of writing gifts, we stress the glamour or 'star' status of great writers; the way we look upon movie stars (although when you actually meet them in the flesh, as I have a few, they look pretty much like everyone else and when you talk to them they are mostly as illiterate), by talking about this something you have to have to be a 'great writer' you are forcing your students to come begging you, 'Do I have it? Do I have that extra special little bit it takes to . . .?' And at the same time, they are discouraged, of course, and you are put on the spot. People ask me this all the time; they send me manuscripts from all over the country and even across borders: please read this; do I have what it takes to be a writer? Tell me, please! I may be able to largely avoid these letters and manuscripts (my writing skills should be good for something!) but I cannot avoid my students. I have to commit myself: yes, this is good, it is very good - and then, what if it really isn't? There is such an unimaginable variety of good writing. Things are so easy in sport, or mathematics: there are absolute numbers to deal with and a runner can either run the 100 metres in 10 seconds - which is incredible but magnificent - or he can't; the student can work through the process and apply the correct equations correctly to reach the only answer; fine, he is exactly so many points more brilliant than the one who can only get halfway through the process. But a great poem, a great story - somehow we would all like to think that if only we had William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor in our classes, even as children, we would recognize them and get them started on their world career, but of course we never have them', we always have young people whom no

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one but their mothers and closest friends have ever heard of. Could this little girl from a messy farm near Vegreville actually have the latent ability and the learnability to become a worldclass writer? Could this boy from a rich family across an Edmonton street - really, is it possible? And we have to commit our judgement, even in an initial way; we have to have some basis for encouraging them, often in face of the derision of our colleagues. For they, of course, work with the acknowledged great and dead - those quite properly venerated by generations of scholars, writers whose very infelicities and crudities and ignorances and stupidities are often cleverly proven by intense critics to be the most exciting parts of their greatness. But you face a questioning student: should I write, keep on writing? Is there any point to it? In this rather lengthy talk- it has become almost an harangue, I'm afraid -1 have actually given you some fairly obvious reasons why some people think creative writing cannot be taught. It's usually too hard to bother with. Maths and phys ed are certainly easier, or social studies, and you can go home and watch your favourite tv show, an educational documentary, no doubt, and feel complete vocational ease. Let those students who are silly enough to want to write poems or stories blunder along on their own; our society rewards scientists and athletes with decent or sometimes obscenely large salaries, but writers - well, if they have it society generally assumes they'll eventually write that great poem, that magnificent novel. How silly. Why don't we have that same attitude about scientists and athletes? If you really have it to shoot a small bit of rubber into a net, well go ahead - isn't it something worth while for a group of men to do? Why should we bother to train you to do it, why should we bother to pay you a million dollars a year to see you do it? Athletes always say that they'll stop playing their game when it isn't fun any more, but that is a barefaced lie; what they really mean is they'll stop when someone stops paying them an enormous salary. The exceptional Ken Dryden proves the rule. The fact is that writing is such an enjoyable thing to do that thousands do it without the slightest hint that anyone will ever pay them for it; on the other hand, no one spends all his time knocking other people down on a grassy field unless he is handsomely paid to do so. To make something with words is so complex and so natural and so satisfying a human activity that it

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is worked at for a lifetime and the satisfaction does not diminish; the very doing of it feeds itself; you want to do it more because it is an activity intrinsically human and valid unto itself; you need no outside motive other than itself. That is the fundamental reason why a teacher must allow her students to learn to write by doing, the way you learn to play the violin by doing. No one expects any coordinated person who can tuck a violin under his chin to play immediately like Isaac Stern; so don't instantly expect them to write like Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro either. Encourage them to do, and in the process of all this writing eventually it may be well done, or very well, and parts of it perhaps excellently, perhaps even far better than you could have written yourself. Then rejoice, first that it is there, second that you've had the wit to recognize it, and third encourage that peak of excellence as you have criticized and explained all those boring plains of medio- • crity. Who knows, perhaps some day that unlikely, clumsy, beautiful student will be capable of building an entire mountain range. For, if we were to speak of fiction writing alone, we would recognize that fiction deals with all the world's objects and ideas and relationships together; in fact, it deals with everything that the other disciplines either split apart for convenience of study or ignore completely. What other discipline deals with personality, death, family, individuality, love, time, hatred, the principles and structures of great art, spirit, goodness, evil, human will? To be any good at all this, the writer must be, not a specialist- which is what our educational world generally encourages us to be - but rather the most comprehensive generalist possible. At any given moment a fiction writer may have to know how an airplane flies or which tribe in New Guinea counts 'one, two, and many'; the writer must know facts, she must experience feelings, think thoughts, grasp concepts, be curious about everything and bored by everything and at the same time be naive enough to say, in effect, again and again, 'Once upon a time there was. . .'. How can anyone be told to do this? They must be provided with the situation where they can attempt it, their efforts taken seriously, and if they have some small successes, be encouraged to keep on trying to do it better. What goes on in a writing classroom needs to be discussed. I have already indicated the workshop method of creative writing;

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to make that method work, certain practical matters must be dealt with: 1. Class enrolment needs to remain small, no more than 14 to 16 students per class. Everything written in class must be responded to, so keep the amount manageable. 2. The best way to limit enrolment is to have all prospective students hand in some of their own imaginative writing. The instructor screens these pieces, either 'yes' or 'no'. The advantages of asking for a portfolio are: (a) you get rid of the simply curious, or those who think it is an easy course; (b) you know that if they are really serious they will have done some writing on their own; (c) if there is real demand for the course, you can choose those who are clearly most imaginative, verbally gifted and so will benefit most from the class. 3. The portfolio application should be supplemented by a short personal interview, especially in doubtful cases; the question to ask them is 'What and how much do you read?' Every writer is first of all a reader. 4. Expect assignments to be handed in regularly, at specific deadlines. A writer writes, constantly; not merely when 'inspiration' bumbles up in him. 5. All assignments should be duplicated, and everyone in class receive a copy in good time to read them before class; reading aloud wastes a great deal of time and is difficult for some writers; besides, it is not the usual situation we encounter with any text. 6. Expect students to read widely in whatever form they are working. I usually ask my students to buy a specific short story anthology which I expect they will read largely on their own; we then have a common group of excellent stories and when writing problems come up, I can refer them to a specific instance where a similar problem has been dealt with successfully by a good writer. 7. You must give yourself, as instructor, enough time to read and comment, in writing, on every piece written. You must also lead a discussion on every piece, so you should be clear about its strengths and weaknesses; it is, of course, better if

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the other students point these out than that you tell them what they are. 8. A private interview, perhaps several a term, with each student is essential to discuss specific strengths and problems. 9. Give students technique assignments (i.e. write a thirdpersonal central intelligence story, a sonnet, a tightly plotted adventure etc.) but never subject assignments. Finding subjects is one of the basic matters a novice must master in order to become a writer; no one can tell anyone what she should be interested in. 10. Marks are an agony but seemingly necessary in most schools. I usually do not give marks on individual pieces, but rather one final mark judged in broad categories as 'Outstanding', 'Excellent', 'Very Good', 'Good', or 'Unsatisfactory'. If you have been properly selective in (1) above, you shouldn't really have anyone in the last category unless they simply have written too little. It is probably in place to note some general problems that face most student writers: (i) to learn to see and hear. An entire essay could be written on this alone: hearing and seeing are not really essential in a comfortable modern society where we mostly hear and see what we want to. Usually students are trained to be critics of texts; well, writers use the world about them as critics use texts - in a way, the best fiction and poetry is always a selected, running critical commentary on the world; (ii) their age. Poets sometimes have tremendous power rooted in the sturm und drang energy of relatively inexperienced youth, but fiction writers need to know a wide range of living. Much of their experience is so generally similar: they see the same tv shows or movies, they hear the same music, they have such limited acquaintances, most of whom are their own age. This is especially true of city youngsters, who know almost no sense of community, that spectrum of living humans from babies to greatgrandparents, even casually. Few urban teenagers, especially of middle class background, ever meet a 'character' or see a dead body. Their fictional ideas about resolving conflicts often come from television plots where people are tangled into insoluble dilemmas and then shot —

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which eliminates the problem, I suppose, but is hardly anyone's normal experience, nor should it be; (iii) a lack of wide reading. Many of them read, some a great deal, but they read in fads like science fiction, or crime and spy mysteries related to movies they see. Modern fiction, however, with ranges from the excellent more traditional forms of Greene, Golding, Bellow, Laurence, Updike and Munro to the cerebral post-modernism of Borges, Kroetsch, Ondaatje, Barth, Calvino and Robbe-Grillet, is so tremendously varied that the compass of fiction requires a kind of obsessive omnivorousness in reading to get even a small sense of where it can fly today. The English tradition of contemporary fiction began with Joyce, Stein, and Woolf, but to understand and know some of the possible forms, languages and subjects that fiction (or fictions, if you please) now have open to them, it is almost imperative to be able to read at least one other European language; German, for example, where you can move from the rather traditional Heinrich Boell (Billiards at Nine-Thirty) to Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum, The Flounder) to the totally impressionistic Horst Beinek (The Cell), to say nothing of the eery father of them all, Franz Kafka. It is a great advantage to write in English, of course, since that is the language most books are likely to be translated into, but the true power of these books, since they depend so much on the use of language itself, can only be grasped in the original. This enormous range of possible fiction is there: often for beginning writers it creates a paralysis of plethora, especially if they are not adept readers. For to be a writer today means you must know something about the state of the art of fiction. Modern and post-modernist fictional forms have been developed by highly intelligent writers, and it requires a well-trained intelligence to comprehend their genius; further, the media, especially movies and music, have influenced modern prose a great deal, and it is small wonder that most writers today grow out of a university experience, that many are intellectuals, professors or writers-in-residence. If, as a teacher, you want to have literate writers who can speak clearly in a modern world, you must help them to understand the very complex state of the art.

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Which brings me to the possible - invariable? — problems of creative writing instructors: (i) the necessity of reading. Your most exciting writers will always want to know what's going on in the world of poetry and fiction; you have to be able to give them some guidance. The easiest way for an instructor to dampen such enthusiasm is to squelch it with his own ignorance. My colleague Douglas Barbour, who teaches poetry, has two walls of his house lined with contemporary verse; if an instructor isn't buying (you can't wait for any library to have all you want) books in his field, he's like a doctor who's too busy to read medical journals: the art will leave him behind. (ii) an essential eclecticism. Everyone finds some forms, modes, subjects more interesting, evocative than others; one needs a lot of experience and a lot of grace to deal with the enormous range of stuff that a truly creative class will throw at you. It is critically important that the instructor not be bent on turning out lesser (they will inevitably be lesser) versions of himself; instructors who have a very set style themselves always face the enormous temptation to tell their students exactly how they should write something. If you will indulge me personally for a moment: anyone reading my seven novels, from Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) to My Lovely Enemy (1983) would, I hope, discover major changes in ways of thinking and presenting, concepts of story itself. I would call that growth, not indecision. A writer who at age 24 already knows how he will write at age 50 is already a stalled writer, dead in the water. (iii) the temptation to be authoritative. One's very position, perhaps personality, age, achievement, often gives one too much weight. Writing well is in large part a developing of sound judgement, and not all judgements need to be equally respected, of course; at the same time, even a stupid comment in a class discussion has a certain validity because it helps the neophyte writer discern the better and it prepares her for the stupid responses she will inevitably get when she is published. The world seems to contain an inordinate number of blundering and even vicious fools who enjoy cutting down anyone who publishes anything. It is better to

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get used to that, quickly, in the relative controllability of a classroom; (iv) the visibly successful student. If you teach long enough and are lucky, you may have one or two. Other neophytes, most often those with minuscule ability, will think you have something special, some particular magic which will rub off on them too, if only they can get into your classes. That is, of course, not the way things happen in a writing class. As any teacher knows, the successful learners in any area are those who have a basic talent and who work very hard. Your job as a teacher is to encourage them, point out where their efforts seem to be going astray, and otherwise stand aside, give them room to make that verbal structure for themselves. If it is excellent, you are all happy; it is their doing, not yours, and you are the first to know that. I refuse to sum up what I have said, as all good term papers should. Rather, I see an image: I see an instructor and a hopeful writer facing each other. A manuscript, perhaps a great many, lie on the desk between them. They have discussed these manuscripts in the wider circle of the classroom, they have been re-written several times and now they have been discussed again, at interminable length, it seems, in the confidence of an office. Both are dissatisfied, always and always and almost always. The hopeful writer is thinking: do I really have what it takes to be a writer; do I have the ability, the energy to stick with this long enough to really learn how to make something with words? And the instructor is thinking, hopefully too: do I really have what it takes to be a teacher; can I, after all these years, learn to help this person to write better? The situation seems very similar to me on both sides of the desk.

8

Writing: Self-Consciousness and a Change in Reality? JOHN DIXON

Years ago, when I taught in the inner city in London, I gradually discovered that - for all the hardship and Dickensian grime - our children had special talents. For example, in writing: the class and I could talk over people we knew well, trying to picture them and catch a likeness at characteristic moments, and lots of my eleven-year-olds would write things like this: My Mother Scrubbing She was kneeling in front of a bucket of soapy water, scrubbing for all she was worth. 'I must get this scrubbing done, before the rent man comes', she muttered to herself. She had brown untidy hair tied back out of her face. She has brown eyes and is five foot and four inches tall. She had an overall on. The cat suddenly jumped on her back. It startled her very much, so over went the bucket of water, flowing over the passage floor. It went under the door and over the carpet. Dirty, dusty water making the carpet look ten years old. Her eyes filled red with anger. Then there was a 'rat-tat-tat' on the door. 'Oh the rent man can wait.' And she started to clear up the mess, shooing the cat here and there. There was another knock on the door. 'Wait a minute please.' She ran to the cupboard to get the money. She opened the door. 'Sorry I kept you waiting', she said. 'Rent's gone up ten bob this week ma'am', the rent man said. 'Wait a minute I'm going to do a bit of paddling', she ran in and came out again with a crisp ten shilling note. 146

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'Thank you', said the rent man, and he went on his way thinking to himself, 'I wish they'd transfer me to another district.' Nothing like a bit of drama - and wry humour: that's the cockney way. But we can see the woman on her knees, the untidy hair . . . the look of the carpet. . . Barbara's enjoying this. Here's another from the same lesson, by Melvyn: My Dad Fishing He stands at the greatest of ease, his long legs resting on the bank. When his float bobs up and down his eyes start to glow. His long arms hold the rod very stiffly as the fish bites. When the fish is on land his teeth show up white as can be. When he strikes his long hair falls over his face so he cannot see. He is very tall so he can get out his line a long way, so he can catch big ones. His eyes shine when they face the sun. They are a light blue and when they face the sun they look like silver and gold. His long arms reach out to put the bait on and then his long fingers press it on the hook. Again and again, as we read back pieces like these to each other, I was surprised by their shrewdness of observation, the relaxed way they could call up the immediate surface of their life. In the inner city you've got to be sharp, on the alert, quick on the uptake, I used to think. However, looking back now, I begin to place this work in a broader frame, recognizing it as one of several peaks in a developmental process. For many children between ten and twelve the ability to observe with a detached, amused curiosity is a real pleasure. You see it in their art work as well, in the readiness, for example, to follow each curve and changing shade in the fine ribs of a bird's feather. But in speech and writing, you find it particularly as they regard people. By this age, with many of the elementary problems of transcription coming under habitual control,1 they can spread their wings in such writing. Sharp images. Action in detail. An ability to imply things below the surface, simply by the care with which they re-enact and re-visualize as they write. Yet even at twelve, some young story-tellers are hinting that

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there is more to come. And that is my central theme today. Listen, for instance, to this young girl from Glasgow: I was standing in the playground next to the railings all alone as I had fallen out with my friends or rather they had fallen out with me. They were standing in a group, five of them altogether and now and then they would give a quick glance at me. I knew they were talking about me. I walked away from where I had been standing and went behind a wall where they could not see me. I stood there for a few minutes then my curiosity overcame me, I must see what they were doing. I peeked round the wall and saw them approaching me. I felt like running but I knew if I did five of them would easily corner me. I gulped and gripped my hands tightly together. The largest of them came up and gave me a sly grin. Then it happened so quickly she struck me in the face. I hit her back then she kicked and I thumped. A crowd gathered and I could hear mocking voices around me, some supporting her, others me. I felt my eye swelling and as I opened it slowly I saw the girl on the ground, her nose bleeding. The others smiled at me and the girl who was now standing up said, 'Let's be friends.' I had won the fight. Studying this closely with a group of Scottish teachers, I was struck by several passages: First: . . . then my curiosity overcame me, I must see what they were doing. ... I felt like running but I knew if I did five of them would easily corner me. At such moments the narrator turns from the flow of action to report inner events: her curiosity, dismay, apprehension . . . are all evoked by what she tells us of her inner thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, notice that when she wants to convey how she summoned up her strength and courage, that's not said explicitly: it is action she uses. I gulped and gripped my hands tightly together. And in the fight itself the actions follow in a kind of uncontrolled stream to which the gathering crowd and the mocking voices form a chorus. Nevertheless, for a moment the narrator retreats behind

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the swelling eye, and then from inside herself as she opens it slowly, she sees the other girl on the ground. Under the pressure of events, then, this narrator is beginning to move inside, to evoke shifting feelings, and to convey the sensation of a mind noting things in confusion yet almost detached from them. It is not just the surface of the experience but her own consciousness that is becoming the appropriate focus. I want to stand back here, before we pursue further this critical shift in a writer's interests. What we are glimpsing here, I want to suggest, is something more important than good stories in an English lesson- something much more all-pervading. Because, as Barbara Hardy has reminded us, we go through life making up stories about the people we meet and the things that happen to us. Each day, besides the stories we consciously tell to friends and strangers (including those at the bar or in hotel rooms at conferences!), there are the less conscious, more fragmented narratives that flow through our minds as we insistently turn over events that have alarmed, 'moved' or overwhelmed us and the imaginary dramas in which we confront again situations where we failed, or prefigure what we'll say in some testing scenario in the future. And edging into this network there are fantasies, building a dream world where events turn on our desires, aspirations or fears. 'The stories of our days and the stories in our days are joined in that autobiography we are all engaged in making and remaking, which we never complete, though we all know how it is going to end.'2 Narrative autobiography then is the form which daily represents how we come to grips with the other in our lives, and what we perceive or imagine about ourselves in action. It follows that changes in the narratives we construct as writers can hardly avoid being intimately related with changes in the way we see life. Suppose, therefore, we trace our 10-12-year-olds through to 15-17. What shifts might we teachers be expecting, or hoping to foster, in the range of ways our students use written narratives to construe experience? If we think of the insistent curriculum of life, what are we doing to take it into account? Age-group pressures being what they are in our societies, today pretty well all adolescents face many challenges to understand and come to terms with inner thoughts and feelings - if they can. Yet there are few schools that I know which are deliberately organized to meet that need. Nevertheless, a beginning can be

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made - and is being made - especially in the English classroom. And to understand the task we need a more analytical grasp of narrative. When Les Stratta and I recently began to analyse more carefully what adolescents were doing in the best of their written stories, among the first thing that struck us were the profound differences in developmental maturity. On the written evidence he and I have seen so far, we might guess that roughly half our sixteen-year-olds have moved little, if at all, beyond that shrewd, amused observation of surfaces I enjoyed with my eleven-yearolds. Does that matter? I suggest it does. Let's look at a typical example. The Outcast I have got a friend and his name is les he comes up to his Grans every week and he works at the Back of the Kelvin flats he is 17 years old we go to the baths every week and one week we went one Girl kept her eyes on les and I knew it but les didnt after a bit I told him about the Girl and he went red all of a sudden and showing off he started throwing me about in the water and Ducking me after everything he did he looked at the girl so I thought that I should go over and ask the Girl if she would go out with him and she said yes then I went Back over and asked les I had already told him that she said yes and he said he didnt know and went back in the water and started showing off again throwing me in the water he was ducking me and he was still red and he was blushing then it was time for me and les to go out, he wasnt really Bothered about the Girl so we went home. Well, I can enjoy this story, that's certain, and take pleasure in its author's achievements. So Les went red all of a sudden did he! And then he turned on you! Yes, it does sound like a kind of 'showing off' when he starts to throw you and duck you, and then - 'after everything he did' - look up at the girl. You're right on th mark, I feel sure. So I wonder, you know, what was going through his mind all that time! And when he said at the end he 'wasn't really bothered': can you imagine what he was actually feeling or saying to himself inside? As you see from my imaginary response to the student (another of those little prefiguring dramas we construct), I want to move on from here, to use this embryonic story as a launch-pad for a deeper

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imaginative probing. A lot of adolescent feeling (a lot of adult feeling, if we're honest) is muddling, ambiguous, complex- and therefore hard to put into words without grossly oversimplifying. So we need the flexible, improvising medium of talk if we're to help students feel their way into the possibility of verbalizing it. Once they've had that chance regularly, I believe, the embarrassments of adolescence become material for a new kind of story. Here's part of the opening of another boy-meets-girl fable. John and Steve are at the Youth Club, with nothing to do, staring at the wall. Two girls walk in, good looking: 'Wonder what their names are', I said enquiringly. 'Come on lets find out', was John's answer to that. John was not very talkative when it came to girls so I could see I was the one who would have to do all the talking on our part. So I started the conversation with the girls by asking them if they wanted a drink, but then I felt a little bit stupid when I saw that they already had drinks. But I pretended not to notice and they replied, 'No, thanks.' The girls had different coloured hair and one was a little smaller than the other but they both looked the same other wise. Our first advance on them did not seem to work, so I interrupted their conversation once more and asked their names. The taller of the two answered my question. 'My name's Julie and my friend's name is Carol, whats your names?' 'My name's Steve and this is John.' Just then the lights in the Youth Club flickered which was the sign that the Youth Club was about to close. The two girls were just about to leave the bar, so I asked them if we could walk them home, they both smiled and said 'Yes.' But as they answered I wondered what I had done, what if they lived miles away, So I quickly said. 'Where do you live?' Julie answered and said, 'No far we only live on the Manor.' I felt a bit of relief as it was not too far from where John and I lived. So we set off from the Youth Club, with the two girls walking in front of us.

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What is represented here is not just a change in story-telling, I believe: it is a shift in consciousness. Let's stand back again for a moment to consider precisely what is going on. We don't learn much about the two girls - the other - but, as readers, we are getting into a new relationship with the narrator. His hindsight understanding of the rather comic side to the 'first advance' and of the problems of constructing a 'conversation' out of thin air is the central focus. As it happens, this enlargement of the narrator's role is achieved at a cost, on this occasion: the cool observation of the surface of life has evaporated at times. (But isn't this typical of what occurs when we first move from an area of familiar control to a new territory?) Building on the narrator's role, then, may be a key to the profound shift in consciousness that we are seeking to foster. If so, can't modern theory of narrative come to our assistance? I am thinking of what people from Wayne Booth to Horst Ruthrof have explored.3 Most of our 11-12-year-olds let the actions speak for themselves, and maintain a discreet (even ironic) distance from what's going on in the mind. It's a Hemingway phase in narrative — brilliantly recaptured by the mature artist, I believe, in the Nick stories. But for many adolescents, what's needed is a narrative stance that (ideally) zooms in closer to one or more of the characters, is privy to their thoughts and fragmentary inner narratives, and can even interpret their stumbling moves in the plot. Now when Les Stratta and I turned to the best examples of imaginary stories by 15- to 17-year-olds, this is precisely what we uncovered - quite by accident, apparently- in the representative folders chosen by other teachers. Some of those stories (and they tended to be the more elementary) chose a first person narrator and focused on a crucial inner moment— a soldier who's been shot and rushed into a field hospital, ruminating alone in a cold ward about what might have happened; a blind girl, who's had an operation that might restore her sight, experiencing the moment when the bandages are removed. The other stories (and they happened to include the most sophisticated) chose a third person narrator who was empathically linked to the central character. On the other hand, and it has to be acknowledged even in passing, we also found many stories that failed, principally because they never found a focus. It's important, then, to consider with our senior students the

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choice and stance of the narrator, and the opportunities thus set up in their stories based on personal or imaginary experiences. Equally, I assume, it's important for each English department to consider much more explicitly how the narrator is operating in the stories that are chosen for reading in class. Television and film, the popular literature students are soaked in, tend to cut out the narrator in the main, we need to remember, so in school we have to be particularly aware of the riches that the narrator's role can offer. I'm speaking, you understand, of opening up the possibilities of unconscious emulation, not teacher-imposed imitation. Equally, I'm saying that, given the way narrative expresses and conveys profound changes in human consciousness, it's time we considered and analysed the tacit course in narrative that we offer in English lessons between twelve and eighteen - and potentially beyond. Thus, at a deeper level aren't there bound to be connections between the stories we tell based on personal experience, the imaginary stories that well up out of our unconscious, and the stories that move us as we listen, or watch, or read them to ourselves? It seems likely, doesn't it, and yet difficult to prove. However, in the course of our joint work, Les Stratta and I have stumbled on some very suggestive evidence. Looking back through all the pieces I've quoted so far, I could show that in the main they are based on an oral tradition of story-telling. This is not surprising: after all, you start as a child telling stories, and when you are up against the demands of the new written medium, it is not surprising if you hold on to the methods of planning and telling already learnt in speech.4 Even at sixteen most personal stories keep to this base, we have found. But for a minority a change has occurred: the forms and rhythms of the story have a literary base. What this seems to imply is that aspects of the literary tradition (for better and worse) have become so internalized that they are felt to be part of the personal voice, for writing at least. Is this a sign of a further transformation in consciousness? I think we need to consider that very carefully — because of all it might imply for literary studies. There are strange contradictions in our practice. Thus, I've said that colleagues in the universities are opening up new frontiers for us in the discussion of narrative. Yet, ironically, as things are at present, few if any university students of literature are ever asked to write narrative themselves. When you think of it,

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that's surely very odd! They are studying a heritage of stories, but if their essay is 'mere narrative' they can expect it to be thrown out. I would prefer to think of an inheritance as something you put to use. After all, is literary narrative so simple? In Dickens? In George Eliot? In Joyce? Last year at the CCTE Saskatoon conference, I tried to suggest that a student who became the omniscient narrator for the scene between Polixenes and Camillo in The Winter's Tale, Act I, was actually being amazingly- but properlyambitious. I mean, would you like to interweave the narrative into dialogue by Shakespeare! Yet until we are capable of doing thatof inferring those actions and inner events from signs in the dialogue- I don't see how our further interpretative abstractions can have much weight. What I mean is this: the quality of the creative words in which we communicate lived-through experience (including the lived-through experience of a poem) is logically prior to and in part determines the quality of any abstracted interpretation. I have already begun to look into the implications of this argument in the course of a research into evidence of response to literature 5 and I believe it needs to be taken further. In the interim, there are things that English teachers in schools and universities might work on together; a priority, I would say, is to consider seriously the personal and imaginary stories written by pre-university students. I predict that they will find in such pieces abundant evidence of the tacit lessons a student has already learned from literature - and thus of qualities s/he can already bring to the reading of literary texts. In the time available today, let's take one such story and look at an opening section. Reality He peered over the landscape of rooftops and chimneys amid the early morning mist and smoke; the common house sparrow chattered on the roof as the first traffic moved in the street below. He wished that he could be back home, he still called it home even after six months in the city. At this time in the morning he would be eating his porridge, that had been on the peat stove since his father had gone out to milk their few cows. His mother would be rocking gently in her chair, knitting away and every so often dipping into her bag for another colour of wool, regular as

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the clock that stood on the shelf over the fire. The smell of peat smoke would fill the room and it would be warm, though outside the wind howled and the bay was filled with white horses rushing at the beach and the rocks. Here in the City the kitchen was a bare white room they shared with the family on the landing below. Here he still got his porridge though it only stood for ten minutes on the gas ring and the oats came out of a packet bought from a shop. At 8 o'clock he ran down the four flights of stairs, wishing that there were no stairs as there had been at home; and he ran across the road between the cars to catch a bus, a double decker as always. Usually he went upstairs to get a different view of everything, there had only been single decked buses at home and even they only came once in the day. Today he was going to pretend, pretend that he was home, that the bus was going along narrow roads across the heather or by the sea. It was no use, the people around him were all strangers and outside no hills and sea but tall buildings lining the streets and cars, lorries and buses all determinedly polluting the air. Always noise and only more noise, at home there had been noise too, but it was the sound of the sea, the wind and sea birds pestering the fishing boats. At a quarter to nine he walked into school, only one small boy among so many others. He hated school. At home there had been twenty children in the village school aged between five and fifteen. When winter came and they were snowed up for weeks at a time, only those who lived in the village went to school, and at harvest time no one at all went as even the Teacher joined in the harvesting. Now he was in a class of forty children all the same age as himself and he had to go to school five days a week, come rain or snow. Here, as you see, we have a narrator (a girl as it happens) who's empathically close to a young boy. It's an important choice because it allows her to interpret and articulate things that may still be subconscious in her protagonist. Come to think of it, that's a fascinating kind of relationship in life as well as in art, isn't it? (Think of parents and children, older and younger siblings . . .). It's characteristic of this story that the 'events' in the immediate present are apparently trivial: looking out of a window, getting porridge, running downstairs, catching a bus. What imbues them

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with significance is the past, their dislocation from it, and the mood that engenders. To communicate that, the writer has to catch a rhythm and suggest tugs and shifts in it. Listen to the opening again: He peered over the landscape of rooftops and chimneys amid the early morning mist and smoke; the common house sparrow chattered on the roof as the first traffic moved in the street below. He wished that he could be back home. A new, contrasting image emerges from the boy's imagination. It has to imply succinctly a world in the past. But more than that. The ebb and flow of images, past and present, have to suggest a discordance in the heart - a flow of feeling, not an externally perceived contrast. It's a very big demand, imaginatively. Finally, in this section, 'he hated school' - the shortest sentence so far — has to flare up suddenly and warn us that beneath the brooding and nostalgia, other things may be smouldering. These and many other details tell me about the student's acquaintance with the resources of language for such purposes, and the ambitions she has internalized from her reading. As the story unrolls, there is a sequence where the boy is back on the Island, among his friends, telling them - and telling himself — stories about what it will be like in the city. Their avid dreaming encourages at each turn simple betrayals of the imagination. Only one question jars, as he recollects it and perceives (for the first time perhaps) how truth-seeking it was. And that brings him back to the present with the shock. It would be fascinating, wouldn't it, to know the books this student had been reading! Whatever they were, I am not surprised by her theme - the uses and abuses of imagination. It is a favourite one in literature, as Barbara Hardy wonderfully showed us in a NATE conference lecture two years ago. But I do think this girl has found a way to use her inheritance, for her own purposes. Perhaps this is the point to stand back and say that, for all its power in an audience such as the present one, the tradition of deepening the conscious awareness of inner life and the other is a special product of western Europe. The story of the schooling of consciousness is still fragmentary. 6 It has taken many different forms: the institution of compulsory private confession after the

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great Church Council of 1216; the self-searching and selfexposing prayers of the puritans from the 16th century on (including the new notion of diaries); and more recently a further transformation on the psychoanalyst's couch. There are many societies and cultures untouched by that schooling, for whom it is alien; and they have their rights. All the more reason, then, why we should look much more closely at the contribution the English department makes - and might make - to that schooling. We are teaching the construction of narratives. We are teaching the reading of narrative, and response to it. It may be a much more important task than we dreamed because of the tacit links with the inner stories we are telling every day of our lives. So we need to look at it, together. NOTES 1. For evidence of staging points in the development of personal narratives see 'A Policy for Writers 9-12', Language Development Unit, Bretton Hall College (Wakefield, 1982). Bereiter & Scardamalia have a useful hypothesis on the difficulties of controlling the written medium in the elementary years in Learning to Write, ed. Freedman, Pringle & Yalden (London, 1983). 2. Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners (London, 1975). 3. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961); Horst Ruthrof, The Reader's Construction of Narratives (London, 1981); Jim Moffett's work from the 1950s on has been very stimulating, especially his recent Active Voice (London, 1981). 4. For a more detailed analysis of structures in spoken narratives see Eisikovits & Dixon (Sydney, 1982). 5. John Dixon & John Browne, Responses to Literature: What Is Being Assessed? 1984/5, NATE, 49 Broomgrove Rd., Sheffield. 6. For many ideas in the background to this article I owe a great deal to the recent researches of my friend Talal Asad, of the University of Hull.

9

What Is Language for?: a Functional View of the Language Arts MARTHA KING

Whatever our views about language- strict or liberal, traditional or progressive - it is abundantly clear that language is at the centre of all of the activities we connect with school and learning. Children who succeed in school generally are those who can use language effectively to ask questions, argue a point, express their personal views and to establish relationships with others. Those who have difficulty usually suffer from some kind of language failure. Sometimes it is failure in communication between pupils, teachers and pupils or teachers and parents. Sometimes it is failure of children to make the transitions from speech to reading and writing. Often it is the failure of both teachers and pupils to link the ideas expressed in textbooks to the reality children know. Whatever the reasons, children's success and failure in school is bound up in the way they use language to share meanings with others (teachers, peers, authors of learning materials) in the process of education. Yet, the role of language in education is seldom given the special emphasis in teacher education accorded other disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy and sociology, that are considered foundations. Although we go about talking, listening, reading and writing every waking hour in order to transact the most crucial and trivial events of our lives, we take language for granted. If we were to reflect on our uses of language over just the past twenty-four hours, we would be surprised at the range and variety of uses: the brief ritualistic and instrumental utterance associated with breakfast and starting the day, instructions to children about 158

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what to wear or how to behave, a note to the milkman, a shopping list, a glance at the newspaper. As the day unfolds, depending on our work, responsibilities and social obligations, language is used to relate to others, to share an idea, to express or receive a point-of-view or complete a financial transaction. We read for pleasure, to get information or to escape boredom, and write to understand, maintain personal relationships, and sometimes for profit and professional recognition. Language serves us well - to request, implore, admonish, explain or express affection. But it is more than our chief medium of exchange; it is also the primary means by which we represent and organize experience in our own minds. But what about children in school? How do they use language? Many find their opportunities are extremely limited. The classroom may be formally arranged and children expected to be quiet and to talk only when called upon by their teacher to participate in a lesson which she is conducting. Even in classes for beginners, much of the language teaching is concerned with aspects of the language itself, i.e. how to talk about letters and words or to speak in complete sentences. Following a 'grandparents' day' visit to school, the grandmother of a first grader told me that her grandson '. . . simply doesn't listen to the teacher'. Worried about his progress in school, she described the English lesson which was designed to get children to respond to questions 'in complete sentences'. Addressing children in turn, the teacher asked about everyday matters, such as, 'Mary, do you like to come to school?' 'Will you come to school tomorrow?' The children were expected to reply with 'Yes, I like to come to school.' When eventually the grandson's turn came, the teacher asked, 'Clint, do you like to come to school?' Clint, who was busy drawing pictures of dinosaurs, replied, 'Sometimes', and continued to work on the picture. The teacher tried again, 'Clint, do you like to read?' Again, Clint replied, 'Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't.' The example raises several questions about the teacher's understanding of language learning, the child's awareness of his own language use, and the expectations of the school. Obviously, he had listened to the teacher because he answered her honestly and sufficiently; but how much awareness of language itself did he have? Was he able to hear and respond appropriately when asked

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to engage in some special language feat? Was he learning to cope with language as it is used in school? As a way of sharing my reactions, I asked the grandmother, 'Lois, do you like to read?' She laughingly responded with 'Sometimes', recognizing that her answer, like that of her grandson, was the natural way to talk. What was the English lesson for for Clint? An exercise, a non-essential, something peripheral which he needed to tolerate in order to get along in school? His home experiences with talk been quite different. He had used language for very practical and personal purposes: to obtain the material things he wanted, to get attention, and sometimes to create imaginative worlds as he built a space station and pretended to be an astronaut. Discrepancy in language knowledge and language My concern is over the discrepancy between what is known about language and language learning in this decade and the way language is used and taught in primary schools. While language studies overwhelmingly point to the holistic and meaning-centred nature of language learning, much of the language teaching in school continues to focus on teaching about parts in the forms of sentences, paragraphs, words and letters. This emphasis may be due in part to early studies in linguistics that were concerned primarily with analysing the structure of English; some undoubtedly is related to the reductionists' views of learning that have dominated teaching and publishing during most of this century; and surely some rests with teachers themselves who have not consistently sought in recent years new information about language- or teaching. Perhaps most influential is the simple fact that the language concepts which have the greatest relevance for education are extremely complex and difficult to implement; they often require global rather than piecemeal translation and major shifts in thinking about the outcomes of education, the curriculum and teaching practices. Admittedly, countries in the Englishspeaking world vary greatly in regard to the use of new language knowledge in education. Some, less caught up in reductionist concepts of learning than others, continue to give more attention to children's natural ways of learning. Fortunately, schools within countries vary, too, as do teachers within schools and school systems. It is these teachers and schools that provide the optimism and models for improved practice just as linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists furnish much of the needed research and conceptual knowledge. The application of linguistics research to education has been a

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mixed blessing. The work in the 1940s and 1950s that centred on descriptions of English, with particular attention to phonology and morphology, were essential to the field, but the applications to education provided new fuel for the smoldering fires within the back-to-phonics movement and for a brief moment brought a new 'descriptive' grammar into the elementary schools. Chomsky's revolutionary generative/transformational theory, on the other hand, and especially the research into language that followed in its wake, had much to offer education. Chomsky's theory made a clear break away from prevailing behaviourists' views and described language use as a dynamic creative process. Human beings were portrayed as having a special language competence, a tacit ability to abstract and apply the rules that govern language production. But the concepts were abstract and difficult and applications to education were narrow, focusing primarily on syntax and transformational grammar. Elementary school teachers, who generally had encountered very little language study in their professional preparation, found it all rather bewildering. These two periods in linguistics, nonetheless, made an impact on language teaching - alas, all too often in the direction of more emphasis on teaching the form and structure of English. Even those teachers who had a strong progressive philosophy and commitment to active meaningful learning felt obliged to turn more and more attention to teaching about language, especially its grammatical form, leaving less time in the curriculum for using language for genuine purposes. As a result, language has been increasingly studied as an object outside meaningful contexts, making learning more difficult and evaluation of products more popular. All this occurred at a time when schools were facing an unprecedented rise in enrollments, great shifts in student populations and wide diversity in the languages and cultures of the new clientele. Considering the linguistic views that were prevalent in the 1960s and early 1970s, it is not surprising that notions of language deficit were readily embraced. What is language for?

Children's first contact with language is encountered in the close relationships with those who care for them; so they come to know what language is as they experience what it does for them. Even before they have learned words, Michael Halliday claims, infants organize their sound system to respond to others and communicate their basic needs. Born into the social world of the family, babies' early experiences of language are organized

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around the routine social functions of the home- feeding, bathing, dressing, family affection, bedtime rituals, and parental responses to their signals of pleasure or pain. The infants respond, interact with their caregivers and around nine months organize a meaning system of four elements of sounds and gestures which they use to communicate their intentions: to get what they want, to regulate the behaviour of others, to interact or relate to someone, and to express themselves as persons. As children gain experience, language functions in new ways: to find out and to imagine. But for these activities they need words - to ask questions, 'Wha' dat?,' and to check their knowledge, 'Dis a book?' or simply 'Book?' with rising intonation. With rapid growth in vocabulary that occurs during the second year, there is a consolidation of early language uses into two superordinate functions which Halliday has defined as pragmatic, language for relating oneself to others, and mathetic, or using language to learn. As uses of language within these intertwined functions expand and talk becomes the major channel of communication between children and adults, children gradually develop the syntactic structures to fulfil their growing needs. Dialogue with adults about shared experiences is a vital part of children's transition to the adult system of language. Constructing a coherent conversation with another person requires that children link into meanings of their conversational partners, attend to words out of immediate context and use approximate grammatical forms. The adult system encompasses in abstract form the two earlier categories of functions and includes a third, a textual function, which represents one's language resources for creating oral and written texts, an ability children demonstrate when they engage in extended dialogue. Although their language is still developing, it serves children coming to school as it does adults: (i)

to relate to others, an interpersonal function, which embraces all of those uses of language for participating, relating oneself to others, including the use of particular communication rules to express personal feelings, values and attitudes toward others and in various ways reveal self; (ii) to learn, the ideational function incorporates language uses for thinking, organizing and expressing experiences, both of the real world and the inner world of one's own consciousness;

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(iii) to generate the text, the textual function, or the ability to use words, sentences and other language options to construct spoken or written statements that are coherent within themselves and within the context-of-situation (Halliday, 1975). Children's continued development in school will depend on their opportunities to use oral and written language for an increasing range of valid purposes in which they relate to others and encounter new experiences and ideas. At home shared experiences within the family helped to clothe children's utterances with meaning; but when they move from home to play groups or school, children face new communicative demands. They must speak more explicitly and tell about themselves, their families and past experiences without the support of a shared environment or an adult who is familiar with their experience. Joan Tough, who has studied children at home and after school entry, observed that most children can use language to fulfill their immediate needs, but differ in their abilities to use language for other purposes that are crucial both to learning and relating to others. She found, for example, that some children in the early years of school had difficulty using language to (1) recall and express their own relevant experiences; (2) make associations between incidents, to analyse, anticipate and predict; (3) collaborate with others; and (4) move away from immediate concrete play experiences to project into the interests and experiences of others. Allowing for the influence of cultural, cognitive and experiential differences among children and between teachers and children in interpreting shared experiences, Tough's research points to aspects of children's language use that deserve greater attention in school. Success depends, not on direct teaching of specific functions, but on involving children in worthwhile learning activities that call for using language for authentic purposes, as I believe are illustrated in the following examples. What is language for - to 'do' and to 'make'?

The first example comes from kindergarten children attending a suburban school. Surrounding the classroom, on window sills, book shelves, and other available spaces were huge fierce-looking creatures reminiscent of Sendak's Wild Things. The children had made them - all in different grotesque shapes - from large sheets of wrapping paper, fastened together around the edges and stuffed with crumpled newspapers. The forms, colours and external

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features of the monsters varied greatly, reflecting the imaginations and artistic skills of their creators. Attached to each one was a typewritten message, the teacher's transcription of a child's dictated story about the monster he or she had created. One example will show how closely related their imaginations were to their own reality. The Monster Crazy Molly This monster lives in a cave and eats mud. He came from the moon and I am a million years old. I move very slow and have a good personality. I like NIKE shoes and I drink bugjuice. I am funny because I eat markers too. The writing here, a culmination of a project which the children obviously had enjoyed, provided an opportunity for them to tell about their creatures, to imagine and embellish their work. The purpose was primarily presentational, to make something as a part of the artist's display. In another instance, these school beginners were expected to use writing for very practical purposes. On one occasion, the teacher asked the children to bring a pencil and come sit around a large chart that contained a list of items needed for their next day's work. When all were assembled with pencils and clipboards, the teacher distributed strips of unlined, note-size paper and instructed the children to write their names on the paper. Then she reviewed with them the list which they had compiled earlier and said, 'Now write a note to remind you of what you are to bring tomorrow.' To cries of 'I can't write', from some children, she insisted that they put down something 'to help them remember'. Beside each item (e.g. Rr:Ribbon) on the chart, was the name of the child who had agreed to be responsible for it. The children weren't expected to copy, but to write some thing to remind them. Some did try to copy letters or words, others made notations of sounds (r b n) and a few made letter-like shapes and drew a picture. Exactly how they wrote in this instance was of less importance than the fact that they were learning about the functions of written language. They were learning to use writing, as adults do, and as they ordinarily used oral language - to get something done. The real need to write, the proper 'note' paper, the teacher's support and the emphasis on 'Write whatever will help you to remember', were all centred on the purpose and content of the

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message. This was not a 'practice writing your letters' exercise. What is language for - to find out what things are? Children not only learn language (as the five-year-olds above were learning the written code), they also learn through language. A group of nine- and ten-year-olds who live in a low-income housing estate located on the outskirts of London (England) provide my next example. Their school is adjacent to an open

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field, a parkland and habitat for many kinds of animals and birds, providing new experiences for many of the children who recently had come from the central city. The children thoroughly enjoyed frequent excursions into the reserve to explore the wildlife. They discovered many different kinds of birds and birdwatching became a fascination. Several children began to make systematic observations as the birds flew down to the birdfeeder built outside their classroom window. Two boys became especially interested in the flight patterns of more than a dozen birds. Nathan's record is reproduced in the figure. As they observed and made separate records of their observations, the boys discussed the variety of movements - the speed and rhythms of the flight patterns; they consulted books for more information; and then they consolidated their information into a written record. Nathan wrote, Bird Watching: Speed of the Wings The crow's wings begins with a slow beat then he glides then he goes on like this threw his flight. The black bird does quite fast beats The sparrow swoops and beats The wood pigeon starts with a quick beat then looses control. Starling: gentle beats swooping up and down Jay quick beats threw his flight Kestrel: very quick beats and hovers and glides. Song thrush: quite slow beats and glides softly Great tit: swoops up and down sharply Swallow: swoops up and down glides with beat Skylark starts with circular glide, beating his wings swooping up and down Nuthatch glides with soft beats Wren swoops with soft beats Gull fast going out of control House sparrow swoops quick beats Dunnock out of control swoops Neither Ray nor Nathan had set out to write about the flight of birds, but the general learning procedures in the classroom, which included sketching, making notes and writing up observations, made this a natural follow-up. The repeated and careful observations, use of reference materials and discussions with their teacher and peers, heightened their interest and led to greater precision in their choice of words. All of these activities stretched the boys' language competence and helped them to make the new experi-

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ence part of their personal knowing. As they sketched and talked about the variation in flight patterns, Nathan and his friend were using language to learn; but when they organized their observations into written words, they were attending to and learning about language itself. What is language for — discovering what things mean?

One of the reasons children fail in school is that they have difficulty in disembedding meaning from the language in which it is written or spoken. Often they don't have the concepts needed to understand a passage or to solve a problem in informational material, or to breathe into life the characters and events in a story. It is much easier, of course, when children are highly motivated to understand and are somewhat familiar with the content of the written text. It also is easier when they are aware of the structure and other conventions typically used to build meaning in a particular kind of written discourse. Not long ago, I visited a class of eight- and nine-year-olds who were learning a great deal about one genre of literature while they actually were engrossed in the study of giants. The whole class was organized into groups of three to investigate giants as they are portrayed in different versions of familiar folktales, such as those about Fin M'Coul, Molly Whuppie, the Little Tailor and Jack-and-the-Bean Stalk. Their work involved reading the stories (some of which had been read by their teacher), discussing the tales and searching the various texts for similarities and differences in the stories. Each child was making a chart of interesting elements found in his or her story related to the setting, the main characters and the tasks they had to perform, as well as the magical elements or trickery employed by authors. It was the first time in the new school year that the children had been expected to collaborate on a substantial project and they were working well, sharing what they were finding and discussing how they would organize and represent their information to their class. The children were not only talking and writing about their studies, but also using art and drama to represent their impressions of particular characters, unusual settings and magical or symbolic objects. The girls studying Molly Whuppie, for example, were making paper chains to represent the chains of straw and gold the giant tied around the necks of his victims. Three boys, working with the 'Little Tailor' tales, made and embroidered symbolic belts and breast plates. All were eager to talk about their research and share their

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discoveries, such as the fact that Fin M'Coul's wife, Oonaugh, is not mentioned in one version but is the main character in another tale which is told from her point of view. Those who had read illustrated versions of the stories were noticing and comparing the way different artists chose to illustrate the story. One child discovered that Tomie de Paola 'liked to use many of the same colours in all of his illustrations' and then quickly obtained two or three of his recent picture books to lay alongside his illustrated version of Fin M'Coul to make her point. The way the various authors used language to tell the stories caught the children's attention, too, and they tried to imitate the giants' habitual sayings, uttering gruffly, 'Woe betide ye, Molly Whuppie, if ye ever come back', and bragging as the Little Tailor to 'Kill seven at one blow!' The study taxed the children's language skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening as they sought to better understand the inner workings of the tales. While the focus of their work was on the main characters and actions in the stories, they were discovering too that writers and illustrators tell the same folktale in many different ways, some of which they found more appealing than others. One child struggled to express her preference for the Grimm Brothers' version of one of the tales: "It's better, there's more to it, um more happenings, more tasks.' It was a superb study for the new school year because it gave the children a much needed opportunity to learn about each other and to find for themselves ways of working together. The learning task was well defined, the books became the common ground for exploration and discussion, but the children could decide for themselves how they would work, organize and present to others the special meanings they had gleaned from their research. While it was a joint effort with many common experiences, each child was able to represent that experience to him or herself in a highly personal way. In the process the children were tacitly learning a great deal about one genre of literature that will help to form their concepts and influence their future enjoyment and interpretation of other stories. What is language for - constructing reality?

We use language to communicate with others and to learn, not only about the external world, but about the internal world of our own consciousness too. James Britton, perhaps more than anyone in recent years, has helped us to understand how language functions in learning. He has selected from and synthesized ideas

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across disciplines and from scholars, such as Sapir, Langer, Bruner, Vygotsky and Kelly, to clarify the role of language both in representing experience and in organizing and storing representations made in other modes. Each of us builds a personal world, he explains, not only because the world had treated us differently, but also because each of us represents to ourselves what happens differently. We represent experience in images, thoughts, or various artistic forms, but as Vygotsky has brilliantly explained, language is the medium by which that experience is organized in memory. Bruner has emphasized that self, too, is a construction, a result of action and symbolization within one's life situation. One of the most impressive stories of children using writing to symbolize themselves and their life situation is told in an unforgettable book by Carol Steedman. It is a story within a story arguing that writing over two centuries has helped young girls to develop an awareness of their status and their future roles as women. As a primary school teacher in England, Steedman observed three working-class girls for four days as they collaborated to write a story, which they called The Tidy House. This first story, which became the title of Steed man's book, is about a house and a life the girls expect they will one day live. It portrays their impressions of their own urban neighbourhood, of love, sex, marriage, birth, motherhood, child rearing and generally the pattern of adult life they project for themselves. The children were familiar with the concept of authorship, Steedman claims, because she read a wide range of literature to them. They also were accustomed to writing extended stories and producing books. The story is about two young couples: Jamie and Jason, who have one child (Carl) at the beginning of the story and another during the narrative; and Mark and Jo, who become parents of twins as the story unfolds. The couples frequently visit back and forth, the children have birthdays, the women go shopping and everyone has tea. The three authors write It was a lovely tea. Thank you. Come again soon. Give nay love to Mum and Dad. We will. Bye. See you soon.

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The couples talk about having children: At the night Jo and Mark wanted a baby. Mark agreed to this. They sat up all night kissing, Kissing Jo all night. Jo produces twins and Jamie gives birth to Scott and the new children bring about a change in family life which is dealt with in the final chapter, titled 'The Tidy House That Was No More'. Here the authors present their views of sibling rivalry, quarrelling and parent child-rearing practices. For example, When he (the new baby) was only four, he and Carl were always fighting. But Darren never got the blame. When Carl was nine, near the ages of the authors, he had few friends in school and sometimes got into fights. The girls write giving his mother's response to Carl's plea for sympathy: 'You stick up for yourself.' Steedman, a social historian, analyses the writing in terms of the way it served to help the girls to understand themselves in their working-class world. She compares their plight and view of themselves to similar oral accounts of working-class girls of the nineteenth century. She then contrasts these insights with information about middle-class girls that has been preserved in diaries kept by such well-known children as the Coleridge sisters, Elizabeth Barrett and the Alcott sisters. Common to both classes was the young authors' general acceptance of life as they found it and a projection of themselves into womanhood in very similar circumstances. But for the middle-class girls a century ago and for the working-class girls today, writing about their existence made a difference: it functioned as an important means to selfunderstanding. Steedman writes that Elizabeth Barrett knew that she had created herself in the act of writing, and that The Tidy House authors used writing to distance themselves from their personal reality. In composing, they could 'play with that reality and notice things that might otherwise have escaped them'. They could explore their feelings about motherhood and compose their

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resentful statements about mothering, child care and the future that awaited them. For these young authors, Steedman believes, the story operated as a means of abstracting meaning away from actual circumstances, allowing them to comprehend new forms of desire by manipulating these desires in their fiction. Through their 'creative words' these working-class girls were able to explore their own consciousness and to imagine new worlds for themselves. What is language for - alienation?

Sometimes those who seem to have stellar success in language arts or English lessons suffer personal loss that is difficult to overcome or explain. One finds a kind of sadness filtering through the stories of Samoan authors who have mastered English in New Zealand schools, Welsh writers who were educated in England and of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans who have experienced similar linguistic success in American schools. In a powerful autobiography, Richard Rodriguez describes his early experiences of growing up in southern California but in a Mexican home where his most intimate early experiences were symbolized and expressed in Spanish. When he went to school, he was expected to talk and to learn in English, which he accomplished quickly, he says, because of his very strong family support. But as he became fluent in English, he also became more and more comfortable with 'Anglo' culture and found himself drifting away from his family, Spanish background, language, values and ways of thinking. He writes that he could 'no longer speak Spanish with confidence'. Long stretches of silence settled over the household and he became embarrassed when his parents spoke to him in Spanish, 'their intimate voices embracing him'. Despite great academic, professional and social success, Rodriguez confesses his loneliness; he had learned extremely well to speak and to write 'public English', but found that he could not write about himself. The images and early experiences that made up his self were shaped and remembered in Spanish and could not find release in his formal English. '. . . I used public language most of the day. I moved easily at last, a citizen in a crowded city of words'. Toward the end of the book, Rodriguez laments his sad alienation from his family and the education that took him beyond

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his roots to a life that his parents could not share. His English was well taught, he says, but what was English for — for Richard Rodriguez? What is language for - in a multicultural society?

Fortunately, we are gaining considerable insight into second language teaching, bilingual and multicultural education. We better understand how language and culture are intertwined, the relationship between language and learning and the subtle influence the dominant culture has on the classrooms with mixed ethnic and cultural populations. There is growing appreciation of the potential values in a multicultural society and the need to provide equal opportunity for all people, from whatever cultural or ethnic background. This attitude is very evident in New Zealand where resolute action is underway to restore and maintain the Maori language and culture. Some primary schools are teaching Maori as well as English and preschools have been established where only Maori is spoken. The Maori community is contributing to these efforts to increase multicultural understanding through special programmes they offer on the Marae, their own special meeting place where the Maori traditions are practiced. In London, where great diversity of culture and language exists in the primary schools, the education authority is instituting new approaches to teaching multicultural understanding and English as a second language. First, they recognize that children have a first language which is an integral part of their meanings and ways of learning; second, the goal in teaching English as a second language is to help 'children develop a positive attitude toward their bilingualism and wherever possible help them maintain and deepen their knowledge of their mother tongue'. The program gives special attention to language skills and methods of work, but within the context of first-hand experiences that involve extensive use of spoken language and collaborative work among peers. Within the regular classroom the second language learners are placed in carefully planned contexts in which the use of English is necessary. The English-speaking children help their peers to gain access to English by talking about their collaborative work. In this process, the children are able to share experiences as well as language and build a common understanding of the world that is their classroom.

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The language arts curriculum

A language arts curriculum construed from a function perspective begins with what language can do for the child, that is, how language can best serve to aid learning, foster relationships with others, and contribute to the development of a sense of'self' that is enduring and satisfying, and yet, liberating. The language learning process is social and involves interaction and collaboration with others in pursuing meaningful purposes. The content of the language arts implied in the examples ranged from personal experiences (The Tidy House authors) to particular subjects, such as environmental studies (the birdwatching episode) and literature (the study of giants). In each of these illustrations language functioned in a subsidiary role, as a means of fulfilling a particular goal. But the children were also learning language and learning about language as they were pursuing these other interests. Surely, the learners were attending to language itself as they searched for exact words and the best way to express an observation of birds or a feeling in their writing about family life. The potential content of the language arts then is broad and characterized by what Bernstein describes as weak classification and framing of the knowledge studied. The weak classification signifies open boundaries between language teaching, other curricular areas and life experiences. An array of subjects and experiences thus becomes legitimate content for the language arts. These I see as arising from three vast reservoirs of experience. The first, Life Experiences, represents all of those home and out-of-school experiences that can enrich school life and, at the same time, provide opportunities for children to develop strength in language skills by giving voice to things they know well, as was the case for The Tidy House writers. Included also in this category of experience are the interests and investigations associated with subject-matter fields, as was illustrated in the birdwatching episode. There, the subject was science and the focus was on flight patterns of birds, but a significant language outcome surely was the children's use of language to report their observations accurately and precisely. The second reservoir of content is literature — read, enjoyed, studied and shared. There should be a planned program in the elementary grades in which literature is read and appreciated for itself and children can find the time and support they need to become readers. Yet, literature should be integrated with other

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studies where it can enrich and clarify the content for the learners. In the study of folktales above, literature was the subject-matter, the focus, as it was for The Tidy House authors who were creating literature about and for themselves. In another subject, a study of the Middle Ages, for example, historical fiction might become for children the 'way in' to understanding that remote time. It is through literature that children experience both the written language - the words, metaphors, sentences and discourse structures - that they need to become writers and the images and feelings they must have if they are to write with truth and sensitivity. Language, the third reservoir of content of the language arts curriculum embodies the assumption that children learn a great deal about language as they use it to fulfill personal intentions and various school requirements. They surely will learn to talk and write in sentences and to express themselves in longer pieces of discourse, if they are given the opportunity to do so. Recent research has shown that children discover many conventions of capitalization, punctuation and spelling with very little direct teaching. As children develop confidence in oral and written language, they can give more attention to language and learn about the structure of words, sentences and larger pieces of discourse, often in texts they are reading and writing for other purposes. It is important that they understand the nature of language just as they understand basic concepts of mathematics or a science. The study of language should go beyond grammar and usage to investigations of the way language functions in the social world - to establish relationships, inform, regulate, entertain or persuade. Children should investigate the uses of language in the environment around their homes, school and neighbourhoods (how things are named, how people address each other); varieties of languages and dialects spoken in their school, community and in television programs; and language used in different kinds of texts - popular music, stories, news items or advertisements. Rich vocabulary studies can flow from these pursuits which will increase not only the children's word knowledge but also their insights about how meaning and word origins influence their spelling. An important goal of language studies should be to further pupils' understandings of language as an arbitrary, but dynamic and ever-changing, symbol system for representing

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meaning. Children should begin to understand that language functions for them in their everyday lives, that it helps them to learn and to establish themselves with others. Central to the language arts, whatever the content, is concern for children's personal and intellectual development through creative and effective language use. Ideally, these aims always are a part of the teacher's consciousness as he or she plans for learning activities. Their full achievement, however, is influenced by the way knowledge is framed, that is, the degree of control teachers have over the selection, organization and pacing of subject-matter and the extent to which they share that control with pupils. When control is shared (weak framing) pupils participate in decisions about how to approach and develop a topic, the kinds of resources to use, the people with whom they collaborate, and the potential audiences for the results of their work. These factors of course influence their language use. When students truly share responsibility in the development of a topic, it is more likely to include facets that will appeal to those from various social, cultural and academic backgrounds. Although the focus of attention may be primarily on learning about a place, a time, or a particular phenomenon, children meet new language demands as they explore the topic from different perspectives and for different purposes. Skill in language use develops as children need to (1) find out and record; (2) organize information and report; (3) discuss, reflect on and generalize learning and explain or describe situations; and (4) speculate about the way things are or might be. Exploring content through particular language modes (drama, for example) encourages elaboration and imaginative uses of language. They allow children to create new or similar situations, assume different roles, envision past and future events and test the reality they perceive in a given situation. In these circumstances children find new uses for language as they play with words and ideas to construct an oral or written text that in its wholeness expresses both their thoughts and feelings. Language arts teaching should strive to help children to become confident effective participants in the social world. They should be able to think and express their thoughts to others and to understand and evaluate what others say. They need to understand how language functions in society to promote ideas and human relationships and how it serves them personally in

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learning and building concepts of self and of the world. Finally, those of us who teach the language arts in school must remember that language is a self-generated activity, controlled by the person who expresses it. If we allow the curriculum or mode of instruction to dictate the language to be used, we will lose the power and natural language-learning strategies children have mastered before coming to school. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, B. (ed.), Class, Codes and Control (London, 1975). Britton, J., Language and Learning (London, 1970). , 'What's the Use?: a Schematic Account of Language Functions', Education Review, 23 (1971) 205-19. Bruner, J., 'The Language of Education', paper presented at the 1982 Bode Lecture (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University). Chomsky, N., Syntactic Structures (The Hague, 1957). Dixon, J., Growth through English (Huddersfield, 1967; 1975). Donaldson, M., Children's Minds (Glasgow, 1978). Goodlad, J., A Place Called School (New York, 1983). Halliday, M., Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language (London, 1975). Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R., Cohesion in English (London, 1976). Harste, J. C., Burke, C. L., Woodard, V. A., Children, Their Language and World: Initial Encounters with Print, Final Report NIE - G 79 - 0132 (University of Indiana, Education Dept., 1981). Hester, H., 'Peer Interaction in Learning English as a Second Language', Theory into Practice (Summer, 1984, in press). Kelly, G. A., A Theory of Personality (New York, 1963). Rodriguez, R., The Hunger of Memory (Boston, 1982). Steedman, C., The Tidy House (London, 1982). Tough, J., Development of Meaning (London, 1977). Vygotsky, L., Thought and Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). Vygotsky, L. S., Mind and Society: the Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). Wells, G., Learning through Interaction: the Study of Language Development (London, 1981).

10

Language, Literature and the Computer KEITH SMILLIE

'So there it is', said Pooh, when he had sung this to himself three times. 'It's come different from what I thought it would, but it's come. Now I must go and sing it to Piglet.' (A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner)

When the University of Alberta was founded in 1908 the president, Dr Henry Marshall Tory, decided that the first Faculty would be Arts and Science and appointed professors in English, Classics and Modern Languages and an assistant professor in Mathematics who was also a lecturer in Engineering. Of his appointment as professor of English, E. K. Broadus, who had recently received his doctorate at Harvard, said that 'the president of a university not yet in being, in a province which I had never heard of, in a country which I had never visited, came to Harvard and offered me a professorship of English'. Despite such an inauspicious introduction Broadus accepted the position and served the university for twenty-eight years until his death in 1936. He set standards of scholarship in English that have been maintained ever since. The Department of English, with a present academic staff of about sixty, is recognized for its teaching, scholarly publications, editing of journals and organization of national and international conferences. However, we observe all about us today a steady decline in standards of literacy and in the esteem in which good literature is held. In the 1960s and 1970s television was considered a threat to literacy, and some children spent more time in front of the television screen than they did in school. In the 1980s, in addition to television, we have to contend with the computer and other 177

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products of high technology. Video games occupy the time of many children, and some adults too, and video arcades present serious social problems. The microcomputer is invading the classroom and 'computer literacy' is becoming the educational catch phrase of the decade. Indeed, we read that 'The real world means computers. It's a place where the written word isn't as important, or won't be.' We may wonder what place a Department of English has in a world increasingly dominated by technology. It is the purpose of this chapter1 to affirm the central importance of English - the writing of English, the reading of English and the enjoyment of English - in the curriculum of the 1980s. Indeed, verbal literacy should be regarded as more important than either mathematical literacy or computer literacy, and possibly the most important skill for those students considering a career in computing. COMPUTERS AND COMPUTING The first electronic computers were developed in the United States, Great Britain and Germany during the Second World War. The first American electronic computer - the ENIAC, for Electronic Numeric Integrator and Calculator - was a huge machine which occupied a room 40 feet by 20 feet and contained 18000 vacuum tubes and 1500 relays. All of the computers built during the 1940s and early 1950s relied on vacuum tubes for their operation. Computer technology probably would not have developed much further if it had remained dependent on the vacuum tube, which was relatively slow, bulky, unreliable and generated heat which had to be dissipated. The transistor, which was developed in the late 1940s, proved to be an ideal replacement for the vacuum tube, for it was much smaller, operated at room temperature, required no warm-up period and generated very little heat. The first transistors were made separately and then wired together with the other components required in the circuit. In the mid-1950s batch processing by photolithography of many transistors on a thin wafer of crystal was developed. Thus hundreds or thousands of transistors could be made at one time although they had to be separated physically and assembled individually into circuits. In the early 1960s the integrated circuit

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was developed in which the manufacture, separation and interconnection of the transistors and other components were accomplished by a photoengraving process. The first integrated circuits had about twenty components. In 1974 there were chips less than a quarter of an inch on a side containing over twenty thousand components. In 1977 the number of components on a chip had risen to over two hundred thousand. Now approximately five hundred thousand components may be accommodated on a chip. The microcomputer of today is twenty times faster than the ENIAC, occupies one-thirty-thousandth the volume, costs oneten-thousandth as much, and may be purchased in a department store. In order that a computer carry out any task it must be provided with a set of instructions or program which is stored in its memory. The execution of a program at a speed of millions of instructions per second makes possible the astonishing applicability and versatility of the computer. Programs for the first computers were written in so-called machine language which the computer could interpret directly. Machine-language programming was a demanding task requiring a specialist who was often a mathematician or engineer. To simplify the task of programming, languages were developed so that programs could be written in an algebraic-like language which was translated into machine language by a special computer program. The development of these higher-level languages may be considered one of the great technological achievements of the mid-twentieth century. The first commercially successful and widely used language was FORTRAN, for 'formula translation', first developed by the International Business Machines Corporation in the mid-1950s. Another very popular language is BASIC, Beginners' All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which was first developed in 1964 at Dartmouth College to simplify programming for undergraduate students in the arts and humanities. Undoubtedly BASIC was one of the most important developments in computer programming in the 1960s. It is relatively easy to implement on computers, it is easy to learn and its popularity has been so great that it is almost a universal language. The language features incorporated into FORTRAN and BASIC have determined the course of much of the development of programming languages in the last twenty years.

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COMPUTERS IN THE SCHOOLS One of the most popular topics for discussion today in schools and amongst curriculum planners is computer literacy which is defined as follows in a report published by Alberta Education: 'To be computer literate one must be able to describe, demonstrate and/or discuss (critically) how computers are used; how computers do their work; how computers are programmed; how to use a computer and how computers affect our society.' Although this definition of computer literacy could have been written with more regard for verbal literacy, it is probably as good as we might expect to find at present. Regardless of the definition that is used, though, the outline of a computer literacy course shows that the students are required to have some understanding of the various components of a computer and their interaction, the history of computers, the applications of computers, the types of employment created by computers and the effect of computers on society, as well as some practical experience in computer programming and possibly in the use of the computer as a word processor. I find the proposed curriculum rather disturbing for a number of reasons. One is that there appears to be too much emphasis on technological details that are irrelevant for an introduction to computer programming or an appreciation of the use of computers. Another is that parts of the curriculum demand of the student and teacher an understanding and even wisdom that has been denied persons who have spent their adult lives working with computers. For example, we read statements such as 'The student will understand the basic applications, limitations and capabilities of computers', 'The student will appreciate the impact that computers will have on our lifestyle', and 'Propose an appropriate role for computers in society.' Finally we might ask if the comment 'Good-bye Gutenberg' that appears in one curriculum outline is meant to imply that the printed word is becoming obsolete because of the computer. However, the most disturbing aspect of courses in computer literacy is the time devoted to computer programming. The most common language is BASIC, some dialect of which is available on all computers. BASIC represents our understanding of computer programming twenty years ago. By today's standards it is a remarkably primitive language which deserves an honoured place in the history of computation rather than in the nation's schools.

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One critic has remarked that the awkwardness of expression in BASIC is similar to have to say to a child something like 'Go to the box, pick up the first apple and examine it for goodness and if it is good set it to one side, pick up the second apple and . . .' instead of the very simple statement 'Go to the box and bring back all of the good apples.' Lest this be considered an unfair comparison, we might quote the following example which appears in a reputable computing science text in a discussion of the 'analogy between human behaviour and computation': while hungry and pancakes on plate do begin Slice one pancake; while hungry and slice on plate do Eat slice end One reply to these criticisms of BASIC and similar languages is that students may be first introduced to a simple programming language, and, when they have mastered it, learn a better language. However, such a reply indicates a confusion between what is easy to learn and what is easy to use. We do not teach our children a basic English vocabulary of fifty words and a primitive grammar, and then later teach them 'real' English so they may read the classics of English literature. Indeed, since most teachers of computer literacy courses have little or no knowledge of languages other than BASIC, this comparison would be made more accurate by imagining the teaching of English by persons who knew only basic English and were not aware that the classics existed. One of the most incisive and well-reasoned critiques of BASIC has been given by Seymour Papert in his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), a book which should be read by anyone interested in computer literacy or the teaching of programming. Papert coins the phrase 'QWERTY phenomenon', derived from the arrangement of the keys on a typewriter, for the tendency of 'the first, usable, but still primitive product of a new technology to dig itself in'. And he goes on to say that we are in the 'process of digging ourselves into an anachronism by preserving practices that have no rational basis beyond their historical roots in an earlier period of technological and theoretical development'. He then gives a cogent argument against the

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use of BASIC, an argument that in my opinion teachers and educators dare not ignore.2 There has been considerable effort devoted to the use of computers to provide automated instruction in English grammar. There are many packages of programs available for microcomputers for instruction in the parts of speech, e.g. nouns, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, and in classes of nouns such as homonyms, synonyms and antonyms. The following description of the first of four lessons on nouns in a program prepared by Educational Activities Inc. of Freeport, N.Y. appears to be typical: This program gives the student practice in recognizing nouns. A test sentence appears on the screen and the student is asked whether or not a certain word will perform in the sentence as a noun. In the most challenging exercise, the student must pick the subject nouns in several sentences and type them in. Another type of package provides a paperback edition of a popular children's book, a short printed summary of the book and a set of programs that quizzes the student on the book. Two of the books that have been used are A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert O'Brien. The programs provide tests on comprehension, vocabulary, sequence of events and the names of characters and places. Such uses of the computer accomplish nothing that cannot be done better, more simply and at much less expense by conventional aids such as a blackboard, flash cards and printed handouts. However, we must not be too harsh in our judgement of the present use of microcomputers. As better programs become available and as more teachers become familiar with them, the microcomputer could become an important aid for providing the reinforcement of ideas that comes from routine drill. Computer Based Learning systems requiring a large central computer with remote terminals, such as the PLATO system developed jointly by the University of Illinois and Control Data Corporation, show considerable promise. A large collection of sophisticated programs written in an author language specifically designed for this purpose, visual terminals with high quality resolution and superior graphics, and audio and video peripherals have resulted in a system of astonishing versatility and appeal.

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The PLATO system will be used for ten of the eighteen hours of instruction in the remedial English program being established at the University of Alberta. Finally we may mention that the microcomputer has been used very effectively in some schools as a word processor. Students are much more willing to make revisions to their work since they are no longer required to rewrite whole pages or even the entire text. In addition they have the pleasure of obtaining a clean and tidy final copy regardless of the number of changes they have made. In using a word processor students are introduced to a real application of computers that is having a profound effect on the preparation and distribution of the printed word rather than to an artificial application created to make use of a computer already in the classroom. LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS The same arguments that are used for verbal literacy in any profession or business apply also to computing. Whenever one has something to say - whether it be in a paper intended for a professional journal, or in the documentation of a computer program, or in an announcement of yet another new microcomputer - he should say it clearly and concisely and in a style that is appropriate for the intended audience. Such writing will affect not only the reader but also the writer since he will have the opportunity to organize his thoughts and recognize the extent, or more often the limitations, of his knowledge of the topic. Since a very large amount of documentation appears to be required in the operation of a large academic computing facility and since hundreds or even thousands of students may be involved in computing courses, the amount of paper required for tutorial notes, laboratory exercises and other material can be overwhelming. Thus a terseness of style, the selection of short illustrative examples and the use of neat layouts can result in appreciable savings of resources. However, because of the analogies between the grammar of a natural language and of a programming language and between the learning and teaching of these languages, there are deeper reasons for persons involved in computing to have an appreciation of the structure and the writing of English. We shall consider

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these topics briefly in this section. The first successful higher-level programming languages such as FORTRAN and BASIC were designed and implemented to simplify the task of programming both for economic reasons and also to enable more persons to write programs. The design of FORTRAN was subordinated to the efficiency in terms of computer time of the resulting programs, and the language itself was made up as the work progressed. However, it was soon realized that programming languages had many of the properties of natural languages and had both syntax and semantics. The first published formal description of the syntax of a programming language (Naur et al. [1963]) has had a profound influence on the development and description of programming languages. (One scientist has remarked that this report is the most incomprehensible piece of meaningful English prose ever written.) There are interesting comparisons between the various objects in a programming language and the parts of speech in English. For example, variable names and the positive integers correspond to proper nouns, while the negative integers and the rational, irrational and complex numbers are analogous to abstract nouns. The name of a program or function acts as a verb- in fact, the word 'function' comes from the Latinfungi, 'to perform'. The objects that a function operates upon are known as 'arguments', and it is interesting to note that the word 'argument' may mean 'subject' or 'topic'. Finally, in some programming languages there are constructs corresponding to adverbs which modify the meaning or extent of a function. A very simple example may be helpful. If 12.85 3.95 18.35 7.80 is a list of book prices, then the expression

sum 12.85 3.95 18.35 7.80, which corresponds to an imperative sentence, gives the sum 42.95 of these prices, and the expression

Total gets sum 12.85 3.95 18.35 7.80 assigns this value to the variable Total. The list of book prices corresponds to a noun or a list of nouns, the operation sum corresponds to a verb, and the variable Total to a noun. Finally, if the variable All prices is a list in which each item is a list of prices, then the expression

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EACH sum All prices gives the sum of each list of book prices, and the construct EACH which applies the function sum to each list in All prices acts as an adverb. Since many of the constructs of English may be found in programming languages, we shall make a few remarks on the learning and teaching of English so that we may draw some parallels with the teaching of programming. We may distinguish three phases in the learning of a native language: an informal phase in which the child learns to use single words, a formal phase in which the child learns to use a grammatically correct sentence structure without being aware of any rules of grammar, and, after he has learned to read, an analytic phase in which the elements of grammar are taught. In a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly (1981), Bruno Bettelheim and K. Zelan give an incisive criticism of primers and other reading material for young children and the teaching of reading in America today. The authors argue that the reason that some children have difficulty learning to read and why many children do not like reading is that the books from which they learn are dull and emphasize repetition and rote learning. 'If, on the contrary,' they say, 'a child were taught new skills as they became necessary to understand a worthwhile text, the empty achievement "Now I can decode some words" would give way to the much more satisfying recognition "Now I am reading something that adds to my life." From the start, reading lessons should nourish the child's spontaneous desire to read books by himself.'3 Unfortunately, most writers of programming texts and teachers of programming appear to have ignored the lessons that may be gained from the learning of English. Many introductions to programming emphasize the structure and syntax of programming languages, and have examples as artificial and as uninteresting as the stories found in the school primers. Of course, there are exceptions but these are in the minority. It would be worthwhile to speculate on the result of introducing the details of a programming language as they are required in a treatment of some subject of interest to the student rather than in a manner more appropriate to a course on the conjugation of verbs. J. C. McPherson makes an interesting comparison between the learning of prose and the current state of programming languages (1983). The writer remarks that a child learning to read and write

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starts with individual words and then progresses to increasingly difficult constructs. Our understanding of the design and use of programming languages, he believes, is now at the word-forming stage in which we are building a vocabulary of functions, i.e. verbs, to give precise instructions to a computer. We then link these in a harmonious manner with appropriate nouns representing the data to give expression to larger ideas. At this stage of forming a vocabulary when we are searching for suitable verbs to describe the actions to be performed on the nouns, a good dictionary such as The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language can be at least as valuable as the computer. What a refreshing contrast is this view to the one heard recently on CBC Radio that programming is 'just stringing commands together'!

COMPUTERS IN LITERATURE An understanding of the historical development of computers can provide an appreciation of some of the themes and characters in English literature just as can a knowledge of, for example, the work of Copernicus, Newton and Darwin. An example appears in Gulliver's Travels in the mechanical device used in the Academy of Lagado for the random generation of words and phrases. By means of this machine the 'most ignorant person at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, may write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, law, mathematics and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study'. The origin of this device is said to be in the work of the thirteenth-century Spanish philosopher and mystic Ramon Lull who thought that every truth of the Christian faith could be obtained by appropriate reflection on all possible combinations of a small number of basic principles. As an aid to generating these combinations Lull constructed sets of rotatable concentric wheels which may be regarded as primitive devices for performing logical operations mechanically. It is worth noting that in a recent edition of Gulliver's Travels A. L. Rowse has the following note, much of it gratuitous, about the machine in the Academy of Lagado: Here is an anticipation of the computer. In the United States examples of computer-history and computer-poetry have been produced — with results as absurd as Swift's prognostications.

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The Viet-Nam War was fought in accordance with computer calculations. It was not very successful. Of considerable interest also is the life and work of Charles Babbage, the nineteenth-century English philosopher and inventor who spent much of his life working on the design of two mechanical calculators, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. He succeeded in making a working model of the first of these devices, but the second, which embodied many of the principles of today's computers, remained unfinished at his death in 1871. Babbage quarrelled with many of his contemporariespoliticians, the Astronomer Royal and even his own craftsmen and with contemporary organizations such as the Royal Society, which he attempted to reform. Charles Dickens, who knew Babbage well, got some of his ideas for the Circumlocution Office of Little Dorrit, the government office which did nothing, from Babbage's experiences with the government, and modelled Daniel Doyce in part on Babbage. One of Babbage's collaborators to whom we owe an annotated translation of a paper prepared from Babbage's lectures was Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, who was the only child of Lord and Lady Byron. She is referred to by the poet in Childe Harold as 'Ada! sole daughter of my house and of my heart? . . .'. It was Babbage who read the couplet 'Every minute dies a man / Every minute one is born' in Tennyson's 'The Vision of Sin' and wrote to the poet: 'I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man/ And one and a sixteenth is born." ' This figure, he added, was a concession to metre since the actual value was 1.167 seconds. It is interesting to note that in editions of the poem published after 1850 the word 'moment' was used in place of'minute'. Only a very cursory knowledge of programming languages is required to see the irony, intended or otherwise, in the following excerpt of a scene from dinner in the Senior Common Room in the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost in Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels'. As I prowled round the table, about my Vice-Warden's business, Arthur Cornish, I was glad to see, was getting on well

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with Professor Aronson, the University's big man science. They were talking about Fortran, the formula and translation, in which Arthur, as a concerned with banking and investment, had a interest.

in computer language of man deeply professional

In 'To a Pocket Calculator' by James Merrill, which appeared in The New Yorker of 2 May 1983, familiarity with the use of calculators does not appear to be too helpful in understanding this poem: Quiz kid, Behavior's midget Mime or mirror, Push-button cogitation sets You racing, brow clear, up to the ninth digit, A dawn-tipped pyramid At which point enter E for Error: . . . Many entertaining examples to illustrate important computational and mathematical principles can be found in English literature. The fact that most of the examples occur in books which were written before the development of electronic computers suggests that there may be some underlying unity between these two seemingly disparate subjects. One of the richest sources of illuminating and often subtle quotations and references may be found in the writings of Lewis Carroll. Indeed an appreciation of many of the finest works in scientific literature would be incomplete without a knowledge of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. One of the most useful editions of these books for the mathematician and scientist is The Annotated Alice (1960), while The Philosopher's Alice (1977) will be of additional interest. Names play an important role in computing- the names of variables, the names of functions and the names of symbols representing functions — and it is important to distinguish carefully between them. For example, '-' is a symbol named 'bar' which is used to represent either the function 'minus' for subtraction or the function 'negative' for changing the sign of a number. This distinction may be nicely illustrated by the White Knight's song 'A-sitting on a Gate' which is called 'Ways and Means' and which has the name 'Haddocks' Eyes' which is

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called 'The Aged Aged Man'. Often words in computing are used somewhat differently, and more precisely, than they are in everyday speech. A defence of this practice is provided by Humpty Dumpty: 'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument" ', Alice objected. 'When / use a word', Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'. 'The question is', said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things'. 'The question is', said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master- that's all.' Formal logic is, of course, fundamental in computing, and the logical design of computers is an important aspect of the computing curriculum. 4 In order to introduce with a touch of levity what might appear to be a formidable topic, the following definition5 by Tweedledee may be used: 'Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.' The difference between the logical functions of'inclusive-or' and 'exclusive-or' may be illustrated by the following incident when Winnie-the-Pooh visits Rabbit: Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and jugs; and when Rabbit said, 'Honey or condensed milk with your bread?' he was so excited that he said, 'Both,' and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, 'But don't bother about the bread, please.' Rabbit may also be used to introduce the concept of an indirect proof in which the negation of the result to be established is shown to lead to a contradiction. In the episode of the Expotition to the North Pole when Pooh begins to look for the other characters to accompany Christopher Robin and himself, he meets Rabbit first:

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The Creating Word 'Hallo, Rabbit,' he said, 'is that you?' 'Let's pretend it isn't,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'

If Pooh, instead of going to the North Pole, had been interested in the Halting Problem which demonstrates the impossibility of showing that any computer program will eventually halt when executed with arbitrary data, the conversation might have been as follows: 'Hello, Rabbit,' he said, 'is it possible to show that an arbitrary program will halt when executed with arbitrary data?' 'Let's assume that it is,' said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.' Of course, in addition to the proof of the Halting Problem, Rabbit may be of assistance in proving other important results which are established in an indirect manner, such as the irrationality of the square root of 2 and the infinity of prime numbers. Although the decimal number system with the ten digits 0, 1,2, ... 9 is sufficient for arithmetic in daily life, systems to other bases are useful and even necessary when working with computers. The binary system with only the two digits 0 and 1 corresponding, say, to two voltage levels in a computer is illustrated by Alice's remark to the kitten: It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. 'If they would only purr for "yes," and mew for "no" or any rule of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?' A beautiful commentary on the difficulties presented by arithmetic in the decimal system and the advantages to some of a simple tally system (corresponding to kittens always purring) may be found in Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet Major, which takes place during the Napoleonic Wars: Behind the wall door were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and

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ones into twos. These were the miller's private calculations. There were also chalked in the same place rows and rows of strokes like open palings, representing the calculations of the grinder, who in his youthful ciphering studies had not gone as far as Arabic figures. An amusing illustration of a number system to a varying base is given by Alice as she repeats the multiplication table shortly after having fallen down the rabbit hole. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! A marginal note in Gardner's Annotated Alice gives a plausible explanation of this apparent arithmetic nonsense by assuming that four times five is twelve, the base eighteen representation of twenty, and four times six is thirteen, the base twenty-one representation of twenty-four, and so on. Some fundamental ideas in programming languages are concerned with emptiness which is analogous to the empty set which contains no items. Constructs involving some form of emptiness are essential if computer programs are to be well-behaved at boundaries characterized, for example, by lists containing no items and two-dimensional arrays in which the number of rows or columns or both is zero. The White King may be used to introduce the empty list: 'I couldn't send all of the horses, you know, because two of them are wanted in the game. And I haven't sent the two Messengers, either. They're both gone to town. Just look along the road and tell me if you can see either of them.' 'I see nobody on the road', said Alice. 'I only wish/ had such eyes', the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as / can do to see real people, by this light!' A three-dimensional array in which two of the dimensions are of zero length is referred to in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

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A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light years from end to end. One of the most interesting topics that may be illustrated by numerous literary quotations is that of self-reference, or recursion, as it is called in programming. A simple example of a recursive program is one that finds the sum of a list of numbers by adding the last number to the list of all numbers except the last. This second sum is evaluated by adding the last number in this list to the sum of all the numbers except the last. This process is continued until the list of numbers to be summed is empty when its sum is zero. Since recursion is often presented as a difficult concept, examples illustrating its simplicity are most helpful. The Red King provides one example since Alice is 'dreaming of the Red King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the Red King. . . .' Another example is Arthur C. Clarke's short story 'The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told', published first as 'A Recursion in Metastories', which tells of an editor who writes a letter which ends by referring to itself and thus starts over again and again and. . . . Of course, this is simply a variation on the story known by all children, which is something like the following: It was a dark and stormy night, the rain came down in torrents, there were brigands on the mountains, and thieves, and the chief said unto Antonio: 'Antonio, tell us a story.' And Antonio, in fear and dread of the mighty chief, began his story: 'It was a dark and stormy night, the rain came down in torrents, there were brigands on the mountain, and thieves. . . .' The label on the can of BONZO Dog Food which occurs repeatedly in Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child is self-referential: BONZO Dog Food, said the white letters on the orange label, and below the name was a picture of a little black-and-white spotted dog, walking on his hind legs and wearing a chef's cap and an apron. The dog carried a tray on which there was another can of BONZO Dog Food, on the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same

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but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of BONZO Dog Food, on the label of which another little black-and-white spotted dog, exactly the same but much smaller, was walking on his hind legs and carrying a tray on which there was another can of BONZO Dog Food, and so on until the dogs became too small for the eye to follow. Later in the book the expression 'an endlessness of little dogs' which is used to describe the infinite sequence of labels gives a graphic description of an infinite recursion. If one wishes to speculate on where such recursion may lead, the phrase 'beyond the last visible dog' is as good a starting point as any. One of the many curious characters in Hoban's book is a rather pompous muskrat who illustrates in an amusing manner the absurdity of speculation completely isolated from reality. When asked by the mouse child if he can make him and his father self-winding again, the muskrat replies: I'm afraid that's a little out of my line. Oh, I've tinkered with clockwork now and then, but I have long since gone beyond the limits of mere mechanical invention. That's applied thought, you see, and my real work is in the realm of pure thought. There is nothing quite like the purity of pure thought. It's the cleanest work there is, you might say. Finally, for the occasions — all of us have them — when we become discouraged with our lecturing and research, let us remember the Cheshire Cat: 'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' CONCLUSION This chapter has touched on several aspects of the relationship

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between English language and literature and computers in the 1980s. No attempt has been made to discuss the field at large, the use of computers for the creation and maintenance of data bases, such as the Cumulative Shakespeare Bibliography at Pennsylvania State University, for example, or their use in the analysis of literary style. Other topics of importance beyond the scope of this paper are the influence of computers on the introduction of new terms into the English language and on changes in the meanings of existing English words, and the use of computer jargon in normal speech. Many of the arguments presented in this paper have come from my sense of the 'poverty of technology'. Swept along by the pace of technological change, we are inclined to value too much those things which can be quantified and done by machine and to belittle not only those things which cannot be so treated but also those who appear unaffected by technology. Our feeling of self-importance may even be making us lose our sense of humour. We forget that our responsibility in the larger academic community is a study of man, the natural world and the relationship between them. We will do well to remember this chorus from T. S. Eliot's 'The Rock': The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness . . . Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

NOTES 1. The author would like to thank William S. Adams, Patricia A. Demers, Lois Markworth Stanford and Aylmer A. Ryan for their comments and suggestions during the writing of this paper. 2. As an alternative to BASIC Papert and his colleagues have developed LOGO, an interactive language in which recursion or self-reference plays an important role. Students, even those who are beginning primary school, become familiar with computers and with programming by using the computer to draw and manipulate familiar shapes such as triangles, squares and circles and by building them into pleasing designs. Papert gives an interesting discussion of LOGO in his book. Other accounts of LOGO are

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given in Abelson (1982) and in other papers appearing in the same issue of the computer magazine BYTE in which Abelson's paper appears. Another alternative is the APL language developed at the IBM Corporation by Kenneth Iverson. APL may be considered to be a simple alternative to conventional mathematical notation which may be also used as a programming language. An excellent account of the use of APL for the teaching of secondary school statistics is given by Alvord (1981). 3. As an indication that these ideas are not new, the authors quote from what they call the first important treatise on the teaching of reading published in the United States in 1908. Part of the quotation is worth repeating here: 'The child should never be permitted to read for the sake of reading, as a formal process or end in itself. The reading should always be for the intrinsic interest or value of what is read. . . . School readers, especially primers, should largely disappear, except as they may be competent editions of the real literature of the mother tongue . . .'. 4. A specialist in English using a computerized data base might also find some knowledge of formal logic quite helpful. For example, he might wish to use a retrieval program to locate all items, and only those items, in a file which satisfy the following conditions: the items are classified under Hamlet OR contain the word 'Hamlet' in the title OR contain the abbreviation 'Ham'. AND which are NOT books. The words 'and', 'or' and 'not' in this statement are logical functions which can be manipulated according to the rules of formal logic. 5. This definition was used last year by the Toronto Globe and Mail to introduce the following remark by Prime Minister Trudeau: 'The budget is stimulative. It is less stimulative than if it had been more, but it is more than if it had been less.' The news item ended with the following remark by Alice after she had eaten the cake and was opening out like a telescope: 'Curiouser and curiouser!'

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abelson, H., 'A Beginner's Guide to LOGO'.BYTE, vol. 7, no. 8 (1982) 88-112. Alvord, L., 'A Vision of Probability and Statistics in APL', APL Quote Quad, vol. 12, no. 2 (APRL81 Conference Proceedings] 1-8. Bettelheim, B. and K. Zelan, 'Why Children Don't Like to Read', The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 248, no. 5 (1981) 25-31. Clarke, A. C., The Wind from the Sun, New American Library (New York, 1973). Evans, C., The Micro Millennium (New York, 1981). Gardner, M., The Annotated Alice (New York, 1960). , Logic Machines, Diagrams and Boolean Algebra (New York, 1968). , Martin Gardner's Sixth Book of Mathematical Gamesfrom Scientific American (San Francisco, 1971). , Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus (New York, 1983). Heath, P., The Philosopher's Alice (New York, 1974). Hughes, P. and G. Brecht, Vicious (Circles and Infinity (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1978).

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Hyman, A., Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Princeton, N.J., 1982). Iverson, K. E., Elementary Analysis (Swarthmore, Pa., 1976). , Introducing APL to Teachers, Report No. 320-3014, IBM Philadelphia Scientific Center, Philadelphia, Penn., 1972. Jensen, W. 'PLATO's Role in Language Skills Remediation at the U of A', Bulletin, Department of Computing Services, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, vol. 17, no. 3 (1983) 18. Kay, A. C., 'Microelectronics and the Personal Computer', Scientific American, vol. 237, no. 3 (1977) 230-44. McDonnell, E. E. (ed.), A Source Book in APL (Palo Alto, Calif., 1981). McMaster, R. D., 'The Department of English, 1908-1982', Folio, The University of Alberta, September 30 (1982) 5-12. McPherson, J. C., 'A Personal View of A P L , Proceedings of a Seminar (1983) 41-3. Mason, G. E. and J. S. Blanchard, Computer Applications in Reading (Newark, Delaware, 1979). Meserole, H. T. and J. B. Smith, ' "Yet there is method in it" ', Perspectives in Computing, vol. 1, no. 2 (1981) 4-11. Milic, L. T., 'Stylistics + computers = pattern', Perspedives in Computing, vol. 1, no. 4 ( 1 9 8 1 ) 4-11. Mowshowitz, A., Inside Information: Computers in Fiction (Reading, Mass., 1977). Naur, P. (ed.), 'Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60', Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, vol. 6, no. 1 (1963) 1-17. Papert, S., Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (New York, 1980). Phillips, R. (ed.), Aspects of Alice (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1974). Richman, E., Spotlight on Computer Literacy (New York, 1982). Savory, T. H., The Language of Science, rev. edn (London, 1967). Simon, J., Paradigms Lost (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1981). Swift, J., ed., Gulliver's Travels, Introduction and Notes by A. L. Rowse (London, 1977). Wexelblat, R. L. (ed.), History of Programming Languages (New York, 1981).

11

Canadian Literature in the Secondary Curriculum SUSAN JACKEL

When Margaret Atwood's Survival came out in 1972 I was a graduate student in English with Canadian literature my chosen field. Although I have since moved into interdisciplinary Canadian Studies, the place of Canadian literature in the curriculum at all levels of our educational system continues to be of interest and concern to me, as it is to many of my colleagues in the English department. Survival, as you probably know, caused something of a furore in university circles, and Atwood herself has written on several occasions of how academics customarily refer to it with a sneer. As literary criticism Survival has shortcomings that have been copiously catalogued, but I have always thought that Atwood deserved more credit than she generally receives from university teachers for what she accomplished despite (and in some cases because of) those scholarly sins. In particular, I admired then, and I continue to admire now, Atwood's courage and honesty in confronting one of the central intellectual problems for self-avowed cultural nationalists, the problem of motive or rationale. To the question, 'Why teach Canadian literature?' Atwood's answer in the early 1970s was disconcertingly blunt but also, I thought then, true. 'Writing Canadian literature', Atwood observed, 'has been historically a very private act, one from which even an audience was excluded, since for a lot of the time there was no audience. Teaching it, however, is a political act. If done badly it can make people even more bored with their country than they already are; if done well, it may suggest to them why they have been taught to be bored with their country, and whose interest that boredom serves.' 197

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Canadians in 1983 are less bored with their country than they were ten years ago, and part of the credit surely belongs to Margaret Atwood and to Survival. Moreover, the scope of the Canadianization debate has also changed considerably, so that the teaching of Canadian literature no longer represents the same kind of defiant activism that Atwood herself recognized as a motive force behind her book. Having intended Survival as 'a brief, easy-to-use guide for teachers', she had ended in producing, in her words, 'a cross between a personal statement and a political manifesto'. As such, Survival was very much a tract for the times, one of a whole wave of post-Expo manifestos and exposes focusing on Canada's 'silent surrender' to foreign economic and cultural domination. It was all very therapeutic, of course, but in time many of us, including Atwood herself, came to realize that the reasons for Canadians' persistent diffidence about their collective accomplishments could not be so easily laid at the door of anonymous and sinister 'interests,' whether foreign-based multinationals or home-bred compradores. A decade of investigation and reflection have shown that the reasons are a good deal more complex, and lie partly in history, partly in economics and politics, and partly in certain long-standing habits of mind that we as Canadians have developed and indeed consciously fostered over time. And in all this the educational systems of our various provinces have played a crucial role. As it happens, Alberta secondary school teachers are at this moment facing precisely the predicament that Atwood discerned and tried to do something about more than a decade ago. With the revised curriculum introduced in the fall of 1983, many teachers, in Atwood's words in Survival, 'suddenly find themselves teaching a subject they have never studied: CanLit'. To their consternation, Canadian content has become an explicit criterion in the choice of texts for literature as well as for social studies courses in grades 10 through 12, and many of the same questions that sparked heated controversy in the universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s are now being asked in Alberta high schools. With the heat of passion somewhat spent in the university Canadianization debate, I think it is now possible to suggest some reasonably temperate answers to those questions, in terms that are at once historical and analytical. In this way, when we move on to considering some of the practical difficulties that confront Alberta English teachers as they strive to meet the new Canadian

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content directives, we can do so with some awareness of how those difficulties arose, and why it may take more than a handbook of CanLit to solve them. English—Canadian literature is by and large a very recent development. Most of the stars who now crowd the CanLit firmament - Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Laurenc Jack Hodgins, Rudy Wiebe, Timothy Findley, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Hood, Robert Kroetsch, to mention only a few, and only fiction-writers at that- these and many others came on the scene during the 1960s, and have achieved their greatest reputation within the last ten or fifteen years. Thus it may seem like reaching in to pre- history if I take you back to 1929. That was the year in which William Arthur Deacon, editor of the book page in the Toronto Mail and Empire, wrote a substantial and not uncritical article on the growth of letters in this country for Bertram Brooker's Yearbook of the Arts in Canada. Deacon began his article with the startling assertion that 1929 was the centenary of Canadian literature, basing his assertion on two important events that occurred in 1829. One was the publication in Halifax by Joseph Howe of Thomas Chandler Haliburton's first book; the other was Egerton Ryerson's journey by horseback from Toronto to New York in search of the printing press that he would use to establish the long-lived and influential Methodist newspaper, The Christian Guardian. From this venture grew the Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, which later became the Ryerson Press which flourished for over a century, from 1860 to 1970, before succumbing to changed economic conditions. Egerton Ryerson, of course, was more than an aggressive newspaperman and publisher. Among Canadian teachers he is well known as the font and wellspring of Ontario's much admired and widely emulated system of tax-supported, universallyaccessible schools. In those schools, Ryerson relied on a succession of national readers-first the Irish National Readers, then the Upper Canadian or Ryerson Readers - to train several generations of Ontario schoolchildren in their civic and moral duties. Moreover, through disciples like John Jessop in British Columbia and David Goggin in the Northwest Territories, the Ryerson system provided the pattern for schools throughout western Canada. Like Ryerson, these educators looked to the schools, and within them the national readers, to mould Canada's young people into a homogeneous, patriotic citizenry. Goggin, one of the

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chief architects of Alberta's and Saskatchewan's school systems during the early settlement years, was particularly concerned about the schools' responsibility to Canadianize the children of recent immigrants. Canadianization for Goggin meant Angloconformity; he wanted a system that would gather the children of different races, creeds, and customs into the common school, and 'Canadianize' them. Though they may enter as Galicians, Doukhobors, or Icelanders, they will come out as Canadians. ... In the West we have asked for no school that divides us on the basis of our creeds, or that separates us at all, but we do need schools that unite us. A common school and a common language will produce that homogeneous citizenship so necessary in the development of that greater Canada lying West of the Lakes. (Quoted in Shaping the Schools of the Canadian West, 1979, p. 23) In the aftermath of the First World War, and springing from the sense of national purpose and sacrifice generated by that traumatic experience, the 1920s were years of burgeoning confidence in the country's future and a corresponding growth of respect for its past and present accomplishments. The Canadian Historical Association, the Group of Seven, and the Canadian Forum were all founded in 1920, and all were important in their way. In the Forum, for example, readers would encounter articles by noted western political figures J. S. Woodsworth and Henry Wise Wood; sketches and line drawings by F. H. Varley, Lawren Harris, Frank Carmichael, David Milne, A. Y.Jackson and A. J. Casson, six of the original Group of Seven; and poetry and short fiction by E. J. Pratt, Dorothy Livesay, A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott, among many others. In 1921, the Canadian Authors Association was formed. Leading publishers of the time were Macmillan of Canada, the Ryerson Press, Clarke Irwin, Musson, and McClelland and Stewart; best-selling authors included R. J. C. Stead, popular both as a novelist and as a writer of patriotic verse, Nellie McClung, whose novels and journalism made her as well known as did her suffrage and temperance campaigning, and Ralph Connor, several of whose novels sold millions of copies and made his name a byword throughout the English-speaking world. Bliss Carman was still alive and rhapsodizing about the joys of vagabondia throughout this decade, although he would die in

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1929, the year William Arthur Deacon saw as marking the centenary of Canadian letters. In 1922, early in this decade of cultural ferment in Canada, the Musson publishing company issued a little book called the Canadian Treasury Reciter with the proud boast that it was an 'all-Canadian production'. By this the publishers meant that the book was edited, printed, and bound in Canada. Only parts of its contents were written here, for it was, to quote its marvellously descriptive cover, 'a comprehensive collection of standard and popular selections for every taste and mood in prose and verse, with a generous representation of the best Canadian material, and a special section devoted to little readers'. More ambitious in the Canadian-content line and aimed at a slightly older audience my copy once belonged to Myleen DeBeck, Grade 8g, Vernon Junior High School in Vernon, B.C. - was the Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse, published in 1928 and drawing entirely on such home-grown authors as Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Charles Mair, William Wilfred Campbell, Pauline Johnston, Duncan Campbell Scott, Robert Service, and a dozen others. The compiler of the Golden Treasury was A. M. Stephen, who recorded in his introduction his belief that 'In the task of nation-building which lies before us, we must realize the fact that the soul of a country is embodied in its literature. Therefore it follows that upon the existence of a small but authentic body of Canadian poetry we may base our claim to be regarded as a distinct and individual people, entitled to be called a nation. If it be true that Canadians are not familiar with the work of the writers who have given to them a national soul and spirit, then it is our immediate duty to correct this defect in our development.' Yet the Canadian anthology that appears to have had the widest circulation of all during the inter-war years was A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse, published in 1923 as part of Macmillan's Western Canada Series and reprinted almost yearly during the 1920s. Its compilers were Edmund Kemper Broadus and Eleanor Broadus. E. K. Broadus, as many of you know, was this university's first professor of English; he taught here from the university's establishment in 1908 until his death in the mid-1930s and it was undoubtedly this book that Northrop Frye had in mind when, in a recent essay surveying the past half-century of Canadian literature and scholarship, he character-

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ized Broadus as 'one of an extraordinary group of scholars in Alberta, and an early Canadian anthologist'. On its title page A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse carries the information that it has been 'authorized by the Department of Education for Alberta'. If you have done some study of Canadian literary history, either in a university course or on your own, you will have run across the writings, or at least the names, of such figures as Charles G. D. Roberts, Gilbert Parker, William Kirby, Louis Hemon, Charles Sangster, Louis Frechette, Isabella Valancy Crawford and William Henry Drummond. Or, if you are old enough to have taken your schooling before 1950, you may well recall these figures from your own school readers. My point in dwelling on these readers is not to lament their passing, or to make exaggerated claims for the literary quality of the selections in them, but simply to illustrate the fact that for some thirty years, from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, school readers in Canada, including Alberta, often included substantial contributions by Canadian authors. Teachers, editors, publishers, education departments and, one presumes, parents and politicians too, were all in broad agreement on the propriety of this state of affairs, and they appear to have worked together to maintain it with little strain or controversy. Following the Second World War, however, country-wide moves to revise and modernize curricula coincided with massive changes in Canada's publishing industry, and the previous consensus broke down. The textbooks and readers offered by American textbook publishers seemed to many teachers and curriculum planners more relevant, more attractively produced, certainly more in tune with changing pedagogical philosophies. At the same time long-standing agency agreements, the breadand-butter of Canadian publishing, were allowed to lapse as American and some British houses set up subsidiaries here. Only direct intervention by the Ontario ministry of education, in the form of its 1951 Circular 14, averted what would otherwise have been the utter collapse of the Canadian textbook industry. Circular 14 offered Ontario schoolboards subventions of up to $3 a pupil for the purchase of Canadian-produced texts, setting in motion a new phase of Canadianization. To meet the Ontario government's criteria an American text would be 'Canadianized', at first through such crude devices as painting out American flags in the illustrations and substituting Canadian place names for

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American ones in the text, and then through more extensive, although still largely cosmetic, editing and re-writing in the editorial offices of the Canadian branch-plant. By the late 1960s this kind of cosmetic Canadianization had become one of the chief targets of the new breed of cultural and economic nationalists who feared that the American takeover would soon be complete. Their fears were strengthened when in 1969 the Ontario education ministry's effective withdrawal of the subvention for made-in-Canada textbook purchases precipitated, if it did not wholly cause, a new crisis in Canadian publishing. The magnitude of the crisis was dramatized by the sale in 1970 of the venerable Ryerson Press, which many people regarded as a Canadian institution, to the American firm of McGraw-Hill. Even Jack McClelland, president of McClelland and Stewart, began murmuring loud enough for the newspaper reporters to overhear that he too might soon have to look for a buyer. An alarmed Ontario government, under whose jurisdiction some 95 per cent of English-language publishing took place, hastily appointed a Royal Commission on Book Publishers and Book Publishing which reported in 1973. In its report, this Commission ended by vindicating the education ministry's policy of preference for Canadian-produced books while recognizing that Canadian production did not necessarily lead to the thorough and informed treatment of Canadian subjects, the expression of Canadian attitudes and values, or the support of Canadian writers. Because they were investigating an industry, the Commissioners paid particular attention to economic realities, pointing for example to the long-standing symbiosis between textbook publishing, which can and often does turn a profit, and literary publishing, where the prospects of anyone's making much money are much dimmer, especially in the relatively minuscule Canadian market. They further recognized that it is at least partly through exposure in the schools that writers build a long-term audience as well as earning an immediate return through permissions and royalties. But if their immediate focus was economic, the Commissioners made very clear that their overriding concern was for the impending 'cultural tragedy' - their phrase - should the unregulated play of the market end in depriving Canadian writers of outlets for their work. This kind of detailed probing of the complex interrelations of education, economics, and literary culture, as represented in the

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Royal Commission on Book Publishing's report, is an early example of a recent trend towards analysis of the so-called 'cultural industries', of which publishing is one of the oldest and most important. As such, this argument is both a supplement and a successor to the more traditional argument for intervening on behalf of Canadian content in the curriculum, by which of course I mean the political argument that goes back to the days of Egerton Ryerson. This more familiar and popular line of reasoning rests on the school system's ability and obligations to instill in young adults a minimum level of civic awareness, in recognition both of their duties as future voters in a liberal democratic system, and also of the especial need in this far-flung country not so much for national unity, although that is indeed at stake from time to time, as for mutual understanding among our diverse regional, ethnic, and linguistic populations. Many of you, I am sure, will recognize this argument from Bernie Hodgett's What Culture? What Heritage? a book published in 1968 which was largely responsible for the creation of the Canada Studies Foundation, and for setting the terms of much of the Canadianization debate in educational circles during the 1970s. Yet by and large, Canadians of the seventies showed themselves reluctant to push this political socialization role for the schools too vigorously. Our caution on this score can be traced partly, without doubt, to the terrible lessons about nationalism taught us in the twentieth century, but it also reflects, I think, a peculiarly Canadian legacy of discord arising out of a long series of schools questions beginning in the early 1800s and still with us today. Canadians know that schools have too often been battlegrounds of ideological strife, with our children the principal sufferers from that strife. At the same time, we are increasingly beginning to acknowledge the costs of our caution, especially in English Canada. In the 1975 Symons Report on the state of Canadian Studies, in Paul Robinson's After Survival: A Teacher's Guide to Canadian Resources (1977), and most recently in the findings of the ApplebaumHebert Cultural Policy Review Committee Report (1982), we find ample evidence that a country can practise moderation to excess, so to speak; that in seeking to avoid chauvinism, we end by teaching our children that Canada is somehow not interesting, notgood enough, to rate a place in the study of history or literature, and so the aspiration to pursue excellence here in Canada in these

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fields is diffused and deflected. The consequences of this persistent mentality of second-ratism on the development of the arts in Canada have been attested to by countless writers, painters, composers, and other practitioners of the arts over the years. Thus what begins as a political argument for intervening to Canadianize the curriculum — the instilling of civic awareness — gives way to a cultural one: an argument that stresses the real connections between Canada as a geographical, political and social entity, and the ambition to achieve high standards in artistic expression. I have raised these two considerations, the economic and the political, because they are ones that many teachers and students of literature tend to brush aside as irrelevant or worse. Our training in the humanities inclines us to the view that economics and politics belong to the base world of the everyday, the money-grubbing, power-seeking world of profits and votes, while literature belongs to some higher, purer realm of timeless, universal preoccupations - the eternal verities, as we like to say. Well, individual works of literature may be immortal, but writers, as they are all too aware, are not, and they find that it prolongs life as well as adding to its pleasure if they are able to eat regularly and keep a roof over their heads. Moreover, writers in Canada today are becoming increasingly active on their own account in the politics and economics of their craft - not all of them, by any means, but a significant minority, as they serve on juries for the Canada Council or on advisory panels for provincial arts councils or departments of culture, or become active members of such groups as the Writers' Union of Canada. What I am saying, then, is that, like it or not, in Canada it is simply not enough to value literary creativity for its own sake, for the richness it adds to our lives and the humanizing influence it may have over us and also over others- our students, for example, or so we earnestly hope. If we care, we must also care at least a little about the conditions surrounding that creativity, and learn to keep these grubby but inescapable realities of politics and economics in mind when education ministers take it upon themselves, as has recently happened in Alberta, to legislate on behalf of Canadian content in the curriculum. Last year I had the privilege of conducting two workshops for teachers on implementing the Canadian content aspect of the new language arts curriculum. Only a few teachers, a dozen all told, were involved, and I would not want to generalize too rashly on

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the strength of this very limited experience. Still, the workshops were very educational for me, whatever the teachers may have gained from them. At the first workshop a colleague and I arrived loaded down with several large cartons of Canadian poetry, fiction and drama, along with supplementary materials on biography, criticism and so forth. We were prepared - indeed over-prepared - to deal with the particularities of books and authors. What we weren't prepared for was the atmosphere of open skepticism and resentment that, initially at least, overshadowed the proceedings. From the comments expressed that day, and from others at a second workshop in Red Deer, I came to the conclusion that before we could talk about the literature as literature, there were some prior concerns waiting to be addressed. If there was any one issue that rankled among the teachers I talked to, it was the setting of seemingly arbitrary numerical quotas for Canadian content in the various streams and grades: an across-the-board 33 per cent for English 13, 23 and 33, and a more irregular apportioning, although with the same total effect, in the academic stream - 25 per cent in English 10, 50 per cent in English 20, and 25 per cent in English 30. But there were other irritants as well: the unseemly haste with which the new requirements were instituted, the consequent short lapse of time, sometimes only a few weeks, between approval of individual titles and the need to make a selection, order texts, and prepare lessons; and the shortage, and in some cases absence, of adequate supplementary materials. It didn't help matters that the workshops were scheduled for all day Saturday, putting the teachers in the position of having to meet a new professional requirement on their own time, and without formal credit. Finally, there were generalized feelings ranging from resignation to deep frustration over the frequency with which 'new' and 'revised' curricula came down from on high. The upshot of all this was a suspicion, and in some cases a settled conviction, that the Canadian content requirement in the 1982 curriculum was just another brainstorm in the minds of the politicians and curriculum planners, another flash-in-the-pan enthusiasm that would go away in time, to be replaced by something just as vigorously touted. And indeed the historian in me can't help sharing some of these reservations, for as I have tried to outline for you here today, agitation over Canadian content in school readers has in the past

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shown a distinctly cyclical pattern, with peaks of concern and interventionism followed by troughs of complacency and laissezfaire. Given this pattern, one can sympathize in some measure with the attitude that says, we've seen it before and we'll see it again; in the meantime, best to lay low and let it blow over. But as I have also tried to suggest to you, the precise significance of these successive Canadianization debates has varied rather widely according to the context of different times and places. For Egerton Ryerson in the mid-nineteenth century, Canadianization meant resistance to Yankee republicanism and the building of a loyal, stable and orderly polity in British North America; for David Goggin at the century's turn it meant Anglo-conformity in the west during a wave of polyglot immigration; for the cultural nationalists of the 1920s it meant assertion of Canada's postcolonial status among the independent nations of the world; in the 1950s it took on the rather narrower meaning of laundering foreign textbooks; while in recent years it has signified a broad-ranging resistance to the swamping of our culture by imported American artifacts, and a corresponding incitement to Canadians to stop lamenting our nation and start enjoying it. And it is this pattern, not simply of recurrence, but of variation and change, that raises, in my mind at least, the possibility that the Canadianization debate of the 1980s may have entered a new, qualitatively different phase, at least where the teaching of literature is concerned. For in contrast to the fits and starts of literary activity that past generations of Canadians have known, in a few scattered centres of our broad land, what distinguishes the current literary explosion in Canada is that it is sustained, it is country-wide, and it encompasses virtually every major genre. In retrospect, historians will undoubtedly pinpoint the late 1950s as the turning point. That was when McClelland and Stewart launched its New Canadian Library series of cheap paperback reprints, making Canadian literary texts readily available for the first time to general readers, and to students in the small but growing numbers of university CanLit courses. Meanwhile, the creation of the Canada Council in 1957 did more than pour some much-needed cash into the pockets of writers and other artists; it also signified the long-delayed acceptance of the arts into the very fabric of Canadian life. With mounting confidence and success, writers all across Canada began to know — and to show — that they could

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write for their own people, and still aim to compete with the best. The result has been a breakthrough, a quantum leap into literary professionalism. Ready or not, Canadian writers are in the big time, and the question for literature teachers here as elsewhere is no longer whether to teach Canadian books, but how many, and which ones. The recognition that Canadian literature has recently come of age is by no means confined to this country. It may interest you to know, for instance, that Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel was a required text for some 13 000 prospective teachers in France in 1981; that the novels of Hugh MacLennan are widely studied in German high schools; that Stephen Scobie's critical study of Leonard Cohen has been translated into seven languages; and that a university in Italy-1 believe it is Bologna - offers a Ph.D. in Canadian literature. In the United States, Canadian writers are being 'discovered' by American critics and teachers with an enthusiasm that, in some of us at least, provokes feelings of pride tinged with mild alarm. Still, it's good for sales, which in turn bodes well for future publishing contracts for our writers; and meanwhile, the image of Canada abroad, which for more than a century has revolved around vast expanses of empty landscape, with perhaps the occasional Indian or mounted policeman or prairie grainfarmer limned against the horizon, is rapidly giving way to a more complex understanding of what is, after all, a very complex country. Thus I think even the most skeptical among us should begin to take as a given that Canadian literature is here to stay, in our lives and in our schools. In which case, the 1980s version of the Canadianization debate becomes less one of ends than of means: how to address the many practical issues raised by Alberta Education's recent dramatic conversion to the cause. In particular, it is teachers in the secondary grades who must wrestle with these issues, although not, I sincerely hope, all by themselves. It is one thing to announce a policy, but quite another to implement it, and there are many parties who must become involved in that implementation. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the teachers in the classroom remain the key. Because Canadian literature has been part of the university curriculum for over a decade now, there are teachers currently in the field who are at home with the subject, and who can take a leading role in assisting their colleagues, and in working closely

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with the Curriculum Branch. However, although the study of Canadian literature is no longer optional for students in the English specialization in secondary education, the proportions- a half-year course in Canadian out of six full-time equivalent courses for an English major - bear little relation to the proportions of Canadian content in the revised curriculum, especially in English 20, where it is 50 per cent. There is no Canadian literature requirement, needless to say, for an education student who takes English as a minor; and no Canadian content requirement at all for secondary education students in subject fields other than English and social studies. Given these rather minimal requirements, plus the vagaries of subject assignments that all too often force teachers to teach outside their fields, it seems likely that the predicament Atwood discerned a decade ago, of teachers suddenly faced with teaching a subject, CanLit, that they have never or barely studied, could be with us for some time yet. In addition to the urgent need for re-training, which can be met by formal courses in Canadian literature and by the more stopgap measures of workshops and in-services, the issue of suitable supplementary materials is a major concern with teachers. Some two and a half years ago I made a formal proposal to the Minister of Education designed to meet that concern. The proposal, in brief, concerned the establishment in Alberta of a Canadian Learning Materials Centre, or rather two of them, one in Edmonton and one in Calgary, on the model of the one that has been in existence at Dalhousie University in Halifax since 1979. This centre would be a repository for all the existing supplementary materials and teaching aids on the whole range of Canadian studies subjects. Its purpose would be to enable teachers, curriculum planners, school trustees and parents to acquaint themselves with the considerable array of materials that already do exist, and to formulate precise projects to meet the perceived gaps and shortcomings. Because the hard work of conceiving and organizing the original CLMC in Halifax has already been done, by people associated with that university's extension faculty and with the Canada Studies Foundation, an Alberta version would be a much less major undertaking. All it would take would be the CLMC purchasing list, a couple of knowledgeable and dedicated people to run it, and a corner in our two education faculties' libraries. Plus, of course, money: a million or two should do it.

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But we also need something else: a 1980s successor to Survival something compact, lively, a little outrageous, but showing beyond argument that reading Canadian is not a question of meeting quotas, or ingesting civic education in disguise, or excavating a few gems from a carload of pebbles and granite boulders gathered on a trip across the Canadian Shield. I've been trying to think of a title that would convey just the right note of tempered optimism that many of us feel these days as our writers sprout and flourish around us: Maybe Almost Making It, perhaps, or After After Survival? In any event, it is clear that teaching Canadian literature in the schools is no longer the political act it was a scant decade ago. Rather it is an adventure of the first order, for students and teachers alike: aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally, and every other way that literature rewards and enriches us. It's an adventure I've been caught up in for nearly twenty years, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Index Abrams, M. H., 2, 4, 30-65, 66-7 'acatalectic', 91 Adams, Douglas, 191 Addison, Joseph, 91 'aesthetic' stance, 74-7, 79-81, 83 anachronism, 181 Anglo-conformity, 200, 207 'Another New Poem by Wordsworth', 65n.28 'aporia', 35, 45-6, 52, 57, 61 Applebaum-Hebert Cultural Policy Review Committee, 204 Aquinas, St Thomas, 5 'arche-ecriture', 34 'argument', 184 Arnold, Matthew, 115 Asad, Talal, 157n.6 Atwood, Margaret, 140, 197-8, 209 Auden, W. H., 89-90, 94-5, 98 Augustine, St, 5 Austen, Jane, 113 Austin, John, 34, 39-40 Babbage, Charles, 187 Barzun, Jacques, 2, 4, 7-29 BASIC, 179, 181, 184 Bateson, F. W., 65n.28, 67, 79, 85n.l6 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 86 Benjamin, Walter, 50 Bettelheim, Bruno, 185, 195n.3 Blackmur, R. P., 24 Blake, William, 87, 89 Bleak House, 101 Book of Canadian Prose and Verse, A, 201

Booth, Wayne, 152, 157n.3 Boswell, James, 86 Britton, James, 168, 176 Broadus, Edmund Kemper, 177, 201-2 Brooks, Cleanth, 65n.28, 67 Browne, John, 157n.5 Browning, Robert, 89, 91, 98 Bruner, Jerome, 169, 176 Burke, Kenneth, 89

Burns, Robert, 96 Byron, Lord, 87, 98 Campbell, Roy, 86 Canada Council, 207 Canadian Authors Association, 200 Canadian Forum, 200

Canadianization, 200—8 Canadian Learning Materials Centre, 209 Canadian literature, 4, 197-210 Canadian Studies Foundation, 204 Canadian Treasury Reciter, 201

Captain Murderer, 120 Carman, Bliss, 200 Caroline, Senhor, 23, 29n.23 Cavalier poetry, 86 Chamberlayne, Sir James, 90 charity, 117 Childe Harold, 107

childhood, 120 Chomsky, Noam, 27n.l, 161, 176 Churchill, Charles, 89 Clare, John, 89 Clarke, Arthur C., 192 class process, 136-7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 62, 97 common speech, 9 communication of basic needs, 161 of lived-through experience, 154 mystique of, 23 computer literacy, 1, 4, 178, 180-1 Connor, Ralph, 200 consciousness schooling of, 156 shift in, 152-3 construal, 47-51, 52, 55, 57, 59-62, 65n.28, 66-8, 79 Cornford, Frances, 90 Crashaw, Richard, 89 creative process, 161 creative writing, 97-8, 134—45

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212

Index

criticism, 30-2, 45 anxiety-of-influence, 30 deconstructive, 30-1, 36-7, 41-4, 46-7, 51, 59 meta, 30 new, 45, 66 novel-, 102-6 reader-response, 1, 30, 77 reception, 3, 30, 105 semiotic, 30 structuralist, 30 Darwin, Charles, 79 David Copperfield, 114 Davies, Hugh Sykes, 65n.28 Davies, Idris, 90 Davies, Robertson, 187 Deacon, William Arthur, 199-201 Deconstructionists, 66, 70-1, 78-9, 84 Deconstructive literary criticism, 30-1, 46 Derrida, 36-7, 41-3, 60, 62 Hillis Miller, 49, 51,57-61 Rosenblatt, 66, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 31-46, 49, 53-4, 57-9,

FORTRAN, 179, 184 Frankenstein, 131 'freeplay', textual, 32, 42-3 Freud, Sigmund, 55, 79 Frost, Robert, 89 Frye, Northrop, 89, 95, 201-2 'function', 184 Gascoyne, David, 94 generative/transformational theory, 161 genre system, 91 Goggin, David, 199-200, 207 Golden Treasury of Canadian Verse, 201 Golding, William, 113 Graham, W. S., 93-4 grammar, transformational, 17, 161 Grammatology, Of, 33, 37, 64n.l7, n.18, n.21 Graves, Robert, 88 Gray, Thomas, 95 Great Expectations, 116-33 Greene, Graham, 118 Grimm's law, 8-9 Gulliver's Travels, 186

62

Dewey,john, 3, 70, 135 Dickens, Charles, 101, 102, 110, 114, 116-33, 187 Dickinson, Emily, 77 dictionary presumed uses, 15 homemade, 28n.l5 Dixon,John, 3,4, 146-57 Donne, John, 86, 96, 98 Dryden,John, 89

Halliday, Michael, 161-2, 176 Halting Problem, 190 Hamlet, 69, 78 Hard Times, 114 Hardy, Barbara, 149, 156, 157n.2 Hardy, Thomas, 87, 190 Hartman, Geoffrey, 31 Heidegger, Martin, 55—6 Hirsch, E. D., 84n.l, 85n.l6 historical perspective, 2, 27n.l history of novel-criticism, 102—6 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The, 191 Hoban, Russell, 192-3 Hodgett, Bernie, 204 Housman, A. E., 90-1 Hughes, Ted, 95 Hume, David, 32-3, 35-6, 42-3

Eagleton, Terry, 106 'efferent' stance, 74-7, 79-81, 83 Eliot, George, 61, 101, 107-15 Eliot, T. S., 88-9, 93-4 Emma, 113 Empson, William, 86 empty set, 191 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15, 27n.l, 28n.2 epanorthosis, 91 Essay on Man, 90 Essay on the Origin of Language, 37-8, 41 Essays on Fiction, 105

identity, 118 Idylls of the King, 107 imitation, 91-2, 99 infant semiologist, 123 interpretation of signals, 112

fairytale, 3, 108, 120-1, 132 Finnegans Wake, 21, 92 footnote poetry, 20 Ford, Henry, 86 Forster, E. M., III

Jackel, Susan, 4, 197-210 Jakobson, Roman, 29n.l7 James, William, 70-2, 74 Jane Eyre, 103, 111 Johnson, Samuel, 86

Index Jones, David, 89-90 Jonson, Ben, 88, 99 Joyce, James, 21, 92, 114 Kafka, Franz, 130 Keats, John, 87 Kermode, Frank, 105 Khairallah, George, 104-5 King Lear, 61 King, Martha, 3, 158-76 Kinsella, Thomas, 98 Kipling, Rudyard, 90, 93 Knight, Wilson, 89 'Kubla Khan', 94, 97 language APL, 195n.2 BASIC, 179, 181, 184 debasement of, 114 dialect or standard, 16, 22-3, 26 Dickens's gift for, 117 as esthetics, 19 as fluid reality, 11 FORTRAN, 179, 184 Language of Fiction, 103 Language as Gesture, 24 as living thing, 10, 13, 28n.7 LOGO, 194n.2 machine, 179 miscalled science, 12, 29n.l7 modern jargon, 16 as natural science, 12 as oracle, 13 pragmatic v mathetic, 162 as reservoir, 72 as self-expression, 21 textual function of, 162 tony, 123 uses of, 158-75 as work of art, 18, 23 Lawrence, D. H., 114 Leavis, F. R., 103 life curriculum of, 149 experiences as content for language arts, 173 literacy decline in standards of, 177 computer, 178, 180-1 Little Dorrit, 187 Lodge, David, 103 Logocentrism, 34, 39, 43, 52, 58, 60

213

logos, 34 classical, 43 Derrida on, 34, 58 Hillis Miller on, 52, 57, 59 as Platonic Form, 34 Longest Journey, The, 111 Longfellow, H. W., 96 look-and-say method, 18 Lowell, Robert, 90 Lucy, 47-8, 51-2, 54, 57-8, 64n.27, n.28, 67 Lull, Raymond, 186 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 95 MacNeice, Louis, 93, 98 Man, Paul de, 31, 46, 49-50, 62 Marlowe, Christopher, 89 Marx, Karl, 79 McClung, Nellie, 200 McMaster, Rowland, 3, 116-33 Mead, George Herbert, 70 metaphysical poetry, 86 Mew, Charlotte, 90 Mill,J. S., 31, 115 Mill on the Floss, The, 107-15 Miller, J. Hillis, 31, 46-63, 65n.28, n.31, 105 Milne, A. A., 177, 189 Milton, John, 87, 98-9 mimetic purpose, 109 Moby Dick, 106 Moore, Julia, 97 moral claustrophobia, 130 Mrs. Dalloway, 106 'My Papa's Waltz', 68 narrative autobiography, 149 narrative voices in Dickens, 117-18 narrator, inner, 148-9, 152 choice and stance of, 153 Nash, Ogden, 61 National Council of Teachers of English, 14, 22 New Canadian Library, 207 New Critics, 66, 84 New English Grammar, 9 New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English, 99 Nietzsche, 42, 44, 70 nursery rhyme, 120 Oliver Twist, 114 Our Mutual Friend, 110

214 Page, Norman, 3, 101-15, 128, 133n.5 Paradise Lost, 96 Paradise Regained, 90 parody,91-2 parole, 53, 57 pedagogy, 17 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 3, 70-1 philology as human achievement, 11 as science, 8-9 phoneme, 12 photoengraving, 179 photolithography, 178 PLATO system, 182-3 Platonic Form, 34 poetry workshops, 97-8 Pope, Alexander, 1, 87, 90-2 portfolio application, 141 Pound, Ezra, 89, 92, 95, 98 Practical Criticism, 89 'Prelude, The', 54, 97 Pride and Prejudice, 123 Proust, Marcel, 83, 118 Putnam, Phelps, 90 Quarles, Francis, 87 Rabelais, 2, 24 Rainbow, The, 106 Ransom, John Crowe, 101, 115 Read, Allen Walker, 12-13, 27n.l Reader, the Text, the Poem, The, 67 reading (1), 37-8, 41-2 reading (2), 37, 39, 41-2 reading as constructing hypotheses, 113 histories of, 105 as possession, 102 as process, 101 reception theory, 3, 105 recursion, 192-3 repetitions, 112 respectability, 116, 131 response to literature, 154 Restoration poets, 87 Revaluation, 103 Rhetoric Grammar and, 8 of high literature, 9 new, 7 Rhetorical Criticism, 8 rhythm of a novel, 112 incremental, 120

Index Richards, I. A., 89 Robinson, Paul, 204 Rodriguez, Richard, 171 Roethke, Theodore, 68-9, 74, 76, 79, 83, 95

Rosenblatt, Louise M., 2, 4, 66-85 rote learning, 185 Rousseau, J. J., 37-41, 64n.l7 Royal Commission on Book Publishers and Book Publishing, 203-4 Ruthrof, Horst, 152, 157n.3 Ryerson, Egerton, 199 Ryerson Press, 199-200 Ryerson Readers, 199 Salter, F. M., 134-6 Santayana, George, 68 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 27n.l, 35, 71 'selective attention', 72, 74 Sexton, Ann, 97 Shakespeare, 89, 95, 98 Shelley, Mary, 131 'shining reality', 101, 115 shrewdness of observation, 147 Sitwell, Osbert, 99 Skelton,John, 88, 95 Skelton, Robin, 3, 86-100 skepticism, radical, 32 'Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, A', 46-65, 67, 79 Smart, Christopher, 87 Smillie, Keith, 3, 177-96 snobbery, 117 Spallenge, 21-2 Speech in the English Novel, 128 Spenser, Edmund, 96 Squeers Principle, 91, 97 Star System, 3, 90-1, 99 Steedman, Carol, 169-70, 176 Stratta, Les, 150, 152 stream of consciousness, 71, 73, 129 Survival, 197-8 Sweet, Henry, 9, 29n.l7 Swift, Jonathan, 87 Swinburne, A. C., 89 Symons Report, 204 Synge,J. M., 86, 98 System of English Grammar, The, 28n.l5 Tale of Two Cities, A, 114 talking, 135-6 Tessofthed'Urbervilles, 103, 114 Thomas, Dylan, 95 Thomas, Edward, 89

Index Thomson, James (B. V.), 87 three-dimensional array, 191 Tidy House, The, 169-71, 176 Tory, Henry Marshall, 177 Tough, Joan, 163, 176 Tradition and the Individual Talent, 88 Traherne, T., 87 'Transactional Theory', 3, 4, 66, 70-1, 77, 79-80, 83 transistors, 178 Treatise of Human Nature, 32 Tristram Shandy, 108 Trumpet Major, The, 190 Tupper, Martin, 89

215

Vaughan, Henry, 87 vers libre, 92-3 Vygotsky, L. S., 72

Watt, Ian, 104 Webb, Phyllis, 95 What Culture? What Heritage?, 204 What's Happening to American English, 25, 28n.l0, 16, 29n.25 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy', 57 Whitman, Walt, 96, 98 Wiebe, Rudy, 3, 134-45, 199 Winnie-the-Pooh, 177, 189-90 wise fool, 125 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 54, 94 Wordsworth, William, 46-59, 62, 64n.27, 97, 115 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal', 46-7, 53-7, 61-3, 64n.27, 65n.28 'The Prelude', 54, 97 workshop method, 140

Wasteland, The, 97, 110 Watt, 108

Yeats, W. B., 86, 89, 95