Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings
This is an interesting but irritating essay in the Guardian. It takes a look at the question of what books ‘everyone’ should have read by age eighteen or twenty, and also at the teaching and study of English literature at the secondary school level. It contains some peculiar albeit doubtless popular ideas about what literature is, what kind of people like it and why, what it tells us and does for us.
English is perceived as a “girly subject” and it struck me that the essence of the subject lies in being honest about your feelings – your personal response to texts. As Kate in the upper sixth says, it is about “empathy”…For me, this explained a great deal about why English was so much more popular among girls. Boys on the whole don’t want to articulate their feelings or be forced into the dangerous situation of having to confront texts and respond personally to them. The rules of physics are so much safer.
Excuse me, but that’s crap. For one thing, literature is very far from being exclusively about ’empathy’. Is ‘Paradise Lost’ about ’empathy’? Is ‘Don Juan’? ‘Gulliver’s Travels’? ‘The Frogs’? ‘Emma’? ‘Lucky Jim’? Literature is more than just the novel, and even novels are not always about empathy. Satire, epic poetry, Aristophanic comedy, much lyric poetry, and many other genres have little or nothing to do with empathy. And then for the other thing, ‘feelings’ [pardon me while I gag] are not the only possible ‘response’ to texts. Dang, you know what? It’s also possible to have thoughts about texts! Imagine that! One can just sit right there in English class, even one composed entirely of girls, and think about what one has read rather than just emoting over it. And as a matter of fact one will probably get a great deal more out of what one has read if one does think as well as feel. The best literature is not just some emotional waterfall, it is deliberately crafted, using that highly cerebral medium, language. Language requires thought, and thought is often the better for language. Boys are perfectly at liberty to think about literature without having to articulate their wretched tedious feeeeeelings. Can’t we ever get out of this dratted Barry Manilow song?
But at least the teacher agrees with me about good old Stephen King.
This was the class that had just so thoughtfully dissected the war poem, and which had soundly argued opinions on the English syllabus – too much of the canonical and academic, not enough contemporary material, why not some Stephen King (no thanks, says the teacher).
Two elitists in the world, then.
The gender implications of the article are perhaps uncalled for, but Motion’s list is ridiculous. This “canon” is narrow, arbitrary and pointless. Emma, but not Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion (both better books)? Great Expectations (a yawn) but not Oliver? Frankly, I find Dickens a mediocre writer, and much prefer Thomas Hardy.
Moreover, if Motion supposedly taught Creative Writing, did he not introduce his students to masters of imagery like Zamiatin, the Russian author of *We*? Unless, of course, Motion has not read that book. God forbid there be brilliant works of literature that were not published in Britain between 1500 and 1950.
While we all get excited when young people want to read difficult but rewarding literature, the idea of a canon with fewer books than I have fingers on my hands is dismissed by everyone with sense. What one read matters not a whit next to how one reads, with excitement and engagement. Perhaps Stephen King is not well crafted enough for a literature class, but there are thousands of high quality books to study, so many that you could read for a lifetime without touching any of those on Motion’s list. Zamiatin, Chekov, Whitman, Ibsen, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), the Brontes, Hardy, another thousand not named, all these authors don’t make the cut for Motion’s canon, but could replace any bit of it, with no loss to learning, and very likely some gain.
I agree about the narrowness of Motion’s list, which is one reason I mentioned a lot of other genres in my comment, but then it’s such a short list, it would be narrow no matter what was on it. It’s debatable how useful lists are. I don’t entirely agree though that it doesn’t matter what one reads. Excitement and engagement are of course also very important, but if it’s excitement and engagement about pure dreck, well…