Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 28 June 2010
Here is the third installment by guest blogger, Adrian Slatcher, looking at some of the topics discussed by writers invited to participate in our 2010 Worlds Literature Festival Salon.
By the third and final day of the salon, the different elements of the Worlds week seem to have come together somewhat. Attending writers have heard each other read, made personal connections and engaged in social discussions. The festival’s aim – to create a somewhat open space for writers to meet, discuss and debate – is being achieved. In between the second session and this one, Jon Cook reminds us, we heard J.M. Coetzee’s reading of a new story at the Norwich Playhouse (right). In this story, which Coetzee prefers to call a “lesson”, a circle in a field intrigues the protagonist – who asks whether it is a fairy ring? But there is no myth about it, it’s actually a threshing circle, a remnant of a forgotten agricultural past. There’s a sense of the failure of the imagination, where the childhood wonder of possibilities is replaced by a more prosaic truth. The wider moral of the story is that the only farms now existing there are facsimiles of farms – part of a story told by the heritage industry, where narratives are developed and set for the benefit of tourists. It is a reminder that the imagination is not purely the preserve of writers but can be co-opted for other purposes, such as the political or the economic.
In the final provocation, Zoe Wicomb (below), who had also read on Tuesday night, began to consider political or civic views of the imagination. She wanted us to think not only of “civic” writing as being about it’s value to a particular society, but about civility – writing that might be within a domestic “civil” context.
When literary historians talk about books having influence on society “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is sometimes given a definite example, but Wicomb wonders whether the sheer number of copies sold, as much as it’s content can explain it’s impact, for it had a reach that few other novels can ever achieve.
She mentions two different South African novels in terms of their message, Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Country” and Nadine Gordimer’s "July’s People". The first of these had a clear political message, yet did it actually have any influence in the real world into which it was pitched? She mentions that Gordimer’s novel was debated in the post-apartheid period as whether or not it should be banned from schools, because of an unsympathetic black character. The irony of an anti-apartheid campaigner and writer facing a ban was a stark one. Although common sense prevailed, it highlights that good writers and worthwhile books cannot easily be put forward for a purely civic purpose, as the books exist separate to our daily realities.
Adorno, Wicomb reminds us, insists that the artist’s imagination is not constructed out of nothing, and that all books come out of some sort of empirical reality, which might just be more obvious where there is state censorship – but is probably echoed elsewhere. (For instance in what the “market” in the West expects from an Indian novelist, a Chinese novelist.)
Is it that the “education of the imagination” is actually not so different than “education” itself? Formal education is set up to pass on the values of a particular society or class. In this context, a creative work can be seen to be co-opted as appropriate educational material, yet this co-option is always partial, as the relationship is between reader and text, and that is a personal one. Reading creates empathy, between text and reader, and we should think of reading as a cognitive act – and, as writers, we are also readers, and use that act of re-reading in the revisioning of a particular work.
If there is some kind of formal relationship between a particular writer and the society within which the work is written in, it’s partly because of our limits of difference. We are all part of a particular society, our education, accents, place in society, there in our life, and therefore likely to inhabit the work.
Wicomb wonders if “reason” is some kind of stumbling block when discussing a writer’s imagination, for writing inevitably occupies a place of ambiguity where the reader is asked to question assumptions of empathy or morality, through characters who may well be flawed. When you read Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles for instance how would it be possible to assess it in terms of “civic value” where your sympathy lies with a fallen woman who has killed?
In responding to Wicomb’s piece we began by looking at how literature is “used” in education – for instance, through which books are read in schools. On the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” it is fascinating to consider how it is still taught in schools, not only in the US, but elsewhere. In the UK, it is one of a number of books used in the classroom for purposes of moral education (alongside the Diary of Anne Frank, and Lord of the Flies.) Yet if it’s a “safe” text for British schools, it was also read in Australian schools at a time when education there made little or no mention of the indigenous aboriginal population. “To Kill a Mockingbird” may well be a book that is easy to assimilate into a school’s ethical curriculum, but it is also one of the most proscribed books in schools, particular in parts of the US.
The use of particular texts in schools for non-aesthetic purposes seems a particularly relevant example of the contradictions in how we “educate the imagination.” More recently, several of the Australian authors round the table have found their own books used in the school curriculum. In the US, local school boards, who may well have profound political, moral or religious expectations, have considerable power in deciding what should be read in school. There’s a scene in the movie “Donnie Darko” where a reading of Hemingway’s “The Killers” causes a minor scandal. It seems that literature in this context is expected to have a clear moral or civic purpose, yet few texts are compliant in this way.
Yet, if this is the way that the state thinks about “educating the imagination”, we should not be too critical. Within Australia, the studying of books with relevance to that country, rather than from the UK or US, is surely something to be grateful for. Yet this officially sanctioned view of the “value” of literature is inevitably focussed on short term gains – where a particular book can be set, read, and then analysed against a series of targets or can be used to spur a particular debate. Outside of schools, the book group may often take on a similar function, where an “issue” book can offer a more focussed debate – albeit away from the book itself – than a discussion on literary or aesthetic merits. Even the reading of a book like “To Kill a Mockingbird” cannot be seen as purely reductive, as the relationship between an individual reader and a particular text, might take much longer to untangle.
A book may be part of a curriculum for a particular reason, yet reading itself can be a powerful act of subversion, offering a relationship between text and reader that is unseen to others. Where particular books (for instance, religious texts) have been banned over the years, it is because of this relationship – books as conduits for (dangerous) ideas.
We perhaps expect in more totalitarian regimes for there to be a proscribed list, or an officially sanctioned literature, whilst missing that “good” or “liberal” regimes can also pile some pressure on literature to conform to a particular worldview. In post-apartheid South Africa requires there to be distinct narratives governing both the apartheid and post-apartheid periods. A recent memoir, Jacob Dlamini’s “Native Nostalgia”, imagines growing up in a violent township, but speaks also of it being a good life, for which he has positive memories. It’s a book that therefore disturbs the “official” narrative. It also takes us back to a theme from earlier in the week, of the difference between books that extend the imagination, and those that are limited to preconceived expectations.
Many of the writers also work within universities, and on creative writing programs, and there is clearly some power in the ability to be able to set curriculums and introduce books into the classroom or lecture hall. Should more attention be given to the role of reading within the creative writing course? For we not only read our own, and other student’s works, but usually a whole series of other books – which may be chosen for a number of reasons. Being writers, we value reading, yet perhaps don’t always think too much about why we do, or what makes us recommend a particular text to a friend or student.
In summing up this final session, we came back to the idea of the “imagination” and the language with which we talk about it. The romantics certainly had a language to do so, but in a more rational age, are we lacking that lexicon?
In going round the table, everyone at the salon had the opportunity for some final thoughts. The week had begun with us talking about stories as existing beyond what we write – indicating that the imagination is innate in us all. We’d then considered research into the brain, and how as we get to know more about the way we think, we also value the power of our imagination. The best books provide an “enhanced environment” where the reader develops their own relationship with the text, stretching their imagination. Yet books are published as commodities, are constructions within a particular society. That relationship between society and writing is a problematic one, but not without its merits. If books struggle onto the school curriculum because of some kind of “moral purpose” to be found within them, they also exist beyond their official role through their ambiguity, and yes, their imaginative reach.
We seemed to talk mostly about novels, though, perhaps pointedly, the when talking about the “imagination” our examples tended to come from poetry, particularly the romantics. As the week came to an end, and taking in not only the conversations we’d had, but also the readings we’d heard, I began to think my favourite writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald for instance, could hardly be further from any idea of a “civic writer”, yet he is clearly a “moral writer.” In a post-religious age, at least in the West, I wonder whether we find something of the moral underpinning of our society, in the novels and poems we read. Formed by our upbringing and education, we are privileged to have access to an “enhanced environment” through the books that we have access to.
On our first morning, a writer mentioned the “luminous shock” that she felt on coming to England and seeing a copper beech for the first time; for she recognised it, and could name it, not from pictures, but from the books she had read. In this we see the essence of literary imagination, not necessarily to bring something fantastical to life, but to describe what we see every day and see it again with a sense of wonder. That our sense of wonder than can be transferred across time and space, simply through words, is the continued triumph of our educated imagination in a world that sometimes can seem reduced to the merely utilitarian.
