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A Few Words from the Editor
In my capacity of small publisher (very small), I keep
receiving e-mails, brochures, and newsletters assuring me that the
industry has never been more vibrant. Of course, this is true in a way.
Not only are hundreds of thousands of people publishing in quantity on the
Internet whose work would not have seen the light of day by conventional
means: the paper, print, and paste grind is also churning out titles
faster than Books in Print can list them all. To those who value
such superficial measurements, the proposition that literacy is in full
decline deserves a hearty laugh in the face.
The sound of that laugh would be the shrill, giddy,
untuned warble of a fool. The decline of freedom is often signaled by
outbreaks of extreme license; genuine religious faith tends to waste away
beneath deceptive bursts of cultic hysteria. They say a dying man
sometimes enjoys a surge of vigor right before his final plunge. Metaphors
and analogies aside, the proliferation of printed matter which we see
today is precisely what any serious student of culture would expect during
the last days of literacy. It isn’t volume that counts: it’s quality.
For about a millennium, northwestern Europe saw a production of
manuscripts in monastic scriptoria whose tally far surpassed the copies of
the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses put into circulation around
ancient Rome. Yet medieval "literate" Europe failed to nurture
Vergils and Ovids in record numbers. In fact, its audiences were at least
as fond of native oral traditions committed to writing for ready
performance on demand as they were of antiquity’s high-literate masters.
What scribal labor was not devoted simply to copying sacred texts and
important official documents was as apt to be lavished upon the Táin
Bó Cúalnge or the Chanson de Roland as upon the Thebaid—or
maybe, for that matter, upon a folksy rendition of the Thebaid
wherein monsters, witches, and the Wut of battle fury would play a
more prominent part. In some very significant sense, was this not an
extension of the oral age rather than an inauguration of the literate age?
By that reasoning, you may respond, the literate age
may be expected to linger well into the twenty-fifth century, comfortably
integrated with screens and keyboards. But you should then be missing the
point: to wit, that true, full literacy isolates the individual with his
thoughts, and is hence always resisted by human indolence. Speaking is
easier than writing, and button-pressing is easier than writing. The last
is indeed a sterile imitation of the first in its sad lack of genuine
sociability, yet an imitation thereof it surely is. The screened images
chatter away like warm bodies, and the clicked mouse shoots out responses
almost as casually as the loose tongue. As orality dominated the cultural
landscape for centuries wherein scribal literacy scratched and squinted,
so electronic transmission of prefabricated images and clichés has within
two generations suborned literacy to be its lowly handmaid. Our fellow
citizens now read in order to study TV Guide or stock prices or Web
directions to the great Nike online shoe sale. Even now, after just a
decade or so, many such instrumental lective chores have been replaced by
visual cues which light up when touched by a manual arrow. Reading fills
in the gaps where graphics remain ambiguous.
As for those tens of thousands of titles unleashed upon
the public annually, do not be deceived. Most are financial disasters. Of
these many, all too few fail in a noble endeavor to stir deep thought.
Like the best-sellers they emulate, the majority are ancillary to the new
crypto-oral culture of the screen. They peddle gossip about the rich and
famous; they spin visually lurid tales of epic slaughter whose degree of
psychological sophistication recalls a fifth-grade writing assignment of
thirty years ago; they pass along secrets about how to stuff a pepper,
fill a pie, and dice a salad that would have been whispered by grandmother
to granddaughter in the days when families still existed. And yes, such
documents will probably linger for a great many decades to come. How would
archaic Rome’s leadership have curbed mass hysteria without a book of
Sibylline prophecies which practically no one could read?
So read our issue and weep! Or better yet, read it and
enjoy, with that special, vanishing enjoyment of frequent pauses to review
an argument, to ponder an image—to go deeper. Tom Bertonneau’s essay
was the material cause of my decision to gather a special issue on this
subject; but, of course, the plight of literacy has vaguely concerned the
pages of every Praesidium ever published. Our creative work may
offer something of a relief to the considering of so many grim realities.
Quite without design, however, I happen to have emerged with a delightful
poem by Ralph Carlson about Internet courtship and a unique short story by
Fiona MacAlister about telemarketing. Coincidence? To some degree… but I
hasten to add that the artists among us can hardly be impervious to the
transformation of our psychic world. Indeed, I suspect they know better
than the rest of us what a rough ride awaits Western civilization.
The Irish proverb illustrated fetchingly on our cover,
by the way, is well suited to pre- and post-universalist tribalism, is it
not? Brace yourselves for more "survivalist" ethics.
~JH
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Thinking is Hard:
How a Damaged Literacy Hinders
Students from
Coming to Grips With Ideas
by
Thomas F. Bertonneau
Writing is a grand symbol of the Far, meaning not
only extension-distance, but also, and above all, duration and future
and the will-to-eternity. Speaking and listening take place only in the
present, but through script one speaks to men, whom one has never seen,
who may not even have been born yet; the voice of a man is heard
centuries after he has passed away… Nothing is more characteristic of
a Culture than its inward relation to writing. (Oswald Spengler, Decline
of the West, Volume II [1923])
Tom
Bertonneau has contributed regularly to Praesidium since its
inaugural days, and is known in many of what few honest corners of the
academy remain as an invincible exponent of sound pedagogy and common
sense. He currently teaches English at SUNY Oswego.
I
It is not merely Oswald Spengler, but many another
among more recent thinkers, who has divined the indissoluble bond between
high culture or civilization and an historical alteration in consciousness
brought about by the written word, most particularly by alphabetic
writing.
Eric Havelock, in Preface to Plato (1963),
describes the consequences of alphabetic literacy as a veritable
intellectual revolution, which, in the period between the eighth and the
fourth centuries B.C., transformed the tribal, the reactionary, the
superstitious into the philosophically inquisitive, the skeptical, and the
empirical—and so established the foundations for all subsequent
systematically conceptual endeavors. From the orally based customs of
their tenth and ninth century B.C. Dark Age, the Greeks of the Archaic
Period had inherited a paideia, or educational regimen, based on
memorization of fixed, rhythmically structured patterns, designed to be
spoken and heard. The human subject fostered by such a paideia is
by no means autonomous or rational in a modern sense but depends, rather,
on rote learning in rigid imitation of another who personally incarnates
the authority of the community. This regime of strictly mimetic education
will leave room neither for skepticism nor for analysis. Assuming that such things were possible
in an oral society (they appear not to be), they would be antithetic to
its fundamental organizing principle of dogmatic conformism. If writing,
as Spengler says, is "a grand symbol of the Far" that has
to do with "distance", then its antitype —what Walter J. Ong
Jr. has dubbed orality—is an index of and has to do with
closeness, and especially with the somatic and personal nearness of other
people and of the concrete features of the immediate lifeworld. Havelock
notes that "at some time towards the end of the fifth century before
Christ, it became possible for a few Greeks to talk about their ‘souls’
as though they had selves or personalities which were autonomous and not
fragments of the atmosphere nor of a cosmic life force, but what we might
call entities or real substances" (197). The salient marker of this
development was a shift in the valor of the term psyche, which
indeed had previously signified something like a mute "life
force":
In brief, instead of signifying a man’s ghost or
wraith, or a man’s breath or his life blood, a thing devoid of sense
and self-consciousness, it came to mean "the ghost that
thinks," that is capable both of moral decision and of scientific
cognition, and is the seat of moral responsibility, something infinitely
precious, an essence unique in the whole realm of nature. (197)
… [Around this time] the Greek pronouns, both
personal and reflexive, also begin to find themselves in new syntactical
contexts, used for example as objects of verbs of cognition, or placed
in antithesis to the "body" or "corpse" in which the
"ego" was thought of as residing. We confront here a change in
the Greek language and in the syntax of linguistic usage [that] is part
of a larger intellectual revolution, which affected the whole range of
the Greek cultural experience. (198)
Havelock elsewhere describes the same metamorphosis in
slightly different terms: "Another and more correct way of stating
the effect of the revolution… would be to say that it now becomes
possible to identify the ‘subject’ in relation to that ‘object’
which the ‘subject’ knows" (201). One might further modify the
formula to state that the species of literacy innovated by the Greeks
(alphabetic literacy together with prose) is the foundation of all objective
cognition. Descartes’s radical dichotomy of the res cogitans (the
thoughts we have) as against the res extensa (the things about
which we have thoughts) is thus already implicit in the
"syntax", as Havelock styles it, of Socrates and Plato. Where
the Archaic paideia trades in the figures-in-action and emotional
states of oral epic, on which it was based, and is participatory (mimetic)
in an almost gymnastic manner, the new prosaic philosophia, or the
literate education, emphasizes concepts, definitions, syllogisms—in
other words, it distances itself from persons and the lifeworld by asking
the subject to suppress his emotional reaction to a topic in favor of
detached assessment according to set criteria. It also creates topics that
are "not necessarily agents, that is, persons" but, rather,
"entities" (The Muse Learns to Write 101). The attitude
appears as early as Heraclitus (fifth century B.C.), when he asserts that
"of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be
uncomprehending… for although all things happen according to the Logos
men are like people of no experience" (qtd. in Kirk, Raven, and
Schofield 187); and later when he urges that "listening not to me
but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one" (187
[emphasis added]).
Appealing to his external criterion, the Logos,
Heraclitus at the same time complains that the many of his day have not
yet come to terms with it; they do not examine the thing in itself
according to its intrinsic character—the thing per
se (κατα φυσιν)—
but by implication only under the received, and by no means guaranteed,
opinion. The "not to me" is extraordinarily important, as it
brackets the ego in an unprecedented way. It suspends, rather more
accurately, the plural egos of contending, relativistic dispute, in which
no subject succeeds in separating affect from proposition. The enduring
battle in the sequence of the Platonic dialogues between the Socratic
passion for truth and the sophistic dedication to mere opinion stems from
the same scheme, which is why Havelock makes Plato’s oeuvre the armature
of his discussion.
Ong’s rehearsal of these same events and facts
demands attention on its own. In his indispensable Orality and Literacy
(1983), he describes how pre-literate communities "conceptualize and
verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the
human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more
immediate, familiar interaction of human beings" (42). By contrast,
"words are alone in a text" (101), where "they lack their
full phonetic qualities" (101) and so tend toward impartiality and
abstraction. The spoken word, confined to "situational, operational
frames of reference" (49), lacks literacy’s "consciously
contrived [and] articulable rules" (82), which, precisely because
they are "completely artificial" (81), force the subject to
reduce the otherwise seamless flow of events into its analytical
constituent elements. Just this suspension of the lifeworld, and of its
confrontation of personalities and subjective orientation, however, is
what exposes the mind "as never before not only to the external
objective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interior self
against whom the world is set" (105). In a discussion of print, Ong
notes:
By removing words from the world of sound where they
had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating
them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual
space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to
think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more
and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print
encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort
of inert mental space. (131-132).
While the image of "inert mental space" might
irritate the vestigial Romantic in us all, we should remember that Ong
intends the phrase positively, for only when one can represent himself
neutrally can he submit himself to rigorous assessment and correction;
prior to that he can only conform. The transition from orality to literacy
therefore has not merely an intellectual implication in the restricted
sense, but a moral one as well. Furthermore, while the assertion that
"print encouraged the mind to think" in a new way about its own
contents might appear as a concession to contemporary relativism (there is
oral thinking and literate thinking and one is as good as the other), the
opposite is in fact the case: for only when the contents of observation
can be stored and evaluated as if apart from the observer does an
empirically verifiable objective knowledge at last appear. The
epistemological advance thus underpins the ethical one; and the ethical
one in turn reinforces the epistemological one. Havelock shows, in The
Greek Concept of Justice (1978), how the sense of what is right in,
say, The Iliad, remains subjective and ego-driven. Without a
concept of objective moral reference, might tends to make right, as the
old saying cynically insists. In Plato’s Socratic dialogues, which
benefit from later developments in a literacy still quite incipient when The
Iliad was written, we can by contrast already see the result of the
mental distancing spurred by writing: the whole point of Protagoras
or Gorgias is to define, as carefully as possible, ethical ideas
(virtue or justice) and to separate them from the rancor and selfishness
of personal claims.
Literacy—as Spengler or Havelock or Ong sees it —is
a momentous and yet tenuous achievement largely of the West. Vast areas of
the globe have been but little altered by the phenomenon of the
alphabetization of consciousness, or they have changed only superficially
without yielding a tenacious orality in their basic adjustment to life.
There is no particular reason to suppose, for example, that the regions of
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan visited by cognitive science researcher
Alexander Luria in the 1920s and 30s would show any greater influence of
literacy today than they did seven or eight decades ago when he studied
their peoples. But we should not imagine that literacy is guaranteed where
it has historically taken root, that it is permanent or inalterable on its
"home ground". It is assuredly not. Ong’s somewhat troubling
coinage of "secondary orality" addresses the vulnerability of
high literacy to erosion and subversion. The term refers particularly to
the reappearance in literate cultures of essentially oral types of
communication, such as radio and television; these technologies bypass and
increasingly replace the written word as the medium of public discourse.
Ong claims that: "secondary orality" is "essentially a more
deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of
writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation
of the equipment and for its use as well" (136). This might be the
case for the first generation of radio and television audiences, but as
broadcasting permeates a society—as it has American society for more
than half a century—the subtlety and objectivity of literate discourse
retreats before a resurgence of ego assertion, opinion, gesture, and
image; the near displaces what Spengler calls the Far. The
advertisement-driven, visual style of "internet" communications
(with cartoon-like sound effects and flashing rebuses) no doubt also veers
away from literacy, as such, and reinforces habits, which are essentially
oral.
Complaints about the politics of the
"sound-bite" indicate the character and direction of the overall
development; so do steadily dropping verbal SAT scores and the "dumbing
down", as it is denominated, of the schools and of the culture
generally. In her essay on "The Question of our Speech: the Return to
Aural Culture" (1989), Cynthia Ozick urges that while "pragmatic
reading cannot die," literate culture "is already close to
moribund" (Washburn and Thornton 86). She notes the primacy of a
visual-oral style (television, movies, commercial music) and spells out
its default: "The job of sitting in a theater or in a movie house or
at home in front of a television set is not so reciprocally complex as the
wheels-within-wheels job of reading almost anything (including the
comics)" (86). Reading books entails "an act of imaginative
conversion" (86). The moral and the intellectual are again connected.
I quote from Ozick’s rather Spenglerian assessment of the current
situation:
In the new aural culture there is no prevalent
belles-lettres curriculum to stimulate novel imaginative intent… what
there is, is replication—not a reverberation or an echo, but a copy.
The Back to Basics movement in education, which on the surface looks as
if it is calling for revivification of a belles-lettres syllabus, is not
so much reactionary as lost in literalism, or trompe l’oeil:
another example of the replication impulse of the new aural culture…
Above all, a book is the riverbank for the river of
language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk—a
free fall, a loose splash, a spill. And that is what an aural society,
following a time of complex literacy, finally admits to: spill and more
spill. (87)
The "new aural culture" that Ozick describes
resembles Ong’s "orality" or Havelock’s
"acoustic-mimetic culture" part by part, with the exception that
it is less competent because less purposeful than either. The salient
common feature is the lack of a literature to serve as intellectual model
and orientation. Archaic Greek culture had not yet invented literature;
twenty-first century "aural culture" has given it up.
II
The written and oral contributions of the students in
my college composition and literature courses substantiate Ozick’s
thesis, which is my own as well: three or four decades of affective—often
outright anti-literate—education in the public schools have created
cohort after cohort of high school graduates whose intellectual capacities
remain largely undeveloped and are perhaps no longer amenable to
development by the time that they reach eighteen and show up in the state
colleges. I shall only state here for the first time what I shall repeat
as my exposition unfolds: while the students suffer intellectually from
the effects of this default in their education, they themselves are not
responsible for it. When I note the intransigency of their untutored
mental habits, it is not for the sake of charging them with their own
shortcomings; it is, rather, to show the manner in which bad schools and
thoughtless schooling have cheated them out of a birthright.
Student "orality" betrays itself in a number
of guises: a childish prose, full of technical defects, depending heavily
on the transcription of oral formulas based on the first and second
persons, as though what one writes were merely a graphic version of what
one says; a reliance on paratactic utterances pointing to a concomitant
unfamiliarity with hypotactic procedures; a nearly perfect lack of
analysis, either grammatical or logical; only the dimmest notion of
causality; a lack of even the narrowest repertory of allusions and
references, such as to an historical chronology or to scientific or
belletristic knowledge; a crude rhetoric of ego-assertion and resentment;
a subjectivity that exploits a ready-made vocabulary of simplistic
relativism, often expressing itself in a sweepingly judgmental
condemnation of judgments; and a penchant for emotional posturing and what
might be called affective argument (except that it is not really
argument). Contemporary student writing is, as Ong might put it, close
to the human lifeworld, agonistic, egotistical, aggregative, and
formulaic.
Consider the responses of first-year composition
students, on the first day of the semester, to the following dictum by
Heraclitus, chosen for its self-contained rationale: "All men should
speak clearly and logically, and thus share a rational discourse and have
a body of thought in common, just as the people of a city should be under
the same laws" (Davenport’s translation, Fragment 81). The dictum
is a modal, counterfactual one describing the necessary (ideal) state for
transparent civic discourse in a community, its point being underscored by
a simile in reference to law. The dictum’s level of abstraction is high
and its grammatical structure of moderate complexity; in its simile,
however, it makes an effort to analyze and clarify itself, and this should
be a help to readers of modest accomplishment. Yet freshmen typically
misread it, often failing to grasp it as a counterfactual plea for greater
deliberation and clarity in the forum while mistaking it for an erroneous
report on the empirical situation. Here is an example:
It is hard to get people in a city [to agree?] that
they should all follow the same set of laws, mostly due to people that
won’t follow them. In comparison "all men should speak clearly
and logically, and thus share a rational discourse and have a body of
thought in common is in principle alone not going to happen. Also, we,
as humans, express ourselves in different ways. We may seem to all
follow the same set of standards on speaking clearly and logically but
there are some different ways to do this that sometimes we outwit
ourselves
The paragraph shows a number of interesting features,
which it will be profitable to detail. Let me start where the writer does,
with his assertion about the alleged difficulty of getting people to abide
by "the same set of laws". The sentence is not true, but it is
not true in a particular way: of course, most people do obey the law or
follow the rules; the writer finds this generalization unsettling because,
empirically speaking, not everyone is law abiding or rule following—hence
his tautology that not everyone toes the line because not everyone toes
the line. Generalization is a form of abstraction. We generalize, as the
theoreticians tell us, by first gaining some distance from the empirical
situation, what Ong would call the sensorium. The writer’s
discomfort with the generalization appears to come from, or to be bound up
with, his unwillingness to reconcile the exceptions with the rules. His
inability to assert a perfectly valid generalization is thus the reverse
of his incomprehension of the modal counterfactual grammar in the sentence
to which he responds. Heraclitus has uttered a formula for ideal
communications in a society; he has not described the empirical situation,
which no doubt differs quite radically from the ideal (in his day, as in
our own). It might well be the case, as the writer says, that Heraclitus’
best possible outcome "is… not going to happen," but modal
counterfactuals are not predictions; they are speculations—hypotheses,
as it were—which deal the probable consequences of projected causes. As
before, the writer does not understand the tense of Heraclitus’ verbs,
and once again he confuses the factual with the counterfactual. Note the
only partially assimilated phrases of the second sentence, the "in
comparison" and the "in principle". These come from written
discourse, but the writer is unsure of their function and seems to employ
them for effect only, in the naïve faith that they will add something to
his iteration. The next sentence reverts to a widespread topos of
contemporary classroom propaganda—the jejune notion that everyone is so
different from everyone else that set criteria for measurement do not
apply. The plausible aim for the writer in asserting that "we, as
humans, express ourselves in different ways" would be to defend
people in general, and most especially to guard himself, from the
application of such criteria. There are "different ways", the
writer claims, of following "the same set of standards". Here,
too, the function appears to be prophylactic. The final sentence, the one
that supplies this armory of defensive anticipation, trails off into a
semi-coherent phrase that seems to contradict what has gone before: it
suggests that there is indeed something inherently confusing in expressive
anarchy, hence the notion that in insisting on private modes of argument
"we outwit ourselves".
Even when respondents appear to agree with Heraclitus,
it is often without fully understanding the formula’s import, as in the
case of the student who writes: "Not only should we stand for what we
believe in but also stand together and disgard [sic] what we don’t
believe in." This sentence confuses the requirement for rules to
which all submit with conformist solidarity as a desideratum; its images
of assembling en masse and collectively expelling "what we don’t
believe in" originate in communal action and suggest an ego still
heavily indebted to peer pressure. In his description of Greek orality
prior to the dissemination of alphabetic literacy, Havelock stresses the
mimetic character of its education: "Tradition… is taught by
action, not by idea or principle", and learning occurs largely
through the sharing of "common feelings" in a "collective
association" (The Muse Learns to Write 77). To explain what he
thinks Heraclitus means, the writer imagines such an occasion, with a
crowd of people standing together. His disgard is an
interesting conflation of disregard and discard and is
facilitated, so to speak, by a lack of visual acquaintance with the two
terms.
A second student trades Heraclitus’ theme of clear
and logical speech for his own theme of "equality" and offers
this gloss: "Equality is some[thing] that can be stressed in this
quote… All people should respect each other and everyone should be
treated the same." Another student agrees: "In the quote by
Heraclitus of Ephesus, it states how all men should be equal." The
same student adds this: "There is no reason why people should not be
treated equally. I believe that no one should be labeled as better than
someone else, and should be treated the same… I believe that equality
and respect should be brought upon everyone." This demand for
"respect" for everyone fits well with the defensive claim that
universal criteria pose a threat of some kind to the individual because,
after all, "we… express ourselves in different ways." Yet
another student opines how "in my opinion, the quote by Heraclitus of
Ephesus is discussing how everybody should be treated equally." Of
course, Heraclitus says nothing at all about "equality."
Why then do the respondents insist in such a convergent
way that he does? It begins with what must be the opacity, to them, of the
text; when the terms defy translation one seeks out some other, familiar
term as if one term were freely exchangeable with another. The
theme of "equality" is currently widespread and is one of the
few Latinate abstractions to which students can readily attach a brief
gloss. Everyone in the contemporary scholastic and academic milieu talks
endlessly about equality. It follows that Heraclitus, too, must have been
talking about it, even if his asseveration makes no mention of it. The
appeal to equal shares in "respect" for everyone belongs to the
same vein of free-floating egalitarian discourse.
A related but resolutely programmatic response to
Heraclitus is this one, the vocabulary of which suggests a rather thorough
assimilation of the reigning sectarian ideology:
The same uniformity, or logic, of thought when shared
by all men does not breed diversity. Diversity is necessary for
expression and leads to more avenues of advancement in the arts and in
culture. A shared and clearly expressed language fosters both
enforcement and creation of laws as well as allowing for an exchange of
ideas. A shared language is vital for a city while undiverse logic and
argument lead to stagnation.
In comparison with some, this response shows a modicum
of grammar and syntax; yet the competency is a reflection, it seems to me,
of the writer’s reliance on stock formulas of a rudimentary sort close
to oral slogans—the sort of pronouncements that freshmen now routinely
hear during summer orientation. Like the obligatory events in an epic
sequence, everything turns on a preexisting collective knowledge of what
actions and emotions go with the topos of "diversity". As
do many respondents, this one reacts with indignity to the misperception,
by no means unique to him, that Heraclitus is calling for a lock-step type
of non-thinking—"uniformity… of thought… does not breed
diversity"—to condense the affront to its essential form. The next
sentence is de rigueur: "Diversity… leads to advancement in
the arts and in culture." This unites "diversity" with a
version of progress ("advancement") in the standard yoking. Note
how the next sentence, which displays a bit of real and perhaps
independent analysis, has an entirely non sequitur relation to the
previous one; for it is quite true, as Heraclitus implies, that it is only
the sharing of concepts and rules that "fosters", in the
student’s surprisingly apt diction, "the exchange of ideas."
The terms "enforcement" and "creation", however, are
not in their proper order; a law cannot be enforced until it is
first created. I am tempted to characterize the concluding sentence
of the response as schizophrenic, since its first half states the
analytically undeniable case, while the second half reverts arbitrarily to
the cliché. It is not clinically schizophrenic, of course; it is merely
contradictory in a confusing and irresolvable way. The weight of the
writer’s moral opprobrium expresses itself through the awkward coinage,
"undiverse", which is close to a manifestation of Newspeak.
Other respondents echo the politically correct indignation without
employing the prêt-à-porter vocabulary. For example: "if we
all had similar thoughts, there could be no creativity in the world"
and "we could be a society of mindless drones with no
individuality"; or: "if this was how things were [run,] then
where would you ever get individuality"; or: "not everyone
should vote or go for something if they don’t like the outcome";
or: "if this were true, we would still be living in caves." The
students persistently and widely identify the call to speak clearly and
logically with the demand to think alike. The paradox is that in making
this error, the students demonstrate that they cogitate in a manner
remarkably similar—and quite predictable, as well.
Luria’s meditations in The Meaning of Mind
(1979) can help us to summarize the mental operations revealed in the
student responses to Heraclitus. "New experiences and new
ideas," Luria writes, "change the way people use language so
that words become the principal agent of abstraction and
generalization" (73). Prior to this development, which stems from
exposure to literacy, language remains oriented to the "concrete
situation" (72), and exhibits a rather tenacious antipathy to
"abstractions or generalizations about categorical relations"
(72). Even the notion of a human being is an abstraction.
Poignantly, the respondents to Heraclitus in my class exercise rarely
refer to human beings or humanity; they are obsessed, on the
other hand, by what they call individuality. This
"individuality", as in the phrases quoted at the end of the
previous paragraph, does not seem to be an abstract—an ethical or
philosophical—category. On the contrary, it seems to mean people whom
I know, my friends, me, the cohabitants of my lifeworld; indeed, those
who share my tastes and typical behaviors. The aggressive speculation
in Heraclitus’ words, which creates a categorical imperative ("all
men should…"), must strike the students as incompatible with, even
a threat to, their concrete and affective sense of themselves and their
acquaintances. That their usage of individuality is not abstract,
but situational in Luria’s sense, is indicated by its unresolved tension
with the ideas of equality and equal respect. Logically,
individuals will differ; the degree of their difference will correlate
with the development of their individuality. Superb singers will not be
"equal" with bad ones; the best basketball players will earn
more than "equal respect" in comparison to those who do not make
the team. But these are precisely the "logical schemas" (75), in
Luria’s term, which the students do not have available, so that the
question of resolving them does not arise.
When interviewing his subjects, Luria noted "a
mistrust of initial premises" (79) when he tried to lead them through
logical or abstract discussions. Ong writes about the "agonistically
toned" character of oral societies (Orality and Literacy 43).
"Writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena
where human beings struggle with one another," but by contrast "orality
situates knowledge within a context of struggle" (42-43). All of the
student utterances previously quoted show traits of oral antagonism and of
non-literate situational, as opposed to abstract or categorical, thinking.
Of course, all of the responses originate with people who are, in some
degree, literate. One occasionally even finds among them vocabulary and
syntax that verges on the sophisticated. But we should remember Ozick’s
observation that pragmatic literacy should not be misidentified with the
literacy of cognitively competent and richly educated individuals.
The adolescents who show up at college in today’s
freshman classes are not illiterates, but they are also not readers or
thinkers; they resemble the middle tier among Luria’s Central Asian
subjects: "Women who attended short-term courses in the teaching of
kindergarteners [who] as a rule had no formal schooling and almost no
training in literacy" and "active… collective farm workers and
young people who had taken short courses" (61). The acculturation of
modern American young people is primarily oral-acoustic, with the imagery
of motion pictures and television added on. The tendency in elementary and
secondary schools has been to concede to this situation and to lower the
standards for reading, writing and literary studies all along the line in
the K-12 curriculum. Sandra Stotsky has noted, in Losing our Language
(1999), how the literary offerings in widely used textbooks have changed
since the early twentieth century. Of the contents of a third and fourth
grade reader from 1900, Stotsky says that its "vocabulary and
sentence constructions… would be an extraordinary challenge to students
in the sixth grade today" (18), who have been brought up on reading
programs "that may actually be decelerating children’s rate of
language learning as they move through the grades" (15). Of an essay
by Joseph Addison offered in a McGuffy Eclectic Reader, Stotsky
says that, "it required much more of the reader than well-developed
reading vocabulary" (19). The Eclectic Reader’s selections
from Addison, Poe, and others "require—and reward—considerable
reflective thought" (19).
III
Heraclitus on the advisability of clear and logical
language is one sentence—of some grammatical subtlety, it is true, but
by no means opaque or intractable for someone who has been exposed
meaningfully to the Lincoln-Douglas debates or who, in the sixth or
seventh grade, has lived up to the demands of H. G. Wells or Jules Verne
or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. My advanced composition
students (freshmen who have tested out of the "developmental"
writing course) recently experienced considerable difficulty with the
following passage on the character of scientific research in a
collectivist context from Simone Weil’s "Sketch of Contemporary
Social Life" (1934), which I had assigned them to read:
New results are always, in fact, the work of specific
individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any
result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past
discoveries that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.
Consequently, new discoveries, as they go on accumulating, take on the
appearance of enigmas, after the style of too thick a glass, which
ceases to be transparent. A fortiori practical life takes on a
more and more collective character, and the individual as such a more
and more insignificant place in it.… As for the general body of social
life, it depends on so many factors, each of which is impenetrably
obscure and which are tangled up in inextricable relations to one
another, that it would never even occur to anyone to try to understand
its mechanism. (Simone Weil Reader 29).
Their bafflement stemmed from a number of proximate
causes—from having almost no discernible sense of the activity of
scientific research, from not knowing what the phrase a fortiori
means and so ceasing to read beyond the point in the passage where it
appears, and from not knowing the import of the adjective
"collective." Yet the scheme of Weil’s statement is neither
complex nor elusive: in a welter of activity where one researcher cannot
possibly know of the endeavors of all other researchers, the results of
experimentation quickly escape from the discoverer, who remains powerless
to influence further developments or practical applications. One student,
on being asked about the meaning of Weil’s words, said hesitantly that
"life is full of mystery." I wanted to know whether that was
good or bad. "It’s good," she said; "people need mystery
in their lives." I asked where the idea of a "mystery"
appears in the passage. She had associated the term, as it happened, with
Weil’s enigma, which however belongs to the metaphor of
diminished clarity, as of "too thick glass", and does not boast
a positive valence in the context. Later on in the passage, Weil develops
the "thick glass" metaphor under the figure of impenetrable
obscurity. The young woman gave no sign of registering any of this.
Another student reacted this way: "People should mind their own
business and not go poking around." He added that Weil seemed to him
"a grumpy sort of person who likes to complain." Yet another
student said, "Most of the people I know are happy."
As do the brief compositions on Heraclitus (which come
from the same group of eighteen students), these oral ripostes to Weil
reveal a restriction to the immediate situation or lifeworld. If my
friends and I are happy, why should we worry whether "blind
collectives" (whatever they are) cancel or otherwise disturb our
individual aspirations? The students do not reject a particular bit of
social analysis (Weil’s) in preference for another on the basis of a
real assessment; they simply do not enter into critical interpretation of
overarching social phenomena. Nor is it exactly a refusal; it is more like
some kind of incapacity. They fall back on bits of folklore, like the
sententious advice that "people need mystery in their lives," or
the admonition not to go poking around. These sententiae are
the functional equivalents of the declaration that "diversity…
leads to advancement in the arts and culture." They mean little but
serve rather as reassurances of the affective status quo. A notion,
on the other hand, like the one stating that "a complex set of
interrelations" now mediates all knowledge, is as it were too complex
and too interrelated with other notions in the same passage for the
students to come to grips with it. Does this odd combination of bafflement
and hostility with complacency represent, as Stotsky and others argue, a
decline in cognitive achievement from past decades? Or have first-year
college students always operated linguistically and intellectually at this
wanting level? Jeanne S. Chall, in "Should We Worry", summarizes
a number of studies that strongly indicate a real decline in freshman
literacy. For example:
A comparison of the reading achievement of University
of Michigan freshmen 50 years apart—in the 1930s and 1980s—on a test
originally given to the 1930 freshmen, found the 1980s freshmen tested
lower on both the vocabulary and reading comprehension subtests than had
the 1930s freshmen. The 1980s freshmen tested particularly low on the
vocabulary subtest.
Another possible indication that reading achievement
has been declining is the great increase in remedial reading courses at
colleges—both at two- and four-year colleges. This may well be a
reflection of the increase in first generation college students. But it
might also be that they are not, as a group, as proficient in reading and
writing as those of similar background who attended college in previous
years (Research in the Teaching of English, October 1996, 267).
Stotsky would probably correlate the comparatively poor
performance of the Michigan students in the 1980s with a shift away from
phonics and from intensive-quality reading in K-12 in the 1960s; as things
in K-12 have gotten no better since then—according to Stotsky they have
gotten progressively worse—we would expect a comparable decline over the
twenty year period from 1980 to the present. The starting ability of the
writers in my current (Spring 2002) freshmen composition class is evidence
for a continuation of the decline noted by Chall; so are the reading and
writing skills of the sophomores and juniors in my "Western Heritage
I" course, essentially a survey of ancient and early medieval
literature in translation.
The class has an enrollment of twenty-five students. On
a mid-term examination given in the second week of March, or about half
way through the semester, essay writers made the following basic-language
errors (among many others):
PROPER NOUNS: "Euricles" for Euripides;
"Ithica" for Ithaca; "Lauis"
and "Laus" for Laius; "Media" for Medea;
"Odesseus" for Odysseus; "Odysseu’s"
for Odysseus’; "Telemachius" for Telemachus.
OTHER TERMS: "a extremely strong theme" for an
extremely strong theme; "apon" for upon; "atuziurs"
for something indecipherable; "can not" for cannot;
"chauvanistic" for chauvinistic; "dionystic"
for Dionysiac; "disgussion" for discussion;
"enstill" for instill; "epidmy"
for epitome; "focus" for focused; "occuring"
for occurring; "persued" for pursued; "resues"
for rescues; "sence" for scenes; "tail"
for tale; "tryes" for tries.
These simple errors tell us a good deal about the
intellectual habits of the students. The misspelling of proper names is
particularly interesting given that "Euripides" and "Medea",
for example, appear boldly on the front cover of the Dover edition that I
ordered for the course. When the ears and the eyes work together, matching
repeatedly what they hear and see, then unfamiliar but easy spellings are
swiftly mastered; when the ears do the work and fail to coordinate what
they hear with what the eyes see, the default produces orthographic
oddities like "Euricles" and "Media". In the second
case, the partial homophony of the proper name "Medea" (where
the accent, however, lies on the second syllable) with the plural noun
"media" results in the substitution of the latter for the
former, because it is known and "Medea" is not. Someone
habituated to the optics of careful reading would not make such a mistake,
especially given that "Medea" is a mere five characters. The
erroneous "disgussion" resembles another item of confused
diction that we encountered earlier: the quasi-portmanteau coinage "disgard",
which conflates disregard and discard, while putting g
for c in the vowel-consonant pattern of the latter. The explanation
is the same—a lack of visual familiarity with the word. "Enstill",
too, probably results from hearing the word but not seeing it. "Dionystic"
and "epidmy" require some background for their implication to
become clear. I make full use of classroom technology in my teaching; I
create detailed outlines of my lectures on transparencies and project them
the screen while I speak. This serves exactly the purpose of making novel
terms as plain as possible, right down to their spelling. In this manner,
during the sessions about tragedy, students had the opportunity to learn
the term D-I-O-N-Y-S-I-A-C along with its Nietzschean pair,
"Apollonian"; in a session on Homer’s Odyssey, I
made reference to Apollodorus’ E-P-I-T-O-M-E of the journey back to
Ithaca (for which two students wrote "Ithica"). In "Dionystic"
and "epidmy", then, we once again encounter the supremacy of the
ear over the eye. The aural/oral aspect of the word overwhelms the graphic
representation of it, so we get a quasi-phonetic transcription of what
"Dionysiac" and "epitome" merely sound like to
the student, who then ignores the template that is set before his eyes.
"Focus" for focused is a related
error, one that indicates a class of misspellings that appear to be
occurring more frequently than ever before in student writing. Many
students seem never to have consciously encountered written
representations of the past participle and are therefore unfamiliar with
it (they show no sign of ever having been exposed to systematic grammar);
and because they do not have a visual sense of the terminal –ed
that marks the inflection, they do not hear it when it is spoken. I have
also encountered, among other instances of the same phenomenon,
"discuss" for discussed, "force" for forced,
and "prejudice" for prejudiced. Now "sence" for
scenes also indicates a flawed visual familiarity with the word,
the written pattern of which the writer has insufficiently noted; the
writer knows that both s and c are involved, but not how the
pattern juxtaposes them. "Tail" for tale shows
unfamiliarity with the latter form and assumes an orthographic identity in
the homophonic convergence of the two semantically quite different nouns.
A really inexplicable item is "atuziurs", which refers to
something in one of the reading assignments covered by the examination.
The closest thing to it phonologically, perhaps, is suitors, as in
Homer’s Odyssey, about whom I lectured at length; but the item’s
context—a sentence from an essay reading, "order was kept by the
atuziurs who had great respect for the gods and one another"—would
seem to eliminate Messieurs Antinoüs, Eurymachus, Amphinomus, et alia,
from consideration.
The apparent triviality of these gaffs might lead one
to dismiss them as mere sloppiness. This is not so: they belong in a
larger pattern with the oral traits in the responses to Heraclitus and
with the inability to render transparent the passage in Weil’s essay.
The representative contemporary college freshman—the one who is likely
to show up in a typical state college —operates mentally in a realm with
some resemblance to Ong’s "secondary orality", but without the
literate formation that Ong supposes for the phenomenon.
What Luria writes about his Uzbek subjects describes
students fairly well:
These people made excellent judgments about facts of
direct concern to them, and they could draw all the implied conclusions
according to the rules of logic revealing much worldly intelligence.
However, as soon as they had to change to a system of theoretical
thinking, three factors substantially limited their capability. The
first was a mistrust of initial premises that did not arise out of
personal experience [which] made it impossible for them to use such
premises as a point of departure. Second, they failed to accept such
premises as universal [but] rather treated them as a particular
statement reflecting a particular phenomenon. Third, as a result of
these two factors [they perceived syllogisms as sets of] isolated,
particular propositions with no unified logic. (79)
In the terms that I am using in the present essay,
contemporary college students have a hard time coming to grips with ideas.
Just how difficult will be further illustrated by their responses to the
examination question that asked them to comment on the theme of order
in three out of the six works that they had read (or were supposed to have
read) prior to the halfway point of the semester. Of course, there is much
dereliction in fulfilling the reading requirement, but wherever a student
has commented on a text, I assume him actually to have read, or to have
tried to read, it. The works were The Odyssey by Homer, Oedipus
Rex by Sophocles, Medea by Euripides, The Symposium by
Plato, and The Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes. They also
had exposure to some characteristic pronouncements of the Pre-Socratic
philosophers, with the emphasis on Heraclitus. They read The Odyssey
in Palmer’s Victorian translation, quite elegant in its prose and
several degrees de-archaized; they also read The Voyage of Argo in
prose, in E. V. Rieu’s translation, likewise fluent and modern.
I conduct the course systematically, as I have earlier
hinted, doing a good deal of story summary in my lectures, supplying a
visible outline of major points, and approaching from two or three angles
any feature of the text or incident in the tale that strikes me as
important. I articulate lectures around a number of themes that unify the
reading and among these the theme of order is foremost. In Homer,
for example, I carefully set out the details of the laws of hospitality
and explain their centrality in the social pattern of the saga; I guide
students through the patterns that inform relations between mortals and
immortals and that dictate right behavior or else, by their disruption,
indicate its default. In the case of Oedipus Rex and Medea,
I pointed out not only the assumptions about order and disorder internal
to the action but also the Aristotelian unities of form imposed on the
action from without by the poets. When dealing with Plato, I analyzed the
speeches in their sequence and spoke about the interior, spiritual order
embodied by Socrates and so casually despised and violated by Alcibiades—who
therefore strongly resembles Homer’s suitors. I place every work in its
historical context and have brought maps and chronologies and other
graphic and artistic material into appropriate convenience with the works
under discussion. I regularly ask students to think, and to talk, about
patterns that appear in more than one work. Odyssey and The
Voyage of Argo are quests; so, in its way, is Symposium,
although there the search is not a topographical, but a spiritual, one.
Apollonius gives us the beginning of Medea’s marriage with Jason,
Euripides its end. In other words, precisely on the assumption that they
will have difficulties, I do my utmost to establish clarity in what is,
for them, opaque because utterly unfamiliar. Given these clues, the
students might have been expected to have an easy time with the essay,
which did not require them to make an argument but merely to
"comment". How did they do and what do their responses reveal?
IV
The struggle simply "to comment" is often
moving. Writing about The Odyssey, a student whom I shall call
"Warfield" produces the following paragraph, which ranks among
the most coherent in the batch:
In Homer’s epic Odyssey, the theme of order is
clearly identified throughout the tail. The description of Ithaca during
the first four books illustrates that of chaos. Penelope is being
persued by suitors who take advantage of Odysseu’s values such as his
herd and the kingdom in general, especially the significance of justice
and order. Telemachus attempts to gain some order by calling an assembly
together to discuss what should be done about the unruly suitors.
Another example of how order is key to a virtuous society is when
Odysseus visits the Isle of Cyclopes. The inhabitants on the island have
no solid community, camaraderie, laws, or customs. After Odysseus blinds
Prometheus, Prometheus yells for help, yet none of the other Cyclopes
come to his aid. Had some kind of order been present, Odysseus might
have been caught and Prometheus helped. One may see that when order is
present in a society, such as when Odysseus returns home and kills the
suitors, that society may prosper.
The writer has read the material and recollects some
significant detail from his reading; not surprisingly, he best remembers
what in his reading coincides with pronouncements made by me during
lecture about and discussion of the poem. "Order" is an
abstraction, however, and Warfield does not quite sort it out. Like a
number of other respondents, he takes the phrase the theme of order
as a unit, failing to separate out the final element as the independent
general term. Nevertheless, he is able to work with both order and its
antithesis, and his implied scheme of order and chaos does
indicate the internalization of a rudimentary dichotomy, something few
other students demonstrate. Warfield recognizes in the tumult in Odysseus’
household, vividly described by Homer in Books I through IV in a set of
concrete images and stock actions, the principle of disorder and thus, by
definitional contrast, of order. The taking advantage that he
correctly ascribes to the suitors is, moreover, a type of ethical
disorder, so that we may justly say that Warfield is not, as many of his
classmates are, thoroughly bound to concrete and operational definitions.
To see order in Telemachus’ calling of the assembly is also admirably
non-concrete. In the discussion of "values", on the other hand,
the analysis breaks down: not only is the sentence cluttered with terms
whose interrelation is unclear, but the idea of "values", which
is essentially abstract, collapses back into its concrete meaning of
property or chattel; thus the suitors "take advantage" of the
absent king’s "herd" and of "his kingdom in
general". That the suitors have eaten Odysseus’ swine, that they
have drunk his vintage, is clear to Warfield; that they have violated
reciprocity, an idea one or two levels up on the ladder of
abstraction, is not. The discussion acquires a bit of
sophistication again when Warfield adduces the lawlessness and lack of
social organization of the Cyclopes as an example of disorder. This is not
an original discovery, however, but a report based on one of my lectures.
Warfield misidentifies Odysseus’ Cyclopean nemesis as
"Prometheus". The correct name, of course, is Polyphemus.
Another exam-taker who cannot break through to genuine
abstraction is "Katherine." "In the Odyssey," she
writes, "the theme of order was destroyed because the king was not
there... The city was in chaos until the king came back. Because Odysseus
was gone for so long the rule of hospitality somewhat diminished & the
respect for others was also lost." Katherine treats "the theme
of order" as a palpable thing, which like a vase or a
mechanism can be physically destroyed, and yet the passive voice omits to
specify who perpetrated the destruction. Katherine has only the most vague
idea of cause and effect in Homer’s story. Events happen, sort
of, but without agency. Thus: "the rule of hospitality somewhat
diminished" and this has something to do with the absence of
Odysseus.
A more representative sample than Warfield’s is
"Xenophon’s": "I feel The Odyssey portrays
has a theme of revenge. Telemachius wants his father back and the
revenge on the suitors that have made him and mothers life in the palace
hell." Note that the instruction asks for comment on the theme of order.
Xenophon implies the opposite of order, possibly, in the "hell"
of "life" under the bullying regime of the suitors; but what is
striking is the way in which Xenophon ignores the instruction to address
"the theme of order" and launches into his own commentary on
"a theme of revenge." This evasion of the topic bears a relation
to the tactic by means of which some of the composition students addressed
Heraclitus. They substituted ready banalities about "equality"
and "diversity" for his recommendation about clarity in speech.
The evidence of hesitation in the two scratched out verbs
("portrays" and "has") divulges, I would guess, some
worry about how the substitution might be made, and whether it is
effective or not. The nebulosity of the cognitive process underlying the
words finds its sign in the first-person report with which the response
begins, the affective "I feel", which should be taken absolutely
at face value, and which controls the remainder of the iteration. Ong,
following Havelock, remarks how Homer’s poems show their own nearness to
the long-standing oral tradition that they immediately succeed by their
reliance on "characters [and] persons", as he says, "whose
deeds are monumental" (71) and with whose outsized struggles the
listener can identify emotionally. Xenophon’s "hell", to cite
it once more, points to this type of emotional participation in a detail
of Homer’s story. I have heard students use the phrase "he is
making my life hell" about their co-dwellers in the dormitories and
about teachers or administrators or supervisors who, in their perception,
harass them in the context of campus life. We might plausibly speculate
then, that Xenophon has remembered this particular detail of The
Odyssey because it exaggerates, in its figures, features of his
personal (direct or indirect) experience. Under this hypothesis, the
"I feel" is redoubled in its honesty and its accuracy—but
Xenophon is reduced to something other than a reader-writer in any beyond
the functional or pragmatic sense.
Students consistently confuse the lecture with the
reading. Homer does not tell of Odysseus’ attempt to feign madness when
Agamemnon came to recruit him for the Trojan campaign; I recited the
episode in my introductory remarks on Homer and his poem. "Gwen"
is not sure where the lecture ends and the poem begins. She writes that:
Well in the Odyssey the theme of order was when
Odysseus left for the Trojan war in Troy for ten years and then went
through different obstacles to get back and the world was basically
destroyed because of the fault of Helen going off with Paris. But
anyways Odysseus tryes to get back to Ithica for the love of his life
which is his wife Penelope he finds his suitors betraying him so to put
back order, he kills his suitors for betraying him and gets back his
wife, son, and country back.
Ong remarks on the "aggregative" (38)
character of oral language, its tendency to string things together in no
particular strategic sequence, and on its copiousness and repetitiousness.
Whereas, in the written language, the possibility of "backlooping"
always exists, yet in spoken language, "there is nothing to backloop
into outside of the mind, for the oral utterance had vanished as soon as
it is uttered" (38). Luria has noted that the syntagmatic structures
of oral language tend to be paratactic: "The simplest form of
parataxis is simple joining of individual sentences by means of the
conjunction ‘and’" (Language and Cognition 130). The first
of Gwen’s sentences illustrates both points. Her initial
"well" is the functional equivalent of a conjunction; Gwen takes
up the topic in medias res, as if she were in on-going conversation
with someone, without grappling with the need to make her written
presentation self-sufficient. Like Warfield and Katherine, she treats the
phrase "the theme of order" as an indissoluble unit; she uses it
grammatically, and must therefore imagine it, as a thing or, rather
more generously, as a concatenation, which inchoately and evanescently
happens ("the theme of order was when…"). On the
positive side, Gwen’s aggregative iteration does bring together elements
of the Homeric narrative that really are causally related to one another,
but it cannot reveal the causality. The causal chain would entail that
Paris eloped with Helen, that Agamemnon convened his barons to make war,
that the siege at Troy lasted ten years, and that Odysseus spent an
additional ten years trying to sail home, impeded on his way by the wrath
of Poseidon. The initial "but" of the second sentence is another
conjunction. The oral "anyways" tells us that Gwen, in writing
her comments, has paused to think what she might put next, and as in a
conversation she has vocalized (or, maybe, graphed) the interstice.
Nor is she clear about who, exactly, the suitors are or on whom they press
their suit; she writes of "his suitors" as though they had been
pressing their cause to Odysseus rather than to Penelope. She does not
quite grasp why Odysseus must resort to violence, either, positing that
the suitors have betrayed him. The real point is that they have
consistently violated every law and custom governing the peace of the
Homeric world.
Another writer, "Jackson", cannot
universalize the premise that order is necessary for a society, any
society. For Jackson, order is peculiarly a desideratum in Homer but
remains confined there without transferability: "The ancient Greek
world is very different than the one we live in today. In those times the
theme of order was very important to their way of life." Ozick says
that real reading pivots on "imaginative conversion." Taking
Xenophon and Jackson together, we see that, in a few instances,
contemporary late-adolescents can experience momentary emotional
identification with fictional characters; what they do rarely and with
great reluctance is to universalize the concepts compactly present in
those fleeting episodes of identification. No "imaginative
conversion" or "reflective thinking", to borrow terms from
Ozick and Stotsky, occurs. The Greeks needed order but we apparently do
not: or rather the question of whether the requirements of ancient people
might have some contact with those of modern people does not emerge.
Tragedy turns on outsized figures and enormities.
Students notice these in Oedipus Rex. "Tillinghast"
delivers one of the most coherent responses:
In Oedipus Rex by Sophocles disorder begins with the
death of King Lauis. Oedipus does not believe what the oracle tells his
wife Jocasta when he finally realizes Lauis was killed at a 3 way
crossroad he comes to the conclusion he was the murderer, and has
married his own mother. With the city in shock Jocasta finds of this
news and hangs herself. The city of Thebes has already lost its king,
and now a queen. In the end Oedipus is sent into exile, blind from
stabbing his own eyes out.
Tillinghast has successfully traced the origin of the
crisis in Thebes to the murder of Laius, king in the city before the
arrival of Oedipus. He falls short, even so, and despite at least two
lectures devoted to the phenomenon, of grasping the relation in the drama
between civic order and personal restraint. The deep-seated cause
of the Theban plight lies in the aggressiveness of both Laius and Oedipus,
neither of whom, when they meet at the fateful trivium, can set
pride aside to make way for the other. Tillinghast’s longish,
unpunctuated run-on sentence once again brings to mind the tendency of
oral language to string items together as though pure sequence sufficed to
give an account of why and how something has fallen out in a particular
way.
The one I dub "Strether" similarly tries to
put an analytical cause in proper relation to its effect,
yet with something less than success: "When [Oedipus] realizes what
he has done, total chaos breaks out and Jacosta (his wife) kills herself,
while Oedipus gouges his eyes, blinding himself. So in this work order
turns into disorder." In fact, "chaos" already reigns as
the tragedy begins, as Oedipus’ speech makes evident and as the speech
of the Elder affirms. Strether, identifying properly with the protagonist,
nevertheless cannot get beyond the incestuous-parricidal horror to the
problem of the Theban people, which is that the city is in a state
resembling the worst of a plague and a civil war. Strether indeed believes
that "there is mostly order throughout the poem until Oedipus starts
questioning whether or not he killed his own father." What Strether
calls "chaos" finds its relief in the discovery of
Oedipus as Laius’ murderer and in the solidarity inspired by the horror
over his grotesque transgressions; the city is saved only as Oedipus is
destroyed.
The respondent named "Indiana" also reduces
the enormity to something simplistic and banal: "Oedipus must find
Laus’ murderer, so he can restore order and society can flourish once
again." This, too, as in the cases of Xenophon and Jackson, betokens
an imaginative default. Indiana’s expectation probably derives from the
self-contained television and motion picture stories that have seen to his
acculturation: at the end of thirty or one hundred and twenty minutes, all
disruptions of the consumer dispensation must have been addressed and the
placidity of the right clothes and the pretty girlfriend and the nifty
sports car restored. Gwen, whom we have encountered through her comments
on Homer, says of Oedipus that "he is so ashamed that he tells Creon
to banish him, this caused chaos & shame for Oedipus &
disorder." Calamity, for Gwen, means personal calamity, so
that the starting mark for "chaos", which is affiliated with
"shame", is Creon’s banishment of Oedipus; the status or the
fate of those who surround Oedipus does not enter into her assessment of
the story, nor do the events that happen before and issue in Creon’s
mercy of expulsion. What accounts for these failures of analysis?
The answer is bound up with the paratactic character of
the utterances. As Luria notes, parataxis works well for storytelling, for
stringing images in a sequence, but for the setting forth of
"relationships", as when one analyzes or explains a story, it is
insufficient:
Whereas communication of events can be expressed
concretely (i.e., the contents can be reflected in a series of images),
the communication of relationships cannot be expressed in this way,
because the communication of relationships involves units of complex
codes of language that serve as a means for abstract logical thinking.
In the communication of relationships, the mere
juxtaposition of individual elements of a message (parataxis) is no
longer adequate. Other, more complex types of grammatical structure are
needed, which [allow] one to develop an entire hierarchy of mutually
subordinate components customarily called hypotaxis. These
structures allow the governance of some groups of words by others. This
means that complex types of speech communication differ from the simple
type both in form and content. (130)
One cannot account for the relation, in Homer, between
the laws of hospitality—which epic poetry represents in action but never
explains—and the maintenance of peace merely by retelling the story.
Because one must shift between orders of abstraction, one requires a
grammar of subordination. The laws themselves, because they are not a
discrete entity in the Homer’s verses, must first all be inferred from
the imagery. I did that in lecture, which is why a sense of it appears in
most of the student essays. In writing about order in The Odyssey,
then, "Vendela" produces the following string of sentences:
"In the Odyssey, by Homer, Odysseus has been away from his home for
many years. Due to this the suitors have violated the laws of hospitality.
Disorder came about because of Odysseus’s absence. When Odysseus returns
order is restored when he slaughters the suitors for their violation of
the laws." Vendela’s first sentence deals with Odysseus’ absence,
her fourth with his return. The second sentence attempts to derive
causality ("due to…"), but confuses the occasion with the
cause: the suitors lack restraint, as do all those in the story on whom
disaster, of their own making, falls; they are thus the authors of their
own demise. The third sentence repeats the second with a slight variation
of the terms. "Milburn" also attempts analysis using the
"due to…" construction: "The Odyssey is plagued
with chaos due to the suitors and it is Oddysseus’ mission to return
home and restore order to his family which is in turmoil." Milburn
confuses Homer’s poem, however, with what it depicts; he mistakes the
turmoil in Ithaka, moreover, for turmoil in Odysseus’ family,
who are threatened but maintain decorum (continue to provide the model of
order) under threat. The static character of the passive mode ("order
is restored" and Homer’s poem "is plagued with chaos")
suggests what the students have not succeeding in overcoming in these
utterances—the parataxis of emotionally toned images in a string.
Plato’s Symposium, because it tells only the
most minimal of stories and otherwise deals in fairly high-order
abstractions, poses a real test for the limits of student understanding.
What "order" do students find in the speeches of the famous
drinking party? We have met Milburn before:
The Symposium also has a hero, Socrates.
However, he is a moral hero, respected for his self control and ability
to know his own limits. The other men he is with decide to have a
disgussion but not let it get out of hand. The conversation does turn
into a symposium, though, leaving everyone drunk and senseless. The
order remains with Socrates who in the morning rises before everyone
else, cleanses himself, and leaves. He is looked at as being the better
man for maintaining the sense and dignity that others do not.
Most of this, in its topsy-turvy way, reflects the
lecture. What one tells the students about The Symposium makes more
of an impression on them, however small it is, than what they read of it.
This is just what we would expect from people who are more oral/aural in
their mental orientation than literate. This is the limitation with which
the best students, who are often also the most frustrated, struggle. The
phrase "moral hero", for example, comes from lecture, as does
the ascription to Socrates of "self control" and knowledge of
his own limits. There is confusion about the definition of a symposium,
a word denoting a convivial gathering for serious discussion lubricated by
moderate drinking. What really happens in the dialogue is that the
drinking party degenerates into a competitive binge. To Milburn’s
credit, only three other students out of twenty-five taking the exam chose
to look for order in Plato. We must acknowledge his intellectual
courage, but we must also see the restrictions within which he operates.
The most interesting sentence is the final one, where Milburn wants to
make a generalization about Socrates, but cannot: instead he lapses into a
deficient passive construction leaving out the prepositional tag that
would tell us who makes the assessment. Milburn cannot produce a simple
third-person predication about Socrates; rather, he imagines a group who
makes the assessment, which he then reports. This is what his phrase,
"is looked at", implies. He remembers a few details of the
dialogue, such as Socrates’ cleansing himself on the morning after the
famous occasion. In Plato’s text, Socrates’ dignity is indeed
connected with his embodiment of spiritual order. Milburn leaves
the two words unlinked; one of them languishes in the penultimate, and the
other in the ultimate, sentence.
Xenophon, like Milburn, achieves predication only
through the roundabout of imagining other people who see something:
"Love [the theme of the dialogue] was seen in various ways
different [sic] and discussed with the aspect during the drinking
party" (emphasis added). "Aspect" is one of the
semi-abstract nouns favored by undergraduates; none can define it. Like
Milburn, Xenophon omits the prepositional tag, leaving the passive
construction in grammatical abeyance.
Given the homoerotic atmosphere of the dinner in honor
of Agathon’s victory in the dramatic competition, we may be forgiven for
winking at Katherine’s declaration: "The discussion of love brought
a rise out of some of the men." In a minimally hypotactic sentence
referring to Socrates, whom she misidentifies as "Sophocles"—"it
seemed no one wanted to disagree with him, which would probably ruin the
theme of order"—Katherine hints at the beginnings of a tenuous
analysis yet pushes it no further. To what does Katherine refer? True
enough, the characters in the dialogue would rather not argue
("disagree") with Socrates, but this by no means indicates their
agreement with him. On the contrary, with the exception of
Aristophanes, Socrates’ speech about love repudiates those of all the
other speakers; their behavior indicates that his lesson has not moved
them. How much farther in grasping the difficult concepts might Katherine
have gone had she been put under stronger discipline earlier in her
education? It is a shame for her; it is a real human loss that
neither she nor we will likely ever know.
The fourth respondent to Plato is "Linley,"
who reports as follows:
In the Symposium order seems to be intact and less
chaotic than in the other books. The theme of the Symposium was the
meaning or a depiction of love. Order was kept by the atuziurs [?] who
had a great respect for the gods and one another. The Symposium seemed
different in violence than the other books because there wasn’t any.
But they all had something in common. They all expressed love and
heartache.
Linley misses entirely the self-serving character of
the speeches by Phaedrus and Pausanias (who argue that teachers are
perfectly justified in sleeping with their students—that it’s an honor
for the students); she notes not the drunken party-crashing of Alcibiades,
which is violent without making a metaphor of the notion. I have already
remarked the opacity of "atuziurs". The last two sentences
instantiate a typical gesture of student prose—the lapse into
sentimental cliché.
V
I have myself tried throughout to be resolutely
unsentimental. According to Ozick, the culture of "mass
literacy" endured "in its narrow period from 1830 to 1930"
(Washburn and Thornton 83); during this century, "the almost
universal habit of reading for recreation or excitement conferred the
greatest complexity on the greatest number… The world of the VCR is
closer to pre-literate society of traveling mummers than it is to that of
the young F. Scott Fitzgerald’s readership in 1920" (83). Ozick’s
references are not to Havelock or Ong, but they might well be: "Where
once the Odyssey was read in the schools, in a jeweled and mandarin
translation, Holden Caulfield takes his stand" (82). Caulfield, Ozick
writes, "is winning and truthful, but he is not demanding" (82).
By "the schools", she does not mean college. Ozick’s analysis
converges with Stotsky’s when she tells what demanding reading did when
it still held a place in the public school curriculum. The century-old
classroom readers that Ozick has before her as she writes are full of rich
selections, whose vocabulary and syntax are of a high order:
What did these demanding sentences do in and for
society? First, they demanded to be studied. Second, they demanded
sharpness and cadence in writing. They promoted, in short, literacy—and
not merely literacy, but a vigorous and manifold recognition of literature
as a force. They promoted an educated class. Not a hereditarily
educated class, but one that had been introduced to the initiating and
shaping texts early in life, almost like the hereditarily educated class
itself. (Ozick 83).
Stotsky says the same thing, exactly, about the
selections in the Eclectic Reader. I put the question whether such
ascriptions as "sharpness" or "cadence" could possibly
apply to a sentence such as Linley’s, "The Symposium seemed
different in violence than the other books because there wasn’t
any"; or Fortheringay’s, "The suitors were made to move in b/c
they should have went to Penelope’s oldest surviving relative asking him
for Penelope’s hand in marriage." If Linley or Fortheringay
represented an exception rather than the rule, then we might be reconciled
to the occasional dullness of student writing. In the sample on which I
draw in this essay, and in others that I have collected for similar
purposes, Linley and Fortheringay are, sadly, typical. Let me repeat here,
however, what I have already stated once in my text and have repeated in a
footnote: I do not blame students. Although they themselves would
almost certainly not understand it were I to offer them the explanation, I
in fact commiserate with them—or is it for them? "For
them", because I take their expression as an index of their thinking;
and muddled thinking, the incapacity before the most rudimentary of
concepts and relations, is all at once chaos and misery. Nor are students,
to say it again, the primary authors of their condition. Stotsky not only
records the reduction in intellectual and artistic value of what K-12
students are nowadays asked to read; she also quotes a specimen of
contemporary English education theory from English Leadership
Quarterly, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of
English, spelling out (so to speak) how teachers will instruct students in
K-12 how to write:
Writers should be encouraged to make intentional
errors in standard form and usage. Attacking the demand for Standard
English is the only way to end the oppression of linguistic minorities
and learning writers. We believe this frontal assault is necessary for
two reasons: (1) it affords experienced writers, who can choose or not
choose to write Standard English, a chance to publicly demonstrate
against its tyranny [sic] and (2) if enough writers do it
regularly our cultures [sic] view of what is standard and
acceptable may widen just enough to include a more diverse surface
representation of language, creating a more equitable distribution not
only of power in language and literacy but also, ultimately, of the
power in economics and politics that language and literacy allow. (qtd.
in Stotsky 212)
I draw a line directly from the semi-literate passage
above (and from the arrogant derailment of education that it represents)
to the wretched reading and writing performance of my composition and
Western Heritage students. Stotsky adds that "only thirteen of the
twenty-eight documents that [she] examined in a review of standards for
the English language arts expect students to demonstrate competence in
using Standard English orally and in writing" (213).
With some effort, one can reconstruct the mental world
of contemporary first-year college students on the basis of their prose
and with reference to their behavior and to what they say. We can make our
own "imaginative conversion", experimentally casting off our own
intellectual achievements, and in so doing understand how tragically
short-changed students are by their passage through the K-12 curriculum.
In the first place, they are massively social creatures—"other-directed",
I believe, is the phrase; yet at the same time they show remarkably little
self-awareness in an ethical sense. Linguistically and cognitively they
live in the continuing seamless buzz of conversation that fills their
lives: this shows up in their writing, which amounts to a transcription of
what they would say to someone in a verbal exchange over a topic, and in
their reliance on, if it is not outright confinement within, the I-You
axis of conversation. Virtually everything that they utter, when asked to
do so in writing, comes filtered through the first-person pronoun, with
the result that they rarely predicate anything about objects per se
but rather report on them indirectly by making them an occasion for
divulgences of personal sentiment of one kind or another. There is, as in
Havelock’s formula, no separation of the knower from the known.
"Like" and "dislike" are the two most powerful
categories. The range of objects denoted by what one doesn’t like is
largely coincident with the range of objects that are unfamiliar, and the
range is large. The range of objects denoted positively by what one likes
is limited and has a commercial flavor. Students are extremely sensitive
and vulnerable to the market and to fads. At the same time, they are
convinced that they are highly individual ("unique" is their
word for it) in their tastes and hobbies. This, of course, is exactly what
the market that caters to them wants them to believe.
Students find reducing large patterns to their elements
difficult; it is extremely hard for them to see existing phenomena as effects
that analysis and research can derive from a cause. Things merely are.
The world is one for them, seamless and contiguous in all its
segments. Wholes of any kind rarely resolve into their constituent parts,
from the student perspective. For example, while displaying a drawing by
the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher, I asked my composition students,
what are the main parts of the scene? "It’s a town," they
said. They struggled to see that Escher’s town sat amid climbing
terraces surrounded by steep mountains and that it contained prominent and
distinct architectural structures, such as a bell tower and a
multi-storied house, arranged around a piazza. By "the
whole", I also mean the situation: for the "I" who
apprehends a thing under some emotional color is not separated out from
the thing; nor is the emotional color, either from the thing or the
perceiver. These restrictions in how students are able to view the world
stem in part from their being young; but youth cannot be the sole, or even
the primary, reason for their comparatively impoverished intellectual
range. Younger people in other circumstances have been much more strongly
focused than they on the world, more perceptive of what they are seeing.
Rather, indeed, than call them childish (as tempting as
the adjective is), it is truer to see them as closely resembling the adult
persons whom Luria studied in Uzbekistan. "Their mental processes
[are] closely connected with their practical activity and their life [is]
characterized by the predominance of concrete practical forms of
activity" (Language and Cognition 207). The words that
students use, to quote Ong on Luria’s subjects, "acquire their
meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat" (Orality
and Literacy 47), and they are not aware of "semantic
discrepancies" (46) or of formal definitions apart from the obvious assumed
or ostensive meanings of words in usage. I have earlier made notation
of their struggles with abstract vocabulary, mentioning that they rarely
talk or write about human nature and express bafflement when they
encounter written discussion of it. All of this is linked to their lack of
interior formation by the model of the written text. In the flux of
practical activity and fleeting I-You exchanges, no backlooping
occurs. Backlooping is required for the formation of high-order concepts and
for ethical self-assessment, in which one must treat oneself as an object
for analysis. Although the words text and textualize have
been appropriated for both silly and corrosive purposes by
deconstructionists and other "postmodern" types, it would not be
implausible (it is really only Havelock’s theory) to say that rigorous,
systematic self-correction requires a permanent, accessible archive of one’s
words and deeds over a considerable period of time. One must textualize
oneself. Such self-assessments find an additional aid in books,
especially in poetry and fiction of a sophisticated species, which offer
models against which one can compare oneself. Detecting semantic
discrepancies in a text is akin to detecting moral slips in the record of
one’s conduct. To imagine the student mentality, then, one must imagine
an inner world without these assimilated structures.
What impinges on student consciousness? Of what are
students chiefly aware? We can glean some idea from their first-person
prose—the kind that they always produce when left to their own devices.
For the men, two realms of the sensorium loom large (their identity will
surprise no one): organized sport and commercial music, especially the
"grunge" and "heavy metal" styles of rock and roll.
The references to sport usually show an element of braggadocio:
"Tough is not throwing an elbow at someone, being a bully or even
fighting. Never complaining, diving on the floor for loose balls, beating
everyone up the court, taking charge of someone twice your size, now that’s
tough." The writer tells how "during my freshman year in high
school I was the same as the rest of society"; but he later became
"tough". These insights might be true; what I wish to emphasize
in them is their confinement within a young adolescent worldview
articulated entirely around the sportive "verbomotor" sensorium.
On music, one encounters passages such as this one:
The 1980’s were a decade of hair bands and
glam-rock that relied heavily on obscenely loud guitar solos, and lyrics
regarding love and living a rock and roll lifestyle. Bands like
Whitesnake, Poison, Winger, and Skid Row gave the era an almost
predictable feel of leading men indulging in women while sporting
leather pants and incredibly long hair. But in the early 1990’s 3
bands emerged from Seattle that would change the face of the music
industry and shape all musical generations to come. Nirvana led the way
with Pearl Jam and Soundgarden following closely behind with what was
later to be dubbed the "grunge rock revolution".
The models lie in Rolling Stone, CD booklets,
and most importantly in the banter of a Music Television "rockumentary":
from these sources come the jargon of "glam-rock",
"obscenely loud guitars solos", and "incredibly long
hair", and the hyperbole of "changing the face of the music
industry" in a "grunge rock revolution". We are back in the
oral world, as described by Ong, of outsized figures and agonistic side
taking. Our writer is heavily for "grunge rock" and
heavily against "glam-rock". The phrase "Nirvana led
the way" reminds me of the Soviet marching song, "Gaidar leads
the Way", sung about one of the Revolutionary heroes. Ong remarked in
1981 that "one of the many indications of a high, if subsiding oral
residue in the culture of the Soviet Union is (or was a few years ago,
when I last encountered it) the insistence on speaking there always of ‘the
Glorious Revolution of October 26’—the epithetic formula [being an]
obligatory stabilization" (38-39), just as in Homer. That the
cynosure of public discourse in the USA is MTV rather than the Komsomol
accounts for the replacement of Gaidar by Kurt Cobain.
Women students work within the same parochial
intellectual circle as the men but have different references: they report
about "love" and related matters in Hallmark card banalities. On
the positive side, they seem largely untouched by feminism, although the
effusions about diversity quoted in Section II have women authors. Given
students’ wide-open receptivity to commercialized group thinking and
their inability to form independent analysis, it is worth quoting Havelock
again on the literate mind and psychic autonomy: "at some time
towards the end of the fifth century before Christ," Havelock reminds
us, "it became possible for a few Greeks to talk about their ‘souls’
as though they had selves or personalities which were autonomous and not
fragments of the atmosphere nor of a cosmic life force, but what we might
call entities or real substances." Most of my students have not
decisively experienced at the ontogenetic level what Attic civilization
experienced at the phylogenetic level "towards the end of the fifth
century before Christ."
A final important component in the lifeworld of
students is pain, of a psychic sort, which they refer to as
"boredom". They experience this pain when they come up against
their limits, which they are reluctant to test or surpass. The passage
from Weil’s essay struck a number of students as "boring", and
they said so, after blinking at it without result for some minutes. The
paradox of their situation is that the very thing that they resist—a
conjoint reading and writing, with its alteration of the oral state
of mind—is the thing that might salvage them from their ennui.
They resist it because no one has insisted to them that they should
assimilate it. In effect, vast libraries have been snatched away from
them, a whole codified itinerary of humanity. These are gone for them just
as if they had vanished in the smoke of incendiary vandalism and looting.
My experience of teaching teachers through Central Michigan University’s
master’s degree in humanities program in the 1990s suggests to me that,
in fact, many instructors of today’s secondary students are hardly more
literate than the students whom they instruct. Writing, as Spengler puts
it (with none of the reluctance that holds back Ong), "is an entirely
new kind of language, and implies a complete change in the relation of man’s
waking-consciousness, in that it liberates from the tyranny of the
present" (The Decline, Vol. II 149). Writing, asserts
Spengler, "is one of the first distinguishing remarks of the historical
endowment" (150). Yet Spengler is assuredly wrong, he has it
backward, when he says that "the peasantry is without history and
therefore without writing" (152).
My students are basketball players and
"grunge-rock" enthusiasts, and not much beyond those things,
because they have no real writing, no real reading, and no real literacy.
We live in the aftermath of a cultural calamity—the disappearance of
mass literacy, as lamented by Ozick. It is actually much worse than a
natural extinction, because, as Stotsky shows, it was a disappearance by
design, and it is also a continued absence by design. At some
point, it will no longer be possible to live on the residue of past
accomplishments, and we will begin to experience the sorrows of our
condition.
WORKS CITED
Bertonneau, Thomas F. "Epistemological
Correct-ness in English 101." Academic Questions 10:1
(Winter 1996-97): 67-78.
---. "We All Have Our Own Brains: The Price
Students Pay For Cutting Edge Instruction." The Montana Professor 11:2
(Spring 2001): 1-9.
---. "Orality, Literacy, and the Tradition." The
Montana Professor 10:2 (Spring 2000): 3-7.
Chall, Jeanne S. "American Reading Achieve-ment:
Should We Worry?" Research in the Teaching of English 30:3
(October 1996): 303-311.
Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational
Berkeley: U of California P, 1951.
Havelock, Eric A. The Muse Learns to Write:
Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New
Haven and London: Yale, 1986.
---. Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Belknap Press
(of Harvard UP), 1963.
Kirk, G.S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The
Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Luria, Alexander. Language and Cognition. Ed. J. V. Wertsch.
Washington DC: V. H. Vinston and Sons, 1981.
---. The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of
Soviet Psychology. Ed. M. Cole and S. Cole. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP,
1979.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Methuen, 1986.
Ozick, Cynthia. "The Question of Our Speech: The
Return to Aural Culture." In Washburn and Thornton, Dumbing Down:
Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture. New York: Norton,
1997.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West, Vol. I,
Form and Actuality. Trans. C. F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926.
---. The Decline of the West, Vol. II, Perspectives
of World History. Trans. C. F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926.
Stotsky, Sandra. Losing our Language: How
Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s
Ability to Read, Write, and Reason. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Weil, Simone. Simone Weil Reader. Ed. G.
Panichas Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1977.
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***************************************
The Dusty, Dog-Eared Book:
Space Well Wasted
by
Peter T. Singleton
Peter
Singleton’s Return to Chivalry: How Contemporary Men Can Recover the
Dignity of Living for a Higher Purpose, was published last year by
Arcturus Press.
Arguments for the existence of a vast degeneracy, I
suspect, are often left unmade because they are too true. If a whole
culture is losing its ability to concatenate reasons and to use a rich
variety of words with precision, then where are the intellectual castaways
to be found who will build this case; and, assuming that a few may be
found (the spring tide of barbarism always leaves a philosopher or two in
a skiff here and there, shepherding his victuals), who will listen?
Certainly there’s no money in publishing or broadcasting complex tales
with unhappy endings for giddy masquers who cannot so much as estimate
their grocery bill.
If I dare, therefore, to defend in these few words the
old-fashioned book, proofread and printed and bound, I do so with no
illusions. I know well, to begin with, that others much brighter than I
have entertained such thoughts as I shall express, and that none of us
sees these thoughts purveyed far and wide simply because, taken all
together, we who understand remain too few to attract a capital
investment. I realize, too, that the abandonment of books and literacy is
unlikely to be arrested in the least by anything that so few may do. My
tone will no doubt seem wistful for these reasons, if not nostalgic. So be
it. Nostalgia as a genre is not without its pleasures: our age, in its
very debasement, is beginning to rediscover (or invent) the charm of the
past, if only through the debased means of poorly scripted movies.
Personally, I prefer to think of my endeavor as a brief exercise in
speaking out, in saying my say. The inferiority of printed, bound books to
computer disks (the wretchedly denominated "e-book") is being so
widely alleged that it now lays an illegitimate claim to self-evidence. In
fact (according to my view of the facts), e-books are miserable
substitutes for those bulky tomes which once collected dust on the study’s
shelves.
Let me count the ways. It has been proposed to me by
some very energetic young people whom I do not suspect of illiteracy that
laptops are cozy. You can read from them in bed without dedicating a hand
to propping them open. You can read from them over breakfast without
worrying about coffee spills or having to anchor down their sides with
marmalade jars. I may say at once that I remain skeptical of the resistance to coffee. If my elementary physics still
serves me, water and electricity don’t mix. I’m not sure what one does
with two free hands in bed while reading, or what one might be reading
which would require two free hands: I am sure only that I don’t wish to
pursue the matter here. As for certain tautly bound books having a
tendency to upset the cream and sugar when pinned dubiously open before
one’s plate, this is indeed one of the great unsolved problems of
literate culture—and laptop computers are growing far too light to be of
any help. I recently retrieved a rusted fragment of coupling from a
railroad track (at the instigation of my son). A little steel wool should
render this quaint relic of the Industrial Age invaluable for my purposes.
Speaking of water and electricity, consider the dark
and stormy night so affected of bibliophiles for curling up in a favorite
chair before the centrally heated study’s dormant gas logs. Would you
wish to be cradling a laptop (and doing God knows what with your two
hands) as lightning cracked just beyond your window? If holding a cell
phone to one’s ear during an electrical storm is inadvisable in these
circumstances, can cuddling a laptop be much less so? My information is
that the e-book requires rather more than a couple of flashlight batteries
to operate. This superior voltage surely makes for risky business. I
prefer to shudder deliciously around my dusty old tome, keeping both hands
well in view, as the thunderbolt r |
