Please Laugh
On the Great Books and the Great Conversation
When I was a Freshman in high school, my language class was British Literature -BritLit to the precocious and obnoxious 15- and 16-year-olds who comprised the class. Emma, 1984, King Lear, Jane Eyre, and other great works I cannot remember and probably hated to read. I recall being a right snot about King Lear because I was 15, had just watched the Ian Holm version, and fancied I knew something about it the teacher didn’t. Which, honestly, might even have been true, but I was still a right snot about it. We were arranged in discussion tables -not the traditional rows and files facing the board at the front of the room -and the teacher would ask us about what we had read and try to work in the other curricular goals.
On this particular day, while discussing Jane Eyre, the topic of the lesson was the use of allusion in Charlotte Bronte’s work. As many works of the era did, Jane Eyre is filled with references to Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical stories, and British history to convey feelings and imagery to the audience that cannot be seen in the pure text of the page. It also contained several passages in untranslated French which I hope were not important, because I do not speak the language and my mother -who does -could not translate them because they were archaic. This is another thing the great British writers apparently liked to do.
As the conversation about allusion drifted around the class, one of the students -who I do remember, and who was also very smart, and with whom I therefore clashed frequently, and also will not name, but will call Jay -asked whether an allusion had to be to these ancient cultures. Could a modern writer make an allusion to a Stephen King novel? I argued against on the grounds that for allusions to work the audience has to be expected to recognize that it is an allusion at minimum, and further has to recognize what it is alluding to. References to Greek and Roman myth and the Bible should be recognizable as what they are -the names and terms alone should tip off even the dimmest reader -and those sources are so foundational to Western Civilization that are continuously taught and most people will either know the references, or will be able to look them up. This is not true of Stephen King novels.
The teacher, who I thought I was smarter than, agreed with me, and I smiled in smug self-satisfaction.
Jay, however, had his riposte. The book in front of us contained many allusions that we did not understand less than 200 years after it had been written. It referenced historical events that were obscure to everyone in the class except Jay and me because we were brilliant little snots. And even we couldn’t translate the archaic French. Those references, though, would have been understood by the audience of the 1840s because they were contemporaneous to the writing of the book, but with the passage of history had become rare knowledge. Thus, while to us the allusions of the book seem to be deep and historical, to Charlotte Bronte, her references ran the gamut from the ancient world to current events. So if Charlotte Bronte can reference mid-19th century English trends in theology and literature, why couldn’t he reference Stephen King?
I appealed to the breadth of Stephen King’s audience -that even as a best selling author each of his books’ sales are measured in the hundreds of thousands, while Jane Eyre (my dislike of the book notwithstanding) has been read by millions. And knowledge of the Greek and Roman sources has to be in the tens or even hundreds of millions. A Stephen King reference might still fit in the book, but it would not age as an allusion would because it lacks the broad social knowledge base.
To which Jay responded that this is because we make 15-year-olds read BritLit like Jane Eyre, but we don’t make them read The Shining. And while I dislike both books, a poll of the class would certainly show more people had read The Shining, and of their own free will, than had read Jane Eyre or even my much beloved King Lear.
At which point the teacher acknowledged that Jay had a point, and he smiled with smug self-satisfaction. Ah, the peacocking of young nerds.
God, I thank thee that I have grown up considerably since then.
The Great Conversation
Which is not to say I think I was wrong on the point, but as an adult I think I can defend the position better and with less shaking of the tail feathers. There’s an old expression that civilization is a conversation that is passed down from generation to generation with no end. Children are newcomers to the conversation and they have difficulty following it because they do not know the context or the referents of the people in the conversation. At first the learn the conversation by listening, and then they have tentative steps into the conversation where they try to refer to other things and see if they get it right. When they get it wrong, they learn more, and eventually they become full partners in the conversation.
We’ve all had this experience when joining a new group of friends. Every friendship has a thousand little in-jokes that the members of the group get, so when one person references those jokes everyone laughs. Except the new people don’t get the jokes.
Much like language, this can be true even of people who formally speak the same language. Sure Frenchmen, Quebecois, and Cajuns all speak varieties of French; but they don’t swear the same, don’t reference the same events, and don’t use the same metaphors. A language might be a dialect with its own army, but it also has its own cultural touchstones.
Education is the way we indoctrinate new members of the group into all the in-jokes which we call culture.
This becomes painfully obvious when members of one sub-culture try to speak with members of another culture and all the references fail. I have bad news for nerds: most people do not know what grok means, nor do they know what Stranger in a Strange Land is. If you’re exceptionally lucky they know the Biblical referent. Final Fantasy VII has the greatest cultural penetration of all Japanese RPGs, but most people have no idea who Aerith (or Aeris1, if you’re old-school) is. Cinema references younger that The Godfather are hit and miss.
And for a real treat, try raising children -when you realize so many emotions, beliefs, and images that mean so much to you, that shape your heart and soul, have no meaning your own flesh and blood unless you impart that meaning first.
No One Has A Memory More Than 2 Years Old
Humans need communication and connection. We have a hard enough time communicating with our own fleeting demographics,2 and we have coterminous events that we can use to help. To speak with those long gone we need a pool of references we can use. Star Trek: The Next Generation exaggerated the point with “Darmok,” but it really is the case that our language is filled with metaphors and references that carry far more meaning that the words themselves do.
The corpus that we use to understand the past, and to therefore be able to join the conversation is the subject of much of our education, from literature to philosophy, but also science and math. The measure of a good scientist and mathematician is the ability to understand Ptolemy and Aristotle so that we can build on the existing conversation. But without understanding their mathematics and observations we don’t understand why the conversation has moved on from objects orbiting the earth.3
When we remove that corpus, communication becomes more difficult both with the past and with the present. Without the body of language and sentiment and emotion that we need to signpost our expressions to other people words become equivocal, and meaning becomes at best unclear and at worse subject to control by those in power. There are reasons why dictators suppress the past, and not just the ones Orwell noted. The suppression of culture means that those little in jokes are lost and with them all the meanings they conveyed. The only meanings that can be carried afterwards are the raw meanings of the words.
The meanings can also be drained from the metaphors. A old writing maxim is that a mixed metaphor is a sign that the writer is not visualizing what they are writing. One cannot fly through a sea of sorrows. The reason mixed metaphors happen is because the writer knows only the alternate meanings of the words the metaphor allows, but not their connection to the actual language. The result is muddled thought.
What Then Shall We Read?
In a more Balkanized culture, each subgroup will read its own literature and its maintain its own grievances and perhaps even its own army, but if we are aspiring to maintain something resembling a unified culture, then there must be a corpus of references. There can be value in adding references from each of the subgroups, too, but a corpus of references must be largely common to all or else it fails to do its purpose. Beyond any other practical wisdom or life lessons carried by the corpus it must first be a common pool.
The common pool may be dominated by books that are liked by teachers or by critics simply because of their cultural position. That something has a social construction to it does not make it less real. The Great Gatsby is not a book I enjoyed, but it is a book that many in our culture have read, its references and imagery are all over our culture, and those who wish to participate in the broader culture need to know the meanings. Taylor Swift is apparently a fan, and sprinkles her songs with Gatsby references.4
This does not, however, mean that all parts of our common references must be curated by literary critics and high school teachers. Numerous cultural treasures fought their way onto the list despite critical dislike. Frankenstein was loathed by critics in its time, but popular love for it has landed “Frankenstein’s Monster” in our body of language even if most people screw it up and refer to “Frankenstein” directly instead of his creation. Popular culture and genre fiction are all part of the conversation and the people have a say in what their culture is.
My personal favorite example is Nicholas Meyer, who has so liberally graced Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with references to the greater culture that people misattribute Melville and Milton quotes to Khan. And it is unfortunate that Khan plays second fiddle in public penetration to the one with the whales.
Culture cannot be controlled by any one institution, and it will and must change over time. We’ll use less untranslated French and maybe more of us will absorb the gist of the Shining from the movies and other references. But for a culture to serve its purpose of facilitating communication amongst its members, the members must learn to get the in-jokes if for no other reason than that everyone else is in on them already. If we lose that ability to laugh at the references and to cry at the sublimated emotions we lose the community which is the point of living together.
And spoilers for a nearly 3-decade old game if you click that link. Which I think may actually still hit harder than the recent remake.
And because it annoys me that so many people don’t know this (there’s no rule saying cliches and metaphors have to be accurate to penetrate the culture) -the short version is that absent very good telescopes we cannot observe stellar parallax. If the stars don’t move, then Earth can’t be moving around the sun. This is what Galileo really meant when he said “E pur si moure” (and yet it moves). Even though he had failed to observe it, he knew the parallax existed and therefore the earth must be moving.
In fairness, perhaps we could get more people to enjoy reading the book if we taught it as “a way to better appreciate Taylor Swift’s music” rather than endless seminars on the green light.