“The world has shrunk to these dimensions, Arthur.”
Mrs Clennam: Little Dorrit
There’s that old joke: “God is black. Yes she is.”
But neither new definition really helps things; it simply perpetuates the old problems in a new form. If God is black, that excludes from divine interest all who are not black. If God is female, that excludes from favour all those who are male. The only answer is a God who is somehow beyond race, gender or even species.
Modern intellectual life has tended towards the concept of the ‘other’. I’m not sure I’ve ever really got my head round it, but it seems to be something like this. Because you belong to one particular group – male, straight, white, black or whatever – you are thereby precluded from understanding, criticising, or even commenting on any other group. Only blacks can teach Black Studies, ethnics Ethnic Studies, women Women’s Studies, queers (their choice of designation, not mine) Queer Studies. And so on.[1]
It’s a bleak take on things. It pitches us into a state of ongoing warfare from the first moment of breath; since we are all somebody else’s ‘other’ by the mere brutal fact of existence. If we are human, we are the enemy, for a start, of all other breathing things that are not human.
Initially, it’s not even our own fault if we are born, say, a white British middle-class male. We are the victims of our parent’s choices and their genes, until such time as we are old enough to take control of our own destinies. Even then there are only so many things you can change. You can alter your sexual behaviour, for instance, but not necessarily your orientation.
If it’s sexist to be male we can have a sex change, but if we have thereby moved from the ranks of the oppressors to that of the oppressed, we have still cut ourselves off from half, or thereabouts, of the human race. Being a hermaphrodite wouldn’t solve things either; it would just make you a minority.
We may be able to change our sex. We cannot yet, as far as I know, change our ethnic origin. Even changing your nationality is not that easy – it takes five years or so of living in another country – and given the average human lifespan, the number of new nationalities you can acquire is finite. After a while, anyway, Authority would probably misunderstand your motive of wishing to escape from your origins, and arrest you as a terrorist.
However disgraceful it may be to be British, if we become, say, Spanish instead, then we have merely exchanged one evil (a nationality) for another evil (a new nationality). As a newly-minted Spaniard and ex-Briton, you could still be hated by Britons, French, Germans, Chinese, Ghanaians etc: as many people, in fact, as hated you before. More, if anything, for there are more Britons than there are Spaniards.
We cannot alter the year in which we were born – although we can lie about it – or the fact of the social class we were born into. George Orwell tried for years to expiate the sin of having been to Eton by living among tramps, drinking tea out of a saucer etc, but ruefully admitted that he still gave away his middle-class origins by a hundred unconscious actions. He tried to get himself arrested by being a nuisance on the streets, but the police tended to let him off when they heard his accent.
You can know, by direct experience, what it’s like to have been younger than your present self; you can’t know, until you get there – if you do – what it’s like to be older.
The implications of all this are catastrophic for a writer whose topic is people.
Take the case of Shakespeare, for example. Shakespeare was male: that invalidates all his female characters. Shakespeare was white: that invalidates Othello. Shakespeare wasn’t Jewish; that invalidates Shylock. Shakespeare was English; that invalidates Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo (and would invalidate Juliet if she weren’t invalidated already on other grounds). Shakespeare was bourgeois; that invalidates King Henry V, Duke Senior or the hempen homespuns.
Shakespeare was human; that invalidates Oberon, Ariel, the Ghost of Banquo and Launce’s dog. Shakespeare was born in 1564; that invalidates Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. Shakespeare died at the age of fifty-two; that invalidates if not Old Capulet – who might be considered young in terms of our society if not of his own – then certainly King Lear.
What is a problem for Shakespeare is, of course, equally a problem for any other writer. Any knowledge or representation of character – so the current wisdom goes – can arise only out of your own experience. All that remains, therefore, is to write about yourself: an autobiography in which to analyse any one else is forbidden by the nature of the ‘other’. [2]
Is there a way out of this impasse? One solution would be to restore to writers four gifts from the past: empathy, imagination, observation and research. Plus, perhaps, facility with words.
For if I have never accepted that any writing whatever must be classified as literature, neither have I ever accepted that there is no such thing as literary language. Even those who profess the doctrine that no one person writes better than another don’t really believe it. Otherwise they would not use their own particular brand of jargon to exclude those who do not belong to their particular brand of ‘other’. Those who argue that dialect is as valid as Standard English are careful to say so in Standard English. If they said so in dialect, not enough people would understand them.
Literature groans under the same oppression applied to those who used to create it. Literary study currently means finding what looks as much as possible like yourself and shunning whatever doesn’t: which is most things. If you have to move beyond, then you apply the straitjacket of yourself to anything you read. You praise it insofar as it resembles your particular version of the ‘other’, and you damn it insofar as it doesn’t. A degree in Literature becomes biography; a PhD an autobiography.
“Ecrasez l’infâme!” Sweep away the whole hideous tyranny of current theory about writing literature and reading it. Break the chains. Start gazing at some one else’s navel instead of your own.
Imagine enjoying a piece of literature because it offers an experience unlike your own about someone quite unlike yourself. Before that, imagine being allowed to read literature for enjoyment at all; rather than as a grim, pitiless heresy hunt for any deviation from the received opinion of your branch of the other.
Seek out the other that is not your own, and immerse yourself in another way of seeing the world. That way, your own understanding may be increased, and your own sympathies might be expanded.
And there might even, once again, be some point in writing, reading and studying literature.
[1] Which raises the interesting question of who’s entitled to teach Cultural Studies. It all depends on what is meant by ‘culture’.
[2] The problems arising from this sort of standpoint are not confined to literature. If you think it’s wrong to commit murder, but haven’t actually done so, how can you know if it’s wrong? Surely only murderers are in a position to comment? Ditto paedophilia, rape, sticking your hand in the fire etc.
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