The Australian Textbook that I am reading for no particular reason begins, rather ambitiously, by explaining “what language is”.
It is easy to think that words are a kind of telepathy: when I speak, a thought is magically transferred from my mind into your mind. And for centuries, most people uncritically assumed that particular words had simple one-to-one correspondences with particular things. Something in the nature of a lion required it to be called “lion”; the study or contemplation of the word “lion” could uncover truths about leonine nature. We would now call that kind of thinking magical, or indeed, superstitious.
What actually happens is that we associate a particular sound or a particular written sign with a particular thing because we have learned to do so. And the symbol doesn’t refer directly to the thing; it refers to a concept or idea in our mind.
I think of a “cat”, and I make the sound that I have learned to associate with that thought. You hear the sound, and you have the thought that you have learned to associate with that sound. Your thought and my thought won’t necessarily be precisely the same. I might be thinking of a scraggy alley cat and you might be thinking of a smart siamese. I might be thinking of a fierce creature that lives in the jungle and bites people’s legs off, while you are thinking of a small domestic pet that lives on the sofa and meows for milk. And it is just possible that (due to some terrible defect in your education) you’ve learned to associate the “cat” sound with an animal which barks, catches sticks and needs to be taken for walkies. But most of the time, the cat in my head and the cat in your head are similar enough to the particular small furry mammal that we are discussing that tolerably good communication can occur.
But sounds and symbols aren’t only associated with thoughts: they are also associated with feelings. When I hear “cat” I might feel the warm, fuzzy emotions associated with a cute fluffy house pet; but you might feel the unpleasant, fearful emotions associated with the scary jungle predator.
Words, therefore, have both a reference and an emotive content. “Cat”, “moggie” and “puss” refer to the same, or very nearly the same, creature; but they are associated with different feelings. If I say “The moggie sat on the Axminster” I am not only telling you what I am thinking of; I am also telling you how you should feel about it. If I say “A Felix catus individual reposed on a domestic floor covering” I am telling you to feel something else.
Some words, like expostulations and expletives, are primarily emotional: they express what the speaker is feeling and how they want the listener to feel and nothing else. Some words, like scientific words, endeavour to exclude emotional resonances. But it is never, in fact, possible to exclude them altogether. “Half-inch reversible ratchet socket driver” might have strong emotional associations if you happened to know that one was used as a murder weapon. Or if you recently dropped one on your foot.
This is not a glitch or a bug, but a basic truth about how language works. Words are not like road signs or military trumpet calls that can be simply decoded; they are fuzzy packages of multiple thoughts and multiple feelings.
According to the Australian Textbook:
In general, it may be said that the more a word is used in all kinds of contexts, the larger becomes the cluster of ideas and feelings associated with it; that is to say, the richer become its reference and its emotive meaning. [page 22]
Reading and writing are therefore not passive activities, but things you have to engage in actively. A good reader has to consciously apply his mind to a text “so that his mind will automatically neglect the irrelevant associations and emotive meanings of the words [the writer] uses” [p37] . A good writer has to put words together in such a way that the reader will pick the correct ideas and feelings from the cluster which hover around the symbols.
It is possible, in fact, to control the meaning of a word by the context we put it into; or, to put it more accurately, it is possible to rouse, in the reader’s mind, only the relevant part of the meaning of a word with wide and vague reference, by putting the word in a certain place in a sentence and associating with it certain other words.[p38]
Meaning is not something that words intrinsically have, but something that the writer must actively control. A good writer thinks about his subject “with active concentration” and a good reader “concentrates on what [the writer] is writing about”.
Far from magically transferring thoughts from one head to another, reading and writing start to sound like awfully hard work.
The writers of the Australian School Textbook acknowledge that their “associative” theory of language derives from The Meaning of Meaning by CK Ogden and IA Richards. It’s a famously obscure text: the story goes that another don tried to elucidate it in a series of lectures entitled “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning”. Inevitably, some undergrads produced a crib sheet called “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of “The Meaning of Meaning”’”. Along with Richard’s equally impenetrable Practical Criticism, the book was a cornerstone of what became known as New Criticism. For New Critics, reading a poem was not a matter of decoding it to arrive at a singular meaning; nor a matter of ascertaining what the author intended by it. Rather, the job of the critic is to attentively study the words on the page, and try to understand what they mean in that particular context. The ideal New Critic eschewed historical and biographical context, and attempted a close reading of the text, the whole text and nothing but the text. The Australian Textbook is a valiant attempt to translate the ideas of Ogden and Richards into the language of contemporary Australian fifth formers, and to initiate schoolboys into the mysteries of close reading.
But the authors are not Gradgrindians. They don’t claim that the referential meaning of a word is its only meaning, or even its primary meaning. They don’t tell students to exclude emotional elements from their essays. They don’t suggest that a factual paraphrase of a poem is what the poem really means. At no point do they say that figures of speech are valueless because they are not factually correct. But they do say that it is important to distinguish between reference and emotional content and that purely emotional writing is likely to be content-free.
The point is that, in some kinds of writing, the words with clearest reference and little emotive meaning are the most useful; whereas, in other kinds of writing, the words with as rich an emotive meaning as possible are the most useful. In some kinds of writing it is important to emphasise the emotive meaning of the words; in other kinds of writing it is important to suppress it as much as possible.[p24]
Their examples are pretty sound. They imagine a technical manual written in strongly emotional language: “Take a piece of wire coloured a delightful warm red, in size about the height of a dear little child of two…” and rightly say that if you came across that kind of thing in real life you’d think the writer had gone crazy. But they also invite the student to translate a passage of Keats’ poetry into scientific language so that “Full on this casement shone the wintry moon, and threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast” becomes “right through the window shone the moon and made red spots on Jane’s uncoloured chest.”
Some people might regard this as an improvement. Some people—my O level English teacher, for one—might even say that the paraphrase is what the poem really means. The Australian Textbook is quite clear that the whole point of poetry (or, at any rate “seventy five per cent of its meaning”) comes from the emotive content of the words. That’s what you would expect disciples of Ogden and Richards to say. Another New Critic, Cleanthe Brooks, famously wrote an essay entitled The Heresy of Paraphrase. You can’t say exactly the same thing in different words. Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
The Australian Textbook is particularly concerned about the use of language in advertising and propaganda. Of course, such writing arouses feelings on the part of the reader: that is the point of it. The problem is when writers use language which has an emotive meaning but no reference: language which sets out to make the reader feel good about a candidate or a product without saying anything about them.
So, they quote a (fictional) election pamphlet:
“The freedom of the citizen is what we aim at, freedom from enemies abroad, freedom from the dictatorship of a bureaucracy at home, freedom from wanton force, freedom of speech and thought, freedom of action. Only by voting for us will you secure for yourselves that liberty without which life is stifled in the chains of tyranny.”[p58]
And they quote an equally hypothetical letter to a newspaper:
“The building of this cinema is an exasperating piece of futility. It is an outrage, an insult. The design of the proposed building is atrociously ugly, a design which no decent-minded citizen could possibly accept….”[p79]
And finally, an actual newspaper report of a riot:
“As the representative proceeded by car ahead of the libertines he saw a foreign establishment being closed—as a precaution against the maddened mob, intoxicated by their excesses and hoarse in voice by the shouting of the night.” [p113]
In each case, they assert that the passage tells the reader what emotions to feel without telling them why they should feel that way; or indeed, what they should feel them about.
The political pamphlet depends heavily on the word “freedom”. But freedom can mean lots of different things. Does the candidate mean that everyone should be allowed to do exactly what they want at all times? When he talks about “freedom of speech” does he mean that he wants to abolish the laws of libel, blasphemy and obscenity? If so, why doesn’t he say that, and explain why he thinks it would be a good idea? The writers of the textbook make a valid argument that in the context of the pamphlet, “freedom” has no reference: it is there only because it has positive emotional associations. Possibly a trifle cynically they say that if the party had a coherent programme, the candidate would lay it out without recourse to emotional language: indeed, if political parties differed from each other on substantive points, there would be no need for political pamphlets in the first place.
They make essentially the same criticism about the bad letter to the newspaper. We can tell that the writer is cross, but not what he is cross about. Presumably, they have particular objections to this particular cinema being built in this particular place, but they haven’t told anyone what those objections are. They have merely “called the cinema names”.
The writers of the textbook propose the following improvement:
The building of this cinema is an insult to the community, and to each member as a democratic citizen and as a lover of orderly civic convenience. The design of the Proposed building, with its exasperating false facade, its futile “birthday cake” decoration, and its mean, ill-proportioned structure, is in ugly contrast to the plain, unpretentious, houses that will surround it with their gardens and lawns and trees. This suburb has always been one of the most attractively quiet and orderly suburbs in the city; and to plant in the middle of it a preposterous building of this sort, with its irritating noise and confusion of traffic, is outrageous.[p80]
They haven’t translated the letter into scientific prose: this isn’t anything like the poetry-free Keats exercise. The indignation is very much part of the meaning of the text. But in their new version, the anger arises from, and applies to, something in particular. And there is some hope that this ire will be transferred to the person reading it.
Turning to the report of the riot, they don’t complain that the journalist is factually inaccurate. And they don’t object to the use of figurative or hyperbolic language. (Presumably, the rioters are not literally mad; and they may not even be literally intoxicated.) Their problem is with the lack of “clear, particular, and individual feelings” and the presence of “vague, general, commonplace sentiments”.
The reporter did not see anything in particular or feel anything in particular. If you really see a certain building, you do not call it a ‘foreign establishment’; but (say) “a ham and beef shop kept by a perspiring Greek.” [p113]
They contrast this report with an article in the Left Review describing a skirmish in the Spanish civil war:
The door collapses, and the bedrooms, saloons and corridors are choked with frenzied men, swinging at Fascists with chairs, bars of iron, knives and rifle-butts. Fascists are flung bodily out of windows, or down lift shafts, or driven into a lavatory; a bomb is pitched in after them.[p114]
If anything, the journalist’s bad writing is a moral or personal defect. If the reporter at the riot scene had known his job, he would have observed specific details, like the war reporter, who bothers to observe that the fascists are blown up in a toilet rather than, say, a kitchen.
And, if you are a good reporter and can really see things in particular, there is really no need for you to pepper “sensational” (sensation-rousing) words, for the picture of the “things in particular” will itself rouse, in your reader, the appropriate feelings. [p114]
To its credit, the textbook doesn’t turn this principle into a dogma. The authors put Shakespeare’s lines about the Princes in the Tower alongside Hollinshed’s chronicle, and note that both are very effective pieces of emotional writing, even though Hollinshed shows the reader what happened, where Shakespeare tells the reader how to feel about it.
The proportion of emotive words in the first passage is small, and yet the description is intensely moving. Shakespeare, on the other hand, does not give us a picture of the incident; he moves our pity and anger by means of the highly emotive words he uses.[p108]
And they don’t even rule language that is purely emotional out of court. They cite a wonderful piece of invective by George Bernard Shaw telling the world why Shakespeare is rubbish:
“It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all endurance.”
Shaw hasn’t, in fact, given any particular reason why he doesn’t think much of Cymbeline. But he doesn’t need to: Shakespeare is such a sacred cow; and Shaw such a famous contrarian, that pure invective may make the point better than rational argument.
As long as Shakespeare is an object of idolatry and not of understanding, a person to be reverently talked about, not passionately enjoyed, so long will it be necessary for people like Bernard Shaw to knock him off his pedestal. And perhaps calling Shakespeare names is as good a method as any other of doing this. [p82]
I carry no particular brief for the Australian Textbook. It was published in 1939 and is very clearly of its time. Some of the asides feel as if they have been fossilised in amber. “That Shirley Temple is a duck” is given as an example of a simile (and a legitimate use of slang). Assembling a wireless set is repeatedly used as an example of a commonplace practical task. “The Jews should be expelled from Germany” and “Corporal punishment should be abolished” are both treated as subjects that students might try to write both-sides pros-and-cons essays about. A passage which says that Japanese people are like ants is critiqued for its use of mixed metaphor, but not for its racism. The tone veers from the rather-too-academic to the positively patronising, as if the writers were being forced to talk down to schoolboys when they really wanted to be back at Oxford doing close readings with Dr Richards.
I am not entirely sure that the distinction between reference and emotive meaning is sufficient to carry a whole thesis. I think that close reading is on the whole a good thing; but that if you read too closely, you can start seeing things which aren’t there. Apparently, when Edmund Burke wrote about “the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty” the “thumping and laboured rhythm” suggested what was described by the words. When he says “they are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and irresistible authority” “the rhythm and sound of the… sentence lend weight to the feelings of angry disgust which the words are communicating.”[p73] I am not sure if they do. And even if they do, I am not quite sure whether students will be able to reverse-engineer good writing from this kind of ultra-close critical analysis. “I must try to make the rhythm of my words reflect the emotions I am feeling” could be an excellent way of inducing writers’ block.
The Australian English Textbook tends to depict writers and poets as a special class of person, a person you can aspire to be as opposed to a skill you can learn. If you want to write good journalism, become the sort of person who notices things; and if you want to be a poet; be sensitive to your own feelings. Maybe. I tend to think of writers and poets as chaps with a knack for putting words in interesting orders. But the Australian writers are probably following their mentor: for all his quasi-scientific rigour, I.A Richards was also inclined to talk about Poets with a capital P, and Poems as a special kind of object that invoke unique and uniquely valuable psychological states in the reader.
The wide range of texts used as examples seems to be wholly admirable. Hollinshed, Lawrence, Burke, Auden, Shakespeare are put alongside passages from the Left Review and the New Statesmen and newspaper movie review columns. The literary judgments, though sometimes reductive and repetitive, seem valid and useful. And the questions for discussion seem genuinely challenging. There is a certain affable pedagogic personality in the narrative voice, which I rather enjoyed. I was quite sorry to say goodbye to the writers when I came to the end.
It is not a great book by any means; but it is not a terrible book either. I would not be talking about it at all if, in 1943, a fellow of Magdalene College Oxford had not accused the authors of disseminating an ideology which, left unchecked, would literally lead to the annihilation of the human race.
This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present.
Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.
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