CULTURE AND THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM

What do we mean by ‘Culture’?

The word ‘culture’ is problematical because it has two connotations.  First of all there is the ‘anthropological’ meaning used to describe all the aspects of the way of life of a social group.  For example, we talk of American Indian culture as a term that embraces religion, custom, law and the arts.  Secondly there is the view of culture as being ‘high culture’, that is, the set of aesthetic values associated with the elite sector of a society’s creative activities.  For example, we regard a person as ‘cultured’ if they attend the opera, but not necessarily so if they are an expert on pop music.

The relationship of the School to Culture

In the educational world, both meanings of the word are relevant and a further problem is added because there is confusion about the role of the school in dealing with culture.  Is the school there to reflect the current social attitudes towards culture in its anthropological and aesthetic versions, or does it exist to transform the nature of culture in both its meanings?

Let us take the anthropological view first: if a school exists in an area in which the prevalent cultural norms are hierarchical and male-dominated, based on alcohol abuse and the materialistic values of consumerism, is it the duty of the school to try to educate children away from values which teachers might feel are less than satisfactory?

In the aesthetic field, if a child’s parents find the music of Mantovani the summit of cultural achievement in the musical sphere, what is the school’s effect upon family relationships if children are exposed to a wider range of musical experience and told that there is something more to appreciate in the music of Mozart?

Culture defines Culture

The problem gains another dimension by the fact that the two meanings of ‘culture’ affect each other.  The anthropological sense of culture defines what will be regarded as high status aesthetic culture.  For example, the general cultural norms of the United States, while more or less following European notions of cultural status, nonetheless accord status to aesthetic forms such as modern dance and jazz, which stem from the historical traditions of the U.S and its relationship with black minorities.  Even within Europe there are variations in aesthetic cultural norms that are a result of the surrounding ‘social’ culture: in Italy opera attracts audiences from a far wider range of social classes than it does in Britain.

The Changing Nature of Culture

There have been two major changes in the nature of aesthetic culture in the 20th century.  The first has been the ‘levelling out’ of the hierarchical view of culture.  More value has been given to artistic expression previously regarded as rustic and ‘primitive’.  This is seen in the collections that were made of folk songs and dances at the beginning of the century and in the founding of institutions such as the Folk Museums to preserve rural crafts. 

The second change has been the influx of new cultures.  This is not a new phenomenon in Britain of course - the island has been washed with waves of incomers throughout its history, but the 20th century has brought a wider range of exotic influences more rapidly into British society than say, previous incursions such as those of Huguenots or Jews.  The schools have been intimately affected by this process of change because they have been in the front line of the debate as to whether incomers should adapt to the prevailing norms of the surrounding and dominant anthropological culture, or should insist that the surrounding culture make allowances for the culture (in both senses) the incomers bring with them.  Whereas the schools might possibly have worked out solutions to this question, the water has unfortunately been muddied by political intervention which has made the question of multiple cultures in schools a very hot potato indeed.

The Role of Teachers as Transmitters of Culture

Whatever the national, local or school policies on the transmission of cultural norms to pupils, in practice the individual teacher will deliver the message to those in his/her care.  Teachers, by definition, represent what their society sees as successful educational outcomes because they have passed all the examinations that society has set to form its teachers.  Candidates who have exhibited behaviour contrary to the expected norms have, in the main, been filtered out of the system.  It is probably true to say, therefore, that teachers transmit a version of knowledge which represents, in the words of M.F.D. Young “conscious or unconscious cultural choices which accord with the values and beliefs of dominant groups at a particular time” (Young, Knowledge and Control,1978, p.38).

The French writer Bourdieu makes the same point about the reproduction of prevailing norms by the educational process, and it becomes clear from the writings of men like Young and Bourdieu that schools are perceived as vitally important links in the chain of cultural continuity.  At a time of cultural change, when a society is examining what its values are and should be, schools are therefore put under a spotlight so that the ruling group may observe what cultural values are being transmitted.  This results in an examination of the curriculum of the school, in the reconsideration of ‘high status’ and ‘low status’ knowledge and in the investigation of the possibilities of a common core of knowledge which might do away with the distinction between the two.

British education in the late 1980’s passed through precisely this phase: the National Curriculum seeks to provide a common core of knowledge which our society feels is essential to unite the membership of the British tribe. The GCSE examination has been created as a unified rite of passage to certify membership of that tribe, superseding the old tripartite system of GCE, CSE and non-examined pupils.  A curious quirk in this reform is that provision has been made for the preservation of a small sector of elite culture based on the traditional values (literary knowledge rather than practical, abstract rather than practical, ancient rather than modern).  This has been brought about by allowing the private sector of British education to be exempted from the National Curriculum of common core knowledge which is being imposed upon children attending state schools. 

The idea introduced above of the schools as transmitters of culture gives the idea of a conservative system, passing on a predetermined set of values.  This is the case, but it must be remembered that to many pupils (and even more so to some parents) the acculturisation process is a dynamic one, in that progress from one social class to another may be attained through the acquisition of elements of an elite aesthetic culture.  This situation presents the teacher with a moral problem: there may be valid arguments against perpetuating an outdated set of aesthetic values formed by a privileged social class, and yet if, in this less than best of all possible worlds, it is still the case that a bright child from a less privileged class can improve his/her life chances by playing the cultural game, what right do we have to propose a more ‘authentic’ form of culture which we feel to be more in tune with the world we live in?

Culture and the Future

If teachers are to introduce a new culture, the problem that they face is to decide on what form it should take.  It is easy enough to say that Latin and grand opera are relics of a past best forgotten, but we have failed to prescribe what an acceptable form of aesthetic culture should be in the future.  A culture evolves, and the crisis of the 20th century teacher is that s/he is at the end of one period of our national culture, before a new phase has clearly revealed itself. 

THE ENGLISH PREPOSITION

As we see in the essay Language and Identity on this blog, English is spared the complications of many other languages such as male, female and neutral nouns, the subjunctive form of the verb and complex counting systems.  It does, however, have its own bête noire, the preposition.  I am amused to see the way publishers have tried to cash in on this problem for English learners by publishing dictionaries of phrasal verbs (forgetting phrasal nouns and adjectives) and ignoring the vital element of social context in the use of these structures.  If you are an English language learner, do not waste your money on these publications and remember a simple rule – 99% of English expressions using prepositions can be said in another way, so you need not learn how to use them, just learn to understand them.  Life becomes so much easier....

So let’s get down to business. Languages are divided into analytic and synthetic types:

·          In a synthetic language, meanings of words are encoded in prefixes and suffixes. 

·       In an analytic one, meanings are transmitted by the use of other words (for example, prepositions) and word order. 

This is very important in the history of English, because during its history we see the language change from being synthetic to mainly analytic.  We say ‘mainly analytic’ because some anomalies remain, as in the comparison of adjectives, where we have ‘close, closer, closest’ (synthetic) and also ‘beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful’ (analytic, although the change from ‘more’ to ‘most’ is synthetic!).

Two things make the English preposition especially difficult to use properly: first, their number and variety and second, the number of meanings each one can have.  In addition there are the phrasal verbs, nouns and adjectives, of which more later.

Let’s have a look at a simple example:

‘John missed his flight because he didn’t arrive at the airport in time’. 

No real problem there, although a slight variation in meaning would require a different preposition: ‘John missed his flight because he didn’t arrive at the airport at the right time’. 

Another variation would be: ‘John didn’t arrive in time for the meeting’ where we add another preposition – ‘for’.  Notice that there is nothing logical about the attribution of these prepositions – theoretically it should be possible to say ‘at time in the meeting’, but the language has chosen not to use this formula. 

This is the key to the whole question of preposition use – the preposition has no meaning in itself, and its use has nothing to do with logic.

So far so good, now let's take time and its prepositions a little further:

in time for

in time(s) of

at the time

at the time of

 at times

from time to time

out of time

by the time

on time

over time

(it’s) about time

We can see that from time to time might possibly a logical connection with the spatial use of the preposition, as do at the time and at times, but what about on time and over time?  When we use ‘You cannot write any more in this examination, you are out of time’, it may be with a positional sense of being outside the allocated time, but what about the illogical ‘We are out of milk; can you get some from the shop please?’  Presumably it comes from ‘We have run out of milk’ – but where is the logic in ‘running out of milk’?  Aha! (I hear you cry) that is an extension of the meaning that the last of the milk has ‘run out of the bottle’.  Oh yes?  So what about: ‘Sorry, I can’t sell you a pork pie, they’ve run out’?  Have they grown legs and run out of the shop?

And all this happens before we come to our major bête noir in English - the phrasal verb.  And let us not forget the phrasal noun and phrasal adjective (‘his way of doing it’, ‘frightened of wolves’, ‘frightened by wolves’).  Before we go any further, the best advice I can give concerning phrasal verbs is to generally treat them as passive vocabulary (i.e. you understand what they mean but don't necessarily have to use them).  This may be considered a shocking statement by teachers who have worked hard to teach students how to use these constructions, not to mention the students who have worked hard to learn them but it is worth remembering that for almost every phrasal verb there is a single-word equivalent.  These equivalents may make your English more formal and less colloquial, but that may be a better result than using the phrasal verb inappropriately or incorrectly.

First of all, the phrasal verb faces us with an essential problem of illogicality, as we began to see above: for example, the construction to put up may mean literally:

‘I have put up the shelves in the bathroom’ or

‘I wonder if you could put me up for the night’. 

If we take the second sentence literally, it is clearly nonsense: to what elevated position is the person asking to be placed for the duration of the night?  It means, of course: ‘May I sleep in your house tonight?’

Even in this sense use of the phrase is restricted by the register (level of formality) in which it is used: we would use it to friends or in a modest hotel; using it in more elite establishments would evoke only that of smile of tolerant contempt which reception staff at the better hotels are trained to use to drive away the peasants.  Equally, the phrase is limited by time: you can put someone up for possibly a maximum of six months; we would not really say: ‘John very kindly put me up for two years’. 

The latter situation would call for a variation on the phrase: ‘John very kindly put up with me for 18 months’ and suddenly, with the addition of one word, we are in very different territory: ‘to put up with’ meaning ‘to tolerate’.  Once again, there is not the remotest connection with the spatial or associative sense associated with these two words.  We have entered an area of language where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. 

Here again the phrase has its limitations: in terms of register it is informal and also, in terms of fields of human activity, it is restricted.  For example, ‘I can't tolerate/put up with his constant complaining’ is possible, but not ‘These ceramic tiles can tolerate/put up with temperatures of 1000°C’.

The best analogy I can find for the use of the preposition in English is the following:

·           The basic use of prepositions to indicate the location or association of objects, people and ideas is reasonably logical and explicable and may be compared to a pencil drawing. 

·           Moving further into the area of preposition use, we are adding primary colours to the picture. 

·           Full mastery of the combination of prepositions with open-class items of language (nouns, verbs and adjectives) can be compared to the subtle management of tones in an oil painting.  The English language already has a huge vocabulary of basic items and the use of prepositions increases the capacity of the language even more.

The problem for the learner, however, is that the use of these combinations is not dictated by grammatical rules or logic - it is controlled, as we have seen above - by custom and usage, rather like the famously unwritten British Constitution.  In other words, you can only learn how to actively use prepositional combinations beyond the elementary stage either by living with the natives for a long period or by reading large amounts of their literature.

Love Lessons in 12th Night

THE REFORMATION BACKGROUND

See the Essay on this subject on this blog, under the title “Shakespeare and.the Reformation, or the Great National Nervous Breakdown.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays analyse the chaotic and brutal politics of his times by looking at historical parallels, but he also analyses human relationships, giving people a guide to living with each other during the Protestant Reformation, a period of history when many traditional values had been overturned.  This section of his work - both tragedy and comedy - centres around love.  Given that today we have 24-hour cable channels bombarding us with popular music devoted to love, this should not come as a surprise, but what exactly did love mean to Shakespeare?

WHAT IS LOVE?

We owe the codification of the western view of love to the Gallego-Portuguese and Southern French troubadours.  Their poetry took the neo-platonic concept of a perfection of feeling beyond that of the merely physical, and married it to the cult of the Virgin in the Catholic Church.  The result was, in the cruel and male-dominated world of the Middle Ages, a school of lyric poetry that elevated the female into an ideal figure to whom homage should be paid.

Shakespeare inherited the hierarchical world-view of the mediaeval world.  The objects of the visible and spiritual world were ordered in chains that descended from God.  So we have the Christ figure linking God to man, with kings and popes at the top of the religious and secular worlds.  Then come bishops and nobles, right down to the ‘villeins’ (note the moral overtone of the modern use of the word) and the unbaptised blacks and indians who could be enslaved and killed with a clear conscience because they were outside the system.

Linked to this concept of personal hierarchy is a cosmic one.  In order to try to make sense of the movement of the heavenly objects, a theory was proposed that they were embedded in a series of spheres whose centre was the earth.  These spheres moved to a heavenly music controlled by God and this explains why Shakespeare so often refers to harmony, to music and to the power of fate, which is written in the stars.  A child born in Shakespeare’s day had its time of birth precisely noted because future readings of its fortune would be based on this information.  From this we see how love and harmony are interconnected in Shakespeare - at the centre of a harmonious universe is God, and God is love.  Therefore, as a more modern song has it - Love made the world go round.

Song is where Man can imitate the divine harmony and when he adds dance to song, the kind of highly formalised dancing of the Renaissance, in which groups of dancers moved in intricate formations, we have earthly bodies interpreting in allegorical form the movement of heavenly bodies.  It is significant that 12th Night opens with references to music, love and the hierarchical nature of life:

music, love mixing of senses: sound and smell Spirit - non-physical aspect of love hierarchy of size

If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again! it had a dying fall: O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more: 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe'er, But falls into abatement and low price, Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical.

We see from the start that Orsino’s view of love is false, as he considers its spirit as a place into which things fall and decay.  Orsino has chosen to put himself in this situation, but when we see Viola for the first time, she is also in chaos, but through no fault of her own. 

Viola      What country, friends, is this?

Captain      This is Illyria, lady.

Viola      And what should I do in Illyria?

My brother he is in Elysium.

Perchance he is not drown'd:

what think you, sailors?

In contrast to Orsino, who lies on banks of flowers feeling sorry for himself, Viola takes action, she disguises herself and goes off to make the best of this unknown land. Contrasting with Orsino’s self-pity we have her optimism that perhaps her brother may not be dead.

TRADITIONAL LOVE AND A NEW UNIVERSE

This transcendental vision that fuses the concepts of fate, harmony and love presents us with two problems.  The first is, how do you relate an earth-centred set of neo-Platonist values to a world that is rapidly being proved to be sun-centred?  To that question I would suggest that today most of us can only conceive of a Newtonian universe, despite our knowledge that an Einsteinian vision of the universe exists.  Shakespeare knew that mathematicians had developed new models of the skies that conflicted with the mediaeval view, but for him the emotional truth of the old vision remained more powerful than scientific truth.

LOVE AND FATE

The second problem was a more serious one for a world where witches were still being burned.  If astrologers are right, and our ways are directed by a fate which can be read in the stars, where does the Christian concept of free will come in?  If my fate says that I shall be a criminal, what is the point in trying to be virtuous?  Equally, where is the virtue in being good if your fate makes you unable to be wicked?  Shakespeare puts this question most graphically in Macbeth.  The prophecies about Macbeth’s future are made at the start of the play.  Certain things will happen to this man.  There is no religious problem with this - an all-powerful deity presumably controls what will happen to His creatures.  These things having been revealed to Macbeth, it is his handling of the situation - his practice of free will - that is at fault.  He pushes his fate forward and becomes king too early by committing the greatest of sins by killing the acting king, one of the closest creatures to God in the hierarchical system.

And, of course, one of the reasons that drives Macbeth to anticipating the outcome of his fate is the relationship with his wife.  Is it love?  It is a type of love, and that is what Shakespeare examines much more closely in 12^th Night.  One of the great themes of the Renaissance is paradox and within that area, the paradox of the destructive power of love is paramount because it contradicts the troubadour ideal.  A much more obvious love than that of the Macbeths is that of Othello and Desdemona and yet it is the very strength of that love that allows Iago to turn it into the agent that destroys the lovers.

THE NEED FOR AN ANALYSIS

The major point that I have tried to make so far is that Shakespeare’s society was in crisis, and I do not mean to say that this situation applied only to the elite, to the thinkers and the politicians.  The religious break affected everyone: in Elizabeth’s England it was compulsory to attend church on Sundays, and one could be fined for non-attendance.  The changes from Catholic to Protestant and back again affected everyone and must have forced a re-thinking of the individual’s relationship with God.

A paradox that was perhaps more evident to the elite was that of Man’s position in the order of things.  With Galileo’s discoveries, three things became apparent:

·         first, Man could no longer regard himself as being the supreme being under God on a planet at the centre of the universe;

·         second, it was man’s powers of reasoning and invention that developed the intellectual and mechanical tools to make this discovery, so in this sense man is not so inferior after all;

·         thirdly, rational exploration of the surrounding world and universe reveals that things are not what they seem.  At first sight, our senses tell us that the sun is no bigger than our hand, but mathematics tells us that it is powerful enough to dominate our solar system, and the telescope tells us that it is a whirling mass of flame with occasional dark spots on it.

So, man moves from being the centre of the physical universe to being the centre of the intellectual universe.  It was unthinkable for 17^th century man to abandon God, but his relationship with God had changed.  Galileo’s own experiences with the Inquisition illustrate this.  When he publicised the results of his rational inquiries, he was questioned by the Inquisition.  When he defended his position, he was taken through the next stage of correction - being shown the instruments of torture that would be applied if he continued to maintain his views.  Being a sensible as well as a rational man, Galileo agreed to sign a confession of error, but as he did so he said under his breath: “Eppur si muove” - It [the earth] still does move.

THE TYPES OF LOVE IN 12TH NIGHT

So where does this leave Shakespeare?  One of the first things to say about him is that he is a perfect example of the social changes that were occurring in the general disturbance of mediaeval values.  Instead of remaining in his station in life, as the son of a Stratford glove-maker, he moves to London, mixes with the disreputable actors and finds himself presenting plays (like 12^th Night) for the Queen.  If we were to look for Shakespeare in the play, we would find him in the character of Feste, the clown who stands back from the action and comments on it, while moving easily between all the social classes and feeling free to criticise them as he does so.  There is no thought of deference to his social betters in Shakespeare (although his plays show that he had little time for those whom he considered socially inferior to him).

Just as Descartes scientifically observes and records his observations of the ball of wax changing its properties under the effect of heat and draws an analogy with human development, so Shakespeare exposes human beings to the effects of the actions of other men, the events of history, the actions of fate or simply, the faults (and qualities) of their own characters.  In the case of 12^th Night, we are shown fate throwing new actors (by means of the shipwreck) into the scene that has been established in Illyria (Orsino’s unrequited love, and Olivia’s household arrangements).  This situation provides the heat to be applied to the beeswax of the characters, who are all changed under its effect.

Shakespeare’s analysis of the experiment is clinically divided into showing us eight different types of love

Orsino-Olivia

Olivia-Viola

Viola-Orsino

Malvolio-Olivia

Toby-Maria

Andrew-Olivia

Sebastian-Olivia

Antonio-Sebastian

The love of Orsino for Olivia is purely mediaeval - the troubadour ideal of the gentleman languishing for love of an untouchable lady.  It shows the paradoxical nature of love: Orsino is rejected, but cannot do as Olivia commands, i.e. leave her alone, because to do so would prove that he does not love her as much as he says he does.  Although it may be spiritually uplifting, this type of love is essentially sterile as it is unrequited.

Olivia loves the appearance of Viola.  The dichotomy between appearance and reality is a major theme of the Renaissance and is related to the neo-Platonic view of the world, which says that the world we inhabit is an imperfect copy of an ideal world closer to God.  (Orsino’s type of ‘platonic’ love was praised for its non-physical quality, for the same reason.)  Olivia’s love may be considered to be less than perfect because its sudden and passionate nature has not left her the time and opportunity to see the truth behind Viola’s disguise.

Viola’s love for Orsino may be seen as an example of a sensible, intelligent person developing feelings for another after having observed and lived with that person.  The tragedy is that the appearance Viola has chosen to adopt prevents her, like her ‘father’s daughter’, from telling of her love.  Given the ugly and violent side of his nature that Orsino shows when he thinks that ‘Cesario’ has betrayed him with Olivia, we may wonder whether Viola has indeed made the right choice.  We notice that both to Olivia and to Orsino, Viola makes a point of her noble birth, so that her giving and receiving of love from these two aristocrats may be legitimised.

Can we say that Malvolio loves Olivia?  He certainly thinks he does, in his way.  The mercenary side of affection was much more open in Shakespeare’s day.  No-one criticised people for marrying for money if they belonged to the same social class.  Malvolio’s crime is to try to jump out of his class.  To Shakespeare’s conservative mind this would be to upset the social order of the state which, as we have seen, was hierarchically ordered by divine will.  We see again, how Malvolio is deceived by appearances and how his counterfeit love is displayed by his appearance - the cross-gartering and the yellow stockings.  He is referred to more than once as a puritan, that sect whose unreasonable strictness in sexual matters was as unnatural as Orsino’s, or Olivia’s before she met ‘Cesario’.

Sit Toby and Maria are an interesting case.  Clearly there is here another case of marrying out of one’s class, but in a way Sir Toby has disqualified himself from his class in two ways.  First of all, he is a throwback to another age.  He is not a Renaissance Man, as is shown by his antics in trying to dance with Sir Andrew.  When pushed into a corner, he fights, sword in hand and does not complain when he loses.  His second disqualification is a result of his drinking, which deprives him of his sense of reason - a serious offence in the age of Sir Francis Bacon. We may also feel that Shakespeare’s approval of Maria’s wit and intelligence justifies her marrying above her station.

Sir Andrew’s love for Olivia is a clear-cut example of a poor knight (not an aristocrat) looking to improve his fortune by courting a rich young heiress.  Clearly he has no chance of achieving this, but Sir Toby has convinced him that he has, in order that he (Sir Toby) may get money off Sir Andrew.  Sir Andrew, in contrast to Sir Toby, is trying to enter the new age by learning languages and dancing, as stipulated in Baltasare Castiglione’s Il Corteggiano, the bible of courtly behaviour at the time.  Nevertheless, like Sir Toby he has not found a way to earn money in a society that no longer needs knights to fight its battles when it can pay mercenaries to do it.

Sebastian’s love for Olivia is, really, no more than part of Shakespeare’s structure in restoring order to the micro-universe he has created on stage.  Nevertheless, now that the outward appearance of ‘Cesario’ has been filled with the body of a pleasant, well-bred young man, there is a distinct possibility that Sebastian will be happier in his marriage than his sister will be in hers.

We cannot end without drawing attention to the over-intense affection shown to Sebastian by Antonio.  Antonio’s actions, giving his friend half his money, accompanying him to territory in which Antonio’s life is in danger, go well beyond the duties of any friendship between two men who have recently met and been shipwrecked.  Whether Shakespeare intended us to see it as merely an intense friendship, or as sublimated homosexual passion on the part of Antonio we cannot know, but it is shown in the play as another form of attachment between people.  What is perhaps significant, in the light of accusations of homosexuality made against Shakespeare himself, is that when order is restored to the universe, Sebastian is left happily with Olivia while Antonio is left to go his own way.

THE LESSONS

What does Shakespeare want us to understand by this play?  First of all, we must not forget that it is a light-hearted entertainment, but the theatre has always had a didactic and moralistic purpose in Western Europe.  Plays began as depictions of biblical scenes displayed for an illiterate public, in the spaces outside churches. In England they developed into significantly named ‘morality’ plays and moved away from the churches into public squares of towns. 

What I have tried to point out here is that Shakespeare is trying to help his audience make sense of a world turned upside down: the previous submission of men and women to the authority of Greek and Roman authors on the one hand, and the Catholic church on the other, had been questioned by respectively, rational inquiry into natural phenomena, and the Reformation.  The idea of God as a prime mover placed outside the universe and controlling it with His love will change over the centuries to one of God being within men and women who can choose whether to allow His presence to be revealed through their daily actions. 

Shakespeare is at the point in history where this change of emphasis is taking place.  The old certainties have gone and the playwrights of the time, especially Shakespeare, his contemporary Ben Jonson and the slightly later Webster, help ordinary people to find their way in a world in which reality and illusion are now confused.  They do this by warning with satire and by encouraging with romance.  In this play Shakespeare is saying: look at the different types of love that can exist - where do you fit in?  Are you an ignorant, drunken buffoon like Sir Toby, whose historical period has passed, or are you an ineffectual fool like Sir Andrew?  Do you see how surface reality can delude those who fall in love?  Is your own love for another person based on thoughts of material gain, like Malvolio’s, or are you in love with love itself, like Orsino?

At the end of the day, the lessons of love that Shakespeare is giving us in this play are, as Viola says, “O time! thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me to untie!”  The lesson of comedy here, just like the lesson of tragedy in Macbeth, is that we must submit ourselves to our destiny while acting within the common code of morality shared by Protestant and Catholic in Queen Elizabeth’s England.  God is still love and even though He may confuse us by the ways in which he allows love to appear here on earth, it is the only guiding light we have in a confused world.

LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY

Reflections offered to the Colwinston Philosophical Society, Old South Wales in January, 2004

The English philosophers G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell founded the contemporary Analytic and Linguistic trend in philosophy based on the idea that precise analysis of language is critical to philosophical inquiry.  Russell wanted to create a logical language to describe the world around him and stated that complex concepts can be resolved into their simplest components, called ‘atomic propositions’. Wittgenstein claimed that “philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts” and his conclusions arrive at ideas similar to Russell’s logical atomism.  He stated that the world is basically made up of simple facts that language is created to describe.

The world, however, insists on working in a different way.  Language insists on being far more complex than it ‘needs’ to be.  However much we might wish to simplify the language we speak, users insist on building difficulties into it.

I suggest that descriptions of Bertrand Russell’s ‘simple facts’ vary according to language, that language develops at different rates historically and geographically and that within the same language area groups differentiate their language in order to establish identities for social or political reasons.  The book The Meaning of Tingo contains examples of words for actions, situations and things that English has not seen fit to describe, for example: the Czech language has a word litot to describe ‘the state of torment created by the sudden realization of one’s own misery’; Malay has the word geragas meaning ‘to comb one’s hair in anger’ and Japanese has a word to describe a woman who looks attractive from the back but less so when seen from the front.

I suppose the example of language and identity most of us first met is this story from the Old Testament:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

Judges 12: 5-6

These differences apply to other languages as well.  In southern Africa there is a language known as !Ora (pronounced ‘kora’) which is distinguished by a clicking sound made at the back of the mouth.  Those of us of certain age will remember the song sung by Miriam Makeba in the 1950s based on this technique taught to babies, which is unpronounceable by those not taught to make the sound from their earliest years.  Anyone who has tried to learn Arabic will know the difficulty in pronouncing the ‘r’ sound of that language.  Conversely, Arabs have difficulty in distinguishing between the sounds ‘b’ and ‘p’ and ‘e’ and ‘i’ in English.  There is a story of a Saudi father phoning a language school in England to ask why his son had not written home.  The school principal called the boy, who said indignantly he had written once a week.  “What did you do with the letters?” he was asked.  “I put them there”, the boy replied, indicating a container marked LITTER.

The same divisions are apparent among the non-Welsh speaking Welsh: it is very interesting to note that in a very precisely defined area between and including Port Talbot and Swansea, the verb ‘want’ is pronounced as ‘wunt’. That is a geographical identity marker but in the city of Cardiff you will find a different marker that denotes the speaker’s social class identity.  This is the adding of final ‘s’ to all forms of the verb: “I comes home at six o’clock and me and my husband we goes off to the supermarket.” This is a working class construction which I have only found within the city limits of Cardiff.  Recently a domestic gas engineer from Cardiff was in my house and produced the construction “He have done it”, a reversal of the final ‘s’ rule, in the one example of the English verb that should have ‘s’. I can only describe this as a form of ‘linguistic perversity’ deliberately done to reinforce the uniqueness of this identity marker.  It must be deliberately done because no teacher ever taught the construction and the speakers have never heard it in the media.  In other words, the gasman is saying: we in this social class in this particular area have taken to ourselves the right to alter this small part of English grammar – as well as creating the phonetically unique ‘flattening’ of the ‘ar’ sound in words like ‘Cardiff’ itself, to sound something like ‘Cyerrdiff’.

A similar example is the pronunciation of final ‘-os’ in non-Hispanic or non-Greek American English.  No American has ever heard a native Spanish-speaker pronounce the name ‘Carlos’ as ‘Carloce’, nor any Greek-speaker say ‘cosmoce’ for ‘cosmos’, but that is how these sounds are pronounced by the majority of Americans.  It is a purely invented form of pronouncing this ending which distances Anglo-Saxon Americans from (especially) Hispanics.

Back in Britain, other markers reveal middle-class identity and age group identity that do not have a specific geographical limitation: I was at a New Year house party on the Isle of Wight this year and when the crowd of young people (i.e. 25 and below, which is young when you are my age) arrived, you could distinctly detect that subtle change in the vowel sound usually represented by the letters ‘ou’ or ‘oo’, producing ‘yiu’ for ‘you’ and ‘giud’ for ‘good’ that has gradually been creeping into the spoken language of this group (watch TVAM – if you can stand it).  The pronunciation is also accompanied by a vocabulary change that I find particularly annoying.  When asked “How are you?” members of this age group tend to reply: “I’m giud (good)”, which would be a response to the question “What is your moral condition?” rather than “How is your health?”  But again, it is limited to this sector of society that is establishing its identity as young, middle class 21st-century citizens.

So where are we now?  What I’ve tried to set out so far is that language is used in all its aspects: pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, as a way of identifying ourselves as members of particular subgroups, in other words – tribes.  Many of my Nigerian students had facial scars in patterns denoting tribal origin.  Those identity markers could never be changed without the help of plastic surgery but language markers can change.  The identities of the Nigerian students were modified linguistically according to their life patterns: if a parent married someone from a different tribe the offspring would speak both tribal languages as well as one of the three major languages: Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba.  Another level was added to denote educational status – speaking English.  And even within English there are officially recognised subdivisions: Educated Nigerian English and Pidgin.  In other words, the combination of languages spoken by a Nigerian gives that person a very precise social and geographical identity, and I would guess that there are generation differences there today as well, thanks to globalised media.

This observation leads us to a consideration of what identity means in the modern world: in traditional societies individuals tend to have one identity which they keep from the cradle to the grave.  In modern, mobile, meritocratic sections of society we may have several identities which we indicate by changing the way we dress and the way we speak, according to context.  Nigeria today contains both types of society, whereas since World War II, Britain has fallen fully into the multi-identity group.

Paradoxically, more traditional societies do not necessarily have more primitive language forms.  The Harvard palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson describes it thus:

Even the peoples with least complex cultures have highly sophisticated languages, with complex grammar and large vocabularies, capable of naming and discussing anything that occurs in the sphere occupied by their speakers.  The oldest language that can be reconstructed is already modern, sophisticated, complete from an evolutionary point of view.

Indeed, the most powerful language the world has ever seen in terms of geographical coverage and possibly the most powerful one in terms of flexibility and imaginative scope (thanks to Chaucer and Shakespeare), the one I’m using at the moment, is actually one of the simplest in terms of pronunciation and grammar.  The relationship between spelling and pronunciation is admittedly idiosyncratic thanks to the way in which William Caxton adapted the pronunciation of his time to the letter combinations he used on his new printing press, but imagine having to speak Chinese, where the same word may be pronounced with four different intonations that give it four different meanings.  The vocabulary of English is immense but a basic and perfectly adequate English grammar was created in the 1930s using only about a thousand words of vocabulary.  We shall speak later of the lack of masculine/feminine differences between nouns, but think also of the simplicity inherent in not having to use a subjunctive, using an alphabet rather than ideograms and only one written form.

What the complexity of Chinese does is reinforce the separateness of the Chinese Empire, which spent many centuries in voluntary isolation from the rest of the world, as did Japan, another country whose language remains stubbornly difficult to learn – even for the Japanese.  When I lived there I would sometimes ask native Japanese people to translate a written text and they would spend several minutes deciphering the (originally Chinese) ideograms.  There are four different written forms in Modern Japanese, not to mention the different forms of language used by men and by women and the different verbs to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects.  This is one reason the Japanese proudly call themselves ‘differently different’ and it has the effect, in China and Japan, not only of keeping foreigners outside their culture and from sharing their identity, but also of creating an internal identity differentiation between those who have learned more than the basic 3,000 ideograms and those who have not. 

The thesis of this essay is based around precisely this point of the unnecessary complexity of language and why it is created.  The idea finally crystallised in my mind when I translated an article about the indian languages of the Amazon basin for a colleague of mine at the University of Brasilia.  (In parenthesis, it is worth noting that this friend is a Catalan born in Spain but working in France who speaks to me only in French.  Modern Catalans do everything they can to avoid speaking Castilian Spanish because, like the Welsh, they are re-establishing a tribal identity that a powerful central state had tried to stamp out.)

My friend’s article described two things: an immensely complex grammatical structure created by Stone Age peoples and secondly, that within the overall family of languages known as Tupi-Guarani, there were differences in these structures that occurred in two dimensions.  Firstly, changes that had occurred in the history of some variants had not yet occurred in other forms of the same language family, and secondly changes are occurring today in some areas that are not happening in others.  So the differences are both chronological and geographical.

A possible interpretation for this situation is that, within the Indian tribes, a permanent state of identity separation has been deliberately maintained because inter-tribal warfare was an important part of the culture: it was a form of population control and, as one of its motives was wife-stealing, it brought new blood into the genetic structure of small tribes. 

In what may be a parallel situation to the Amazon, there are apparently 300 languages spoken among the tribes of the relatively small area of Borneo and these tribes too, at least until recently, lived in a state of permanent but controlled warfare with their neighbours.

I have suggested this theory to my Brazilian wife, who was not convinced, but in fact she provided an example that tends to confirm it: in the 19th-century wars with the Spanish colonists of Uruguay, prisoners taken on the ill-defined frontier were told to say the Portuguese word pãozinho (small loaf of bread); if they pronounced it pãosinho in the Spanish manner, their throats were cut: an updated version of the shibboleth technique.

A specific example of unnecessary complication of language is that of gender in nouns.  I’m sure we can all recall the problems remembering if cage and plage in French are masculine or feminine and then remembering to make adjectives agree with them both by gender (and by number – another unnecessary complication that English doesn’t have).  Mercifully, English has done away with these structures, but why on earth do they exist in the first place?  Linguists have attempted to reconstruct the earliest known language, proto-Indo-European, and have found evidence of gender difference in its nouns, a characteristic was inherited by the languages developed from it.  The idea seems to be that the language first of all distinguished between human and non-human (i.e. neuter) nouns and then divided the human ones into male and female.  This works well enough with ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘bull’ and ‘cow’, but why should a table be feminine in Latin and later in French and Spanish?  Why is a woman feminine in German but a girl neuter?

In Latin, the word Sol (Sun) was masculine and the word Luna (Moon) was feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but in German (and Germanic languages in general), the opposite occurs. The learner of a language thus must regard the gender as part of the noun, and memorize accordingly to use the language correctly. A frequent recommendation is to memorize the definite article and the noun as a unit.  Even in English we have remnants of this: some personal pronouns have different forms based on the natural gender of the thing referred to: e.g. ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’, ‘his’, ‘hers’ and ‘its’ though in the plural, we use the common ‘them’ and ‘their’, as in “The boys and girls put on their hats”.  

Gender-specific pronouns vary considerably across languages: there are languages that have different pronouns in the third person to differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, like Hungarian and Finnish, but this distinction is usually forgotten in spoken Finnish.

Conclusions

·         Development of language change is chronological and digressive – in other words, some Tupi-Guarani language elements change faster in some versions than in others, and change in different directions.  And the same can be said of languages on a global scale – in India, English is still constructed in patterns of the 1930s; in the United States there are regional differences between the East and West coasts.

·         I have tried as well to show how language differences are used to create a social class identity as well a tribal one.  Finally, there is the use of language to create cultural identity, as shown by the words and phrases describing actions like combing one’s hair in anger. 

·         We can also say that there is no such thing as a primitive language: language complexity is unrelated to economic and scientific development.  The English-speaking world dominates science and technology and uses a relatively uncomplicated language to describe its triumphs, but Finnish is one of the most complex languages in the world and the Finns stand up well in terms of science and technology.  The Japanese and Chinese share many of the same linguistic complexities but Japanese Research and Development are light years ahead of China. 

·         Finally, the most striking element in all of this is that language difficulty seems to be deliberately built into languages, first of all to mark those who belong to the tribe, secondly to keep strangers out.  We could start talking about mutations in Welsh, but we'll leave that for another time….

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRASILIA

Writing today's essay has been a strange experience: I set out to write a celebration of the capital of Brazil on its 51st birthday because I genuinely enjoy living here and yet the deeper I have looked into the history and current situation of the city, the darker the picture has become.

Near the town where I was born in Wales there is a cave with prehistoric remains.  The town itself has Roman and mediaeval features and the surrounding district seems to have been inhabited for several thousand years.  In total contrast, for the last 15 years I have lived in Brasilia a city which, on 21st April, celebrated the 51st anniversary of its inauguration.  Obviously, indigenous peoples lived in this area long before the Europeans arrived and on our occasional wet and rainy days I often wonder what life was like for them, building whatever protection they could from the bushes and trees in the local scrubland known as the cerrado.

But it is the modern city that dominates the landscape today - no one knows or cares what happened to the original inhabitants.  The abundant greenery of other parts of Brazil provided building materials for large-scale communal dwelling places and also the colourful feathers to create the headdresses of the indigenous groups that appear on picture postcards.  The relative inaccessibility of their lands also provided a certain inviolability, whereas the cerrado provides less game to hunt, less foliage suitable for building and less protection against human predators, so tribal societies in the Brazilian Midwest were always more sparse and precarious.

As far back as the 18th century there was talk of moving the capital of Brazil towards the centre of this huge country and in the mid-1950s President Juscelino Kubitschek finally committed his reputation and the country's finances to planning a functioning capital where there was nothing but miles of virgin scrub, a few farms and, in the words of one of the first pioneers: "More snakes than you could shake a stick at".  Even more striking is the fact that to all intents and purposes the place was up and running within three years after construction started.

Of course, there was a cost to all this.  The country ran up huge amounts of debt and safety regulations for the mainly unskilled labour force were rudimentary to say the least.  Two fascinating films: Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra, by Vladimir Carvalho and O Romance doVaqueiro Voador by Manfredo Caldas show the lives of the labourers brought in (mainly from the Northeast of Brazil) to build the city.  Translating the phrase Vaqueiro Voador - Flying Cowboy - is an example of Brazilian black humour referring to the northeasterners, many of whom had been cowboys before becoming unskilled construction workers, falling from the high-rise office blocks they were building.  Local folklore has it that the bodies were buried in the foundations of new buildings.

One particular incident stands out in both films: at the time of Carnival in 1959 men working for the Pacheco Fernandes Dantas construction company staged a protest against the quality of their food and also against the water being cut off in their living quarters, thus preventing them from washing after work and going to Carnival dances in nearby towns, as well as their pay being withheld for the same reason.  Carnival or not, work had to go on 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  On 8th February a protest about bad food in the dining hall led to altercations with the catering staff and a general breaking of furniture, which led to the GEB (Special Brasilia Guard) being called.  This was a police force that had been put together because police chiefs in the then capital, Rio de Janeiro, did not want to lose their men by sending them to what was to be the new capital.

As the men of the GEB attempted to beat up the ringleaders of the protest, they were in turn set upon by others from the 1,300-strong workforce and had to beat a humiliating retreat.  That night, a stronger force of GEB, allegedly armed with machine guns, appeared in lorries and proceeded to shoot indiscriminately into the living quarters of the construction workers.  It is not known how many casualties resulted from this action: claims of numbers of deaths range from one to 120.  Incredibly, there was almost no news coverage of the event because at that time Brazilian newspapers closed down for two days during Carnival and in any case they were more interested in covering the visit to Rio of the American film star Jayne Mansfield.  One anti-Kubitschek newspaper from Minas Gerais did send a reporter and even tried to follow the story up a month later, when it discovered that the eyewitnesses had mysteriously disappeared.

We do have a statement from a socialist politician, Salvador Lossaco who, as well as being in favour of building the new capital, also supported those working there.  He denounced the violence of the GEB and with respect to this incident he claimed that 50 law-enforcement officials fired machine guns, resulting in the deaths of 14 workers and serious injury to 37 others.

For those who speak Portuguese, I recommend viewing on Youtube the following excerpts from the film Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra that show interviews with Lúcio Costa, the urban planner of Brasilia and Oscar Niemeyer, its main architect.  Costa claims that he knew nothing of the incident but goes on to say, in essence: "Even if I had known I would not have cared because it was the Wild West out there and we had a job to do".  Niemeyer at least has the decency to look uncomfortable (‘shifty’ might be a less charitable description) and tries to close down the interview when pressed.  The clips can be viewed at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA6M_C5vTcI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qIjSCVwflU&feature=related

What I find interesting is that Niemeyer has always claimed to be a Communist and indeed shows his true Stalinist credentials in making no protest against the sacrifice of workers for the Greater Good.

And this brings us to the paradox that makes Brasilia such a perfect place to live in: despite initial cosmetic attempts to provide different levels of accommodation for different income groups, it soon became clear that the new capital was attracting inconveniently large numbers of people with little or no income and these migrants were accommodated in the satellite towns that are now known as the Entorno.  These settlements follow the classical American pattern of shabby, low-rise, low-cost houses served by dirt roads that are gradually paved over time.  Given the immense problems of unemployment and drug trafficking in Brazil, violence levels are at a level that countries like Iraq would consider unacceptable.

(Conversation some years ago between me and my then maid, who lives in one of the satellite towns:

Self: So Maria, you're from the Northeast, right?

Maria: Yes.

Self: So do you have your family here?

Maria: Well, my father was here but he was murdered 12 years ago.  I still see the bloke who did it walking around town but he was never brought to trial.)

The situation is reminiscent of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, in which the Eloi live a perfect life on the sunlit uplands until nightfall, when the Morlocks emerge from their subterranean factories to capture members of the Eloi to eat.  This situation is mirrored in Brasilia in recorded cases of armed thugs raiding domestic dinner parties in houses in the elite sector of town.

So, what started out as a pleasant reflection on a remarkable achievement in a developing country has unfortunately turned into a rather more critical observation.  If Lúcio Costa were still alive, he would probably put the problems down to ‘growing pains’, but given that the Federal District politicians were recently videotaped pocketing bundles of cash payoffs it is difficult to see the social and financial imbalances between the Plano Piloto and the satellite towns being reduced in the near future.  In fact, Costa's enlightened social views are reflected in this form of social apartheid. I would say that I am going to cultiver mon jardin except that the safety risks involved in living in a house with a garden force my wife and I to live in an apartment.