The Politics of Literacy
SIMON, JOHN
The Politics of Literacy On Literacy By Robert Pattison Oxford University Press. 213 pp. $17.95. Reviewed by John Simon Robert Pattison's On Literacy is really two books in one. That is not,...
...never captures the wholeness of the thing written about"—as if speech captured the wholeness of the thing spoken of...
...he must smart from today's "custom to pay the instructor a token stipend," and be galled by the absence of ripples stirred up by his one previous book, Tennyson and Tradition, which, I wager, did not come out, as this one does, for the poetry of Peter Townshend and Bruce Springsteen...
...But next we gather that reading contains "the germ of both Western man's recognition of supremeselfhood and of his tragic self-absorption," which is the sort of ambivalence that applies equally to potatoes: Eaten in moderation, they are highly nutritive...
...At the very end, in an extraordinary palinode inspired by Marx's reading of Aeschylus (whom, incidentally, Pattison turns into a rebel if not a Marxist) and by some absurd gibberings of Norman Mailer's on television, our author advocates the teaching of such "seemingly useless" subjects as Greek and Latin—a strange way of implementing what he has until now been preaching: giving the entire citizenry power by instilling in them the "critical talent" for using language to their own advantage...
...But television and other electronic media—notably rock music, another Pattison favorite?are not principally verbal...
...The first part is an overview of what "literacy" was, or was thought to be, in ages past...
...What we get here is the countercultural rant of late-'60s youth movements bolstered by academic diligence cavalierly applied...
...It makes use of an impressive range and number of books and articles listed in two separate bibliographies, and if Pattison has read them all, he is—by most people's definition, even if not by his own—a literate man indeed...
...Yes, but they know them so well that they have become part of their unconscious...
...While the verse of his theme song proclaims that "literacy, no matter what kind, is used for power," the chorus blares out that "the relations of literacy and culture are always reciprocal...
...From the very outset of the book, we learn that literacy is good if "like man himself [it] changes in time," bad if it becomes "the formal structure society gives to its lies...
...The emperor Augustus cashiered one of his consular governors "for being rudis et indoctus, 'backward and ignorant,' because the official couldn't spell in the proper style...
...Or that they are unconscious of grammar and syntax...
...third, and foremost, what connection is there between faulty syntax and vulgarity...
...Again: "The students differ from Simon in being unconscious of the forms they use or any alternatives to them, but the great majority of writers are unconscious most of the time of the conventions within which they work...
...Or, if you can, the study of correct writing is not a bad way to begin...
...in'-mite!'—a rare English example of the classical rhetorical device tmesis---Surely a device used by Vergil...
...Pattison teaches Humanities at Southampton College of Long Island University, surrounded by the summer mansions of New York's upper crust...
...Glued to the tube, the youths whom Pattison so hotly champions end up by going down the tubes...
...Athens was the center of Greek literacy, yet it was defeated by Sparta, a mainly antiliterate society...
...I could go on citing such absurdities, small and large (hatched, no doubt, on the barricades of Berkeley or Columbia), till the cows come home, but not till the rock-and-TV generations come to any sort of literacy, old or new...
...I immediately question "by 1975," since the only source cited in the bibliography is auNESco publication dated 1973...
...now consider his gift for analogy...
...And does one such study make the truth any more than one swallow does a summer...
...We are taken on a brisk tour of Greek, Roman, medieval, Renaissance (chiefly English), and modern civilization, with the odd excursus into the cultures of American Indians, Iran, and East Pakistan...
...For instance, heavy weather is made of the case of Iran, supposedly proving that "theeffectsof reading and writing largely depend on the ideological context in which they are acquired...
...Idiosyncratic as this schema is as a generalization, its specifics are downright bizarre: "For Donne, action lies beyond language, and good action is only possible where the tricks and nuances of language have been exhausted," a statement whose second part is as much pure fantastication as its first is a perfect commonplace...
...a so-called literacy rate of about 70 per cent," it seems, Western-style culture did not come to pass...
...They will not stop reading, writing, or doing these well because of television...
...Does this mean that most novelists, for instance, are unconscious of the conventions of the novel...
...Though the book holds our interest despite its vagaries as long as it is preponderantly a cultural survey and an account of rival literacies, even here some of Pattison's "facts" bear closer scrutiny...
...Is this an either/or proposition, or might there be a tertium quid...
...It appears to me that whereas you can teach two different languages, it would be impossible to teach two different forms of the same language...
...The apostles Peter and John were accounted agramatoi and idiotai, 'unlettered and uncouth,' by the habitues of the temple at Jerusalem...
...what, in any case, did Milton's alleged synthesis achieve...
...One of the themes of this part of On Literacy is that the middle-class usurpers teach literacy only so as to make their black, Hispanic, poor-Southern, and non-Ivy League slaves know enough to observe the tyrannous directives handed down to them, but not so as to enable them to think for themselves and seize some power...
...So much for Pattison's logic...
...Pattison perhaps, who thinks Frank O'Hara the modern equivalent of John Donne, and George Steiner "the best diagnostician of the larger social and linguistic problems...
...Pattison obviously will clutch at any straw, no matter how imaginary...
...Very well, but then why set up a kind of thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern, of which the exemplars are Donne, whose use of language is hieratic, authoritarian, elitist...
...It seems that we must teach standard English without any pretense that it has esthetic or moral values, and merely stress its usefulness for getting ahead in the world and for communication with others?which seems to me to constitute a moral value right there...
...Although tendentious, this half of the book is by no means uninteresting or uninstructive...
...The second part of the book, in sum, is an elaborate defense of our rock-and-TV culture and a denunciation of elitist, capitalist, bourgeois fogeys such as Edwin Newman, William Safire, and especially John Simon...
...For example, he distinguishes between Chief Cobb, the eloquent Indian who warned against the white man's prevaricating literacy that fudged the directness of the spoken word, and the Athenian commander Themistocles, who had a message chiseled in the coastline rocks to urge the Ionian Greek sailors in writing to desert their Persian masters, or at least fight for them badly...
...Though this statement is evasive (what was this "main" as opposed to what subsidiary culture...
...no sermon of our period can hold a candle to, say, 17th-century homiletics...
...Forthwith he quotes "a 1980study of teenage television viewing and reading habits" by one Michael Morgan, which provides "some hard evidence" for his conclusions...
...But why stop at teaching mere critical talent...
...It is for me that Pattison coins one of his most poetic phrases, "the totalitarian rapacity of Simon's bourgeois dream," wherein dream and reality, fascism and free enterprise are wedded in orgiastic rapture...
...that, since then, there have always been two literacies at odds with each other...
...Just like the law, literacy has its letter and spirit, and where the spirit is willing (the argument seems to run), it matters not if the letter is weak...
...more peculiarly, he sees a parallel between ultraefficient Sparta and today's American students who resist "the blandishments of an educational curriculum that stresses writing"—the Lacedemonian and the lackadaisical...
...Racing forms...
...There is decidedly a Mephisto-phelian cast to the whole age of written record," he declares, ludicrously blaming the messenger for the message...
...Thestudy shows that teenagers "who are heavy viewers early on are the ones who read more later...
...From this our author concludes: "The electronic media will give us a new kind of literacy, but consider the alternative: a nation of rabbit-feeders...
...The second part of Pattison's book is prefigured in the first, as when we are informed: "Print and written record did not destroy but supplemented the oral literacy in which they emerged...
...This hapaxlego-menon (one-time-only word) is interpreted by Pattison as "to blither" or to express oneself inadequately, illiterately...
...To justify a student's grammatical error, the author writes: "Why is it wrong...
...The new electronic media will not destroy print and written record...
...gros-so modo, being able to think...
...Alas, you can lead a horse to grammar, but you cannot make it think...
...Only, I think, if dying of poison can be construed as a good action...
...would be because"!] we had a shabby notion of language...
...how do we know that the Nazis were the product of any culture...
...A precedent can be cited even for the vulgar term of approbation 'dyno-f...
...Quite so, but how are we going to get even one of these "authors" to be self-consistent, let alone get consistency among all and sundry...
...Unfortunately, this dualistic view of literacy becomes an obsession with Pattison...
...It would be because (note: "the fault...
...and Milton, the great reconciler of the two literacies, of Donne's ritual elaborateness and Bunyan's nonconformism...
...I have no idea how Pattison knows what went on in every medieval mind, but it is easy to see what goes on in his nonmedieval one...
...Fair enough...
...Letmecon-clude with Pattison's suggestions for a curriculum...
...Asked what he does do in his spare time, he answers, "Well, mostly I feed my rabbit...
...Bunyan, for whom writing is merely recorded speech, God's active word translated into print...
...Popular romances...
...These conflicting attitudes, initially pitting the literate against the illiterate, are to be found later within literacy itself as the conflict between those for whom literacy was an establishmentarian device to enforce the law and their own hegemony, and those who discerned in writing the living word (usually of God, but sometimes, it appears, of Marx) and a chance for the individual conscience to assert itself in some dissenting way...
...Yet, as Pattison admits, the authoritative Liddell and Scott definition is "to waste time in false pretenses," which seems to me rather a different kettle of fish...
...Every cultivated medieval mind must have been to a degree skeptical about language as an exact revelation of any truth...
...and that literacy in the traditional sense of being able to read and write is no guarantee of a deeper literacy, i.e...
...Men did not stop speaking, preaching, or doing these well because of print...
...Homeric bards chanting poetry are just about extinct...
...overindulged in, they can be killers...
...We find that even in analphabetic Greece, according to Homer, Agamemnon was guilty of klotopeuein...
...If they did, the fault would not be electronic...
...Why not teach genius while we're at it...
...Writing...
...For the rest, we are to allow students to express themselves in whatever argot, patois, pidgin, orstreet language they may use: there is to be perfect bilingualism...
...Furthermore, both speech and writing are verbal techniques...
...The duller students would never be able to sort them out, while the brighter ones would not wish to waste school time on the nonstandard English they already know...
...That is not, however, the bargain it sounds like...
...Nonsense...
...The basic premise is reiterated ad nauseam: "Writing gives no assurance of cultural superiority, and in fact brings with it the potential for alienation and cultural anxiety" Pattison first finds in Alexandria...
...Pattison cites the example of one of his students who does not read, watch TV, or go tothe movies...
...Then comes the trump card: "I would rather trust Homer's oral education than the book learning that produced the main culture of Hitler's Germany...
...To the extent that people do speak on television—as athletes or sportscasters, news commentators or weathermen, talk-show hosts or guests—it is precisely their drivel that creates the shabby notion of language...
...First, it should be dyna-, not dyno...
...Moreover, my own informants set the Shah's achievement in popular literacy well below 70 per cent, and cite the banners at Tehran airport that read in huge letters: "WELCOME DELEGATES TO THE LITRACY [sic] CONFERENCE...
...And fishy Pattison is, though we may grant him that even illiterates possess rhetoric...
...For Pattison, this holds an emblematic significance...
...The thesis here is that there was a kind of literacy even in preliterate cultures...
...And who, if there were students able to learn critical talent, would be qualified to impart it...
...And what...
...Pattison continues: "Hamlet's 'The rest is silence' echoes this view...
...I'd almost rather take Bruce Springsteen...
...How much more...
...Or rabbit-feeding...
...cannot be vulgar...
...To the contrary, print did, in many ways, destroy oral literacy...
...About someof his students'subliter-ate papers, Pattison writes: "Like most young Americans, these authors have a different set of spelling and grammatical notions that, if practiced consistently, make [sic] as much sense as those [sic] used by John Simon...
...and today's college students cannot approach the utterances of yesteryear's simple folk whose tales, riddles and songs were recorded by collectors...
...TV Guide...
...Like all sentimental populists, Pattison refuses to allow for an enormous, invincible, ecumenical stupidity that needs no despot but itself to keep it down...
...second, it can indeed be vulgar if used for vulgar purposes, just as you can knock someone unconscious with a Ming vase...
...they reveal him so besotted with sentimentality as to be almost more pitiable than ridiculous...
...I can give only a few samples of Pattison's method and the madness in it...
...But Pope Zachary (whom Pattison, not spelling in the proper style, calls "Zachery") upheld the baptism of an infant whom an eighth-century Bavarian priest baptized "in execrable Latin...
...it and the preceding make abundantly clear that Pattison is playing a game of precarious parallelism...
...We have, then, reliance on established literacy (Themistocles) versus rejection of it as a perversion of the living word (Chief Cobb...
...For all that Shah Reza Pahlavi (or "Pa-levi," as Pattison, rudis et indoctus, spells it) achieved "by 1975...
Vol. 65 • December 1982 • No. 23
