Freud, Klein and Dr Seuss

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Pete Langman

I recently dredged this out and it’s quite funny – one of my undergrad pieces (from 2001, I think), but on The Cat in the Hat. You just have to love it.

I notice that this is getting a lot of views … which is great. I would, however, appreciate it if those of you who read it say hi. It’s here, open for all to read, and to use (so long as you cite me properly …), and it would be great to know that you’ve at least enjoyed it!

What are the connections between Freud’s idea of sublimation and Klein’s theory of reparation as theories about where creativity has its sources? How does The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss treat the same subject?

The link between imagination and reality plays an important part in creativity, as John Lechte suggests: ‘the literary text […] is simultaneously symbolic and real, a product of imagination and a disguised reality.’ ^¹ For both Freud and Klein, the roots of artistic creativity were laid down in childhood and derived, primarily, from unsatisfied sexual instincts. Freud considered that these instincts were sublimated, a process which ‘enables excessively strong excitations arising from particular sources of sexuality to find an outlet and a use in other fields.’ ^² Klein, however, considered that the conflict caused by the sexual instinct led to aggressive phantasies – directed initially against the mother – which, in turn, led to guilt and fear. This guilt resulted in the child attempting to repair the damage perceived to be done in these phantasies to re-gain the original mother: reparation. Both theories, however, consider phantasy to be the basis of creative thought. Written for, and apparently by, children, Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat also deals with destruction, guilt and the possible reasons for imaginative creation. For Freud, Klein and Seuss, it seems that creative art serves a purpose.

For both Freud and Klein, the phantasy-life of the child lay at the roots of artistic creativity. In ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Freud suggests that ‘the creative writer does the same as the child at play.’ ^³ While the child invests great emotional energy into play, ‘the opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.’ ^⁴ The difference between the creative writer’s daydreams and childhood play is that the child links his imagined objects and the tangible objects of the real world. For, Freud the desire for play never leaves us: ‘whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we can only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate.’ ^⁵ We can see, therefore, that ‘the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies.’ ^⁶ Unable to give up the pleasure of play, the adult replaces it with phantasy, the root of creative writing which can return him to the child-like state: ‘by equating this ostensibly serious occupations of to-day with his childhood games, he can throw off the heavy burden imposed on him by life.’ ^⁷

Klein broadly agrees, stating ‘The baby who feels a craving for his mother’s breast when it is not there may imagine it to be there, i.e., he may imagine the satisfaction which he derives from it. Such primitive phantasying is the earliest form of the capacity which later develops into the more elaborate workings of the imagination.’ ^⁸ She does not, however, consider that the child’s phantasies come later in life: where Freud talks of a child’s play, Klein talks of its phantasy. Here Klein moves away from Freud, suggesting that the child cannot differentiate between its phantasies and reality: ‘A most important feature of these destructive phantasies […] is that the baby feels that what he desires in his phantasies has really taken place, that is to say he feels that he has really destroyed the object of his destructive impulses.’ ^⁹ For Klein, it is also the baby’s natural frustration, initially at the removal of the breast, and later during the Oedipal conflict, which gives rise to these destructive phantasies, which the baby then believes it has carried out in reality. Where Freud does not, initially, consider the genesis of the child’s play, Klein considers the child’s phantasies to come directly from its sexual frustration.

Klein places the child’s sexual instinct earlier than Freud, at the mother’s breast, leading to conflict with siblings, mother and father due to jealousy, resentfulness and desire. Initial love of the mother as satisfier of desires soon turns into hatred, leading to destructive urges and phantasies of destruction: ‘this first love is already disturbed by destructive impulses […] destructive phantasies also go along with frustration and the feelings of hatred which this arouses.’ ^¹⁰ Conflict and hatred lead to guilt and fear: ‘the child himself desires to destroy the libidinal object by biting, devouring and cutting it, which leads to anxiety, since awakening of the Oedipus tendencies is followed by introjection of the object, which then becomes one from which punishment is to be expected. The child then dreads a punishment corresponding to the offence.’ ^¹¹ The child, now fearing punishment, ‘finds support against these fears in omnipotent phantasies of a restoring kind’ ^¹², thus, ‘if the baby has, in his aggressive phantasies, injured his mother by biting and tearing her up, he may soon build up phantasies that he is putting the bits together and repairing her.’ ^¹³ This is the basis of Klein’s theory of reparation – the child, having destroyed the mother in his aggressive phantasies, feels guilt and fear as a result of his (imagined) actions and sets about assuaging this guilt by indulging in new, restorative phantasies. This urge for reparation forms the basis for the creative arts: ‘feelings of guilt […] are a fundamental incentive towards creativeness and work in general’ ^¹⁴.

Freud defined sublimation as ‘the power [of an instinct] to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly’ ^¹⁵, yet Leslie Hill suggests it is a far from complete theory: ‘Sublimation, then, names a process of displacement that shows little respect for continuity or identity. It functions as an index for the enigmatic [my italics] production of the non-sexual from the sexual, or the cultural from the erotic; but as such […] what it offers is less a theory of cultural productions than a myth of origins. Sublimation, it appears, is more like a fable than a concept.’ ^¹⁶ Freud explains the need for this ‘fable’ in On Sexuality’: ‘The very incapacity of the sexual instinct to yield complete satisfaction as soon as it submits to the first demands of civilisation becomes the source, however, of the noblest cultural achievements which are brought into being by ever more extensive sublimation of its instinctual components. For what motive could men have for putting sexual instinctual forces to other uses if, by any distribution of these forces, they could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? They would never abandon that pleasure and they would never make any further progress,’ ^¹⁷ or, as we saw above: ‘What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate.’ ^¹⁸ Sublimation is the diversion of sexual instincts which cannot be satisfied to other ends, most notably cultural or the urge for knowledge. As Freud noted in the life of Leonardo da Vinci, such aims become a substitute for sexual activity: ‘the libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the research becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual activity.’ ^¹⁹

Freud does not suggest that sublimation of the sexual instinct must be towards artistic production: it may also be towards ‘a general urge to know.’ ^²⁰ Pointing the reader squarely towards his theories of childhood sexuality, ‘the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather as revivals and restorations of the young child’s ideas of them,’ ^²¹ Freud also brings to mind Klein’s reparation. Sublimation seems likely to occur around the time of the Oedipus Complex: ‘at about the same time as the sexual life of children reaches its first peak, between the ages of three and five, they also begin to show the first signs of the activity which may be ascribed to the instinct for knowledge or research […] its activity belongs on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery.’ ^²² Sublimation of sexual desires does not necessarily lead to creativity; ‘the amounts of excitation coming in from these parts of the body [erotogenic zones], do not all undergo the same vicissitudes, nor is the fate of all of them the same at every period of life.’ ^²³ Though Freud does not provide a smoothly delineated path between childhood sexuality and artistic creativity through sublimation, he does suggest a credible link, and again both he and Klein trace creativity to the same source: lack of satisfaction of childhood sexual instincts.

Freud suggests of a piece of creative writing that ‘the stress it lays on childhood memories in the writer’s life – a stress which may perhaps seem puzzling – is ultimately derived from the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood’ ^²⁴, further elucidating the link between childhood play, experience and creativity. The link between past and present is vital: ‘A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old memory’ ^²⁵.

Freud noted the connection between past, present and wish fulfilment and his work on neurosis and dreams: ‘there is a class of human beings upon whom, not a god, indeed, but a stern goddess – Necessity – has allotted the task of telling what they suffer and what things give them happiness. These are the victims of nervous illness.’ ^²⁶ Here Freud alludes to literature, specifically Goethe, the connection between literature and psychoanalysis often made explicit: ‘Neurosis, we recall Freud saying, is a “failed work of art.”‘ ^²⁷

Both in her language and views, Klein followed yet diverged from the Freudian model: the title ‘The Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’ highlights this reliance. Klein connects creativity with the desire for possession of the contents of the womb and Oedipal guilt: ‘the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one another and at the same time with the sense of guilt aroused by the incipient Oedipus conflict.’ ^²⁸ Suggesting that ‘the drive to explore need not be expressed in an actual physical exploration of the world, but may extend to other fields, for instance, any kind of scientific discovery […] the desire to re-discover the mother of the early days whom one has lost actually or in one’s feelings, is also of the greatest importance in creative art and in the ways people enjoy and appreciate it, ^²⁹ Klein not only creates a direct link between childhood, the urge to make reparation and creativity, but also to Freud himself, describing his work as ‘the exploration of the unconscious mind (by the way, an unknown continent discovered by Freud)’ ^³⁰.

Interpreting Keats’ On First Looking at Chapman’s Homer, Klein repeats Freud’s proscriptively vulgar reading of a creative work – where Freud found Hoffman’s The Sandman riddled with the Oedipus Complex, Klein finds Keats a perfect exposition of the theory of reparation, mapping mother upon continent. Where Freud blurred the boundaries between literature and psychoanalysis through citation, Klein suggests that ‘the sculptor who puts life into his object of art, whether or not it represents a person, is unconsciously restoring and re-creating the early loved people, whom he has in phantasy destroyed.’ ^³¹ Klein’s use of phrases such as ‘puts life into’ not only suggests a connection between creativity and the desire for children expounded in other works, reminds us of Freud’s search for ‘the essential ars poetica.’ ^³²

Klein’s identification with Freud continued: ‘I wish above all to point out that they [her conclusions] do not, in my opinion, contradict the statements of Professor Freud’ ^³³. This defence of both her own and Freud’s work, along with he use of the title, definitions and techniques resembling Freud’s, brings to mind his analogy: ‘A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His defence was “First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave the him back the kettle undamaged.”‘ ^³⁴ Just as these defences seem mutually exclusive, so Klein’s statement both suggests there is no contradiction while alerting the reader to their existence. We can also observe the working of guilt, phantasy, wish-fulfilment and mutually exclusive excuses in the realm of creative writing in The Cat in the Hat

It would not be hard to impose a Freudian reading of The Cat in the Hat, dealing as it does with the themes of phantasy, creativity, guilt, fear of punishment and the transgression. Freud might read the cat himself as ‘His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and every story’ ^³⁵, while Things One and Two are envoys of the Id. The fish, with its continual references to the fact that the cat should not be here, slips easily into the role of the super-ego. This is, however, not all, for the Things also reflect the automata discussed by Freud in his reading of The Sandman: this story could be a Freudian case-study. The Cat in the Hat also fits Klein’s theory of reparation snugly. The children, resentful at their mother’s absence, destroy the order of the home – itself identified by Klein as a ‘manifestation of [motherly] love for other people’ ^³⁶ – through the creation of phantasy figures. The guilt they feel at this destruction, triggered by the mother’s return, causes them to repair the damage in phantasy, leaving them simply to ponder the question of whether they should tell their mother what has happened.

The story deals with creation and creativity more directly, however, opening with a vital detail: ‘The sun did not shine / It was too wet to play / So we sat in the house / All that cold, cold, wet day’ (p1). Not only does the narrator foreground the impossibility of play due to inclement weather, but that he is one of the children. Has he invented this story merely to amuse himself and his sister: ”I sat with Sally / And we sat there, we two. / And I said, “How I wish we had something to do!”‘ ^³⁷

The Cat in the Hat, narrated by the child from within the story, is a work of literature which foregrounds its own status as phantasy. Thus the reader, as interpreter, in answering the question ‘does the narrator consider the cat real or imagined’ ends up asking the same question of himself. This is Shoshona Felman’s ‘reading effect’: ‘The scene of the critical debate is thus a repetition of the scene dramatised in the text. The critical interpretation, in other words, not only elucidates the text but also reproduces it dramatically, unwittingly participates in it. Through its very reading, the text, so to speak, acts itself out.’ ^³⁸ While the interpreter may ask whether the cat is real, the children in the story do not seem to mind that from its entrance, it is the cat who speaks: ‘Then Sally and I /Did not know what to say.’ ^³⁹ It is also this interpretation which Klein reflects when she insists that her theories do not clash with Freud’s.

Freud suggested ‘the child distinguishes it [play] quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s “play” from “phantasying.”‘ ^⁴⁰ Is Cat in the Hat an imagined object that the child do not believe is real? It seems unlikely that this is a real Cat, with a real Hat, who can say to these children ‘”Why do you sit there like that?’” ^⁴¹ While neither the children in the story nor those to whom the story is being read may believe the cat is real, this does not prevent them from taking him seriously, as a phantasy to relieve the boredom of this ‘cold, cold, wet day.’ ^⁴²

The cat’s games are destructive and transgressionary. The fish, commenting on the game ‘Up-up-up with a fish’ ^⁴³ states ‘”I do NOT wish to fall!”‘ ^⁴⁴ The inevitable, disastrous fall, which places the fish conveniently in a pot, leads the fish to re-iterate his view that ‘You SHOULD NOT be here / When our mother is not.’ ^⁴⁵ In The Uncanny, Freud stated that ‘in their early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond of treating dolls like live people.’ ^⁴⁶ Here the fish is differentiated from the Cat and the two Things – whose status as dolls, automata or actual people is opaque – by being included in the family structure.

The cat and the things are phantastical creations, however. It is they, not the children, who are to blame for the mess and the chaos created in the house. On the mother’s return, the fish’s rhetoric changes, as he is scared of maternal retribution: ‘Oh what will she do to us? / What will she say? / Oh, she will not like it / to find us this way!’ ^⁴⁷ The boy’s apparent impotence is now shown as fraud: ‘Then I said to the cat, / “Now you do as I say.”‘ ^⁴⁸ The boy has control over his creations, so his final imaginative act is to clear up the mess, which is, according to the fish, ‘so big / And so deep and so tall, / We can not pick it up. / There is no way at all.’ ^⁴⁹ The cat returns, atop a vivid Heath Robinson-esque cross-fertilisation between a hoover and a tricycle, stating ‘I always pick up my playthings’ ^⁵⁰: the boy avoids the maternal retribution predicted by the fish.

The reader is invited to believe that the whole story has been a phantasy, even though it is presented as real. When the mother finally returns, she asks ‘Did you have any fun? / Tell me. What did you do?’ (p60). The boy asks the reader plainly, ‘Should we tell her about it? / Now, what SHOULD we do? / Well… / What would YOU do / If your mother asked YOU?’ ^⁵¹ The children are in a position not dissimilar to Freud’s kettle-borrowing man: if they say what happened, they will get into trouble for their transgression, yet surely the mother will not believe them because there is no evidence, and thus the children must be lying, another transgression. The story’s final lines invite the reader to question the nature of truth, phantasy, and culpability.

Centering on art’s reparative function and drawing her theories from the nature of childhood phantasy, Klein suggests that the creative urge stems from childhood conflict and works to allow the adult to re-capture the joy of childhood. Freud suggests a similar link: the sublimation of childhood sexual instincts provides the energy for creativity, while the relationship of adult experiences to childhood ones provides the creative spark. Freud, too, connects childhood play and phantasy with the later creative urge in adulthood. While for Klein art can heal childhood aggression and guilt, for Freud it is a civilising force, allowing the relatively safe dispersal of transgressional sexual urges not allowed in civilised society. Freud connects art and neurosis as a form of troubled expression with their sources in childhood conflict without fully exploring the ramifications, especially regarding the theory of sublimation: it seems enough to suggest that it explains the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. Freud, unlike Klein, never fully explores the ramifications of his theory. In The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss allows the reader a glimpse into the creatively imaginative world of the child, drawing lines of distinction and similarity between play and reality, as well as suggesting motives for creativity similar to those put forward by Klein and Freud: transgression, guilt and the desire for self-expression.

Bibliography:

Lechte, John, ed, ‘Writing and Psychoanalysis: A Reader‘ (London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold, 1996)

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams‘, trans Joyce Crick (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Joseph, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 3: Studies on Hysteria‘ trans James and Alix Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991)

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature‘ (London and New York: Penguin 1990)

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 7: On Sexuality‘ (London and New York: Penguin 1991)

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 6: Jokes and the Relation to the Unconscious’ trans James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991)

Klein, Melanie ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ (London: Virago, 1988)

Mitchell, Juliet, ed ‘Selected Melanie Klein’ (Harmondsworth, London: Penguin 1986)

Seuss, Dr., ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ (London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1992)

Shoshona Felman, ‘Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)’ from ‘Madness and Psychoanalysis‘

Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael, eds ‘Literary Theory: An Anthology‘ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

1 ‘Writing and Psychoanalysis: A Reader’ ed John Lechte (London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold, 1996) p21

2 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 7: On Sexuality‘ (London and New York: Penguin 1991) p163

3 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ in ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature‘ (London and New York: Penguin 1990) p132

4 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p133

5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p132

6 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p133

7 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p133

8 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ (London: Virago, 1988) p308

9 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’ p308

10 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’ pp307-8

11 Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, in ‘Selected Melanie Klein’ ed Juliet Mitchell (Harmondsworth, London: Penguin 1986) p71

12 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ pp308

13 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ pp308

14 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ pp335-6

15 Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ in ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature‘ (London and New York: Penguin 1990) p167

16 Leslie Hill, ‘Lacan with Duras’ in ‘Writing and Psychoanalysis: A Reader’ ed John Lechte (London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Arnold, 1996) p151-2

17 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Sexuality‘ pp259-60

18 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p132

19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ p170

20 Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ p225

21 Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ p216

22 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Sexuality‘ p112

23 Sigmund Freud, ‘On Sexuality‘ p211

24 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p139

25 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p139

26 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p134

27 ‘Writing and Psychoanalysis: A Reader’ ed John Lechte p117

28 Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’ p72

29 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ pp334

30 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ pp335

31 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ pp335

32 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p140

33 Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’ p82

34 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 6: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious‘ trans James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) p100

35 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p138

36 Melanie Klein, ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation‘ FN p312

37 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ (London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1992) pp2-3

38 Shoshona Felman, ‘Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)’ from ‘Madness and Psychoanalysis’ p148

39 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p8

40 Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ p132

41 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p6

42 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p1

43 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p12

44 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p13

45 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p25

46 ‘The Uncanny’ in Sigmund Freud, ‘The Penguin Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature‘ (London and New York: Penguin 1990) p354-5

47 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p47

48 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p52

49 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p55

50 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p57

51 Dr. Seuss, ‘The Cat in the Hat‘ p61

Knowledge is power?

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Pete Langman

Not so long back I wrote a rather involved comment on another’s blog. One of these business motivational guru sorts, who had clocked Bacon’s most famous utterance and was making the point that power is nothing without execution.

Naturally, I pointed out that there was an error here. Bacon did write Scientia potestas est, and he did so almost twice: once in 1598, then again in 1620. Typically for Bacon, each referred to a different sort of knowledge. The first (from Meditationes sacrae) concerned the match or mismatch between God’s foreknowledge and his power; the second concerned human knowledge and our ability to make things do what we want them to. Both very different points.

In the first, Bacon seems to have been a pretty good Calvinist, and a determinist – that is, it was God wot done it. This is what he wrote, when discussing heresies:

The third degree [of heresies which deny the power of God] is of those who limit and restrain the former opinion to human actions only, which partake of sin: which actions they suppose to depend substantively and without any chain of causes upon the inward will and choice of man; and who give a wider range to the knowledge of God than to his power; or rather that part of God’s power (for knowledge itself is power) whereby he knows, than to that whereby he works and acts; suffering him to foreknow things as an unconcerned looker on, which he does not predestine and preordain; (Meditationes sacrae (1598) in Works VII, p. 253).

The point is that for God, knowing and doing are one and the same thing.

22 years later, he published his magnum opus, Novum organum, which included a similar phrase (Scientia & Potentia humana in idem coincidunt), but this time wrapped up in some contextualising words:

Human knowledge and power come to the same thing, for ignorance of the cause puts the effect beyond reach. For nature is not conquered save by obeying it; and that which in thought is equivalent to a cause, is in operation equivalent to a rule. (Novum organum, 1620, Bk I, aph. 3, OFB XI, p. 65).

That is, if we know how it works, we can hope to reproduce it.

Obviously, this isn’t a post about Bacon, but about the relationship between knowledge and actuality. That is, how well does our knowledge map onto reality?

Now, I have no desire to start rattling on about fate and all that, though sometimes there is an inexorability about events which defies logic as much as it defies any attempt to alter its course. The irresistible force meets me. Me loses.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, it seems. There is simply never enough knowledge to allow us to overhaul our instinct or predilection towards making decisions about what is going on, and then simply cherry-picking the pieces of information we need to support our views. And these views may be positive or negative.

But Bacon has a good point here – the only way to conquer nature (and this includes our nature), is to obey it. Obedience allows for comprehension, and acceptance helps to stop us raging against the dying of whatever light we are raging against at the time.

Suppositions based on the sorts of imperfect knowledge that we now see flying throughout our worlds – twitter, facebook, wordpress, SMS, email – leads to little but distress. Sometimes no knowledge is considerably preferable.

In fact, the more knowledge we have, the less we have to exercise power. Power is potential, and it becomes debased when it is exercised – exercised power necessarily debases both the exerciser and the exercised upon.

Knowledge is power. It’s just not quite the power we think.

Night terrors

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Pete Langman

Sleeplessness comes in many guises, some of them pleasant, some of them benign, some of them simply mundane. When sleeplessness is combined with impotence the whole experience takes on a slightly ethereal air.

It has happened before, though I suppose each time it feels like the first time, and the feeling is exactly the same. It’s one of those problems which is more prey to the power of thought than most. The more one thinks about it, the more impotent one feels, so the more one thinks about it. It happens randomly, invariably when least expected, and definitely when least welcome. It never seems to be a zero sum game, either. It comes, it goes, it ebbs, it flows … but once it’s started, there is almost nothing that can be done. You simply have to give in. Allow the feeling of utter powerlessness to wash over you, and try not to try not thinking about it. What happens, happens. It’s natural. It is the way of things, the order of the universe is as it is, and it simply seems wrong to intervene. After all, in saving one party, one automatically deprives the other.

I’m not sure what time it was, but it’s happened twice in the last week already. The strange screaming, screeching of a fox as it somehow corners some poor, soon-to-be-dead avian creature one the road, under a car, in a secluded alley. By the sound of the flapping, last night a seagull met its end. I awoke, and almost immediately realised exactly what these noises meant. Now seagulls are quite intimidating birds, and their beaks are more than capable of taking out an eye – and a one-eyed fox is a soon dead fox. So the fox simply will not charge in. It takes stealth, guile and no little guts to take out a seagull. This is why when I first hear the noise, I listen carefully to ensure the aggressor is not my cat. He’s taken out two gulls before, but they were juvenile, if fully grown.

The urge to rush out, to shoo the fox away and save the gull is almost overwhelming, but there is always a voice in the back of my mind, a small yet powerfully insistent voice which tells me that some processes, once begun, simply must run their course. The fact that the gull is still flapping suggests that while alive, it is injured, and though I have seen one-legged gulls exist happily if precariously, an injured gull is a dead gull, sooner or later. It is best to let the fox have its way.

Predator and prey enter into a tacit understanding, and the ebb and flow continues until something, somewhere, snaps. And it’s never obvious when it happens. But whatever happens gains a power beyond its obvious nature, because it is at that point that both predator and prey understand that the end has begun. They clasp each other closely until one lets go, and either the predator accepts that the prey must escape, or the prey accepts that its time is up. There is an instant of recognition of this point, followed by frantic flapping as one or both parties try desperately to delay or even reverse the inevitable.

But the inevitable is just that. Slowly, the flapping becomes less frantic, more pitiful, and the silences between the confrontations become shorter and shorter. And when both parties accept the inevitable, as they must, the fox moves in for the kill.

And then there is the howl, part victory, part despair, part pity. But it is the howl which signifies death. And then you know that impotence is just that. An utter inability to change the inevitable. And sleep comes, fitful perhaps, but sleep comes.

polymathematics

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Pete Langman

With regards ‘Mathematics – Go Figure’ – http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/go-figure/

Francis Bacon, polymath and scientific theorist, would be proud to read that Timothy Gowers has adopted two of his own techniques in the seeking of an advancement of mathematical learning. The first is what is a sort of linguistic colonialism, that is, the taking of words with specific meanings, and the re-defining of them. Gowers re-draws the word polymath, changing it from a word indicating a wide-ranging (and approaching comprehensive) knowledge into a rather facile pun. Bacon did the same, taking words like ‘form’ and ‘metaphysicke’ and reconceptualising them so that he might bend them to his own will: ‘my Conception & Notion may differ from the Auncient, yet I am studious to keepe the Auncient Termes’.^¹ Bacon understood that words had power, and that in re-defining them he made them work for him and against their original coiners.

Bacon was also big on collaboration, as demonstrated in his New Atlantis and various other works, but more importantly, he invented what was, within the confines of the available technology, open-source natural philosophy. He was explicit in his suggestion that should a reader find an error in his work, they ought to change it, or at least suggest how to make it better. It worked. In Sylva sylvarum, Bacon write on the imitation of the human voice, noting en passant that ‘I have known a dog, that if one howled in his ear, he should fall howling a great while.’Dutifully, one reader followed Bacon’s earlier prescription, writing these words in the book’s margin:‘I hav tried this expt, but the dogg must love him who doth it.’^²Wisdom, indeed.

Bacon would, however, also be somewhat disappointed. He lost faith in the genius of his own times, and entrusted his thoughts to the future: ‘knowing well enough the nature of the things that I impart, I deal out work for ages to come.’ Open collaboration, especially at a distance, and the re-meaning of words was something Bacon recommended four hundred years ago, so when Jim Giles writes of Gower’s collaborative ‘polymathematics’ that ‘there are now tentative signs that science is catching on too’, he is just a little behind the times.

The long version:

Francis Bacon would be proud of Timothy Gowers, and for two different reasons. The first, and perhaps most surprising, is for his re-definition of the word ‘Polymath’. Gowers takes a word which has a very specific meaning, and re-uses it as a somewhat facile pun. Francis Bacon hails from an era when being a ‘proper’ polymath, that is, being in possession of large and wide-ranging gobbets of knowledge was still theoretically possible. These enlightened times perhaps make it impossible to be in possession of anything but a tiny percentage of that known – perhaps erudition is all that we can hope for. Far from being critical of this re-drawing of the word’s definition, Bacon would have approved, as one of his tactics in his campaign against the evils of received knowledge was exactly the same. He wrote in his Advancement of Learning (1605) that ‘I vse the word METAPHISICKE, in a differing sense, from that, that is receiued: And in like manner I doubt not, but it will easilie appeare to men of iudgement, that in this and other particulars, wheresoeuer my Conception & Notion may differ from the Auncient, yet I am studious to keepe the Auncient Termes’.^³That is, he kept the word, but changed what it meant. An Early Modern Humpty Dumpty, if you like. But for Bacon it was a serious, not a frivolous business. In re-defining terms used by ancients such as Aristotle and Plato, he not only used language that they recognised, but in making them re-assign new meanings to these old words, he wrestled them from their original context: this was linguistic colonisation.

The second aspect of Gowers’s ‘polymath’ idea is that of collaboration, and the denial of the primacy of the ‘lone genius’. Bacon’s entire philosophical programme, or Instauration as he called it, relied on the brains and hours of many, all working towards the same goal. Like Gowers, Bacon explicitly invited his readers to change his work when they saw errors:

For my own part, if I have wrongly given credit to anything, or grown sleepy or inattentive, or become weary on my way and left the investigation unfinished, I nevertheless make the things plain for all to see, so that my mistakes can be spotted and separated out before the body of science is further infected by them, and also so that my labours can be carried on easily and expeditiously.^⁴

Now, Bacon may have been slightly disingenuous, but the principle was plain – his natural philosophy was open source. Now, the question is whether anyone actually joined in with Bacon’s new way of doing knowing. The example of the Royal Society is perhaps a little simplistic, not least because Bacon’s influence has been over-emphasised over the years. But one just has to look at his Sylva sylvarum, a rather odd (and misunderstood) compendium or collection of natural historical observations and experiments published shortly after his death in 1626 to find evidence for Bacon’s open source natural history bearing fruit – if rather odd fruit. It’s not the fact that Sylva was accompanied by his New Atlantis, the so-called scientific utopia, which contains the ‘blueprint’ for collaborative scientific research, but the margins where the student ought to look. One copy, lodged in the British Library, has marginalia from now fewer than five hands, most of which comment on, correct or cross-reference the printed material. One reader has plainly thought long and hard about the experiments contained within, and has even carried them out: exactly what Bacon intended. Experiment 238 concerns the imitation of the human voice by animals, asserting that only birds can do so, and that apes cannot, before commenting in a sort of aside, that ‘It is true that I have known a dog, that if one howled in his ear, he should fall howling a great while’.^⁵In the ample margins next to Experiment 238, the diligent, co-operative reader has written the following:

I hav tried this

expt, but the dogg

must love him

who doth it^⁶

Jim Giles writes of this sort of collaboration that ‘there are now tentative signs that science is catching on too’. In his later works, written while disgraced and his hopes for a ‘publically-funded’ scientific institute were dashed, Bacon repeated like a mantra that he was writing ‘to present and future ages’. Indeed, Bacon went further, writing in the late and long-lost Abecedarium novuum naturae that

As for me, I am pretty sure that, because I have little faith in the genius of our times, my own words (as far as the work of instauration is concerned) could be accused of lacking an age or era to match them. […] That is why I am devoted to posterity and put forward nothing for the sake of my name or taste of others, but, knowing well enough the nature of the things that I impart, I deal out work for ages to come.⁷

Bacon would be overjoyed that Timothy Gowers had adopted both his technique of linguistic colonialism and the idea of open-source science. This Joy, however, might well turn to despair when he realised that they thought it was a new idea.

1 OFB IV, p. 80-1.

2 BL, Sylva sylvarum, 928.f.14, I2^r.

3 OFB IV, p. 80-1.

4OFB, XI, p. 21.

5 BL, Sylva sylvarum, 928.f.14, I2^r.

6 BL, Sylva sylvarum, 928.f.14, I2^r.

7 OFB, XIII, p. 173.

Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Pete Langman

My entry in the Literary Encyclopedia

Known primarily for the section on Salomons House, the supposed blueprint for the Royal Society, New Atlantis is one of only two fictional texts written by Sir Francis Bacon (1563-1626), natural philosopher and statesman, and occupies a precarious position in his canon. While in many ways a “utopian” text similar to Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602; 1623) and More’s Utopia (1516), to which it cheekily refers, it simultaneously subverts, manipulates and pulls itself clear of such generic bindings.

Appearing unheralded at the back of Sylva sylvarum (1626), a sort of compendium of natural historical experiments and observations published a few short months after Bacon’s death, New Atlantis lacks definitive evidence of authorial intention. All material relating to the circumstances of its composition (scholarly estimations range from 1613 to 1625), publication, purpose and meaning stem from its editor, William Rawley, latterly Bacon’s chaplain, secretary and amanuensis: it is not mentioned in Bacon’s works or letters. Rawley does, however, give two versions of its status: one accompanying the original vernacular edition, another the Latin translation which appeared in Operum moralium et civilium tomus (1638). In his rather sketchy letter “To The Reader”, Rawley refers to it as a “fable”, noting that Bacon intended (but failed) to incorporate a series of laws to form “the best State or Mould of a Common-wealth” (New Atlantis, a2r) connecting it squarely to both More’s Utopia and Plato’s Republic and finishes the text with the words “The rest was not perfected”. We have nothing but Rawley’s word for this, however.

Beginning like a typical travel narrative, New Atlantis could have been taken straight from Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1599/1600):

WEE sayled from Peru, (wher wee had continued by the space of one whole yeare,) for China and Iapan, by the South Sea; taking with vs Victuals for twelue Moneths. (a3r)

First becalmed, then lost in an “vtterly vnknowne” (a3r) part of the South Sea, the crew finally abandon all hope of survival. It is then that the island of Bensalem (which translates as son of peace) reveals itself. The sailors rejoice, praise God, and make for land. Their reception is cordial but firm, and the Bensalemites question them on their religion. Assured that no blood has been shed by the crew for forty days, they transfer the sailors to the Strangers’ House, where they are quarantined for a further three days before being given limited licence to remain on the island.

Part hospital, part quarantine, part guest house, Strangers’ House has lain unoccupied for thirty-seven years, as the island is so rarely discovered, and here the sailors get their first taste of Bensalemite food, which, as happens so often in New Atlantis, is not only shown to be superior to European fare, but is described in terms which mix the familiar with the exotic:

Dinner was serued in; VVhich was right good Viands, both for Bread, and Meate: Better then any Collegiate Diett, that I haue knowne in Europe […] A Drink of Graine, such as is with vs our Ale, but more cleare: And a kinde of Sider made of a Fruit of that Cuntry; A wonderfull pleasing and Refreshing Drink. Besides, ther were brought in to vs, great store of those Scarlett Orenges, for our Sick; which (they said) were an assured Remedy for sicknes taken at Sea (b1v)

The Governor of the House of Strangers, from whom they learn of the island’s spiritual and temporal history, a Christian Priest “by vocation”, is described as “clothed in Blew [...] saue that his Turban was white, with a small red Crosse on the Topp” (b2r), perhaps evidence of the non-denominational Christianity which exists on the island. He explains the terms of the sailors’ licence to remain before answering the narrator’s question regarding the island’s conversion to Christianity by stating that it was “About twenty Yeares after the Ascension of our Saviovr” (b3v). A pillar of light appeared off the east coast which no boat could approach. A “wise man” from Salomons House, the island’s “scientific” institute, however, certified it as a miracle, upon which his boat was allowed to move closer an early connection between religious devotion and natural philosophy. The wise man approaches to find an ark of cedar which opened to reveal “a Booke, and a Letter” (b4r). The letter, from Saint Bartholomew, states that God’s providence has guided the ark and brings salvation, while the book

conteined all the Canonicall Bookes of the Old and New Testament, according as you haue them; (For we know well what the Churches with you receiue And the Apocalypse it selfe; And some other Bookes of the New Testament, which were not at that time written (b4r)

This statement is typical of New Atlantis, as it demonstrates the superior knowledge of the Bensalemites, who “know well most part of the Habitable World, and are our selues vnknowne”, and also the nature of their scriptures – given directly to the Bensalemites rather than mediated through the apostles in the Western tradition. Furthermore, they come pre-translated, as “There was also in both these writings, as well the Booke, as the Letter, wrought a great Miracle, Conforme to that of the Apostles, in the Originall Gift of Tongues” (b4v). Bensalemite Christianity is perfect, unriven by controversy, and truly sola scriptura. Indeed, Christianity is the driving force behind the islanders’ activities, and much of the reason why the sailors are greeted so warmly.

The Governor follows his spiritual history with a temporal history, accentuating Bensalem’s longevity, as three thousand years previously,

This Island, (as appeareth by faithfull Registers of those times) had then fifteene hundred strong Ships, of great content. Of all this, there is with you sparing Memory, or none; But we haue large Knowledge thereof (c1v)

This is but one of many references to unbroken record-keeping on the island, asserting Bensalem’s superior “tradition” over that of the Europeans while simultaneously allowing for a culture within which the production of a Baconian natural history might be accomplished. Bensalem, explains the Governor, avoided the fate of the other great nations of that time because King Salomon framed a series of rules which effectively hid the island from the view of the rest of the world, protecting it from malign influences. This, combined with a policy of assimilating those rare visitors who happen across the island, means that

in so many Ages since the Prohibition, wee haue memory not of one Shipp that euer returned, and but of thirteene Persons only, at seuerall times, that chose to returne in our Bottomes. What those few that returned may haue reported abroad I know not. But you must thinke, Whatsoeuer they haue said, could bee taken where they came, but for a Dreame (c3v)

The narrator then details the social make-up of the island, firstly through an explanation of a ritual called the Feast of the Family, a great honour accorded to “any Man, that shall liue to see thirty Persons, descended of his Body, aliue together, and all aboue 3 yeares old” (d1r) and secondly through his discourse with Joabin, a Jewish merchant who explains the Bensalemite marriage customs (gently poking fun at More’s Utopia), before he is “commanded away in hast”, returning only to inform the narrator that “one of the Fathers of Salomons House, will be here this day Seuen-night: Wee haue seene none of them this Dozen Yeares. His Comming is in State; But the Cause of his coming is secret” (d4v).

The narrator is duly given an audience with the father (though not until over a page is spent describing his splendid attire and glorious retinue – the Bensalemites place great store, it seems, on their mode of dress, using it to communicate both status and function), who gives the narrator “the greatest Jewell I haue [...] a Relation of the true State of Salomons House (e2r). For the majority of commentators this descriptive narrative is the focal point of New Atlantis: indeed, Rawley’s letter “To The Reader” states

THis Fable my Lord deuised, to the end that He might exhibite therein, a Modell or Description of a Colledge, instituted for the Interpreting of Nature, and the Producing of Great and Marueilous Works for the Benefit of Men; Vnder the Name of Salomons House, or the Colledge of the Sixe Dayes Works (a2r)

While keen that his natural historical project be carried out, Bacon saw that it was “plainly a work for a king or pope, or some college or order” (LL, VII, p. 533) and the dedicatory letter which accompanied the Instauratio magna of 1620 – Bacon’s magnum opus which included Novum organum – was essentially an extended plea for James to provide suitable finance. It may be that the founding of Salomons House was a coded criticism of James’s refusal to cough up the cash – James considered himself a new Solomon. The Governor of the House of Strangers noted that

amongst the Excellent Acts of that King, one aboue all hath the preheminence. It was the Erection, and Institution of an Order, or Society, which wee call Salomons House; The Noblest Foundation, (as wee thinke,) that euer was vpon the Earth; And the Lanthorne of this Kingdome. It is dedicated to the Study of the Works, and Creatures of God (c4r)

The father states that “The End of our Foundation is the Knowledge of Causes, and Secrett Motions of Things; And the Enlarging of the bounds of Humane Empire, to the Effecting of all Things possible” (e2r), echoing the rhetoric of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and Novum organum. He then lists the various experiments and trials undertaken by the brothers of Salomons House, the advances in plant and animal husbandry, food manufacture, munitions, the prolongation of life, and so on. In doing so, the father accentuates not only the ongoing nature of the research, the time it has taken and its success, but its application to actual problems – this is operative, not speculative power.

As with Bacon’s own programme, Salomons House relied on the gathering of information over long periods of time, something allowed for by Salomon’s wisdom in assuring Bensalem’s temporal stability. The institute was tightly organised, with information collected according to the Baconian natural historical principles elucidated over the course of his works by several dedicated groups, not least the Parasceve of 1620.

The first such group, often mistaken for intellectual thieves, were the merchants of light: a group of twelve “that Sayle into Forraine Countries” to collect “the Bookes, and Abstracts, and Patternes of Experiments of all other Parts” (f4r). The raw information is organised by groups of three: the Depredatours collect the experiments in books; the Mystery-Men collect the experiments of the mechanical arts; the Pioners or Miners try new experiments. Then the Compilers “Drawe the Experiments of the Former Foure into Titles, and Tables, to giue the better light, for the drawing of Obseruations and Axiomes out of them” (f4v), before the Dowry-men investigate these experiments for things of use. The whole body meets to consider all that has been collected, before the Lamps direct new, more penetrating experiments, the Inoculatours carry out these experiments, and the Interpreters of Nature “raise the former Discoueries by Experiments, into Greater Obseruations, Axiomes, and Aphorismes” (g1r).

Having explained the workings, the rationale, and the successes of Salomons House, the father does something very strange, something which has gone un-noticed by critics who obsess over the final, editorial insertion of “The rest was not perfected”:

And when Hee had sayd this, Hee stood vp: And I, as I had beene taught, kneeled downe, and He layd his Right Hand vpon my Head, and said; G O D Blesse thee, my Sonne; And G O D blesse this Relation, which I haue made. I giue thee leaue to Publish it; for the Good of other Nations; For wee here are in G O D S Bosome, a Land vnknowne. And so hee left mee; Hauing assigned a Valew of about two Thousand Duckets, for a Bounty to mee and my Fellowes. For they giue great Largesses, where they come, vpon all occasions (g2r)

The narrator essentially becomes the mouthpiece of the father, an act which harks back to Bacon’s first piece of fictional writing, the Redargutio philosophiarum, in which the narrator recounts a speech given by “a man of peaceful and serene air, save that his face had become habituated to the expression of pity” (Farrington, p. 104) a description pre-figuring that of the father of Salomons House, “a Man of middle Stature, and Age, comely of Person, and had an Aspect as if he pittied Men” (e1r).

After publication, New Atlantis was regularly appropriated, with a continuation being published in 1660 by “R. H.” (who some take to be Robert Hooke), an explicitly Rosicrucian version appearing in John Heydon’s Holy Guide (1662), and Thomas Bushell stating that he would leave “after my debts paid a magnificent Monument in memory of my most deserving Master, by finishing his SOLOMONS House in all its dimensions, and with all the accommodations and endowments thereof, according to his Lordships own Heroick Idea” (Bushell, A3r).Naturally, Bushell failed to create the research institute in the flesh, but the idea was powerful enough for Samuel Hartlib to invite Comenius to England in 1641 to begin the “construction” of the “Invisible College”, based on Salomons House, while Joseph Glanvill called Bacon’s fictional institution a “Prophetick Scheam of the ROYAL SOCIETY” (Glanvill, c1v).

A rich and rewarding text whose influence on the “scientific” endeavours of the following centuries is, like much of Bacon’s oeuvre, underappreciated, New Atlantis bears several generic “utopian” features, while neatly encapsulating Bacon’s ideas on religion, natural philosophy, morality, and history. Even the “new” in the title reflects Bacon’s iconoclasm and desire to overthrow lazy dependence on received authority, and replace it with a natural philosophical authority as delineated in his Novum organum, itself an appropriation of the Organum of Aristotle, Bacon’s bête noire. In New Atlantis, Bacon simply wished to show how mankind could “make it new”.

Bibliography:

Bacon, Francis, Sylva Sylvarum: or A natural history, in ten centuries (London: J. H. for William Lee, 1626/7)

The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban and Lord Chancellor of England, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 7 vols, (London: Longmans, 1861-74) (abbr to Works)

The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban and Lord Chancellor of England, ed. by James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 7 vols, (London: Longmans, 1857-9) (Abbr to LL)

Bushell, Thomas, M^r Bushell’s Abridgement of the Lord Chancellor Bacon’s Philosophical Theory in Mineral Prosecutions (London: 1659)

Farrington, Benjamin, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon, an essay on its development from 1603 to 1609, with new translations of fundamental texts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964)

Glanvill, Joseph, Scepsis scientifica (London: E. Cotes for Henry Eversden, 1665)

Hot lemon and hopelessness

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Pete Langman

Just write something, she says. Five hundred words. Interesting, I think to myself, there are prescriptions already. Don’t edit yourself.

An interesting lunch was presaged by a rather strange walk through town (and now, conscious that I’m under instructions not to edit, the stream of consciousness is subject to a series of locks, though which my prose is gently carried uphill, against all logic). It wasn’t the astonishing lack of patience I currently show towards mankind in general – after all, I have a cold, and snat and sneezed my way through the crowds – but the habits we form that become obsolete and are yet hung onto.

She wants me to write about my experience, about my disease. Because it weighs more heavily upon me than I admit, she says. I know people in much worse positions, I point out, but she’s insistent. And though I hate to admit it, she’s right, up to a point. Damocles’ sword may well have been an absolute pisser, but he knew what he was dealing with. Me? Potential. Possibility. What can I lay at the door of the disease? What at the drug? What at middle age?

A friend recently said he thought I was being more protective of my left arm. Sharp man. I certainly notice more bad days than I used to, days when my left hand is beyond recalcitrant. But with the drug I take suggesting that immediate cessation of treatment may lead to coma, it’s difficult to say where it’s at. Last time but one my specialist (who was looking peeky) suggested I take the ‘levadopa challenge’. Sounds like climbing an ancient hill fortress. He described it as a ‘battery of tests’ on gait and fine motor control. Oh, but the drugs tend to make people vomit, so best you take an anti-emetic – and stop the dopamine agonists the day before. (Remember? Coma?) Naturally, the anti-emetic is a dopamine agonist. I’m confused now.

So. They’re testing my brain. The waiting room is, get this, in one of the neurology wards. Yup, that’s right, you’re there waiting for tests to see how bad your brain is getting, and someone wonders in (and yes, I mean wonders) and starts talking to me as if I’m an old friend. Naturally, I converse politely and pointlessly with this woman who seems to have a five minute reset button. Every five minutes or so, she starts again. I continue being polite while my brain (the broken bit) screams ‘fuck off you mad bitch’ over and over. But she’s not mad. Merely broken. Like me. Which is why I’d really like her to fuck off.

Eventually, she does. Are you mr langman (dr fucking langman, it screams)? Yes. Will you follow me?

Ah, battery of tests. Intellectual curiosity. Should be interesting. She stops me in the corridor, puts a piece of red tape on the wall. Can you see this? (hello?) Wait here. When I call you, walk towards me. (woof?) This I do – though she has to tell off a disgruntled porter. Then she writes on her clipboard, points at the tape on the wall, walks back to where we started … and that’s that. It’s not that severe, she says, almost disappointed. Then she leads me back to the waiting room. Pardon?

I sit. She takes a piece of A4 paper from her bag. It has two biro dots about half a centimetre in diameter on it. I am to touch each one in turn. For a minute with one index finger, then the other. Take this, she says. (is that fucking it?). Three quarters of an hour later we do the whole pitiful charade again. I comment on how difficult it is to remain natural when you know what the test is noting. Are you trying to do it quicker? (God, you’re dumb). No, it’s just that … oh, never mind.

I walk out furious. What an utter waste of time. I get to the parking machine, stick my ticket in, grab some change and feed it. Jump in the car. Storm off.

Hang on. That was my left hand. I can’t usually get coins out of my left-hand pocket, let alone sift them with the left-hand only. Christ, this leva dopa shit damn well works.

So, I’m walking to lunch. I hold my phone in my pocket so that I can feel it ring or if a message comes through. I pull it out to look at the time. One missed call and one message. I switched off the rings etc so I can use it to time lectures. Because I left my clock at a friend’s. I’ve rather enjoyed not knowing when a message has been coming through. The phone is now a potential message every time I look at it. Just like I’m a potential new symptom every time I look at myself.

And I look a lot.

Please stop teaching them Shakespeare

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Pete Langman

Shakespeare. Let’s say it again. Shakespeare. A word which strikes fear into the average schoolchild, and eye-rolling boredom in the average adult. But why? Received wisdom says that Shakespeare is the great genius of literature, so far ahead of the pack that many refuse to believe he even existed, putting his plays down to a ‘tortured genius’ like Marlowe, a simple genius like Bacon, a toff like the Earl of Oxford, or some sort of literary conspiracy.

All nonsense, of course, but it reflects the fact that Shakespeare is more than simply the playwright. He’s an industry, an icon of Englishness, the cultural glue that binds. His legacy amounts to something more than the sum of the parts, the plays, the hundreds of phrases he introduced, or the slightly misleading truism that the OED lists more words as having their first outing in Shakespeare than in any other writer’s work. For some, Shakespeare practically created the English language, and if you believe Harold Bloom, he invented the human being. This, I presume, is why the government recently decided that children as young as five ought to be studying Shakespeare. As schools minisiter Jim Knight put it in these pages a mere brace of weeks past, “Shakespeare is the most famous playwright of all time. One of our great Britons, his work is studied all over the world. It is fitting then that his work is a protected part of the curriculum in the country he came from.” It’s certainly true that, as one of my MA students recently observed, Shakespeare “straddles high and low culture”, as he’s simultaneously the autocthenous bard of bawdy ribaldy and testy insults, whose characters swear, drink and fornicate, and the absolute of high culture. Name a character ruder than Falstaff, a work of art held in higher esteem than Hamlet. I dare you.

Ay, there’s the point. So why is it that when undergraduates are presented with the choice of a course on Shakespeare, they tend to skip it? Why do so few of them go to see his plays? The answer, I’m afraid, is simple. They don’t get Shakespeare. They don’t appreciate it. They don’t like Shakespeare. This is something of a problem, as the government, the school system, the Shakespeare industry and the media are constantly banging the “Shakespeare is the great cultural pillar on which our country’s character is based” drum. If we ignore the slight whiff of propaganda and brain-washing this pushing of Shakespeare onto our youth resembles, then there’s a real problem. We’re making our youth dislike the very thing we tell them is both the great unifying experience of Englishness, and the acme of high culture. Personally, I’m not convinced that this is a good thing.

Mr Knight was quoted in The Times as saying that “even very young children can become gripped by Shakespeare’s stories and characters,” and unsurprisingly, they’re going to be indulging in pastimes such as “using puppets and masks to retell their own versions of Shakespearean stories.” I suppose they can be gripped by these stories, and perhaps one or two of the characters, but there’s a problem here. As we all know, if you boil Shakespeare down to the plots he’s neither particularly good nor remotely original. In a very real sense, there are no Shakespearean stories. They’re all nicked. Every last jack one of ‘em. His manipulation of these second-hand plots is interesting, and worthy of study, but what school is going to make their children read The Iliad and Chaucer and Lydgate’s medieval treatments of the Troilus story before getting onto Troilus and Cressida? None. So instead we feed our children Bowdlerised versions of the least interesting parts of Shakespeare, while society tells them that when it comes to writing, he’s the one. And “one of the greatest Britons ever”, to boot. No wonder they’re disillusioned. Macbeth reduced to three scabby witches brewing newt soup is high culture? This was produced by a great Briton? Yes, they might love Romeo and Juliet, but that’s because of Leonardo di Caprio, not Shakespeare.

The genius of Shakespeare lies in the language, not the stories. Of course, the plots help frame and direct the language, but what Shakespeare did better than anyone else is writing. Why, then, must we insist on force-feeding our schoolchildren these great plays of western civilisation, and yet ignore the very essence of their greatness?.

But here’s the rub. Shakespeare’s language is difficult. Far too difficult for the majority of schoolchildren. And eventually they’ll have to put down their puppets and confront it. But it seems that making them struggle through it just because Shakespeare is this great, shining cultural edifice simply alienates them, makes them hate the man, hate the plays, while giving them the sneaking suspicion that high culture, and for that matter Englishness, excludes them. The government is perhaps right to note that Shakespeare isn’t embedded in the hearts and minds of our youth, but rather than trying to make it accessible by reducing it to a bundle of specious ‘universal themes’, we might do better to accept and embrace the fact that Shakespeare is tough. Accept the fact that it’s too difficult for most, if not all, schoolchildren (and I use the term so we don’t get confused with university students). So let’s not teach it to them until they get to university.

Yes, you read right. Of course, some will say that this simply puts Shakespeare back in the hands of the university elite, but it never really left, did it? It’s true that teaching Shakespeare at school just might turn on a couple of kids onto Shakespeare who’ll never go into higher education, but it’s already turning off far more than that amongst those who are going into University. Don’t ban them from reading Shakespeare, just don’t force them to.

In my experience, and I’m not alone, undergraduates arrive at University neither equipped to deal with Shakespeare, nor much liking it. The nature of A level study encourages them to spit out impressive-sounding but empty phrases and concepts they’ve learnt practically by rote rather than indulge in considered analysis. This is both because of the need to get A grades, and because Shakespeare is too difficult for them. The result is that we get some students who can barely string a coherent sentence together, let alone construct an argument of any kind. Re-training them is difficult when they’re already sick of the texts we admire so much.

But they aren’t ill-equipped because they are stupid, or because their teachers are rubbish: it’s simply that they’re ill-served by this Shakespeare obsession. The time they spend ‘reading’ something they really can’t get is wasted time, the net result of which is that when they read Shakespeare, they see ink, not poetry. First-year undergraduate essays on Shakespeare are too often Cocteau meets Larkin: they have a beginning, a muddle, and an end, just not necessarily in that order.

We can’t teach English without literature, of course, but let’s give them works they can access, appreciate, even if they have to be ‘classics’: literature which they can read without having to translate it first. The literary minded A level student is more likely to see themselves as a type of Byron or Bronte, a Coleridge or a Camus than a playwright like Shakespeare – unless you consider Joe Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love. But Joe played Shakespeare as a Byronic or Keatsian hero. It’s the romantics and the existentialists who provide perfect reading for the angst-ridden years. So, let’s take the Lyrical Ballads as a starting-point, throw in Wuthering Heights, perhaps some Wilkie Collins. Give them Keats, Hemingway, Hunter S Thompson. Stuff that inspires, not confuses. Give them writers they’ll want to quote, writers they’ll want to steal lines from. Compare Churchill with George Bush, not with Henry V. When they get to University they can study the difficult stuff like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser.

Dropping Shakespeare from the school curriculum is not sacrilege, it’s wisdom. Sacrilege is making them hate Shakespeare by forcing them to read it at school as a result of misguided cultural arrogance. A student will only read the difficult, truly rewarding stuff if they want to. If they’ve read Pullman, for example, by the time they’re given Paradise Lost they might actually want to read it, and not give up after ploughing through the argument. Read enough, and you soon notice that Shakespeare turns up everyhere. It isn’t long before you want to go direct to source.

Let’s do a thought experiment. You’re a thoughtful, skillful and accomplished reader, because you’ve been shown how to read properly at school. And you still read books. You keep bumping into Shakespeare in other works, so you decide to read some, because he must have something going on, right? Everyone talks about him, after all. You pick up Richard III. Imagine reading his opening soliloquy for the first time. Imagine reaching the passage where Richard meets Anne with the corpse of her almost father-in-law (killed by Richard) and practically seduces her, before making off with the body. Now that’s the power of words. It would blow your mind. Show it to a kid and they’ll go ‘whatever’. And rightly so.

So. To sum up. Leave Shakespeare until university. At school, teach children to read confidently and write clearly. Equip them with the tools they need to read the difficult stuff themselves, later on, should they choose to. Then when they get to University, or pick it up through choice, they’ll meet this great literature and it will be fresh and new and it will amaze and entrance them, not bore them. And we’ll produce graduates who really can read, who really can write, and not just churn out stock phrases and arguments without understanding them. And, more to the point, I won’t have to mark any more essays which use words like ‘widespreadily’, suggest that things were done ‘in a plotish way’, tell me that Spenser finishes his stanzas with an ‘alexandrian’, or write sentences such as ‘it is consciously self-aware of itself as a new self-reflexive style’. Oh, hang on, that last one was Derrida, wasn’t it?

To see what chapped my hide so much, just go here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/children-to-be-taught-shakespeare-at-five-861475.html