Blue Corner and Red Corner, Metropolis and

Province: Literature and Education in

Contemporary Australia

Richard Lansdown

Associate Professor of English, James Cook

University

My daughter recently finished high school in provincial

Queensland, where she was exposed to two plays by

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, principally by

means of Baz Luhrmann’s and Roman Polanski’s movies of

the dramas. Her assignment as regards Romeo and Juliet was to

re-write a chosen scene in a modern idiom; as regards

Macbeth to write a autobiographical response to events of

the play from the point of view of a minor character: in

both cases in effect to layer a second piece of creative

writing on top of Shakespeare’s original. These were not

empty exercises, but neither were they particularly

profound ones — where coming to terms with Shakespeare

was concerned, at least. At no stage, for example, did

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the tasks assume that either drama — in and of itself,

irrespective of how Luhrmann or Polanksi themselves

interpreted it — was an experience that might raise

issues (psychological, existential, political, and so

forth) worthy of her moral curiosity: that life ‘is a

tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying

nothing’, for example, might be an idea she might want to

come to terms with, given that plenty of people come to

share it now and then. Her assignments took Shakespeare

for granted, like a corporate edifice or monument, and

the means of contact they envisaged with his work was

imitative rather than critical. There is a particular set

of attitudes at work behind what she was asked to do:

Shakespeare is an cultural inheritance of such magnitude

that we have to study him, whether out of a sense of duty

or some more positive impulse; yet he is too hard to

read, so we must make do with a film; and we shall pay

him no higher intellectual tribute than some modest,

‘expressive’ re-writing. People have been teaching

complex works of literature in schools around the

English-speaking world for a hundred years and more, to

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all sorts of students. What would explain this marked

lack of curiosity and ambition in my daughter’s

experience? Have we lost the means to discuss Macbeth in

and of itself, or the desire to do so?

Perhaps her interaction with Shakespeare would have

been deeper at a higher level; but I doubt it. English

Extension, as envisaged by the Queensland Studies

Authority in 2011,1 is full of theoretical sound and fury:

about ‘reading with, across, and against’ a variety of

literary forms; about ‘the application’ of ‘theoretical

approaches’ ‘to make meaning of the text in particular

ways’; about ‘writing practices and reading positions’,

about investigating and challenging ‘invited readings’

and by such means ‘constructing alternative readings by

intervening in those texts’; and so forth. What any of

this rolling-up of intellectual sleeves signifies for

seventeen year-olds I do not know, apart from suggesting

that masterpieces like Shakespeare’s plays are passive

instances of a ‘writing practice’ inviting certain

readings that an educated young person would do well to 1 The subject guide is available at:

http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/17601.html#syllabus

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challenge and amidst which she would do well to

intervene, if she has ‘making meaning’ in mind. (‘Making

meaning’ being the ultimate reading position, I assume.)

I teach Macbeth in first-year because it is a play,

because it is a good one, and because it is a tragedy.

Time is limited, and we can only spend two hours in

lectures and an hour in tutorials on it; but that is

enough, I think, to raise the question the drama most

pressingly urges on us as it no doubt did on its Jacobean

audience so many years ago and so many miles away: what

sort of work of literature, what sort of intellectual

experience, can it possibly be that makes us treat a

sceptical aside from a disgraced tyrant and a vicious

murderer as an inescapable comment on the human

condition?

* * *

Looking at English secondary curriculum drives plenty of

academics (never mind parents) to apoplexy, no doubt. But

curriculum is like lantana: there’s no point blaming it

for prospering where it will. Let me veer off to some

instances at the non-corporate end of the literary

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spectrum before returning to the matter of how literature

is envisaged in class.

October 2011 saw the last issue of the Australian Literary

Review: a supplement of the Australian newspaper partly

financed by the ‘Group of Eight’ circle of metropolitan

Australian universities. By way of a valedictory that

issue contained two articles on literature and reading:

‘Words that Make the World Afresh’ by professor of

English at the University of Queensland, Peter Holbrook,

and ‘Slow Boats to Culture’ by novelist and writer-in-

residence at the University of Adelaide, Brian Castro.2

The extent of the overlap between the two writers in

terms of social concern, and the claims they make both

for the importance of literature and the importance of

getting it taught appropriately, helps me make the link

between my daughter’s school and literary consciousness

in Australia more broadly conceived.2 The Australian’s Review of Books; a supplement issued with the

Australian, Wednesday 5 October, 2011, pp. 12-13 and 20,

respectively. I have not given page references in the

numerous quotations from Holbrook and Castro that follow;

both articles are short.

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‘Why do we bother to teach children written works of

literature?’, Peter Holbrook asked at the beginning of

his article. His first answer is unexceptionable, though

I am not sure how far it takes us, or whether it takes us

altogether in the right direction. ‘If we want to know

how people in times past felt and thought’, he writes,

‘we have no choice but to read the works they have left

behind them.’ I am sure this is true. ‘If we want to know

what it felt like to be a bronze-age king, we need to

know Homer.’ By extension, if we want to know how people

from other cultures in the present feel and think, their

parallel productions (more diverse than the art and

literature of Classical Greece or Renaissance England,

certainly) will be of similar centrality. ‘One thing good

art does’, Brian Castro agrees, ‘is to allow others to

inhabit a mind to which they were not previously privy.’

But why should we want to know such things or inhabit

such minds? How should we plant and nurture that desire

in young people? What are the implications of such a

desire? They are not purely historical, for a start,

since knowing how others live, whether in historical or

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cultural terms, is inevitably bound up with how we do.

When we take up a ‘position’ as readers it is by no means

against a mere ‘practice’ carried on by writers, as the

Queensland Studies Authority imagines: every position we

take up in culture is against another position and another

way of conceiving the world — a fact that Shakespeare’s

plays happen to dramatize with unprecedented intensity.

So I am not convinced by Peter Holbrook’s suggestion

that ‘in reading old literary works we are, in some hard-

to-specify degree, liberated from the confines of our

world.’ ‘Not wholly, of course’, he goes on to say: ‘I

can read Homer for years and never escape my own cultural

conditioning’. But this misses the point. Reading Homer is

cultural conditioning, and the opportunity on offer in

literature is not to escape such conditioning, but to

recognize, comprehend, and integrate it; not to liberate

yourself from the confines of our world, but willy-nilly

to see it as it is by means of some other point of view.

According to Holbrook, Harold Bloom asserted that ‘it is

ridiculous to suppose reading great literature may make

you a more moral person’ — but the weight of Bloom’s

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assertion is revealingly unsteady. Reading a lot of

literature is certainly not guaranteed to make you a more

tolerant and decent human being. But is the expectation

that reading a lot of literature may have such a tendency

‘ridiculous’? If it is, what are those elements of

historical and cultural curiosity in humanity that

reading Homer is designed to serve? Why bother to feed a

‘humane’ curiosity of understanding if you believe that

curiosity does not exist, or has no implication for human

betterment? ‘The tacit assumption that literature has

something to do with the amelioration and tempering of

society’, Brian Castro argues, ‘was always an idea

waiting to fail.’ Any tacit assumption will fail if

enough people cry it down. But to support the opposite

assumption, to propose instead that literature has

nothing to do with the tempering of society, and then be

surprised at the effect on society and education of your

doing so: this does not look like a line of thought

likely to encourage people to read literature. It would

be better to stress the element of engagement rather than

alienation, I would suggest.

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The notion of escape is pusillanimous, then, and a

recipe for evasion masquerading as objectivity. But it is

also partial. Holbrook doesn’t want to escape ‘the

confines of our world’: like most of us, he wants to

escape the confines of the world as he sees it. The

freedom he calls for is freedom from the evils that are

self-evident to him. As it happens those evils are self-

evident to other people, too: Brian Castro, for one. ‘In

a society dedicated to the production and consumption of

sensuous pleasures, in which the gratification of such

pleasures has become virtually an economic and social

duty,’ Holbrook writes, ‘reading a mentally demanding

work of literature takes on the character of active

nonconformity.’ The last things ‘modern capitalism’

requires are ‘thought, reflection and speculation’, he

goes on to say, and Castro joins in with masochistic

gusto: ‘The spirit of the times is one of noise and

debacle: economic meltdowns, environmental disasters,

terrorism. Media presentations play on viewer-voyeurism

and smugness in the commodification of catastrophe.’ We

are saturated by ‘the shamelessness and artificiality of

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the new fascism: consumerism.’ ‘We defer the deeper

pleasures of thoughtfulness to choose between labels and

covers, egos and iPads. There is nothing beneath the

surface.’ Under these circumstances, literature is

inevitably ‘a provocation and an irritant.’

Such views are mostly rhetoric. I do not believe

that our society, any more than any other, is ‘dedicated’

to pleasure or prostrated by the commodification of

catastrophe; still less that the gratification of

pleasure is a social duty for us. In the nineteenth

century we learned to value comfort and sufficiency for

good historical reasons, and the winding back of the

twelve- to fourteen-hour Victorian working day has left

us with more leisure time and less to do with it. But to

say that our response to these developments amounts to a

new variety of fascism is hysterical. Such a view might

be more intellectually respectable if those putting it

about had more sympathy for the victims of consumerism. ‘If

our intent is merely to produce compliant workers, able

to slot into commercial, industrial or bureaucratic

practices,’ Holbrook argues, ‘we absolutely do not need

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to introduce them to the treasures of the literary

tradition.’ But who shares that intent? And what are

these mysterious ‘practices’? They would involve making a

living, perhaps; but then, according to Holbrook, ‘very

little literacy, in fact, is needed to perform

successfully in economic life.’ Economic life, seen in

these terms, hardly exists in a modern and literate

society like Australia’s. For many of us work is a chore,

as it has always been; but the workhouse and the

sweatshop are illegal here, and to tell those taking part

in ‘the economic machine’ that they have been compliantly

slotted into it like so many rivets and flywheels, and on

that basis to argue that ‘literature…therefore stands

outside, even opposed, to contemporary life’ (‘that is

its strength naturally’) is intellectually to cut off

one’s nose to spite one’s face, by telling the potential

readers of literature that in all likelihood they are too

dim to join the party. Literature has often and

significantly been opposed to contemporary life, from the

days of Aristophanes to our own; but who would want to

confuse that opposition with its standing outside the world?

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More intimately involved with it, surely, if its opposition

was ever of any value.

Society has been going to hell in a handcart,

according to numerous literary commentators, since the

birth of the intellectual class in the Renaissance, and

jeremiads about ‘noise and debacle’ have a long history

in the English-speaking intelligentsia, accordingly.

Philip Sidney was among the first at the crease with his

‘Defence of Poesie’, where the dark forces that treated

literature with indifference or abuse were identified as

the ‘tougher knowledges’: philosophy, history, theology,

and law. With the advent of the Romantic era other forms

of knowledge were so well established that challenging

their right to exist seemed truly quixotic. Now it was

ignorance, shameless and artificial, that was the barbarian

at the gate, and given its utter lack of interest in what

literary critics were defending on the other side of it,

it is surprising it hung about so long. Wordsworth and

Shelley, Arnold and Ruskin, Eliot and Leavis, radicals

and conservatives alike, muttered off the same sheet

about how horribly traduced, bullied, and abused the poet

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was by the philistines who wanted to beat him up, but

also how brilliantly he or she subverted the paradigm and

outwitted the myrmidons of trade and manufacture. ‘Of all

sciences is our poet the monarch’, Sidney said. ‘The

unacknowledged legislator of mankind’, Shelley agreed, in

his ‘Defence of Poetry’.

Skip on two hundred years and here we are, still.

Out there, awesomely super-incumbent but also

reassuringly stupid, are what Brian Castro calls the

‘corporate strategies’ of modern Coketown, which Holbrook

envisages peddling ‘the contemporary norm of passive

pleasure-consumption’ (‘food, sex, drink, drugs,

entertainment, distraction’), and among which ‘the

opinion, dominant now,’ is ‘that human life is a matter

[only] of sleeping and feeding’. ‘Civilisation is

fragile, easily overcome’, Holbrook warns, and Castro is

firmly of the belief that institutionalized mindlessness

of this kind in fact has led to a ‘contemporary epidemic

of depressive illness’.

But the knights of Camelot are stirring in their

tombs. Freedom from the sleepers and the feeders is in

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the gift of a messianic few, sharply to be distinguished,

Castro says, from ‘French theory, the semioticians and

the “boa deconstructors” who disengaged language from

real presences’. A modern reader will go nowhere without

Harold Bloom, for example, the eminence grise and Wizard of

Oz of the pulverized humanities, and ‘one of the main

influences’ on Castro’s literary career, who does deep

thoughtfulness like none other — though he contributed to

Deconstruction and Criticism (1980), one of the pioneering works

of State-side boa-deconstruction, and though his The

Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading were regarded as key

theoretical interventions in their day. Frank Kermode

(one-time author of The Sense of an Ending and The Genesis of

Secrecy) is another such converted fellow traveller, quoted

approvingly by Holbrook to remind us how ‘rich in

implication’ works of literature are ‘for any number of

interpretive approaches’.

Looming over these literary-critical übermenschen are

the cloud-capped peaks ringing the horizon of that

‘deeply strange, sometimes repellent, frequently

enchanted world’ Holbrook calls literature. With guides

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like Bloom and Kermode at our side we can turn our backs

on ‘the production and consumption of sensuous pleasures’

and take up a life of monastic yet ‘active

nonconformity’, pledged ‘to undermine the present order’

with a good dose of Penguin Classics. ‘Low-order

literacy’ can be left to others, whereas the sturdy

mountaineer makes his way among Holbrook’s ‘treasures of

the literary tradition’ (‘so vast one person could never

master it’).

Both Holbrook and Castro are university-related;

both hold their vocations in high esteem, and feel that

‘training’ is something the novice must submit to before

the pearly gates of active nonconformity will open wide.

‘It is impossible to achieve high-order literacy outside

a system of formal instruction’, according to Holbrook,

and Castro, too, emphasises the value of ‘initiation and

induction’. The relationship of this instruction to the

freedom that Holbrook argues is fundamental to the

literary experience — ‘the expert teaching of literature

is connected to something we should hold most dear above

all: freedom’ — is not clear to me. As he says, ‘reading

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is the product of a vast social enterprise’, mediated by

‘suitably trained teachers’. This enterprise is clearly

not a legislative vacuum, and Castro emphasizes that

‘civilisation requires a regulation laid down by memory

and by time.’ Such statements make it less surprising

that both commentators convert literature’s capacity to

take us to other places into a desire on its part to be

hieratic and mysterious: ‘a secret passage to a world

elsewhere’, as Castro calls it, instead of a passage

anyone could find if the fancy takes them. I have no

objection to Montaigne and Robert Burton, whom Castro

brings into his discussion; or to Homer, Hamlet and King

Lear, which Holbrook brings into his — though his

enthusiasm for The Portrait of a Lady and Henry James’ ‘deep

intelligence’, ‘vivid and sensitive consciousness’, and

so on is one I find harder to share. But why frighten

people with The Anatomy of Melancholy? Why train hill-walkers

in the Himalayas? Why turn all this into a cabal? If the

values at stake involve nothing less than subversion of

the consumerist, materialist world order, why do you want

to smuggle those values away and set ‘Thou shalt not’

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over the door by flaunting how far you, the priestly

initiate, have made your way into the Golden Chersonese?

Why talk at length as Castro does about ‘the difficulty

that comes with agony and struggle’, when so many great

works of literature are more like a stroll in the park?

Why try to make it sound hard instead of easy? Castro

tells us a story about Margaret Atwood gravelling a brain

surgeon who had the temerity to say, in conversation with

her, that when he retired he intended to take up writing.

‘Really?’ Atwood replied. ‘When I retire, I plan on

taking up brain surgery.’ Is it absurd to suggest that a

brain surgeon is more likely to have a good book in him

than a novelist is to develop a talent for brain surgery?

If you were seeking to defend literature, and extend its

appeal to the population at large and the young in

particular, is Atwood’s the kind of point you’d really

want to make: ‘Don’t even think about parking here’?

* * *

My response to my daughter’s dilemma, and to the

positions mapped out by Peter Holbrook and Brian Castro

is essentially twofold. First: neither intimidate readers

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with high-flown notions of the hieratic difficulty of

literature, nor mystify them with equally high-flown

notions about freedom and inner space. Second: suggest

its intellectual utility to them, and let them form their

own views — informed, by all means, by vehement anti-

materialists like John Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence — about

art and society. If it’s an anti-capitalist social

revolution you want, you may be sure the books will do

more to bring it on than the teachers.

In seeking to build a sense of that intellectual

utility my own teaching rotates around three things in

literature: how well does such-and-such a writer express

herself (aesthetics); what sense of the intellectual

world of its time does such-and-such a text give us (the

history of ideas); and what makes such-and-such an author

or character tick, in the broad sense of the term (moral

psychology). These three together give us an idea of what

is going on in a novel, a drama, or a poem — and it seems

to me that they present themselves particularly vividly

in works of literature as such, as opposed to movies

derived from them. Macbeth is abundantly a set of

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psychological cases — as Freud, for one, argued in his

discussion of those ‘wrecked by success’; it is also a

study of traditional, feudal values (monarchical,

familial, domestic) and their disintegration; it is also

(as every teacher working with it must have pointed out)

a remarkably concentrated work of art, with its absence

of a sub-plot, its powerfully concentrated suite of

images (blood, clothes, darkness), and its intense

handling of time.

The proportions of these three ingredients will vary

in every item, assuredly. A poem by Sylvia Plath will be

for most readers overwhelmingly an aesthetic and

psychological object of enquiry (though important work

has been done on her attitudes to the Cold War and to the

environment, and no one could insulate her personal sense

of frustration from the position of women in a society

still pronouncedly patriarchal). Burke’s letters on a

regicide peace are more likely to involve aesthetics and

history (though Burke’s writings often possess an urgency

that is demonstrably psychological in origin). But none

of the three coefficients will ever be wholly absent, and

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each of the three will interpenetrate the others. The

resulting amalgam, therefore, is transformed by becoming

an amalgam: the whole is greater than the sum of its

parts, and the intellectual project can only take you so

far. Finally, therefore, the literary object is important

and worthy of study because each element in it is seen in

human terms, existentially rather than theoretically: as

a phenomenological thing rather than an intellectual one.

Philosophers consider aesthetics, historians interest

themselves in past ideas, and psychologists study

psychology, but works of literature are (with only a very

few exceptions) written by untrained human beings, like

ourselves: themselves ‘taking positions’, themselves

‘intervening’ in the poem they have in hand, and ‘making

meaning’ by those means. In the end, each element in the

triad must be seen in the light of the others, as was the

case for the author at the start of the process. Any

science we bring to bear on one element must submit

itself to the other two, or the value of the process is

lost.

* * *

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The connection between the two hierophants in the Australian

and my daughter’s classroom is not remote; the stated

aims of the Queensland Studies Authority make it very

clear. Peter Holbrook might seem temperamentally at odds

with the QSA: ‘I am opposed to detailed rules on how to

teach literature’, he writes, and to ‘the routinisation

and bureacratisation of the study of literature’. But the

QSA presents no detailed rules for Extension English, and

no routinisation, either. Like Holbrook and Castro (only

more surreptitiously) the Authority appeals to far

cloudier and more ideological senses of what reading

literature most importantly involves: above all, that it

is an activity people should be intimidated by. For both

the Authority and the two commentators the activity of

reading is ineluctably an intellectual process, and for them

all it is all about me: all about the reader. The idea

that a reader might find him- or herself submitting

hopelessly to Jane Eyre, losing him-or herself in it,

having his or her ‘position’ made hay of by it — that it

might most significantly prove a ‘provocation and an

irritant’ in that way: this moral possibility goes almost

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entirely beside the board. Selfless contemplation of a

work of art — surely one of the most liberating

experiences known to post-religious humanity — and a

concomitant freedom from the self: these moral realities

neither party recognizes. The primary capacity that

reading literature really builds, which is the capacity

for reflection, neither group concerns itself with. On one

side the educators in Brisbane invite students to adopt

reading positions and ‘produce complex transformations of

texts by intervening in a text or part of a text’; on the

other Castro murmurs about ‘deep feeling and subliminal

influences’, and Holbrook warns us that ‘reading great

literature is to encounter ultimate questions of human

life’, that ‘literature is thought’, and that ‘to the

extent that the study of literature helps us become more

passionate and precise thinkers it threatens to undermine

the present order.’ Both groups smother the activity in a

thaumaturgic mist: flattering to adults, no doubt — an

utter mystery to my daughter.

It is a grave mistake — politically, morally,

tactically, strategically, pedagogically — in any way to

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defend poetry by promoting its remoteness or its

professional status, such as that is. If literature is a

passage to a world elsewhere for some, for many

(including most of the people who write it) it is a

passage to the world we inhabit: and that is just as true

of the Iliad as of a novel reviewed in the paper. If

literature is a passage toward the world we live in,

instead of away from it, it must necessarily be moral, in

the loose sense of the word. That is not ‘ridiculous’ at

all. If literature is a form of thought, it is one

clearly quite distinct from rationalism and philosophy,

the canons of which are notoriously unhelpful when

brought within its frontier. Accordingly, neither writers

nor readers should be intimidated by what Castro calls

the ‘accumulation of the past’ or by Holbrook’s ‘suitably

informed teachers’ (with their ‘up-to-date, sound

scholarship’). Literature does not require to be quoted

in its own defence; nor does it involve what Holbrook

calls ‘a withdrawal from the world, from normal human

contact, and retirement into some private, inner space’;

nor does it thrive in those Masonic communities of taste

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Castro describes: ‘the unspoken or little-spoken

affiliation one feels on entering the home of a friend

and finding some of the same books on the shelves as

one’s own.’ Mercifully, poetry is not so stiflingly

introspective or complacent. If it were, it could pose no

threat to the status quo, could enthuse nobody, and would

degenerate into a parlour game. If it has something to

say about the world, ancient or modern, it must say it

out loud, not in secret or ‘timeless solitude’, and the

job of its facilitators is to make access to it easy, not

fearsome.

Richard Lansdown is the author of Byron’s Historical Dramas

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), The Autonomy of

Literature (London: Macmillan, 2001), Strangers in the South Seas:

The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought (Honolulu: University of

Hawai’i Press, 2006), and The Cambridge Introduction to Byron

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He edited

the Critical Review from 1993 to 2002, and Henry James’ The

Bostonians for Penguin Classics in 2000.

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