Kenneth Wiltshire, the end of literature and the end of the nation's youth and the end of Australia ...

(Above: time to save students and schools by a return to the Delphian course? Not when you get to read the book, available here at the Internet Archive).

Don't get me wrong. I love a good book, and I remain eternally indebted to my high school English teacher, and the way he introduced me to Shakespeare and sundry other writers, as a prelude to an extensive university introduction to the so-called great works of English literature.

As a result, I stay in a terrified state fearing the first floor will collapse onto the ground floor under the weight of books. Thank the lord for the digital revolution.

Yep, it's a so-called day at the so-called pond, as we explore the so-called debate on English nee Australian literature.

Australian literature was of course specifically and deliberately excluded from my study, as the Oxford dons who ultimately presided over my literary education knew nothing of it, and didn't want to know anything about it, and yet knew deep within their bones that there was no literature worthy of study in the colonies, and certainly any not great works of English nee Australian literature. And yet eventually I came to read Australian authors, though not with the help and counsel of academicians.

But what happens when cretinism comes to the aid of literature, specifically Australian literature, allegedly so that future generations may have the opportunity to study and appreciate the nation's key prose, poetry and drama - if any? Or else the very foundations of the nation will tremble as if in an earthquake?

As a concept it sounds passing strange, since as late as 1950 everyone knew Australia had no literature worth speaking of. Oh sure there were oddities, like Henry Lawson, looked down on with a sneer, and struggling achievers like Kenneth Slessor, but all around was a wasteland, and we're not talking T. S. Eliot.

Well if you wanted to crank up that old parochial nationalist debate again, how about getting things going with an absurd argument like this doozy:

Literature as taught through text is the central feature of a nation's culture and enlightenment, as well as its knowledge and awareness.

Which goes to suggest that Australia before 1950, at least in the hearts and minds of English departments throughout the land, simply had no understanding that Australian literature was at the heart of Australia's knowledge and awareness. They looked to England, while a few continentals looked to Europe, and dangerous modernists looked to the United States.

Not that I mind that much, since the more the cognescenti looked abroad, the more the mood was building for the defiant literary nationalism of the nineteen seventies. And never no mind the refusal to allow the plastic arts or the performing arts or music into the pantheon of meaning.

Yep, there's a sense that Kenneth Wiltshire's Dumbing down English teaching looks to high minded exaggeration, as a practical illustration to students of the danger of first class blather.

I knew I was deep in the thicket of ignorance, the woods of babbling, when I came to this particular line:

They have fallen prey to the propaganda of the Left that literature is too hard for most students to understand, whereas the fact is that any good teacher can instill a love of all literature in all students no matter what their social background or capacity.

The propaganda of the Left? Dear lord, must everything be reduced to the dull banality of political dualism, and all evil heaped on the Left? Is it true that the Left is full of propagandists that hate literature, and believe George Orwell should be banned? On ideological grounds, since he stayed a socialist but left Russian communism behind?

Or is it just that some people think that literature can actually have some relevance to current lives, as opposed to trooping through some Harold Bloom collection of important tomes designed to be pummelled into young brains?

Are we talking here of Australian literature, or good old Shakespeare, and sundry other works from the canon of the English tradition?

Surely you can find, not just amongst the left, but amongst the odd mercantilist or capitalist or hard-hatted practical engineer, thinkers who think, along with Henry Ford, that history is bunk, and that literary history and literature is the most refined form of bunk.

Practical on the move folk who understand that old saw I wasted time, and now doth time waste me (Shakespeare was it? Well I never).

Indeed once upon a time if you announced you were a follower of Romanticism in literature (or music or whatever) you'd have your ears soundly boxed and be sent to bed without supper.

Now that the intertubes are available to waste your time, and you can get wasted, you can even find this kind of earnest, tragic confession:

Which is more useful and important to society: Shakespeare, or knowledge about the human anatomy?

You see, I've been writing earnestly since 8th grade, which made last August the 6th anniversary of when I wrote my first poem. I went to a performing arts high school where I majored in Creative Writing, and wanted to be better than Shakespeare and Hemingway. But I've recently come to doubt the practicality of literature. I've wondered if it's importance and allure is merely an illusion, and really a waste of time. Perhaps it is better to major in agriculture, or engineering. Better to read papers on psychology, and spend your time people-watching. You can learn more about people by people-watching than reading poetry by Keats.

Throughout history the study of literature has been a key element of social progression for young people who might otherwise have been trapped in the travails of their socio-economic circumstances. (here).

Clearly a Leftist, or worse still a Wiltshire fellow traveller who's now fallen off the straight and narrow.

But it's not just bloggers forlornly aspiring to be writers. Why that haven for American leftists NPR recently carried this forlorn article Aspiring Writer Questions Value of English Degree, with this plaintive note:

Heather Lefebvre just graduated from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., summa cum laude, with a double major in English and creative writing. Her thesis earned the highest honors, and one of her short stories won a writing award.

Her thesis was about a zombie. "He just wants to make his way in the world like everyone else, but life is difficult for him because of who he is," she says.

Zombies! And now she's worried about the the value of writing, and her degree and how to pay off US$85,000 in student loans. The answer? She's working as a cashier, which at least is better than Orwell's lifestyle when down and out.

But back to Wiltshire, no doubt rolling about on the floor at all this talk of zombies in the context of literature:

The curriculum talks of analysing and dissecting authors' motives in literature, with little mention of enjoying, appreciating, and learning from literature: its vocabulary, flow, style, characterisation, and richness of language and expression. The authors have clearly fallen prey to the loony nihilistic deconstructionists.

Steady. Only on this site is it proper to carry on a debate by labelling your enemies as loony nihilists.

But then you quickly realise that Wiltshire is somewhere back in the luddite days, a loony nihilistic technology denier himself:

They also make the dangerous and erroneous assertion that film, digital, and video modalities are equal to the written text, and so McGaw and his colleagues have surrendered to the current cohort of teachers and their union bosses, most of whom have never read a good novel themselves and would rather push a button or click a mouse than turn a page.

The dangerous and erroneous assertion that Citizen Kane or Ivan the Terrible - to name just two - are films not equal to the written text? What, in the same way as Shakespeare presented on the stage isn't the equal to a dry and desiccated Shakespeare read on the page?

If anyone can explain how treating the movies and television as art forms, equal in potential the novel, and how this is somehow a dangerous and erroneous assertion ... well take it and shove it wherever you keep your delusional denialism in relation to all kinds of modern art forms.

What next? Abstract art is a modality not up to the written text?

You see, when people make absolutely stupid assertions, it tends to diminish the quality and force of the rest of their argument, especially when they couple it with a seemingly un-ironic use of words like "modalities".

In other, better days anyone using the word "modality" would simply have been taken out the back and shot, and the world a better place for it.

It doesn't take long in fact to appreciate that Wiltshire himself is a prime loon when it comes to luddite ranting:

They have no appreciation of the significance and richness of literature text and the proper means of teaching it. It is not possible to curl up in bed with a good modem. Film makers are never true to the literature which they plunder, manipulate, and exploit.

The proper means of teaching it? Presumably that means the Wiltshire method, perhaps derived from the Delphian course - not to be confused with Scientology's Delphi schools -invented somewhere back in the golden ages when we were made to sit through class readings of Robert Louis Stevenson and Emily Bronte, and only a few devotees survived the experience to later enjoy their works, while others went on to careers in football and concrete mixing.

But for sublime luddite irrelevance, surely the snide remark that it's not possible to curl up in bed with a good modem is the capper.

Dear fellow, old chap, it's perfectly possible to curl up in bed with a good iPad (and all the imitations soon to flow on to the marketplace). And if you don't like Steve Jobs, why not kurl up with a Kindle? Hey that's not a bad line, must ring up Amazon. Kurl up with a Kindle!

Welcome to the world of ebooks, and first floors safe from collapse. And pray how do you think your luddite-ism will go down with the connected, wired wirelessly young?

Now I'm not against physical books - the smell of the page and all that - just as I understand the fetish for vinyl, but we all must move along, just as Gutenberg once made papyrus lovers move along.

And as for your ongoing contumely towards film - yes, we mean rudeness or contempt arising from arrogance and insolence - is it wrong to remind you that Shakespeare, as an inveterate stage man, was never truer to the literature he ripped off than when he plundered, manipulated and exploited it?

In a sensible world, you could of course have both the cinemah and literature. But it's clear Kenneth Wiltshire knows little of rational, coherent argument, and so he resorts to an end of the world argument:

This issue is far more important than mining, taxation, infrastructure, emissions, or any of the matters that dominate our daily lives: the whole wellbeing of our youth is at stake; in other words the future of our nation.

What? If we don't produce enough English literature graduates to infest the inner west of our major cities, latte suppliers will be ruined, and the commentariat will have no one to blame for the impending decline and fall of western civilisation?

Yes, I'm talking to you there in the coffee shop with the pretentious copy of Sartre peeking out from your carry bag. Sheesh, they wander around Newtown all the time, clutching their Australian novels as if the damn books explained the meaning of life to them ... hovering outside Better Read than Dead with the implicit socialist Marxist pun in its name. You can see them in Carlton too, hanging around Readings like cultural blowflies. But isn't their shop in Port Melbourne a treat ...

I digress, perhaps showing recidivist tendencies.

In the meantime, can we all calm down a little? Yes, you there, in the back, I'm talking to you Wiltshire, what with all the ruckus and the unseemly squawking.

Studying the apocalyptic strain in western thinking is of course an ideal topic for younger students, themselves given to melancholy and depressive attitudes of a neo goth, neo romantic kind, but there are many amongst us who will have grown up reading comics, Enid Blyton - to the consternation of librarians everywhere - and Shakespeare, or even David Ireland, while watching endless reams of movies and television, and as a result will have come to understand the Chicken Little approach to rhetorical debating and Australian literature is futile.

The vast illiteracy that surrounds Wiltshire's end of world argument begins to sound like idle paranoia:

How does the Rudd government square all of this with its controversial decision earlier this year to act contrary to the findings of the Productivity Commission on the importation of books? The government says it acted to protect the interests of Australian authors but what is the point if no schoolchildren will be reading them? All our Australian authors churning out all those books for a population incapable of reading and enjoying them.

You see how quickly he elides from schoolchildren not reading Australian authors to an entire population incapable of reading Australian authors? Or reading at all? A vast all devouring all consuming illiteracy.

And so Australia, and perhaps the world is doomed, when truth to tell, since Australian movies have been made a subject of study in schools, they've killed off the Australian movie audience, and book sales have stayed quite buoyant.

Such are the ironies of an academic education.

Was it only in 1946 that George Orwell wrote:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

And being Orwell, he prescribed an antidote:

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Now if only Wiltshire could learn from Orwell, and dump into the dustbin blather about true educational principles or Australia's egalitarian foundations and the propaganda of the left and modalities and the blame game and mugging by vested interests in state Labor governments and so-called "experts" and "so-called" national schools curriculum and policy bungles and other "so-called" rhetorical flights of fancy which end up like bits of over-heated pork in a frying pan basted in rancid luddite butter.

If nothing else, here's hoping that "so-called" ends up in the "so-called" dustbin where it belongs.

There are arguments in favour of literature. What a pity Wiltshire couldn't find them, and instead found conspiracy theories and paranoia and hysteria ...

Sheesh, it's enough to make me want to read a Frank Miller graphic novel or re-watch the whole of The Wire ...

(Below: and now a cartoon for those who find it hard to read).