Interesting

King and Ketley stand accused of teaching young Australians that all value judgements are subjective and insignificant. Based on their remarks about grammar, there appears to be a case to answer. 

The prosecution will now demonstrate what effect their buried assumptions have on their teaching practice. When King and Ketley come to talk about actual texts, do they say the kinds of things you would expect people who disbelieved in values to say? 

Yes, says the accuser, as a matter of fact they do. As an example of bad emotive writing, King and Ketley cite a piece of advertising copy. But they fail to demonstrate why the writing is bad, or to contrast it with a piece of good writing. Instead of showing why the bad emotional writer describes emotions badly, they debunk the emotions themselves—primarily by pointing out that the advert contains statements which are not literally true. 

At which point, the prosecution rests. Those very same debunking techniques could be applied to a lot of very good writing: to any writing which includes a value judgement, in fact. Ketley and King’s theory is thus proved to be pernicious. It remains to be established whether or not it is false: Lewis concedes that a philosophy could be bad for society but nevertheless true. (The corollary, incidentally, is that to preserve society it might be necessary to disseminate a falsehood.) 

But before sentence is passed we need to hear the case for the defence. 

1: King and Ketley do not, in fact, say that the advertisement is a piece of bad writing. As a matter of fact, they draw attention to its skilful  (they say “cunning”) use of vocabulary and rhythmic devices. They present it as an example of how emotional writing can be used to a bad purpose.

2: King and Ketley do not, in fact, say that the emotions roused by the advertisement are contemptible in themselves. Their complaint is that the advertiser is evoking emotions and illegitimately transferring them onto his product.

3: King and Ketley do as a matter of fact, point out that two of the claims made in the advertisement are factually untrue, and that one is only true metaphorically. But this is not the central plank of their criticism. In fact, it is only an aside—a literal parenthesis. 

Here is the advertisement. (Lewis does not quote it in full.) 

Away across the western ocean where Drake of Devon sailed, the Italic will carry you. You too will go adventuring after the treasures of the Indies. In golden hours, in glowing colours, in new fitness of body, and new delight of mind, your treasure will be counted to you. No galleon of Spain ever brought home such great store of good things as you will bring back from your six weeks’ luxurious cruise in this most modern motor vessel. [Control of Language, page 52-53]

If I had to write a critical review of the passage, I would be hard-pushed to say that it is outright bad. The writer understands that Latinate sentence-construction gives English sentences a certain gravitas; partly because Milton used them and partly because delaying the verb creates a slight tension in the sentence.  (“Holding the heavy shopping basket, as fast as his legs could carry him, back to his house he ran” has slightly more punch than “He ran back to his house as fast as his legs could carry him, holding the heavy shopping basket.”) He knows that metrical prose can sound dramatic, but that too much of it sounds silly. He knows about using parallel clauses (“in golden hours/ in glowing colours”) and about saying the same thing twice in different words (“new fitness of body/new delight of mind”). If we had encountered the first sentence in a nautical adventure story it would not strike us as particularly terrible writing:  (“‘Across the Western Ocean where Drake of Devon sailed, the Italic will carry you’ my father said to me as we stood on the dock at Portsmouth.”)

The problem with the text is bathos: that after a perfectly serviceable five-line build up about the romance of sea travel, we are brought clunking down to earth with a line about a holiday on a cruise liner. I was reminded of the occasion when an entire cinema audience groaned because a perfectly good drama about the 1914 Christmas armistice turned out to be an advertisement for chocolate biscuits. If the conclusion had been placed at the beginning (“The Italic is a modern motor vessel which will carry you…”) the effect would have been far less comical. 

As Lewis says, it is very difficult to say why a bad piece of writing is bad. Most of us would say that Dan Brown and JK Rowling were terrible stylists: but millions of people have found their stories compelling and engrossing, so they must be doing something right. Umberto Eco makes the nice point that the Count of Monte Cristo is written in dreadful French; but since it is one of the best adventure stories ever written; and since it wouldn’t work nearly so well as a yarn if the language were  “improved”, the writing must, in fact, be very good indeed. 

Or consider what many believe to be the worst poem ever written: 

A newspaper dispatch which said “We are very sorry to report that ninety nine lives were lost on the last Sunday of 1879” wouldn’t strike you as irredeemably dreadful. It’s the tonal changes—from a mock epic invocation to a news dispatch; and the contrast between strong rhymes and prosaic diction that make it legendarily bad. Unless, of course, William McGonogal was doing it deliberately for comic effect, which I am now quite certain that he was. In which case, it is very good writing indeed. 

Ketley and King found the text of the cruise liner advert in another English textbook, Reading and Discrimination by Denys Thompson. Thompson is another of the New Critics: he cites IA Richards in his introduction, and went on to co-author a book with FR Leavis. Reading and Discrimination substantially consists of a series of prose-extracts for students to critique. New Critics naturally like “unseen criticism” because it removes writing from its historical and biographical context and forces the student to attend to the words themselves. The advertisement isn’t one of his extracts: it’s simply used as an illustration in his introductory section about—again—emotional writing. He says that he found it in a Sunday paper, but it illustrates his point so perfectly that I think we can safely assume that he made it up. 

Thompson’s objection to the passage is that it doesn’t say anything. It uses words and phrases to evoke a mood—a mood which the advertiser hopes will be conducive to splurging money on a big holiday. But the passage is devoid of content. 

The professional copywriter of this is not arguing the merits of travel—the sense of what he says is unimportant—so much as playing upon the feelings of his reader, tired by a weeks work in Winter, to induce in him a comforted or receptive frame of mind in which he will be likely to act on the suggestion of a cruise. One notices immediately it’s literary pretension—as if to say this is a special occasion no ordinary work a day affair—and the fact that it employs the romantic feelings and a vocabulary with which most of us have been familiar since we first learned history. The dreamy rhythm of the first two sentences helps to lull the reader and causes him to suspend rational judgement while he abandons himself to the illusion roused by the associations of “Drake” “Devon” “adventure” “treasure” “Galleons” and “Spain”. [Reading and Discrimination, 1934 edition, page 15]

King and Ketley’s critique is much longer than Thompson’s but goes over substantially the same ground. When Thompson says that the sense and meaning of the words is irrelevant, they say: 

Now what exactly has the prospective buyer of a ticket for this pleasure cruise been told? Only that the voyage will be somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean, that the name of the ship is the Italic, that it is a motor not a steam ship, and that the voyage will last six weeks. [Page 53, emphasis in original]

Thompson talks about the advert playing upon the romantic feelings of the reader, which Ketley and King paraphrase as: 

What is the rest of the pother about Drake and the treasure of the Indies, the golden hours and glowing colours, put in for? Merely to rouse in the prospective buyer feelings of romantic excitement and pleasure at the thought of going in the Italic.

Where Thompson talks about suspending rational judgement, Ketley and King are fairly specific about how a rational man chooses his vacation: 

The Englishman or woman who read it and had thirty pounds to spend might probably decide, if he thought about it calmly and unemotionally, that he could get all the pleasure and rest he required by having a holiday at Margate or in the Lake District, and still have fifteen precious pounds over to buy things he needed. 

£30—about £2,500 in today’s money—seems excellent value for a six week cruise; but £15 rather steep for a trip to the Lake District.

But the idea behind the advertisement is that it should rouse a quantity of extremely pleasurable emotion which will make the reader unthinkingly prefer a holiday cruise on the Italic to any other kind of holiday. [Emphasis in original]

None of this is remotely controversial. Every good salesman is told to sell the sizzle rather than the sausage. In 1971, the Coca-Cola company famously and successfully made a short film which evoked the feelings of youth and optimism which were in the air in 1971, and persuaded people that they were somehow connected to their product. Drinking sparkling carbonated fizzy sugar water won’t really make the world a happier place—and certainly not more so than bonding with a stranger over an unbranded soda. But that is not the same as saying that the ideals of youth, peace, and internationalism are in themselves absurd. No-one in their right mind would say “You shouldn’t believe in living in perfect harmony, because it will give you diabetes and rot your teeth.”

King and Ketley are again trying to illustrate the distinction between reference and emotive meaning. “Galleon”, on their terms, doesn’t have a reference: it is there to trigger a feeling that the salesman thinks will make you well-disposed to his product. One could say the same thing about apple trees, honey bees, and snow-white turtle doves.  

What has the reference of “Drake of Devon,” namely, his personality, his clothes, his actions, his appearance, to do with sitting in a liner in the twentieth century? And so with “galleon of Spain,” “treasure,” and so on. The reference of these words is very largely neglected. And the reference of most of the other words, such as “luxurious” “glowing,” “golden,” “adventuring,” “delight,” is extremely vague. [Page 57]

In that sense, they reasonably say, advertisements work like poetry—where, as you may recall, seventy five per cent of the meaning comes from the emotive content. In the previous chapter, they tried to “translate” the Eve of St Agnes into “scientific” prose, so “casement” becomes “window” and “warm gules” becomes “red light”. If you tried out the same experiment on the advertisement, you would swiftly find that when you take out the emotion, there is nothing left at all. (“The ship will take you across the sea. You will have a nice time. You will have a nice time. You will have a very nice time. It is better to have a nice time than to loot precious metals from indigenous populations.”) The political sketch writer Simon Hoggart once said that you could tell when an advert or political speech was claptrap because the opposite statement would be meaningless. (“This government will stand up for lazy single people”; “It’s a pedestrians car: so push it.”)

Thompson lists the words “Drake”, “Devon”, “adventure”, “treasure”, “galleons” and “Spain” as having strong emotional associations. King and Ketley explain, at rather too much length, what they think those emotional associations might be. 

Notice how cunningly the piece is constructed… not  just “across the Atlantic,” but “away  (a word arousing  feelings of escape, perhaps from drudgery or disappointment or ill health) across the western ocean (“west” is connected with many romantic emotions, sunset feelings, Westward Ho! feelings and so on;)“ocean” is connected with feelings of vastness, of escape from the small and the confined), “where Drake of Devon sailed” (the Italic won’t of course sail exactly where Drake sailed, but the words “Drake of Devon” call up romantic feelings with regard to the “free, roistering, spacious,” days of Elizabeth and the gentlemen buccaneers—again feelings of escape from the routine, narrow life of to-day). “You too will go adventuring” (in actual fact, sailing, or rather living, in a modern floating hotel, like the Italic, is hardly an adventure; there is little danger or discomfort or difficulty; but the word “adventure” is connected  with escape feelings, hardy-dardy feelings, hero feelings, all pleasant to experience)….[page 54]

But this is where, according to C.S Lewis, they go a step too far. Instead of putting the terrible advert alongside a decent piece of travel writing, they take it to task for inaccuracy. The ship won’t, as a matter of simple fact, retrace the Golden Hind’s route. But, says Lewis, plenty of good travel writing is guilty of the same offence. 

What they actually do is to point out that the luxurious motor-vessel won’t really sail where Drake did, that the tourists will not have any adventures, that the treasures they bring home will be of a purely metaphorical nature, and that a trip to Margate might provide “all the pleasure and rest” they required. All this is very true: talents inferior to those of Gaius and Titius would have sufficed to discover it. What they have not noticed, or not cared about, is that a very similar treatment could be applied to much good literature which treats the same emotion. [Abolition of Man, page 4]

This is, I submit, a deliberate misreading. 

• The Green Book says that even though the holiday is not really retracing Drake’s steps, the name “Drake” is irrelevantly used because the reader will associate his name with escapism. 

• The Green Book  says that even though the holiday will not really be dangerous or uncomfortable, the word “adventure” is irrelevantly used because the reader will associate it with escapism, and other pleasant feelings. 

• The Green Book says that the word “treasure” is  used metaphorically because the reader will associate it with romance and excitement. 

For Lewis, this amounts to a denunciation of the whole idea of treasure and adventure. But it isn’t. King and Ketley don’t say that it is wrong to associate Francis Drake and Spanish Galleons with Good Queen Bess’s Golden Days. They say that it is wrong to exploit people’s feelings about Good Queen Bess to induce them to buy holidays they can’t afford.

Lewis wished King and Ketley had compared the advert with a good piece of travel writing. But no-one is claiming that the Sunday Paper listing is a piece of bad travel writing. It is, if anything, presented as a good piece of advertising. The correct procedure would have been to contrast it with an advert written by a more honest or honourable travel agent. 

It would be trivially easy to write an advertisement which makes honest use of history: 

“Have you thrilled since boyhood to tales of piracy and derring do along the Spanish Main?Imagine your excitement when you sail through those waters; walk around the ruins of real seventeenth century castles, and visit the wrecks of actual pirate ships…”

Or we could dispense with the sizzle altogether and simply sell the sausage: 

“Our cabins have been highly commended by the Hotel Journal; our chef has worked at some of the top restaurants in Paris; our gym instructor has twice been to the Olympic Games…”

The trouble is, what you end up with in both cases is a demonstrably less effective advertisement than the one we are deconstructing. Salesmen use emotional soft-sell because it works. 

The passages that Lewis suggests King and Ketley might have used for contrast are from Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth. Both writers say they experienced very strong emotions in particular places. Both say that the feelings may not have been very sensible or very rational; but that they nevertheless had value. They both think that the feelings brought them closer to their Christian God. 

For Johnson, it is visiting the ruins of Iona, which make him think about St Columbia converting the pagan Scots in the fifth century. Some people might think it better to look at the ruins dispassionately, as scientific or archaeological data, but he wouldn’t want to be one of those people: 

 Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue.  That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona! [Samuel Johnson, “Journey to the Western Islands”]

William Wordsworth is naturally more romantic—more interested in recording the minute qualia of subjective experience. He says that he was in a perfectly ordinary carriage surrounded by perfectly ordinary people, but at the precise moment he entered London (it was more clearly delineated in his day) he felt an emotion that he couldn’t describe, but connected in some way with heaviness. It only took a second; he didn’t attach much significance to it at the time, but he now sees it as the action of God. Like Wordsworth, he admits that other people might not find the emotion very sensible:

Great God!

Now, I think I see what CS Lewis is driving at here. The emotions—about Iona, London or the Spanish Main—are real. And the emotions, like Coleridge’s feeling about the waterfall, are appropriate to the places: they are exactly what a sensitive person ought to feel there, because the place is such as to merit those feelings. Such emotions can be used to sell holidays; they can also be the literal voice of God. If you are going to give your students examples of emotion being put to bad use, you ought to give a counterexample of it being put to good use: otherwise they might get the wrong end of the stick and think that it’s emotions themselves that you have an issue with. If you are going to review a terrible pantomime, tell your reader that there are good pantomimes as well. If you are going to pillory an awful atheist, remind us that some atheists are much less awful.

But this isn’t what he says. Rather he says that King and Ketley’s whole case against the advert is that it uses figurative expressions which aren’t literally true; and since Wordsworth and Johnson also use figurative language, Johnson’s Christianity and Wordsworth’s pantheism could just as easily be debunked. 

What, after all, can the history of early British Christianity, in pure reason, add to the motives for piety as they exist in the eighteenth century? Why should Mr. Wordsworth’s inn be more comfortable or the air of London more healthy because London has existed for a long time? [page 5]

But this is word salad. No-one has mentioned Wordsworth’s inn. You can’t get from “It is misleading to use the romance of English history to sell holidays” to “Wordsworth was wrong to think that the pang of joy which surprised him when he came to London was theologically significant”. If you said that, wouldn’t you also have to say that if Wordsworth truly felt that his emotions of weighty heaviness when he came to London were meaningful, it follows that there is a meaningful analogy between six weeks lolling in a deck chair in the Caribbean and a chest of Spanish doubloons? Lewis thinks it was a Good Thing that the Scottish landscape made Dr Johnson want to be a better Christian: but he would presumably have thought it a Bad Thing if it had been used by an advertiser to persuade him to buy a more expensive brand of porridge. 

Unless…  Could Lewis possibly be arguing that if an Englishman who had read the right books were to sail from modern Cartagena to modern Caracas, he might very well feel thrilled and liberated? And that those feelings would be ordinate and appropriate? And although he is really only on holiday, the dinners and the sightseeing might really feel special because he loves stories of the Spanish Main? That pint of beer I had in the Cavern Club was special to me because I had spent forty years reading about Merseybeat; and that remains true, even though it wasn’t the original Cavern, I hadn’t travelled back to the 1960s, and the guy playing Beatles covers wasn’t much good. 

But that would amount to a defence of the advert. We’d be reduced to saying that the 1935 newspaper was inferior to Wordsworth’s Prelude only insofar as there was a certain inelegance to the prose. And I am not even quite certain about that. I am far from sure that in purely formal terms, I could show that “a weight of ages did at once descend upon my heart” is superior to “ in new fitness of body, and new delight of mind, your treasure will be counted to you.”.

Thompson and King and Ketley have a wider point; and it is not one that Lewis seems to have noticed. We have just seen how easy it is for a salesman to use trigger words to make you suspend rational judgement: but it is just as easy for politicians and newspaper leader-writers to do the same trick. The message is not “emotions associated with places are contrary to reason”. The message is “since it is so easy to use emotions to sell boat trips, be very careful when demagogues use them to sell you dictatorships.”

One last point.

Thompson’s first chapter is a perfectly good introduction to literary criticism, albeit from a clearly Leavisite perspective. He is particularly good on the question of taste. Do we even need to criticise books, he asks: why can’t we just read them? And yes, he says, there are lots of books that you can just read, and enjoy as easily as “oysters and champagne”. But they are not likely to give lasting satisfaction. The more serious writers, that Mr Shakespeare for example, need to be read several times and contemplated; but they repay that additional work. You can’t prove that a book is good or bad with scientific rigour: taste does come into it. Some people might conclude that there is no accounting for taste and therefore no point in discussing literary merit to begin with.

Against this conclusion it must be argued that in the arts there are standards of truth and of value, but they are not hard and fast measures to be automatically applied. This argument will be readily accepted by anyone who holds that religious or philosophic beliefs supply the individual with a scale of values which he must apply for himself, and even those who do not hold any such beliefs must see that in every hour of our waking lives we are making choices on the assumption that one course of action is “better” than another. This is to say,  we are constantly operating a scale of values whether we are conscious of it or not. [page 14]

Ketley and King had definitely read Reading and Discrimination because they quote from it. They can’t radically disagree with it, or they wouldn’t use it. So here is one of the Green Book’s sources, taking it for granted that there is a system of value that all philosophies and religions hold in common and that even people who don’t have a faith tacitly accept. 

Perhaps we should give this scale of values a name. 

Maybe we should call it the Tao?