“If we want to capture something of the essence of working-class life … we must say that it is the ‘dense and concrete life’, a life whose main stress is on the intimate, the sensory, the detailed, and the personal” (p. 87).
This ur-text of what’s now called cultural studies is divided into two parts. First, we get 140 pages on the working-class Leeds where Hoggart grew up before the war, and the attitudes and outlooks of his people. This covers everything from the expected roles of mothers and fathers respectively to the focus on what he calls “the personal and the concrete” in the little pleasures taken wherever possible. Hoggart paints a vivid, tactile portrait of a place and time. But there’s a sense of loss, too: it’s a world of which he is no longer part, because of where reading has taken him.
Then there’s more than 160 pages on how things are changing post-war, which he links directly to what working-class people are reading. There’s lots here on magazines, newspapers and what he thinks of as trashy literature — he does not hide his distaste for the lurid covers and cheap newsprint of crime, sci-fi and sex pulp fiction that offers “sensation-without-commitment” (p. 242). He dismisses this as read by adolescents and those on National Service, and is especially disparaging of,
“American or American-type serial books of comics, where for page after page big-thighed and big-bosomed girls from Mars step out of their space machines, and gangsters’ molls scream away in high-powered sedans [which is] bad mass-art geared to a very low mental age” (p. 177).
He’s just as withering about the kind of airbrushed, big-bosomed covers of pulp fiction, often illustrated by or in the style of Alberto Vargas (who Hoggart refers to throughout as “Varga”, for example on p. 227). But he fails, I think, to adequately explain why this kind of stuff might appeal to particular readers, in the way we find in George Orwell’s famous essay. “Good Bad Books” (1945). Hoggart dismisses it all as masturbatorial — and feels the need to explain the service term “wank” on p. 220.
I think we can understand the attraction of cheap, convenient sensation to teens and servicemen with limited money. If you’re stuck in school or National Service, bored, trapped and frustrated, how thrilling to read of people who take action, break rules and escape. It satisfies in a way that perhaps “good” or canonical literature does not. (I wonder if the illicit thrill of rule-breaking in fiction can also serve a social purpose, shoring up those rules in real life.)
Hoggart is more nuanced when it comes to popular songs, admitting that old tunes and lyrics have an effect on him that makes it hard to be objective (p. 199), and that,
“we remember the best songs from a large number of weak ones” (p. 200).
He can see the stuff is not very rich or good or worthy (in his terms), but it conjures something for him, writ through with keenly felt memory and association. My suspicion is that he found it easier to scorn pulp fiction and comics because he’d not grown up on them. They were not of the world he knew, so they are invaders.
His argument is that improvements in education, literacy and welfare haven’t necessarily seen improvements in reading. Indeed, he thinks reading rates are high, quoting sales figures for magazines and newspapers that seem incredible now. He also cites a Gallup poll from 1950, in which 55% of respondents said they were currently reading a book (p. 301), but slightly spoils this high figure by muttering that it gives no sense of the quality of the books being read.
This is all part of his thesis that culture is becoming more homogenous and less granular and specific; we are reading more of fewer titles, pitched to a mass-market audience, an identikit culture. He puts particular blame on advertising for this effect, but does not, as he surely would had this book been written just a few years later, cite television as a factor. There is little sense, either, of this being part of a wider social or political development, or even construction of power, though he does mention Alex Comfort on p. 172 — presumably in reference to his book Authority and Delinquency (1950).
As Hoggart admits, his observations and conclusions are drawn mostly from his own experience as a grammar school boy rather than on broader empirical evidence such as a survey or wider study. But the book chimed with a generation of readers who saw themselves in what he described. I think that rather proves his thesis: his personal, concrete experience had wide-reaching appeal to readers.
Perhaps the most haunting passages are where, towards the end, he describes “the Uprooted and the Anxious” (p. 262) population, largely comprising grammar-school pupils, whose cleverness and reading severed them from their working-class communities. Hoggart describes them — himself — as prone to insecurity and being alone (pp. 264-5). He explains, convincingly, how a bookish boy would grow up studying diligently in the home, so largely in the company of his mother and other women of the family, while the menfolk would go out to work or the pub, and other boys would be out playing (pp. 266-67). This, he argues, shapes a whole outlook for life: what we read shapes who we are.
Given this and his argument that our reading is getting worse, we are left on a pessimistic note. It’s interesting to read, in the interview from 1990 included at the end of the book, that Hoggart thought things improved in the 1960s with a flowering of rich culture, but saw further stagnation in the 1980s.
The Uses of Literacy was first published in January 1957 and widely reviewed and debated in the following months. I wonder if and when it was read by Terrance Dicks, about whom I'm writing a biography. At the time of publication, Terrance — a working-class grammar school boy from East Ham in London — was just coming to the end of his three-year degree in English on a scholarship at Downing College, Cambridge. There, he was taught by FR Leavis, whose close scrutiny of literature for clues about wider social and economic life was surely a big influence on Hoggart’s approach here. Surely his book was discussed at Downing by the final-year students. As I read it, I wondered to what extend Terrance would recognise himself and his world in these pages?
But Terrance didn’t like that kind of abstract analysis. He preferred things to be more concrete.
No comments:
Post a Comment