Language is our supreme evolutionary achievement, and this chapter is about how we can use it to sublime effect. We save our best words for our most complex thoughts, our attempts to win a sexual mate, deal with the inevitability of our own death or to persuade someone to do something they don’t want to do. It’s where language blooms in resplendent fashion. That doesn’t mean it has to be florid; it can have the simplicity of a haiku. Three hundred years ago, Alexander Pope wrote: ‘True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought but n’er so well expressed.’
A manual on how to hunt, plough, build a house, fight a war or paddle a boat can get by with pretty basic language. But courtship won’t go far if you say simply, ‘You look nice, let’s have sex.’ The same goes for death: ‘What, old dad dead?’ is a great line from The Revenger’s Tragedy, but mainly for dramatic impact. Hamlet’s ‘Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve into a dew!’ certainly has more eloquence to it. Is it better? Well, that’s very subjective, and we all have our favourites, be they poems, songs, plays, novels or the speeches of a gifted orator.
The acme of language is literature; it defines our species, gives us voice, personality and history. Quite simply, it tells our story.
Essentially, what we like as a species across all cultures and throughout our history is a good story, well told: as Joyce would have it, the right words in the right order. We return first to that village in Turkanaland in north-east Kenya we visited earlier in the book, for the Turkana can tell us something about the beginnings of storytelling.
The village is about ten miles from the Sudan border. The Toposa, mortal enemies of the Turkana, live on the other side. The Toposa are as obsessed with cattle raiding as the Turkana, and for the young men of both tribes the raids are a way of life: ritually important and essential as a means of getting cattle to pay the bride price, so they can get married. It’s also tremendously exciting. Sometimes as many as a hundred heavily armed Toposa will cross the border and launch attacks. Up until thirty years ago both Toposa and Turkana relied mainly on ancient muskets, Enfields and spears, but now Kalashnikovs have replaced them. There is not a single spear to be seen, and even young boys of fourteen have an automatic rifle slung casually over their shoulders. As the day wears on the warriors start to drink their millet beer. Drunkenness and guns are never a good combination.
Turkana warriors keeping their traditions alive
But what the alcohol does is lower the inhibitions of the young warriors, and they start to tell stories of their escapades against the Toposa. Soon a crowd gathers and, emboldened by their audience, the young men launch into a full re-enactment of their latest raid. Miming their ambush of the Toposa warriors, they tell the story of capturing a hundred head of cattle, losing a couple of their men in a firefight and then the Toposa taking back some of their cattle only to be re-ambushed. The crowd love it, as do the warriors. This act of mimesis, miming out their story – with a few embellishments – goes to the heart of storytelling. There’s also a plot, action, humour (one of the men got shot in the buttocks – very Forrest Gump) and resolution.
The story is an improvised bit of drama without any religious or moral undertones. It’s a bit like an action buddy movie – a platoon of warriors on a dangerous mission meets with adversity, overcomes it; some are wounded, but the end is a happy one because the warriors return home victorious.
The Turkana have other stories, many of them traditional myths which attempt to answer the major themes of their lives. They do have a creator figure, Akuj, and there are many stories in which he is the protagonist. Most involve rain, which is the life-or-death commodity for the Turkana. These stories, like the Judaeo-Christian Bible, try to reconcile the big issues that trouble the Turkana. In the harsh environment where they live, the Turkana believe that the unreliability of the rains which cause drought, famine and death can be alleviated by the intercession of Akuj, the bringer of rain.
Storytelling is as old as language and is rooted in our life as a social animal. It is a universal across all cultures throughout history. When the Turkana tell a story they do more than just entertain the community, they bind it together in a communal ritual. This ritual (and it’s not so different from being read a Harry Potter book, or going to the cinema to see Avatar or watching a performance of Hamlet) illustrates two of our most important traits: our ability to create imaginary worlds – fantasy – and our capacity to empathize. Empathy allows us to reach out to others and understand another’s emotions and needs whilst fantasy allows us to postulate alternatives and imagine new ways of seeing reality. Both are at the heart of good storytelling. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of being so prone to fantasy?
‘One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one,’ says linguist Steven Pinker, but he thinks stories are in fact an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition. Pinker’s hypothesis is that as our ancestors evolved to live in groups, so they had to make sense of increasingly complex social relationships. Living communally requires knowing who your group members are and what they are doing and if possible what they are feeling and thinking. Storytelling is the perfect way to spread such information.
Storytelling is at the heart of the indigenous people of Australia. There were over 400 distinct Aboriginal clans when the first British settlers arrived in Australia, and each of them had their own body of stories that describe and link the eternal mythical world of what they call the ‘Dreaming’ with the everyday world of living. The stories are called ‘Songlines’.
It’s almost impossible for a non-Aborigine to understand the idea of the Dreaming which underlies the Songlines. The Dreaming is an English word that attempts to describe the entire mystical and ontological life of the Aborigines and encompasses how they are linked to the contours of the landscape in which they live. Aboriginal actor Ernie Dingo tries to explain: ‘When you talk about it, you think about it in the back of your head – “Now hang on a sec, how did that story go?” – and that moment of thought would come like a dream. So it’s going back into the past through memory, rather than in the English sense, through the history books.’
The Dreaming is an extraordinarily complex body of stories that guide the Aborigines in their quest for water, hunting, fertility. Each of the Aboriginal tribes has its own stories, and these are sung in Songlines or Dreaming Tracks, the paths created by the ancestors during the Dreaming as they criss-crossed the country. This is one from the Grampian Mountains of Victoria.
The Gariwerd Creation Story
In the time before time began Bunjil, the Great Ancestor Spirit, began to create the world around us: rivers, mountains, forest, desert. He created the animals and plants. He appointed the Bram-bram-bult brothers, the sons of Druk the frog, to finish the task of naming the animals and making the languages and laws. At the end of his time on earth Bunjil rose into the sky and became a star, where he remains.
There was a giant ferocious emu named Tchingal, who ate people. His home was in the scrub, where he was hatching a giant egg. One day, Waa the crow flew past and, feeling peckish, started to eat the egg. When Tchingal came back and saw this he was furious and chased Waa all over the place and each time he escaped Tchingal crashed into mountains creating the gaps in the rocks and the streams than run through them.
So do Aborigines sing their stories because songs tend to be more memorable?
Ernie explains, ‘It’s both a rhyme and rhythm, and the rhythm is the heartbeat. You sing this, your heartbeat can tell you how much time you’ve got to travel. So the song that you sing, if it’s a good old slow song, you know that this is a long journey, before you get to the next part of the verse. The story will stay similar to the rhythm of the walk and it tries to get your heart to pace you so that your step paces you to the next location in the song.’
Songlines explore themes of hunting and fertility and each Aborigine tribe has their own set of stories
The Songlines are a brilliant, practical way of navigating. They tell you compass points, give you landmarks (depressions in the land, for instance, are remembered in the songs as the footprints of the creator beings), and reinforce the identity of each tribe by making everyone learn by heart their collective history. They also, as any parent will know who’s tried to coax a child on a long walk, provide sufficient distraction and entertainment to make the journey more bearable.
If you like a gripping story, packed with adventure and heroic exploits, jealousy and loyalty, friendship and family, love and loss, and the yearning to find the way home, then read – no, listen to – this:
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
Even so, he could not save his companions, hard though
he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,
fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,
and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point
here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak and begin our story.
It’s the opening lines to the Odyssey (from a translation by Richard Lattimore), the towering epic poem of the trials and tribulations of the Greek warrior Odysseus, as he tries to sail home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.
Homer’s Odyssey may be Western literature’s first – and some would say most influential – work but it was not a written creation. It was born out of, and shaped by, an ancient oral tradition which memorized and passed on stories, cultural values and information from generation to generation, long before we learned to write. It’s more song than words.
Except that, at some point, it was written down. We’re not sure when and we’re not sure by whom: probably some time around the late eighth century BC, by a man we call Homer, but who might have been more than one person, according to scholars. Around the same time, a few decades earlier, probably, Homer’s other masterpiece, the Illiad, was also written down, and together they form the bedrock of the Western literary tradition.
Homer’s epics are great yarns, wonderful stories and, far more, they create vivid worlds of complex human desires and contradictions, where people love and suffer, fight and die, live with dignity or dishonour, struggle against misfortune and tragedy and fate. The characters try to understand the world they live in, the physical and the unseen, against a backdrop of heroic deeds and all-too-human gods. Like all the best tales, they’re in essence stories of the human condition, and their depictions of the ancient world, their plots, styles, literary devices and imaginative sweep have soaked into our culture, language and art. Every epic journey, road movie, every tale of the returning warrior, every story of the absent father and the coming-of-age son, Dante’s Inferno, the epic poetry of Milton and Pope, the classical poets, the Romantics, James Joyce’s Ulysses – they all owe their inspiration and origin to Homer’s Odyssey.
The Greeks themselves considered the Illiad Homer’s greatest work; and it was the story of Achilles, and not the wanderings of Odysseus, which Alexander the Great took with him as bedtime reading on his campaigns. Both poems draw their inspiration and material from the Trojan War myths. You know the story: Helen seduced by Paris and whisked off to Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, Agamemnon leading the Greeks against King Priam in the ten-year-long war, the burning towers of Ilium, Achilles dragging the body of Hector round the walls of the city, the Trojan horse and the fall of Troy. And then one of the Greek generals, Odysseus, gets lost on his way home. It’s the ancient world’s equivalent of the greatest road movie ever – except it was by boat.
It’s the Odyssey which has given us some of the greatest stories and adventures in literature, as Odysseus and his men meet one obstacle and disaster after another: navigating between the lethal whirlpool and rocks of Scylla and Charybdis; being captured by the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus, whom Odysseus blinds with a stake so that he and his men can escape clinging to the undersides of the Cyclops’ huge sheep.
Things are always going wrong, working against Odysseus getting safely home, either because of the gods or the stupidity of the men, or the weather. Like when Aeolus, the master of the winds, gives Odysseus a leather bag containing all the winds, except the west wind, to speed him home safely. The sailors think the bag’s got gold in it, and they wait until Odysseus is sleeping and then open it. All the winds fly out in a fury, and the resulting storm drives the ships back the way they had come – just as Ithaca had come into sight. Then there is the episode when Odysseus decides he wants to hear the irrisistible song of the Sirens, who would lure sailors to their death on the rocks. He gets his crew to plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast, with strict orders not to untie him, no matter how much he begs. So there he is, writhing against the creaking mast, straining towards the singing
Homer’s Odyssey may be Western literature’s most influential work
Homer wrote epics full of vivid worlds and complex human desires
So they sang, in sweet utterance, and the heart within me desired to listen.
And so it goes on, twenty-four books and 12,000-odd lines of pacy, vivid poetry which have burrowed deep into our Western collective imagination in the same way as the Bible stories have done.
The mystery of who Homer was and the scholarly debates about the exact origins of these epic poems only add to the allure. There’s no trustworthy information about the life and identity of Homer which have come down to us. All we have is what we read that the ancient Greeks believed, people like Herodotus, who thought Homer lived about the ninth century BC, and Aristarchus of Alexandria, who offered a much earlier date – he believed Homer lived about 140 years after the Trojan War (which we date around 1200 BC). The Greeks believed Homer was blind, and some thought he came from Chios, others from Smyrna. They also assumed that he was a poet who wrote. There was disagreement about when the poems assumed their final shape, and whether different poets wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey – but everyone, all the way down to Alexander Pope in the eighteenth century, assumed that Homer was a poet who composed with the written word.
Scholarship over the next couple of centuries challenged this traditional view and located the poems in a pre-literate culture, with an oral composition and transmission span of generations, until they were finally written down, probably in the eighth century BC. Academics argued that Homer was, in fact, one of a long line of oral poets and that the style of oral compositions is very different from written ones. They analysed the texts and identified the repeated use of descriptive phrases – what we call Homeric epithets – like ‘divine Odysseus’, the ‘wine-dark sea’, ‘grey-eyed Athena’, ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’, and even whole repeated lines and standard set-pieces of description. They argued that these formed a vast repository of word-groups, a sort of poetic diction, which the oral poet would draw on. He would hear them and learn others from other poets, and during the live performance of his poem, which could go on for hours, he could use them when he improvised. He could draw on words and phrases which would fit the metre and rhyme, signpost the characters for the listeners, give shape and pace to the whole. The argument continued that this kind of poetic diction could only be the cumulative creation of many generations of oral poets over centuries, and was so complex that it couldn’t have been the work of a single poet.
No one today would claim that one man called Homer sat down and wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey at one sitting. But we can say that one man probably perfected what generations worked at, a magnificent poet who, perhaps over a lifetime, gathered the treasures and resources of an ancient traditional art, shaped and polished old stories, and created something vivid and new – these powerful dramas about the tragedy of Achilles and the desperate wanderings of Odysseus, which have stood the test of time and fired the imagination of succeeding generations. Whether this poet was called Homer or not doesn’t really matter. Because, whatever the origins and authorship of these epics, it’s their supreme storytelling verve, their poetry and the imaginative power driving them which still speaks to us.
Here’s another example, from the opening of the Illiad, in a modern, vernacular translation by the American scholar Stanley Lombardo:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
It’s rousing stuff, with the immediate promise of action and terrible deeds, and that ringing phrase which instantly turns the spotlight on the brooding, proud figure at the centre of the drama – Achilles and his ‘black and murderous’ rage.
Stanley Lombardo is so passionate about the poetry and the music of the Illiad and the Odyssey that he travels around performing them to live audiences, just as the bards did millennia ago. Armed only with a drum, which he beats at strategic points in the action, he recites sections from the poems. ‘You experience the poetry of Homer in a different way,’ he says. He thinks that Homer came to this level of composition through performance.
The Illiad is full of passionate, rousing language
Bonnie and Clyde, a modern tragedy
The Seven Basic Plots
What makes a good story? Compulsive characters, scintillating dialogue, wonderful writing – certainly – but for most of us, the plotline is the vital ingredient in a story, the roadmap, as it were, for characters.
Most writers will tell you that there are only so many storylines to be told. Some have even tried to put a number on it. Rudyard Kipling is thought to have had a list with sixty-nine basic plots; others have argued for thirty-six, twenty and – in the case of Professor William Foster-Harris – three. He suggested happy ending, unhappy ending and the ‘literary’ plot, ‘in which the whole plot is done backwards and the story winds up in futility and unhappiness’. Ronald Tobias argues that all plots can be boiled down to two – ‘plots of the body’ and ‘plots of the mind’. Some have even managed to squeeze all the stories in the world into one plotline: exposition – rising action – climax – falling action – denouement.
The most useful list – certainly the best fun at dinner parties – is probably that of journalist Christopher Booker, who proposes that all narratives in the world are variations of a basic seven plots. Here they are, along with some story suggestions to get the conversations going:
Overcoming the Monster: the hero confronts and defeats a life-threatening monster or evil force. The hero returns home victorious. Beowulf, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and Dracula would fit into this category, along with all the James Bond films, High Noon, Jaws and Alien.
Rags to Riches: a commonplace character, often in wretched circumstances, achieves wealth, status, beauty, happiness. ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’, ‘Aladdin’ (and a host of other fairy tales) have common links with Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The Quest: the hero sets out on a hazardous journey to reach his goal, confronting dangers and temptations along the way. The Odyssey, Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Watership Down (yes, rabbits can be heroic).
Voyage and Return: the hero leaves home to explore another, often magical, world and, after a dramatic escape, returns to the familiar world. The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, The Wizard of Oz and Gulliver’s Travels. Many of the Quest stories fit this bill as well.
Rebirth: the hero is overcome by dark forces and then redeemed, often by the power of love. ‘Snow White’, Silas Marner, It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, Star Wars, The Grinch.
Comedy: a chaos of misunderstanding which eventually resolves itself into a happy ending. Everything from Oscar Wilde plays and Jane Austen novels to Feydeau farces and most of Shakespeare’s comedies.
Tragedy: a flawed character spirals down into evil and inevitable death or disaster. From Macbeth and King Lear to Bonnie and Clyde and Madame Bovary.
There are other genres, of course – mystery, romance, sci-fi – but most of the stories will fit into the framework of one of these seven basic plots.
Why is it that some books have us staying up all night to finish them and others stay unread after the first few pages? What is it about one story which has us quivering for more and another which has us wriggling with boredom? The secret of what makes a good story is the Holy Grail of writers, publishers and movie and TV executives. Get it right, and you’ve got a chart-topping book or film on your hands. Get it wrong, and you’ve got a flop. Nowhere is the secret of a good story more hungrily sought than in the movie business, where hundreds of millions of pounds are made or lost at the box office.
William Goldman, double Oscar-winner and considered by many to be Hollywood’s pre-eminent screenwriter, should know a thing or two about the ingredients for a good story – or perhaps not, as his most famous quote is ‘Nobody knows anything.’ Goldman described in his memoir, Adventures in the Screen Trade, how one of the highest-grossing films of all time, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was turned down by every studio in Hollywood except Paramount. And Star Wars was passed over by Universal. ‘Nobody – not now, not ever – knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.’
It’s hard to believe that, after more than fifty years in the story business, Goldman doesn’t have an inkling of what works and doesn’t work. After all, he’s the screenwriter of some of the most intelligent films of the 1970s and 80s – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men, The Stepford Wives, The Princess Bride …
Goldman has described with real feeling the torment of writing.
‘Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.’ As he says, ‘The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.’ It’s reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer – a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
So how does Goldman find inspiration for his stories? His screenplay for Marathon Man was adapted from his own novel and was made into an iconic thriller staring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in 1976. Goldman says it was based on two ideas. The first was what would happen if someone in your family wasn’t what you thought they were. (That’s the Dustin Hoffman character, who thinks his brother is an oil man and actually he’s a spy.) As for the second idea: ‘I was walking on 47th Street in New York – the diamond district – about forty years ago, and it was a hot day, and all the people that worked in the diamond district were wearing short-sleeve shirts, and you could see all the terrible marks from the concentration camps – because they were all Jewish and they all had their tattoos – and I got the notion: what if the world’s most wanted Nazi was walking along this street?’
William Goldman at his writing desk, 1987
From these two ideas emerged a compulsive story which climaxes in a torture scene which has put a generation of filmgoers off going to the dentist. The marathon-running student, Dustin Hoffman, has his teeth drilled without anaesthetic by Laurence Olivier, the former Nazis SS dentist at Auschwitz, who repeatedly asks the clueless Hoffman, ‘Is it safe?’
Goldman may insist that a walk along New York’s 47th Street gave him the germ of his story, but the point is any one of us could have been walking along that street and noticed the tattoos. Only a very few are able to carve a story out of the scene. It’s a bit like Michelangelo contemplating his block of marble – his genius is what he takes away, revealing the statue of David inside. Goldman has a mind that makes stories.
If you read through the movie trade magazines, there’ll always be a page somewhere advertising a piece of software or a seminar or a course that claims to teach you how to write. You can actually buy an application for your computer that supposedly allows you to build a story. It’s as if you can break down a story into a knowable, quantifiable entity that can be proscribed and created according to a formula. William Goldman reckons if it were possible to pre-programme a successful story, we’d all be doing it and making a fortune. Just look at the success of the film The King’s Speech.
‘There’s no logic to it. I mean, who in the name of God thinks there’s gonna be a successful worldwide movie that wins every honour about a king who has a stammer? It’s the worst idea I ever heard but, guess what, it was a fascinating story and it works.’
Casting is surely a vital element in the sense that it can completely alter the way you see the story. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the most commercially successful of all the films Goldman has written screenplays for. It got him his first Oscar as well as establishing the buddy movie genre. The winning combination of actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford as the eponymous Wild West outlaws was obviously a factor, but Goldman insists that it was a piece of luck. The part of the Kid was supposed to have been played by Steve McQueen, who along with Newman was the biggest movie star in the world at the time. But they couldn’t agree on the billing – literally the size and positioning of their names – so McQueen pulled out. Jack Lemon was offered the part but declined because he didn’t like horses. Warren Beatty turned it down, as did Marlon Brando, who ‘disappeared off with the Indians’. So finally they got Robert Redford. ‘But who knows, if we’d had McQueen, if it would have been different. I don’t know, it might have been better, it might have been worse.’
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won Goldman his first Oscar
Very little was known about the real-life characters Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Goldman spent years researching their lives before he wrote his screenplay, in which the two men run away to Bolivia.
‘When I tried to sell the movie, a guy in a major studio said he would buy it if they didn’t go to South America. And I said, “But they went to South America.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. All I know is that John Wayne don’t run away.” And I’ll never forget that sentence, “John Wayne don’t run away.” ’
Goldman’s experience suggests that, although the basic plotlines of stories are universal, our idea of the hero has changed. There was a time when heroes were heroes and, like John Wayne, they didn’t run away. What Goldman and his generation did in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to add a new twist – that you could have a hero who is self-deprecating and flawed and not made of granite.
Goldman remembers the thrill of discovering Homer as a child, immersing himself in the tales of the siege of Troy. And then reading Cervantes as a student and flinging his book across the room in a rage when Don Quixote dies. He’s almost apologetic in his admiration of these authors.
‘I’m gonna say something stupid … they were great at story. They really had fabulous stories to tell.’
Irishman James Joyce is acknowledged as one of the great and most original voices in world literature, but to many there’s an aura of impenetrability about his work that puts them off. Stephen Fry’s Desert Island book on Radio 4 was Joyce’s novel Ulysses and he urges anybody who’s never read it – or tried to and thought that it was too difficult – ‘just to let themselves go and swim into it, because, apart from anything else, there were never more beautiful sentences in any single book’.
Ulysses chronicles the journey of the middle-aged Jewish Dubliner Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin on an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. To a small but passionate group of devotees, an obsession with the book manifests itself in a rare literary curiosity: Bloomsday. Bloomsday is celebrated every year on 16 June, all over the world, often recreating events from the novel. In Dublin it’s frequently experienced as a lengthy pub crawl.
David Norris, a senator in Ireland’s parliament, the Taoseaich, is a hugely enthusiastic Joycean and Bloomsday participant. He explains why 16 June was so significant to Joyce and his wife Nora.
‘I didn’t know Joyce, I didn’t know his wife Nora, but I knew all their friends very well and I remember Maria Jolas saying that in the thirties in Paris, when Bloomsday was mentioned, Nora would adopt an insouciant look and she said, “That was the day I made a man out of Jim.” ’
So why is Ulysses lauded so highly? Partly it’s the style, the content, and the language, which is a tour de force that has never been matched since, but it’s also the humanity of the characters. The genius of the book is that Joyce manages to take examples of Homer’s epic adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) and find in a single day in Dublin a modern equivalent of the Sirens and the Circe and the Oxen of the Sun. Not only that, but each chapter that represents one of those eighteen adventures has its own colour, atmosphere, smell and linguistic style. The novel contains everything in human life, including public masturbating and use of the c-word that caused it to be banned in the UK until the 1930s. (It was published in Paris in 1922.) It also confronts issues that we now consider to be very urgent and modern, like racism.
The primary beauty of the novel is the hero, Bloom, who is warm, frail, silly and loveable, and yet he’s bullied, treated badly, whispered about behind his back. Another wonderful thing about him is that he’s so at home with the workings of his own body. The first time you meet him he’s having a crap. Joyce describes him shitting and pissing with the same casual exactitude with which he describes him thinking, and it’s all treated as part of a continuum. And the character of Bloom, this extraordinary man who we follow over the course of twenty-four hours, grows and grows in stature and warmth and dignity. He becomes a hero out of the most ordinary material imaginable.
David Norris thinks that part of the genius of the book is in its detail. Joyce didn’t just invent one day, he investigated and researched that one day in minutest detail. So on that 16 June in 1904, there was a particular horse race that was run, and there was a particular jockey and there was a particular time when the odds on the betting were such and such. And he put that in. He mapped that day completely, perfectly, and Norris believes that’s part of the obsession we have with the book to this day. Joyce renders reality with words in a way that a painter can capture the essence of something with brush strokes. Ulysses pioneered what became known as the stream-of-consciousness novel, or in Joyce’s case, the irrational hiccups of human thinking.
Norris adds: ‘Few writers have had more grace and splendour in the way they write. It is just simply beautiful.’ He tells the story of Joyce’s great friend, Frank Budgen, who met Joyce in a café in Zurich one day and found him looking rather pleased with himself.
James Joyce, one of the most original voices in world literature
‘Good day’s work, Joyce?’ said Budgen.
‘Oh yes’, said Joyce.
‘Write a chapter, couple of pages, paragraph, a sentence?’
And Joyce replied, ‘I had the words and the sentence yesterday but I got the order right today.’
As Joyce said himself in Finnegans Wake, it’s about getting ‘the rite words in the rite order’. But what’s probably surprising for those who have been put off reading Ulysses because they think it’s too difficult or obscure (which is true of his last work, Finnegans Wake) is just how much Joyce uses the rhythms and idioms of the street and pub. He had an uncanny ear for the overheard remark.
Norris laughs. ‘Every kind of Dublin saying, like “the sock whiskey” for sore legs, for instance, is in it. Joyce collected these things, and I often think that subsequent writers must have thought it terribly unfair competition, because Joyce was so terribly greedy; he left nothing behind for other people.’
He was, to be sure, a hoarder of linguistic treasure.
Davy Bryne’s pub is one of the many that grace the pages of the book. Over delicious grilled liver providing an olfactory accompaniment altogether fitting in a novel so keen to that sense, Norris reads out a passage from the opening scene where Bloom is preparing breakfast for his wife Molly.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish, the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palette a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the kitchen, but out of doors, gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel a bit peckish.
The lilt of David Norris’ accent adds something to the already lyrical cadence of the writing. Does this Irishness lend to the English language another quality which has helped make Hiberno-English writers so successful? He believes it’s because of their discomfort with English. Joyce says, ‘My soul frets in the shadow of your language’ (meaning the English language). Norris cites a book by Father Peter O’Leary, in which he describes hearing two children talking in the period of the famine. One child says to the other, ‘I have no language now, Sheila.’ ‘Why, what have you got?’ she asked him back, and he says, ‘I have only English.’ And English was, of course, the language of emigration, of administration, of logic and calculation and bureaucracy, whereas Irish was the language of creation, the imagination, improvisation. You find this kind of exuberance in the Irish language, and that cannot be eradicated. So it’s as if they’re speaking Irish in their mind and translating it into English; and it’s that exuberant creative side that is the classic Hiberno-English sound.
Norris adds: ‘We tend to be a bit subversive and we’re subversive in language too; and people will deliberately use a form of a word that they know is wrong, but the sound of it appeals to them a little bit more.’
Declan Kiberd and Barry McGovern are sitting in O’Neills Bar on Suffolk Street, a stone’s throw from Trinity College Dublin, where Samuel Beckett studied. Kiberd is Professor of Hiberno-English Literature at neighbouring University College, Joyce’s alma mater, and McGovern is an actor, a stalwart of the Abbey Theatre, who created a wildly successful one-man Beckett show. Over pints of Guinness – what else? – the conversation heads into the rich waters of politics and language. Kiberd is a champion of W. B. Yeats.
‘I would say the greatness of Yeats was that he took up the oral energies of the people just when the Catholic middle class were trying to transcend them and cast them to one side, and he said no, these are beautiful and they’re important. He invented really the modern idea of Irishness and Ireland, and the brilliance of Yeats is that he was both the Irish Shakespeare and its Derek Walcott all rolled into one.’
Kiberd warms to his theme that Yeats was the creator not only of some of the most memorable and patriotic poems, like ‘Easter 1916’, but also of a cycle of plays that invented Ireland in the same way that Shakespeare’s Tudor plays created the idea of England. But he was also postcolonial Ireland’s foremost critic, becoming extraordinarily sceptical of and disillusioned with the very country he’d helped to create. Kiberd is convinced that the Bardic idea is probably an essential role for any great writer: you don’t just praise the chieftain on good days but you are honest enough to speak the truth and say when things are not being done right.
‘And for me that’s the magnificence of Yeats, that he was both a tremendous Irish patriot and an absolute auto-critic.’
He believes that Ireland has represented itself through its writers. He tells the story of Oliver Gogarty, a member of the early Irish Senate, who stood up one day and said to the other Senators, ‘We wouldn’t be here today in a Senate of an independent Ireland, were it not for the poems of someone like W. B. Yeats.’ He was affirming that the word can become incarnate, can become an action.
W. B. Yeats captured the essence of Irishness
Easter 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born …
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
It becomes becomes clear in this Dublin pub that an unselfconscious delight in ideas and language are at the heart of good storytelling. There’s a great story Yeats picked up in Sligo about a man who went to a cottage and asked for a bed and breakfast, and they said, ‘Sure, but you have to tell us a story in return.’ And he had no story, so they kicked him out. He went to the next cottage, and they said, ‘Yes, you’re welcome, but tell us a story.’ No story, so he was booted out the door. So he went to a third house and he complained bitterly and described in detail his treatment in the other two houses. So the description of how he was treated for not having a story became the story itself, and he was taken in.
While it’s a particularly Irish story, it’s also a universal that any culture can understand and appreciate.
‘You make your destitution sumptuous, and that’s what Samuel Beckett did and why in some ways he is perhaps the central voice of this culture,’ Kiberd concludes.
‘In the last ditch,’ he concludes, quoting Becket, ‘all we can do is sing.’
In many ways it was a serendipitous time to be an Irish writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – comparable, perhaps, to being an English writer in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Just as Ireland created linguistic gold out of the cataclysmic changes after the Hunger, there’s something about the language in Elizabethan England that was growing and developing as the country found itself: the King James Bible, the outpouring of plays, the new words that were emerging and a new confidence and boldness in using them. And then, of course, there was Shakespeare.
Imagine you could go back 400 years or so to wander the streets of Elizabethan London. You might pop into a tavern, hoping to bump into Shakespeare or Marlowe or Jonson or Webster, and watch as they drank and talked and scribbled, or go to the newly built Globe Theatre in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames and pay your penny to stand with the other ‘groundlings’ in the pit in front of the stage and experience for a few hours that extraordinary flowering of language and theatre that the world has never seen since. Shakespeare might be there acting in one of his own plays; and – it being 1600 – the performance on stage that night might well be his latest work, Hamlet.
There was a sort of explosion of words taking place in early modern English in the sixteenth century. What Shakespeare did was to give style and structure to the language, to mine its rich seam and to add to its vocabulary. He invented, or was the first to put in print, around 3,000 new words. You may think you don’t know any Shakespeare but of course you do. Expressions like in one fell swoop and it’s not the be all and end all; or make your hairs stand on end, cruel to be kind, method in his madness, too much of a good thing, in my heart of hearts and the long and short of it. Eaten out of house and home, love is blind, foregone conclusion – the list goes on and on, and they’re all creations of Shakespeare. Clichés today, perhaps, but genius.
Someone (Stephen Fry, as it happens) once wrote that as theatre is a rhetorical medium and film is an action medium, so the perfect film hero is Lassie. The hero doesn’t need to speak. The boy’s on the cliff edge, Lassie looks, Lassie grabs the trouser leg, pulls the boy back … you just watch the action unfold. And the perfect theatrical hero is Hamlet, because everything is expressed in language, absolutely everything. It’s rhetoric, and he does it like no one else on earth. Hamlet explores sex, life and death, hope, revenge and despair. He’s utterly contemporary.
The Globe Theatre, c.1600
For this reason, the role of Hamlet is seen as the ultimate test for an actor, a theatrical Everest. The character is so full of complexities and the play itself is so well known that sleepless nights are spent worrying about how to bring something new to some of the most quoted lines in literature. A roll call of theatre greats have played Hamlet – John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellan. Three actors who’ve all taken the part of the Prince in the last decade talk about the role: Simon Russell Beale played the student prince at the National Theatre in 2000 to rave reviews; David Tennant, best known as BBC TV’s Dr Who, was Hamlet in a Royal Shakespeare production in 2008; and Mark Rylance has played Hamlet three times – first as a teenager, then with the RSC in 1989 and again at the Globe Theatre in 2000.
Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, 1948
‘Absolutely terrifying’ is how Simon describes performing the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy for the first time on stage. ‘Apart from it being so famous, it was scary because it’s such a simple question.’ He says it took him until well through the run before he got to grips with the power of the soliloquy – its calmness and self-control.
‘I get the sense that it was a radical exploration of a single human soul in a way that hadn’t been done before.’
Stephen Fry and Simon Russell Beale in the Globe Theatre
For the Elizabethan audience, Hamlet must have seemed incredibly modern and cutting-edge. Macbeth, for instance, was set 400 years before, but Hamlet is completely different; he has a whole different set of morals and a whole new outlook on the world. The controversial American scholar Harold Bloom wrote a book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human in which he claimed that before Shakespeare there were no real, rounded, ambiguous, complex characters.
Some people argue the culture we live in, with the competing attractions of television and books and computer games, makes Shakespeare too boring for an awful lot of people, simply not important. Is there any argument Simon can propose that would persuade someone to feel that Shakespeare is worth trying, that he’s not an unpleasant medicine that you have to take for the good of your soul?
Simon admits first off that Shakespeare does take work – there’s no way round it. He was lucky at school because he had teachers who managed to inspire him. He admits that there are boring bits in Shakespeare – bad bits occasionally – but it’s worth the effort:‘It really does yield extraordinary riches.’
The passion which Shakespeare inspires was evident when Simon was touring with Hamlet in Eastern Europe. One day he arrived in Belgrade, where the play’s poster with his face on it had been stuck up everywhere. He went into a shoe shop, and the woman serving shouted, ‘Hamlet! Hamlet!’ when she saw him and just kept saying, ‘To be or not to be,’ over and over again. The idea of that simple little phrase being repeated everywhere they went – even in China – is rather moving.
‘Utterly terrifying, poleaxing with fear because of all the baggage that it brings with you and because of the expectation that people have.’ That’s how David Tennant remembers feeling before his opening night as Hamlet at the National Theatre in 2008. He’d wanted the part since he was an eighteen-year-old drama student and he’d seen Mark Rylance play Hamlet when the RSC came to Glasgow.
‘I saw him at that very formative age and … it sort of sang. And you suddenly realize that these plays are deeper and wider and longer and better. Utterly contemporary, which is sort of a magic trick because it remains four hundred years old, and yet it seems to keep being reborn and rediscovered.’
Accepting the role of Hamlet – ‘like keeping goal for Scotland’ – was a brave thing to do. David was at the height of his TV career playing Dr Who and was put under intense media scrutiny in the run-up to opening night. David describes the newspaper articles with critics drawing up their top ten Hamlets of all time and wondering where David would fit in the list.
‘And you think, please Lord, let me just remember the lines. And then on the first night the News 24 truck draws up outside your dressing-room window, and you think, oh so now I’m going to fail on a global scale. Terrifying but also so thrilling to have those words at your command and to have that part in your palm for even a brief time. And you think, how do I begin? And of course you just begin by not worrying about it, which sounds terribly simple and isn’t, but there’s sort of no way round it other than just going, “Well, this character happens to say these lines here and they’re the first time they’ve ever been said.” ’
David Tennant holding Yorick’s skull, donated by André Tchaikovsky
Richard Burton said it helped him to remember that there’s always someone in the audience who will never have heard a single line of Hamlet before, so this is absolutely the first time for them. For other audience members, this is not the case. One night during a performance at the Old Vic Burton heard a dull rumble coming from the stalls; it was Winston Churchill sitting in the front row, reciting the words along with him.
Another of David’s favourite scenes is Act 2, Scene 2, when Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, ‘I can be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’.
‘You just get the sense that he hasn’t slept for days,’ says David. ‘He wants to sleep but can’t. And if you’ve ever had those long nights of the soul … it’s just that sense which is so vivid in that speech of “all I want to do is close my eyes but I can’t because it’s terrifying when I do, because my brain is so full of demons, and I hate myself so much”.’
Shakespeare talked a lot about sleep. He probably didn’t get enough of it or maybe he simply loved to sleep. The language he used – in Julius Caesar he calls it the ‘honey-heavy dew of slumber’; in Macbeth it’s ‘sore labour’s bath … balm of hurt minds’ – isn’t that fabulous?
The most identifiably visual moment of the play is the gravediggers’ scene, when Hamlet holds up the skull of the court jester and says, ‘Alas poor Yorick, I knew him’. It’s a memento of death, just like the ‘to be’ soliloquy. ‘I think the Yorick moment is much more specific,’ says David ‘because he’s looking at the material of a human being and he’s imagining that lips hung here and he’s trying to get his head round the actuality of death.’
The skull used in David’s performance was in fact a real one, donated by a concert pianist called André Tchaikovsky, who donated his head to the RSC in his will, to be used as a Yorick.
‘The first few performances holding a real human head was terribly potent because that is exactly what it’s about – we will become inanimate matter.’
As a young boy Mark Rylance spoke too fast to be understood by anyone. He had elocution lessons to slow him down, chanting tongue twisters and reciting poems and prose out loud. Mark found that learning bits of Shakespeare by heart and speaking the lines in front of people was the first time that he was able to express a whole range of emotions and ideas. He performed his first Hamlet as a sixteen-year-old school boy, then played him again aged twenty-eight and finally at forty. He reckons that’s about 400 performances in all.
When Mark was offered the part of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company it was a huge thing for him. He told the director, Peter Gill, that he planned to go up to Stratford immediately and read the old prompt scripts of all the luminaries who’d played the part, ‘like it was some big oak tree and I hoped I might add a little twig to the tree by being aware of all the choices they’d made’. Peter Gill told him not to be a fool – they’re all dead and gone or at least not playing the part any more. ‘ “It’s you who are alive now. Make sure it’s not set in outer space, but apart from that it’s you.” I said, “Yeah, but David Warner, he has such a …” “He was only wonderful because he was of his time,” said Gill, “and you’re of our time.” And that comment comes right down to the last ten seconds before you’re about to enter to say “To be, or not to be”.’
Just like Richard Burton, Mark had encounters with members of the audience who knew the play a bit too well. He had to be careful not to make his dramatic pauses too long. ‘In Pittsburgh there was a little old lady sitting next to her husband, and I came out right next to her in my pyjamas, all tearful and crying, and I said, “To be, or not to be”. And then I thought for a moment. And she turns to her husband and says, “That is the question”. And everybody heard it and laughed a bit. But I was able to say, “That is the question!” ’
Those sort of close-hand experiences with the audience stood Mark in good stead when he was appointed the first artistic director of the newly recreated Globe Theatre in 1995. He developed strong ideas about the relationship between actors and the audience, so that by the end of his ten years there he says he thought of the audience as more like fellow players. They were bringing the most important energy of the whole evening, a desire to hear a play. Mark likens it to a moment when he was playing Hamlet and delivering the line ‘Sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes’.
Mark Rylance as Hamlet
‘I remember performing the play out at Broadmoor special hospital and turning to a man and I wasn’t aware whether he was a nurse or a patient but I could see his imagination was completely with me. And in that moment between us I felt: who’s to say you’re the audience and I’m the actor? We’re in this together.’
Hamlet’s soliloquy
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause – there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Sir Christopher Ricks is one of the greatest literary critics of our day. He’s written seminal works on Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, edited the Oxford Book of Verse, has been Warren Professor at Boston University since 1986 and until 2009 was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He’s been described as holding all of English poetry in his head. He was also my very exacting professor at Bristol in the 1970s.
Photos of Ricks’ academic subjects adorn the walls of his elegantly spacious office at Boston’s Editorial Institute, which he now runs – the haggard, intense face of Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot besuited and respectable, and Bob Dylan, whom he has favoured with a compelling 500-page critical work entitled Dylan’s Visions of Sin. Sir Christopher is the critics’ critic. Scholarly, yes, with an extraordinary forensic ability for close textual analysis down to the use of the comma or apostrophe, but also very funny and in his seventy-seventh year as bright and acute as ever in not letting any lazy thinking get in the way of good criticism.
Stephen Fry almost had Ricks as his supervisor when they were both at Cambridge University in the 1980s. Now, thirty years later, he finally gets the chance of a one-to-one tutorial with the Professor. The ostensible subject is Beckett and Dylan and why poetry matters, but in typical Ricksian fashion they end up dancing all over the place. Here’s a flavour of the Ricks Masterclass, kicking off with the difference between poetry and prose.
Bob Dylan, a poet songwriter
CR: I think poetry is to be distinguished always from prose. They have different systems of punctuation.
SF: That’s a really good point because it’s a game people play to try and devise the best, most compact, most necessary and sufficient definition of poetry as opposed to prose. And you said different punctuation which sounds trivial but it strikes at the heart of it in a way, doesn’t it?
CR: Well, I think that it does. The line endings are significant in poetry or verse. They carry significance.
SF: So it’s the shape on the page. T.S. Eliot said that poetry is not about expressing emotion or personality, it’s almost the opposite. And people might say, but surely poetry is the excess, the demonstration of personality and emotion?
CR: You’re right, especially in a world in which too much is being made of the idea that poetry is self-expression. Though Eliot is always resourceful enough to know that you need a multiplicity of ways of talking about things. That is, a poem is in some ways like a person. In another way it’s like a plant. In another way it’s like a beautiful building. We need all these figures of speech. The key term from him, I think, is when talking about intelligence either in criticism or in poetry – he thinks of it as judging. It’s the discernment of exactly what and how much you feel in any given situation. So it doesn’t make poetry or literature the realm of feeling as against prose as the realm of fact or proof or argumentation. I think it’s a very, very beautiful formula in what it does with both thinking and feeling.
SF: And it requires a huge amount of honesty. Direct confrontation.
CR: Great honesty, including doubts about the rhetoric of honesty. So as one says, ‘I’ll be completely honest with you,’ as though in the ordinary way I was doing no such thing.
SF: Yes quite. We’ve started with Eliot, which is for some people the start of modernism and the time when a lot of the public turned off poetry. But while we’re on the subject of him there’s a precision, an almost miraculous ability to create lines which stick in the head like music. Anybody who’s read Eliot will probably say he’s one of the easiest poets to memorize a phrase from. And I wonder where that comes from. Why, for example, ‘the young man carbuncular’ and not ‘the carbuncular young man’ in a modern poem?
CR: Well it would partly be that – the striking turn of phrase, and that is indeed a turn, isn’t it? What it’s doing is imitating languages, ancient or modern, in which an adjective comes after a noun. The human form divine becomes the young man carbuncular and so on. So there’s something about moving. You’ve got to allow a shape to it. So I think he’s always interested in resisting either the tyranny of the eye or the tyranny of the ear. Each is inclined to take over. The eye will say every time you use the word ‘image’ it’s clear that imagination is seeing things. But every time you turn to a figure of speech that comes from hearing, you seem to be deaf to this.
SF: That’s a very good example of the close attention to language that people might find astonishing in your work. You go almost to the molecular and atomic level of a sentence and into the syllables and the actual structure of words and you find in them an energy and they are often the thing that causes the whole work to show itself.
And I suppose as much as anything, the problem that poets have to confront is that they’re making their art out of something that is common to all humanity. Unlike a painter who can go to a shop and get turpentine and acrylics and canvas and brushes or a musician who has a special language of augmented sevenths and special machines made of brass and wood. There’s another Eliot phrase – ‘to purify the dialect of the tribe’. So a poet has to take the same thing I use when I order a pizza over the phone and turn that into art. And does that mean poetry has two choices? One is to embrace the everyday and the other to try and get rid of it and to find a noble and elevated language.CR: I think it’s always having to do both. I think poetry is very like ordinary life. It’s continually wanting some arrangement of things that are new and surprising to it. It’s continually interested in the fulfilment of expectations and in the arrival of surprise.
SF: Yes. You want to be surprised but you also want the comfort of reassurance that you know them.
CR: The poet Donald Davy talks about how the words of a poem should succeed one another like the events of a well-told story. They should be at once surprising and just. That is, it’s easy to be surprised if you don’t care whether the effect is a just one. It’s easy to be just if you don’t care whether it’s surprising. Bob Dylan loves rhyming ‘new’ and ‘true’ because every artist is in the business of finding something new to say that is also true. It’s easy to find something new to say. It’s easy to find something true to say but these people come up with very extraordinary things that are at once new and true.
SF: Again it suggests the Eliot line in the ‘Four Quartets’ about arriving at a place and seeing it for the first time. There is this sense in poetry and even in just great writing of being in a familiar place and being assured by the authority of a writer that you trust them and yet also being surprised by them because they make you look with new eyes and things. And is that something that you think is innate in that there is a certain class of person who can do this and they do it with words when someone else might do it with music?
CR: Dr Johnson believed that there were talents and you employed them in any way that struck you. It’s as if you were at the North Pole and you could walk south in many different directions. But what you do is essentially exactly the same, you walk south. On the other hand some people are amazingly numerate. They can look at a spreadsheet and see that the figures have been rigged and fixed. They can see that the books are being cooked. I could look at equations and symbols and numbers for ever and be blank. What about you?
SF: I’m exactly the same. I don’t understand. And as you say some people are like a spider on the web – every twitch of the filament means something to them. And they can chase it down. So yes there is the gift of language.
CR: Well, I think poets are really intelligent, and resourceful poets are much less vulnerable than you might think because their self criticism is alive to what might be the criticism of others. Pretty well all great writing has a warning about over-valuing writing in it. At some point or other Shakespeare will tell you not that plays or dramatic representations tell no truths but that you must remember they also tell lies. And so words half reveal and half conceal the truth within. And every great writer has intimated some such things at some point.
SF: I think that’s absolutely right. Language is a bit like a dress. A dress can reveal the form, can flatter the form, can exaggerate the form, can give a real sense of the beauty and elegance of a particular form but it also hides deformities. It also masks and covers nudity; covers the passionate side of us, our fleshly side. And words are constantly doing that.
There’s also this idea that there’s great literature: Leavis and his great tradition and Harold Bloom and his sense of the canon of writers, but can they include in that twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures from what is often called popular culture – like Bob Dylan who you’ve written about?CR: I think Dylan uses words with extraordinary effect. The effect is related to a different system of punctuation – the speed and pace at which it goes is determined by him, his music and his voice. He changes those and the beautiful thing he says about the songs is, my songs lead their own lives, and it’s lives in the plural not because each song has a life but because each song has lots of lives. I think again and again Dylan is very good when you can imagine an unimaginative creative writing school telling him he’d got it wrong. I think that he’s simply astonishingly imaginative with words.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
That poem was written by W. H. Auden, but you may well know it better from the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, where it was recited during the funeral of the title. It’s extraordinary how something can have such impact, be so succinct and have such emotional truth behind it.
For anyone who’s had to organize a funeral, the choice of words is one of the most difficult things to get right. In the past, the traditional funeral passages from the King James Bible had little competition. But in our more secular times many prefer not to invoke religion at all. So what do we do when we want to express the grief and love and sadness of the loss of someone? Music is integral, and, if it’s right, the emotional heft will inevitably lead to tears.
So what led Four Weddings scriptwriter Richard Curtis to choose the Auden poem for the funeral scene, a choice which catapulted sales of Auden’s poetry beyond anything he’d enjoyed while still alive?
Richard explains with his unfailing modesty that he didn’t feel up to the job.
‘Tragically in my life, in every film I’ve ever done, the single best moment in the film has nothing to do with me at all. I was writing a moving funeral scene so I thought I’d better leave it to a better man. I’d always been told I should study Auden and I didn’t understand most of his poems. And I remember being very thrilled when I came across that one. And I think it’s no coincidence that it’s in fact called ‘Funeral Blues’ and it’s a lyric; it was meant to be sung. And that is symptomatic of the fact that I’m passionate about lyrics in a way more than poems.’
It’s become the thing to choose songs rather hymns or prayers at funerals. ‘I Did It My Way’, ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’ or ‘Angels’ may be a bit clichéd, but people clearly feel their lyrics do the job better than a poem or a reading. They can express a communal emotion that everybody can share.
Richard has a theory that we don’t have access to poems now in the way we once did. The Romantic poets were celebrities in their day. People were outraged by the work of Byron because they knew about him, he was famous. Nowadays it’s hard for a poem to break through into the popular culture, so what happened with Four Weddings was a rare example of a poem being heard by enough people to get a passionate reaction.
Poems are often perfect word for word, pop lyrics less so, although, as Richard is keen to point out, there are some wonderful wordsmiths in the world of pop lyrics. He cites Paul Simon as one lyricist who has written some extraordinary, powerful songs.
‘Every day I think of that line from “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” And it lodges in your head, and as you go through life you realize people are only hearing a bit of what you say because it’s the bit that suits them. Rufus Wainwright’s song “Dinner At Eight” is about him and his father, and there is no finer expression of the argument between a son and a father who abandoned him. And there are the huge, big popular ones that everybody knows. They become the fabric of your life, and those lyrics are carried around with you and reflect your moods and feelings.’
Richard is in full flow now. ‘If you pick up a poem for the first time you have to piece it together. It’s much harder. Whereas a song by Coldplay like “Fix You” has the lyrics “I will try to fix you.” It’s very direct, and the fact that the lyrics may not be as well crafted is compensated by the beauty of the tune, and is enough to turn it into something deeper. And on top of that you have the feeling that your whole generation heard that song together, so it has a binding effect. If you stood in a stadium with 45,000 other people who know those words, it’s the Nuremberg Rally of pop.’
He’s right, of course. Pop songs are a brilliant way of people sharing a culture. But, despite his love of popular lyrics, does Richard still read poetry? He had to read lots of it at Oxford. He laughs.
‘I think there was a six-month period in which I understood it. I tried to read something by Yeats the other day which I know used to be my favourite poem. It’s gone completely. It’s as if I’ve forgotten the language.’
Paul Simon, right, with Art Garfunkel
Music
If you’ve ever wondered why you sing in the bath (if you don’t, ignore this bit); or why you spent all those hours and hours as a teenager, shutting out the annoying world of parents and other people, glued to Radio 1 and the charts; or why the hairs on your neck prickle and your heart beats faster whenever Wagner’s music fills the air – well, if you’ve ever wondered, sorry, but nobody really knows. To be precise, scientists can’t agree on what it is about music and singing that touches us so profoundly, and whether it’s something to do with our evolution. Are we hard-wired to be musical?
Music is universal. It’s found in all cultures across the ages, and archaeologists have unearthed musical instruments dating from as far back as 34,000 BC. The mystery is why humans have been singing and making music virtually since prehistoric times. What purpose does it serve?
Evolutionary psychologists have a few theories. Some think that music originated as a way for males to impress and attract females, rather like brightly coloured birds competing with each other to produce the most elaborate and complex songs. In other words, it’s a tool of evolution and natural selection: the male with the biggest lungs and catchiest song gets the girl. Another idea is that women were the original music-makers, and it goes all the way back to the universal instinct of the mother crooning and singing to her child. Experiments show that mothers automatically make their speech more musical when they talk to their babies, more lilting and melodic, and the theory is that music perhaps evolved as a sort of prehistoric baby-pacifying tool. Human babies can’t just cling on to their mothers’ bodies the way other primates do, so perhaps the singing was a way of the mother keeping contact with her children when she had to put them down to work.
And then there’s a third theory that identifies music as a sort of social glue, a way of bonding early human communities, much in the same way that football supporters or people in church or families round the piano singing together enhances a sense of tribal identity. The evolutionary psychologists trace this back to the necessity for early tribes to work together for survival: communal singing demands coordination, bringing many voices together, and the theory goes that this is a way of practising for the kind of teamwork crucial in hunting or fighting for survival.
Interestingly, researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute discovered, when they scanned musicians’ brains, that listening to music stimulated exactly the same part of the brain which food and sex affect. In other words, music lit up the basic, instinctual, pleasure centres of the brain.
However, others dismiss these ideas. The Harvard linguist Steven Pinker caused an uproar when he addressed a conference of cognitive psychologists in 1997 and told them that their field of music perception was, basically, a waste of time because music is just an evolutionary accident, a redundant by-product of language: ‘Music is auditory cheesecake,’ he said, ‘an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of several of our mental faculties.’
For many people – whatever the neurological and evolutionary theories – music is another form of language. A way of communicating without words.
Music is universal and serves as a social glue
Much research has been done on the use of music therapy with people suffering from dementia. They find verbal communication very difficult because the disease causes aphasia and amnesia. If you can’t find the words, if you can’t remember who you are, how do you express yourself and connect yourself to the people and the frightening world around you? Music therapists use singing and music in place of words. Singing a song with someone with Alzheimer’s doesn’t put demands on them; it doesn’t require the answer to a question; it doesn’t make the world even more confusing than it is. Singing is a way of being together, of inviting the person to take part, of somehow bypassing the damaged part of the brain that can no longer form the words. It releases tension and calms anxiety because it opens a door to expression when all the other doors are barred and shut tight. Music is part of who we are. It travels further, down and down into that part of ourselves which is older, deeper, mysterious.
Auditory cheesecake indeed.
If you were to chant ‘Helps you work, rest and play’, the chances are most people will respond with ‘A Mars a day’. Or if you sing, ‘Now hands that do dishes …’, a surprising number of you will feel the urge to sing ‘with mild green Fairy Liquid’. Someone younger will have the same automatic response to ‘Just do it’, immediately associating it with Nike. For just as succinct language can have a powerful effect on us through poetry and song, so the perfectly turned phrase can enter our subconscious, influencing our actions and decision-making. Nowhere is the use of the clever slogan seen more explicitly than in the language of advertising.
From an ancient Egyptian town crier hired to shout out news of the arrival of a goods ship to a computer pop-up ad offering the secrets to a flat belly, we have always found ways of attracting the public’s attention to a product or business. Advertising may have become much more sophisticated, but wherever communities and commerce exist, so too does the advert in some shape or another.
We’re been shouting our wares and promoting our products for thousands of years. Historians reckon that outdoor shop signs were civilization’s first adverts. Five thousand years ago the Babylonians hung the symbols of their trades over their shop doors, a practice still used today in areas of poor literacy or in some of the traditional shops like barbers – the red-and-white pole – or the three golden balls of the pawnbroker. A poster found in Thebes from 1000 BC offers a gold coin for the capture of a runaway slave. The Romans advertised the latest gladiator fight on papyrus posters and seem to have introduced the world’s first billboards with their practice of whitewashing walls and painting announcements on them.
The advent of printing and spread of literacy meant advertising could expand into handbills and newspapers. A newspaper ad for toothpaste appeared in the London Gazette in 1660: ‘Most excellent and proved Dentifrice to scour and cleanse the Teeth, making them white as ivory.’
An early example of a Wedgwood ad in a newspaper, c.1769
The Industrial Revolution and the greater availability of factory-produced consumer goods brought a growing awareness amongst manufacturers that they could create a need for a product amongst the middle and lower classes able to afford luxury items. Our friend Dr Samuel Johnson wrote one of the first articles on advertising in a 1759 edition of his magazine The Idler: ‘Promise, large Promise, is the soul of an Advertisement … The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection, that it is not easy to propose any improvement.’ He wasn’t very prescient, for at that very moment one Joshua Wedgwood was founding his pottery workshop and he had very big ambitions about improving advertising technique. Wedgwood was one of the first industrialists to recognize the importance of creating a market through advertising and used newspapers ads, posters, publicity stunts, give-away promotions and money-back guarantees to persuade people of the need for a must-have Wedgwood vase or a twenty-piece dinner service.
Increased competition amongst manufacturers and a growing public sophistication opened the way for agencies in the late nineteenth century who promised to create and run advertising campaigns for the client. Advertising had become a profession. The advent of radio and television extended the mass reach of advertising, revolutionizing its persuasive potential. This is the world of advertising we’re all familiar with – the TV commercials and product placements in films and internet pop-ups.
On the reception desk of the west London ad agency Leo Burnett is a large bowl of green apples, a reminder of the humble beginnings of the founder, Mr Burnett, who established his agency in Chicago in 1935 with just one account, a staff of eight and a bowl of apples on the front desk. Legend goes that, when word got around Depression-hit Chicago that Leo Burnett was giving apples to visitors, a newspaper columnist wrote, ‘It won’t be long till Leo Burnett is selling apples on the street corner instead of giving them away.’ Leo was a wizard with visual imagery and created the iconic brands for the Jolly Green Giant canned peas and corn, Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger – ‘They’re GR-R-R-E-A-T’ – and most famously the Marlboro Man for Philip Morris, who were persuaded to repackage their woman’s cigarette as a rugged man’s smoke. Today, Leo Burnett is one of the world’s leading advertising organizations.
Don Bowen is a creative director at the agency’s London office and currently in charge of the Kellogg’s and Daz accounts. He began in the business thirty years ago as a copywriter and manages to turn on its head the adage of a picture being worth a thousand words.
‘Words are tremendously important in advertising because there have been hardly any ads where there have been only images that can make a lot of sense. The Economist has done this, once or twice, but most of the time most ads have words in them, and very often the words can be worth a thousand pictures.’
Don gives the example of the Volkswagen advertising campaign in the 1960s. The American ad agency DDB faced an apparently impossible task – selling Hitler’s favourite car to the Americans, a decade or so after the Second World War. What they came up with is known simply as ‘The Lemon’ – a black-and-white picture of a Beetle car with the one word, ‘Lemon’, underneath. The story below explained that this car had been rejected by the quality-control inspectors because of a blemish on the glove box. ‘We pluck the lemon; you get the plums,’ ran the end tag. It intrigued readers that a company should be critical of one of its own cars. Then it hooked them with its assurances of rigorous inspection. It was an approach to advertising that the Lemon’s creator, William Bernbach, saw as part of a creative revolution, rethinking how advertising works. (For the car rental company Avis, his agency made an apparent failure a virtue: ‘We’re only Number 2. We try harder.’)
The 1960s Volkswagon campaign was part of a creative revolution in advertising
‘Lemon’ is an example of what copywriters call the endline, like ‘Probably the best lager in the world,’ or ‘Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach,’ or ‘Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it.’ Huge amounts of time are spent getting them right, distilling a number of ideas into one three-, four- or five-word end line. ‘English is a particularly good language for being able to play gags, to word play, to sum up an idea pithily,’ says Bowen, ‘like “You’ll never put a better bit of butter on your knife.” ’
TV commercials in the UK particularly like to use endlines and some of the best slogans (and quirky storylines) have become as much a part of our culture as classic TV shows. Many of us can recite advert slogans from our childhood as easily as we can chant a nursery rhyme. ‘Don’t forget the Fruit Gums, Mum,’ Beanz Means Heinz, ‘All because the lady loves Milk Tray.’ ‘Opal Fruits! Made to make your mouth water’, ‘For Mash get Smash!’, ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’
‘The end line has got to resonate with people,’ says Bowen. ‘There are thousands of end lines out there, most of which we don’t care about. But when you get it right and there’s some emotional connection with the end line, then I think you can tell the story which leads up to it again and again, which is what makes the words so powerful.’
Today the notion of advertising as an art of persuasion is seen as rather an old model. The days of the unique selling propositions –USPs – have gone. One detergent really isn’t that different from another. So you have to attract people to your brand rather than persuade them that it’s the right product. Advertising has become much more about engaging people emotionally, and the most successful way of doing this is by creating a story about the brand.
Don’s favourite ad from his own agency in recent years is the McDonald’s poems.
Now the laborers and cablers and council-motion tablers were just passing by …
and the first-in types and lurking types and like-to lose their-gherkin types and suddenly-just-burst-in types were just passing by.
He likes the attention to detail of the words, the internal rhymes, the little word jokes. The most interesting thing of all was – ‘it was so human’.
Does Bowen worry that this storytelling in advertising, the communal appeal of the sales pitch, will be lost as the consumer is targeted with individual messages and offers via the internet?
‘I think there will always be good stories to tell. Whenever it’s difficult in advertising, I always say to myself, this brand, with any luck, is going to be around in fifty years, and somebody is going to need to advertise it. So there will be a story to tell. The question is just finding it.’
The Most Famous Ad Man in the World
He has the looks, the pipe and the suit of one of the original Mad Men in the American TV drama set in the advertising world of the 1950s and 60s. Dubbed the ‘King of Madison Avenue’ and the ‘Pope of Modern Advertising’, David Ogilvy rewrote the rules of advertising with his emphasis on brand image, consumer research and the Big Idea. ‘Unless your advertising contains a big idea,’ he insisted, ‘it will pass like a ship in the night.’
Iconic adverts demonstrate the power of the word
Born in Surrey in 1911, this eccentric Anglo-Scot started his working life as a sous-chef in Paris after being sent down from Oxford University. A job selling Agas, the most expensive cookers on the market, door to door in Scotland during the Depression gave him the experience of direct selling (albeit to stately homes and convents) which influenced his later career. He wrote the company’s sales manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the Aga Cooker, which began ‘In Great Britain, there are twelve million households. One million of these own motor cars. Only ten thousand own Aga Cookers. No household which can afford a motor car can afford to be without an Aga.’ The twenty-four-year-old Ogilvy offered a variety of personal tips including: ‘The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bull dog with the manners of a spaniel. If you have any charm, ooze it.’
David Ogilvy and Mad Men’s Don Draper
After some initial training in the ad agency Mather & Crowther, he left London at the end of the 1930s to seek his fortune in the United States. There he was hired by pollster George Gallup to work with him at his newly founded audience research institute; he and Ogilvy spent months travelling from New Jersey to Hollywood and back, quizzing the public about their movie star preferences and selling the research to studio heads and movie producers. After working for the British Secret Intelligence during the war and a brief period living with the Amish as a tobacco farmer, Ogilvy finally moved to New York in 1948. With virtually no experience in advertising and, as he recalled, ‘no credentials, no clients and only $6,000 in the bank’ $6,000 in the bank’, he opened up his own agency in a two-roomed office with a staff of two. Within a decade he’d built Ogilvy & Mather into an advertising powerhouse that attracted the biggest clients in America. He employed all the skills he’d learned in door-to-door selling and audience research along with a flair for language, a strong visual sense and a personal showmanship – he was known to dress in a full-length black cape with scarlet lining.
The bulk of Ogilvy’s notable advertising campaigns were produced in these early years. He called them his Big Ideas. He outlined how to recognize one by asking five questions. ‘Did it make me gasp when I first saw it? Do I wish I had thought of it myself? Is it unique? Does it fit the strategy to perfection? Could it be used for thirty years?’
An early iconic campaign was for a small clothing company called Hathaway. On the way to the photo shoot, Ogilvy stopped to buy some eye patches. The photograph, ‘The Man in the Hathaway shirt’, caused a sensation. The clothing firm couldn’t keep up with demand. The eye patch had given the ad what Ogilvy called ‘Story Appeal’. The reader was intrigued by the model with one eye and wanted to find out more. Other campaign successes followed: ‘At sixty miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock,’ and ‘Only Dove is one-quarter cleansing cream’ (which helped make Dove America’s bestselling soap). When Ogilvy won the Shell account in 1960, other major American advertisers – General Foods, Campbell Soups, American Express – jumped on board.
Ogilvy was credited with introducing the novel idea (for the 1950s certainly) of the intelligent consumer. In his bestselling Confessions of an Advertising Man he included his most famous aphorism ‘The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don’t insult her.’
Words were the backbone of Ogilvy’s campaigns. His biographer, Kenneth Roman, worked for him for twenty-six years and described the ad man at work.
The eye patch gave the ad ‘Story Appeal’ and caused a sensation
Being edited by Ogilvy was like being operated on by a great surgeon who could put his hand on the only tender organ in your body. You could feel him put his finger on the wrong word, the soft phrase, the incomplete thought. But there was no pride of authorship, and he could be quite self-critical. Someone found a personally notated copy of one of his books in which he had written cross comments about his own writing: ‘Rubbish,’ ‘Rot!’ ‘Nonsense.’ He would send his major documents around for comment, with a note: ‘Please improve.’
Ogilvy retreated to a chateau in France in the 1970s, unconvinced by the direction advertising was taking – less direct-sell, more art form.
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative’. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip.’
When Ogilvy died in 1999, the Leo Burnet agency placed a full-page ad in the trade papers. It read: ‘David Ogilvy 1911 – Great brands live forever.’
Oratory is a powerful ally of the written word because a great public speech is a potent means of communication. It can persuade, move, convince, agitate, enlighten and – yes – manipulate, and history is littered with examples of oratorical tours de force, from Cicero’s attacks on Mark Antony to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’.
The art of oratory goes back to ancient Greece, where public speaking was considered an essential part of education. Socrates, Aristotle and Plato discuss it at length, and it remained a central part of Western liberal humanistic education into the twentieth century. Lawyers, politicians and entertainers all need to be good orators, and it comes in handy if you’re asked to be a best man or after-dinner speaker. Wit, humour and the habit of reasoned arguments are all part of the armoury of the orator. It’s not essential but it helps if you believe in what you’re saying, as the best examples of oratory bear out.
The art of oratory is more than just the words and the arguments. The American writer Gore Vidal pointed out that in ancient Rome the senators were really drama critics, critiquing not only the contents of one another’s speeches, but the style of delivery. And former President Bill Clinton says: ‘A lot of communication has nothing to do with the words; a lot of it is just your body language, or your tone of voice, or the way you look in your eyes’.
Clinton is one of the best-placed (and highest-paid) contemporary orators to remind us of the challenge in delivering a truly great speech:
‘You measure the impact of your words,’ he says, ‘not on the beauty or the emotion of the moment but on whether you change not only the way people think, but the way they feel.’
There is fine oratory to be found in fiction too. Shakespeare is a great place to look, of course: Mark Antony’s funeral oration over the body of Julius Caesar in Act 3. The opening words – ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!’ – along with ‘To be, or not to be’ and ‘Out, damn spot’ and a dozen others – must be among the most-often-quoted lines of Shakespeare, but the whole speech is a massive 137 lines of verse, in which Antony works the crowd and succeeds in changing the minds and hearts of the Roman mob. He uses every oratorical trick in the book, every tool of rhetoric to turn their hostility towards him and Caesar into grief for their murdered emperor and rage against Brutus. Gradually, he builds his argument by suggestion, ambiguity, calculated flashes of anger and grief, hypnotically repeated cadences – ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ – and by persuasion, artifice, sneaky cleverness and superb rhetoric, he brings the crowd over to his side. It’s a piece of theatre, performed by a duplicitous man who is a master of oratory.
Back to real orators, past and present. There are all kinds of different styles of oratory, and obviously they change over time as tastes and traditions change. The demagogic style of someone like Hitler certainly did work once, but we’re not taken in by it in the same way any more. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is one of the most powerful speakers to have come from a background of preaching, a tradition which creates a kind of poetry of words and rhythm. ‘Words,’ he says, ‘paint pictures; words draw our imagination’, and help us to believe we can achieve great things.
The Reverend Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963, and Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’ drew heavily on this tradition of church preaching. The pastor is both the composer and the conductor, delivering the words and orchestrating the response from the audience by the pace of delivery, the rhythm of the words and pauses, the rhetorical questions, the ‘call and response’ sections where he knows the audience will murmur in agreement, or repeat a phrase. You can hear it when you listen to ‘I have a dream’ and ‘Yes, we can’, these echoes where people accompany the main voice, like background singers.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of the most powerful preachers in America
A way with words has always been an asset, and, when used for political ends, or in times of crisis, it’s worth a hundred battalions. In ancient Greece, Demosthenes employed his powerful oratorical skills trying to warn the citizens about the imminent danger of invasion by Philip of Macedon. When Philip advanced on Thrace, the Athenians called an assembly to debate whether or not to heed the great orator’s advice. Demosthenes was sick of people taking liberty and the Athenian way of life for granted, and he boldly called upon the assembly to rise up and take action.
US Senator Barack Obama at the ‘Yes, we can’ rally in the Johnson Hall at George Mason University
It is this fate, I solemnly assure you, that I dread for you, when the time comes that you make your reckoning, and realize that there is no longer anything that can be done. May you never find yourselves, men of Athens, in such a position! Yet in any case, it were better to die ten thousand deaths, than to do anything out of servility towards Philip or to sacrifice any of those who speak for your good. A noble recompense did the people in Oreus receive, for entrusting themselves to Philip’s friends, and thrusting Euphraeus aside! And a noble recompense the democracy of Eretria, for driving away your envoys, and surrendering to Cleitarchus! They are slaves, scourged and butchered.
After his rousing speech, the assembly all cried out, ‘To arms! To arms!’
Brevity is also a great attribute. Perhaps the most famous speech in American history is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. It was delivered on the site of the newly consecrated cemetery in Gettysburg, but ironically it was never intended to be the main event. The principal speech was by the former Secretary of State, Edward Everett, which lasted a good two hours and ran to nearly 14,000 words. Lincoln’s, by contrast, lasted two minutes and was only 275 words long. Today, who remembers Everett’s words?
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
And then there are the speeches whose power lies in simplicity, in quiet, heartfelt, searing honesty. In the 1870s, the Native American leader Chief Joseph tried to resist his tribe of Nez Perce being moved to a reservation by the US military. After months of fighting and a forced march of 1,300 miles towards the Canadian border, he surrendered with these words:
I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.
Chief Joseph’s surrender speech may have immortalized him as a great orator, but it did little to help his cause. The US military reneged on their agreement, and Chief Joseph never returned to his homeland in Idaho.
One of the greatest of all orators was Winston Churchill. His use of the language, cadence, repetition and the honesty implied in the simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon words in his famous ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech can still raise goosebumps:
Chief Joseph became immortalized as a great orator
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
The repetition of the same phrase – ‘we shall fight’ – is the same device that Martin Luther King used in ‘I have a dream.’ And every word from ‘We shall defend’ onwards (whether Churchill chose them consciously or not) is Anglo-Saxon, apart from ‘surrender’, which is French. Churchill’s speech worked because it spoke to everyone. As the American journalist Edward R. Murrow commented, ‘He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.’
Winston Churchill on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on VE Day, 1945
Propaganda, said the English academic Francis Cornford, is ‘that branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies’.
Advertising may have moved on since the Golden Days of Madison Avenue, but propaganda has never shied away from its primary role of explicit persuasion. In its most basic form, it’s about disseminating information for any given cause, and it’s been around for as long as we’ve had organized societies with messages to promote.
It doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining or subtle. Some of the best British propaganda was produced in the dozens of films made during the Second World War. Of course, some of them are truly awful, cringe-making examples of pragmatic jingoism, but others have become classics, like the 1942 Went the Day Well? (based on a Graham Greene short story), which tells how a vanguard of Germans, disguised as British soldiers, infiltrates a sleepy, idyllic English village to prepare the way for invasion. The villagers eventually manage to fight back, with a combination of British pluck, ingenuity and surprising ruthlessness (in one scene the local postmistress kills a German with an axe), and Britain is saved. The purpose, of course, was to warn against the danger of invasion (which, in fact, by 1942 was not so real) and ram home the need for constant vigilance; to portray German brutality and evil and, above all, to extol British patriotism, sacrifice and bravery – all standard war propaganda.
But it’s war propaganda done with some style and artistry, with touches of pathos, and the occasional satirical side-swipe at other enemies – like the great line, completely un-pc nowadays, of course, when a young village lad is being urged to do his part in defending the British Isles. ‘You know what “morale” is, don’t you?’ someone asks him. ‘Yes,’ he declares, ‘it’s what the wops ain’t got!’ There’s black humour, rousing British cheeriness and flashes of shocking realism which knock against the rural idyll cliché, all of which make it a more powerful piece of cinema, and therefore a more powerful piece of propaganda.
Propaganda can be blunt or subtle, blindingly obvious or relentlessly and cleverly suggestive, but its aim has always been to persuade and get everyone on message, whatever the method. It’s been used by regimes to lie, dissemble, exhort, convert and cover up. Totalitarian regimes have created huge ministries of propaganda, while democracies have given birth to their bastard offspring – the PR companies and spin doctors.
Propaganda films were hugely popular during the Second World War
It’s been wildly successful, but thankfully we usually end up seeing through it. In works of fiction like George Orwell’s 1984, the propaganda ministry realizes that to really change people’s minds it needs to change the language itself. If you can’t say it, you won’t think or feel it. So the Newspeak dictionary gets slimmer and slimmer as more and more words are ‘disappeared’. Newspeak, where only prescribed words can be used, is the propagandists’ dream.
Newspeak
‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words’ (1984)
Newspeak (pronounced New-speak) is the fictional language created by George Orwell in his novel 1984. It’s closely based on English but with a vastly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. The aim of the totalitarian government of Oceania is to make language so basic, so sterile that any alternative way of thinking to that prescribed by the regime (thoughtcrime) is impossible. In a nightmarish twist on Sapir–Whorfism, how can you have ideas of freedom or rebellion if there are no words for them?
‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible,’ explains the character Syme, a Newspeak specialist, ‘because there will be no words in which to express it … [We’re] cutting the language down to the bone … Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.’
Richness of language is anathema to the Party. Words must be stripped of superlatives or negatives and reduced to the absolute minimum. ‘Uncold’ for warm; ‘unlight’ for dark. Good and evil and all nuances in between are distilled into six words: good, plus good, doubleplusgood, ungood, plusungood and doubleplusungood.
Many of Orwell’s Newspeak words appear to be modelled on Esperanto. For instance, in Esperanto the opposite of good, bona, is malbona, and its extreme is malbonega – literally ‘very ungood’. When he travelled to Paris in 1928 for his ‘down and out’ period, Orwell is thought to have stayed with his aunt Nellie and her partner, Eugène Lanti, a leading Esperantist. According to his biographer Bernard Crick, Orwell told a friend that he had gone to Paris ‘partly to improve his French’, but had to leave his first lodgings because the landlord and his wife only spoke Esperanto – ‘and it was an ideology, not just a language’. So, whether out of antipathy to Esperanto or a fascination with a language constructed for political aims, Orwell was clearly inspired.
‘Thoughtcrime’ would be impossible and everyone would speak ‘Newspeak’ in Orwell’s 1984
In 1984, Newspeak was still being introduced as an official language, but the expectation was that Oldspeak, the Newspeak term for English, would have disappeared by 2050; all literature from the past – apart from technical manuals – would be unintelligible and untranslatable. The ‘all men are equal’ passage from the Declaration of Independence would be reduced to a single word: crimethink.
Orwell’s 1984 introduced an astonishing number of words and concepts denoting totalitarian authority into the English language – Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, doublethink, unperson, thoughtcrime. Chilling slogans resonating as clearly today as they did over sixty years ago – ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’
It’s an idea far more powerful and frightening than the most destructive of weapons: loss of language leads to loss of our history and, ultimately, loss of our selves.
In the Western liberal tradition we’re pretty sniffy about overt propaganda – for us, it’s a negative, dishonest tool – but other systems and ideologies see it as a positive means of motivating the population and keeping it under control.
One of the first modern propagandists was Josef Goebbels, who became Hitler’s Reich Minister for Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Public Enlightenment and Propaganda). It’s chillingly ironic that he should use the inference of the Enlightenment in his title when he was the master of the dark arts, but then ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘Work Makes You Free’), the slogan that adorned the entrance to the extermination camps, was hardly a promise they kept.
As editor of Der Angriff (The Attack) Goebbels masterminded Hitler’s attacks on his opponents, which were particularly effective in the election of 1932, when Hitler become Chancellor. He used radio, cinema and spectacular demonstrations, which culminated in the famous Nuremberg rally. His showmanship helped to get the Nazi message across and then keep the German people firmly corralled within the Nazi ideology, but his techniques were just as often crude. He was interested in effectiveness, not art. ‘Good propaganda is successful,’ he declared. ‘Bad fails to achieve its desired result.’
To this end Goebbels exploited racism, xenophobia and envy to the limit and sold the idea of the master race and the thousand-year Reich. His power and influence dwindled the more successful the Nazi Party was in extinguishing any opposition. There was simply less need for that sort of propaganda when no one dared complain or criticize, and by the beginning of the war his main task had been accomplished. What he did understand, however, was the need for the German people to have some light relief from the rigours of war and he became the David Selznick of the Nazi movie industry, producing an endless supply of frothy comedies and romances from the famous UFA studios on the outskirts of Berlin. It’s hard to imagine Nazi comedies now.
The propaganda – the control of what people were to believe, and the way they were to live – went far beyond overt messages and the production of films. Goebbels’ influence was pervasive. Holiday complexes and cruise ships were built for the Nazi worker. The KdF (Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy) became the largest tourist operator in the world, and Goebbels’ ministry was even given the task of enticing foreign tourists to spend their holidays in Germany. By 1939 over 25 million people had been on KdF holidays – though, unsurprisingly, few came from overseas. KdF also built the first VW Beetle and marketed it as the workers’ car – a subtle blend of propaganda and advertising.
The thing about propaganda is, it doesn’t matter what the message and purpose is – it could be anything – the point is finding ways of promoting it and ensuring that people believe it. Take Stalin in the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao in China, masters of propaganda both – they could give Goebbels a run for his money. They used similar methods to the Nazis, but they were promising different results: a utopian socialist society, rather than the thousand-year Reich.
Adolf Hitler demonstrated impressive showmanship
All these dictatorships made extensive use of the printed word, speeches and, especially, posters. Stalin’s ambitious Five Year Plans, with their slogans exhorting workers to up their quotas and defeat the imperialists, were none too subtle, but the images of a smiling benevolent Uncle Joe did much to win the proletarian heart. In China, propaganda was taken to a new level with Mao’s continual revolutions within the revolution, each new wave designed to direct and control, under the guise of improving the nation and the lives of the people.
The Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, for example, was a short-lived experiment in asking intellectuals to criticize the direction of the revolution. ‘Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land,’ was Mao’s initial premise. But when the criticisms became personal attacks on him he ruthlessly squashed it and effectively killed off any further intellectual debate.
German propaganda was explicit and forceful. This example compares healthy German children with hungry, barefoot Russian children
Propaganda turns language upside down. It twists meaning and says the opposite of what it does. (It’s all in 1984 – have a look again. ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’) In his attempts to neutralize any further division within the party, Mao launched ‘The Great Leap Forward’ in 1958. Propaganda was used extensively to mobilize the masses and change the country from a predominantly agrarian economy to an industrial one. But there was no leap forward. The opposite happened, with catastrophic results. An estimated 20–40 million people died of starvation as the economy went into freefall.
And that’s where another side of propaganda kicks in. When the reality is not as the propaganda promises, just keep pumping out the message until people are swamped. Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ was one of the tools of revolution which flooded the consciousness of millions of citizens with the wisdom and pithy sayings of the Chairman. It was impossible to escape the message. The People’s Liberation Army General Political Department printed a total of 1,005,549,800 copies of the book, in sixty-five languages. That’s over a billion ‘hits’ of propaganda in a pre-internet age.
Chairman Mao with peasants during the Cultural Revolution of 1966
Of course, as well as making some fine war films, Western society has put out its fair share of outright wartime propaganda. Lord Kitchener’s recruitment campaign during the First World War was more direct than anything dreamed up by the communist propagandists, and Uncle Sam was no slouch either. Today’s messages, though, are couched in subtler and more entertaining ways. The US Defense Department, through the US Army’s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis, has developed its own video game, ‘America’s Army’, to try to lure new recruits. Available as a free download, it’s been a huge success with over 8 million registrations.
Today’s politicians in general, though, have a much tougher job getting their message across in what the PR chaps would call ‘a crowded marketplace’. As ad man Don Bowen says, ‘Political slogans are still useful because they sum up the approach that the political party is moving in. The difficulty is there’s always somebody with an antithetical political statement that they’re trying to get over. So, unlike propaganda, when there’s only one story in town, which was true in Nazi Germany and in Mao’s China, here there are many stories. We have choices. There isn’t just one beer that says, “Probably the best lager in the world,” there’s another beer that says, “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” And there’s another beer that’s saying something else. So you never just get your own way.’
Well, that’s democracy for you. And in a democracy, people are free to pick and choose, and there are many, many different voices we can listen to, or ignore. And, generally, we prefer the simpler message. Don’t make it too complicated, or it’ll just get lost. Hitler knew that very well. ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly,’ he said. ‘It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’ Which is as true today as then. A slogan like Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ struggles to be heard, so little wonder he has to repeat it every time he’s on the radio or TV.
Does ultimate resistance to the power of state propaganda depend on there being so many channels of communication, so many messages, that no one authority or idea can dominate? It’s true that even within totalitarian regimes the profusion of social network sites like Twitter and Facebook is chipping away at their hegemony. The events in the Middle East and the Maghreb in 2011 show just how difficult it is to contain information and channel people’s thoughts. When a young street seller in Tunisia sets himself alight because he can no longer fight the system which makes scraping a living almost impossible, and a very short time later his story is texted and tweeted and posted round the world – that’s when ideas can’t be corralled. When so-called ‘citizen journalists’ can upload pictures and videos of events to the internet in a matter of minutes, then the windows of communication are well and truly open.
‘Stalin Leads Us to Victory’, 1943
We can now share our ideas, our anger, our frustrations with thousands of people at the touch of a button. When the financial crash in Iceland happened in 2008, it was a Facebook campaign by ordinary Icelanders that ultimately persuaded the government to support an investigation into the people responsible for the banking collapse. If the government wouldn’t take action, the people would. Goebbels would not have liked that. And could he possibly have imagined a world where WikiLeaks existed, a world where he couldn’t control the message, because, with a click of a mouse, someone, somewhere with access to government secrets and confidential documents can upload them to the web?
The language of Twitter, texting and social network sites may not be the most elegant, but it shows that we humans have this innate need to communicate, be it banal gossip, love stories or life-changing revolution.
So how will the storytellers of the digital age gain and keep our attention? Will language still be as powerful as it is today? Will it be controlled by an elite of media owners, the neo-Brahmins of the twenty-first century, or democratized so that we all become producers rather than consumers? What does the future look like on Planet Word?
In an elegant, light-filled building worthy of a sci-fi movie, MIT’s elegant new Media Lab houses a division called ‘The Future of Storytelling’. The idea is tantalizingly simple and almost impossible to envisage.Yes, we will undoubtedly have immersive 3D screens, and video games that involve physically wearing a suit to mimic the movements in the game (because they’re already invented). And, yes, we’ll be able to roll up a screen like a newspaper and put it in our pocket, and have adverts directed at us personally as we walk around the cities of the future (like in Spielberg’s movie Minority Report). And, yes, we’ll be able to create stories across space with interactive screens linked to the web: families will be able to create their own histories or mythologies, to preserve images and voices for future generations. But will all this new technology change what we want to say?
Communications theorist Marshall Mcluhan was wrong: the medium is really not the message. The message is the message. Humans will continue to be addicted to chatter and gossip, to talk of love and sex and sometimes of death. We will go on flirting and cracking jokes and making up wild stories that have no sense. In other words, the same things we talked about when we all sat around a fire at the end of the day, roasting a zebra or slab of sperm whale. What is different is that the global village which Mcluhan predicted in the early 1960s is now a reality, and the realization of it has been the biggest transformation in our species’ evolution since … well, maybe the invention of language itself. What is certain is there will be many more stories to tell.
