CHAPTER 5
Both these tales are fairly violent stories, with wars as the defining factors. One can hardly condemn stories for violence per se without condemning almost every story from The Bible to Mother Goose and practically every great novel. Certainly, this sort of condemnation does occur in some places, (30) along with such things as attempts to ban war toys and promote peace toys for children. (31) To quote from a 1986 newspaper article:
[C]hildren's book editors are on the lookout for any traces of sexism ... Some children's authors have become crusaders for reform. An American college professor named Dr Doug Larche, who calls himself Father Gander, has just published a series of revisionist nursery rhymes, which he has homogenised, sanforised and sanitised for the 1980s. The trouble with the traditional rhymes, says Larche, is that they offer a "tawdry view" of the world: "A study of 100 of our most popular rhymes reveals a male-dominated fairyland filled with sexism, anger, violence, environmental and nutritional ignorance and insensitivity to the human condition ... His Miss Muffet actually befriends the spider (who seems like a bit of a wimp). His Higgledy, Piggledy, My Black Hen, now lays eggs for "men and women", and not only do the same "men and women" replace "all the king's men" but they actually manage to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. But Dr Larche has other messages too. He ends his version of "The Old woman Who Lived in a Shoe" with this thought: "There's only one thing I don't understand/ If they didn't want children why didn't they plan?" As for nutrition, it's all right for Jack Horner to eat "an occasional treat" but only if he tries "every day to choose foods the right way/ from the basic nutritional groups". Stirring lines indeed ... Dr Larche has some good advice for Jack Spratt and his wife: "Both Spratts, I'm sure of that:/ Much better off would be/ To leave the fat upon the plate,/ And be cholesterol-free". (32)
Writing of recent educational theories of spontaneous moral development in America, journalist Donna Steichen in Fidelity described how:
Children were kept busy with string painting, hero-tales about John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King ... and innocuous films encouraging tolerance and nonspecific niceness while, presumably, they awaited the ripening of their moral majority. (33)
By such efforts, it seems likely, a contempt may be inculcated among young readers for notions of kindness, innocence and wonder, so bracketted with wimpish stupidity. It is at least highly arguable that an education whose moral content consists exclusively of injunctions to "non-specific niceness" may inculcate, to use Colm Brogan's phrase, a heart of stone as well as a head full of mush. Such a curriculum may end up de-authorising even its legitimate elements by presenting them in a ridiculous context, and thus, as far as moral education goes, leaving its pupil-victims worse off than ever.
Another aspect of some contemporary moral education for children has been a fashion for moral game-playing in arbitrarily constructed, hypothetical situations. For example, is it moral for a poor man to steal drugs to help his dying wife? Is it moral to save the lives of the rest by throwing one person out of an overloaded life-boat?
These problems have tended to be presented to children in a context that suggests the important thing is a balanced, objective exploration of the problem and that there are no final, absolute answers. This approach to the inculcation of ethical development owed a great deal to Lawrence Kohlberg's theories of "stages of moral development", well-known in Australian educational circles because of their influence on the notorious "MACOS" (Man -- A Course of Study) and "SEMP" (Social Education Materials Project) school courses. The SEMP teacher's handbook laid down that:
At Stage 6, people define the right action by the decision of their conscience guided by self-chosen ethical principles such as justice, equality, or the dignity of the individual. The principles appeal to logical comprehensiveness, universality and consistency. Instead of being concrete rules, such as the Ten Commandments, they are abstract ethical principles, such as the categorical imperative ...
The conclusion one class reached might be no more or less valid than the opposite conclusion reached by a different class the following period. William Kirk Kilpatrick commented on "Story-Telling and Virtue" in Policy Review:
You can do what you want with [such] stories ... There is no sense of a life fully lived or a mission accomplished.
This suggestion of moral relativism was combined with a tendency to bowdlerise or sanitise children's stories to remove disturbing or unsuitable elements and replace them with others perceived as more ideologically correct. A recent (November 1989) newspaper report describes a collection of re-written modernistic fairy-tales called Rapunzel's Revenge, written by a "Dublin-based feminist co-operative", being the subject of a seminar at Bristol University. In this, Snow White organises the dwarfs into a trade union and Goldilocks turns the three bears' house into a shelter for homeless single women.
This chapter does not intend to argue the plainly absurd proposition that the exposure of children to tales of violence or even tough-mindedness is a good thing in itself. Rather its intention is to sketch in briefly some of the perceived significance of themes of nobility, heroism and adventure in the tradition of which these tales are part. It also considers some recent cultural developments as they have affected fantasy and science-fiction stories and fiction and art in general.
It is impossible to measure precisely the effect of literature, film, television and other entertainment on a culture. However it is generally thought that where the values expressed in entertainment (and education, into which it merges) consistently denigrate notions of courage, honour, gallantry, nobility, self-sacrifice and discipline as evil, contemptible, obsolete, neurotic, boring, absurd or suicidal, there will be some real social and political effect, and that a converse effect may be expected in a culture where such values and notions are promoted and portrayed positively. Myths and stories as well as formal educational programmes that explicitly or implicitly promote certain cultural values affect in some way how people think and behave.
To put it another way, "myths", using the term in a particular, politico-cultural, sense, may have a good deal of self-fulfilling prophecy about them. The Biggles stories proved excellent recruiters for the RAF, so much so that their author, Capt W.E. Johns, was asked by the British Government to do other series on a soldier and a WAAF (Harold Wilson, when Prime Minister of Britain, was reported to have sent emissaries to Johns asking if Biggles could be made a little more left-wing. The doughty old aviator apparently threw them out with the comment "Biggles is above polities".) The more sombrely realistic, even gruesome, naval stories of Nicholas Monserrat also seem to have proved good recruiters for the Royal Navy.
More negatively, one is inclined to believe that there has been an element of self-fulfilling prophecy in the persistent depictions and stereotyping of Vietnam veterans as alienated and neurotic, even to the setting up in Australia of a government body under the loaded title: "Vietnam Veterans' Counselling Service". There seems to be something very odd about the allegedly high level of alienation or mental disturbance among Vietnam veterans when compared to the veterans of previous and much more intense wars, but the matter still awaits objective enquiry.
We are dealing here with a large subject where the disciplines of hard science are difficult or impossible to apply. However this does not mean such enquiry is meaningless. Myth matters, if it affects cultural attitudes towards important things -- not only in the dramatic example of military valour, but a vast range of matters including, for example, the importance or otherwise of work, personal ethics and family life.
Plato said the aim and justification of education should be to make men good because good men acted nobly. Andrew Fletcher expressed much the same thing in 1704 when he suggested that if a man was permitted to make all the ballads of a nation he need not care who made the laws.
Colm Brogan wrote a memorably scathing summary of value-free progressive and enlightened French culture and education and its social and political effects in Who Are The People?, published in 1947:
[T]he teacher was of immense importance ... He taught youth by the pure light of reason and filled them with unprejudiced and tolerant wisdom which left them believing in nothing in particular and greatly assisted Germany in conquering the country in a month.
Again, George Orwell argued that popular cultural values and mythologies played an important role in helping the British people stand up to the most dark and apparently hopeless part of the Second World War (one thinks again of the lessons of Vietnam):
Traditionally, the Englishman is phlegmatic ... not easily rattled. And since that is what he thinks he ought to be, that is what he tends to become. (34)
C.S. Lewis wrote, against the relativising of values in education, in The Abolition of Man:
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe "a gentleman does not cheat", than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism ... about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato.
It has been argued that the true hero tells us that life can be what it should be: that nobility, bravery and self-sacrifice occur because there are beliefs and responsibilities which warrant bravery and self-sacrifice. The hero tells us there is indeed purpose in human life.
William Kirk Kilpatrick has written:
What is revealed in heroic stories is a profoundly realistic appraisal of behaviour under conditions of combat -- when it is dangerous to act as one ought or a price will have to be paid, when the hero is weary, outnumbered or alone, when his resources are depleted or temptation is overwhelming, he does better to rely on his acquired virtue than on his knack for moral philosophy. Likewise, most of us are thrown into situations where there is little time to weigh the moral pros and cons. Then, the best question we can ask is, what do good men and women do in such situations? We are more likely to find an answer to that question if our training includes a thorough exposure to stories of virtue ... Stories of virtue, courage and justice can and should play a central part in the formation of good habit. That is, in the formation of character. Stories provide a way of habituating children to virtue.
In this process literature and entertainment, including, and perhaps especially, children's literature and entertainment and those things which hearken back to childhood impressions, play what seems obviously a very important role.
Lewis believed it was irresponsible to hide from children the fact that they would meet cruel enemies in the world, and stern physical as well as spiritual challenges. One may escape into other worlds but never, in any place, from the need for courage. His The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, written to instruct children in spiritual values as well to entertain, has a classic passage: four children, the heroes and heroines, have found a way into the world of Narnia, a wondrous place inhabited by such beings as fauns. Full of excitement, they follow a path to a faun's dwelling, but find it smashed and ruined. Among the ruins is a notice. The children read:
The former occupant of these premises, the faun Tumnus, is under arrest and awaiting his trial on a charge of High Treason against Her Imperial Majesty Jadis, Queen of Narnia, Chatelaine of Cair Paravel, Empress of the Lone Islands, etc., also of comforting her said Majesty's enemies, harbouring spies and fraternising with humans.
(signed) Maugrim, Captain of the Secret Police
LONG LIVE THE QUEEN!
The children stared at one another.
"I don't know that I'm going to like this place after all", said Susan.
The message is that courage is needed against enemies in all worlds. No safer option is available and the way will be hard, demanding and unfair. Bound up with this is the need for nobility, and the acceptance of making unequal sacrifices if necessary. Being "nice" or closing one's eyes to the existence of enemies does not protect one. "Innocence" in one sense will be violated. Part of the challenge is to accept this and face the world while retaining innocence in a more profound sense. In The Lord of The Rings there is the following dialogue between an old doctor, and the shield-maiden Eowyn:
"[M]en say that the new captain out of the north is their chief. A great lord is that, and a healer; and it is a thing passing strange to me that the healing hand should also wield the sword. It is not thus in Condor now, though once it was so, if old tales be true. But for long years we healers have only sought to patch the rents made by the men of swords. Though we should still have enough to do without them: the world is full enough of hurts and mischance without the wars of men to multiply them."
"It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden", answered Eowyn, "and those who do not have swords can still die upon them. Would you have the folk of Condor gather you herbs only, while the Dark Lord gathers armies?"
As has been pointed out, in Star Wars Luke's Uncle Olwen, the peaceful farmer, in one of the first to be killed by the enemy. The peaceful planet Alderaan is destroyed to demonstrate the power of the Death Star. There is an implied critique here which goes to the heart of absolute Pacificism, and, for example, to the slogan "Give Peace a Chance!" (which suggests "Peace", and presumably "War", are entities in themselves and may be considered independently of surrounding contexts).
Lewis wrote in an essay on the problems of dealing with themes of violence and terror in writing for children:
[T]o keep out of [a child's] mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil ... would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.
He continued:
Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children ... and I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors ... I will go even further. If I could have escaped all my own night-fears at the price of never having known "faerie", would I now be the gainer by that bargain? I am not speaking carelessly. The fears were very bad. But I think the price would have been too high. (35)
When looking at the "heroic" in these tales it is worth noting that The Lord of The Rings has one benevolent and sympathetic character (he twice saves the hobbits) who, while not exactly a pacifist, is completely detached. That is Tom Bombadil, who lives independently, with no interest in power politics or even defensive strategies beyond his own borders. Of him Tolkien wrote:
The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ugliness, kingship against tyranny, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any objective save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have ... renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves ... then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there are in fact things with which ultimately it cannot cope; and upon which its existence depends. Ultimately, only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron. (36)
There is a certain though not exact similarity between Tom Bombadil and Yoda in Star Wars. Yoda is far more involved in practical affairs, but he too lives in his own place, and, though possessed of great powers, specifically rejects ideas of conquest or political domination for himself. He trains Jedi in military skills among other things, but tells Luke, at their first meeting: "Wars do not make one great". He repeatedly emphasises to Luke (as does the Emperor later) that the good side of the Force is concerned with knowledge and defence, not with aggression. But, as Hilaire Belloc wrote in "Epitaph for a Pacifist", illustrating what he saw as a weakness in the Pacifist position:
Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.
It is worth noting, too, the difference between "kingship" and "tyranny" in Tolkien's world: a king is a legitimate head in the natural order of things, whose position and role have something of sacrifice about them. A tyrant is one who has seized power for self-aggrandisement, a gangster writ large, but more dangerous than any gangster if he is operating on a spiritual or ideological level. The gangster is satisfied with robbing and perhaps killing; the ideological tyrant wants souls as well, and there is no limit on his appetite.
These tales presume a world in which some sort of conflict is an inevitable fact, which good people must be prepared to face. In the fragments from Tolkien's mythology published posthumously as Unfinished Tales, there are accounts by Gandalf of how he brought about Bilbo's adventures in The Hobbit. He tells of having known Bilbo as a child, and, after many years' absence, returning to hear of the "eccentric" habits he had developed, and imagining him sick at heart for the sight of the wide world. But when he visited him again he discovered Bilbo had changed:
[H]e was getting rather greedy and fat, and his old desires had dwindled down to a sort of private dream. Nothing could have been more alarming than to find them in danger of coming true!
He looked at the hobbits in general, and found:
It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and perilous.
It was partly to prepare the hobbits for what was coming that he sent Bilbo on his quest: to start by reminding one rusticated hobbit at least of high and perilous things.
The memory of the "high and perilous" persists in our own culture. So much has been written recently, though perhaps less in very recent years, of the anti-hero, that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that books and films celebrating heroism are enduringly popular. This seems to indicate that art and culture are to some extent out of step in the West. Comparing the general themes of commercial films and novels with those of so-called "art" films and "literary" novels makes the point obvious at once. Popular culture pays more attention to themes of nobility and heroism than does "high culture".
James Burnham has written:
[M]odern liberalism does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice and die for God, family, king, honour, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of history ... Except for mercenaries, saints and neurotics, no-one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, Medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a 10 per cent rise in social security payments. (37)
Another conservative American commentator, Professor Thomas Howard, has written, in a somewhat despairing vein, of teaching college students in the late 1970s:
I have sometimes given a class the following list of words: majesty, magnanimity, valor, courtesy, grace, chastity, virginity, nobility, splendour, ceremony ... they have never encountered them. (38)
In a sense the implications of what Howard wrote -- that the consciousness of traditional Western values has been lost -- was too pessimistic. His book was itself evidence of this. It was an evaluation of the achievement of C.S. Lewis and it, like many other books in what might be called the C.S. Lewis industry, could not have been published if there had not been an enormous appetite for the traditional values celebrated by the works of Lewis, Tolkien and (as is argued here) Lucas, even if temporary intellectual fashions have driven their appropriate vocabulary underground.
Another distinguished American educator, George Roche, has said:
The very words we need to think about when we discuss heroes -- valour, magnanimity, fortitude, gallantry -- rust from disuse. (39)
That the vocabulary has been buried is important, but there is no indication that the desire for the things to which that vocabulary refers has been diminished. The college students to whom words that traditionally name and celebrate the numinous have no meaning, still crowd in millions to watch Star Wars and similar tales. They still buy millions of copies of The Lord of The Rings or even a grim allegory of Original Sin and the Fall of Man like The Lord of The Flies. There are many signs of undiminished desire for the celebration of traditional things. In fantasy games shops children learnedly discuss the obscure pedigrees of The Silmarilion. One of the most popular fantasy games is "Dungeons and Dragons", attacked by at least one commentator recently on the grounds that it: "reinforces a system of medieval values which are not acceptable in modern society". Even the current Western fascination with Ninjas and other icons of Japanese chivalry may be connected to this (Yoda has something zenlike about him).
What we see here is the persistence and great success of heroic and other traditional themes in and the ideas and images of nobility in contemporary culture. Of course, there are innumerable other examples of the same thing. It is a refutation of a notion much abroad that the appeal of classic and traditional heroism and of the ideals and images of nobility belong to the past. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a series of left-wing films attracted critical acclaim in the US but proved disasters in the marketplace. Silkwood, for example, was thrashed at the box-office by Clint Eastwood in Sudden Impact. (40)
A recent newspaper description of the American test pilot Charles Yeager described the "great success" of his autobiography. It was headlined: "America's last folk hero". Hero Yeager certainly is, but the word "last" says more about the writer of the headline than about Yeager, America, or heroes. The "great success" of his autobiography seems to say something different about the persistence of traditional values.
This is seen not merely in the contemplation of the position of the heroic and noble as themes in imaginative works today, but moving beyond that, is seen also in the widest view of contemporary art and culture and in the great resilience of traditional themes against modernism (in the sense in which the latter term is used here).
I am not attempting here the impossible task of making a comprehensive or complete distinction between "high" and "popular" culture (The Lord of The Rings, for example, might be thought to belong to either or both), or between "traditionalism" and "modernism" (T.S. Eliot's work and thought, for example, span both), but it is possible to make workable common-sense distinctions nonetheless.
Along with the persistence of heroic and otherwise traditional themes, we have seen a certain decline in what might be called the "market value" of modernistic, post-enlightenment works.
In England, Christopher Booker has stated:
[M]any giants of the modern movement died in the ten years between 1965 and 1975 -- from Le Corbusier to Picasso, from Eliot to Stravinsky -- leaving very few major figures on the world art scene. The truth is that the Modern Movement had exhausted itself ... The concert halls were still full, the theatres busy, the queues outside the art galleries longer than ever -- not so much in honour of the masterpieces of our own time, as because the appetite for the music, the plays and art works of the past had never been greater. (41)
The modernist movement (in the sense that term is used here) came to science-fiction and fantasy late. Perhaps, if modernism is a decayed romantic impulse, science-fiction and fantasy were largely inoculated against it by being products of other types of romantic impulses themselves.
Perhaps, too, if modernism can be described as the development by which technique replaces content, then fantasy and science-fiction ("science-fiction" meaning a fiction about ideas and things) cannot in the long run be part of literary modernity because they are actually a reaction against it. The "new wave" in science-fiction which began in the 1960s associated with Michael Moorcock and New Worlds magazine, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss in Britain and William Burroughs and some others in America did not really run on.
Furthermore, there was with science-fiction far less vested interest in an industry of academic criticism, and therefore in obscurity, than was the case with other arts, and less access to public funding via Arts Councils. A buying public still had to be given what it wanted, and the art retained strength and meaning because of this.
As in other modernistic arts, in the new wave fantasy and science-fiction nihilism, pessimism and emptiness were major themes, coupled with a progressivist political agenda. In a remarkable number of "new wave" stories the defeat, humiliation or annihilation of the West was welcomed and celebrated. J.G. Ballard pronounced "inner space", not "outer space" the truly stimulating subject of science-fiction. In practice this led to pessimism, introspection and attempted science-fiction equivalents of the modern psychological novel. (42) Artistic, political and metaphysical statements were run together. However, New Worlds, the magazine most closely associated with the new wave, amd in which Ballard and Aldiss frequently appeared, failed to attract enough readers to remain viable and would have folded had the British Arts Council not bailed it out with a grant of tax-payers' money in 1968.
It is interesting to see that, by the end of the 1980s, Ballard's writing had really moved out of the genre of science-fiction. Some of the most successful science-fiction then was the work of writers like the Americans Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. These produced, in an up-dated traditionalist vein, stories with a hard-science background about human-alien contacts such as The Mote in God's Eye, Footfall, (at one point in this, Alien invaders are disconcerted by picking up a television transmission of Star Wars) and the continuing saga of the Man-Kzin Wars, with other hands including Foul Anderson's joining in the creation of the last-named. These stories are quite at odds with the presumptions of left-liberalism or dialectical Utopianism.
The tales of the Man-Kzin Wars, in which a space-faring but profoundly peaceful human civilisation must learn in a hurry to cope with tiger-like alien predators, emphasise the honour and chivalry of both sides as being desirable and ultimately hopeful. On the Kzin world, it was the great felinoid predators, not simianoids, that had adapted to changing conditions by getting big brains. Rampagingly aggressive, they carry a Samurai-like warrior culture into space. In the Man-Kzin Wars, men have the choice of fighting and probably dying to resist the Kzin or living as slaves and prey-animals in a Kzin Empire. Because they choose to resist, both they and the Kzin are saved. Men, previously on the way to, with the best of intentions, "turning themselves into sheep", rediscover valour and initiative; the Kzin, who otherwise would probably have destroyed themselves and many other things sooner or later, are eventually made to become a good deal more reasonable. The fact that the two species, while totally different in much of their outlook, share a sense of honour and nobility, makes an optimistic and constructive end possible.
While these are basically adventure stories written to entertain and not too much should be read into them, they do have a certain congruence with ideas of heroism and nobility, as well as with the Burkean injunction that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".
The attempt to create "modernistic" science-fiction, on the other hand, had come to look like the pursuit of a path which had led other forms of literature to a dead end. To quote the English libertarian Chris R. Tame:
The cultural mainstream of this century ... has been characterised by the ethos of "An Age of Defeat" ... of the "Unheroic hypothesis" or the "discussion of triviality". Doctrines of naturalism and realism echo collectivism's social determinism. The traditional novel of manners evokes merely boredom. Literary and stylistic experimentation seem devoted to little but "disillusionment, cynicism, disgust and gnawing envy", or in "making delicate picture-puzzles out of the butt-ends of life ... Rational moral values, a voluntaristic image of man, have been preserved in ... the "bootleg" forms of romanticism, in the adventure, detective, thriller and science-fiction genres. It is no accident that the Frankfurt School Marxist Max Horkheimer contemptuously referred to the "rhetoric of individuality" within popular culture. (43)
The decline of the "mainstream" novel was obvious (Tolkien said The Lord of The Rings was not a novel but an "heroic romance, a much older and different variety of literature", and that he had "no interest at all" in the history or present situation of the English novel). (44) Paul Johnson said in 1981:
The novel is being pushed to the margin of literature ... No use blaming inflation. Young people think nothing of paying £10 or £12 to get into a top-rated pop concert. The fact is that novelists neglected their market. They thought they could dictate to the reader. But the novel is a popular form of literature or it is nothing, and that implies a two-way traffic in taste. So now novelists are retreating into the subsidised sector, seeking refuge in Arts Council grants or as "writers in residence" ... But the subsidised sector won't last in my view ... Even in literature the customer's rights cannot be indefinitely denied. The market always wins in the long run. The danger for the English novel is that it will go the way of British Leyland.
The moral, Johnson added, was neatly pointed out by the conjunction of the Booker award and the enormous success of the TV serialisation of Brideshead Revisited. It was a very long time since a novel had been so talked about among the masses of middle-class, educated people who once formed the solid, novel-buying public:
Of course the merits of the serial are precisely those of the novel: a powerful, well-constructed story, sharply-defined characters, dialogue that lives and a narration which communicated pleasure in words as well as images ... a major theme is tackled ... (45)
To Johnson's point about the television success of Brideshead Revisited might be added here the comment that it too dealt with a form of splendour and ennoblement. Its long-growing sadness at the withering of Arcadia ended at last with a kind of joy, with a flame "burning anew amongst the old stones". The success at the end of the decade of Tom Wolfe's classically-constructed novel The Bonfire of the Vanities reinforces the point.
It is worth noting, too, that the allegedly epoch-making British "anti-heroic" books, plays, and films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Look Back in Anger, Room at the Top and A Kind of Loving, exist today simply as curiosities, despite the rapturous welcome given them at the time of their release by an influential establishment of critics like Kenneth Tynan. The films, for example, are watched by virtually no-one and are screened on television in the dead small hours of the morning. The British films from this period which remain commercial and popular successes to this day and are reliably screened in prime-time television include Zulu, a story of valour and chivalry (and the slapstick "Carry On" comedies).
C.S. Lewis suggested that the hostility in many literary and intellectual circles to tales of fantasy and heroic adventures sprang partly from an uneasy awareness that the most "popular fiction", if it embodied a real myth, was very much more serious than what was generally called serious literature:
For it deals with the permanent and inevitable, whereas an hour's shelling, or a ten-mile walk, or even a dose of salts, might annihilate many of the problems in which the characters of a refined and subtle novel are entangled.
ENDNOTES
30. Writing in Commentary in June, 1986, Andre Ryerson ("The Scandal of 'Peace Education'") gave the following summary of Perspectives, published by "Educators for Social Responsibility":
To demonstrate to children that Western fears of the Soviet Union are merely based on mistaken perceptions, Perspectives recommends: "The Stranger: A Modern Fable", which "tells the story about how some people, in their fear of a giant stranger, bring out their cannon against him. When they finally get to talk to him, they like him a lot and he is invited to stay in their country." In another story ... "A little boy refusing to believe a village rumour that a dragon is evil, decides to invite the dragon to his birthday party, thereby overcoming prejudice and misinformation." Then there is "Jonathon and the Dragon", wherein a child once again shows adults the folly of their ways: "After the mayor and townspeople have tried violent means to no avail, a little boy gets the invading dragon out of town simply by whispering a polite request to him.
"ESR might," Ryerson comments, "consider shipping a few cartons of this story to assist the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan."
One might also, without considering even later instances like Hitler's invasion of Norway and Stalin's of the Baltic States, remember the sad but true story of the Chatham Islanders, a gentle, Pacific people who in the nineteenth century allowed themselves to be not only exterminated but eaten by a much smaller group of invading Maoris, because they had entered into a compact with their gods that forbade them to fight.
ESR material is particularly hostile to inculcating children with notions of good and evil. Its literature suggests that: "the roots of our attraction to conflict" are to be found in Western tradition and religious values, and recommends a garbled version of Taoism, urging teachers to: "explore with the students the good guy/ bad guy dichotomy that pervades our Western mythology and texts, or the God and Devil imagery that is part of the Christian ethic ... At the roots of Chinese life there is a trust of the good-in-evil in one's own nature which is particularly foreign to those brought up in the chronic uneasy conscience of the Hebrew-Christian cultures."
31. I am indebted to The American Spectator for preserving in its sarcastically-named "Current Wisdom" page the following from the journal Presbyterian Survey of December 1985:
Walking into any toy store, we may find a wide assortment of toys on display -- but also a serious gap. On today's mass market, there are basically just two kinds of playthings ... toys for playing war and violence; and tea sets, doctors' kits, fire engines and dolls -- toys for playing ordinary life. Missing are any playthings that reflect our struggles for peace, that hold before our children the occupations of peace, the images of peace, or the heroes and heroines of peace ... there are no toys to say that we must involve ourselves in working persistently for peace ... the game of toss the spindle could be moulded in the shape of a diplomat with a sash across his chest and a top hat on his head, and each ring could be labelled "peace offer". Children playing the game could be acting out the negotiating process by tossing peace offers to the diplomat ... The game of Old Maid has always implanted a negative image. The unwanted card could be changed to "war" or "violence".
32. The Australian, 8 June 1986.
33. "Lawrence Kohlberg and Catholic Religious Education", reprinted in AD2000, June 1989.
34. "The Lion and the Unicorn", reprinted in various collections.
35. "On three ways of writing for children" in C.S. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds (Fontana, 1982).
36. Letters, page 197.
37. "Liberalism v. Reality: the ideology of Western suicide", National Review, 11 September 1987.
38. Thomas Howard, The Achievement of C.S. Lewis (Shaw, 1980), pages 14-15.
39. Imprimis, August 1986, 15, page 8.
40. See Richard Grenier, "UnAmerican Activities", The Daily Telegraph (London), 4 February 1984.
41. Christopher Booker, The Seventies (Penguin, 1980), page 32.
42. See also footnote 1, page 36.
43. Chris R. Tame, The "New Right" Enlightenment (Economic and Literary Books, 1985), pages 245-246.
44. Letters, page 414.
45. Paul Johnson, The Pick of Paul Johnson (Harrap, 1985), pages 36-37.
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