The word was used in 1942 about the practice of the Nazi government in Warsaw when they "shut us [the Jews] up in a manageable area - the 'Kettle' - and combed through our helpless crowd", as John Hersey's fictionalised account of the Ringleblum archives reported in 1950.
Perhaps those who have little sense of history or political philosophy are unaware of the connotations of the term, but for the rest of us this police practice is one more sign that the government of covert forces behind it are putting into place, little by little, whatever would be needed at some future stage for totalitarian control.
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Language. Show all posts
Thursday, April 09, 2009
A Different Kettle of Fish?
Sometimes, when there are other, more desperate things going on, one is tempted into thinking that writing about literary things is a little effete. But then the way we use language is at the root of everything, as Orwell taught us, and a letter to The Guardian yesterday from Professor John Veit-Wilson reminds us of an earlier use of the word 'kettling' for containing crowds:
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
The End of Romance?
Speaking of language: I wonder if it was really necessary for the Guardian to line up for and against arguments about whether Mills and Boon books perpetuate a patriarchal sexual ideology? Just look at the titles quoted and on display in the pic, and the power relations they express:
The Italian's Captive Virgin
The Desert Shiek's Captive Wife
The Greek Tycoon's Inn[ocent?].... [rest of title hidden]
The Spanish Prince's....
His Christmas Bride
The Prince's Forbidden V[irgin?]
Apart from this, one of the biggest criticisms came inadvertently from my one-time mother-in-law, who loved the things. She would sit with her feet up and read non-stop for a whole afternoon, and then when she'd got to the end she would look suddenly shocked and say in wonder and disappointment: 'Oh, I think I've read that one before!'
The Italian's Captive Virgin
The Desert Shiek's Captive Wife
The Greek Tycoon's Inn[ocent?].... [rest of title hidden]
The Spanish Prince's....
His Christmas Bride
The Prince's Forbidden V[irgin?]
Apart from this, one of the biggest criticisms came inadvertently from my one-time mother-in-law, who loved the things. She would sit with her feet up and read non-stop for a whole afternoon, and then when she'd got to the end she would look suddenly shocked and say in wonder and disappointment: 'Oh, I think I've read that one before!'
Literature, Language and Speech in the Age of Terrorism
Halfway through the Q & A at Monday's Manchester University sell-out debate between Martin Amis, Ed Husain and Maureen Freely on Literature and Terrorism, a questioner asked: 'Do you think we can get back to Literature?'
I think this must have been Tom Chatfield who writes about the event on the Prospect Magazine blog. Can literature tackle the subject of terrorism, he asked, or must it buckle and be sidelined in the face of it - as, he was implying, was indeed happening in this debate?
Only Maureen Freely tackled with any urgency the subject of the responsibility of the writer, while Amis and Husain concentrated in their opening speeches on reiterating their distinctions between Islam and Islamism and on condemning jihadist terrorism, and like Tom Chatfield I found her contribution moving. Apart from that, and a few angry reiterations of familiar political positions from the floor, there was no real debate, as Maureen Freely says on the Guardian Books blog. Instead there was a disconcerting sense, in that vast hall packed with 500 people, of issues being skirted around.
'What do you expect a novelist to do, deny his feelings?' asked Martin Amis, when finally, towards the end, a questioner challenged him outright about what Maureen Freely calls The Controversy, reiterating the point he made in Saturday's Guardian.
Whoa, Martin, stop there. OK, yes, novelists, unlike politicians and Amis's 'post-historical automata', deal in feelings, and this is why I'm always saying that, contrary to current belief, fiction has potentially greater persuasive power than any political tract. But a novel is complex and subtle, it's not just a knee-jerk response, and we are not, after all, writing novels when we are speaking in public - briefly, and without the emotional investment a novel earns from an audience - on political issues. Indeed, Amis himself (in his own defence) makes a distinction between the status of the two forms of expression: What you say about something is never your last word on any subject. But what you write should aspire to be just that: your last word. The trouble is, though, what you say to a journalist, or even on telly, gets written down and can be, and mostly is, presented as your last word.
To me there is no doubting Amis's sincerity, but he does seem to have some confusions and he really needs to watch his language. I do agree with him that there's a mistaken and dangerous 'liberal' inability to condemn horrors perceived to be confined to other cultures, but perhaps the 60% of an audience who failed to put up their hands when he asked how many would call themselves 'morally superior' to suicide bombers were simply shocked by his diction? It's one thing to condemn an action, but it's another to bring the focus back onto oneself and bathe in moral righteousness. Much of Amis's diction is hierarchical in this way: we in the west are more 'evolved' than Islamic states, he says (it's no good Amis claiming as he has that by 'evolved' he simply means 'more civilized': the word has inescapable Darwinian connotations of progression and hierarchy); Muslims need (and want) 'to put their house in order', he says, calling on Biblical and western-political notions of division and patriarchal hierarchy (and in danger of conflating Islam and Islamism once again.)
It's a mindset that doesn't help. Maureen Freely, who grew up in Turkey, where East and West most graphically meet, put her finger on this at one point, calling on everyone to stop thinking, in this age of mass immigration and global communication, in divisive terms of East and West. She got a clap, I think.
But she's right: through no fault of her own, she failed really to challenge, and in spite of her best efforts, the subject of literature, its political responsibility and its power in the face of terrorism trickled away. Meanwhile, today a Turkish publisher goes on trial for publishing a book 'insulting Turkishness'...
I think this must have been Tom Chatfield who writes about the event on the Prospect Magazine blog. Can literature tackle the subject of terrorism, he asked, or must it buckle and be sidelined in the face of it - as, he was implying, was indeed happening in this debate?
Only Maureen Freely tackled with any urgency the subject of the responsibility of the writer, while Amis and Husain concentrated in their opening speeches on reiterating their distinctions between Islam and Islamism and on condemning jihadist terrorism, and like Tom Chatfield I found her contribution moving. Apart from that, and a few angry reiterations of familiar political positions from the floor, there was no real debate, as Maureen Freely says on the Guardian Books blog. Instead there was a disconcerting sense, in that vast hall packed with 500 people, of issues being skirted around.
'What do you expect a novelist to do, deny his feelings?' asked Martin Amis, when finally, towards the end, a questioner challenged him outright about what Maureen Freely calls The Controversy, reiterating the point he made in Saturday's Guardian.
Whoa, Martin, stop there. OK, yes, novelists, unlike politicians and Amis's 'post-historical automata', deal in feelings, and this is why I'm always saying that, contrary to current belief, fiction has potentially greater persuasive power than any political tract. But a novel is complex and subtle, it's not just a knee-jerk response, and we are not, after all, writing novels when we are speaking in public - briefly, and without the emotional investment a novel earns from an audience - on political issues. Indeed, Amis himself (in his own defence) makes a distinction between the status of the two forms of expression: What you say about something is never your last word on any subject. But what you write should aspire to be just that: your last word. The trouble is, though, what you say to a journalist, or even on telly, gets written down and can be, and mostly is, presented as your last word.
To me there is no doubting Amis's sincerity, but he does seem to have some confusions and he really needs to watch his language. I do agree with him that there's a mistaken and dangerous 'liberal' inability to condemn horrors perceived to be confined to other cultures, but perhaps the 60% of an audience who failed to put up their hands when he asked how many would call themselves 'morally superior' to suicide bombers were simply shocked by his diction? It's one thing to condemn an action, but it's another to bring the focus back onto oneself and bathe in moral righteousness. Much of Amis's diction is hierarchical in this way: we in the west are more 'evolved' than Islamic states, he says (it's no good Amis claiming as he has that by 'evolved' he simply means 'more civilized': the word has inescapable Darwinian connotations of progression and hierarchy); Muslims need (and want) 'to put their house in order', he says, calling on Biblical and western-political notions of division and patriarchal hierarchy (and in danger of conflating Islam and Islamism once again.)
It's a mindset that doesn't help. Maureen Freely, who grew up in Turkey, where East and West most graphically meet, put her finger on this at one point, calling on everyone to stop thinking, in this age of mass immigration and global communication, in divisive terms of East and West. She got a clap, I think.
But she's right: through no fault of her own, she failed really to challenge, and in spite of her best efforts, the subject of literature, its political responsibility and its power in the face of terrorism trickled away. Meanwhile, today a Turkish publisher goes on trial for publishing a book 'insulting Turkishness'...
Friday, August 17, 2007
Graphic Language
I know I've been away, but I was pretty puzzled when today I first read about the fuss over Ian Rankin's statement that lesbian crime writers write the most 'graphic' novels, and that he finds this 'interesting'. What? Why would people bridle at a compliment? Doesn't 'graphic' mean 'vivid'? See what a week in the Welsh hills (and a lack of familiarity with crime novels generally) does to you - you simply don't keep up with the language and you have no idea that it's shorthand for 'graphic violence'. And, to add to the confusion, in the same paper I am told that Rankin, having left Rebus behind, is now embarked on a 'graphic novel'!
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Orwell and the Plain English Campaign
The debate on the Guardian website and on my post below, generated by Germaine Greer's award of a Golden Bull by the Plain English Campaign, has sent me back to Orwell's 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language.
No doubt the PEC would pull me up on that first sentence for its length, long sentences being one of their bugbears. And do you know, I have a hunch they would be right. Maybe the facts packed into it would be clearer and more quickly assimilated if I separated them. But the fact is, I can't be bothered to go back and do this because of the time and thought it would take without making it clumsy, and I've got a damned play to write. This is one of Orwell's points: that writing more simply yet with a satisfying rhythm takes time and thought. It's easier and lazier to pick up on euphonious ready-made constructions (which tend to be abstract and convoluted), and when we do this we tend to write with less thought. Orwell expresses an opposite idea to the one that to simplify language is to dumb down: by providing a translation of a Bible passage into modern-day speak he demonstrates that the simpler, more concrete language of the original is far more vivid and thus more meaningful.
There are some odd apparent inconsistencies about the PEC. It's very off-putting to me that that arch mangler of the English language, Tony Blair, is one of their supporters - the guy who has so dramatically mouthed (as if it's his own coinage!) one of the very cliches Orwell condemned all that time ago: stand shoulder to shoulder. But then (to unpick another cliche) you don't necessarily blame the bandwagon for those who jump on it, do you, and it's the vice of our age (so well demonstrated in Animal Farm) to lump together everything a person says as either good or bad, simply because of who they are. And just because the application of a set of principles is not always successful does not of course mean those principles are wrong. Anyway, some of the PEC's examples of clarification don't seem so bad to me:
Before: High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the on-going learning process.
After: Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.
I have to say, the first of these is the kind of thing I have satirised many a time in a radio play.
However, the thing which discredits the PEC for me is what seems to be a huge category error. Not content with the rightful target of officialese, at the end of their section on 'Long Sentences' they provide a list of creative works with exceptionally long sentences, including Ulysses (for Molly Bloom's long stream-of-consciousness monologue). It's not altogether clear that they are condemning them and that they have no notion that these long sentences are artfully constructed for specific and dynamic effect, but it looks like it (and anyway, I thought they were all about clarity?)
Nevertheless, I think that Orwell's six rules for writing English are useful for creative writers, and I have always tried to abide by them myself whatever I'm writing (not always successfully, of course, as that redundant 'myself' proves!). It's perhaps worth repeating them here:
i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii) Never use a long word when a short word will do. (This does not preclude the notion that sometimes a short word will not do.)
iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent. (Once again, this does not preclude the notion that there may not be an equivalent.)
vi) Break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.
No doubt the PEC would pull me up on that first sentence for its length, long sentences being one of their bugbears. And do you know, I have a hunch they would be right. Maybe the facts packed into it would be clearer and more quickly assimilated if I separated them. But the fact is, I can't be bothered to go back and do this because of the time and thought it would take without making it clumsy, and I've got a damned play to write. This is one of Orwell's points: that writing more simply yet with a satisfying rhythm takes time and thought. It's easier and lazier to pick up on euphonious ready-made constructions (which tend to be abstract and convoluted), and when we do this we tend to write with less thought. Orwell expresses an opposite idea to the one that to simplify language is to dumb down: by providing a translation of a Bible passage into modern-day speak he demonstrates that the simpler, more concrete language of the original is far more vivid and thus more meaningful.
There are some odd apparent inconsistencies about the PEC. It's very off-putting to me that that arch mangler of the English language, Tony Blair, is one of their supporters - the guy who has so dramatically mouthed (as if it's his own coinage!) one of the very cliches Orwell condemned all that time ago: stand shoulder to shoulder. But then (to unpick another cliche) you don't necessarily blame the bandwagon for those who jump on it, do you, and it's the vice of our age (so well demonstrated in Animal Farm) to lump together everything a person says as either good or bad, simply because of who they are. And just because the application of a set of principles is not always successful does not of course mean those principles are wrong. Anyway, some of the PEC's examples of clarification don't seem so bad to me:
Before: High-quality learning environments are a necessary precondition for facilitation and enhancement of the on-going learning process.
After: Children need good schools if they are to learn properly.
I have to say, the first of these is the kind of thing I have satirised many a time in a radio play.
However, the thing which discredits the PEC for me is what seems to be a huge category error. Not content with the rightful target of officialese, at the end of their section on 'Long Sentences' they provide a list of creative works with exceptionally long sentences, including Ulysses (for Molly Bloom's long stream-of-consciousness monologue). It's not altogether clear that they are condemning them and that they have no notion that these long sentences are artfully constructed for specific and dynamic effect, but it looks like it (and anyway, I thought they were all about clarity?)
Nevertheless, I think that Orwell's six rules for writing English are useful for creative writers, and I have always tried to abide by them myself whatever I'm writing (not always successfully, of course, as that redundant 'myself' proves!). It's perhaps worth repeating them here:
i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii) Never use a long word when a short word will do. (This does not preclude the notion that sometimes a short word will not do.)
iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out.
iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent. (Once again, this does not preclude the notion that there may not be an equivalent.)
vi) Break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Plain Mystifying
Noosa Lee at That's So Pants and Ms Baroque cheer Germaine Greer for her sarcastic response to her 'Golden Bull' award from the Plain English Campaign. Prof Greer receives this award for the following sentence in a Guardian article on October 23rd:
Now I agree with those who have said that the PEC are barking up the wrong tree here (legalese and political obfuscation are surely the better targets), and it's also true that, as Ms Baroque illustrates with examples from their web site, there is a dangerous linguistic dumbing-down tendency in their philosophy and practice.
But, I don't know... Maybe it's the ex-secondary-school teacher in me, a teacher of rehoused Gorbals kids who had arrived at secondary school at the age of twelve unable to read... Those contemptuous sniggers when I didn't make myself understood, those life chances which failure to understand meant those kids wouldn't get... Maybe it's the ex-twelve-year-old in me whose uneducated relatives looked so dismayingly uncomfortable when I used big words they didn't understand... But, the thing is, I'm not very happy with that elitist supposition about 'most Guardian readers', Greer's assumption (in her original article) that she had no need even to say where that phrase comes from, leave alone what it means.
It's all a question of who you are writing for, I suppose. Are you writing only for those who already understand everything about the subject you're addressing, or are you prepared to include those who don't?
The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold.'The unsynthesised manifold', as Greer explains in her more recent article, is a phrase from Kant's Critique of Judgement which should be familiar to students of aesthetic theory, and Greer says, to 'most reasonably educated Guardian readers'.
Now I agree with those who have said that the PEC are barking up the wrong tree here (legalese and political obfuscation are surely the better targets), and it's also true that, as Ms Baroque illustrates with examples from their web site, there is a dangerous linguistic dumbing-down tendency in their philosophy and practice.
But, I don't know... Maybe it's the ex-secondary-school teacher in me, a teacher of rehoused Gorbals kids who had arrived at secondary school at the age of twelve unable to read... Those contemptuous sniggers when I didn't make myself understood, those life chances which failure to understand meant those kids wouldn't get... Maybe it's the ex-twelve-year-old in me whose uneducated relatives looked so dismayingly uncomfortable when I used big words they didn't understand... But, the thing is, I'm not very happy with that elitist supposition about 'most Guardian readers', Greer's assumption (in her original article) that she had no need even to say where that phrase comes from, leave alone what it means.
It's all a question of who you are writing for, I suppose. Are you writing only for those who already understand everything about the subject you're addressing, or are you prepared to include those who don't?
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