Monday, July 18, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 25 / The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life by Richard Hoggart (1957)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 25 – The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life by Richard Hoggart (1957)

This influential cultural study of postwar Britain offers pertinent truths on mass communication and the interaction between ordinary people and the elites

Robert McCrum

18 July 2016

ists such as this occasionally face difficult, even impossible, choices. In 1957, a 100-page monograph by a brilliant young American linguist, a book regularly nominated for an automatic place in contemporary “most influential” and “modern classic” selections, was published by a small Dutch publishing house (Mouton & Co) in the Hague.

The text in question is Syntactic Structures, “part of an attempt to construct a formalised general theory of linguistic structure”. Its author, Noam Chomsky, celebrated as the founder of modern linguistics, is one of the foremost public intellectuals of the age, and the fierce conscience of progressive America, acclaimed as much for his polemics against US foreign policy as for his theories about language and mind.

Richard Hoggart

And yet, despite an immersion in his “masterpiece”, a summary of a much longer 1,000-page work entitled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, I have to confess, after two baffled readings, that I cannot inflict Chomsky on the subscribers to this list. If his prose was otherwise lovely, I would forgive Syntactic Structures its forbidding and impenetrable mask of technical language (aka jargon). If his ideas were profoundly obscure, but ultimately recoverable as deep and thrilling, I would take a chance.

To this reader, sadly, apart from one arresting piece of brilliant nonsense (“Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”), Chomsky’s masterpiece is unreadable. I’m sorry: no doubt, as some have suggested, Syntactic Structures is comparable to the work of Keynes or Freud. On my reading, on behalf of the common reader, the presumed audience for a list such as ours, it is also unintelligible.

What, for instance, are we to make of Chomsky’s declared “fundamental concern”? This, he writes, is “the problem of justification of grammars”. Seeking clarity, but still mystifying this reader, he goes on to define “a grammar of the language L” as “essentially a theory of L”. This is also, he declares, in a further clarification, “a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones”.

Richard Hoggart’s by Eamonn McCabe

There are, maybe, lists on which this short and singular book should be at home. For Observer readers, I believe that Syntactic Structures would be a hideous imposition. Instead, from the same year, 1957, I am choosing Richard Hoggart’s beautifully written and profoundly influential, classic of British postwar cultural analysis, The Uses of Literacy.

This attempt to understand the changes in British culture after the second world war in which the mobilisation of the home front had ushered in “massification” – mass society and mass culture – will resonate with any reader struggling to make sense of the Brexit referendum vote.

In this deeply autobiographical study, written from within the experience of growing up in industrial Leeds, Hoggart argued that Britain was squandering the hard-won skills of education and literacy by moving towards a new kind of society dominated by new and troubling values. The upshot of this, he said, would be that an urban, working-class culture “of the people” would be destroyed.

Originally, Hoggart’s passionate alarm-call was to have been called The Abuses of Literacy, and some of his most memorable passages attack the “mass publicists” who, as he saw it, were destroying the delicate web of close-knit neighbourhood communities based on local libraries, corner shops and working-mens’ clubs. Hoggart is aware of the dangers inherent in his analysis, finding himself, he writes “constantly having to resist a strong inner pressure to make the old much more admirable than the new”.

Richard Hoggart
Poster by T.A.

His book falls into two parts (“An ‘Older’ Order” and “Yielding Place to New”): first an impassioned narrative of former working-class values, followed by an extended portrait of the changes that had occurred in Britain between, roughly, the election of the Attlee government and the coming of the Beatles.

Hoggart, who was plainly influenced by the George Orwell of The Road To Wigan Pier, interrogates the popular songs, newspapers, magazines, and mass market paperbacks of the 1950s for clues to the transformation of the popular imagination.

Some of this strayed into the realm of fiction. To evade British libel laws, Hoggart was forced to invent titles for the sex and crime pulp fiction he was excoriating. (One of these, Death Cab for Cutie, had an extraordinary afterlife becoming a comedy rock song for the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and subsequently performed by the Beatles in their 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour.)

Whatever the multiplicity of its sources, the deep authenticity of Hoggart’s writing is unmistakable. As with the greatest books in this series, The Uses of Literacy focuses on a case study – the particular plight of the poor and underprivileged, in relation to the available mass media (tabloid newspapers, pulp magazines, local radio).

From this microcosm, Hoggart derives a work resonant with universal truths about the interaction between the many and the few; the ordinary person and the dominant elites. Ultimately, Hoggart provides an anatomy of an archetypal conflict: the street versus the ivory tower.

In his preface, Hoggart, implicitly rebuking academics who preach only to the choir, observes that he thought of himself “as addressing first of all the serious ‘common reader’ or ‘intelligent layman’ from any class. I have written as clearly as my understanding of the subject allowed”.

He concludes: “One of the most striking and ominous features of our present cultural situation is the division between the technical language of the experts and the extraordinarily low level of the organs of mass communication.”

We shall probably never know if he was familiar with Syntactic Structures.

A Signature Sentence

“It is often said that there are no working classes in England now, that a ‘bloodless revolution’ has taken place, which has so reduced social differences that already most of us inhabit an almost flat plain, the plain of the lower-middle to middle classes.”