In one of Charles Dickens’ most memorable classroom scenes, Thomas Gradgrind, who believes in the importance of facts, asks Sissy Jupe to define a horse. She panics and fails to find the correct answer. “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!” said Mr Gradgrind. ...Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy’s definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours. Cold-eyed Bitzer knows the answer. “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”
—Charles Dickens: Hard Times, 1854
This passage provides a clue to how the Shakespeare scholar and professor at Warwick, Jonathan Bate, is able to provide a selective canon of the entire range of English literature from the 5th century BC down to the present in nine small chapters in the Very Short Introduction Series (Oxford University Press, Special Indian Price Rs 165). If the basic substance of all imaginative literature (novels, plays, poems) was not reason but emotion which you learn from experience and relationship not from fact and system, then the facts of chronological history and a brief anatomy of the main landmarks of literature (as has been done in the standard anthologies, like Oxford, Norton and others) are not really required by the common reader. And if “English” and “Literature” had to be defined and the question of “inclusion” and “exclusion” discussed, these can be substituted by ideas of the undercurrents of literary movements and their multiple themes over the centuries. Suitable quotes from specific texts embellish the text that should seduce the reader to discover the original on her own. This is what the professor has done in this small little book that really attempts to answer the question, “What is Literature?”
First, the little book itself. There are just nine chapters: Once Upon a Time; What it is; When it Began; The Study of English; Periods and Movements; Among the English Poets; Shakespeare and Dramatic Literature; Aspects of the English Novel; and The Englishness of English Literature?
The introductory chapters deal with classical children’s literature of “the golden age” when God was in heaven and everything right with the world. So, we have “recollections of early childhood”, as Wordsworth put it, with Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh that takes in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and comes right down to Harry Potter and the wizards of Hogwarts. It’s quite a sweep that includes many juvenile novels in English because Bate is inspired by Kipling’s line, What should they know of England who only England know?
After the brief introduction, the remainder of the book divides into two sections. Three chapters deal with What is Literature, when English literature could be said to have begun and how it has been studied and written about. These deal with Medieval English literature like Beowulf, Chaucer, Anglo Saxon Celtic and Norse and so on that includes texts in which language is used most cleverly, and “those that respond to a diversity of meanings”.
The section endorses Dr Johnson’s thought that a century was the real test of literary durability and T S Eliot’s dictum that “the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”. Bate has also included in this section “the sort of analysis that has been going on since the 1950s when the French semiotician (theorist of signs) Roland Barthes published Mythologies that explored the cultural meaning of everything “from wrestling to soap powders”.
The inter-disciplinary approach that combines aesthetic, historical and cultural studies inevitably gives prominence to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Austen and other leading lights of English literature who have been widely quoted throughout the book. Bate endorses the idea that a conversation between living and dead authors, and authors with their readers is what makes literature meaningful and come alive for every generation. But what makes literature live is not a description of things as they are but the way in which they are said, that is, the style. Bate quotes several authorities on how style has influenced thought, clinching his argument with Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University (1858) that “literature expresses, not objective truth... but subjective... not things, but thoughts, style is thinking into language”.
Bate’s canvas is so wide that you may feel that he has tried to do too much within the limited space available to him. Bate has given weightage to Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf that should satisfy feminists of different hues. More importantly, readers must bear in mind that the book has been written for the serious common reader.
Perhaps the most endearing feature of the book is that Bate sees English literature as “hybrid”, the product of “a mongrel nation”. So, we have a range of non-British writers included here: Beckett and Joyce, “though Irish”, Vikram Seth and Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott and V S Naipaul and so are the Americans who have enriched language beyond measure. As A Very Short Introduction of just 180 pages, it couldn’t have been better.
