ADDITIONAL SEQUENCE THREE

The Uses of Reading (I)

Richard Rodriguez and Richard Hoggart

Susan Bordo and John Berger

David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky

ALTERNATIVE:

Richard Rodriguez and Richard Hoggart

This sequence focuses attention on authors as readers, on the use of sources, and on the art of reading as a writer. It combines technical lessons with lessons on the practice and rhetoric of citation. The assignments ask you to think again about how writers use the writing that precedes them in order to move forward, to get work done, to define a position for writing and thinking. The final assignment returns attention to attitudes toward reading and writing in contemporary American education, with Ways of Reading offered as an example.

ASSIGNMENT 1

The Scholarship Boy (I)

Richard Rodriguez, Richard Hoggart

You could look at the relationship between Richard Rodriguez and Richard Hoggart as a case study of the relation of a reader to a writer or of a student to a teacher. Look closely at Rodriguez’s references to Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy and at the way Rodriguez made use of that book to name and describe his own experience as a student. (An extended selection of The Uses of Literacy can be found in the alternative assignment.) What did he find in the book? How did he use it? How does he use it in his own writing?

Write an essay in which you discuss Rodriguez’s use of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. How, for example, would you compare Rodriguez’s version of the “scholarship boy” with Hoggart’s? (At one point, Rodriguez says that Hoggart’s account is “more accurate than fair.” What might he have meant by that?) And what kind of reader is the Rodriguez who is writing “The Achievement of Desire” — is he still a “scholarship boy,” or is that description no longer appropriate?

Question 29.16

ASSIGNMENT 2

Sources

SUSAN BORDO, JOHN BERGER

In “Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body,” Bordo refers to John Berger and his work in Ways of Seeing, although she refers to a different chapter than the one included here. In general, however, both Berger and Bordo are concerned with how we see and read images; both are concerned to correct the ways images are used and read; both trace the ways images serve the interests of money and power; both are written to teach readers how and why they should pay a different kind of attention to the images around them.

Question 29.17

ASSIGNMENT 3

Ways of Reading

DAVID BARTHOLOMAE, ANTHONY PETROSKY, AND STACEY WAITE

Reread the introduction to Ways of Reading. Given the work that you have done in this sequence, you are prepared to read it not as a simple statement of “how things are” but as a position taken in a tradition of concern over the role of reading in the education of Americans. Write an essay in which you consider the introduction in relation to Rodriguez, Hoggart, Bordo, and Berger, and the ways they articulate the proper uses of reading.

Question 29.18

ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT

The Scholarship Boy (II)

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, RICHARD HOGGART

At the end of this assignment, you will find an extended section from Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. This is the book Rodriguez found in the British Museum, the book he used, he says, to “frame the meaning of my academic success.” The section here is the one that surrounds the passages Rodriguez cites in “The Achievement of Desire.” Read the Hoggart excerpt and think about these questions: How might you compare Rodriguez’s version of the “scholarship boy” with Hoggart’s? How might you explain the importance of Hoggart’s book to Rodriguez? What kind of reader is the Rodriguez who is writing “The Achievement of Desire” — is he still a “scholarship boy,” or is that description no longer appropriate?

You could look at the relationship between Rodriguez and Hoggart as a case study in the possible relations between a writer and a prior text or between a student and a teacher. Read the two together, taking notes to assist such a comparative reading. As you read Rodriguez’s discussion of Hoggart’s book, pay attention to both the terms and passages Rodriguez selects and those he ignores, and pay attention to what Rodriguez does with what he selects. Look closely at how Rodriguez reads and presents Hoggart’s text.

As you read Hoggart’s account of the scholarship boy, try to read from outside Rodriguez’s point of view. How else might these passages be read? In what ways might Hoggart be said to be saying what Rodriguez says he is saying? In what ways might he be said to be saying something else, something Rodriguez misses or ignores? In what ways might Hoggart be said to be making a different argument, telling a different story? What position or point of view or set of beliefs would authorize this other reading, the reading from outside Rodriguez’s point of view? And, if you can establish this “alternative’’ reading, what does that tell you about the position or point of view or set of beliefs that authorize Rodriguez’s use of the text?

As you prepare to write about Rodriguez’s use of Hoggart, think about how you will describe his performance. What, for example, might you attribute to strategy, to Rodriguez’s intent? What might you attribute to blindness (a failure to see or notice something in the text)? What might you attribute to the unconscious (a fear of the text, a form of repression, a desire to transform the text into something else)? These are conventional ways of telling the story of reading. What use are they to your project? Can you imagine others?

Question 29.19

A SCHOLARSHIP BOY

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.

—GEORGE ELIOT

This is a difficult chapter to write, though one that should be written. As in other chapters, I shall be isolating a group of related trends: but the consequent dangers of over-emphasis are here especially acute. The three immediately preceding chapters have discussed attitudes which could from one point of view appear to represent a kind of poise. But the people most affected by the attitudes now to be examined — the “anxious and the uprooted” — are to be recognized primarily by their lack of poise, by their uncertainty. About the self-indulgences which seem to satisfy many in their class they tend to be unhappily superior: they are much affected by the cynicism which affects almost everyone, but this is likely to increase their lack of purpose rather than tempt them to “cash in” or to react into further indulgence.

In part they have a sense of loss which affects some in all groups. With them the sense of loss is increased precisely because they are emotionally uprooted from their class, often under the stimulus of a stronger critical intelligence or imagination, qualities which can lead them into an unusual self-consciousness before their own situation (and make it easy for a sympathizer to dramatize their “Angst”). Involved with this may be a physical uprooting from their class through the medium of the scholarship system. A great many seem to me to be affected in this way, though only a very small proportion badly; at one boundary the group includes psychotics; at the other, people leading apparently normal lives but never without an underlying sense of some unease.

It will be convenient to speak first of the nature of the uprooting which some scholarship boys experience. I have in mind those who, for a number of years, perhaps for a very long time, have a sense of no longer really belonging to any group. We all know that many do find a poise in their new situations. There are “declassed” experts and specialists who go into their own spheres after the long scholarship climb has led them to a PhD. There are brilliant individuals who become fine administrators and officials, and find themselves thoroughly at home. There are some, not necessarily so gifted, who reach a kind of poise which is yet not a passivity nor even a failure in awareness, who are at ease in their new group without any ostentatious adoption of the protective coloring of that group, and who have an easy relationship with their working-class relatives, based not on a form of patronage but on a just respect. Almost every working-class boy who goes through the process of further education by scholarships finds himself chafing against his environment during adolescence. He is at the friction-point of two cultures; the test of his real education lies in his ability, by about the age of twenty-five, to smile at his father with his whole face and to respect his flighty young sister and his slower brother. I shall be concerned with those for whom the uprooting is particularly troublesome, not because I underestimate the gains which this kind of selection gives, nor because I wish to stress the more depressing features in contemporary life, but because the difficulties of some people illuminate much in the wider discussion of cultural change. Like transplanted stock, they react to a widespread drought earlier than those who have been left in their original soil.

I am sometimes inclined to think that the problem of self-adjustment is, in general, especially difficult for those working-class boys who are only moderately endowed, who have talent sufficient to separate them from the majority of their working-class contemporaries, but not to go much farther. I am not implying a correlation between intelligence and lack of unease; intellectual people have their own troubles: but this kind of anxiety often seems most to afflict those in the working-classes who have been pulled one stage away from their original culture and yet have not the intellectual equipment which would then cause them to move on to join the “declassed” professionals and experts. In one sense, it is true, no one is ever “declassed”; and it is interesting to see how this occasionally obtrudes (particularly today, when ex-working-class boys move in all the managing areas of society) — in the touch of insecurity, which often appears as an undue concern to establish “presence” in an otherwise quite professional professor, in the intermittent rough homeliness of an important executive and committee-man, in the tendency to vertigo which betrays a lurking sense of uncertainty in a successful journalist.

But I am chiefly concerned with those who are self-conscious and yet not self-aware in any full sense, who are as a result uncertain, dissatisfied, and gnawed by self-doubt. Sometimes they lack will, though they have intelligence, and “it takes will to cross this waste.” More often perhaps, though they have as much will as the majority, they have not sufficient to resolve the complex tensions which their uprooting, the peculiar problems of their particular domestic settings, and the uncertainties common to the time create.

As childhood gives way to adolescence and that to manhood, this kind of boy tends to be progressively cut off from the ordinary life of his group. He is marked out early: and here I am thinking not so much of his teachers in the “elementary” school as of fellow-members of his family. “‘E’s got brains,” or “‘E’s bright,” he hears constantly; and in part the tone is one of pride and admiration. He is in a way cut off by his parents as much as by his talent which urges him to break away from his group. Yet on their side this is not altogether from admiration: “‘E’s got brains,” yes, and he is expected to follow the trail that opens. But there can also be a limiting quality in the tone with which the phrase is used; character counts more. Still, he has brains — a mark of pride and almost a brand; he is heading for a different world, a different sort of job.

He has to be more and more alone, if he is going to “get on.” He will have, probably unconsciously, to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense gregariousness of the working-class family group. Since everything centers upon the living-room, there is unlikely to be a room of his own; the bedrooms are cold and inhospitable, and to warm them or the front room, if there is one, would not only be expensive, but would require an imaginative leap — out of the tradition — which most families are not capable of making. There is a corner of the living-room table. On the other side Mother is ironing, the wireless is on, someone is singing a snatch of song, or Father says intermittently whatever comes into his head. The boy has to cut himself off mentally, so as to do his homework, as well as he can. In summer, matters can be easier; bedrooms are warm enough to work in: but only a few boys, in my experience, take advantage of this. For the boy is himself (until he reaches, say, the upper forms) very much of both the worlds of home and school. He is enormously obedient to the dictates of the world of school, but emotionally still strongly wants to continue as part of the family circle.

So the first big step is taken in the progress towards membership of a different sort of group or to isolation, when such a boy has to resist the central domestic quality of working-class life. This is true, perhaps particularly true, if he belongs to a happy home, because the happy homes are often the more gregarious. Quite early the stress on solitariness, the encouragement towards strong self-concern, is felt; and this can make it more difficult for him to belong to another group later.

At his “elementary” school, from as early as the age of eight, he is likely to be in some degree set apart, though this may not happen if his school is in an area which each year provides a couple of dozen boys from “the scholarship form” for the grammar-schools. But probably he is in an area predominantly working-class and his school takes up only a few scholarships a year. The situation is altering as the number of scholarships increases, but in any case human adjustments do not come as abruptly as administrative changes.

He is similarly likely to be separated from the boys’ groups outside the home, is no longer a full member of the gang which clusters round the lampposts in the evenings; there is homework to be done. But these are the male groups among which others in his generation grew up, and his detachment from them is emotionally linked with one more aspect of his home situation — that he now tends to be closer to the women of the house than to the men. This is true, even if his father is not the kind who dismisses books and reading as “a woman’s game.” The boy spends a large part of his time at the physical center of the home, where the woman’s spirit rules, quietly getting on with his work whilst his mother gets on with her jobs — the father not yet back from work or out for a drink with his mates. The man and the boy’s brothers are outside, in the world of men; the boy sits in the women’s world. Perhaps this partly explains why many authors from the working-classes, when they write about their childhood, give the women in it so tender and central a place. There is bound to be occasional friction, of course — when they wonder whether the boy is “getting above himself,” or when he feels a strong reluctance to break off and do one of the odd jobs a boy is expected to do. But predominantly the atmosphere is likely to be intimate, gentle, and attractive. With one ear he hears the women discussing their worries and ailments and hopes, and he tells them at intervals about his school and the work and what the master said. He usually receives boundless uncomprehending sympathy: he knows they do not understand, but still he tells them; he would like to link the two environments.

This description simplifies and overstresses the break; in each individual case there will be many qualifications. But in presenting the isolation in its most emphatic form the description epitomizes what is very frequently found. For such a boy is between two worlds, the worlds of school and home; and they meet at few points. Once at the grammar-school, he quickly learns to make use of a pair of different accents, perhaps even two different apparent characters and differing standards of value. Think of his reading-material, for example: at home he sees strewn around and reads regularly himself, magazines which are never mentioned at school, which seem not to belong to the world to which the school introduces him; at school he hears about and reads books never mentioned at home. When he brings those books into the house they do not take their place with other books which the family are reading, for often there are none or almost none; his books look, rather, like strange tools.

He will perhaps, especially today, escape the worst immediate difficulties of his new environment, the stigma of cheaper clothes, of not being able to afford to go on school-holiday trips, of parents who turn up for the grammar-school play looking shamefully working-class. But as a grammar-school boy, he is likely to be anxious to do well, to be accepted or even to catch the eye as he caught the eye, because of his brains, at the “elementary” school. For brains are the currency by which he has bought his way, and increasingly brains seem to be the currency that tells. He tends to make his schoolmasters over-important, since they are the cashiers in the new world of brain-currency. In his home-world his father is still his father; in the other world of school his father can have little place: he tends to make a father-figure of his form-master.

Consequently, even though his family may push him very little, he will probably push himself harder than he should. He begins to see life, for as far as he can envisage it, as a series of hurdle-jumps, the hurdles of scholarships which are won by learning how to amass and manipulate the new currency. He tends to over-stress the importance of examinations, of the piling-up of knowledge and of received opinions. He discovers a technique of apparent learning, or acquiring of facts rather than of the handling and use of facts. He learns how to receive a purely literate education, one using only a small part of the personality and challenging only a limited area of his being. He begins to see life as a ladder, as a permanent examination with some praise and some further exhortation at each stage. He becomes an expert imbiber and doler-out; his competence will vary, but will rarely be accompanied by genuine enthusiasms. He rarely feels the reality of knowledge, of other men’s thoughts and imaginings, of his own pulses; he rarely discovers an author for himself and on his own. In this half of his life he can respond only if there is a direct connection with the system of training. He has something of the blinkered pony about him; sometimes he is trained by those who have been through the same regimen, who are hardly unblinkered themselves, and who praise him in the degree to which he takes comfortably to their blinkers. Though there is a powerful, unidealistic, unwarmed realism about his attitude at bottom, that is his chief form of initiative; of other forms — the freely ranging mind, the bold flying of mental kites, the courage to reject some “lines” even though they are officially as important as all the rest — of these he probably has little, and his training does not often encourage them. This is not a new problem; Herbert Spencer spoke of it fifty years ago: but it still exists: “The established systems of education, whatever their matter may be, are fundamentally vicious in their manner. They encourage submissive receptivity instead of independent activity.”

There is too little stress on action, on personal will and decision; too much goes on in the head, with the rather-better-than-normal intellectual machine which has brought him to his grammar-school. And because so often the “good” boy, the boy who does well, is the one who with his conscientious passivity meets the main demand of his new environment, he gradually loses spontaneity so as to acquire examination-passing reliability. He can snap his fingers at no one and nothing; he seems set to make an adequate, reliable, and unjoyous kind of clerk. He has been too long “afraid of all that has to be obeyed.” Hazlitt, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, made a wider and more impassioned judgment on trends in his society; but it has some relevance here and now:

Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings, and high propensities of the soul are, as it were, shrunk up, seared, violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse with the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children, to make them fit for their future situation in life.

Such a scholarship boy has lost some of the resilience and some of the vitality of his cousins who are still knocking about the streets. In an earlier generation, as one of the wicker-witted persons born into the working-classes, he would in all probability have had those wits developed in the jungle of the slums, where wit had to ally itself to energy and initiative. He plays little on the streets; he does not run round delivering newspapers: his sexual growth is perhaps delayed. He loses something of the gamin’s resilience and carelessness, of his readiness to take a chance, of his perkiness and boldness, and he does not acquire the unconscious confidence of many a public-school-trained child of the middle-classes. He has been trained like a circus-horse, for scholarship winning.

As a result, when he comes to the end of the series of set-pieces, when he is at last put out to raise his eyes to a world of tangible and unaccommodating things, of elusive and disconcerting human beings, he finds himself with little inner momentum. The driving-belt hangs loosely, disconnected from the only machine it has so far served, the examination-passing machine. He finds difficulty in choosing a direction in the world where there is no longer a master to please, a toffee-apple at the end of each stage, a certificate, a place in the upper half of the assessable world. He is unhappy in a society which presents largely a picture of disorder, which is huge and sprawling, not limited, ordered, and centrally heated; in which the toffee-apples are not accurately given to those who work hardest nor even to the most intelligent: but in which disturbing imponderables like “character,” “pure luck,” “ability to mix,” and “boldness” have a way of tipping the scales.

His condition is made worse because the whole trend of his previous training has made him care too much for marked and ticketed success. This world, too, cares much for recognizable success, but does not distribute it along the lines on which he has been trained to win it. He would be happier if he cared less, if he could blow the gaff for himself on the world’s success values. But they too closely resemble the values of school; to reject them he would have first to escape the inner prison in which the school’s tabulated rules for success have immured him.

He does not wish to accept the world’s criterion — get on at any price (though he has an acute sense of the importance of money). But he has been equipped for hurdle-jumping; so he merely dreams of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s way. He has neither the comforts of simply accepting the big world’s values, nor the recompense of feeling firmly critical towards them.

He has moved away from his “lower” origins, and may move farther. If so, he is likely to be nagged underneath by a sense of how far he has come, by the fear and shame of a possible falling-back. And this increases his inability to leave himself alone. Sometimes the kind of job he gets only increases this slightly dizzy sense of still being on the ladder; unhappy on it, but also proud and, in the nature of his condition, usually incapable of jumping-off, of pulling-out of that particular race:

Pale, shabby, tightly strung, he had advanced from post to post in his insurance office with the bearing of a man about to be discharged. . . . Brains had only meant that he must work harder in the elementary school than those born free of them. At night he could still hear the malicious chorus telling him that he was a favorite of the master. . . . Brains, like a fierce heat, had turned the world to a desert round him, and across the sands in the occasional mirage he saw the stupid crowds, playing, laughing, and without thought enjoying the tenderness, the compassion, the companionship of love.

That is over-dramatized, not applicable to all or even to most — but in some way affecting many. It affects also that larger group, to which I now turn, of those who in some ways ask questions of themselves about their society, who are because of this, even though they may never have been to grammar-schools, “between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” They are the “private faces in public places” among the working-classes; they are Koestler’s “thoughtful corporals”; they are among those, though not the whole of those, who take up many kinds of self-improvement. They may be performing any kind of work, from manual labor to teaching; but my own experience suggests that they are to be found frequently among minor clerks and similarly black-coated workers, and among elementary school-teachers, especially in the big cities. Often their earnestness for improvement shows itself as an urge to act like some people in the middle-classes; but this is not a political betrayal: it is much nearer to a mistaken idealism.

This kind of person, and we have seen that this is his first great loss, belongs now to no class, usually not even to what is called, loosely enough, the “classless intelligentsia.” He cannot face squarely his own working-class, for that, since the intuitive links have gone, would require a greater command in facing himself than he is capable of. Sometimes he is ashamed of his origins; he has learned to “turn up his nose,” to be a bit superior about much in working-class manners. He is often not at ease about his own physical appearance which speaks too clearly of his birth; he feels uncertain or angry inside when he realizes that that, and a hundred habits of speech and manners, can “give him away” daily. He tends to visit his own sense of inadequacy upon the group which fathered him; and he provides himself with a mantle of defensive attitudes. Thus he may exhibit an unconvincing pride in his own gaucheness at practical things — “brain-workers” are never “good with their hands.” Underneath he knows that his compensatory claim to possess finer weapons, to be able to handle “book-knowledge,” is insecurely based. He tries to read all the good books, but they do not give him that power of speech and command over experience which he seeks. He is as gauche there as with the craftsman’s tools.

He cannot go back; with one part of himself he does not want to go back to a homeliness which was often narrow: with another part he longs for the membership he has lost, “he pines for some Nameless Eden where he never was.” The nostalgia is the stronger and the more ambiguous because he is really “in quest of his own absconded self yet scared to find it.” He both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class, feels himself weighted with knowledge of his own and their situation, which hereafter forbids him the simpler pleasures of his father and mother. And this is only one of his temptations to self-dramatization.

If he tries to be “pally” with working-class people, to show that he is one of them, they “smell it a mile off.” They are less at ease with him than with some in other classes. With them they can establish and are prepared to honor, seriously or as a kind of rather ironical game, a formal relationship; they “know where they are with them.” But they can immediately detect the uncertainty in his attitudes, that he belongs neither to them nor to one of the groups with which they are used to performing a hierarchical play of relations; the odd man out is still the odd man out.

He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual; and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound. Sometimes the working-classes and the middle-classes can laugh together. He rarely laughs; he smiles constrainedly with the corner of his mouth. He is usually ill at ease with the middle-classes because with one side of himself he does not want them to accept him; he mistrusts or even a little despises them. He is divided here as in so many other ways. With one part of himself he admires much he finds in them: a play of intelligence, a breadth of outlook, a kind of style. He would like to be a citizen of that well-polished, prosperous, cool, book-lined, and magazine-discussing world of the successful intelligent middle-class which he glimpses through doorways or feels awkward among on short visits, aware of his grubby finger-nails. With another part of himself he develops an asperity towards that world: he turns up his nose at its self-satisfactions, its earnest social concern, its intelligent coffee-parties, its suave sons at Oxford, and its Mrs. Miniverish or Mrs. Ramseyish cultural pretensions. He is rather over-ready to notice anything which can be regarded as pretentious or fanciful, anything which allows him to say that these people do not know what life is really like. He wavers between scorn and longing.

— RICHARD HOGGART

The Uses of Literacy (1957)