New subject: Subtext vs Character, or would Mr Humphries have pushed the right buttons?

6 Feb 2001


      Fiona wrote:
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whole book by L. Trilling, 'Beyond Culture'
To which I would counter R. Jenkins, "Social Identity."
What is it about?
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One can also reach beyond culture by resorting to one's innermost core,
instincts and feelings, or to the simple biological facts of life: your
body
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is not a product of your society, and it is also you.
Yes, but for how long? What you're saying is that it's only possible to
resist culture by withdrawing totally from it. Which is a fair point, but I
think it also makes it clear that as human beings we are irrevocably linked
with our cultures.
A quote from Trilling:
'We reflect that somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a
hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological
necessity, and biological *reason*, that culture cannot reach and that
reserves the right, which sooner or later it will excercise, to judge the
culture and resist and revise it.'
This doesn't sound like a withdrawal tactic to me.
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(A good example of this is Orwell's W.Smith, who cannot compare his
wretched
...
living conditions with anything different in his experience, but feels in
his bones and his stomach that everything around him is wrong.)
But again, this decision and feeling is not outside his society. Smith has
not personally experienced anything different, but other parts of the book
suggest that he would have had at least casual contact with ideas about
other ways of being, through his parents or through old people like the
prole man in the pub.
Indeed, to have contact with 'ideas about other ways of being' is another
option cited by Trilling, which I've also mentioned. It enables an
individual to view his/her culture from another standpoint - by comparing it
with other traditions or other cultures.
Winston's mother conveys a very important notion in the book. The governing
ideology of Winston's world claims that one's greatest loyalties should lie
with the state, Party and Big Brother. Winston's mother was able to resist
this system, not because she was well educated in history or politics, but
because she gave supremacy to her private loyalties - her family and
children. This is a very primitive, un-intellectual notion, but it actually
implies a way to remain human. In one of the first scenes in the novel,
Winston watches a movie in which a mother tries to protect her son from a
bomb by embracing him. Love cannot protect one from physical harm, but it
makes all the difference. Winston is, however, incapable of resisting his
culture by resorting to this same instinctive, emotional core of his being,
because the inhuman society in which he lives has conditioned him too
thoroughly: when, after a bombing, he sees a human hand in the street, he
simply kicks it aside.
Hey, Orwell is a part of the curriculum, so I'm *very* prepared - this List
still doesn't match my students in asking tricky questions!
(Er, I cannot find a B7 point here, unless someone wants to apply the hand
symbolism to Travis...)
N.

Re: [B7L] Subtext vs Character, or would Mr Humphries have pushed the right buttons?