Recently I set a student an essay on 'The Importance of the Arts.' What can I say: it was the 60th minute, I needed to finish and start my next class, she was desperate for homework. "I'm Chinese, come on!" she joked coyly. We'd just finished reviewing an essay she'd written on the stereotype of the straight-A* maths/music genius Chinese student in which she'd argued for its unfairness: "we are hard-working because of that image; we are not all natural geniuses." And I must say, from my experience with a particularly dim-witted 13 year old boy, I had to agree with her; and on the basis of a few 16 year old boys currently established in some of our top English schools, I'd go so far as to say that you are not even all hard-working. While many are both diligent and bright, the majority of my students are simply hard-worked; a concept that is, I think, alien to children in most English schools. I certainly do not remember staying up til 4am to finish an assignment or prepare for a test. In fact, if the homework was 'revise' then this seemed - as the audible sigh that went out from the class suggested - a licence to do nothing at all. But mine is not an example I encourage my students to follow. So in that spirit I'd come up - off the top of my head (of which Freud would probably have a lot to say) - with the homework essay in question. And quickly forgot all about it.
Well, as my mum would say, what you give out only returns to you, as was witnessed when my student returned to class on Saturday bearing the essay. I read it. It was sensible, predictable. It wasn't wrong but yet it managed to stir me out of my "I've only one week left in this job" ennui to come out fighting against the idea that the importance of the arts is that they are educational, instructive, edifying; that music and literature has lessons to teach us and the power to change the world. Is this so very bad, you might ask? Is this a terrible ambition to have as a poet, painter, dancer or musician? That something you might do, say or create should make a difference to the way people and society live their lives? No, I would answer. Not at all. I was once that a young person with ideals and ethics, who would nurse a dormouse back to health or adopt a killer whale to keep it off the streets, to save it from a life prostituting itself in front of crowds at SeaWorld. So demeaning! Once upon a time I would have stridently boycotted Gap because I’d read they used sweatshops and would have forgone buying Shreddies because they are made by Nestle. I used to endure 24 hour famines to raise money for World Vision, lying delirious on the floor at 8pm staring up at the ceiling, trying to resist the urge to break fast on the entire contents of the bread bin. Oh, yes, I once wanted to change the world, make it a better place... But did I ever think that writing a book would do it? No. Gullible as I was, I believed my uncle - not unknown for his jests and pranks but in fact infamous in those there parts for goth-rock and magic tricks - when he told me I'd have to become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Universe (with him as my assistant, of course, in charge of some satellite orbiting my own administrative - not imperial, you understand - planet) if we were to sufficiently change reality to reflect our own childish ideals. That is, if we really wanted a world in which muesli just came with the right quantities of raisins, summer the right amount of sun and water for hosepipes and bees (but no wasps), and Christmas Eve the best falling snow; a world in which you wouldn't be made to eat all your greens before being allowed dessert for the seemingly illogical and insensitive reason that there were children starving in Africa - the image of which is enough to put most sensitive children off their dinner, and perhaps in more wayward young minds to encourage xenophobia and racial hatred; and in which at the back of everyone's wardrobe is a little fawn who'd take you for tea and crumpets when you just needed Out.
Well, as I was saying, I was once this moralistic, idealistic girl. But now? Well, I still don’t shop at Gap but for the less altruistic and more practical reasons that a) size zero's been eliminated, either out of concern or jealousy I'm not sure, but I don't think making us naked from the waist down is going to help, and b) there are none in Hong Kong despite my now aged blue sweater assuring me – or mocking me, more like – that it was “Made in Macau.” (Is b) because of a)??) My killer whale though is, I believe, still at large out there somewhere, freely swimming the oceans and living off my mum's credit card (I send her a cheque once every now and again to keep things sweet), but as you can see mine is a long-distance style of parenting. I've never visited her straits and she's unlikely to enter mine. And while I would still love to find a forest of magical creatures at the back of my wardrobe, I am less enamoured with the ones I actually find there, fluttering around and eating what is left of my prized, now almost vintage, Topshop clothes (that shop too is not to be found in HK), and install anti-moth devices to try and chase them away, back out into the world where in my view they belong. When the change occurred, I am not certain, but I guess it was quite some time ago and perhaps around the same time that I realized I would not become Supreme Grand Ruler of the Modern Universe. And yes, before you say anything, it was before I entered an Oxford college reknowned for churning out almost as many Prime Ministers as underpaid English teachers. But – as I say – it was even longer ago than that that I knew I would not change the world by writing a book about it. In fact, honestly, I don’t think the idea ever would have occurred to me even in those terms. It would’ve seemed ridiculous. The point of literature, for my younger self, was not to learn how to bring about existential, physical or societal transformation. I was not reading Einstein, Engels or Oprah after all. It was simply to forget the world, leave it behind. Even reading Little Women, the point had never been educational. As far as my sisters and I were concerned, Meg, Jo/Beth (for we could never agree which one I was - Beth dies after all, so that was hardly fair or nice) and Amy had stolen from us, not visa versa. No, to read a book was precisely and purposefully to have nothing to do reality.
“What are you doing?” was an ordinary and not infrequent question at home as I was growing up, usually shouted from one end of the house to the other. We did have stairs in our house, don’t get me wrong, but the problem was rather that there were too many and we resented having to use them, feeling that the power of our lungs should be better exhausted in shouting. “Where are you and what are you doing?” And the answer might well be: “I’m reading.” That was a permissible answer and it could, sometimes (at least, with more authority than TV), get you off the hook of having to do anything else. Reading, from an early age I realized, was then a thing in itself and not just a means to an end. What was more it was an activity that you engaged in while at the same time being completely inactive and in which you could be both there and not there all at the same time. To me it seemed ideal, the lazy person’s dream, to go somewhere – anywhere you wanted – without actually having to move! And if I was reading I wasn’t obliged to do anything else, be it help tidy the house or change the world, and this only got better as I got older. The bigger the book, the more archaic the language (“Are you sure you’re supposed to read that?” I will forever remember my dear mother saying as she looked in dismay at a book of Middle English verse, “It’s not just a test, you know, to see how stupid you are?” Oh, it was a test alright, but one I would pass by learning to read it, not by concluding it was illegible, not proper English and so nothing to do with me, thank you very much!) and abstruse the content, the more I could be sure I’d be left alone to read it. “Yes, you read your book dear. [Aside] Just don’t make me read it when you’re finished. Please dear god, no.” For it - whether To the Lighthouse or The Faerie Queene -clearly had nothing to do with the world whatsoever, but it seemed to keep me occupied - albeit ungainfully employed - and it didn’t make any noise or mess so I was left to get on with it.
This, however, brings me to the second objection I had to my student’s thesis that literature and the arts are important because they help to change the world. What do we think books are? Shoemaker’s elves and fairy godmothers? The paperback equivalents to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of penicillin? My books seemed to everyone around me to be keeping me engaged in relatively good, safe practices. I may not have been exactly contributing to society by working on a cure for cancer, but I had potential: “Ah, so…you’re gonna be an English teacher?” they would suggest hopefully, to which I would turn a withering look of disdain upon them and reply with the single word “No.” Oh the irony! But I can’t really blame them for getting this idea. To look at me you would not really think me capable of causing much trouble by my sedentary pursuits: so studious, so… specky. Well, while I maintain that the books at least that I read never changed the world – never single-handedly abolished slavery or emancipated women, brought about civil liberties for gays or ended totalitarianism – they did bring about a change in the way I saw the world. I may have been putting my eyes out reading into the wee hours of the morning, but I was having my eyes opened to the personal experiences, visions and language of characters and writers beyond the scope and comprehension of my bedroom window. Can I say that I have learnt about the world from the books I’ve read? Or about human nature? Umm, only that it’s varied. Can I say that I’ve read books that’ve changed the world? 1984, my student suggested. No, are you kidding?! If the literature – which still speaks ‘volumes’ (though in characters that seem like a sick joke to most sensible people) across 700 plus years – is anything to go by, the world seems to continue more or less as it always has. Great works have been written, of course they have, but would the world be any different had they not? Apples and angels fell to earth before Newton figured out why and seem determined to continue to do so now (though if I were them I'd be tempted not to out of spite). But if the world hasn't been changed, can I at least say that literature has changed or shaped my "little world of man": the way that I see, experience and interact with it? Is that a rhetorical question?! As I said to my student, in what I hope was a heart-raising moment of astounding oratorical fireworks and not just literary nihilism: I have learnt little of use about the world from my years of reading. (Or when I did, witness A Journal of the Plague Years - thank you Mr Defoe - it was most disheartening.) I have, however, experienced other worlds, lived through many fictional lives and been audience to, as Austen says, "the greatest powers of the mind... the liveliest effusions of wit and humour," all written in the richest medium, the best chosen language.
And, if that is not enough, perhaps I have learnt something after all: not to try and write a book that’d change the world. The world, flaws and all, is fine as it is: it necessitates all the other, unreal ones we choose to escape into - gives meaning to the fawn in the wardrobe.
