Literary "relevance"

Have got ten minutes to fill between hospital visits, so thought I'd rant about something - it's always therapeutic. What neither hospitals nor G.P.s ever tell you is that Alf Garnett was the most physically healthy character ever invented - ranting is good for your health.

Anyway, this morning, before toddling off to the "orspital," I saw on the BBC News an article about a guy who's released a book which retells Shakespeare's plays in "contemporary" language (e.g. using text-speak, street slang, etc. etc.). Now, this has been done many thousands of times before, and I've got nothing against it, per se. There's nothing new in Shakespeare studies (whatever the academics say), and no doubt Will isn't turning in his grave (innit). One possible reaction to the story is: so what?

Another reaction is the slight nagging worry about the explanation given for the new book - i.e. that it will enhance Shakespeare's "relevance." Shakespeare's olde-worlde language is a bit long in the tooth, so it needs brushing up, Ali G-ing, and selling (selling being the operative word) to a new generation.

I have two problems with this common point of view: firstly, it is patronising towards the young. It assumes that the young have less capacity to appreciate Shakespeare than previous generations. It assumes that they can only talk, understand and appreciate idioms of their own time and contexts. It assumes, in short, that they are stupider than people of previous ages.

Secondly, this point of view is patronising towards Shakespeare. It assumes that Shakespeare wrote "timeless" stories and scenarios (the one thing, in fact, that he didn't - as is well known, most of the stories are not his own); but his language is archaic, obsolete, irrelevant and out of place in the modern world.

The problem is that, without his language, Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare. Shakespeare IS his language (after all, as I've said, his stories and many of his characters are often not his own). Get rid of his language - substitute a faux-contemporary idiom - and you have precisely nothing. You certainly don't have the Shakespeare of Hamlet's soliloquies, Othello's anguish, Prospero's musings, Anthony and Cleopatra's love-makings ....

And "relevance"? Why on Earth do people bang on and on about relevance, particularly with Shakespeare (but also with Mozart, Blake, Beethoven, Shaw, Tennyson, Dickens and anyone else you care to mention who has surely proved over and over again that he or she doesn't need special pleading)? The Arts Nobbling Councils (as Douglas Adams called them), the LEAs, and the government education strategies of the world bang on and on about relevance, whilst relevance itself trundles along, taking no notice, humming a Mozartian tune.

What these people don't seem to realise is that relevance isn't about forcing Shakespeare into contemporary contortions. Relevance isn't about making Shakespeare relevant to now. I mean, who wants to be relevant to now? Now is crap. Let's try and transcend now, imagine a better now, imagine a world beyond, before, or after now. Art that's relevant to now will get precisely nowhere: it will be forgotten tomorrow, along with the thousands of anti-gun-crime, just-say-no, don't-have-unprotected-sex-or-binge-drink musicals churned out by committees and funded by government quangos.

Art shouldn't be relevant to now. Art, as William Blake realised, should try and destroy now because (frankly) it's rubbish. Art should reach out beyond relevance. In fact, the very best art, the art of geniuses like Shakespeare, turns the question of relevance inside out: rather than making Shakespeare relevant for us, we should make ourselves relevant for Shakespeare - we should try and make ourselves worthy of him. To put it another way, rather than asking what Shakespeare can do for us, we should ask what we can do for Shakespeare ....

New Labour and the Proms

How reassuring that Margaret Hodges, so-called Minister of Culture, has come in for a huge amount of criticism following her attack on the Proms. There's a particular good letter from the cellist Steven Isserlis in The Guardian today, which about sums it up:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/mar/06/politicsandthearts.musicnews?gusrc=rss&feed=news

Amongst other things, Hodges said: “All too often our sectors are not at their best when embodying common belongings themselves. The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events - I’m thinking in particular of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease with this.”

Now, I think the Proms as a whole is a fantastic festival. As regards the Last Night, well, it's a bit of fun and (in my nostalgic old age) I don't object to Patriotism as much as I used to, as long as it doesn't slide into crude Nationalism.

But the idea that Art might be there just to be enjoyed "as a bit of fun" is anathema to New Labour. Art is there to promote New Labour thinking - a certain kind of British integration posited on authoritarian inclusiveness.

This, to my mind, demonstrates a typical New Labour attitude towards culture. Culture, for this government, is there for the following reasons:

1. to stop people stealing cars

2. to stop poor white people stealing cars

3. to stop poor minority ethnic people stealing cars.

Government policies on the Arts are all founded on these three central tenets. Music exists in order to stop people stealing cars. Literature exists to express the consequences of stealing cars. Plays should all feature someone stealing a car and facing the consequences. If said plays can also feature the consequences of gun crime and knife crime, all the better.

This is the utilitarian, gradgrindist world of New Labour Arts Strategy: the Arts are there to make people more amenable New Labour subjects, who will not steal cars, fire guns or stab people. More or less every single Arts and Culture-funding body in the country now has a form which you have to fill in to show how your music / literature / stage play will help poor, misguided people from doing wrong.

This is about as far from an Aestheticist or "Arts for Art's Sake" attitude as it is possible to get. It's also a long way from what the Arts are really about. Gosh, imagine telling all this to Richard Wagner - "Yes, Herr Wagner, 'The Ring of the Nibelung' is all very well, but at times it seems to promote knife crime (when Siegfried stabs Fafner), teenage rebellion (in Brunnhilde's misguided attitude towards her father, and Siegfried's attitude to Mime), and even stealing (in Siegfried's appropriation of the ring). Can't you write something, well, a bit more socially responsible next time? Otherwise, Herr Wagner, you're going to have your Arts Council funding cut, and be given an ASBO."

Real art, real culture can be violent, anti-social, apocalyptic, dangerous, subversive. Real art and culture might, in some contexts, promote the stealing of cars rather than the other way around. Real art and culture doesn't obey the programme of any ruling class - be that ruling class bourgeois, Conservative, New Labour, Communistic or Fascist. No signed-up, single-minded, hood-winked flunky of any political party will ever be able to accept this. Real art is anarchistic in the widest possible sense - it escapes being pinned down to one meaning, one role, one policy, and flies dangerously free of fixed political agendas - even those of the creator him or herself.

To retutn to the Last Night of the Proms and one of its famous moments, what ignorant New Labour flunkies don't and can't understand is that Elgar's famous Pomp and Circumstance March no.1 isn't just jingoistic tub-thumping - it's also other things as well. It's also aspiration towards a utopian vision of England that's never been realised; it's also a pastoral and nostalgic memory of an England that never was in the first piece; and, as many people have recognised, the dying fall at the end of the famous march rather subverts the jubilation of the words which have been imposed upon the music.