Englishness and National Culture
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ENGLISHNESS AND NATIONAL CULTURE Today, ‘nation’ is probably the strongest of all forms of group identity. Over and above its expression in symbols such as flags, leaders and cultural icons, national identity also works at a less visible, more fascinating level—in the forms of discourse specific to a nation: not what we say so much as how we say it. In this compelling study, Antony Easthope argues that the typical discourses of Englishness are structured by a deep-rooted philosophic tradition: empiricism. He sustains his lively polemic through appeal to a wide array of instances from high and popular culture, ranging from philosophical and literary works to the daily press and aspects of the English sense of humour. Englishness and National Culture asserts a profound continuity running through from the seventeenth century until now. Today’s journalists, historians, novelists, poets, comedians and politicians may imagine they are speaking as themselves. They are mistaken; ‘ancestral voices’ speak through them. Antony Easthope is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, and is the author of Literary into Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1991). ENGLISHNESS AND NATIONAL CULTURE Antony Easthope London and New York First published 1999 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1999 Antony Easthope The right of Antony Easthope to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Easthope, Antony. Englishness and national culture/Antony Easthope. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. National characteristics, English. 2. England—Civilization. I. Title. DA118.E23 1999 942–dc21 98–35349 ISBN 0-203-20913-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-26733-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-19687-6 ISBN 0-415-19688-4 FOR MY FATHER, KELYNGE EASTHOPE When in doubt, the English imagine a pendulum. Raymond Williams CONTENTS List of figures vii Preface viii PART I Nation 1 1 Nation, identity, discourse 3 2 National desire 33 PART II The English tradition 59 3 Empiricism in English philosophy 61 4 An empiricist tradition 87 PART III Englishness today 115 5 The discourse of literary journalism 117 6 The discourse of history-writing 135 7 English tragedy, English comedy 153 8 Contemporary English poetry 177 9 Nation: identity and difference 201 Bibliography 231 Index 241 FIGURES 1.1 Steve Bell cartoon, ‘Dr Tate’s Patent Schoolroom’, Guardian, 16 5 January 1996 1.2 Diagram, from Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the 17 Ego 2.1 Venn diagram of ‘Being’ and ‘Meaning’, from Lacan’s Four 36 Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 7.1 Illingworth cartoon, ‘What, me? No I never touch goldfish!’, 171 Daily Mail, 17 November 1939 7.2 Taylor, ‘No, you can’t play with mine—just ’cos you’ve broken 174 yours off’, postcard, Bamforth and Co, Holmfirth PREFACE Culture and Society by Raymond Williams was published in 1958. Since then, analysis which began by thinking about social groups in terms of class developed to consider gender and ethnicity (among others); it now needs to be directed at the most powerful collective identity to emerge with modernity: nation. My argument begins by justifying an understanding of nation in terms of collective identification; in conclusion I return to some of the unwelcome but ineluctable implications of recognising that human groups are organised on a basis which is unconscious as well as conscious. National collectivities identify with the overt symbols of nationhood (flags, presidents) but my proposal is that a much deeper effect is achieved through identification with a discursive formation specific to a particular nation. If two strangers from the same nation meet and talk casually for half an hour, there would be a number of ways to analyse their exchange. I shall address the level at which the conversation would enact national identity, not just in what was said but in how it was said (typical tropes, shifts of tone, jokes employed, the conception of truth appealed to). To support this I shall take Englishness as my example. From the New Left of the 1960s I have retrieved the proposal that the English tradition is essentially empiricist. It would have been possible to justify that argument by tracing a history of empiricism in English writing from 1600: my approach has been to establish a sense of the empiricist tradition from the seventeenth century and then look in detail at four examples of contemporary discursive forms. Englishness and National Culture aims to demonstrate a profound and hardly acknowledged continuity between the seventeenth century and today. This means that often when English people (journalists, historians, novelists, poets, comic writers and others) think they are speaking in their own voices, in fact the discourse of an empiricist tradition is speaking for them. ix I am deeply grateful to people who found time to read this manuscript and from whose criticisms I have learned a great deal and tried to improve the argument accordingly. Fred Botting, Huw Jones, Willy Maley, Steve Rigby, Michael Westlake and Scott Wilson all commented on the theoretical section, while Martin Bell, Anthony Mellors and Ian Parker discussed particular chapters. I must also express my keen admiration for the anonymous reader for Routledge who understood what the book was trying to do better than I did. I am very pleased to thank Talia Rodgers for keeping faith with the project throughout. Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Eric Lupton, without whom this book could not have been written. Some of the material that went towards Chapters 1, 2 and 4 has appeared elsewhere: in Contemporary Writing and National Identity, edited by Tracey Hill and William Hughes (Bath: Sulis Press, 1995); in ‘The Question of National Culture: Thinking about Englishness’ in Moving the Borders, edited by Marialuisa Bignami and Caroline Patey (Milan: Unicopli, 1996); and ‘Culture and Nation: Englishness’ in Litteraria Pragensia/Perspectives, edited by Susan Bassnett and Martin Procházka (Prague: British Council, 1997). An earlier version of part of Chapter 6 was published as ‘Romancing the Stone: History-Writing and Rhetoric’ in Social History, 18 (2) (May 1993). ‘How Good is Seamus Heaney?’ from English, 184 (Spring 1997) was revised to make up part of Chapter 8. For giving permission to use copyright material I would like to thank: Steve Bell and the Guardian newspaper for ‘Dr Tate’s Patent Schoolroom’, 16 January 1996; Illingworth and Solo Syndication Ltd, London, for ‘What, me? No I never touch goldfish!’, 17 November 1939; Faber & Faber Ltd for an extract from ‘The Waste Land’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S.Eliot; extracts from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin; ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ from The Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes and an extract from ‘Hawk Roosting’ from Lupercal by Ted Hughes; extracts from ‘The Grauballe Man’ from New Selected Poems 1966– 1987 by Seamus Heaney; Grafton Books for ‘Shoes’ from tottering state (copyright Tom Raworth). While every attempt has been made where appropriate to trace the copyright holders of the above material, the author and publisher would be pleased to hear from any interested parties. I have marked ‘sic’ only for the first instance when a cited text uses a masculine term to mean men and women. x Part I NATION 2 1 NATION, IDENTITY, DISCOURSE I am determined to talk about France as if it were another country, another fatherland, another nation. (Fernand Braudel 1988, l, p. 15) Britain…treated as if it were a foreign country. (Gregory Elliott 1995, p. 7) National identity is a product of modernity. It is therefore comparable to another exemplary version of the modern experience though one that rarely gets serious attention: driving a car. The one thing everybody says about driving is that you don’t learn how to do it until after you’ve passed your test. You know how to drive when it has become a habit, a pre-conscious integration of perception and movement. Without reflection, from the whole field of vision I immediately pick out the signs that matter (that car’s flashing light 50 metres away means it is turning left) and co-ordinate them with motor response (foot off accelerator and over brake). Driving is a matter of submitting to rules, something you are reminded of every time you approach a crossroads (are the lights red or green?). Driving offers us two radically different positions. In one I have exceptional individual mastery. I see the world with almost all-round vision through a wide-screen windscreen as well as via two side-view mirrors and one rear-view mirror. Besides physical controls (operated with minimum physical exertion) I have ready access to a display of dials, gauges and one-touch switches. Driving seems an almost spontaneous extension of my bodily self—I inhabit it, I live it, it is a disposition so effectively assimilated that I say ‘I drive’, ignoring the car I do the driving with.