Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for Literacy
dangerous levels of literacy
Literacy is a very fluid concept. If a definition for literacy is being able to read, then being able to read is a skill of many diverse talents. In the medieval world, literacy was founded on the art of grammar – not a learning of the rules of language, but on the art of speaking properly and of interpreting the poets (no wonder our continued notion that literacy and reading literature are inexplicably interlinked). Today, what constitutes literacy is something quite different, and in the midst of changing radically. Consider the following quip from the BBC Today website:
Once Biggles and Just William captured the imagination of teenage boys – now computer games and texting seem to occupy their time.
As Ian Rankin notes on the programme, texting and following the prompts of computer games “is a form of literacy among teenage boys.” Anyone familiar or not with the language of texting knows that that reading a txt msg is an act of interpretation. Texting foregrounds the fact that reading itself is an act of interpretation, a fact sometimes lost on those of us who are “literate” in the intricacies of standardised phonetics. Interpretation is therefore a core element of literacy, and the level of interpretation closely related to the level of literacy.
Considering how thorny the issue of textual interpretation is in any field of knowledge, a low level of literacy premises a dangerous thing. While for many young boys leaving the UK education system with a reading age of eleven, the dangerous thing looming is poverty, a classified internal MI5 report on radicalisation in the UK finds another dangerous low level of literacy at work in the UK:
Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices.
It is notable that the MI5 use of the terms radicalisation and violent extremism refer to (Islamic) terrorism. But these terms could equally apply to boys leaving school with a reading age of eleven and finding there way into gangland lives. In both cases, it is the inability to interpret with a level of sophistication the texts by which they are able to interpret the world that creates the dangerous circumstance for themselves and their communities.
Can’t read, can’t write
Radio 4′s Start the Week with Andrew Marr this morning (Monday, 7 July) featured an interview with adult literacy teacher Phil Beadle. Worthwhile the listen. Here’s the blurb from the website:
According to Government figures, over 5 million adults in Britain can’t read or write well enough to cope with modern life. In a new TV series, the teacher PHIL BEADLE tackles the problem by attempting to teach nine illiterate adults how to read and write in only six months. Can’t Read, Can’t Write starts on Channel 4 on 21 July.
Fiction as “lectio divina”
Karen Armstrong notes in her book The Bible (2007) that lectio divina is the “peaceful, leisurely perusal of the [scriptural] text” in which a reader finds “a quiet place in [the] mind [...] to hear the Word” (128). In lectio divina, scripture is not studied as a historical-linguistic text on the one hand, or as a fundamental proof text on the other, but as a prophetic window upon the here and now. This style of “reading” was developed by monks at the end of the pagan Roman Empire as a means of spiritual formation, whereby the “rhythms, imagery and teaching of the Bible became the substratum of their spirituality, built up incrementally and undramatically day by day, year by year, in silent, regular meditation” (ibid). The purpose of such an inworking was to be able to live as close to the movement of the Spirit as possible, perceiving the Spirit’s words, thoughts, groans and inner desires. The daily liturgy, with its scripture readings and Eucharist became, in Karen Armstrong’s terms, the illiterate “laity’s “lectio divina” (130) by which the lay folk were incrementally and undramatically brought to the knowledge of Christian faith.
Today, illiteracy is again beginning to pervade the lower stratum of UK society. But this illiteracy is also an illiteracy at the story level on the one hand, where the Christ story has all but passed out of knowledge for the vast majority of people in the UK, and at the “reading” level on the other, where liberals and conservatives jockey for media positioning as they joust with their respective historical-linguistic interpretations and fundamental literal proofs of scripture. For neither side is the scriptural text a prophetic breathing into contemporary reality, but a dead text to dig up or eat. As a consequence, the laity have not been nourished with the Christ story. The Bible goes unread, and its interpretation is put back in the hands of religious authority. Yet It was just this authority that the first monks sought to escape when they went into the desert. Karen Armstrong makes the insightful point that the beginning of the monastic tradition coincides roughly with the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire (115). The monks became the new martyrs, not martyrs to death through persecution, but martyrs to state established religion. While the church developed its society-controlling doctrines, the monks lived and breathed the texts that were eventually to form the corpus of the Bible.
If the religious authorities of our day are the liberal and conservative theologians (consider the current Anglican spat over whether to be at Lambeth, or not to be at Lambeth), then who are the monks? Well, if lectio divina is the peaceful, leisurely perusal of a text, what text today but the novel better fits that description? And what community today but the reading group more aptly describes a group of monks reading a text in unison in search of its rhythms, imagery and teaching for internal meditation.
There is some truth to the argument that the novel replaced the Bible as the culture’s central “text” and that the literary canon has since Victorian times been put forward as a surrogate of scripture. Literary theory has been justly unkind to this proposal, and the English canon itself is in as much disrepute as the Biblical text. As such, few today read the Bible, while not many more read the canon. Rather, reading groups have taken fiction into their own hands:
If 500 of this country’s most fervent readers have got it right, the past 25 years have been a golden age for classic fiction, the past 15 years have been even better and the past five years have verged on the platinum.
[...]This perspective will be news to most critics, academics and publishers, although publishers will be grateful for the boost for their newer titles. But it is the firm view of 48 book reading groups across Britain.
The reading laity have become the monks, and the literary authorities, the dogmatics. Freed then from both their roots to scripture as a story stock, and from an authorising canon, today’s novels are read “lectio saecularis” by reading groups. Nevertheless, the rise of reading groups in the UK shows that the novel remains the English culture’s central de-centred “text”, which means that somewhere inside that “text” hide its scriptural traces.
It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish works of fiction, of which Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is the first, that track these traces back through the canon to the scriptures. This desire is based on the deeper desire to combine lectio saecularis with lectio divina in a way that sees the reading laity mastering both and then passing on those reading skills to the illiterate so that they can join in.
If you have any interest in finding out more about this project, then please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
