When the King and Queen of England Came to TownPopular entertainment, everday life, and the teaching of ‘culture’ Anne Freadman – Inaugural lecture in the University
of Melbourne, |
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Distinguished colleagues, friends and relatives, ladies and gentlemen,
Let me say first how grateful I am to the Vice-Chancellor for his introduction and for the generosity and the grace of his words. In the line of work that I have pursued for many years, one of my preoccupations has been the function of the ritual order of events in both daily interactions and in ceremonial occasions such as this. So perhaps I should start by reflecting upon the way we have started. The Vice-Chancellor’s introduction is what discourse theory calls a speech act: it makes something happen. In the present instance, it is intended to make me speak: how can we be sure that it will work? … I could not be so churlish.
There are many introductions, before anything can be said and done; they are all thresholds between silence and words. Indeed, a lecture such as this is itself an introduction. I am expected to introduce myself as a scholar, and you are perhaps hoping that I will introduce to you, and hence inaugurate, the programme of questions, themes, and preoccupations that will inform my tenure of the Chair of French. But in order to embark upon that project, I have to find an introduction to my lecture.
I have thought of several possibilities. I could start with a warning to the effect that you will not hear from me a defense of French, or an attempt to identify the Frenchness of French; you will not see in my performance here tonight, or in my teaching, a display of francophilia. French is not for me an object of unreserved love; it is a problematic collection of issues into which I was introduced in the first place by the hazards and opportunities of my education. And it is a means, as any language would be, of gaining access to the surprises of a world into which I was not born. What sort of thing is this access? What is it to learn, as we now say, another culture? This will be one of my themes, and I shall want to consider the implications of a very simple proposition: just as any encounter with the surprises of an unfamiliar culture leads to a learning, all genuine learning changes one’s culture. There may be no difference essentially between learning one’s “own” culture and learning someone else’s.
Another possible introduction would be an abbreviated form of my life-story as a student of French. I firmly believe that it started at pre-school, where some nuns taught me “Frère Jacques”, in French and then in an English translation, and at age 3 or 4, I went home to my parents in great excitement to tell them I’d learnt French that day. They were suitably amused. I could give you the list of the inspiring teachers with whom I did my serious learning – Mrs Jackson at school, who gently but insistently moved me to considering a career in teaching; Professor Jackson at this university, without whose generous, discreet and far-sighted understanding I would not have undertaken post-graduate study; Professor Chisholm who, in his role as Emeritus professor, introduced me to Rimbaud and to the insight that great poetry did not have to be about pretty things; then Ross Chambers, with whom I continued my reading of Rimbaud, and whose inspiration accompanies all my reading to this day. This story, were I to tell it in detail, would trace the route I took through literature to the broader study of culture. It accounts for the choice I have made to read Colette’s journalistic writing rather than her novels.
A third possible introduction would start from another lucky accident; at my age, I can boast of having been a student in France in 1968. This was the year of the barricades; but 1968 can be used as shorthand for an intellectual revolution, in which a whole range of questions concerning language and culture came to prominence in France. In the practice of some people, these things took shape as methods of analysis of cultural phenomena – structuralism, then post-structuralism; in mine, it was the very idea of a semiotics that got under my skin. In some uses of those methods, there is a temptation to take an exclusively linguistic view of culture. I will contest that today and take, instead, a view of culture based in a general semiotics. And I shall adapt to that view a set of questions that we asked in the 70s only of language: how do we learn a culture? How do we participate in it? and what kinds of inventiveness arise as we do?
I am still at the threshold, and there is one more thing I should do before I start. I should introduce Colette, whom some of you would know as the author of a rather salacious series of novels called the “Claudine” novels, written at the behest of her first husband.
Others of you would have read her mature novels, and still others would know that she was a mime artist in the music-halls of Paris and a rather notorious figure about town.
But before any of this she was making her name as a newspaper critic and journalist.
The collection that intrigues me most, and from which I shall draw my material this evening, is called Dans la foule – In the crowd. In it, Colette observes the crowds at the events that were making the daily news. She went to the boxing, she went to parliament, she stood in the streets waiting for the numbers to be posted following an election; she went to a cemetery to watch what people did there, she attended trials, and she went to join the cheering when the King and Queen of England came to town.
This was simply a royal visit, of which there were many in these years: the Czar and Czarina of all the Russias, the King of Afghanistan, the King of Portugal, the archduke of this and the prince of that. Crowned heads paraded regularly through the streets of Paris.
Colette was appropriately ironic.
| Paris, enchanté, attend un roi. Rien ne manque à sa joie républicaine; il aura, outre un monarque, une reine à acclamer. | Paris is overjoyed; she’s expecting a king. What more could a republic want? |
The people of Paris were interested in the king and queen; I am not, and nor was Colette. I am interested what it is to participate in such an event. I shall try to answer this question through the research I and others have done on the issue of genre. Genres are kinds of cultural events – royal visits, for example, ceremonial parades, or trials or elections or sporting contests. They have certain regular and predictable features, and they are the occasion for a certain kind of experience. Some theorists would go on to say that each genre assigns a role to its participants, this including its audience. This being so, each genre has something like a social or an ideological function, putting the public into its place and using it for its own ends. This certainly seems to be the case in the visit of George V and Mary of England to Paris.
The street decorations and the fanfares, the welcome they were given by the enthusiastic crowds, show us how the genre is intended to work. As indeed it did. Colette records the cheering:
- Vive le roi!…Vive la reine!… Vive l’Angleterre!… tous donnent de la voix, lèvent les mains, agitent des mouchoirs, |
Long live the King!… Long live the Queen!… Long live England!… Everyone lends a voice and waves a hand or a handkerchief, each one adding an individual spark to the burst of collective enthusiasm. |
The public of Paris was doing a job for the Government of France. While officially there was no diplomatic agenda for this visit, the visit marked the tenth anniversary of the signing of the entente cordiale, and the newspapers remarked that this was the popular display of the spirit of that agreement, if not, indeed, its living proof. This, if you like, is one of its ideological functions; the other is that like the official appropriation of sporting fixtures, they are occasions for the manipulation and the display of public unanimity: there are, one might be led to believe, no class or political divisions in what is mythically known as le peuple.
This might lead us to conclude that to participate in a cultural event of this nature is to be entirely scripted by it. But many theorists of popular culture have pointed out that it is rare for an audience simply to play its assigned role. Indeed, Colette is far more interested in the crowd than she is in the parade, and she tells us is how unscripted a lot of their behaviour is. They cheer, certainly but they have other things to say as well.
Much of what they say illuminates the genre, and firstly, by insisting that it is a genre before it is a singular event. This royal visit is so generic, Colette remarks, that there has been nothing like it since the last time. Indeed, this official parade is almost the same thing as the parade for the 14th of July, give or take some details of the decorations. As if to underline this generic quality, the crowd is first represented as homogeneous, without individuality. I watch, she tells us, from the footpath, imprisoned like an ear of wheat in a field of wheat, my view blocked by three rows of heads and shoulders and the uniformed backs of the police. Yet the individuals, as well as their class distinctions, do assert themselves, and they do so in their conversations. Such moments serve to particularise the event. The characters in this exchange are a trottin, who is a messenger for a fashion house and a properly dressed, rather foolish young man:
À gauche, un jeune homme bien mis cherche à engager la conversation avec un trottin vipérin, dressé sur deux sabots de velours poussiéreux, un parfait trottin acide et indomptable… “Pardon, mademoiselle, c’est bien à 4 h 30 qu’il doit arriver, le roi Georges? - J’en sais rien! réplique le trottin. Il vient me prendre à 6 heures pour l’apéritif.” |
To my left, a very proper young man essays a gambit with a trottin on tip-toes in dusty pink clogs, a wily, quick-witted, irrepressibly wicked trottin, a classic of the genre. “Excuse me, mademoiselle, is 4.30 the time we can expect King George?” “Wouldn’t have a clue,” replies the trottin. He’s picking me up at 6 for a drink.” |
The official event provides the opportunity for people to meet in the street, but the trottin puts an end to such hopes by purporting to take the young man literally. Doing so, she precipitates the contrast between the official expectations of public behaviour, represented by the proper young man, and her own refusal of those expectations. Don’t think I’m waiting on the streets for any man, king or not, she is saying. He’ll pick me up at my place. Her response, then, is to the genre itself; we might say that she deconstructs it – the waiting, the recognisable hierarchy of class and power, the asymmetrical dynamic of desire. She draws a parallel between the relation of king and people, and that between men and women, translating one genre into the other, using one to mock the other and to give herself a place from which she can refuse the characteristic power relations. It is not my desire that is at stake, she points out; this is what the King wants, in order to know he’s king.
Behind the trottin and her young man, some elegant ladies are having a different sort of conversation.
“Le dîner chez les Breteuil sera très froid! Crie l’une d’elles. - Parce que? … glapit sa voisine d’en dessous. - Parce que la princess M*** et et la duchess de L*** y sont invitées toutes les deux, qu’elles y vont toutes les deux et qu’elles ne peuvent pas se sentir!” |
“The Breteuils’ dinner is going to be a very chilly affair, screeches one of them. “Why so?…” yelps her neighbour. Why because… the princess of M and the duchess of L are both invited, and they are both going, and they can’t stand each other!” |
These society ladies have rented places on steps, and are claiming to belong to aristocratic circles. In their dress and in their diction, they are, so to say, a cut above the rest, asserting a social hierarchy and a system of class values that was not, as we might wish to believe, brought low by the storming of the Bastille. Colette is right: some of the cultural practices that sustained, and were sustained by, monarchical rule especially as it was revived in the nineteenth century have been called on by the republican government for the sake of the entente cordiale - never mind the contradictions. Notice, then, that these apparently random conversations – the trottin’s repartee and the society ladies’ gossip – serve as comments on the genre, and both reveal its politics.
Let us
compare these characters at the point when the procession comes into view. There
may indeed be some continuity with royal parades of France’s recent monarchical
past, but the society ladies are emphatically not fooled. The carriages are
showing their age: “what shabby carriages!” – “Quels
landaux miteux!” - they hoot, as if to say that they should at least
have been dusted off for the occasion. Really this republican government just
doesn’t know how to do things. The trottin is once again much
funnier:
Ces types en bicorne à plumes ... ils n’ont pas l’air de se douter que les bordures en autruche ne se portent pas cette année. |
Those chaps ... the ones with the feathers in their two-cornered hats; nobody seems to have told them that ostrich borders aren’t in this year. |
If the ladies are speaking
from their class values, the trottin is speaking from the authority
of her profession. For her the issue is not History, its march towards modernity
or its continuity with the past; it is fashion. The hats are just not up to
date. Later, when the moment arrives and the monarchs roll by, she again calls
on her own professional expertise. The enthusiasm and the cheering catch the
whole crowd up; again, individual differences and class positions are apparently
irrelevant. Yet even now, mixed in with the choking emotion that Colette assures
us is quite genuine, the members of the crowd maintain their self-respect in
irony and mockery. Our friend trottin provides the example: 
Pas mal, tout ça, pas mal. Il y a qu’une chose à changer là-dedans. C’est le chapeau bleu de la reine Mary. |
No-ot ba-ad, not bad. -- Just one thing I’d change -- Queen Mary’s blue hat. |
Let us think of the crowd in Colette’s depiction as a metaphor for the jumble of cultural possibilities: then what actually happens is a range of conformity and inventiveness. The exemplary moments Colette picks out are a function of the clashes and the contrasts and the happy coincidence of chance encounters that happen when people jostle together. All the members of the crowd bring with them other genres, and their capacity to judge, to mock, or otherwise to step out of the script derives from the generic heterogeneity of their own experience. It is in this sense, I think, that genre theory can illuminate the question I have asked: what is it to participate in culture? It rarely if ever means being scripted by the rules of a single genre. When we step outside our script, it is not to discover a space of pure unscripted freedom. “Outside” is a jumbled and chaotic space of other genres: both the society ladies’ snobbish judgments and the trottin’s witty repartee depend upon the patterns they make in this space. The crowds that Colette observes lend themselves, but do not give themselves, to the public events that they attend. Their cultural mobility is summed up metaphorically in the trottin: she is a messenger whose job is to fetch and carry across the whole variety of the city. In that, she is like the reporter, and her powers of juxtaposition have similar effects to Colette’s own.
Now you might have noticed that both the members of the crowd, and Colette as she joins with them and observes them, are thoroughly familiar with the script. There is nothing they need to learn, no aspect of this event with which they are not culturally at ease. Royal visits are part of their culture, as they are part of the culture of royal visits. Indeed, easy familiarity is often used to characterise what we think of as culture itself: my culture is what cannot surprise me, my culture is what I have no trouble interpreting, my culture is what I do not need to learn. But there are significant problems with this view. It suggests that we are either inside or outside a culture, that it is either thoroughly familiar or thoroughly foreign. It suggests that there are impermeable boundaries around cultures. In the same way as I reject the loathesome idea that there are “language barriers”, I have a deeply held objection to this view. Were it true, my profession would have no vocation; it would be futile to teach anything, and futile in particular to teach culture. So I want to question this view of culture now by turning to two further articles by Colette, one in which she has to make a discernible effort of interpretation, and the other in which she has to correct a prejudice and learn something from which she had felt estranged. My suggestion will be that one can be surprised, or wrong, about one’s own culture, and that part of participating in a culture is learning it.
In the first of these articles, she goes to the boxing. This is not French boxing, which was going out of fashion at the time, but English boxing, which was all the rage.
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French boxing |
English boxing |
She watches from the box reserved for the press and notably, at this early date, for the people filming the match. There is something about this crowd that she does not understand: she picks out particular faces, noting their features, and she listens:
Ce murmure des foules calmes, qui s’enfle et s’apaise, et ne se tait jamais, je l’écoute avec soin […] comme si je voulais découvrir ses sources mouvantes, insaisissables … |
I listen to the hum of a peaceable crowd, rising, falling, never still, closely I listen, watchfully, alert to the secrets it keeps from me. |
The match is between the famous French boxer of the period, Georges Carpentier, known as Gentleman George, and an American boxer, Willie Lewis.
Colette describes little of the match, although she does attend to what she calls the “choreography” of the bodies and the bloodstains and bruises that appear on their surfaces. Again, she is more focussed on the crowd. In particular, she is fascinated by how riveted they are, by their patent emotion. It is here that her curiosity takes the form of a specific question: what she asks, is the mode of participation that binds the women so intensely to the spectacle of the match and to its outcome? She finds her answer through comparison with behaviour around the roulette tables in Monte-Carlo. The women have the same faces in both settings: the same faces, the same emotions, hence the same mode of participation. They are gambling.
Something of this is true also for the men, she concedes, as if answering an implied question, but she reads in their faces another, distinct emotion:
Fièvre du jeu, sadisme qui s’ignore, excitation sportive – il y a aussi de tout cela, certes, sur les physionomies masculines; mais une autre émotion fait de beaucoup d’hommes, ici, autant de champions immobiles, enchaînées à leur stalle, anxieux – car le boxeur français faiblit – sévères – car ile le glorifient comme une oeuvre de leur pays – et tendres – car leur plus noble orgueil, leur fierté le plus désintéressée tient à sa victoire. Il est leur délégué, leur incarnation florissante, leur espoir… Va-t-il périr? |
There is certainly something of all of this in the men’s faces – the fever of gambling, an unwitting sadism, the sport of it all; but another emotion turns many of the men into motionless champions, chained to their seats: they are anxious (the French boxer appears to weaken) - unforgiving (he is for them a glorious national treasure - and fond (their noblest pride hangs on his victory). He is their proxy, their hope in flesh and blood… Will he go down? |
Projection and identification, we might say, were we inclined to the psychoanalytical mode. The French boxer stands for his fans, he represents them to themselves, and he fights on their behalf. It is through the spectacle of his injuries and his valour that he represents their fantasy of themselves as men.
As in the crowd that lined the streets for the royal visit, there is a range of participatory modes available for the audience at the boxing; these modes are differentiated by the stake people have in the outcome, and Colette identifies these stakes by evoking a different range of genres for each gender. For the women, it is other forms of gambling; for the men, it is other genres for playing out metaphors of the citizen-warrior. She also brings to her observations of the crowd at the boxing her familiarity with the theatre. This helps her to rule out an inappropriate interpretation. By insisting that this is a form of theatre, she can focus on how the audience is bound to the spectacle. It is this that allows her to treat as irrelevant the hypothesis that the rapt attention of the women might be interpretable along heterosexual lines. Never! she exclaims. Mouths open and jaws dropping, eyes dilated, no woman ever showed a face like that to any lover.
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If it is the case, that Colette assembles an array of genres in order to interpret behaviour that she finds puzzling, then we can say two things. One is that she starts out in a situation of unfamiliarity with the genre, and the other, that she comes to understand it by calling on other cultural knowledge. Sometimes her extrapolations are unconvincing, and she has to start again: familiarity is achieved. I want to explore this proposition further, by following her to the cemetery, where, as she puts it, “je ne connais personne”, meaning that she is not here to visit a grave. Indeed, not only is there no-one buried here whom she knows: she has no knowledge at all of what it is to be in cemeteries. She is in for some surprises. She seems to have been expecting a sombre, contemplative mood, mixed with what the French call pompes funèbres – horses decorated with black feathers, hearses with wreaths. |
... nulle majesté funéraire... |
What she finds instead is families on their Sunday walk, in a place entirely lacking in mystery:
It is the banality, the ordinariness of the place that surprises her, the total absence of the atmosphere she associates with the ultimate mystery. She starts by making fun of it, comparing one of the tombs she sees with the gateway to a fun-park.
As with the trottin’s acerbic comments, the mockery comes from an incongruous juxtaposition of two genres, but it is sheer mockery here, without the trottin’s deconstructive acuity. Evidently Colette has no engagement with the cemetery, no understanding of it, and no power, therefore, to investigate its dynamic. She is speaking from the outside. Moreover, she actively resents the room that is given to the dead, as if they are invading the space of the living. Other people treat their proximity with death with the same insouciance as in a department store on a busy day, she tells us, whereas she is close to disgust at the very idea of a space reserved for the processes of putrefaction.
Oui, tant de morts… Sous ce pont, contre la rue, contre nous, parmi nous; - morts si proches, si peu habillés de bois, de plomb et de terre… Le bois s’effrite, le plomb se troue, la terre respire… Je ne frissonne pas, mais je suspecte cette grasse terre qui colle à mes semelles, je suspecte l’odeur du vent; |
So many dead… Beneath the bridge, almost on the street, amongst us; - dead so close, so imperfectly clad with wood, or iron, or earth … Wood splinters, iron rusts, earth breathes … I am not shuddering, but I am suspicious of this sticky earth and the curious smell in the wind. |
Her disgust is followed by revulsion; she prefers cremation. Colette rejects the genre that is called in French “le culte des morts” – the ritual practices involved in care of the dead.
As if this were her first encounter with the cemetery, she has everything to learn from the people who feel at home here. But most of the article is given over to a refusal to learn, which takes the form of a contrast between her own reaction and the way other people use the space. I don’t want this, she says, I don’t want this to be part the city in which I live or of the culture that gives meaning to that life. Yet, in the very last paragraph, she achieves an understanding, precisely by reworking her description; then she remembers that the cemetery is the space for a cultural practice whose conditions would be lost with cremation.
Mais que deviendrait, alors, le “culte des morts” tel que l’entend cette brave dame, debout dans son petit enclos et piétinant d’un talon autoritaire une, deux, trois, quatre dalles couchées, gravées de noms et de dates? |
But then, what would become of the “culte des morts”? See this good lady, erect in her little enclosure, stamping with authority on several tombstones engraved with names and dates. |
The lady in question is tending a family plot, with no sign of the awed respect that Colette expects. It’s a practical job, like housework:
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The Melbourne General Cemetery |
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Elle passe bonnement sa “bête” en fourrure au col d’une urne, et elle gratte la mousse, balaye, pince un surgeon tardif de rosiers, marmonne tout bas et claque de la langue: “Tt… tt… ah! Ces domestiques.” Puis elle reprend sa “bête”, ses gants, assure l’équilibre de son chapeau en se mirant en le médaillon bombé d’une couronne de perles et s’en va, … |
Muttering and tut-tutting, she hangs her foxtails around an urn and scratches at the moss, sweeps, snaps off a late rose-bud: “ttt- ttt – those servants!” Then she picks up her fur and her gloves, looks at her reflection in a metal medallion to adjust her hat, and leaves. |
Unlike the comparisons with the fun-park and the department store, this analogy works to reveal a truth about the genre. The woman is at home here, hanging up her fur on an ornament, adjusting her hat in a medallion. Her gestures, the tasks she goes through, even her muttered complaints against the servants, show that what she is doing in the cemetery is a simple extension of her household duties.
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The Melbourne General Cemetery |
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For Colette, the important discovery is that there is some continuity between the spaces of the living and the spaces of the dead. Quite unlike her earlier incongruous contrasts, which rely on the opposite assumption, and quite unlike her fear that the dead are invading the space of the living, what Colette comes to understand is that the culte des morts is what Wittgenstein calls “a form of life”. She provides us with a metaphor: leaving her family plot after adjusting her hat, the good lady we have been watching casts a scandalised look at an abandoned grave. The tombstone has been taken over by ivy and brambles, the weeds hold it tight in an embrace and at the same time demonstrate their freedom; as metaphors for irrepressible life, they reconcile Colette to what she had initially rejected. Although the good lady is scandalised by them, because she is scandalised by the very fact of an abandoned tomb, she and these wayward plants are very much alike, because they use the cemetery as yet another space in which to live.
I belong to a profession whose vocation is to introduce our students to unfamiliar situations and practices, to teach them, so to say, to speak in them. I believe that it is counterproductive for us to embark on these activities by positing the foreignness of the other culture as against our own. After all, there is no property of any culture that makes it foreign, and to reify our fantasies of “Frenchness” is to adopt a dangerous form of circular argument. Foreignness is simply our experience of an encounter, it inheres neither in “them” nor in “us”. It is useful for us, then, to reflect upon the ways in which we might feel “foreign” in settings that are very close to home. This is particularly true in the cemetery, which marks the threshold space between the known and the ultimate unknown. This boundary between life and death is marked in Colette’s writing by a taboo; don’t touch, do not seek to know, fear this proximity. Her visit to the cemetery has allegorical force in the study of intercultural encounter. The cautionary tale in my story has been Colette’s fun-park and her department store: they are ways of making fun of the cemetery, not means of participating in its ways. As such, they dispense with the process of learning and leave her culture intact.
I have analysed the experience of foreignness by considering a culture as a collection of genres. Any genre is a practice that derives from a local history and whose form becomes conventionalised through practice. It takes place in particular social or indeed physical spaces, in – or for – a crowd whose expectations and behaviour are to some extent shaped to the needs of the event. As Colette goes about the streets reporting on the daily life of Paris, she has to discover what moves her neighbours, she has to learn not to reject their activities and preoccupations. Instead, she sets about observing the details of these activities with a writer’s eye: she listens to fleeting scraps of conversation, she watches people’s faces, outlines their gestures and the spaces that organise them. Most tellingly, she draws attention to her own sense of foreignness in particular situations, shifting between her observation of her own reactions and her observation of the people who are at home there. In this way, we find her exploring the resources of her own cultural knowledge, discovering its limitations, certainly, but also discovering in it comparisons and contrasts which she can use to shed light on the problems of the encounter. In this way, we have seen her use the familiarity of what she does know to defuse the fears and the subtle threats of her first experience with the unknown. Thus she draws on her understanding of women’s work in the home to understand le culte des morts; she draws on her understanding of the range of leisure activities of a certain social milieu to clarify the inarticulate desires that move the crowd at the boxing. Her irony, which in later work turned to satire, gives a literary form to her sense of outsiderness. At its best, it accommodates both her distance and her compassion, but what impresses me most in this writing is her use of the arts of description to search for apt angles from which to understand what she sees and hears. Frequently, this search takes the form of teasing out a metaphor or adjusting an analogy. Following her lead, I am going to try to find some alternative to the dratted metaphor of the boundary.
| The first thing I have done in preparation for this task is to locate foreignness at a local level. |
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| There are little edges all over the place, discernible at points where we feel unfamiliar with the genres that we encounter. I want to stress the ordinariness of this experience. I stress, too, the fact that these little edges do not coincide with things of unmanageable dimensions, such as Australia, or the English language, France, Frenchness, or French. | |
| It is, I am sure, seriously misleading to think of language, or of culture as homogeneous wholes corresponding with the romantic view of nationhood. The first prong of my challenge to this view has been to consider culture as a heterogeneous collection of genres. | |
| The second will be to put language in its place. | |
| I said at the beginning of my lecture that language was “a” means of access to another world, but only in the reductions of an academic imagination could it be considered to be the only one. There is no conversation at all at the boxing. In order to understand this event, Colette does not rely on anything that anybody says: she reads the faces and the changing volume of the sound. At the cemetery, too, she reads tasks carried out and gestures to accommodate the body to those tasks; the minor imprecation regarding the servants adds to her understanding, certainly, but is not its key. At the royal parade, the trottin is particularly attentive to millinery, and Colette herself makes a special trip that evening to see the decorations in the rue de la Paix. Dress, gesture, lighting, the arrangement of furniture and the “choreography of bodies”, Colette attends to all these things, and all these things are semiotic practices. Language is simply one amongst them. | |
| There is an old question that haunts the profession of language teaching: what, we ask anxiously, is the relation between “language” and “culture”? It is an ill-formed question. If a culture is a collection of genres, the appropriate question is this: what is the function of language in any particular genre? | |
| The answer is that it acts in dynamic relations with other sign systems, sometimes in a dominant, and sometimes in a supporting role. Moreover, the semiotic view has it that the “boundary” of a language in no way coincides with the boundaries of other sign systems, so it must follow that a language is neither geographically nor historically coextensive with a culture. Facial expressions, gestures, the public and indeed the private display of emotions, sound, the design of spaces for spectator events, the exhibition of monarchs and other public figures, care of the dead and of their resting places … the range of cultural practices that cannot be confined to the sociological extension of a given language is unlistable. |
For these reasons, the intercultural vocation of language teaching is in need of significant revision. If I am right, that we cannot extrapolate a theory of culture from a theory of language in the narrow sense, then neither can we extrapolate a way of teaching culture directly from the ways in which we teach languages. Of course it is true that language is inextricable from the cultures in which it is used, but the teaching of culture and the teaching of language use their materials differently and they must draw on distinct pedagogical methods.
It is important not to conflate the ways in which we use language for the purposes of participation in the event, with those displayed by Colette herself when she describes them. Verbal participation is the business of the language class, and to be useful the teaching must attend to the finely differentiated discursive skills appropriate to particular settings. On the other hand, the culture class takes culture as an object of reflection and investigation, not an environment or an experience. It attends to, and uses, description, analysis, and theory, which are practices in which discourse is dominant, and in which the relation between language and other semiotic practices is reversed. Hence, in my lecture this evening, I have used images in the secondary function of illustration. Those images have told their own story. Firstly, I have shown Colette in various genres. Secondly, royal visits were a genre for the whole of Europe and beyond; likewise international sporting fixtures and their relation with gambling, and I have found direct parallels between the cimetière Montmartre as Colette describes it at Toussaint in 1913 and the Melbourne General Cemetery at All Saint’s in 2004. Thirdly, the contrast between French boxing and English boxing is quite unable to be generalised beyond itself, and no conclusion at all regarding Frenchness and Englishness can be drawn from it. But the boxing, the culte des morts, and the royal visit are not my genres, they are Colette’s. I have wanted to show that she uses the arts of description in order come to terms with them. Descriptions are adequate to this task under two conditions: the first is when they are based on attention to the full array of semiotic information available, and the second is when this information is used to locate a neighbourhood within which to situate that genre: the parade for the 14th of July, or indeed fashion parades, for the royal visit; gambling, for the boxing; and housework for the culte des morts.
You may wish to make an objection to me at this point. What we want for our students is not that they stand to one side and describe the genres that make up Francophone cultures; we want them to participate in them. When they go into the streets, so to speak, and mingle with the crowds, we want them to know what to say and how to say it, what to do and how to do it; we want them, eventually, to exhibit the same level of cultural mastery as the trottin at the royal parade. I agree. So the two modes of learning surely should not be separated. I have distinguished them for three reasons. The first is that with us our students are in classrooms, and there are material and indeed generic constraints on what can be learned there. The second is that their learning of the finely differentiated forms of discourse required for participating in particular genres is ineffectual if they do not understand the semiotics of the genre and its place in the culture. The third is more technical. Much of what we hear from the trottin, and indeed from Colette herself, takes the form of commentary, and commentary is a most interesting discursive mode. While analysis and theory may take us so far out of the event that it is difficult to get back in, commentary has the special property of taking us back to participation. It is a mixed mode, and an integral part of any cultural experience. Once she has succeeded in interpreting the crowd at the boxing, Colette uses her binoculars to make out the end of the match, which she describes in some detail. Then she records the cheering that greets Carpentier’s victory, and she tells us that despite herself, she joins in. There is a lesson in this for us: she cannot participate in the joy of the crowd until she understands, as she puts it, its elusive and secret source.
It is salutary, I think, for us to consider that what we call our “own” culture is incomplete and fragmentary, that it is traversed by ignorance, that it is imperfectly owned. But the edges are little edges, they emerge at the encounter of genres. These are manageable edges; genres can be learned. So let me return to the question from which I started: if it is the case that participating in a culture is not always a matter of cosy familiarity, if it is the case that we must often adapt to the unfamiliar, if it is the case that culture is a process, not a thing, and that that process involves learning and sometimes getting it wrong, then is there a significant difference between learning in the cultural environment we call home, and learning abroad?
I am sure that the answer to this question is no. But I am also sure that we must be very careful about how we interpret the implications of this answer in our pedagogical practice. There is considerable risk involved in supposing on this basis that there is no problem, that our students will move seamlessly through various cultural encounters, from near and from afar, bringing equal skills to all of them. It is most unlikely that they could do so. For there is, always and in the most unexpected places, an edge, or a tear in the fabric. It was politically useful for France and the Great Britain to write the entente cordiale, and useful again ten years later for the king and queen of England to parade through Paris to celebrate it, but I’m not at all sure that a treaty is a useful model for cultural learning. Having a marked affinity for women’s crafts and some aversion to statecraft, I prefer the metaphor of the seam to the metaphor of the boundary. A seam is a point where two discontinuous edges of fabric are made to fit together and then to hold. Colette’s metaphors and her analogies are, if I may put it this way, her way of teaching us to sew.
