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Bring Back The Myth Kitty!

In what must surely be one of his last radiophonic interventions, before retiring soon, the greatest Poet Laureate of the last fifty years (and beyond), Andrew Motion, has been at it again, today on the BBC, arguing for a need to study The Bible, for its "great stories" - in order to appreciate "Western Literature".

This is Descartes before the horse, surely. Western Literature once was designed to help appreciate The Bible. More to the point, as someone who believes that some of The Bible is "true", I must wonder at how much can be gained from merely cherry-picking the exciting bits (and there are a lot).

Turning to a major Holy document to find adventure tales is like recommending Playboy for the articles on Existentialism - they're there, but not really the crux. I think Motion, a self-described atheist, is sensing a truth, though - people coming to university to study "literature" are now, often, culturally illiterate. Reading, itself once the bottom line of studying English, is now secondary to - what? Well, reading for many is boring, and something they don't do.

I am not sure that parachuting Bible studies into such a mob would help much. It might be better to start them on Twain or Hemingway. Nor is it the case that all literature requires The Bible - or even Myth - to be appreciated. Larkin is a case in point. He eschewed most of the infamous "myth-kitty" and managed to generate remarkable poems that - while gesturing sometimes at transcendence - find their horizon in the bleak and present now of particularity, observed through horn-rimmed specs.

Do I want more students to read more of The Bible? Yes, I do. Will that arrest the massive decline in the interest in poetry and literature among the young? I doubt it.
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Sheenagh Pugh said…
Surely it isn't so much about trying to arrest the massive decline in the interest in poetry and literature among the young as about making sure they understand fairly simple references without which a lot of literature is a closed book to them. I have, in a university workshop, had to answer such questions as "who's Lazarus?" and "what's Ithaca?" (not where; they didn't even know it was a place.) The Bible is just one strand of the myth-heritage that informs so much Western writing and without which we are poorer. Twain and Hemingway both assume familiarity with the Bible among their readers, by the way.

I don't think Motion was suggesting concentrating only on the kind of literature that requires this background (though personally I can't think of a better way to make literature boring than concentrating on Larkin); he has made many other suggestions in his time as laureate.
Tue Feb 17, 06:07:00 pm 2009
EYEWEAR said…
Dear Sheenagh, it's good to have a poet of your stature commenting at Eyewear, and I can only blush at my Hemingway goof-up ("The Sun Also Rises" is of course from The Bible). I agree that students of English require familiarity with the myths, legends, and canon, which form the background of, and feed into, "Western literature". I was mostly trying to provoke some thought as to how ironic it was to be now reading The Bible "only" for litcrit, and no longer for spiritual nourishment. I was also, perhaps too vaguely, wondering if appreciation of literature was even farther gone than Motion thinks - in the sense that, in Northrop Frye's time one could observe the value of the Bible as code and guide to everything - but in our own, for some students, the plain alphabet might be a place to start. I'd be delighted to have you as a featured poet some Friday, by the way, best, Todd
Tue Feb 17, 07:13:00 pm 2009
Richard Moore said…
Myth Kitty died with Marshall Dillon.
Fri Mar 09, 08:05:00 am 2012
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