‘Auteur Theory’ for the Sub-Literate

Being consulted, earlier this year, by a concerned mother, with regard to her Year 10 daughter’s progress (or lack of it) in English at school, and with the demands of the HSC beckoning in a couple of years’ time, I asked for details of the girl’s current classroom study. The first few weeks of the term, it turned out, had been devoted to “creative writing”. I have detailed this delusion in my Quadrant article, “The Inane Expansion of Creative Writing Courses” (May 2019), so there is no need to re-visit that issue now. The remaining several weeks of English periods were to be devoted, she told me, to the study of “auteur theory”.

I was at a loss to say anything meaningful to the mother on this topic, and its supposed contribution to her daughter’s ongoing education in English, for the simple reason that I had never heard of it. Having been engaged, myself, in English study at school, and then having been an undergraduate in English for four years, and subsequently a postgraduate, in master’s and doctoral study, for a further half-dozen years, and then having taught and written extensively about English Literature, at the university, for forty more years, I had never once, in writing or speaking, used (or heard or read) the phrase “auteur theory”. I did study French at school, so I knew that “auteur” meant “author”. But what is “auteur theory”, and what is it doing in English study?

My ignorance was quickly dispelled, as an online search of the phrase revealed its meaning and significance, but also why I had never encountered it. Auteur theory, in fact, has nothing whatever to do with “English” as a subject and a discipline at all. It is a commonly-applied term in film study and criticism which (as one definition clearly, if controversially puts it) “contends that the director of a film is the primary creative force behind it, and that the films of an auteur director bear a distinctive creative ‘signature’”. One might have thought that such as the screenwriter was the primary creative force behind a film, but you live and learn, even in your seventies. Auteur theory focuses on “audio and visual elements” of a motion picture: “lighting, camerawork, staging, editing”, the use of music in a film’s score, and so on. It turns out that it is a well-established and respected intellectual study, having been developed, over the decades, from the years after the Second World War.

Altogether, auteur theory sounds fascinating and, no doubt, develops excellent skills of analysis for students of film, as they dissect and discuss this or that auteur director’s body of work. But what is it doing in an English course, in high school, in Year 10?

Further, to the point, where weeks of study in such a course, in this senior year, are to be devoted to it? And most seriously of all, what is it contributing in the case of the development and refinement of this fifteen-year-old girl’s writing and oral skills, and those of her peers, in what passes for education in Australia today? I have, at her mother’s request, carefully assessed the girl’s abilities: she is functionally sub-literate, and all but totally unskilled (because unschooled) in such as elementary grammar, or such tasks as the construction of an essay, or in literary-critical analysis of even a simple text, such as a short lyrical poem. Yet she and her classmates were to be immersed in auteur theory for much of the term in English.

If film is to be so closely studied, with attention to such techniques as mise en abyme (yes, I had to look that up, too), use of fisheye lens, non-diegetic score, motion, graphic and index vectors, and so on, then multiple scenes from the film will need to be screened, in class, for that study. Apart from the basic pedagogical exercise of concentrated attention to the matter in hand—a valuable experience, in general, for students—the skills and terminology of analysis that are being introduced and developed here, in pursuit of the distinctiveness of a particular auteur’s techniques, have no direct relevance to the fine-tuning of the writing and literary-critical analytical skills, in close textual study. This is what English should be developing and, by Year 10, fine-tuning after a decade at school.

So, it is a distraction from what should be being concentrated on in the subject, and, as film study is essentially visual and aural in nature and possesses the experience of screen-watching (as opposed to book-reading), it aggravates the now-increasingly-discussed problem of young people spending far too much of their time looking at screens of one sort or another, and failing to develop reading, writing and even basic conversational skills.

As study of film invades the English classroom, the ludicrous impression can be given to students that there is not sufficient variety and interest, for their study, of poetry, fiction, drama and non-fictional prose from the vast corpus of the several centuries of writing in English; that the English course needs to be gingered-up with “film” to alleviate even the meagre representation of texts to which Year 10 is typically exposed (poetry, in many cases, for example, being entirely absent) and to which teachers should be devoting all their attention and advocacy.

The fundamental source of this topsy-turvydom, of making students of English run before they can scarcely crawl—and, in auteur theory, in a direction away from the subject they are supposed to be studying—is the disintegration of the discipline in the universities where the teachers are trained. This is in association with the ever-increasing enrolment of would-be career teachers not in a “major” (let alone an honours degree) in what is left of “English”, but in degrees in “Education” where the now-meagre disciplinary component of the subject is further watered down. This lamentable process has been in progress for years, to the point, now, in many universities, where the English Department, as such, has ceased to exist, having been cobbled together with other disciplines, or gobbled up into larger conglomerates of the Humanities and Social Sciences, best suited for the managerial purposes of university administrators, for whom academic considerations are, typically, the last concern.

A decade ago, the New York Times wrote the obituary of the English major in America, “The Decline and Fall of the English Major” (by Verlyn Klinkenborg, June 22, 2013), particularly focusing on the selective specialisation of academics which has eroded the breadth and sequential character of the subject and its historical and canonical bases, to a grab-bag of selective and arcane topics, determined by professors’ research interests and, today, increasingly driven by partisan ideological zealotry:

Studying the humanities should be like standing among colleagues and students on the open deck of a ship moving along the endless coastline of human experience. Instead, now it feels as though people have retreated to tiny cabins in the bowels of the ship, from which they peep out on a small fragment of what may be a coastline or a fog bank or the back of a spouting whale.

Where the major was securely in place, two essential characteristics of the discipline were guaranteed: a thorough and orderly survey of the historical conspectus and development of English language and literature, from the Middle Ages to the present, and the more or less equal representation of the various types of literature: poetry, prose, drama and non-fictional prose. Within that disciplinary structure, students had non-negotiable, core commitments that ensured that what have now become risible lacunae (entire centuries of writing omitted; some of the most famous authors and influential works left unread, unstudied, even unheard-of, and so on) in the education of graduates in the subject, and future teachers of it, could not occur. And prior to university study, there were expectations of a degree of mastery of English language and expression by the time of matriculation. It was taken for granted that, after twelve years of schooling, no less, the cream of high school graduates who were genuinely of university-entry standard, would have competence in written and oral expression in their native tongue.

Now, in universities, remedial courses have to be offered in such as “writing” to bring undergraduates to an acceptable, if modest level of competency, compensating for the failure of the school system to achieve this goal.

As an example of how dire the situation has become, we need only look over the Tasman. Earlier this year (as reported in The Conversation on June 12 by Claudia Rozas, a lecturer in Education at Auckland), it was proposed that New Zealand’s secondary school English curriculum should be rewritten, to include “compulsory Shakespeare and grammar lessons, as well as a recommended reading list ranging from contemporary New Zealand authors to Chaucer”. At present, teachers may select whichever texts they like for classroom study.

What was the response from the very people responsible for teaching English in schools and universities to this proposal that mandates such as Shakespeare and grammar for study? It “generated disquiet from teachers and academics alike”; they “expressed concern” and judged “the emphasis on traditional literary texts, such as Shakespeare and other works” disturbing because “many students might find these works inaccessible”. So we see, once again, as with so many of the academics who profess English these days, the enemies are within the gates: people who hate literature are teaching it. As the advocate of the new world order, Syme, gleefully points out, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron”. The chilling Orwellian dystopia, in this regard—as in so many others—has become our reality. For nobody who loves literature—and if you don’t love it, you have no business teaching it—could take exception to this modest proposal. The teachers’ and academics’ “disquiet” reflects what the distinguished literary critic Frank Kermode identified as “the current state of disbelief in the ‘value’ of literature as literature” and how this has taken over the academy. Teachers of English, he wrote:

should be on their honour to make people know books well enough to understand what it is to love them. If they fail in that, either because they despise the humbleness of the task or because they don’t themselves love literature, they are failures and frauds.

We particularly note, in the New Zealand teachers’ deprecating of Shakespeare (even as you cannot believe you are typing such a phrase), their emphasis on accessibility, which is often coupled with its dismal sibling, relevance. Nobody worth his or her salt as teacher or professor of literature chooses texts for study on the criterion of accessibility, or rejects a great work because of its apparent failure in that regard. Of course, and in varying degrees, a writer such as Chaucer is initially inaccessible; so is Milton; so is a diarist such as Samuel Pepys and the Augustan satirists, or any of the great Victorian novelists; even Les Murray’s poetry of more recent times and set in Australia presents various obstacles of interpretation and understanding, and so on.

Your responsibility as a teacher of any intellectual principle or ability is to make the inaccessible accessible—and, further, you should enjoy the process, rather than reviling it—through the rigour of what is called “teaching and learning”.

We don’t prescribe this or that poet or novelist or non-fictional writer, or the plays of Shakespeare because they are easy to read and relevant to our life experience. We do so because they are works of genius which it is worth our while to come to understand and appreciate, through careful study, with the inestimable result of entering into a new world of imagination, of human experience and understanding.

Literature is not a mirror to which we bring ourselves to gaze at ourselves; it is a window that reveals the range and depth of human experience through the ages, and through the medium of the brilliance of language-use by the great writers. Indeed, the less immediately accessible and relevant that a work may be to our own place and time and personal circumstances, the more interesting and educational, in the best sense of that term, we may find it. And, typically, in such adventures of learning, pursued under the guidance of learned teachers with a passion for their subject, we can find that an author and a text which seems so far removed from ourselves, will touch various chords of commonality with our essential humanity. The work, thereby, becomes accessible and relevant, but in the most profound and enduring, rather than superficial and ephemeral, ways. It was this idea that Ben Jonson surely had in mind when he commented, of his contemporary, Shakespeare, that “He was not of an age, but for all time!” and Milton, later in the century: “Thou in our wonder and astonishment / Hast built thyself a live-long monument”.

In reaction to this pervasive dumbing-down of the English classroom, there has been some agitation in recent times with regard to a “back to basics” movement in primary and secondary education. The “classical schools” model, which seems to be gaining some traction, is linked to this concept of a recovery of emphasis on the essentials of teaching and learning, with admirable attention, also, to the great works of Western civilisation. But there is a disabling problem at the heart of these worthy movements. Where are the teachers going to come from to reclaim such as Eng. Lit. along these demanding disciplinary lines? By this stage, in the continuing meltdown of education, the current generation of teachers have not experienced such instruction themselves. Who will teach the teachers? Certainly not today’s universities!

With regard to the hard work of grammar study, and related tasks such as concentration on vocabulary and etymology, sentence- and paragraph-structure, and essay-writing, the 600-page volume Complete English All-in-One (ed. Ed Swick, McGraw Hill, 2019), with “Practice Makes Perfect” aptly highlighted on its cover, unflinchingly presents, in its “total language study program”, what is involved and required in mastery of these essential skills. It is a formidable example of what should be being accomplished, in the English classroom, along with graded reading in all the forms of literature. This, with the nurturing of interpretative abilities, the all-important understanding of the significance of context (historical, cultural, biographical) for informed reading and interpretation, as well as oral skills (in which the current generation are most lamentably deficient) would, you might think, be enough to keep teachers busy. But, no, they must spend several weeks on auteur theory.

Yet, finally, it is not only incapacity, laziness, or opposition to such as teaching Shakespeare and grammar in order to bring English back to where it belongs that is responsible, au fond, for this particular neglect of the disciplinary components of the subject. A more sinister and widespread phenomenon—the devolution of education, in general, into indoctrination—now well-embedded, is wilfully impelling this meltdown into subliteracy. A generation of students are being uneducated to the extent of having thwarted or undeveloped their abilities to read deeply, widely and carefully, and to write with confident ability, to sustain well-reasoned argument and thesis skills meticulously, and have oral-expression competence nurtured to a level of articulacy. These are the social goods which English, properly and rigorously taught and studied, can achieve, in addition to the profound enjoyment and appreciation of great writing. Without them, young people are seriously ill-equipped, as they advance into adulthood and the broader life of society, to interpret intelligently what they read and hear, in general, and contribute to discussion and debate. They are, effectively, deluded or silenced in the face of flawed policies from government, the fake news of our corrupted mainstream media or the vomitorium of anti-social media on which people squander so much time and to which they uncritically submit. Reduce human beings’ capacity to think deeply and critically, and to write and speak lucidly and confidently and you make them ready (as George Orwell pointed out in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the essay, “Politics and the English Language”) for tyranny—to comply, unquestioningly and without any nuanced insight and discernment, with any tripe that is spouted to them.

So, wasting multiple periods in English (of all subjects) in classes for the functionally subliterate, on material extraneous to the discipline, such as auteur theory in film, is not only ridiculous, but ultimately inimical to nurturing and sustaining a society that truly values free and informed thought and expression.

Barry Spurr, Literary Editor of Quadrant, was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry. His next book, Language in the Liturgy: Past, Present, Future, will be published in 2025.