The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.

Back in January (the 22nd) (Was it really that long ago?) I ventured a comment on Jim Murdoch's Post, Judging a Book by Everything Bar it's Cover that I was coming round to the idea of literature being what is left when you subtract the story. The actual phrase was not original, was not from my fast-breeder of a brain; nor, I guess, was the concept. Both seemed to have been hanging around at that time. However, the ground in which the seed for that thought might have grown had been prepared a little over forty years ago, and having left the comment I was reminded of a fascinating puzzle encountered in those dim and distant days, a puzzle that fascinated me then and still does today. At any rate, my comment on Jim's post set that old train of thought back upon its rails, and I have decided that it is now time I went somewhere with it. At the end of the day you might come to doubt the wisdom of that decision.

In the early days of my teaching career I worked in a special school for children with learning difficulties. Looking back, it was one of the most interesting periods of my career. Each child's special difficulties were individual to that child, but in any one there would be some sort of combination of: short attention span, immature language development, poor verbal- and abstract reasoning, some degree of hyperactivity... They were all aged between eight and ten. You will understand my amazement then when I tell you that their favourite television programme, was Perry Mason, an American, Emmy-winning drama. That is, you will understand my amazement if you are ancient enough to remember Perry Mason - or if you happen to have one or more of his D.V.Ds. in your collection. It was basically a courtroom drama written to a formula, the formula being that, in the first half hour a murder is committed and the police arrest the wrong person. Perry, a lawyer, is engaged for the defense and sets out to prevent what seems like an inevitable miscarriage of justice. There is a trial. Perry and his assistant investigate. Perry ties the prosecution up in knots before producing a pyrotechnic display of verbal wizardry that traps the guilty party into a dramatic court room confession, usually while giving testimony on the witness stand. The second part would consist of Perry and the innocent principals getting together for Perry to explain the intricacies of what happened: how the dastardly deed was done and covered-up and how the villains were eventually trapped by their one fatal mistake. That at any rate is how I remember it forty years on.

What I do remember and for sure is that the whole programme was geared to their weaknesses. The emphasis was all on the talk and away from the action. The 'action' was, for the most part, explained, not shown, other than in brief flash-backs - a further complication, for children not as television-sophisticated as they are today. The time-line must have been quite beyond their powers to unravel. And yet they were in no doubt about it: it was their favourite programme. The enthusiasm with which they recounted the previous evening's story was corroboration enough, if any were needed. They could not wait to explain the latest happenings, to tell me "What it was about". But here was the problem: the stories they unfolded bore no resemblance to the one I had watched. Consistently so. Week after week I failed to reconcile "their" plot to the one I had watched. I began by making the assumption that, not able to understand the speech (in which was the action, remember), they were in some way creating their own action and attributing it to the characters, rather as they might manipulate dolls or action men, projecting appropriate motives onto them as they did so. These alternative plots, I supposed, were the direct result of their lack of understanding or of their misunderstandings. That was very condescending of me, a fact I was to realise only when it finally dawned on me that my twenty pupils were not producing twenty different scripts. Some weeks they would all be telling the same tale, like crime suspects who had carefully rehearsed their alibi. (I did check that one out, by the way: they had not had the opportunity to compare notes to that extent, many of them having come straight off different coaches - not that they would have been able to get their stories together that well, in any case.) Other weeks there would be two or three versions with varying degrees of agreement between them, but impressive correspondence within each. And then a moment of intuition: watching the broadcast one Sunday, I tried to rid myself of all the extraneous baggage that I had been bringing to it, baggage which they did not possess: knowledge of the formula to which the stories were written (their versions rarely conformed), familiarity with the conventions of film and video drama (their story lines were always linear, not always as simple as you might expect, though flash-backs would often be absorbed into the present), my greater susceptibility to spoken language than to body language or to other forms of non-verbal communication (it was not so much that the actual words used were beyond them, as that the sentence structures would be unfamiliar), etc, etc. There was a colossal amount of it when I got right down to it. Too much ever to have allowed me to succeed in my self-appointed task of divesting myself of it! However, to the extent that I managed something of my plan, I was able, at least to intuit - no more than that - the possibility of alternative interpretations beneath the author's complex plots. False ones, you might think (the author would have, I am sure!) but that perhaps is to show the prejudices with which our culture so unthinkingly equips us - then sometimes (as in the case of those youngsters), doesn't. Assuming that I was correct in my suppositions, who are we to say that those alternative versions were less valid than the ones the programme-makers had in mind? Less valid to them, perhaps, but to those youngsters? (Another source of divergence, I decided later, after a little more "research", was the fact that they consciously took cues from the mood music - as they called it - while, it being anathema to me, I had always done my best to filter it out.)(I still practice this occasionally, with a kind of detached viewing when watching the soaps - the results can be quite interesting!)

So what did I glean from all that? A good deal that was valuable to me as their teacher, but for our purposes, an understanding that in any play or novel there are things going on that are not in concert, so that for the reader, viewer, listener what they take from it will depend upon where their focus is located. How many plots are there in even a simple tale well told? What, for this reader, that viewer, listener, is the tale about? Who but they can know? Certainly not the author. In a slim volume, an anthology of his work, a real gem of a book called Various Voices, Harold Pinter tells how many years ago he was taking part in a discussion on the theatre. A lady asked him what his work was about. As it happens, Pinter hates having to answer that particular question, and so replied "with no thought at all and simply to frustrate that line of inquiry: The weasel under the cocktail cabinet. It was a great mistake," he says, for "Over the years I have seen that remark quoted in a number of learned columns. It has now seemingly acquired a profound significance, and is seen to be a highly relevant and meaningful remark about my own work." I believe theses have been written on it since, and no doubt Doctorates awarded and professors appointed on the strength of it. For Pinter the remark had meant "precisely nothing".