But, as June Thomas of Slate pointed out, the show’s set-up actually poses a rather pointed question to its audience.  “Do you like these people, or do you just like their lifestyle?” it demands.  The problem over the entail and Lady Mary’s inheritance forces the viewer to consider what they’re finding charming and engaging about this world.  If it’s the people, and the audience is willing them to be happy and fulfilled, that’s going to involve the family estate breaking up and them losing their ancestral home.  If the attraction is simply the fabulous wealth and poshery, that can only be maintained by forcing their daughter to marry against her will.  This device seems to undercut Downton’s celebration of fabulous privilege by nudging the audience every now and then to make sure they’re not just wallowing in it.

This dilemma doesn’t last too long, however, and its solution arrives in the person of Matthew Crawley, a middle-class lawyer with exceptionally good bone structure.  As the Earl brings Crawley further into Downton, it becomes clear that this isn’t a lament for the lost glories of Edwardian feudalism.  It’s a birth myth for the middle class.  Matthew Crawley, handsome, educated, and pleasantly “classless”, is the future of England.  He’s a clean-cut emblem of what Barbara Ehrenreich called the professional classes, “those people whose social and economic status is based on education, rather than…capital or property”.  Just as the ancient glories of the British aristocracy are about to be shattered by the First World War, it turns out that the right man to inherit them is a smart young professional with nice manners.

It seems particularly apt that he’s a lawyer.  Open to all, promoting only on merit, valuing intelligence and hard work, the law sums up what the professional class would like to believe about itself.  Decently paid, of course, but it’s serious work and some of the top people are really quite dashing.  A smart youngster can go far in the law.  Tony Blair and Barack Obama studied it.  All of which is certainly true, but the profession is not as “classless” as we might hope.  The Sutton Trust estimated in 2009 that more than half of solicitors in the elite London firms, and over two-thirds of barristers, went to private fee-paying schools.  Their figures suggest that seventy percent of British judges went to seven percent of British schools.  One of London’s leading solicitors, David Morley, has said that it is now significantly harder to enter the legal profession if you come from an average income family than it was thirty years ago.  This squares with anecdotes I’ve heard from students trying to break into the law, who give the impression that success often requires an Oxbridge degree, or a family who can support you whilst you work for free to make the right contacts.  It may not involve titles or stripy ties but this is an elite class reproducing itself, even more convinced of their right to rule by the certificates which confirm they’ve earned it.

This is the group – determinedly “classless” in their privilege – which Downton Abbey bequeaths the nation to.  The inheritance, a resonant metaphor left over from Victorian fiction, is used to install the new ruling class.  For all its noise about epic upheaval, this is less a social revolution than a management buyout.  Perhaps the National Trust was a suitable comparison after all. Jeremy Paxman describes its operations in the 1930s and 40s as a form of charity offered to the landed aristocracy, a way in which the middle class could “save” the great country houses from the twin threats of mass democracy and aristocratic incompetence.  These estates are often described as being purchased “for the nation”, which is true as long as we accept that “the nation” is that same group of reasonably well-off professional people who instinctively recognize Matthew Crawley as their spiritual ancestor.  Paxman quotes from the diaries of James Lees-Milne, who travelled through the country assessing stately homes for the Trust:

This evening, the whole tragedy of England impressed itself upon me…A whole social system has broken down.  What will replace it beyond government by the masses, uncultivated, rancorous, savage, philistine, the enemies of all things beautiful?  How I detest democracy. More and more I believe in benevolent autocracy.

This is the authentic voice of Downton Abbey, a charmlessly snobbish parable which explains smoothly that of course all that class business is all in the past, though wasn’t it glamorous whilst it lasted?  Welcome to Brideshead Rebranded.

“Social” is one of the big ideas at the back of a lot of theatre talk.  The founding stories we tell about the form are almost always about past theatre’s healthy relationship to society.  The Greek tragedies were staged, so we’re told, in amphitheatres which could contain the entire adult male population of the city-state.  So when Euripides wrestled with the claims of kinship, personal love and duty to the city in Antigone, the entire electorate of that society was listening.  The Greek theatre tends to be discussed as a sort of giant philosophy seminar with a plot.  Just as people had accidentally invented a society, goes our story, they developed a theatre with which to think about it.

A few years later, the mystique of Elizabethan playhouses like The Globe is closely tied up with the idea that – unlike the private playhouses or court venues which don’t loom nearly so large in the popular imagination – the whole of Early Modern society crammed into them to see the latest by Shakespeare, or Marlowe, or Dekker.  David Scott’s Victorian painting of Queen Elizabeth visiting The Globe (an important cultural event which importantly never happened) captures this feeling.  It’s not so much a painting as a diagram of/ loveletter to a happy and unified England which we’ve somehow lost.  The massive success of Shakespeare’s Globe in modern London suggests that we’re still haunted by this idea.

"Queen Elizabeth Viewing the Performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor at The Globe Theatre" (1840, oils and syrupy complacent make-believe on canvas)

Particularly the queues of people eager to pay a fiver to be a “groundling” for a couple of hours.  That’s not a word any Elizabethan theatre-goer would have recognized, at least not as applied to them.  When Hamlet uses it to describe the people standing in the yard, it’s a joke or a slur or both: a “groundling” is a kind of fish which lives near the riverbed.  “Bottom feeder” is probably a decent enough translation, or maybe “lurker”.  I don’t think sales would improve if they changed the names of those tickets.  As Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack have pointed out, “groundling” is a word the Victorian critics seized on to mark out class distinctions in the theatre (handy scapegoat for the “bad”, “crude” or “popular” bits in Shakespeare), and I think it has stayed with us because it seems to promise that those class distinctions can be erased.  Buying a ticket to the yard at Shakespeare’s Globe and becoming a groundling[1] lets us pretend that we’re “the people”(whoever they might be), that our society is happy, unified, simple and all those other words we project onto the past.  The Globe, and the Elizabethan theatre for which it stands, figure in our cultural fantasies as a sort of theatre engine to bring people together into a healthy and happy society.  When Dominic Dromgoole says that the audience at Noises Off “arrived as a quiet Friday night shuffle of weariness” and “left as a wild exhilarated babble of Elizabethans”, he doesn’t mean they had developed weeping sores, or forgotten how to literacy, or decided that Irish people were subhuman beasts who should be exterminated.  He means… well, we know what he means.  That’s why the reference works.

While the Victorians were busy inventing these stories about the Elizabethans, we wrote them into another one about theatre and society.  In this account, theatre had become frivolous and melodramatic and people were staging Shakespeare with altogether too many fairies and/or live rabbits.  Up rose George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, who wrote plays which addressed Social Problems and generally encouraged society to have a word with itself.  Through the theatre, the late nineteenth century came to grips with issues like the Woman Question, the Poverty Question and the Empire Question.  (Some theatres made a brave attempt at all three by selling cheap tickets to plays involving actresses dressed in leopard skins, but they were deemed to have missed the point.)

Someone misunderstood the question.

This idea also still hangs around our discussions about the theatre.  The “modern theatre” may not be an untroubled pastoral in which all classes mingle joyfully, but it still has a mission to confront society with its own problems, in order to begin solving them.  We might disagree on whether that’s actually the case, but it’s implied in many of the ways we talk about theatre.  It’s imagined as a space where our social life and our social problems can come into contact, for everyone’s benefit.

All of which is what I don’t mean by saying Alan Ayckbourn is a social playwright.  All the theatre stories (or myths, if we’re feeling less kind) above use “social” as a positive term, just as we use “value” or “quality” with an implicit “good” in front of them.  Watching Season’s Greetings at the National last year, and Neighbourhood Watch last weekend, I noticed how good Ayckbourn is at bad social scenes.  Not scenes involving social problems (though he does those pretty scorchingly too) but awkward scenes, where there’s a lot of goodwill but people can’t quite get it to work.  They laugh at their own jokes for slightly too long, or offend each other by accident, or don’t quite know which social script they should be working from.  Characters end up being serious when they can only get along by being frivolous, or bracing when someone desperately needs them to be sympathetic.

This mixed style, which doesn’t so much “blend” the comic and the serious smoothly as rub them up against each other, produces a similar effect in the audience.  Or it does in my case, at least.  Watching Ayckbourn, I get irked by the insensitive sods who laugh at the rude joke which is supposed to signal how desperate a character is, or I feel impatient with the pathos crowd who breathe solemnly at a satirical moment.  From my seat, I’m practically the only one who gets this play, and I wonder why Ayckbourn bothers writing for the theatrefuls who clearly misunderstand him at several crucial points.  Then a big laugh comes, and the air and the furniture vibrate with everyone in here delightedly agreeing with the actors and with each other.  But the next laugh splits us up again and I start resenting whoever laughed, or didn’t laugh, or drowned the end of the line which would have shut them up if they’d only caught the rhythm and waited for it.  Watching Ayckbourn is a genuinely social experience because it doesn’t let us pretend that “social” is always a good word, or that the theatre dissolves our differences and brings us together into one simple, happy, unified country.  Resenting and misunderstanding one’s neighbour are as much as social emotions as loving them, and Ayckbourn’s work helps us keep that in mind.

Slightly more surprisingly, the journalist and pollster Peter Kellner declared on Radio 4’s Beyond Westminster that the differences in the way men and women relate to politics can only be explained by the same pre-historic gender divisions.  Men are “hunter-gatherers” who have to be “risk-takers” to be successful, women are “home-makers”, who have always been “risk-avoiders” ever since they developed those roles in pre-historic times.

These arguments are, of course, completely vapid.  They were both dealt with by some thoughtful people who know more about this stuff than me: the blog at Birkbeck’s Centre for the Study of British Politics and Public Life pointed a few facts in Kellner’s direction, whilst the pink/berries question was dealt with by Jezebel and the Smithsonian Magazine in their varying styles.  The question here is not whether or not these accounts of our human origins and history are true, but how they works and why they’re so widespread.  Neither Kellner nor the Daily Mail journalist came up with the idea that gender differences can be explained by reference to supposed roles humans developed at the dawn of history.  They simply stuck the topic they were thinking about into a well-known narrative and found a justification for why it should always be this way.  Aside from being really irritating, I think these arguments about what we have been like “throughout human history” misuse the very idea of history in a couple of ways.

Firstly, such arguments invoke history’s authority, but they employ the techniques of myth.  Instead of asking what we know about the past and sifting through sources for evidence, they begin with the present.  Taking some observed fact about the world around us (girls often wear pink clothes, women vote differently to men) they produce a story about our distant ancestors which justifies it.  This is the historiographical mode of the Just So Stories, or the Greek myths.  Walter Ong’s work on linguistics records that in the 1900s the Gonja people of Ghana told traditional stories about the founder of their nation, Ndewura Jakpa, who had seven sons.  Each of these sons had inherited one of the seven areas into which the Gonja’s territority was divided.  Sixty years later, when the Gonja state had shifted its divisions, those stories had altered: Ndewura Jakpa now had only five sons, and the spare two had disappeared from history.  This isn’t an illegitimate way of telling a story, or an inaccurate attempt at documentary history, it’s an entirely different mode.  The purpose of myth isn’t to record a series of confusing and contradictory events so they can later be made sense of, it’s to justify the current state of affairs.

I bet there are much more interesting stories to be told about women’s voting patterns and the prevalence of pink in women’s and girls’ clothing.  Off-hand I’d think they might involve the Industrial Revolution, middle class gender roles shifting sometime in the eighteenth century and later being entrenched by the development of a “separate spheres” ideology, some sheep (because this is British history and sheep are always involved somehow), various campaigns for suffrage, the music halls (see above with the sheep) and something about the differences between organising nomadic and agrarian societies.[1]  But any such narratives would involve producing evidence and accounting for change, which myths don’t.  In mythical narratives the change – the kidnapping of Persephone, the stretching of the Elephant’s Child’s nose, the gathering of berries by the first women – takes place only once and long in the past.  After that, everything is the way it is.  Mythical thinking stops us seeing the world around us as a continuous process of development, and instead asks us to accept that things are hardwired like this.

Secondly these arguments demonstrate oddly low ambitions for history.  They don’t ask it to tell us anything we couldn’t find out by looking out of the window.  If the present is the only important focus for historical discussion, we wilfully ignore the swathes of historical evidence which might suggest that things have been different, and that they will change in the future.  The legal scholar Emily Bazelon has described the dissenting opinion as one of highpoints of US jurisprudence.  For her they provide a vital irritant in an apparently cohesive system of decided questions, stimulating future thinkers with ‘an articulation of the opposing viewpoint.  It reminds them that there wasn’t a consensus, that there’s another way to think about it.’  This is what we should be going to history for – a reminder that the world around us is not inevitable, nor natural, and hasn’t always been this way.  History should force us to justify ourselves in the face of its strangeness, not flatter us that we’re the pleasing culmination of everything which went before.[2]

Telling rubbish stories about berry-picking or voter-gatherers displays a cheap and lazy attitude to history.  But it also betrays an insecurity in us, an unwillingness to really examine the past in case it forces us to ask awkward questions about how things are now, and how they should be in the future.  If we accept the consolations of the past, we ought also to accept the challenges, which really can be found “throughout human history”.

Metaphors are a necessary way of conceptualising the world – without them it’s difficult to see how we’d get much thinking done.  But they’re never neutral and by creating an image out of an issue they sneak in a bunch of assumptions.  If an analogy seems elegant and striking, that may well be because it has imposed order on an apparently formless set of ideas, and in doing so has already won the argument.  Plato’s “ship of state” is compelling because it seems to encapsulate exactly what the political life of a Greek city-state was like, and because it provides implicit answers to political question.  A ship has a direction, a specific set of esoteric knowledge necessary to understand that direction, and (perhaps most importantly for Plato) a clear hierarchy in which everyone must submit absolutely to one man for their own safety.  That’s politics sorted, then.

The effect is more obvious with a more emotive subject.  Public debate about rape and women’s safety rarely lasts long before someone brings up the analogy of “leaving your car unlocked” or “having your wallet hanging out of your pocket”.  It suggests that dressing “revealingly”, overindulging in alcohol and walking through dangerous neighbourhoods are unnecessary risks which women can easily change.  Of course, to entertain the analogy you need to suppose (if only for a moment) that women’s bodies and sexualities are objects which can be ”stolen” and need to be locked up.  That’s just one of the working parts in this rhetorical device, but it’s also an attitude which a lot of people have historically held (and many still do), and which led to the very problem the “leaving your car unlocked” analogy tries to deal with.  Whether intentionally or not, the terms of this metaphor ask the listener to accept some deeply damaging and offensive ideas about women as a way of approaching the problem.

Even when the answer isn’t so clearly built into them, analogies carry their own haze of associations.  When someone says that the deficit is like a household budget, and we can’t keep borrowing more money, we have to cut back just like any family, I realize they’re simplifying deliberately.  They don’t actually assume that all economic principles can be scaled up or down at will, and that the economy as a whole works like their paycheque.  There’s nothing in that metaphor which means they distrust big government, would prefer decisions be taken on a local level and perhaps feel that the traditional family unit isn’t valued as much as it should be these days.  But I wouldn’t be surprised if their views tended that way.  If in the same discussion someone tells me that the country has maxed out its credit card and has to pay it back, I’d consider it very possible they have a slightly old-fashioned view of consumer credit and think people these days are too used to instant gratification, particularly those younger or less well-off than themselves.  No concrete basis for that in the metaphor itself, but I’d suspect.

“Hardwired” carries its own template for the world.  The word has a clunky, compound feeling to it, a sense that it doesn’t quite translate from its original setting, like a literature student who deliberately talks about l’écriture rather than writing. “Hardwired” keeps some of the heft and authority of the sciences: even when being used in an argument about reading habits or gender roles, it gives an impression that these are questions which have already been settled by scientific investigation.  It seeks to shut down the discussion, to foreclose speculation, to insist that things are the way they have to be.  It’s the rhetorical equivalent of the naturalistic fallacy, of ending an argument with “Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just the way things are.”  Of course the metaphor doesn’t explicitly say this, but often are we been told that humans are hardwired to transcend their biological limitations?

More generally it implies that the “hard” sciences take precedence over the “soft” branches of thought such as history or politics.  The metaphor seems to suggest that not only are we determined by our “wiring” in this particular instance, but that our minds and our lives are best considered as a kind of circuit board.  (An oddly Creationist implication, as I’ll discuss in the next post.) I think there’s a particular danger in thinking about ourselves in this way – it enshrines every injustice and inequality as the will of the machine.

So dressing up as a wizard from a fictional magic school in the common room of an Oxbridge college seemed ironic at best and deeply myopic at worst.[1]  Surrounded by the towers and libraries where some of history’s most famous (alleged) magicians lived and worked, why play at being in a magic story?  Do the detectives of the Metropolitan Police read Sherlock Holmes to each other in the pub?  Do the airmen in the Officers’ Mess at RAF Cranwell dress up as Biggles?  It was a little irksome having tourists wandering around on tours which promised to show them the Harry Potter locations: few of us enjoyed having our beloved university, with its eight centuries of history, treated as a minor competitor to Disneyland.  But to those of who get didn’t get the lure of Potter, to whom they were fun and fluently-written children’s books and nothing more, fellow students taking that attitude verged on a betrayal.  We were all the inheritors of this place and our gowns were not costumes, they were the thing itself.  Oxford was not magical because it looked a bit like Hogwarts, Hogwarts was magical because it was built from bits of our colleges and legends from our history.  “Stop!” we wanted to cry, rising like a furious Partridge from a crucible of ashes, “Stop getting Oxford wrong!” 

Of course, we squawked no such thing.  We grumbled a bit under our breath and wandered off to the pub or to the river.  Strangely enough, we rarely followed these grumbles by disappearing off to the library, and following the example of Doctor Mirabilis or the learned Grosseteste by long hours of study.

When we got to the river, a funny thing happened.  If it was sunny enough, we hired the college punt, jumped in, and poled our way down the river in more or less successful style.  Sometimes we became hungry or thirsty from the exercise, but this was not a problem as we found we had provided ourselves with strawberries, biscuits and cheap sparkling wine before setting off.  Odd, since none of us had ever been punting before university, to our knowledge.  It’s almost as if we’d seen it done before, in a film or a book.  I’m not sure Brideshead Revisited can take all of the blame, but its subliminal influence certainly would explain the inter-war way we held our cocktails.  And before I came across that book I’d certainly never told anyone “You’re a h-horrid boy, and I shan’t love you a b-b-bit.”

Nor was the effect just confined to our spare time.  I’d been carrying around a copy of Robert Harris’ Enigma for about a fortnight during a particularly stressful time before I realized that maybe there was a reason I found that story consoling.  Brilliant young mind, with mixed-up love life, spends his days staring at a jumble of incomprehensible codes on a page, whilst the history of the world depends on his understanding them?  Sheer coincidence.  The same goes for John Le Carré’s Smiley novels: we appreciated them as masterly accounts of Britain’s post-war decline and moral compromise.  In no sense did we sense a parallel between our own colleges and the dusty labyrinths of Le Carré’s “Circus”, nor did that give us any kind of thrill as we made our own treks through old books and papers.[2]  I must stress that at no point did we give nicknames to other students based on the suspects in Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

It’s not just that we all arrived at university with some preconceptions about what life there would be like.  (Of course we did, though I’m unsure what sort of an institution I might have expected from Lucky Jim, David Lodge’s campus novels and repeatedly rereading the first section of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  I’m fairly certain it’s one I should have wanted to avoid.)  More than that, we constructed our lives through books.  We used them to make sense of a baffling rush of experiences and possibilities which university presented us with.  First term (and many of the subsequent ones) gave some of us the odd sensation of wanting fewer options rather than more: the opportunities were exhilarating but also daunting.  These books and films provided a set of templates to fit around the world, to see which made most sense or to assure us there was some meaning to it all.  It was just a bit more obvious when the Harry Potter crowd were doing it, because no-one had thought of making their own Smiley glasses.

In one sense this is what we use fiction for all our lives – to console us, to make sense of things and “re-plot” our own experiences.  It’s particularly the case at university, where a lot of people, many of them young, have moved across the country to an institution which continually tells them that they get to choose whatever happens next.  Not to mention that those of us in the humanities probably read a very large number of books in order to get to this point, so we have the raw material easily to hand.  It also points to the way universities are themselves constructed by imagination.  Of course they’re made out of buildings and budgets, and those of us who don’t work on the administrative side could probably use a reminder of that occasionally.  But they’re also places called into being by the intentions, hopes, contracts, agreements and snobberies of the people around them.

We can see this in the arguments happening over the purpose of universities on both sides of the Atlantic.  Are they economic innovation centres?  A permanent political opposition?  A safe space to try out the wildest ideas?  A way of handing down the culture of the past?  A system to train and accredit professionals?  A nostalgia factory to provide business and financial leaders with sepia-tinted memories which can then be leveraged to keep a trickle of money flowing to the arts and humanities?  The last refuge of discredited ideas and unfunctional egomaniacs?  A lot of the time we talk about them as if they’re a natural phenomenon we’ve just come across, whose structure and origins can be investigated in order to determine its real nature.  But so much of what universities are stems from how they’re regarded.

The worries which have been raised by some commentators in the US over the super-selectivity of some colleges, which feeds itself since potential students are attracted to the idea of selectivity as an almost tangible virtue, are familiar to a lot of people in British higher education.  We didn’t just find these institutions and subject them to tests to determine which were the best.  The attitudes of everyone inside them – and particularly those outside them – help shape the way they function.  Having said that, the mystique of Oxbridge may be partly an optical illusion, partly slow mass hysteria and partly good storytelling, but it has a real effect on people’s careers.  The aspiring lawyer who doesn’t get a place because their university isn’t perceived as elite enough can’t just explain that the firm in question has misunderstood the nature of higher education, and recommend a few books for them to read.

The Harry Potter fans are simply doing, more colourfully and with a larger ratio of broomsticks to persons, what everyone does to our universities.  Especially those attending them.  Come to think of it, in five or ten years’ time there may be a generation at Oxford whose major point of reference for understanding and enjoying the place is J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard and the films which borrowed bits of it.  Never mind Oxford’s effect on Harry Potter, the interesting question will be Harry Potter’s effect on Oxford.  So it seems the wizard-impersonators weren’t getting Oxford wrong, they were just getting it rather more Quidditchily than a lot of us felt comfortable with.  I hereby undertake to smile upon the next procession of stern Hogwartists I see marching through the streets, on their way to a midnight marathon at the local arthouse cinema.  In fact, I may well join them.  Taking my inspiration of Roger “Doctor Mirabilis” Bacon, I have already come up with my wizard name, derived from the Latin “fabula”(“tale”, “story” or “invention”.)  I shall procure a suitably impressive hat, mingle with the throng, and insist that everyone address me as “Doctor Fabulous”.

Of course there’s a reason that it’s so easy to impersonate J.K Rowling characters at our ancient universities.  And why those books translated so easily to the movie screen, with chunks of Christ Church College, Durham Cathedral and various other university buildings being knitted together for the backdrop.  These places look wizardy because they’re where a lot of the wizard stories came from.  For example, Roger Bacon, nicknamed “Doctor Mirabilis”, was a thirteenth-century English philosopher who lectured on Aristotle at Oxford, with a bit of reputation for alchemy and magic.  There’s a story (detailed in Robert Greene’s play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay) that he tried to construct a talking head out of brass that could answer any question posed to it, a project believed to be described in the lost Codex Gailtrimbul.  He also wore long grey robes and did his thinking in a tower on Folly Bridge, in an apparently prophetic attempt to pander to stereotypes which didn’t exist yet.  Clearly a wizard, on this evidence alone.  Bacon’s fellow Franciscan Robert Grosseteste showed a similar disdain for Oxford rumours, doing his work on optics and the scientific method in robes and a beard which also made him look, let’s be frank, a bit Gandalftastic.[1] [2]

Doctor Mirabilis, wearing a non-pointy hat in an attempt to disguise himself as Someone Not Quite So Obviously Sorcerous. Divelish cunning, these university types.

Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan Bibliomancer, mathematician and angel-botherer, was a Cambridge man.  I’m told they have a certain quantity of gowns and creepy-looking mock-Gothic stone buildings over there too.  Dee gained a reputation for magic whilst a student, apparently after he designed the spectacular special effects for a show by the Greek playwright Aristophanes.  Easy to laugh at the Cambridge locals who labelled him a wizard after some stage trickery, but he did go on to write on alchemy, practise divination and attempt to converse with supernatural beings.  They were probably just used to spotting a raving Merlin wannabe by the way he handled his astrolabe.  The good Doctor turned down the offer of a post at Oxford for a more lucrative career inventing mystical glyphs, advising Queen Elizabeth I to invade everywhere else (for its own good), and getting all up in the spirit world’s business.  To give one last example, Giordano Bruno, the Italian cosmologist and philosopher who knew a lot of the same gang as Dee, hung around the university in an unsuccessful attempt to gain a job there.  After returning to Italy, he was eventually burnt for heresy.  Many years later, the Italian people, having decided he was not a wizard after all, put up this statue in his honour.

Definitely not a wizard.

So dressing up as a wizard from a fictional magic school in the common room of an Oxbridge college seemed ironic at best and deeply myopic at worst.[3] Surrounded by the towers and libraries where some of history’s most famous (alleged) magicians lived and worked, why play at being in a magic story?  Do the detectives of the Metropolitan Police read Sherlock Holmes to each other in the pub?  Do the airmen in the Officers’ Mess at RAF Cranwell dress up as Biggles?  It was a little irksome having tourists strolling around on tours which promised to show them the Harry Potter locations: few of us enjoyed having our beloved university, with its eight centuries of history, treated as a minor competitor to Disneyland.  But to those of who get didn’t get the lure of Potter, to whom they were fun and fluently-written children’s books and nothing more, fellow students taking that attitude verged on a betrayal.  We were all the inheritors of this place and our gowns were not costumes, they were the thing itself.  Oxford was not magical because it looked a bit like Hogwarts, Hogwarts was magical because it was built from bits of our colleges and legends from our history.  “Stop!” we wanted to cry, rising like a furious Partridge from a crucible of ashes, “Stop getting Oxford wrong!”

Of course, we squawked no such thing.  We grumbled a bit under our breath and wandered off to the pub or to the river.  Strangely enough, we rarely followed these grumbles by disappearing off to the library, and following the example of Doctor Mirabilis or the learned Grosseteste by long hours of study.

This is the first part of my piece on Harry Potter, fans, wizards, and university.  The second part, in which I change my opinion, entitled “Reading Things Into It, or, ‘Quads and Quidditch’”, can be read here.  Feel free to wait to see how the story develops, comment on what I’ve written here, or just generally pile on.

The answer might seem obvious: the clue’s in the “festive”, and we do a lot of odd things at this time of year.  I’m not, for example, thinking me deeply as to why I have this sudden hankering for stollen or fir trees.  We see The Nutcracker at Christmas because we always have.  It is the way of our people.  Though of course that’s not actually true.  It’s not true of my people: we spent the last three Christmasses going to other shows as a break from tableware-based ballet, seeing (amongst other things) a magical version of Wind In The Willows at Covent Garden before ending up last year at Jersey Boys, the jukebox musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.  Which, as far as I could tell, was the West End telling me to sort my life out, get my priorities straight, and hie me to a Nutcracker.  Nor is it true that Anglo-American audiences have always gravitated towards this particular show.  It was a relative failure during its early performances in the 1890s, and it was only following productions in the 1950s by Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and the English National Ballet that it gradually became a fixture in the calendar.

Those dates suggest the work’s connection with Christmas might be due to more than theatre-going habit.  By the end of the nineteenth century, when The Nutcracker was first produced, the “Christmas revival” of the mid-century had grown to seem a natural part of British and American culture.  Books of “Christmas customs” appeared in the earlier decades of the century, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol appeared in 1844 and Christmas trees were common on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1870s (when Dickens stopped giving public readings from A Christmas Carol, since he had died.)  So much of what we tend of think of as “Christmas stuff” originates in this era – to the extent that when the programme for the English National Ballet’s production described their choice of an “Edwardian” setting I realized I had just been mentally reading the first act designs as “Nutcracker/ Christmas/ Victorianish” as if the three were roughly equivalent.  For a lot of popular culture, late-Victorian is Christmas – rather as the 1920s and 30s have an association with the iconography of New Year’s Eve.

Added to which, The Nutcracker became popular during the 1950s, an era which gave us another raft of Christmas associations, particularly in the US.  Bing Crosby was releasing the records on The Voice of Christmas, Alistair Sim was starring in another film based on A Christmas Carol, whilst Ralph Richardson was getting into the spirit of things by appearing in The Holly and the Ivy and Frank Sinatra was deploying a saturation strategy by releasing both a record and a film called White Christmas.  The post-war American family Christmas somehow became shorthand for a certain vision of society, values and nationhood, rather as the Victorian family Christmas had done.  Whether you like or loathe the image of a 1950s US Christmas, I bet you have stronger feelings about it than a 1810s British version, or a 1960s French equivalent.  Unless you were actually there at either, of course.  So part of The Nutcracker’s power, particularly at this time of year, might be due to its connection to two very powerful periods in our cultural imagination.

The other reason I think we’ve seen so many versions of this ballet over the years, and why it continues to be adapted and reproduced, also starts with its first production in 1892.  The early 1890s were an extraordinary time for the theatre all over Europe.  In France, the Theâtre Libre was experimenting with putting “real life” on stage with its Naturalist productions, in England the Independent Theatre Society was scandalising London by staging Ibsen’s Ghosts, which the theatre critic Clement Scott denounced as an open sewer of a play.  These “little theatres” and “free theatres” were creating the fringe model which still operates in theatre today, where small groups (hopefully) work as the laboratories of new styles and ideas which will (supposedly) come to influence the mainstream.  Much of what happened then set the agenda for the next century, as a swirl of “isms” were whirling in the maelstrom that we designate as “modernism” – symbolism, expressionism, naturalism, and even the occasional dash of feminism.  Tchaikovsky wasn’t exactly embraced by the modernists, who tended to write him off as prettified, insipid and twee (charges that were also raised in the first reviews of The Nutcracker) and a ballet full of hummable tunes, dancing toys and a Sugar plum Fairy hardly seems the show to endear him to them.  But on reflection, especially in later and “darker” productions, it’s surprising just how many elements in The Nutcracker have affinities with modernist theatre.

The transition from one world to the other is an old tradition in Victorian pantomimes, whose “transformation scenes” were famous and featured on their playbills.  But the sense of reality distorting around the characters, that disorienting sense that it’s not clear where the mind stops and the world begins, is a classic modernist trope.  From one angle the Nutcracker and his army of toy soldiers are a kitschy storybook device, but they can be uncanny creatures, somehow inanimate and lively at the same time.  In the 1890s, just as The Nutcracker was being put together, the Belgian symbolist Maeterlinck was experimenting with “puppet plays”, aspiring to present on stage “some being with all the appearance of life though not actually living”.  Edward Braun has described Maeterlinck’s vision that “the actor, if only he will surrender his precious personality…can virtually become a puppet, but he will be compensated with the puppet’s disturbing power”.  Watching the Nephew and the Nutcracker as they swapped places in the ENB’s production, and we saw the same uniform sometimes surmounted by the smiling gallant face and sometimes by the crude painted mask, Braun’s words seemed to fit exactly.

The fact that whole sequences take place in a dream also pushes the ballet oddly close to the modernists’ habits.  Fantasy and dreams held a special place in the ideals of the Symbolists in particular, who were fond of insisting that the real world was only worth depicting insofar as it allowed access to misty realms beyond. These ideas clearly made their way onto the stage with greater or lesser degrees of success: on the upside, one review of a dance in the Independent Theatre Society’s version of The Duchess of Malfi praised the effect of figures “seen through the transparent drapery of silken gauze of the finest texture” as if “indistinct images seen in the troubled dream”. On the other hand, the critic Jules Lemaitre lost patience with Aurélien Lugné-Poe dreamily intoning the lines in every single role as if he were half asleep, and started calling him “the somnambulist clergyman”.  Either way, dreams and the landscape of the mind were distinctly avant-garde concerns for theatre in the 1890s.

So The Nutcracker is a bit of a paradox: a piece of trite “diverting” confection which also contains the kernel of ideas which theatre would be worrying away at for much of the next century.  An unsuccessful Russian ballet which came to seem as much part of authentic British Christmastime as German trees or that song about Duke Wenceslaus of Bohemia.  Something about this preposterous, lopsided show keeps us enthralled, and I’m already looking forward to another crop of Nutcrackers next year.  Inevitably this piece is based on my own responses in the theatre, which are always subjective, variable and influenced by the unhealthy amount of time I’ve spent over the last few years thinking about the 1890s!  I’d love to hear other people’s ideas about what gives this show such longevity, or whether The Nutcracker is worth restaging so many times.

A while ago, I was introduced to a friend of a friend in a pub during a party.  The women who’d introduced us disappeared off to the bar, and we two guys were left standing together, smiling sheepishly and searching for something to say. I was just about to ask how he knew our mutual friends (no-one said ice-breakers had to be original…) when he gestured towards them and made a joke about putting Rohypnol in their drinks.  What depressed me most about this incident was the polite, eager smile with which he made the remark, as if he’d solved a slightly awkward social moment by finding a topic upon which we could both agree without question.  It could have been the Ashes, the weather or real ale, but he’d decided on a rape joke as the safest option.  After all, I might not have been a cricket fan.

About a week later I wandered into the kitchen at another party (I know, quite the social life, me) and found introductions going on again.  A couple of newly-met partygoers had just discovered they’d taken the same university module at different times, taught by the same lecturer, and it turned out I knew her too.  One of the guys offered us both a beer from his own stash and joked that he thought the lecturer was a lesbian, but she probably just needed raping to sort her out.

Better critics than me have written (on sites like Shakesville and Feministe) about how “rape jokes” perpetuate a culture of violence and objectification towards women, how they normalise a destructive model of sex and why they’re offensive even if the speaker doesn’t “mean” them. In this post I want to consider a specific aspect of these situations: the fact that the people involved had only just met each other.

For a start, this undermines one justification often made for such comments: that they’re just “banter” between mates who know that none of them believe these things about women.  On the contrary, in these cases they were made as a way to start a conversation between men who didn’t know each other, a conversational gambit to break the ice and keep a social situation running smoothly.  I was taken aback in both cases because someone I didn’t know had assumed they were safe comments to make, based on my gender.  I couldn’t decide whether it was more or less unpleasant because it seemed to have nothing whatsoever to do with the women in question, but it didn’t: they were being used simply as ciphers whose abuse was intended to work as a token of male bonding.  (I came across a copy of Lorna Hutson’s The Usurer’s Daughter on my bookshelf the next day, and remembered why the idea seemed so familiar.)

Less extreme examples occur all the time, with sexism used as the small change of male interactions.  At root it all assumes that the most basic element of male identity is hostility to women.  You may not know anything about a guy, but you can always reach out to him by denigrating another gender.  This is why I think writing off sexism and misogyny between men as “banter” is a mistake, and one which harms men themselves.  Apart from the issue of how private discourse has an impact on our public space, it offers men a bleak and corrosive vision of their own masculinity.  Their experience of being a man is reduced to a single hostile meaning, and their sexuality is co-opted as a means of degrading other people.  It asserts that the baseline fact about them is a contempt for women, and the only solidarity they can expect is based on shared aggression.  These kind of comments don’t assume relationships between men, they are attempts to create them, and in doing so to define what being a man might mean.  On offer is a rotten definition, and one which I think we should all refuse.

None of this is terribly new, and two anecdotes hardly constitute proof – nor do I think this is the most important thing to say about “rape jokes” or the strongest reason not to make them! – but I wanted to offer these reflections and ask if they make sense to others.  I’d like to hear if people think I’ve got it wrong, if I’m missing the point, or if there’s another perspective which would be more useful.  As with a lot of posts in Quite Irregular, this is a thinking in progress…