Posted by Peter Hyland on January 05, 2001 at 21:18:40 from 193.113.185.169:
This plea is instigated by reading Ed Kiser’s thread below on inconsistencies in Coot Club, but I emphasize that I am not gunning for Ed in particular. I appreciate the energy and enthusiasm Ed brings to his study of AR’s books. However, Houston, I have a problem. What I am worried about is the tendency for Ransome scholars, many of them, to regard AR’s text as somehow sacred; and that every word must be examined and assessed carefully for some significance. Hence, below, for example, it is pointed out that AR used ‘around' and ‘round’, and ‘bows’ and ‘bow’ etc etc.
When AR wrote the stories, I doubt very much whether he intended his text to be used as a sort of lexicon of the English language. He was writing stories for children. He came up with the first word or phrase that came into his head. He might have revised it later, as authors do, because he felt that there was a better word, but he almost certainly would not have gone through the whole text checking whether he has used a word consistently. Indeed, as WPs were not invented, that would have been a long and weary chore. It would also have seemed to Ransome pointless, as his child readers had other priorities when they were engrossed in the storyline. I think that to try and discover some rationale for AR’s casual use of fairly everyday words is futile and, possibly, dangerous.
I say ‘dangerous’ because history is littered with disagreements over the interpretation of texts. In the case of the Bible, the disagreements have frequently led to bloodshed. We don’t go that far in AR studies (yet), but I would suggest that most of the rows which have broken out have been caused by some basic difference as to what Ransome meant or what particular location or boat he used (e.g.there was a bitter row last summer in the Lake District over the ‘true Amazon’, and then there’s the ‘real Beckfoot’ nonsense). This then leads to exclusivity – ‘we are true believers and you are not’.
I am all in favour of looking at the method in which AR built up his stories, and the technical means he used, with the object of discovering how the stories work and why. And it is only right that technical or UK-orientated terms are explained where this is necessary to a fuller understanding. What I am against is what Norman Willis has called the ‘Talmudic Scholar’ approach to AR, when every word or passage must be perused and analysed and argued about. Writers are artists, and they use words to create a picture. Ransome was not writing a Gospel. When he says ‘kitchen’ he means a kitchen. Don’t let’s get too obsessed with it.