Posted by Duncan on April 11, 2002 at 22:53:14 from 152.163.201.49:
In Reply to: Re: Casual Elitism posted by Prue Eckett on April 11, 2002 at 21:41:08:
Mm, you're right about that, and yet I must have got the impression that they schooled in the Lakes from somewhere even though I can't remember chapter and verse off the top of my head. I suspect it might be from Winter Holiday, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, it doesn't really affect my overall point, because I wasn't suggesting they went to a secondary modern...
I think that people have been discussing slightly different things from time to time. If 'casual elitism' has a definition then it is subconscious, innate elitism sneaking out of the pen and onto the page. Ransome was very conscious of class. Incidentally, he didn't think his readers would find the stories 'normal' - his reaction to the idea that his stories were so appealing because they could really happen was (paraphrasing) 'yes, if they lived by a lake and owned a boat'. The point is rather that he did not feel that what he wrote was exclusive on class or any other basis and was proud of his book's popularity amongst working-class children. Furthermore, as you would expect, he took quite an intellectual interest in questions of class, politics (and class politics) and literature. Once again he fits into an interesting academic aesthetic tradition that he would have soaked up from Ruskin and Morris (partly via the Skald) - and also, I might add, the views of Leon Trotsky - that art should not be 'classed'. Trotsky went further than I suspect AR would, to say that 'proletarian art is necessarily pock-marked'. He related this argument to the iconoclasm of the early years of the Russian Revolution that he saw as well-intentioned, naive wanton destruction; he rather took Lenin's view (more or less) that any 'democratic', future culture would include the best of 'bourgeois' culture or the culture of past ruling classes. Trotsky believed that culture and art could only really be created by ruling classes which I think AR fundamentally disagreed with (see his interest in folk tales, etc.) AR put all this more prosaically - but rather skilfully: what 'saved' pre-revolutionary Russian art was not really the intellectual views of Lenin or Trotsky or anyone else - it was the fact that Russian workers (once they had won the freedom, education and leisure to enjoy and pursue it - at least in the short term, I'm not wanting to open up a second front on the desirability or otherwise of communist revolutions!!!) did not want to see Tolstoy and Prokoviev replaced entirely by agit-prop, etc. because they liked and enjoyed the bourgeois art that hitherto existed.
AR was a bridge between a rather elitist leftist view of the arts, and the more democratic post-war view.
There you go!
Duncan