The Global Banyan Tree: English, Culture and Western Modernity

The Global Banyan Tree: English, Culture and Western Modernity

An inaugural lecture delivered on 31st January 2001 by Prof. David Parker, professor of English

There is a story of a British official who asked Mahatma Ghandi on his arrival in London what he thought of the civilization of Britain. Ghandi apparently thought for a while and said, 'I think it would be a good idea.' I feel some kinship with that foolish official as I stand here, a newcomer, in this great Chinese University less than four years after the handover and propose to talk about English and Western culture. I do it for strong reasons. When they first come to us, our intelligent and highly motivated students have studied English for many years, but many have hardly read, much less studied, any literature in English. In fact of 33,000 students who took Use of English at the A-level last year, around 200, or only just over half of one per cent, took English literature.1 This matters for a pragmatic reason. Hong Kong's future as an international city depends on having citizens who are not merely competent in English but who can make and maintain contacts anywhere in the world, not least in the West. For this they need to be literate in the cultures in which English is a major language. The study of literature in English is a way of helping Hong Kong's young people become literate in those cultures, and especially the less affluent who will never study or work in an English-speaking country.

English is a world language, which means that it is among other things an Asian and an African language. I have chosen to talk about it tonight as a Western language, again for a pragmatic reason. In Hong Kong's post-colonial situation there is a continuing need for people who have a deep and inward understanding of Western culture. This is especially important given the current position of the West in the global cultural market place, not least in Hong Kong. It is important to understand where its cultural goods are coming from.
I

Most readers will have noticed the tendency, almost a disease, in some English-language newspapers, to try to snare the reader's attention with headlines containing puns and allusions. Since I became a regular reader of the South China Morning Post last year I noted a few examples. An article on the new wine industry in Thailand is headed 'GRAPE EXPECTATIONS'. The caption to a photograph showing Mr and Mrs Blair and their new baby reads 'LABOUR OF LOVE'. A piece about the poor homecourt record of the Los Angeles Lakers is headed 'HOME IS WHERE THE HURT IS'. Finally my favourite, a photo of the Queen comforting a young patient in an Australian hospital who is wearing a baseball cap. The caption is 'HAT TO HAT TALK'. This isn't of course an isolated practice in English-speaking cultures, confined to newspapers. In fact the engine of social life in educated circles is partly oiled by displays of wit and allusiveness such as these. Listeners often respond with groans of delight, but this particular use of language undoubtedly helps to create a convivial social space among those in command of both language and culture.

But suppose you do not possess both language and culture. Suppose you have learned the language in a purely functional way: you have adequate grammar and syntax, reasonable dictionary understanding of vocabulary, and some grasp of idiom. But you know nothing more. What do you make of HAT TO HAT TALK? The answer is, not much at all, because to read that caption with full understanding of the intended meaning you need to know the phrase 'heart to heart talk'. To understand GRAPE EXPECTATIONS in the same way you need to have heard of the title of the novel by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations. In another case you need to know the saying 'home is where the heart is'. All of these examples point to the same conclusion, namely that a high level of literacy in a language depends on knowledge of the culture in which the language has been shaped.

This knowledge is what the American literary critic E.D. Hirsch Jr. calls 'cultural literacy'. By this he means the 'network of information that all competent readers possess. It is the background information, stored in their minds, that enables them to take up a newspaper and read it with an adequate level of comprehension, getting the point, grasping the implications, relating what they read to the unstated context which alone gives meaning to what they read.'2 Hirsch's term 'cultural literacy' is useful up to a point, and has been applied to second-language situations. Hirsch makes it clear that by culture he doesn't simply mean 'high culture', but he ends his book by producing a controversial list of some 5,000 items entitled 'What Literate Americans Know' and many of these items of knowledge turn out to be the titles of books, the names of writers and philosophers and their ideas, as well as well-known quotes from classic texts. The list includes, for example, St. Augustine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Great Expectations, Oscar Wilde, William Wordsworth, Faust, Faustian, the Gospel of St. Mark, and Romanticism.

Hirsch's work provoked vigorous debate. He was criticized as privileging the knowledge and values of a dominant group in America and thereby enforcing conservative social norms. He was also defended, for example, by the eminent African-American sociologist and historian Orlando Patterson. Patterson says that it is a fatal error to see the demands of cultural literacy in terms of one dominant sector of society imposing its culture and values on the rest. 'It's not WASP culture,' he says; 'it doesn't belong to any group. It is essentially and constantly changing, and it is open. What is needed is recognition that the accurate metaphor or model of this wider literacy is not domination, but dialectic; each group participates and contributes, transforms and is transformed, as much as any other group... The English language no longer belongs to any single group or nation.'3 Patterson goes on to argue that the narrow vocational training often given to disadvantaged groups is further disabling them. What they need above all is the wider cultural knowledge that will empower them to adapt to new contexts, more advanced technologies, the sorts of challenges, in short, that the culturally literate are much more able to meet. Those who achieve only a narrow functional literacy are therefore condemned to the lower-paid positions, which are usually the first ones to be made redundant in times of rapid change. The more powerful people, those at the tops of organizations, will increasingly be those who have achieved cultural literacy.

Hirsch is one of those who drew renewed attention to the dependence of linguistic competence on culture. The 1990s have seen much activity in this area, including a great deal of new work on ESL and culture.4 It has also produced such phenomena as The Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture, first published in 1992 and targeted partly to 'students of English from other cultures'. It boasts that, along with 40,000 general language words, there are 15,000 cultural references, ranging from 'literary figures to pop culture, from Shakespeare to Psycho, from Maya Angelou to the Simpsons': the Gettysburg Address, Ayrton Senna, Viagra and m'n'ms are all entered.5 In other words, the dictionary seems to share Hirsch's project while taking on board some of the criticisms aimed at him. Such a dictionary is undoubtedly useful: it will tell you, for example, the meaning of 'home is where the heart is', and 'labour of love' and Great Expectations. And for many purposes that will be enough. Dictionary meanings and cultural information are necessary.

However, I think that Hirsch's conception of cultural literacy is limited. The limitation emerges in Two Years in the Melting Pot, an autobiographical account of his stay in America by a Chinese journalist called Liu Zongren. Liu had spent many years in China learning English, but found on his arrival that he could not communicate satisfactorily with individual Americans:

It hadn't taken long for me to realize that my language was not so much an obstacle to learning as was my cultural heritage. Even if I could have understood all the words people were using in their conversations, I often had no idea what they were talking about. I could follow a conversation but could not take part in it because I knew so little about the subject. The gap was often so great that I thought we must be using different forms of logic in our thinking. As the Chinese say, 'You can't grasp his mind.'6

Liu's painful inability to make anything more than functional connections with English speakers shows the extent to which cultural knowledge constitutes a shared social space.

But the phrase 'You can't grasp his mind' hints at the reason why cultural literacy must ultimately involve more than information. When John Lennon was killed, for example, Liu was understandably puzzled why a mere 'guitar-player', as he called him, should excite public grief bordering on veneration. This time he had the relevant information about who and what Lennon was, but still felt he could not grasp the mind of those around him. In her important autobiography Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language the Polish-born immigrant Eva Hoffman asks the question: 'How does one stop reading the exterior signs of a foreign tribe and step into the inwardness, the viscera of their meanings?'7 This is the question I wish to pursue. But to understand what Hoffman calls 'the inwardness, the viscera', or gut, of meaning, we need to cut a bit more deeply into our subject.

II

One of the key moments of modern philosophy is when Ludwig Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with a critique of the account of language acquisition in St. Augustine's Confessions. He comes to several significant conclusions that have played a part in shaping the twentieth century's understanding of language. First, he says that 'to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life'.8 By 'a form of life' he more or less means what we would call a culture, or an implicit set of established practices and agreed understandings, without which a language could not function. Among many other things a form of life would, for example, have to entail established agreements about rules of correct usage and then about what constitutes following a rule. 'If language is to be a means of communication,' Wittgenstein says, 'there must be agreement not only in definitions but also...in judgments.'9 Later commentators have glossed these statements in various ways, but I think that Wittgenstein was pointing to the fact that in learning a first language I cannot but imbibe forms of discernment and discrimination that are part of the very texture of my language. I learn, for example, not only the explicit meanings of the words 'courage' and 'cowardice' but also what, in my linguistic culture, constitutes courage or what counts as cowardice. I learn, from those around me, what it means to say that person X is loving or that act Y shows anxiety. Indeed such words do not have the meaning they have for me unless I have been initiated into this set of implicit understandings by my language community.

This set of mostly pre-reflective implicit understandings constitutes part of what the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer called 'prejudices'10 --- in a special non-pejorative sense. For a second-language learner such as Liu, the cultural prejudices of the Americans produce the silences around words and their dictionary definitions that he needs to understand before fuller communication can begin. For him, his 'cultural heritage' is indeed an 'obstacle' to understanding --- his cultural prejudices are not theirs. But according to Gadamer, our prejudices (and the traditions underpinning them) define the ground (or horizon) we occupy when we understand. They cannot, as the Enlightenment and its heirs think, simply be neutralized. Our horizon of understanding needs somehow to be fused with the horizon of the other. But the question is, how?

III

That cultural literacy is more than a matter of factual knowledge, especially in second-language contexts, emerges clearly from the examples I have been discussing. Simply recognizing phrases such as 'heart to heart talk', 'labour of love' or 'home is where the heart is', and knowing their literal dictionary meaning, is one thing. But if the aim is cross-cultural communication at anything more than a functional level, it is important to know, for example, how contemporary Western speakers are likely to hear or use such phrases. It should be emphasized that the case I am making does not entail the view that the Westerner's usage is necessarily normative. The significance is pragmatic; there is advantage in knowing the nuances of words and phrases in another culture --- for the people with whom one is doing business, for example. In the present case, sayings such as 'home is where the heart is' would rarely be used by some of these speakers in a straightforwardly unironic way because, used like that, they will often sound platitudinous, sententious, sentimental, or simply too earnest --- which is a word I'll come back to. Witty, playful or ironic uses, such as the headlines and captions, are a different matter. The ear of such an English speaker will be finely tuned to discriminate between these different registers of usage.

How is this sort of ear achieved, short of living many years immersed in an English-speaking culture? There are reasons for thinking that students can be helped to achieve it by the study of literature. The most searching account of what is involved in the encounter with a text of another culture is that of Gadamer. In a final section of Truth and Method devoted to language and hermeneutics (or interpretation), Gadamer begins to explicate Humboldt's account of second language acquisition. For Humboldt, a natural language constitutes a particular 'worldview', in the sense that it tends to frame and taxonomize reality in a distinctive way, which is why so much tends to be lost in translation between one language and another. Gadamer adds: 'If every language is a view of the world, it is so not primarily because it is a particular type of language (in the way that linguists view language) but because of what is said or handed down in this language.'11 That is, languages don't simply differ in grammatical structure but because they mediate cultural heritage or what he calls 'traditionary content'. Humboldt also says, in Gadamer's account, that learning a new language involves acquiring a new standpoint in regard to one's previous worldview. This will become one of the keys for what Gadamer calls the 'hermeneutic experience'. This is the process by which, through encountering a different worldview to my own, I suddenly become aware of the very 'horizon' of my own understanding, of what previously determined the forms and limits of intelligibility for me. I am aware of my cultural 'prejudices' for the first time. In other words other-understanding changes self-understanding, displacing me from my unexplored ethnocentrism.12 Returning to the Humboldt passage, Gadamer says: 'It is not learning a foreign language as such but its use, whether in conversation with its speakers or in the study of its literature, that gives one a new standpoint "on one's previous worldview".'13 The reason why the study of literature is critical for Gadamer is that, like a genuine conversation with a speaker of the language, the study of the other literature forces language learners into dialogue with the unfamiliar 'worldview', such that it makes a claim on them to be a valid perspective on the world. In other words, through the study of its texts, the other worldview enters their worldview, questions their worldview, offers to enlarge it and to relativize its topography. Gadamer's belief is that this doesn't simply happen through learning a language per se, which may keep me comfortably at home in my own worldview, fixed in the perspectives of a monoculture.

We can see from this account that literature is not only, as others have shown, a valuable site for the development of second-language skill, as well as providing, or providing the occasion for learning, new vocabulary and cultural information. Nor does it merely 'open a window' or provide a 'port of entry' into another culture.14 It opens up a testing interaction with another linguistic 'worldview'. For this reason, students of literature won't be quite in the situation of Liu, unable to 'grasp the mind' of those around him. Through imagination they will not only enter empathically into another linguistic world; they will be actively engaging with what Eva Hoffman called 'the inwardness, the viscera' of its linguistic meanings.

This process will also equip them to discriminate between the different registers of usage I was discussing a little earlier. This is because --- to take a pointed example --- they have not simply heard of the name Oscar Wilde like the literate Americans in Hirsch's book. They will also have read, for example, the play The Importance of Being Earnest, and they will have some understanding of its significance. Achieving this may be more of a challenge for second-language learners than for first-language speakers, but it will not be a radically different one. In fact Gadamer's account of intercultural hermeneutics is similar to his view of the hermeneutic experience in relation to texts of an earlier historical period within the reader's own linguistic culture. In both cases there will be an otherness to be overcome, which only begins to happen when readers allow the text to interrogate them, to call into question what they take for granted. In my experience, the otherness of Earnest in the case of contemporary Anglophone but non-British students, is primarily historical, but that will present itself phenomenologically in most cases as a moral otherness. The whole play is likely to strike them as funny perhaps but effete and trivial. For example, when Algernon says: 'The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing their clean linen in public.'15 Many will tend initially to see this as an empty gesture of turning conventional wisdom on its head simply for witty effect. Similarly the un-earnest word-play on the word 'Earnest' in the title, as against the importance of having the name 'Ernest', will strike many morally earnest 19-year-olds as vapid and annoying. Such students only really begin to engage with the play when they begin to picture the Victorian culture of moral respectability that Wilde is having so much fun with, a culture they will often be able to understand once they come to recognize its abiding echoes in their own world. It is not difficult from here for students of Victorian literature to begin to comprehend how stifling a dominant culture of moral rectitude and earnestness might have been, with its pervasive under-layers of hypocrisy and self-deception. Wilde's epigrams and apparent triviality can then be understood as giving expression to a half-suppressed spirit of frankness and personal freedom from convention, a spirit of creative play. His work will then be seen as a move away from a culture of sincerity to one of authenticity, in which more of the self is free to be brought into play, often through masks, role-playing, and imposture. The poetics of public address gives way to dramatic monologue, in which ideas are expressed through indirection and irony.

In other words, Wilde can be understood as standing on the threshold of the great moment of Western modernism, which was already beginning to manifest itself in the work of later nineteenth century contemporaries such as Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky. In a variety of ways this moment has left its deep impress on Western culture and not least on its use of the English language. It is a moment that continues to make itself felt in the history of words such as 'earnest', 'sincere', 'virtue', even the word 'moral' itself. After Wilde and the anti-Victorians such as Lytton Strachey, some Western speakers can never again use these words quite as the Victorians did. As George Steiner says with his usual hyperbole, 'When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history.'16 The moment of modernism also makes itself felt by way of the discriminations I've been talking about --- discriminations that are likely to make the unironic use of the phrase 'home is where the heart is' sound sentimental or platitudinous to many contemporary Western speakers. These speakers will share an implicit 'horizon' of understanding partly constituted by such 'traditionary content' as the work of Oscar Wilde, even where, for such speakers, his part in the shaping of the language may have been forgotten or never known.

Another way to put all this is to say that Wilde and his contemporaries represent a moment in the unfolding of Western modernity. And Western modernity has been, and continues to be, mediated through the English language to many non-Western cultures, not least of course Hong Kong. As we have seen, the language bears the imprint of its cultural history, which continues to operate as a kind of magnetic field of distinctions and values on those who use the language --- or, we might say, who get used by it. By 'modernity' I do not of course simply mean 'modernism', the important shift of sensibility in the arts I have just been talking about, which began in the late nineteenth century and flowered brilliantly in the West between about 1910 and 1925. Nor do I just mean 'modernization', which I take to refer to the main scientific, technological, and industrial processes that have been at the heart of change, first in Europe then all over the world, for several hundred years. Both of these are important aspects of Western modernity, but it comprehends both of them and much more.

In my view Western 'modernity' is only fully understood in the way Charles Taylor presents it, as almost identical with the history of the West since the sixteenth century, and reaching even further back than that. Taylor's focus is on the history of the key moral ideals and spiritual traditions at the heart of Western culture. These continue to operate powerfully in the present in a complex layered way. Towards the end of his monumental work, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity, Taylor shows how 'understanding ... [modern Western] society requires that we take a cut through time --- as one takes a cut through rock to find that some strata are older than others. Views coexist with those which have arisen later in reaction with them. This is to oversimplify, of course, because these rival outlooks go on influencing and shaping each other.'17 So if we accept Taylor's view, 'modernity' includes not only the growth of the capacity for disengaged and instrumental rationality that was at the core of the scientific revolution, together with the individualism that seems to have gone with the growth of that capacity; it also includes reactions against both of those, in such manifestations as certain aspects of the Romantic movement and environmentalism. For Taylor all these go into the making of what he later comes to call Western modernity. This isn't the only view that is taken of the subject. The influential Cambridge sociologist Anthony Giddens exemplifies a more common view when he talks about modernity as a 'post-traditional order'.18 Taylor's work shows not only that Western traditions, such as Platonism and Judaeo-Christianity, seem to be ineradicable from Western modernity, they actually play definitive roles in determining its very contours; in a strong sense, they are constitutive of it.

A lot of writing about 'modernity' in the West talks about it without the qualifier 'Western', as if 'modernity' were simply a stage in economic, technological and cultural development. A famous and brilliant book on the subject by the American cultural critic Marshall Berman begins with a memorable flourish:

There is a mode of vital experience --- experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils --- that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience 'modernity'. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world --- and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, 'all that is solid melts into air'.19

In its sweeping rhetorical movement, this heady passage is itself caught up in the excitement of the modern transformations it is describing. Berman in fact later shows that the contradictions of modernity go deeper than they may appear to do here, and include the reiterated struggle in the nineteenth century between the Faustian drive for self-expansion and the use of memory to restore vital connection with the past. Everything we know and are may threaten to melt into air, and, at certain moments, may seem to have done so, but these traditional roots of self and identity are never in a certain sense beyond recovery, and may become sources of renewal. This is what so much of Dickens, including Great Expectations, is all about. At the same time, in this passage Berman seems to subscribe to what has been called the 'convergence hypothesis' of modern identity; namely that, all over the world in the post-industrial age of global technology, we are beginning to share so much of contemporary experience to the point that traditional markers of identity, such as nationality, will cease to be important. We are, it is claimed, at the end of history.

Here I happily follow in the footsteps of distinguished colleagues at The Chinese University, notably Professors Ambrose King and Michael Bond, and say that I find difficulty in accepting the 'convergence hypothesis', for all its superficial plausibility. Part of the reason is that there's often an element of ethnocentrism in the talk of a single world 'modernity' rather than a plurality of 'modernities', including what has been called 'East-Asian modernity'. Western modernity has a long history of discursively constructing itself, using vocabularies largely derived from the Enlightenment, as the template for the future of mankind, which is a cultural prejudice in the more common pejorative sense. This is why it is so important to understand Western modernity, not as a universal destiny but as a particular historical formation, with its own particular traditions, and not least the vocabularies of disengaged rationality and universalism that are internal to those traditions. These, as we all know, can be precise and necessary instruments for the sciences, law, or administration, but to use them rather than be used by them requires an understanding of their history, as part of the 'traditionary content' handed down through the English language.

IV

I now want to give a detailed example of what I have been talking about. I'll be looking at a poem as a single expression of Western modernity and explicating its complex filiations with the traditions of thought and feeling it mediates. The poem is by the Irish Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney. The choice is tactical in several senses, not least because I wish to make it clear that by 'English literature' I don't simply mean the literature of England but the world-wide literature written in the English language. The poem was published in the volume Station Island (1984).20

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

With a verbal artefact such as this, of course, knowledge of the dictionary definitions of words, and of basic grammar and so on are necessary, and the poem will inevitably provide an opportunity for extending vocabulary and consolidating language skills. But such work will fall far short of providing the knowledge required for understanding the poet's intended meaning. In order to explicate this, I need to draw attention both to what is explicit and what is implicit in the poem, what I called earlier the silences around words. In fact, it will be at this 'visceral' level that much of the significant learning will take place, as the students understand some of the important cultural traditions informing the poem. These turn out to be some of the key spiritual traditions informing Western modernity, namely Judaeo-Christianity and Romanticism. These are traditions that have shaped modern Western attitudes towards childhood and education and they are in the background of debates about education going on in Hong Kong today. In so far as these attitudes are culturally foreign to students they will question their worldview in the way Gadamer said, giving the students an alternative perspective on the world and extending their cultural understanding.

The title is an allusion to a book many of Heaney's generation would have read as children, The Railway Children, written by E. Nesbit and first published in 1906. The poem has echoes of the book, especially the moment when Nesbit's children discover the railway line at the back of their vacation house.

The way ended in a steep run and a wooden fence --- and there was the railway with the shining metals and the telegraph wires and posts and signals.

They all climbed on to the top of the fence, and then suddenly there was a rumbling sound that made them look along the line to the right, where the dark mouth of a tunnel opened itself in the face of a rocky cliff; next moment a train had rushed out of the tunnel with a shriek and a snort, and had slid noisily past them. They felt the rush of its passing, and the pebbles on the line jumped and rattled under it as it went by.

'Oh!' said Roberta, drawing a long breath; 'it was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?'

'I suppose a dragon's lair might look very like that tunnel from the outside,' said Phyllis.

But Peter said: 'I never thought we should ever get so near to a train as this. It's the most ripping sport!'21

The Nesbit passage elaborates something that is more obliquely implied in the poem, namely that the railway, as an emblem of industrial modernization, impresses the children with a hint of Marshall Berman's promised 'adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world'. The railway and telegraph wires embody a mode of 'vital experience', to borrow his phrase; they energize the imagination through which their somewhat disturbing newness and strangeness can only be refracted. The importance to the poet Heaney of such long-past moments of enchantment at the railway cutting is made more explicit in his Nobel lecture, delivered in 1995, where again he recalls the impact of the railway on his siblings and himself:

We took in everything that was going on, of course --- rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house --- but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.22

The importance of that intensely poetic passage is partly that it contextualizes the poem in the two worlds, one traditional and the other modern, in which Heaney was growing up in Ireland in World War II. The old, the archaic, was as transitory as the bucket of water, whose rippling surface emblemizes the delicate registrations of the poetic imagination. The 'rumbling' of the new distantly threatens the old order, just as the enormity of distance covered by the lovely sizzling wires was 'beyond us', making the children feel somewhat small, insignificant, and ignorant. There's no sense of Edwardian ruling class 'ripping sport' about Heaney's children. The emphasis is on their humility before the largeness, beauty, and intricacy of the world.

The pivotal line and a half of the poem is: 'We were small and thought we knew nothing/ Worth knowing.' The word 'thought' alerts us to the possibility that the children did know something worth knowing, even though, when we see what they were thinking, it certainly isn't very promising as knowledge. They thought words travelled along the wires through the raindrops --- which is, needless to say, pitifully erroneous by present standards of scientific knowledge. But as we turn into the second to last stanza the poem invites us to see the 'shiny pouches of raindrops' as the children saw them, 'Each one seeded full with the light /Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves /So infinitesimally scaled...'. The children see each raindrop like one of those tiny universal mirrors so much loved by the Dutch engraver M.C. Escher. Each drop captures the whole circumambient world in microcosm --- sky, lines, and the children themselves --- so miniscule that they themselves might have almost become those words travelling along the wires. But that isn't quite the way Heaney puts it in the wonderful epiphanic line on which the poem ends: 'We could stream through the eye of a needle.'

Suddenly the children's smallness is not ignorance but spiritual power: 'We could stream ...' --- not along the wires but 'through the eye of a needle'. This is the second allusion in the poem that may be known to some readers. In the tenth chapter of St. Mark, Jesus is confronted by a rich young man who asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him to go away and sell all that he has, give the money to the poor, and come and follow him. The young man goes away sad, for he is very wealthy. Whereupon Jesus says: 'How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.' How does the allusion apply to the children? They are poor, not materially, but in their estimate of their own importance in the scheme of things. Yet paradoxically that humility is the very condition of their power. But to see the reason for that more clearly we need to return to St. Mark, to the passage that immediately precedes the ones we've just been looking at. Some people were bringing little children to Jesus, but the disciples turned them away. He says: 'Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom like a little child will never enter it.' This is one of the submerged allusions that shapes the whole poem. But what is Heaney getting at? The poem isn't religious in a conventional doctrinal sense, but is exploring a human truth in a vocabulary that has the deepest emotional and cultural roots for him, and for many readers who share the tradition he is drawing on. I take the implication of these allusions to be that the railway children are in a blessed state in the sense that theirs is a world fresh with innocent wonder, a world of acute and vivid perception. What they know is in one sense almost nothing, but in another their world is 'seeded full with the light' of imagination.

But to understand this fully we have to see that the poem's Judaeo-Christian references are inextricably entangled with those of another tradition shaping Western modernity, namely Romanticism. The key Romantic source for Heaney was Wordsworth, one of whose best-known poems begins:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore ---
Turn whereso'er I may
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.23

Heaney doesn't dwell on the fact that for him too a glory has passed from the earth, but that is surely the force of the past tense throughout 'The Railway Children'. No longer small, no longer knowing nothing worth knowing, the poet can only stream through the eye of the needle of memory. A much fuller explication than I have time for now would have to explain the autobiographical structure of the poem, and the complex relationships between narrating adult self and narrated child self. It would begin with Wordsworth, the father of poetic autobiography in English and specifically with the three-line epigraph that precedes the poem from which I just quoted: 'The Child is father of the Man:/ I could wish my days to be/ Bound each to each by natural piety.' Here we're at the heart of one major strand of Romanticism: modernization, with its melting of solid significance, its dislocations and disenchanting knowledge, tends to cut through the landscape rupturing continuities, displacing the self from innocent at-oneness with the world. The healing faculty is memory, with its power to bind disjointed lives, and fragmented selves, into wholeness. Through memory, we find some of the most important sources of self in the child, the paradoxical 'father of the Man'.

At this point I need to break into notation and suggest more threads that a full explication of this poem would have to follow. One is surely to capture some of the main filiations of the key words 'know' and 'knowledge'. We could start in one place from Platonic and Hellenic ideas of knowledge as a basic form of human good and note how transformations of these in the scientific revolution of the Renaissance, and in the post-Enlightenment period, have been so important, perhaps dominant, in Western modernity. From this perspective knowledge is self-evidently good, especially scientific knowledge. Not knowing much that was worth knowing is no state to be in. And yet, starting from Genesis, we can trace what looks like an alternative tradition. There is forbidden 'knowledge' of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, and we can follow this idea through to medieval proions, for example, on magic and necromancy. In the Renaissance the story of Doctor Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil for the power of greater knowledge, suddenly grasps the European imagination. Marlowe's play is about the man who breaks the order in which knowledge is one good among many and in disordered longing, 'swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit,/ His waxen wings did mount above his reach,/ And, melting, heavens conspired his overthrow.'24 This over-reaching Icarus arguably expresses the culture's perennial anxieties that the single-minded pursuit of knowledge can have a destructive underside, anxieties that mount again in Romantic reactions to the Enlightenment, not least in Goethe's Faust, and in Wordsworth's 'Immortality Ode' from which I have quoted. Wordsworth regards the child as one 'whose exterior semblance/ Doth belie thy soul's immensity'. All this, however, is about to be destroyed by 'custom', which includes an education full of rote-learning of classical languages: 'Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,/ And custom lie upon thee with a weight,/ Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.'

What I have been attempting to show is how the analysis of this poem historically (in a certain sense) and in depth can illuminate something of the cultural history shaping the particular meanings and values attached to such key words in modern English as 'childhood', 'imagination' and 'knowledge'. To know only the dictionary meanings of these words is to arrive at a starting point. To know the words as they are used in literature is to have a much richer, more nuanced understanding of them --- and of the culture in which they have been formed. If you are in education in contemporary Hong Kong, you cannot avoid the force-field of implicit meaning and value that comes into debates over such words as 'creativity' and 'rote learning'. A person broadly educated in English will know, so to speak, where such words are coming from.

There are many valid ways of justifying the study of literature --- as a broad education in the humanities, as a way of teaching students how to think, and how to analyse the multitudinous cultural texts that surround them in everyday life; as something to be enjoyed; as a form of art; as the site of some of humanity's deepest ethical, political, and philosophical questioning. But it is also an extremely valuable resource in a second-language setting, especially in Hong Kong, which has a stake in having its people highly literate in English. Given the widespread concern about the state of the language in Hong Kong, the time is surely ripe to think again about the role of literature in a post-colonial curriculum.

V

What I have said so far about my subject English is only the beginning of a much bigger story. I have focused so far only on the West and have yet to talk about the profound cultural differences, for example of nationality, class, ethnicity, region, that variously form English-speakers even there. Anyone educated in English needs to understand these differences too. They also need to understand that the West has never been a monolithic, hermetically-sealed formation. In one form or another, globalism seems to have been there continuously from the beginning, and many Others have always been internal to its unfolding story. All of these topics deserve inaugural lectures. I have of course made a deliberate choice in beginning where I have. Because English bears the imprint of its cultural history, it seems to me to be important, among these many other important things, to present a picture of the cultural background with some historical depth. The picture also makes a claim to some broad-brush continuities that cross all or many of the divides I have just been talking about. The process of becoming highly literate in English is greatly helped by some grasp of the rise of Western modernity, as manifest in such historical developments as individualism, disengaged scientific rationality, universalism, Romantic conceptions of nature and human nature, slavery and anti-slavery, feminism, colonialism, environmentalism, multiculturalism. And you do not have an adequate grasp of these without some knowledge, at very least, of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic period, and modernism. The question for an educator is how do you convey all these big isms without reducing them to reified travesties? The answer is that you teach them as specifically-embodied, multi-vocal, ever-shifting, and ever-contested forms of life in the work of writers such as Shakespeare, Blake, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison. This is of course giving emphasis to the productions of high culture. Again the reason is pragmatic: these seem to me to be some of the most effective means available for enabling students to become culturally literate in the way that I have outlined. They are also worth studying for other reasons, none of which involves the claim that they represent 'the best that is known and thought in the world'.25

Where is the global banyan tree in all this? English today is only a Western language among other things. This too deserves another lecture at least. To some, the differences between forms of English are so important as to deserve the phrase 'world Englishes', which is the title of a respected journal in the field edited by Braj Kachru. Kachru represents the variety of world Englishes as a series of concentric circles, with an inner circle consisting of such places as the UK and the US where English is a first language, an outer circle of places in which it is strongly established mostly as a second language, such as Singapore, India, and Hong Kong, and an expanding circle of countries such as Russia and mainland China where it is becoming the key foreign language.

To other scholars, however, the more salient fact is that English-speakers, for all their cultural differences, can communicate with each other effectively on most matters, and so we can talk about 'world English' in the singular. The stress here is on what is shared. The diagram used to represent this in English Today, edited by Tom McArthur, is the figure of intersecting circles in which the shared area is called 'international English'. Both Kachru and McArthur are right, but to capture something of the cultural backgrounds of the language we need a more organic figure, hence my title, the Global Banyan Tree. The key feature of this tree for me is the fact that it has aerial roots. These symbolize the fact that historically newer forms of English, taking root in different cultural soil, sooner or later begin to nourish the whole tree. The whole tree is global: the new roots reach out in all directions. But after a while, most of the roots, old and new, begin to entangle and fuse --- which may be an emblem of the language in the globalized future.