TV As Art: Some Reflections

The title of this collection appeared presumptuous to some who read the drafts of the book in mimeographed form at the 1964 Cleveland convention of the National Council of Teachers of English. These essays, in explication of significant TV programs, were commissioned by the Television Information Office for preliminary distribution at a Television Festival for English teachers organized by the former NCTE Committee on Commercial Broadcasting.

Because many English teachers define their professional role as one of keeping clear the distinction between the aesthetically first-rate and the mediocre, they feel that TV in America has been so conspicuously "average" that it deserves the epithets non-art or anti-art or, at the very best, near-art. Accordingly, to talk about TV as art to a constituency of English teachers takes some explaining (which is not apologizing but may be mistaken for it).

One tradition which makes it difficult for the humanist to accept the possibility that TV programs can at least theoretically be "works of art" is the post-romantic defection of the refined aesthete from what he calls the pseudo-world of mass culture. He defines personal integrity and aesthetic quality by his distance from the predominantly shabby and jerry-built domain of industrialization. To him, TV is an example of the intrinsic shallowness of the mass-produced artifact.

Yet this facile theory of an aesthetic Apocalypse generates more and more doubt. Walter Ong, S.J., reminds us that the printed book was, after all, the archetype of mass production, as indeed its appearance marked the beginning of mass communication. The simplistic division of human production into really fine and merely useful arts since the industrial revolution has proved ambiguous. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that the original meaning of the word art, which is skill, makes the distinction. When men do a job well, they have worked artistically.

Sometimes the action is individual, as in the creation of a lyric; sometimes it involves greater degrees of collaboration, as in the execution of completion of a fresco by a master's helpers; sometimes it is itself a paradigm of human society or the ultimate in collaboration, as in the construction of Chartres. There is no metaphysical reason, therefore, why men working together in TV cannot create works of art.

That they rarely do is quite another matter. For men seldom achieve excellence in any medium. And the enfranchisement of the "untutored" masses in the cultural sphere has admittedly increase the percentage of the total aesthetic output which is mean-spirited and demeaning. This is as true of books (Mickey Spillane mysteries), of music (The Groaning Bones), and of movies (How to Stuff a Wild Bikini) as it is of television. So many more people have suddenly entered the cultural marketplace that the sheer volume of materials is overwhelming to the Arnoldian fighting an invasion with his few touchstones.

Understandably, the emergence of a teenage culture designed to exploit the very immaturity a teacher is committed to exorcise has rattled us. It may be, too, that the prevalence of an "exploitative art" will be more than our schools can handle. Because America is the Land of Happy Endings, it is salutary for us to consider the possibility of failure. Some very respectable critics, Robert Brustein for one, have argued that the only defensible strategy for the humanist in mass culture is to teach his students to hate it. Trying to wheedle or cajole mass culture into maturity will only put the school at the mercy of commercialism.

This collection explores another possibility. If, to use Eliot's famous rationale, the critic's job is to put the reader in the fullest possible possession of the work of art, the TV critic's task is to make the viewer as aware as possible of what a TV program is. The method of explication, of showing how technique discovers meaning, ought to work on a significant TV work of art. It is reassuring to report that a critic like Cleanth Brooks finds such an assumption as obvious as it was to contributors to this experiment.

The cultivation of judgment about TV programs and other manifestations of cultural democracy must surely be one of the primary responsibilities of the contemporary school. Whether such cultivation best proceeds by a direct confrontation of mediocrity, a selective study of TV excellence, or indirectly from the study of literary classics is a pedagogical issue for which not enough evidence is available. This collection of essays makes it possible for teachers at every level of instruction, from elementary grades through college, to test the strategy of studying a few excellent works in the new medium.

Gifted teachers like Ned Hoopes at the Boston convention of the NCTE and thoughtful administrators like Henry Maloney in his editorship of "The Humanities Today" for The Clearing House have been suggesting the liberating potential of studying Socratically the "bad" programs our students watch instead of doing their homework. Imaginative teachers will want to try any and all of the approaches outlined, for example, in Neil Postman's Television and the Teaching of English (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961). It is too early to know what the best ways are for raising the level of demand in the mass audience for better TV.

Granted that the English teacher accepts the challenge to raise the taste of the next TV generation, how does he keep informed about the new programs of merit before and after broadcasting? TIO prepares a monthly checklist of specials, Scholastic Magazines provide a weekly "Look and Listen" guide aimed at school needs, and local newspaper TV critics and TV stations can be persuaded to provide previews for teachers on an ad hoc basis. Most significantly of all for 1966-67, NET's Henry Alter had a $.60 Guidebook prepared for the NET Playhouse season of forty weekly dramas. (Order from him, 10 Columbus Circle, New York 10019.) These are common sense approaches teachers and curriculum planners would be foolish not to use.

But, it seems to me, an alert English profession could take many more steps to insure that television fulfill its potential as a means of civilizing mass man. Let me first list the more important of these possibilities and then explore a few of them in some detail:

1. Provision that U.S. Office of Education curriculum centers and NDEA summer institutes take TV and other popular media into account.
2. Creation of an NCTE screening committee that would audit domestic and foreign TV and film, both commercial and educational, for programs ideally suited to English instruction.
3. Design of preview circuits to close the gap between the appearance of such materials and their use in curriculum.
4. Cultural exchange of television creators at the college level to encourage [our] best students to use their talents in the TV medium.

To spell out some of these opportunities, then, one properly begins with the federal government's generous funding of curriculum design and teacher retraining. There ought to be a small but irreducible place for outstanding TV programs in the work of the curriculum centers. It is inconceivable that forward-looking curricula ignore the newest medium. These new designs will influence the shape of curricula all over the country for the next generation.

I should say that the inclusion of one program at every grade level for each element in the trivium--language, literature, and criticism--would be a way of insuring that TV not be ignored as it now is in the curriculum. Three works, carefully studied in the fashion suggested in the essays in this collection, is hardly too much to ask as a down payment on a gradually maturing medium. Similarly, one TV program bearing on each of the three components of the trivium would be a reasonable investment of time in the NDEA summer institutes.

The NCTE and the MLA might very well form such a screening committee as an outgrowth of two recent commitments. WGBH-TV, Boston, generously agreed to broadcast Robert Lowell's verse play based on Melville's novella Benito Cereno at the 1965 NCTE convention. National Educational Television made a kinescope of the one-hour-and-forty-minute play so that the Modern Language Association could show it to its members at the 1965 Chicago convention, when that organization began to alert its members formally about newer media materials.

This program is an ideal test case. It is first-rate TV adapting a brilliant verse play by a major American poet working with a neglected nineteenth century classic. Novella, stage play, LP recording, TV program. Here is the raw material for real understanding of the complex media mix we must learn to live in and teach through. Because many English teachers are skeptical of audiovisualism in general and of TV in particular, we need a fresh opportunity to recover from our prejudices. NET has cleared the rights for this program so that it can be rented from its Audiovisual Center in Indiana University.

From all reports, the first year of the institutes was not very successful at the media level. Here is a simple way to take a fresh start. A small committee composed of Melville specialists and media artists should be convened to prepare a repertory of materials about this TV program for the summer institutes. Out of their first very circumscribed task would develop more comprehensive ways of getting a few superlative TV programs into the literary curriculum.

In the course of preparing a report for the U.S. Office of Education on using newer media in the teaching of English, I have had an opportunity to see what Canadian, British, and Irish television networks are doing for their schools. The teaching profession and the television industry in this country simply must devise ways of informing the schools of what is available from domestic and foreign networks. There is too much we don't know.

The simplest way to do this is to see that no professional meeting of any consequence goes on without its showing of new TV films. Local, regional, state and national convention committees should get in the habit of allocating "prime time" for one or two worthwhile examples of TV with teaching possibilities. Weekend workshops can also be built around the screening of such materials. ETV stations could telecast samples in their early Saturday off-hours (or right after school closes) so that an English department, for instance, could view films from commercial and educational TV which have recently gone into school distribution.

Finally, if we don't like what we see on TV, what can we do to encourage a new generation of creators to make television come closer to our first expectations for a medium? I think we have at this point the right, indeed the responsibility, to create a vision for TV. As we survive from day to day, playing Sisyphus to our mountains of themes, it would be a pity if we neglected altogether the humanities' responsibility to articulate an image and vision of a larger, better world.

The anguish of transition will be too dear a price if a stable global community doesn't eventually emerge from the world's present painful chaos. The dream of a decent world community to follow the terrors and tensions of today's world is not a fatuous and unworthy hope when the only alternative is a nightmare of disaster. Television can play a major part in the efforts of good men to have humane values endure and prevail. And English teachers and professors, if they are not paralyzed by Eliot's version of a wasteland, can be crucial links in slowly building up the institutions of an international community.

In September 1965, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Union met in Lagos, Nigeria, to plan ways for people in advanced countries to help design better communication systems in the less developed one. In the same month, over a thousand artists from the same Commonwealth countries met in England for the first international Commonwealth Arts Festival.

For the American English teacher, the coincidence of these two outgrowths of British idealism has an exciting implication: suddenly, all over the world, variants of English are being used to create new literatures in English. Nigeria has several outstanding novelists (view NET's "African Writers Today"). Ghana is filming its own interpretation of Hamlet. The BBC is producing excellent documentaries on the new "English" writers of the Caribbean, the Antipodes, the Asian subcontinent. The broadcasting services of these countries, hewing to the BBC tradition of respect for indigenous writers, are making at least part of a world community a reality.

We need to inform ourselves about these new revealers of our expanding subject matter, English. We need to bring from these various emerging nations writers to be in residence here, and we need to send out best creators abroad so that TV may become a major link in the communication chain that precedes a humane world order.

My experience viewing this world television in Toronto, Dublin, London, Geneva, and Paris convinces me that English teachers would not only be exhilarated by the first artistic evidences of a global civilization, but they would also want to share in creating more English-speaking television as one medium of a slowly crystallizing world society full of marvels. Indeed, the first task of a world association of English teachers, I think, should be a gathering of the best TV being created throughout the English-speaking world.

American commercial television has a firm commitment to world TV. It could perform a service to our profession and to our collective desire for a world safe for diversity if it underwrote annual chrestomathies of world TV in English, beginning at the 1966 NCTE convention in Houston, the Space Capital of the world, and at the 1967 one in Honolulu, whose East-West Center symbolizes our desire to live with our Asian neighbors in mutual respect.

I suspect commercial TV might even, in the process, find some programming they would want to include in their own schedules. They would have the continuing gratitude of an English profession appreciative of a volume of essays like TV as Art: Some Essays in Criticism.

from TV As Art, National Council of Teachers of English (1966)