Page 263 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

252 ENGLISH STUDIES

strategy of broad democratic alliance between the ‘popular classes’. So we
conclude this chapter by outlining Gramsci’s concept of common sense and its
uses in the analysis of popular fiction.
Narrative ‘grammars’ have sought hitherto to relate the structure of narratives
to some underlying and permanent ‘structure of signification’, a trans-historical
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general grammar. Here we attempt something rather different: to suggest
analogies between certain narratives—the novels of Barbara Cartland—and a
particular grammar practised within an historical institution: English teaching
from the 1930s to the 1950s. School grammars across the period classify
sentences into two types: the simple sentence (subject: verb: object), with its
straightforward aggregate, the compound sentence (simple sentence+simple
sentence), belongs to elementary English. The complex sentence, with its
articulation of principal and subordinate clauses, stands at the threshold of a
more advanced literacy; beyond lie the richer pastures of composition,
interpretation, literature itself. Thus a standard formal typology of the sentence
corresponds rather closely to a basic structure of the English educational system.
It is not a question of popular narratives being composed entirely of simple
sentences. We have argued elsewhere for a formal relation between certain
‘middlebrow’ fictions of the 1930s and specific contemporary practices of
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English teaching. And as secondary English stands in a special relation in the
curriculum to history and civics in the formation of educated, responsible social-
democratic ‘citizens’, so elementary English has, for girls, an intimate
connection with ‘domestic science’ and education for motherhood.

Girls who from circumstance, lack of training or low intelligence find
themselves in repetitive jobs are mainly interested in the prospect of
marriage…. Such girls form the majority of 15-year-old school leavers,
and all of them are future homemakers. Their own happiness, as well as the
good of the community, requires that they should be much better equipped
for this particular career than many who undertake it at the present time. 73
The relation of popular narratives to elementary English is not primarily
grammatical but formal and ideological. The narratives of popular female
romance are so composed as to ‘boil off all narrative elements of a subordinate
kind, to reduce potentially complex narrative sentences to a set of functions that
corresponds as closely as possible to the subject:verb.object of the elementary
sentence. But this distillation or reduction of effective functions may actually
produce, at climactic moments, a simple sentence:
‘I love you,’ he said a little unsteadily. ‘And now tell me, my darling, what
you feel for me.’
‘I love…you! I love…you!’ Romara cried. 74
‘Aren’t you going to answer me?’ he asked….
‘I love you,’ she whispered. 75