The elegies that fail the forgotten places

Storytelling’s not about giving people a voice, it's about listening to what they’re singing.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A book's front cover beside a portrait of the author, JD Vance

J.D. Vance book promotion, 2017.

Does it matter who tells the story of a place? It’s a question I’ve sat with as a writer, a community worker, and as someone who returned to my native West Country after a long time away. My departure and return to this place brought with it a sharper awareness of the labels this rural region could invite; of the way its people could be portrayed; of how easily they can be reduced to a one-dimensional stereotype that fosters little understanding.

And I am both reducer and reduced. I am a proud Devonian, rooted in soil thick with my ancestors, whilst also craving the culture and variety of elsewhere. My story of life in this place is complex. It’s a story that’s mine to tell, and not representative of anyone else from here – just as the people I’ve worked with in communities here and across sub-Saharan Africa taught me too: this person is not this place. This story is not this people.

Stories matter – stories told; stories hidden. They shape our identity, our opinions, our possibilities. John Steinbeck wrote that:

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice…”

Stories told reflect stories carried, like light refracted through a prism. A story’s colours tell us something about who tells the story and how they see the world. Which is one reason perhaps that JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came under scrutiny, especially since he was named Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in the forthcoming US election.

Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of Vance’s white working-class family, from his grandparents in the Appalachia region of Kentucky to his own coming of age in Middletown, Ohio. Vance raises questions about how local people, including his own family, are responsible for their own misfortunes, including poverty and addiction. His book came out in 2016, at just the right time to give many Americans an insight into why so many people like Vance’s relatives and past neighbours had voted for Donald Trump. It was painted as the voice of a forgotten community, and it became a bestseller, admired by some for its portrayal of Appalachian culture by someone from the inside. But reading people who know the places he talks of, it becomes clear that the book is “rife with stereotypes and classic Republican talking points peddled under the guise of lived experience,” as one commentator said.

Sarah Smarsh, author of books including Bone on Bone: Essays in America by a Daughter of the Working Class, said in a Guardian piece published in 2016,

“that the media industry ignored my home for so long and left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.”

A Bitter Southerner article responding to Hillbilly Elegy said that generalisation means that “…complexity gets simplified, the edges get rounded out[…]Appalachia has been written about and photographed in such a compelling (if fabricated) way that the descriptions of passersby took on more weight than the lived experiences of the people being described. What remains is a concept of a place that is both wildly romantic in its natural beauty and backward enough to justify the destruction of that very nature.”

We live in divided times, but often I find it hard to discern real division versus the media-created story of division. Theirs is a story that gets things wrong. Smarsh reflects how “countless images of working-class progressives…are rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll. This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America…” This is why it matters that we hear stories that do not fit that paradigm. A many-voiced 2019 publication Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy offered some of those stories in response to Vance’s painting of Appalachia.

Vance thought he could write the story of a 13-state region, but many Appalachians were unhappy about him becoming their spokesperson, especially when he seemed to blame the poor for their poverty. Appalachian Reckoning is a graceful counter to this: not silencing Vance’s own story but offering many more views and stories from Appalachia. Its co-editor Meredith McCarroll said she wanted to “complicate any singular view simply by including multiple ones. I wanted to create a chorus of voices, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,” to borrow from Walt Whitman’s view of place.” The publication offers cultural nuance, emotional connection, and a “context for some of the claims Vance makes in his book when it moves beyond memoir, and to pass the mic to a wider range of writers, poets, photographers, activists, and artists who make Appalachia a place far too complex to capture and far too dynamic to die.”

This approach feels important now, in the world as is it, with a media that often overlooks nuance, and with a culture that has become so visual that the way things are styled and framed and presented to us online can often be quite different to the reality. It is important to know the difference, and stories can help us discern that.

This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear.

There are stories that are easy to peddle and easy to buy into. In charity work, I saw how the story of the benevolent professional outsider could shape things, leaving little room for local stories and experience. In politics I saw how the story of opposition got in the way of all the people getting on with the everyday work of restoring and caring for their communities across lines of difference. We can, unknowingly, make a place and a people shrink or even disappear with the stories we carry or amplify, or ignore.

Stories wielded unwisely can shrink faith as well as people and places. The Jesus who I did not grow up with but came to know slowly as an adult is a Jesus of nuance, compassion, and deep listening. He would not, I think, recognise the brand of Christianity that can be used to justify particular politics. That religion and politics have in places become so intertwined is perhaps a reflection of the reduction of the vastness of the Bible and the many diverse voices it contains into one story that serves a particular group of people. Jesus again and again subverted what empire and hierarchy and tradition expected of him. He invited people into his story over and over, curious about their own story but never using it as a reason to include or exclude.

When I think about who tells the story of a place – or of a people, a time, a faith – I see that really, there is never one story anyway. There is a chorus of voices, each a little different, each part of a vast harmony that – if we have the ears and heart to hear it – sings a song of challenge and joy, of despair and illumination. Former US president Woodrow Wilson said, “the ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people”. Storytelling is not about giving people a voice – something I heard a lot in charity work. It is about listening to what they’re already singing. This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear, of biased framing and selective storytelling. It can sing us back to ourselves, helping us see each other. And isn’t that what softens hearts, isn’t that why we tell stories? Author Kazuo said in his Nobel acceptance speech that “stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” Stories are not tools of manipulation or power, but pathways to encounter, to relationship, to understanding. They are, perhaps, the only way through divided times.

Essay

Character

Comment

Language

7 February 2024

6 min read

Our language use is leading to a cultural abyss

We are witnessing a profound loss of commitment and discernment in the use of language, writes Oliver Wright.

Oliver Wright

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

Four rugby players stand and watch beside a referee gesturing with his arm.

Rugby players wait upon Wayne Barnes' word.

RFU.

The 2023 Rugby Union World Cup Final was one of the most iconic international matches in living memory, involving two of the most iconic teams – the All Blacks and the Springboks. It’s not surprising that after reaching such a pinnacle of a sporting career, there should be retirements that followed. But two retirements caught my eye. Not from players, but from referees: Wayne Barnes, the most experienced international referee in the world, the main match official, and Tom Foley, also highly experienced, the Television Match Official. Why? Wayne Barnes’s statement is particularly gracious and thoughtful. But the reason given in common with Tom Foley, and indeed many others in similar situations and similar high-pressure roles in the public eye, is worrying: online abuse. After the cup final, death threats were even sent to the school of Foley’s children.

Online abuse has become an endemic, worldwide problem. There are real people issuing these threats and abuse; and there are real people receiving them, and responding in some way. Of course, there is also the problem of online ‘bots’. But they only succeed in their abuse because of their imitation of real abusers.

It’s worth asking why, because we can go beyond the helpless handwringing of ‘the perils of being online’. There are philosophical and indeed theological reasons, and philosophical and theological ways, I suggest, of climbing out of the abyss.

In fact, all words ‘act’ in some way. Even plain truth-describers assert something, such that an interlocuter can learn or discern for themselves.

Let’s go back to the 1950s, when two important advances in the philosophy of language and in religious language occurred. The first came from Oxford, and the White’s Professor of Philosophy, J.L. Austin. The second came from Durham, and its then Bishop, Ian Ramsey.

Austin, whose remarkable life and work has now been brilliantly documented for the first time in the biography by Mark Rowe (published by OUP, 2023) was a decorated Second World War veteran in the intelligence corps who was widely recognised as being one of the masterminds of the success of the D-Day Landings. On his return to Oxford in the late 1940s he perceived with great dissatisfaction a certain philosophical move which accorded the greatest importance in language to words and phrases which described things, which indicated some form of empirical truth about the world. For sure there were other kinds of use of language, religious language, emotional language, and so on, this argument continued. But that was fairly worthless. Describing cold hard scientific truth was the true utility for language.

Austin’s most famous response was in his book How To Do Things With Words. The function of language goes way beyond the scientific description of the world. Language acts, it does things. We promise, we name, we cajole, we threaten, we apologise, we bet. There is no real ‘truth’ as such conveyed in such ‘speech-acts’. Their importance lies, rather, in what is thereby done, the act initiated by the words themselves. Or, in the Austin-ian jargon, the ‘illocution’ within the ‘locution’.

But Austin realised something even more important as he investigated this form of language – these performative utterances. In fact, all words ‘act’ in some way. Even plain truth-describers assert something, such that an interlocuter can learn or discern for themselves. What matters is how ‘forceful’ the relevant act of speech is in each case. Sometimes the speech-act is very simple and limited. In other cases, such as threats, the performative aspect of the utterance is most forceful indeed.

Austin’s student John Searle took the idea of performative language to America, and developed it considerably. Most notable for our purposes, however, over against Austin’s idea, was the separation of speech from act. By analysing the conventions and circumstances which surround the performance of a speech act – a baptism service for instance – we can observe how and why the act occurs, and how and why such an act might go wrong. But the debate was then divorced from the context of speakers themselves performing such actions, an integrity of speaker and action. The philosophical problem we then hit, therefore, is that a spoken word and the associated act (‘locution’ and ‘illocution’) are two entirely separate ‘acts’.

Let’s move now from Oxford to the great Cathedral city of Durham. At the same time as Austin was teaching in Oxford, the Bishop of Durham Ian Ramsey – apparently unaware of Austin’s new theory of performatives – investigated religious language to try and get to grips with both how religious language does things, and what it says of its speakers and writers. Ramsey developed a two-fold typology for religious language – that of commitment and discernment. First, religious language implies two forms of commitment: there is the speaker/writer’s commitment of communicability, a desire to communicate, to be comprehensible, to ‘commune through language’; and the speaker/writer of religious language also entertains prior commitments for the language adopted – language is rarely neutral when it comes to religion. Second, religious language implies a form of discernment about the words that are being invoked and for what purpose. They are not universals, but carry special meanings according to the particular conventions involved. Commitment and discernment.

But this new innovation in the philosophy of religious language too was taken up and developed away from Ramsey’s idea – particularly in the much more famous work of John MacQuarrie, a Scottish philosophical theologian who spent much time teaching both in the States, and in Oxford. In MacQuarrie, writing at the height of the influence of thinkers such as Heidegger and Bultmann, Ramsey’s ‘commitment’ and ‘discernment’ got subsumed into existentialism and myth. The religious speech act became merely an event or an act for the self, a personal matter which might involve transformation, but might not.

These two strands, of the philosophy of language as it got taken up by Searle and his American counterparts, and of the philosophy of religious language as it got taken up by MacQuarrie, have for some time now predominated. And it is only recently that scholars on both sides have begun to perform a ressourcement, both on Austin, and on the nature of religious language in the wake of Bultmann.

The Twitter-sphere seems irrevocably to have divorced the bonds that tie speaker to their acts. In these fertile conditions, abuse flourishes.

We can now return to the cases of Wayne Barnes and Tom Foley, and many others in many different walks of life just like them. Undoubtedly, the emotional, existential, and physical distance secured by interacting online has created the conditions for online abuse to flourish. But at a deeper level, what we are witnessing is a profound loss of commitment and discernment in the use of language, in society as a whole and also in the Church. Real people feel free to use language oblivious to any inherent act contained within it. The Twitter-sphere seems irrevocably to have divorced the bonds that tie speaker to their acts. In these fertile conditions, abuse flourishes. Similarly, in the Church, the commitment and discernment which has lain behind millennia of liturgical and doctrinal language has become a private spiritual matter; or indeed has been neglected in public when religious witness has not been matched between word and deed.

How do we walk back from this cultural abyss? There is an ethical, and, potentially, a religious choice to make. The ethical choice is to think about what our language does to those who read (or hear) it, and to change the way we speak or write, accordingly. Ramsey's modes of ‘commitment’ and ‘discernment’. The religious dimension is to recognise that our words bind us to a system of belief, whether we like it or not. Saying one thing and doing another in a religious context implies a diminution in value of language for all concerned, not just the private life of the individual believer.

Actions speak louder with words.