Whatever facet of art we’re talking about, one thing is certain, if it becomes popular, the mainstream arbiters of ‘meaning’ will try to make use believe it as dull and uncontroversial as possible. But a televised lecture by Paul Foot set me on a journey that eventually led to the launch of Indy Film Library, in a pursuit to make culture, and the themes its creators imbue it with, as accessible as possible. Decades after I first saw it, and after another year of introducing radical and thought-provoking films to viewers around the world, now seems like the right time for me to revisit The Trumpet of a Prophecy, and the blueprint it provides for engaging with art – as well as critiquing the critics.
I was first introduced to the work of Paul Foot when my dad showed me a VHS recording of What the Papers Say. I wouldn’t have been older than 13 at the time, and the following ten-minute cross examination of the British press was like nothing I’d ever seen before – a relentless interrogation of the way the media had shaped a narrative to wrongly convict the Birmingham Six. With the prisoners set to be released, all the papers had trumpeted that justice was finally set to be done – apparently forgetting the way they had rejoiced at the conviction 16 years before.
It wasn’t just a damning indictment of everything the papers had said between 1975 and 1991, then, but what hadn’t been said – with any (correct) suggestion that the case had been a grotesque miscarriage of justice frozen out of the mainstream – forming an analysis of the limitations and biases of a for-profit press, during and after the whole ordeal.
News organisations aren’t benevolent sources of information, and which each have a set of their own ideological motives. In terms of profit, having your staff do investigative work is expensive especially if it turns up evidence that upsets corporate and state interests. Deferring to press releases, or formal statements from the powers that be, verbatim, remains the preferred mode of UK journalism, then. At the same time, when the system gets it wrong, it is in an organisation’s interests to clip and reinterpret history until it suits them.
Looking back, if a programme which dared to question the narratives presented by the news as immutable fact seemed unlikely then, it seems downright impossible now. The BBC conspicuously axed What the Papers Say in the spring of 2016 – a year which constantly demonstrated the importance of media literacy – but even if it hadn’t, could you imagine a programme on the state broadcaster being allowed to look into reporters’ default position of believing Israeli military press releases as it shells hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza?
As profound as I found this in terms of television, however, it wasn’t something that changed much for me. I was lucky enough to be born into a house where I was encouraged to be careful not to take whatever I read at face value (something which you probably guessed by the fact Paul Foot factored into my early teen viewing at all). No, what changed things for me was what I was shown next.
On a second, grainy VHS, buzzing with static noise and occasional aerial interference from the time of recording, was an hour-long lecture by Foot, examining the life and radicalism of the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Over the course of The Trumpet of a Prophecy, Foot took those same razor-sharp analytical tools he brought to his analysis of the press – and their shaping of what is considered ‘fact’ – and showed that same process is relevant to culture. In fact, he showed that it was not only relevant, but essential.
Can Spring be far behind?
Three seeds were planted in that initial viewing, which led me to important realisations later on. We miss the best of storytelling, art, culture when we take them at face value. People who encourage those one-dimensional readings serve the same motives and biases. And that any critic worth their salt should fight against that, to make art, and the themes embedded within it, more – not less – accessible.
Running through the lecture is Foot’s analysis of Shelley’s 1819 poem Ode to the West Wind – which runs parallel to a potted biography of the poet. Foot uses this format to patiently and relentlessly skewer the gatekeepers of British poetry – critiquing the critics of his work, living or dead. Beyond the straightforward conservative rage of Shelley’s contemporaries, who suggested writing him off on the basis he would “abrogate our laws of private property”, this also includes more insidious academics, who suggested no poet ever “repaid cutting as much as Shelley” – and censored him while arguing they were removing ‘inaccuracies’ that made his work read better as lyrical poetry.
Mimicking a style of cultural commentary that we might now recognise as a forebear of the reaction video (a format which might be more accurately described as the reactionary video, as critics prioritise banal and pedantic observations about form, over extracting or analysing underlying themes), Foot himself begins with a few light jibes about Shelley’s poetry from this position. Responding to the question “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” with the obvious “No”, he elicits a few giggles from the crowd, before quipping that Shelley’s description of autumn leaves, “yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red” is off the mark, while “muddy brown” might have resonated better. In fact, if you “read poetry for accuracy”, you can find Shelley extremely frustrating, Foot notes in deadpan style. But of course, what he is driving at becomes overt in this moment of pointed absurdity. Poetry that resonates with people is ridden with metaphors, it is only in the very least inspired, dreary moments, about the literal subjects it centres on (William Wordsworth’s daffodil-centric I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is presented as an example of this, from the same era).
So, what is Ode to the West Wind about, if not just a lovely stroll through an idyllic woodland scene? Following a particularly visceral response to his poem The Revolt of Islam, Shelley found himself at cross-roads, where it was clear he would not be a successful artist in his lifetime, if he held to the radical notions of his youth. Threatening private property, undermining the institutions of religion and monarchy, championing working class political rights would see his work reviled by every critic of note. But the alternative, to become a pet poet of the ruling class, like Wordsworth, was a fate far worse.
While walking in a wood near Florence, Ode to the West Wind took shape – as Shelley noticed the transformation of the natural world amid the onset of autumn. But this was not a capitulation to inoffensive, aimless prose about how nice plants and flowers might be. Foot’s lecture – accompanied by excellent performances from a cast of theatrical actors, who breathe new life into the verse – paints this as a satirical sucker-punch; suggesting Shelley had adopted the safe and sterile writing of his acceptable contemporaries, before using that style to paint a vision of revolutionary fury.
Leaves might not be described accurately in the terms Shelley sets out, but as they shake in the cold autumn wind – a force for change, which may bring a time of monsters, or a time of renewal – aren’t to be taken at face value. They are the diverse and tumultuous forms of the masses, who faced – and still face – a deepening crisis, as a system built to grind them to dust for profit struggles to find new ways to keep a hold on them, through ever more desperate and violent means.
The poem’s structure suggests that the ageing Shelley is at war with himself here (just as the grey-haired Foot might have been once, having been a talented journalist whose socialism undoubtedly made him an obvious target for newspaper bosses). Caught between his principles, and a growing sense of futility that suggests he might as well just go “back to the daffodils”. But the fact he is writing in these terms at all, that he is subverting that very genre to political ends, also suggests he has made up his mind, even before the final verse ends on its hopeful rhetorical question. Even as the panic and decline of autumn gives way to a long, dark winter, that sets into motion processes which will eventually herald new life. Spring – a revolutionary upheaval, overtaking the cruel, barren landscape – cannot be far behind.
Critical blueprint
This is, as Foot points out, the idealistic zeal which eventually meant that Shelley would be remembered.
“Not by these famous litterateurs, reviewers, who nobody’s heard of since. But by the people who matter; the people who mattered to him, the people who created the wealth and could bring about the revolution he wanted.”
According to Foot, between 1827 and 1841, there were 14 separate editions of Queen Mab printed by pirate publishers, sold on the streets for pennies, “bought up by little circles of semi-literate and illiterate people, who wanted… to change the world”. This saw it become a great inspiration of the Chartist revolutionary uprisings of 1839, 1842 and 1858; and a favourite of all the socialists who came forward to start the labour movement in the 1890s. Meanwhile, “can man be free if woman be a slave” from The Revolt of Islam became a slogan of the women’s suffrage movement, and “rise like lions” became a go-to slogan whenever and wherever anybody rose against their oppressors.
This is where I would like to make my own final point. Because it is in this context Foot shows us the importance of cultural criticism – and offers us the very best example of it. Shelley’s posthumous popularity forced the gatekeepers of the elite to interact with his work in a way they were initially able to avoid – but like the journalists Foot eviscerated in What the Papers Say, they did this in terms that enabled them to utterly ignore and obfuscate their own shortcomings. To try and repackage him as a tame lyric poet, whose poetry about woodland strolls is to be taken literally.
This is the self-same process which sees the cultural institutions which confer ‘meaning’ on art – journalistic platforms, awards bodies, academic departments – often insist on the most limited reading of a piece. They work to castrate art in a way that removes it from its social context, to preserve it as something so dull and uncontroversial that it can only be of interest to elites – and not to anyone who might threaten the order they do so well out of.
Foot supplies a masterful example of what cultural criticism could – and I would argue, should – be instead. Refusing to take things at face value, he works to show how Shelley’s poetry is relevant to a modern audience, how the themes running through the work link to the modern world, and how with a little thought, we can recognise those themes. He also helps provide a blueprint, showing how we can draw out social and political themes in other works – alongside a crash-course in how the ruling class can close ranks to de-fang radical culture, in the defence of their hegemonic worldview.
Ultimately, he provides a form of cultural critique which is democratising – and one which we should be striving to live up to.