That "I Believe In Father Christmas" is in the title only and not in the body
of the song leaves it open that this title is there to be examined for its
truth and not as a summary of the point of the song. Compare "Hitler: Saviour
of Germany" or "Nixon - Honest Politician". Or "My Happy Life Hiding From The
Nazis". Or "A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius". This may be surprising
in a Christmas song - "White Christmas" didn't turn out to be snowless, Rudolph
was a red-nosed reindeer. Lumbering literalness generally plagues the Christmas
song. But before Sinfield, in "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" it became clear from
the body of the song that war was not over in the present tense at all but only
if you want it.
Admittedly playing with belief in the first person present tense will throw
some people. But consider EM Forster's "I do not believe in belief". And then
"I believe there is no such thing as belief".
The phrase "I Believe In Father Christmas" is one of the pat answers to the
perennial "Do you believe in Father Christmas?" This is important, I suggest.
In fact, it is an assurance adults may give children - a bromide. The writer is
playing with a trope. This gives the title a different slant to where "I
believe..." is used in simple factual context to report a state of belief. Two
years later John Lydon took a trope and took a hatchet to it with "God Save The
Queen" - here the clue was not in anything like a literal reading of the title.
A medieval monk wrote against the doctrine of the Trinity under the heading "I
believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit", or could have done. The heading
would then become an assertion - perhaps standard - to be examined and refuted.
Swift's "A Modest Proposal" was excessive and deliberately so - to mock the
excesses of moralising reason.
All this is to suggest that the lumbering literalness of treating "I Believe In
Father Christmas" as if it were a factual assertion is surely mistaken in the
context of the song in question; the meaning of the title here needs to be
examined in the light of the body of the song rather than the body subsumed
under a 'literal' reading of the title.
The analogy may be made between believing in God and believing in Santa. There
is a strain of modern theology - perhaps dominant in the Church of England, but
not in the Vatican - where God is not asserted as having any literal existence
and trying to treat God as a fact or a fiction is seen as missing the point (as
is any sustained examination of the Bible for its literal truth). These a murky
waters; but since the song doesn't aim to dispel them it may be it is playing
in them.
Songwriters trying for something different may nevertheless produce a fudge
between the old and seeming new or something that seeks to have its cake and
eat it. In fact, this kind of blend may be what they aim at - it's a well-known
device within advertising ["Coke. It's the real thing."; "Go to work on an
egg." "London Underground - You can't beat the system."]
And never forget this is popular song and not obscure poetry: artistic
intentions aside, a title that made clear the song was a statement that the
person did not believe in Father Christmas might be commercial suicide. That's
bad at any time of year.
DL
From: "dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, 11 December 2016, 13:16
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Santa Claus: The Implicatures
Palmer set to music a so-called ("by whom," being the implicature) "Xmas song"
(the lyrics are "mostly" by someone other than Palmer, but "mostly" is one of
the most tricky adverbs when it comes to 'implicature').
McEvoy notes:
"This post [the previous one in the thread] mentioned the ambiguous
implicatures of "I believed in Father Christmas" but does not mention the more
compelling evidence that the song doubts that Santa is real: "they told me a
fairy story" and "I saw him and through his disguise". What lies beneath
Santa's "disguise"? Not a real Santa is one answer."
Well, the logical form of Sinfield's
i. I believe in Father Christmas.
is an obvious echo of
ii. I believe in God.
One of Ryle's claims to fame (in Oxford) was to distinguish:
iii. know that.
and
iv. know how.
Since, for many Oxonians, knowledge is justified true belief (not for Popper,
but he's no Oxonian), Ryle thought (for a week or two) whether to distinguish
v. believe that
and
vi. believe how
would make sense. It didn't (for him). "But there's "believe IN," as "I believe
in God"". He could have uttered "Santa Claus," or "Father Christmas," and he
would have had the same response (a full round of applause) at the Oxford
Philosophy Club, where he delivered his musings.
So one has to be careful if a Griceian is careful with the alleged title to
Sinfield's 'poem' ('literature', in Dylan's speech),
i. I believe in Father Christmas.
From McEvoy's first reference to the 'intended meaning' of this, it would seem
that McEvoy would take (i) implicaturally equivalent to
vii. I believe that Father Christmas exists.
Or, worse,
viii. I believe that Father Christmas really exists.
But Cant taught us that we cant take existence as a predicate, and Austin (with
'typical artless sexism') called 'really' a really otiose word. So one has to
be careful.
As for the more easily tractable (in terms of Witters's Tractatus) molecular
proposition
ix. I saw Father Christmas & I saw him in disguise.
I admit I focused on the first conjunct. Sinfield, but then this is SUNG --
vide Dylan on the parallels between Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and his songs
(Dylan's songs) that he aimed at broadcasting on radio) -- i.e. performance --
and we cannot expect a scare quote alla:
x. I saw 'Father Christmas' & I saw him in disguise (through which... etc.)
The conceptual analysis of 'disguise' is a difficult one. If Sinfield is
IMPLICATING he saw his father, 'Father Christmas', a clearer proposition would
be:
xi. I saw my father disguised as 'Father Christmas'.
Or
xii. Through his disguise, I realized that 'Father Christmas' was no Father
Christmas but Father.
Chomsky calls this
xiii. Father Christmas --> Father.
a 'syntactic deletion'. ("It doesn't work all ways" -- implicating that
xiv. Father Christmas --> Christmas.
is obtuse.
McEvoy goes on:
"By the end, where we get the Christmas we deserve, we are being given another
possibility - that the fairy story may be true or come true if we believe it.
In this way, Santa may be real or become real because of his role in an
important fairy story which can create a reality if we believe it or act like
we believe it. But the song is unclear on the different senses in which we may
believe or disbelieve in Father Christmas, the different senses in which Father
Christmas may or may not be real, and the relation between them - Greg Lake is
not an analytical philosopher."
He is mostly NOT an analytic philosopher, as I prefer. The lyrics is mostly,
again, credited to Sinfield.
"Broadly there are two 'resolved' readings of the song - first, though Santa is
a fiction of sorts he is a useful fiction and represents a truth or reality
that goes beyond the world of straightforward facts; alternatively, we need to
see through the disguise or fiction of Father Christmas to get to the important
truth or reality he might represent (say, as to having more of a heaven rather
than hell on earth)."
This should not aequivocate on the meaning of 'disguise,' a colourful one when
it comes to Santa. In most Northern traditions, he is all bundled up in red. In
Southern Italy, and even Sicily, Santa's disguise is different. One could
question oneself why a person need a disguise. The Greeks knew the answer (cfr.
Strawson, "The concept of a person"). "Pro-sona" is a disguise. For the Greeks,
and a fortiori for Strawson, one cannot see a person (assuming Santa is one)
EXCEPT through his or her or its disguises. Strictly, an institution can be a
person, -- hence the 'its'.
McEvoy:
"A third reading is that the song depends on being unresolved as between these
two broad readings and you can therefore interpret it as a song professing
continued if modified adult belief in Father Christmas or disavowing such
belief:"
Well, yes. In 'Personal Identity,' Grice deals with this. We have to
distinguish:
xv. Sinfield-1
and
xvi. Sinfield-2
Sinfield-2 wants his set of propositions (which I append below) to be referred
to as "I believe in Father Christmas". But IN THAT SET OF PROPOSITIONS, the
phrase or proposition
xvii. I believED in Father Christmas [emphasis on the past tense mine].
occurs, which is easy to interpret as uttered by Sinfield-2 but referring to
Sinfield-1 (where 1 is temporally prior to 2). The fact that, simpliciter, the
use of the past tense IMPLICATES that the belief no longer holds is CANCELLED
by the assumed title to the thing, "I believe in Father Christmas". But since
"I believe in Father Christmas" is NOT part of the set of propositions that
Palmer sang, we have a problem here. (Palmer never cared to SET to MUSIC the
title of the song, as most musicians don't --. In some cases this is not
tragical since the title of the song re-occurs in the lyrics to the song,
"Pennies from Heaven," "Everytime it rains it rains pennies from heaven" -- In
others, notably this one, it doesn't. This poses a problem for an implicatural
analysis, but not a TOO serious one.
McEvoy concludes:
"[I]n this way, the song is "systematically ambiguous". I tend to think,
whatever the intention behind it,"
(vide Grice, "Utterer's meaning and intentions")
"the song does not give adequate material for a 'resolved' interpretation and
so is systematically ambiguous as to whether Santa is real or is believed (in
whatever sense, which sense is also not clearly resolved). These indicate
reasons why I struggle with its intended sense but which make it a very
striking and perhaps unique Christmas song."
Well, 'sense' and implicature converge here, and I see why McEvoy would
struggle with the song's intended IMPLICATURE. If the thing was NOT intended it
is NOT an implicature (As Grice said, "An implicature is not like a baby. One
can have an unwanted baby; but the idea of an unwanted implicature repels me.")
So it may do to reconsider the lyrics slightly:
xviii.
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on Earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the Virgin birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winters light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas Tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire
They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
And they told me a fairy story
'Till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked TO the sky with excited eyes
'Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise
I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on Earth
Hallelujah Noel be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get we deserve.
xviii.
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on Earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the Virgin birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winters light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas Tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire
They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
And they told me a fairy story
'Till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked TO the sky with excited eyes
----- This is the first time "Father Christmas" (cfr. Grice, "Pegasus" in
"Vacuous Names") is mentioned:
xix. I believed in Father Christmas.
Sinfield is no analytic philosopher but the provider of 'rhyme' (not reason).
It is obvious that the 'excited eyes' that follow in the next line are meant
for Palmer to find a suitable toon for which Sinfield provides the appropriate
rhyme, "disguise". So perhaps one doesn't have to take 'disguise' too
rationally ('reason') but more as a matter of 'rhyme'.
'Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise
I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on Earth
Hallelujah Noel be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get we deserve.
Note that the syntax of what follows after "through his disguise' is complex,
from a performative point of view (vide Austin, "How to do things with words").
So far, it's been mainly a narrative ballad, and after 'disguise', that rhymes
with 'eyes', Sinfield ceases to narrate (the illocutionary act of STATING) but
starts a new illocutionary act, one of WISHING season's greetings, as the PC
police goes. Note incidentally, that the implicatures of
xx. Father Christmas
differ from
xxi. Merry Father Christmas
where syntactic deletion IS operative:
xxii. Merry Christmas! (while "Merry Claus", with an exclamation mark, sounds
odd at worst).
Etc.
Cheers,
Speranza
