Naturally, the film is a hit. When a black student submits a poem about castrating whitey, Enderby argues that poetry is not made of emotions, as the class would have it, but of words. Though, like them, he is only half right, Enderby is more amusing as he attacks the notion of the relaxed approach to life and art. There is, he says, no essential virtue in comfort. To be relaxed is good if it is part of a process of systole and diastole.
Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness.
Art is essentially tense. The trouble with your art is that it is not tense. Enderby is still better when, in an involuntary revulsion against his literature class, he invents several fictitious minor Elizabethan dramatists. Gervase Whitelady, he writes on the blackboard, 1559-1591. Whitelady, he continues, was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener.