I am reading A Literature of Their Own. Elaine Showalter has justed quoted George Egerton (aka Mary Chavelita Dunne) complaining philosophically about the challenge of writing as a woman in an established male-dominated genre. Quite conventionally, she complains that:

I realised that in literature, everything had been better done by man than woman could hope to emulate. There was only one small plot left to tell: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as a man liked to imagine her - in a word, to give herself away, as man had given himself away in his writings

And then this irony, apparently inintentioned, bursts into her essay:

Unless one is androgynous, one is bound to look at life through the eyes of one's sex, to toe the limitations imposed on one by its individual psychological functions. I came too soon.

Poor lady! Though this seems a candid admission of a sexual problem of prematurity, in fact she intends, rationally, to suggest how she is an historical anachronism, as she goes on to note how her late nineteenth-century novels with their stories of repression neatly predict the analyses of Freud.

The double-entendre is the stuff of Shakespeare and Donne, but it is wholly incongruous when encountered in a work of literary criticism. Written in 1932 (in "A Keynote to Keynotes"), it is all the more humorous when it so sharply illuminates the reserved innocence of a pre-war age, against the lewd sexualisation of the dirty minds of the twentieth century, of which mine is clearly no exception. But although "cumming" may seem a stock phrase of the modern porn writer, and hardly to be expected in a novelist seventy years ago, in fact the word has a 350 year old etymology as another meaning for orgasm, though it seems this was not the significance Egerton meant the word to assume here.

Labels: Elaine Showalter, Literature

Have just visited the web archive Internet Archive, so of course I checked to remind myself how The Pequod looked 11 months ago when it was first launched. As with all things, it has evolved dramatically, if not beyond all recognition then at least to a stage where I am now happy with the way it looks and is structured. But what do you think? Let me know!.

Labels: Computers and the Internet, Internet Archive

Powerful songs of innocence are those of waves on a shallow beach, sucking sand in their greedy tows; of children shrieking in fun; of the bleep of arcade machines; of the clatter of unfolding deck chairs. Songs of colour and pattern, too, are those of the bright yellows, reds, and blues of spades, and kites, and rubber boats and, as the evening and the tide close in, of the temporary archaeological shapes of a day's activity: names in the sand, mounds of collapsed castles, holes, paw and footprints. These are the songs of my childhood holidays in North Yorkshire, a monastery of happiness visited ritually every year for the thirteen years of my pre-sexual youth.

Try as I have to recollect some chord of anxiety that might once, just for a moment, have been played on me, lodging itself in my unconscious like a chip between the teeth, irritating this harmony of happy activity, I cannot. And so, returning now, a decade after my last visit, experience kicks me in the gut. Maybe it was naivete, or the fact that when younger my eyes were for the shore only, ignoring the periphery of the town through which we had to pass, but Whitby today is busier, harder, greasier than I ever remember.

Seagulls, sirens wailing, police the skies, whilst pulled up on the kerb real CCTV vans observe stags stagger, stripped to the waist, raising arms in bold, gorilla-like movements of mating when their group intercepts that of middle-aged women, with their disintegrating fairy wings, here for a hen weekend. A puppeteer plays his puppet playing a piano, his call for "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" answered by a drunk, who sways and stomps, to the applause of an elderly couple on the bench behind him, and eyed by their grandchild standing warily in front. Suddenly, a cheap plastic football lands amongst the performer's wires, kicked by a group of lads across a busy main road. He barely looks surprised - probably he had seen them coming with a well-trained peripheral eye - and carries on. The child cries.

Then something else catches my candid eye, one which merges the two perspectives of innocence and experience I had falsely constructed in my mind. A burly man, tattoos vining their way up his arms, tips his Oakleys back onto his shaved head, leans back against a white wall, closes his eyes, and licks at a fluffy ice cream. Retrospectively, I realise that the seaside is a place where habitual guards come down, less because of alcohol than because of the common denominator of the childhood holiday, in which the ties with which parents hold their kids slacken in that hundred-meter space at the fringes of our country; it is this memory that relaxes the muscular divisions of class and sex, and the regular rules of social engagement, that govern life inland and in older age; this is why in seaside towns people seem to lose all road sense, crossing brazenly in front of traffic, as if they expect still that mother's hand to tug them back if they take a risk too far.

Labels: Miscellaneous, Whitby

With the recent BBC dramatisation of To The Ends of the Earth (which I did not catch on TV), I thought I'd dig out and post a brief biography of William Golding that I wrote some time ago:

Golding's father was perhaps the most important influence on his career, setting the ethical terms against which his son would define himself and his work. Alec Golding was rationalist, atheist and socialist; a science master at Marlborough Grammar School, he also published several scientific textbooks, gained degrees in music and architecture, and was elected to the Royal Geographical Society. William Golding admitted the influence this scientist who had rejected religion had on his life, describing him in his autobiographical essay "The Ladder and the Tree" as "incarnate omniscience."

Having entered Brasenose College, Oxford to read natural science, Golding seemed destined to follow in his father's tradition, but after two years Golding transferred to read English literature. This was a turning point, with Golding acting out his growing belief that art was more important than science because, whereas the rationalist desires the unattainable end of perfect order and control, the artist acknowledges and more accurately represents the chance way the human world works.

Golding's experience of the Second World War, in which he worked both as a scientist and saw action at the front during D-Day, confirmed that the attempt of the rationalist to paint an image of the world which could, through its methods, be improved and progress to an ultimately unified society, was wrong. It was the pivotal event in which Golding "began to see what people were capable of doing", bringing about the belief that since man "produces evil as a bee produces honey", science would always be recruited to achieve detrimental social ends.

On returning from the war, Golding taught English and classics (with which he had become engaged during his long hours on watch in the military), and simultaneously began to write the novel that would develop into Lord of the Flies, whose publication in 1954 projected Golding to the status of a household name. This book deliberately and explicitly (the names of the characters were kept the same) reworks R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858), correcting its smug Victorian belief in the validity of the imperial enterprise, and portraying of human evil in the light of the horrors of World War Two, itself an imperialist enterprise.

Some of Golding's other novels also draw heavily on pre-existing texts and narratives, updated to indicate their relevance, or irrelevance, in a post-war age. His next work - which he considered his favourite - was The Inheritors (1955), a re-imagining of a Well's short-story, "The Grisly Folk". Here Golding imagines the perceptual modes and expressions of a tribe of Neanderthals, seeing through their eyes the arrival of the tribe of Homo Sapiens who will eventually wipe them out. Although explicitly detached from contemporary society through time (as Lord of the Flies was by its setting on an island), Golding examines modernity by studying from an unusual viewpoint how any human group may, even when isolated socially from wider society, develop along a natural path to authoritarianism, lust and jealousy. As he wrote in his essay "Belief and Creativity":

The themes closest to my purpose, to my imagination have stemmed from this preoccupation, have been of such a sort that they might move me a little nearer that knowledge. They have been the themes of man at an extremity, man tested like building material, taken from the laboratory and used to destruction; man isolated, man obsessed, man drowning in a literal sea or in the seas of his own ignorance.

Still unable to break completely from the mould of his father, Golding's works do, then, have something of the scientific method - tested in isolation from external (social) influences - in their structure and interest. Some critics have suggested that his style is, therefore, too manipulative and overtly critical of man's morality. Certainly it is difficult to read certain passages - such as the scene in The Inheritors, where the early hominids get drunk and give in to primitive sexual urges - as offering anything other than a irredeemably damning view of human nature.

Until he published Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize in 1980, Golding's work after The Inheritors largely dropped off the critical and public map, as his work continued in its pessimistic vein but with less of the innovation of perspective which characterised Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors. Rites of Passage - the first book of a trilogy - restored the "universe in little" structure of these first two works, studying a society on board the detached and closed environment of a ship.

Re-established as an important modern novelist, Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, for "for his novels which, with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art, and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today". In his Nobel lecture, Golding happily maintained his reputation for denying the redemptive possibilities of science, "universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist", the cosmic side being the spiritual, religious dimension of human activity.

Labels: Literature, William Golding