I mentioned here the other day that in his list of books Andrew Motion believes prospective English undergraduates should read, he controversially included James Joyce's Ulysses. At his Newcastle lecture on "Reading for Life," he hailed the novel's profound democracy, its willingness to plot and describe the minutiae of life, of any life, even of a sexually frustrated Dublin Jew. At 1000 pages long, however, this detail can be its downfall, depressing many readers within a few chapters.

As with all books, though, if you can't be bothered to read it, just wait for the movie. In 2004, director Sean Walsh obligingly provided one adaptation, entitled Bloom. I missed this when it came out, but I did get a chance to see it last weekend. The film itself was enjoyable without being particularly memorable. But it was the discussion afterwards that encouraged me to write this post.

The occasion for my watching the film was that I was at an Irish Studies conference. Given that my research is in science and contemporary fiction, it might seem odd that I spent two days at such an event. Without going into detail, I was offered a free place, and I thought it politically expedient to go, even if slightly alien intellectually. But it was precisely this experience of alienation that I suffered at the end of the film, when we were asked for our comments. The chair enquired whether there were any in the audience who had not read the book first, and if so to comment on how this affected their response to the film. One man (an archaeologist) tentatively put up his hand; the rest in the room, all literary people, kept their hands down. Including myself.

This was disingenuous. Although Ulysses was naturally a set text on the modernism module of my undergraduate degree, I never actually completed it. I reached the Aeolus chapter (I got up to midday, even if not mid-way) and this was enough for me to give a tutorial presentation and to write an essay. My failure was not so much to do with the pressure of time, as the fact that I just didn't get on with it. Whilst I ploughed through the couple of hundred pages of Djuna Barne's modernist novel Nightwood, without enjoying it one bit, I could not bring myself to continue on through Joyce's comparable paradigm of high modernism.

Thinking about my fib later that night, however, I decided that perhaps I should have a little more confidence. A-level English courses today are dominated by short books: Wide Sargasso Sea, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby. These are beautiful examples of compression and symbolism; but also, handily, they cut down the hours of reading required for sometimes uninspired students. But it would be wrong to believe that these texts evidence the need for a high-speed, twenty-first century culture to have everything presented in bitesize chunks. Sit on any train, and the businessman connected furiously to the world through his Blackberry might very well be holding in his other hand the latest Harry Potter (650 pages) or Lord of the Rings (1000-plus pages). So the fact that Ulysses is a long book, one that stretches the "adhesive limits of binding-binding glue" (as James Lasdun nicely puts it in his review of Thomas Pynchon's latest epic, Pynchon being often heralded as a contemporary Joyce), should not automatically deter readers. I am not an example of a contemporary English Literature student, adept at using Spark Notes synopses and unwilling to spend time reading at length; and I suspect that the idea that the shorter the novel, the more popular it will be does not stand up.

What does deter readers, including myself, is the experience of reading. Whilst I love Joyce's Dubliners, its short stories cunningly crafted and displaying a more controlled linguistic exuberance than in the novel, I made a subjective judgement that Ulysses was, for me, not so successful a book. Objectively and critically, I am aware of the importance of Ulysses as an inspiration to later modernist novelists; I appreciate the full range of innovative devices it employs, from parralax to stream of consciousness; I understand how Joyce's position as an exile, both geographically and historically, is important in relation to this paradigm story of place; historically, I am aware of how significant Ulysses was in the struggles of censorship and taste in the early twentieth century. So when I say I have not read Ulysses, I do not see it as at all evidencing my limitations as a practitioner in English Literature. Nor does it mark my failure as a dedicated, even professional reader. Surely the ability to read a long book ought not to be the final test of one's readiness to study English at university (as Andrew Motion has it). Rather, being willing to react against the authorities who hold this up as a text that must be read and must be enjoyed is the tougher test.

The next day, in a session of papers on Joyce, I found myself sitting next to an English lecturer new to our university, who happens to be a world authority on the man. Chatting about the previous night's film, I decided to put my theoretical belief to the test, and I admitted that I had never completed Ulysses. "Shame on you," he replied, half-jokingly but also, significantly, half-serious. I had certainly wiped out in a moment any of the careerist Brownie points I had hoped to accrue by spending my weekend at the conference. But I did not really mind; I had proved my point, both to myself and to him. I always imagined that I would finally finish Ulysses sometime in the future, when (the old, endless prevarication) I got around to it. I have now determined that, unless I end up teaching the novel, I will take a defiant last stand against those gunning for the canon, and not take it off my shelves again. I may even drop it into Oxfam.

Labels: James Joyce, Literature, Postgraduate Diary, Ulysses

Not that it will do the slightest good, if the Iraq war is anything to go by, but the government has just launched a new e-petitions service, whereby people can submit petitions to Tony Blair online. Organisations such as Amnesty International and Live 8 have been running these sorts of online systems for a couple of years, but going direct through Number 10 feels a little more satisfying (although I cannot imagine Tony Blair glued to his monitor, anxiously watching as the numbers of angry voters clock up before his soon-retiring eyes). Among others currently running are a petition to not replace the Trident nuclear deterrent and a petition to tax horrendously inefficient and antiquated incandescent light bulbs.

I have signed up to both of these; it has only taken two minutes, and it makes me feel a little more moral, even if its practical impact will be nil. However, I do worry that this new system will do away with those quaint local news clips, in which angry-young-mum or fed-up-of-Milton-Keynes trots up the steps of Number 10 and hands a wedge of paper to the bemused police officer, who passes it on to a hassled civil servant, to add to the pile on Blair's in-tray.

Update: At 12.07pm today, according to my Statcounter, this blog entry was tracked by someone at gateway-101.energis.gsi.gov.uk. Who is watching the watchers?!

Labels: e-petitions, Politics

On the day our Prime Minister gives evidence to the Iraq Study Group, I hear on the radio Emily Dickinson's poem, "Success is Counted Sweetest."

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of Victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.

Labels: poetry, Politics

If the previous Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, brought publicity to the role because of his private life, the current Laureate, Andrew Motion, has made himself very deliberately into a public intellectual and literary commentator. In recent weeks, he has made the headlines with everything from the publication of his new autobiography to his comments on literary archives to his choice of books teenagers should be reading to his complaints about the decline of poetry.

Andrew Motion came to Newcastle last week to lecture on "Reading for Life: Children, Books and Culture." If nothing else, this was an opportunity to put a three-dimensional face and a speaking voice to a dominant name in British letters. His lecture was authoritative and light-hearted in equal measure, and centred on his own experiences of reading as a child, particularly the moment when, reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he realised that beneath the story were submerged depths of symbolism. Although reading is something which develops cumulatively rather than being revolutionised by the turn of one page, all writers like to have a work which they point towards as being the one which changed them from a reader to a creator of literature. For my (humble) self, I maintain that the most significant book I have read (or, rather, had read to me), was Goodnight Mr. Tom, by Michelle Magorian. It was this book that taught me that a story can be ambiguous, can initiate complex and contradictory responses which have a moral effect quite unlike that experience which comes with the predictable "happy ending" of fairy tales. At the end of his reflective lecture, Motion read an elegy to his recently departed father; Goodnight Mr. Tom was the source for one of the earliest poems I wrote as a mature reader and writer, and it, too, is dedicated to my Dad (thankfully, still very alive).

Emotionally, then, I am very much in sympathy with Motion. Where I differ is from his conservative and, in my opinion, slightly naive sense of the political and cultural scene as it stands today. The second part of Motion's lecture was a complaint about the relative absence of poetry from our cultural life. Working regularly in primary and secondary schools, Motion noted that younger students have a terrific ability to imagine and embrace all sorts of subjects and forms in creative writing, but that this is often stifled when, at puberty, the imagination suddenly becomes uncool, and is no longer moulded by schools with an eye on league tables and model G.C.S.E. answers. Children are often voracious readers and writers, but once they get older we are happy for them, in Motion's wonderfully caustic phrase, to "Scrape along the C/seabed of expectation."

So far, this is entirely understandable and a common argument. But Motion takes it one step further, arguing that young people should also be reading books such as Ulysses and The Waste Land. Because of this, the "elitist" bullet has predictably been fired at him by social commentators in the press, and he backtracked somewhat in his lecture, admitting that when he made the list for the Royal Society of Literature of the ten books he thought they should be reading, the "they" he had in mind were those who would go on to study English at university. Nevertheless, he said, he wanted his list to be a defence against shrinking horizons, to say to children - in a way that was not said to him at school - that anything is out there to be read, that there is no such thing as a specifically adult book. Again, this may be commendable in theory, but in practice it is slightly naive: would Motion be responsible for the bullying that would be directed at anyone at a state secondary school who has a copy of Joyce in his bag, rather than a Playstation Portable? One suspects that, although Motion has spent a lot of time running creative writing classes in primary and secondary schools, these have generally taken place in the classrooms of inspirational teachers, and not behind the bike sheds, where the only rhythms to be heard are those of growing masculinity. Indeed, even at university the number of people who read Ulysses, let alone actually enjoy the lengthy experience, is probably smaller than Motion believes; certainly (as I will talk about in my next post) this postgraduate is not alone in never having completed it. And Motion noticeably failed to discuss whether, if good adult literature is automatically available for children, it is a good thing that adults today seem as likely to be reading His Dark Materials or Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter as Wuthering Heights.

However, I believe Motion was on the right track when he suggested that one of the reasons for the decline of poetry (and good literature generally) from the life of individual readers is that it is no longer used by people in public life. If politicians were subtly to start to highlight the importance of reading as a democratic principle (as Gordon Brown has done), letting us glimpse the plural lives of others, then we might have more respect both for politicians and for books. Likewise, Motion has pointed to cult musician Pete Doherty's announcement that poetry saved him whilst he was in prison. Motion notes that young people have locked onto the concept of the "troubled young genius who gives up their life to their work." Implicitly, he is suggesting that the Romantics (drugged up on opiates, troubled and passionate) ought to be every bit as accessible to youngsters as a Baby Shambles album. However, one is sceptical as to whether Motion would follow this logic to its logical conclusion: if poetry deals in pop's business, would he be willing to teach music lyrics to his English Literature students at Royal Holloway? One suspects he would not go this far, although to be fair to Motion, he did review Christopher Rick's study of Bob Dylan in positive tones.

Nevertheless, even though Motion does not quite convince me as an architect of change, that is not to say that I do not appreciate his efforts; his lasting legacy will be to have turned the laureateship from an outmoded and quaint role (with its annual terse of wine as payment) into a serious and central platform from which to speak on literary issues of the political day. When Motion steps down, let's hope he is replaced by someone who is fully attuned to the media and popular culture. After all, poets above all other professions should be great spin doctors for literature.

Labels: Andrew Motion, Literature, poetry