They say great authors should always be capable of surprising you, and it was certainly a surprise to find one of my favourite authors, subject of a couple of thesis chapters and numerous blog posts, announcing her love of football in the Observer this weekend:

I watch for aesthetic reasons. Some are to do with real dramatic tension. There is a story, and the end is really unknown until it comes. I have worked out that I also watch as though I was watching a kinetic sculpture or abstract light show. The things I watch are all contained in quadrilaterals, concern the movement of round balls, and the shifting lines of force and energy made by the players' movements. The games I care about are snooker, tennis, and football. The rules of rugby have changed to make the movements more fluid and exciting for the TV viewer so sometimes I watch that too. But I cannot get interested in, say, motor racing or golf.

Watching Spain win Euro 2008 last night certainly had both the aesthetic and the dramatic in abundance. If England are the perennial whiners of world football, Spain are genuine underachievers, but this made it more remarkable that there was in them a certain confidence or self-belief, of a greater depth even than Germany, who were coming to this final whilst being technically an average team. There was a real sportsman's satisfaction in watching Spain set up their intricate triangles, but the fluidly "shifting lines of force" also provided a dramatic satisfaction: as they knotted and weaved the ball around German defenders, the final gave the same sense as the tying up of the loose ends of a Shakespearean sexual comedy. There would have been nothing more untidy, more unfitting, than a German win, neat and efficient though it would no doubt have been.

But in spite of the way in which yesterday's final gave me a sense of pleasure both as a fan and an aesthete, I fear I cannot help but feel snooty about A.S. Byatt's enjoyment of football. Writers should, certainly, enjoy cricket, with its slowly accumulating tension lending itself to a day spent reading (or writing) a novel in the sunshine of Lords. However, I simply cannot imagine A.S. Byatt, cultured and eloquent as she is, shouting at the television or applauding a dive that wins a last-minute penalty kick. Of course, I am entirely guilty of stereotyping, and reading Byatt's piece I am forced to recall a comparable passage from her novel, A Whistling Woman, in which Frederica (the character most analogous to Byatt herself) records her fascination with her first television, on which she watches "Tennis on green grass with white figures and the geometry of the court contained and constantly in movement in the geometry of the box."

As I am writing this immediately after watching Andy Murray beat Richard Gasquet in the fourth round of Wimbledon, I am more easily inclined to see how Byatt's love of tennis might reflect and inform her artistic interest. We have, of course, become used to "Henmania," with its temporary congregation believing that it is better to come close and lose nerve at the last, than to maintain a sense of self-belief throughout the match. Henman certainly evoked fear and pity, but they were not quite the right kind for the tragic hero they felt he was. The fear was more that we were deluding ourselves in maintaining the belief that he could reach a Wimbledon final; the pity was not for how far he had fallen, but for how far he had yet to climb to reach our annual expectations.

As Henman was ensconced in the commentary box, however, it became clearer how superficial Henmania had been. Certainly, Murray too looked to be down and out after losing the first two sets, before he began his comeback. However, there is in Murray a bloody fierceness that Henman lacked in his white costume, and it manifests itself in his ability to play brilliant tennis not just with the occasional volley, but with a sequence of five or six points that are breathtakingly audacious.

For all that Murray's tennis broke Gasquet's powerful returns, shattered his rhythm, and set the pace deliciously and relentlessly on his side, there was still a possibility of a fall lurking in the background - or, rather, later in the ticking clock. It was Henman's unconscious presence that took it from mere excitement to a total Aristotelian drama. For as the evening light began to draw in, in the back of everyone's mind was, surely, that match in 2001 against Ivanisavic, when Henman had come from a game down to win two sets through astonishing tennis, only for rain to push the game to the next day, at which point he capitulated.

Today, then, eyes flicked between the court and the umpire. Even if the players on the former were finding it hard to see visually, could the latter not see or feel the aesthetics of the event, the lines of force building and curving it towards a climax just as the curtain of night fell? Did he not realise that putting the game off until the next day, with a new crowd and fresh players' legs, would be equivalent to dropping the curtain mid-way through Lear's final speech? Luckily, the umpire (and Murray) held his nerve, and with what would have been the final game of the night the young Scot came through. Though I am sure she would have expressed it with exceptional acumen, A.S. Byatt will not have been the only one attuned to the drama of this Wimbledon act. In its greatest guises, as in the European cup final or Murray's fourth round win, the players alone must write the script.

Labels: A.S. Byatt, Andy Murray, Euro 2008 final, football, Literature, Miscellaneous, Wimbledon

Now back to writing after Christmas, I am working on my second chapter on A.S. Byatt, this time looking at her Booker Prize winning novel, Possession. This is a work with an encyclopaedic scope, with its themes ranging from the romance of love to the romance of the quest, its plots derived from the detective story and the romance and the Victorian epic; it is a palimpsest of letters, journals, poetry and fairy tales. And in the process of all these it takes a fairly hefty swipe at the more dogmatic aspects of literary academia, from the biography industry to postmodern psychoanalytic feminism (try saying that with your mouth full). Thus it might seem surprising that those in the establishment it critiques chose to bestow upon it a series of welcome reviews, as well as British literature's top prize. On the other hand, postmodernist critics like nothing more than to be critiqued themselves. See, for example, the following statements: "postmodernism contests culture from within its own assumptions"; "postmodernism literally names and constitutes its own paradoxical identity"; "postmodernist discourses need the very myths and conventions they contest and reduce" (all quotes taken from my current "read," Linda Hutcheon's The Poetics of Postmodernism). Postmodernist criticism erects a facade not unlike those energy-absorbing shields so loved by starship captains, in which anything which attacks the postmodern paradox simply feeds in more powerful evidence of the contradictions and destabilisations of culture that are postmodernism.

All this debate places me in a thicket of language and terminology, and I need to cut my way through it before I can start to tackle Possession on my own terms. Happily, however, Byatt herself comes to my rescue. Asked by Nicolas Tredell about her novel's attack on poststructuralism, Byatt acknowledges "Possession is a postmodernist, poststructuralist novel and it knows it is. It does present itself as a piece of Victorian melodrama, but of course it's no such thing.” However, she goes on, “within that, it is also a sort of passionate plea for readers to be allowed to identify with characters...Most postmodernist fiction cuts out any emotion very much earlier on. It doesn't allow the reader any pleasure, except in the cleverness of the person constructing the postmodernist fiction. I think that's boring. I think you can have all the other pleasures as well.” And very enjoyable the novel is too, without the need for it to be acknowledged as belonging to one category or genre, or to say that its critical work is more significant than the wave of the plot of romance and detection on which that critique rides.

I suspect that Byatt, like myself, finds the term postmodernism a somewhat necessary irritant. Necessary because it allows us to place a particular text in context; an irritant because we can become so bogged down in determining and defining precisely what that context is that we ignore the immediate pleasures of reading the text itself. In developing a "poetics" of postmodernism, we forget to read the poem. I am therefore unwilling, let alone unable, to answer the general questions "what is postmodernism" and "what is a postmodernist text," which lead to my more immediate concern which is "is Possession a postmodern text and, if so, why?"

In looking at the first two questions, I use the analogy of evolution. One of the fundamental errors made by creationists is that they argue that since we cannot see evolution happening in the present, or even in the (incomplete) fossil record, then there is no evidence for evolution at all. However, as Richard Dawkins dismisses this fallacy in The Blind Watchmaker, the error is really one of scale. Wander around any modern zoo, and you will see lions and tigers, and you will go home and talk about them to your domestic tabby. All three seem to be distinct sub-species of the cat family. Surely the creationists cry, since they are distinct, this implies they were created in one moment, by a discrete process, rather than by the continuous development argued for by evolution. However, imagine now that you are visiting a virtual zoo, in which a representative of every cat family currently on this earth are prowling in one large cage. Now, imagine every individual in every cat sub-species is present in one enormous cage. And, finally, imagine every individual of every cat sub-species which ever lived in one gargantuan cage. Now, looking at this last enclosure, it would be impossible to define where the group of "tigers" starts, and the group of "tigers" gives way to "lions." There would be clusters of individuals more tiger-like and less-lion like, and some small ones who bear some resemblance to your pet cat. The idea of a species or sub-species is in some senses a completely false one. Darwin himself did not like the term species - which implies a discrete group of individuals with particular characteristics - preferring instead the term variation, for reasons that should be obvious from the analogy. Nevertheless, without the concept of species, the art of taxonomy (and it is in some senses an art) could not exist; producing nature programmes would be impossible; and knowing on which species to perform experiments which relate to humans could not happen. The term species is a necessary irritant.

So it is with postmodernism, or, indeed, with any form of generic categorisation we use in literary theory: the Chivalric Age, Renaissance period, Romanticism, Victorian period, Modernism, Postmodernism. If you were to line every literary work (indeed, what is a "literary" work, for that matter? The Origin of Species has its own beautifully creative eloquence.) ever written on your long, long shelves, then pinpointing precisely the "species" that is the Romantic poem or the postmodern novel would be impossible. Deciding when the Victorian period gives way to Modernism (other than by using the strict dates of Victoria's reign) is an entirely arbitrary one, and results in debates around transitional figures such as Thomas Hardy or Hopkins. In my opinion, and in the guises in which I use it, postmodernism is a unit of terminological currency, one which enables me vaguely to locate a text in time and style, and then to move on and study the text itself.

All this might seem a somewhat aimless argument. However, in an unexpected way, deciding whether A.S. Byatt is a postmodernist writer, feeds nicely in to the more holistic framework of my thesis. I am looking at the role of metaphors of the "demon" in science as well as literature: Maxwell's demon, Descartes' deceiving demon, Daniel Dennett's "pandemonium" model of consciousness, and others less well known. So often, these strange beasts - given legitimacy in science by being called "models" rather than "metaphors" - are used to allow thinking to continue in a hypothetical sense, a future tense, even as the empirical evidence supporting the theory of the moment remains elusive. For example, Maxwell suggested that a demon could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics; however, he had no idea how this might manifest itself in a practical, working device (others such as Wojciech Żurek in the twentieth century have been able to create computer simulations, however, and point to potential applications of Maxwell's demon in medical nanotechnology). Daniel Dennett argues that consciousness works through a series of competing "demons" chattering together and, out of the chaos, a consensus emerges which we think of as a thought. Neuroscience has yet to develop the sorts of brain scanners that might allow "demons" (which would be called something different when they are found) to be pinpointed, but by positing that term, he enables his thinking to move on, rather than getting stalled simply because the technology has not caught up with the hypothesis.

When I first entered the debate around postmodernism, I rather like Charles Newman's denunciation of post-modernism as "a dash surrounded by a contradiction." However, conjunctions of competing terms - demons and science, species and evolution - are often highly productive.

Labels: A.S. Byatt, literary theory, Literature, postmodernism

Having at long last rounded off my chapter on A Whistling Woman, I am moving on to look at A.S. Byatt's Possession (although with only a week before I go home for Christmas, I am trying productively to procrastinate and to re-edit existing chapters, rather than starting a new one now). Among its many other subjects, this Booker-winning novel provides a parody of postmodern literary criticism. At one gloriously anarchistic moment in the novel, Maud (the heroine) stands in the shower and thinks about Fergus, an arrogant, academic anti-hero with whom she had a brief fling at a conference. Maud is a feminist, psychoanalytic critic, a form of analysis Byatt mockingly plays up to here:

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. The Paris conference where she had met Fergus had been on Gender and the Autonomous Text. She had talked about thresholds and he had given an authoritative paper on 'The Potent Castrato: the phallogocentricstructuration ofBalzac'shermaphroditehero/ines'. The drift of his argument appeared to be feminist. The thrust of his presentation was somehow mocking and subversive. He flirted with self-parody. He expected Maud to come into his bed.

The passage reminds that we are addicted to jargon and conjunctions as evidence of our own cleverness. But, as Maud rubs her legs, naked in the shower, it lays bare through the puns that our vocabulary provides a screen of language which conceal s the fact that, behind it all, we are, simply, obsessed about sex. (See Acephalous for some unfortunate, hilarious proof).

Byatt is herself a former institutionalised literary critic (as opposed to the public intellectual she is now). However critical, her writing also indicates that we do have a sense of humour, able to mock ourselves even whilst taking and presenting ourselves seriously and (perhaps incongruently) sexily as well. Given the passage above, Byatt would probably have approved of The Amazing and Incredible, Only-slightly-Laughable Politically Unassailable, PoMo English Title Generator. Here, you type in an author and a novel and let the generator produce a clever sounding title, for use by the undergraduate in his dissertation topic, or by the professor "trying to obtain department funding to go to that high-flying, hard-drinking conference." Try Balzac, and what emerges is not unlike the title Byatt invents for her fictional characters. From "Collusive Relic and the Dis-ease of Masculist Dualism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine" to "Merging Seduction: Testicular Capitalism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine," the generator produces titles which, worrying, would be quite feasible in some of the postmodern literary journals and conferences of the sort the two fictional academics attend. For myself, I am not sure that I dare write on "Complicity and Feminism in Possession: A.S. Byatt Visioning Orgasmic Discourse," though it remains a possibility if the current theme of my chapter proves unproductive.

We are driven by sex, and as part of that impulse we show off our learning with the pretentious peacock feathers of language (an ostentatious piece of alliteration and metaphor if ever there was one). Literary criticism has thus become something of a cult, with its own morals and codes of discourse. Perhaps, therefore, not every reader of this blog will appreciate the humour derived from intense anthropological observation of our group that goes into Jorge Cham's comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD). If you are lucky enough to have escaped academia for the real world, the subtleties of some of these may pass you by. If you are yourself a postgraduate, however, you may be able to comment on whether, since I dare not use a randomly generated title in my PhD, I dare at least show this or this to my supervisor, as I fail to get my writing on Possession off the ground?

Labels: A.S. Byatt, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary

One of the nice additional features provided by Google Toolbar is that as you type your search, it provides a drop down list which predicts your search requirements based on the number of pages available. The method produces some eclectic results. Type in "b," for instance, and there on the list appear "BBC" and "baby names," "Britney Spears" and "bank of America." I am sure there's material for one of those trendy "found" poems here.

This morning, I start to type in "A.S. Byatt" (searching for a bibliography). As might be expected, at the top of the predictive list, with 38,000 results, is "A.S. Byatt possession." But fourth on the list, and only just behind with 25,000 results, is "A.S. Byatt Harry Potter." Intrigued, and unsure of what can lie behind these results, I divert from my original intention and click on this option. Suddenly, I am plunged into the furious and bitter debate that surrounded an essay, provocatively entitled "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult" (full text available here), which Byatt contributed to the New York Times in 2003.

Byatt likes the "secondary world" Rowling has created, which is "made up of intelligently patchworked decorative motifs from all sorts of children's literature." Whether her comment that "derivative narrative cliches work with children" is a compliment, or a backhanded barb, it is hard to be sure. What is certain, however, is that Byatt disdains the phenomenon's adult readers:

Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip. Its values, and everything in it, are, as Gatsby said of his own world when the light had gone out of his dream, "only personal." Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family.

Wow! How to alienate several million readers in one blow. Certainly Charles Tayor was not amused. He countered with an essay in Salon entitled "A.S. Byatt and the Goblet of Bile." Since I am writing on A.S. Byatt I feel I must take sides in the debate and, out of loyalty to a writer whom I admire greatly, I suppose I ought to defend her. Whilst the communicants of the Harry Potter cult riled against Byatt's assault on their cherised priestess, I think in her essay Byatt was attacking not so much Rowling's work itself on aesthetic principles, but rather was condemning the state of the culture that accomodates it with the false kind of passion soap operas are so skilled at inculcating:

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

I totally agree that reading Harry Potter is the literary equivalent of comfort eating: you know you can devour it all in one go, and you know it is going to leave you satisfied. But Taylor is quite right to point out that Byatt avoids discussing the increasing darkness of the books later in the series, when this comfort food gets harder to swallow:

Rowling has conceived of the seven-book cycle as tracing Harry's growth from childhood to late adolescence. And as the books have gone on, the dangers he faces have not only increased but, as happens with age, become less easy to shrug off, inflicting physical and psychological wounds that are not so quick to heal.

Not having read these later books, I am not in a position to judge whether Rowling is able to plot the intricate paradoxes of sexuality that twine the adolescent mind as well as she plots a game of quidditch. But given that she has managed to keep her growing audience captivated - and buying - it is surely true that her later works offer not only the simple reassurances of escapism but also a more emotionally affective portrayal of human (magic) reality.

And if Byatt really is railing against the television culture, of which Rowling is a manifestation rather than a cure (unlike Byatt's own favourite Georgette Heyer), can the books really be so bad? Byatt is right that nowhere does Rowling's writing come close to giving us "the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's 'magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'" But there was a time when a television culture would hardly think to pick up a book at all, let alone a Keats or, for that matter, a novel like Possession, with its complex embedded poems and knowing literary references. It is surely apt that when The Observer asked 100 British literary luminaries to name the greatest work of British fiction of the last 25 years, both Possession and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince appeared on the list. The former may have been the most academically-minded, "literary" book to have won the Booker Prize in that period; the latter is probably responsible for getting more people into literature in the first place than any other single work.

It is ironic, then, that when you Google A.S. Byatt you are almost as likely to turn up Harry Potter as her great novel. And more fierce critics of A.S. Byatt might well have liked the option that appears fourth on the Googel Toolbar list: "A.S. Byatt baglady." "Baglady" is the actually the title of one of her short stories, but it is impossible to erase the vision of Byatt standing on the steps of a university wielding a conservative handbag against all popular movements, not unlike that other empowered Conservative with her dark accessory, Margaret Thatcher.

Labels: A.S. Byatt, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, Literature