Over at the American Spectator, the British philosopher Roger Scruton has been having an eloquent grumble about the state of the humanities, entitled Farewell to Judgement.

Scruton complains that in an attempt to justify their coexistence with the sciences at universities, the humanities have faced a crisis of legitimation. If the sciences offer knowledge that explains the world, what can the humanities present as their raison d'etre? The response has been an ideological turn, with the humanities justifying themselves by their political radicalism. As Scruton notes, this led to a problem for English studies, which is the informed cultivation of something that might otherwise be seen as a leisure interest:

Unlike women's studies, which has impeccable feminist credentials (why else was it invented?), English focuses on the works of dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today. So maybe such a subject should not be studied, or studied only as a lesson in social pathology.

The brave new world faced by English studies is not one recognised by Scruton's generation. For him, literature offers a way of perceiving those human universals that, in a writer like Shakespeare, transcend historical circumstances to sympathise with a deep human nature, even if the superficial politics look very different to ours. When Shakespeare invites judgement, it is not a political one. Instead:

We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty. And that is how you justify the study of English, as a training in this other kind of judgment, which leaves politics behind.

Scruton says that the other aim of English studies was the judgement of "taste," established through careful emotional criticism, taught by the likes of R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, William Empson and T. S. Eliot, "who had raised the study of literature to a level of seriousness that justified its claim to be an academic subject." Now, however, Scruton laments that:

When judgment is marginalized or forbidden nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost. What do they have to tell us about the ideological conflicts of today, or the power struggles that are played out in the faculty common room?

Scruton seems to have things both ways. On the one hand, he argues that literature offers access to human universals, whilst on the other he complains that because Jane Austen cannot tell us about contemporary ideology or power struggles, the point of studying Austen - if we are going to focus on political rather than aesthetic values - is lost. Resolving this double standard of universality points us to the factor Scruton overlooks in his lament about the state of the humanities.

Whereas Scruton perceives that judgements of value and politics must be mutually exclusive, so that Jane Austen both is and is not universal in her value depending on which side you come from - the political or the aesthetic - I do not see any such binary. I do not see the binary because I am, in my own critical and teaching approach, a historicist. Historicism allows one to perceive the universality of underlying aesthetic or humanistic values, without this entailing that political values must be similarly universal; or, to look at it another way, just because political values today are historically different does not automatically mean that the work must be aesthetically compromised.

Take the case of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As most famously expressed by Chinua Achebe, this novel that has come in for a great deal of political criticism, because of its alleged racist tendencies, as Conrad refuses to offer black characters a voice, other than those of cannibal grunts. It is an ideal case of Scruton's "dead white European males whose values would be found offensive by young people today."

Except my students - like myself - do still read and enjoy Conrad today. They are very adept at perceiving that even if Conrad's political values may be suspect, this is not to say that his aesthetic values should automatically be condemned. Students generally recognise that his artistic techniques in representing Africa as an inscrutable, dark place of the Earth - what Leavis called Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery" - must be held in aesthetic admiration, even if the political work to which those techniques are directed, the denigration of Africa as a "dark place of the Earth" and the consequent elevation of European culture as one of enlightenment, may be troublesome from a postcolonial point of view. Students appreciate that Conrad's stylistic traits, such as "delayed decoding," his use of a frame narration, and metafiction, are a masterful way of allowing Conrad to represent Africa in his own way, and to convey his personal, sensual impressions to us as readers who have not necessarily travelled up the Congo. We may not like what he says, or allegedly says, about blacks, but we can admire the way he says it as part of the wider impressionistic purpose of the novel. The crucial intervention here, between political and aesthetic values, is historical awareness, the understanding that Conrad was operating in a different political framework to our own time and that, because we could not have expected him to be of a postcolonial mindset in the late nineteenth century, we can accept that he did the best possible aesthetic work he could under his different circumstances. What would be most surprising of all about Heart of Darkness is if a novella first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, read solely by European civilised males, were to be actively anti-colonial. I should add, as a caveat, that I do not agree with Achebe that Conrad was a racist, and my own view - which I will not elaborate on now - is that he very cunningly undermines the status of his anticipated readership. But even if a modern student or Achebe do think Conrad's political values were wrong, and are inscribed as such in the novel, that does not preclude one holding a different view of his aesthetics. To keep the aesthetic and political in mind simultaneously, what is required is a historical consciousness, as well as a critical acumen.

Which leads me on to another problem I have with Scruton's argument. Scruton later laments that:

Departments of musicology are now “into” pop music and Heavy Metal, and refrain from creating the impression among their students that they regard the Western canon as anything more than a piece of musical history. I recently had the experience of teaching a course on the philosophy of music to young people in a British university, and was acutely aware at every moment of the resentment that now greets any criticism of pop.

This is symptomatic of the humanities' opening of that door to modernity labelled "cultural studies," where instead of looking at dead, white artists, literature, music, art departments encourage their students to look at what is going on in the contemporary cultural world. The problem with cultural studies is its tendency to conflate popularity with quality. Further, as Scruton shows, because pop music is popular amongst those studying it critically, any suggestion that it might not be as good as Bach or Beethoven is taken as a personal affront, thus making judgements of value very difficult. The only thing that can be done is the relative comparison of one pop artist against another - which students readily do in pubs and bedrooms - rather than saying with critical acuity that this pop artist is inferior to Bach.

I appreciate Scruton's criticism here, but his view is based on an experience of cultural studies done badly. There is nothing in principle wrong with studying the contemporary. However, it is only by tapping in to the historical moment in which a particular work of art is produced - asking, why this piece of art, why this style, why now? - that we can hope to perform the separation of politics from value that Scruton desires. Politics can be taken more broadly than just ideology, to mean the social, technological, economic factors that inform a person's beliefs and experiences in any given moment. At its best, the aim of cultural studies should be not primarily to look at what is popular per se, but to ask how that popularity acts as an indicator of what is significant in a culture at any given time. This allows cultural studies to model a moment clearly, and to use this as the basis for making value judgements.

Given the things that matter and inform a contemporary society, which works are doing the best job at this time of responding to, elucidating and - if politically radical - seeking to change that moment? Scruton is right in that cultural studies can fall for the trap of thinking that if something is popular, it must be good. But if, as I believe it should do, cultural studies makes its first point of attention the historical circumstances of the time, and only then asks what works are doing the best job within these circumstances, it can achieve the aesthetic value judgements which literature, music or art departments used to do in the days of Leavis, Eliot et al. Whether looking at canonical works, or looking at the present time, then, the important factor that Scruton overlooks in perceiving a tension between politics and aesthetics as the subject of study is the way in which the historical can mediate between the two objectives. It provides a bedrock from which value judgements of older works can be made, even if their politics seem alien, and from which value judgements of the contemporary can be made more objectively, even if they seem too familiar and a part of who we are, and thus beyond any potentially stinging aesthetic criticism.

Labels: aesthetics, cultral studies, Literature, Roger Scruton

I am currently marking my way through 70 exam scripts, for a couple of the introductory English Literature modules at my university. This blog post is the confession of this examiner, perhaps a bit risky if you find out who I really am, but nevertheless I hope worth making public as a way of demystifying a process between the end of the exam and the publication of marks that students do not often see or even understand.

If I remember my own, not-too-distant days correctly, students might want to imagine that examiners treat their scripts as sacred objects. A student has attended numerous lectures and read numerous books over the year, poured over revision notes long into the night, and then spent a few hours hunched over a desk in some dismal hall, frantically trying to pour out knowledge in the hopes that that brief exam will do justice to all the hours of work put in over the previous year. With this much invested on a few sheets of paper, surely examiners deal with them reverently, in a darkened room, with the white paper subject to the glare of an anglepoise lamp, as the examiner interrogates and teases that script to give up its worthy marks?

The reality is somewhat different. Naturally, I look after exams with the utmost care, and mark them as conscientiously as I can. However, there are certain unavoidable practicalities of marking, and of human psychology, that mitigate against any such pure, religious process described above.

The big practical issue is time. With a large number of scripts to be marked in a brief period, it is simply not possible to spend hours on each one. It would be nice if I could read an essay carefully, and then go for a walk, take a shower, and massage my temples as I try to weigh up whether to give it 66 percent or a 67. But that does not - it cannot - happen. Even marking a qualitative, essay-based subject like English, having read an essay I tend to place my mark quickly and instinctively. At my university, we work from very detailed guidelines that explain the characteristics that should be present in an essay for it to merit a First, 2:1, 2:2 or lower, with each band sub-divided into two, for example, a high 2:1 (65 to 69 percent) or a low 2:1 (60 to 64 percent). It is very rare that I ponder deeply what percentage to give an essay. Essays usually fall easily into a band, and the pressure of having perhaps a week to mark 50 scripts leaves me little time to deliberate at length whether it needs a 64 or a 63.

People often grumble that an essay-based exam cannot be marked as objectively and as fairly as something like mathematics, with a right or wrong answer. Certainly the personality of the marker may have an effect on a percentage point here or there. But on the whole it is always surprising from my examiner's perspective how easily papers drop into one of these assigned bands. The moral for university students, then, is not to lose sleep over percentages. It is the band that says everything about what sort of student you are, even if you are frustratingly just on the borderline. In many ways, a 69 percent is the most horrible mark an examiner has to give - and in the last few days I have been heard shouting at papers, because I was frustrated that a good student was not quite there, and could see that with a little nudge and feedback the student could go on to improve in subsequent essays. But my 69s are below that glass ceiling not because a few tiny details were overlooked by me, the examiner, not because I was tired, or because my football team had just lost, but because it read, argued, reasoned, discussed, evidenced in ways which said 2:1.

With this caveat about the band being everything, I will admit to some of the other factors that an examiner faces that may well lead to small variations in marks.

Imagine this scenario. I have just read two First-class essays. The third essay I mark is going to have to do something impressive not to look weaker in comparison (for those of a mathematical bent, this is an effect called regression to the mean). Perhaps I will dock it a few more marks than I might have done if marking it in isolation, because it compares worse against the previous efforts. But in the alternative scenario, marked after two solid but not particularly remarkable 2:1 essays, perhaps suddenly essay three looks better than that localised average. I know that I must be guilty, at times, of marking relative to other essays, rather than against the single standard of the mark scheme.

Luckily, there are a few ways to negate this effect. One of the most hotly debated is that fad of the 1990s, the bell curve. Perhaps I get a run of three weak essays before lunch, and then suddenly give three Firsts after lunch. Is it that I am in a better mood after my break? Is it that I have remembered those three earlier, average essays, so that those that come later are bound to look more positively in their light? I do get anxious when runs of unusually high or low results happen - as they have done this year - and that is why I find the bell curve a useful check. I may perceive that my marks are being affected by local circumstances, but taking a larger sample of my marks, I can see that they have fallen out in a normal distribution. Usually, there is a statistically good range, with a smattering of 2:2s and Firsts, and the majority bunching around the mid 2:1.



The reason that the bell curve, or normal distribtion, comes in for debate is that it is tempting to mark for the curve, rather than to construct the curve on the basis of marks. Out of ten essays I have given three 66s. Better make the next one a 59 or 71 just to smooth out the graph. This is a real risk for the individual examiner, whilst institutionally it may be tempting to adjust marks across the board to create a smooth curve with its apex at the point the university suspects most candidates should be at. In my institution, with most students coming with excellent A-levels, we would expect more high 2:1s and Firsts than another institution with a lower achieving intake, so our marks tend to have a peak around the high 60s.

Now I do not know - or have reason to believe - that my own institution does any sort of retrospective adjustment to bump our averages higher than the national baseline for English Literature degrees, but if they did the problem would be clear. Just as I get funny moments marking when there have been no Firsts for ages then three come along at once, an institution could quite feasibly have consecutive year groups which seem to achieve comparable marks, until one year is comprised of an unusually bright or slightly less well-performing group. By shoving that bell curve to fit expectations based on previous experience, the institution is engaging in a sort of social engineering, making results fit students, rather than the other way around, so that the unusually bright or underperforming group is down or upgraded unfairly. This is precisely the sort of complaint about "grade inflation" long levelled at A-Levels and GCSEs, and increasingly at universities. But as an examiner, I can sympathise with the faith in statistics and the normal distribution, because it offers subjects like English an objective foundation for marking, helping to cancel out those personal factors that do come into play, no matter how hard one tries to contain them.

The bell curve aside, students need to remember that the mark they get is not dependent on the individual examiner because other, less controversial, controls are there to restrict the impact any one examiner can have. I have admitted that time, my mood, marking an essay relative to previous results, the effect of statistics, all can affect what percentage an essay achieves, even though I would hope that these would not affect which broader band an exam falls into. But once they leave my hands, exams are filtered through layers of double-marking, moderation by other examiners from within the institution, oversight by external examiners outside of the university, anonymous exam codes, board meetings, appeals procedures, publicly displayed marks so that it is possible to see how each year's exams compare to previous ones and, finally, individual students can request copies of their exam papers and examiner's comments under the Data Protection Act. These controls too ensure that, when the best-willed examiner gets a mark an entire band out, it should be an isolated incident.

However, this last control - allowing students to see and hence to interrogate their own papers - is also controversial. My own university does not exactly make public the fact that students have a legal right to see their scripts after they have been marked. Personally, I think this right should become an expectation among students, who are still often fearful of approaching departments with what seem like trivial requests. The National Union of Students has a policy that feedback should be provided on exams, and have issued stickers for students to put on exam papers stating that "Exam Feedback Helps Me Learn." From an examiner's perspective, although in many cases it is not possible to indicate specific places where students might improve (again, partly because time pressure makes it impossible to write detailed comments), there are many papers about which I do note specific stylistic issues that could be quite easily addressed. Making these comments, though, seems like shouting into the wind, if students are never going to get the opportunity to see them. Having gone to the effort to mark a script as an examiner, why not at least allow students to get as much from your work as possible?

Besides the adminstrative burden, the reason universities are reluctant to provide exam feedback is, I suspect, from a fear of litigation or of students picking examiners up on every point to gain even more marks. Even if the fear of litigation is a little hyperbolic, the idea of student's challenging their papers may affect the exam process unduly. Those students prepared to go through the technical process of questioning their results may end up with better marks than those who are mostly concerned with studying their subject for the pleasure of it, and who are not so end-focused, and who simply accept the results given to them and look to the following year. In a system where exams are always open to challenge, results might become partly determined by a student's ability to work the system, rather than their ability in any given subject. On the other hand, is this issue not precisely the problem with exams overall, that not only are they testing knowledge but they are also testing one's ability to sit exams and to have good "exam technique" in the first place? Allowing students to interrogate and receive feedback on their own marks at the end of the process only mirrors the effect that happens in that artificial period called "exam season" at the start of it. At this time of year students who may have done less work all year sit down to cram and prepare model answers just to pass the three essay questions on an exam, whilst students who have conscientiously studied broadly throughout the year continue in their model approach to their subject in a way that does not always help them to focus on the specialised nature of an exam. As an examiner, I usually have a pretty good hunch which students have prepared to pass a few questions on the exam, and which have enjoyed studying their course as a whole, but it is a very difficult thing to prove, and it is not possible to adjust marks based on a hunch.

From my examiner's perspective, then, encouraging students to seek the written feedback from their exams would be a positive step, because it would add a qualitative report to the process, allowing those students who have worked well throughout the year even if not reflected in the pure exam percentage to seek guidance on how to improve. These sorts of students are more likely to incorporate these comments into their more holistic approach to the subject (such as their desire to write well), than those who simply aim to pass the exam as a technical challenge, and so hopefully some sort of levelling might be achieved.

If you are a student reading this post, then, I hope you feel some sense of schadenfreude. If you have been sat there feeling fed up about the fact that you have to work through exams which seem a disproportionate measure compared to the way you have worked throughout the year, it is worth knowing that this examiner at least feels the same way about marking the exams. It may be slightly disturbing that I have drawn attention to the human frailties of the marking process, but on the other hand I hope too students appreciate firstly that it is bands, not single percentages, that are the most important indicator of ability, and secondly appreciate the lengths institutions go to in order to mitigate against any widespread effect marks can be consistently misjudged, even though probably every examiner misplaces a percentage point here or there, and even occasionally gets a band wrong.

The trouble is, exams remain the most efficient system we have for testing even qualitative subjects like English. The good news is that even though there may be candidates who can work the exam system to their unrepresentative benefit, and even though examiners of essay-based subjects may be unable, as ordinary human beings, to mark every essay to its perfectly deserved percentage, on the whole, the system, tumultuous though it is during the early days of Summer, does work.

Labels: essay marking, exams, Literature, University Life

A couple of days ago, somebody forwarded me a link to a new career's website for Arts and Humanities PhD graduates, called Beyond the PhD. The site seems quite useful, offering advice and experiences from recent graduates, who have gone on to careers inside and beyond academia. Unlike many other careers websites, this is actually targeted at, and relevant to, this particular audience.

Seeing the website reminded me of my own experiences a couple of years ago, back when I was in the middle of my PhD research. I am a socialist and utilitarian at heart, which means I find it necessary to justify taking public money by explaining what benefit the society which distributes those funds gets out of it. Given that I was lucky enough to be fully funded throughout my studies, I was always conscious of the need to put something back into the public domain, as I explained in a series of posts labelled "The Idea of a University."

It was out of one of these posts that the issue of the "value" of an English PhD arose. Picking up facts and figures from various reports circulating at the time, I worked this post into an essay, which I presented as a seminar paper in my department. However, since I am now at the end of my PhD studies, I thought it appropriate to revisit this piece and put it up on The Pequod. Since some of the employment figures may be slightly out of date (especially given the current recession) it is not an authoritative case study, but will hopefully be of interest to some readers, particularly those currently undertaking PhDs in the Arts and Humanities, and wondering for themselves whether and why their studies are worthwhile.

The essay can be found here: The Value of an English PhD.

Labels: Literature, PhD, the idea of a university

Last week, I attended the annual British Society for Literature and Science conference in Reading. As in the previous two BSLS conferences I've been to, this was a fabulous event, an opportunity to renew old acquaintances, chat about common interests, enjoy sumptuous breakfasts...oh, and to hear some excellent panels and plenaries.

However, thinking broadly about the weekend's papers, there seems to me - and I stress that this is my general sense, or thought-in-progress, and may well turn out to be misguided or making a false accusation - to be something of a crack emerging in the interdisciplinary approach to the field of literature and science.

On the one hand, there are those who treat literature and science in an essentially conventional historicist vein. Often focusing on Romantic poets and Victorian novelists, they explore the ways in which particular writers were influenced by scientific ideas in circulation at the time. Which scientists was George Eliot reading when she wrote Middlemarch? How was Wordsworth influenced by Humphrey Davy? Often drawing on archives or letters, scholars in this vein connect ideas or metaphors at work in the creative text with scientific enquiries. This is very interesting and worthy work, but it uses an essentially conventional model of English literary studies, showing the influences upon a writer in an attempt to make better sense of their oeuvre. In this case, scholars look at science, but they might just as easily refer to an author's tour of Venice, or their reading of Milton.

On the other hand, others in the field see the confluence of science and literature as an opportunity to rethink the models of knowledge with which literary scholars work, asking what are (to me) very interesting epistemological questions. What is "science"? Can a scientific "fact" about the world be conveyed to readers via creative works, such as science fiction, or does a fact assume a different status the moment it transfers into a genre other than the scientific journal article? To what degree does scientific writing draw on narrative modes, employing devices such as metaphor, plot, drama, rhetoric in order to produce a stable and persuasive body of knowledge? What sort of knowledge is made available by literary fiction, and can fiction itself therefore be said to be a science of sorts? How can we use recent discoveries in science, such as neuroscience or evolution, to inform our interpretations of literary texts? Without invoking that outmoded postmodern belief that science has no greater claims to reality than any other way of looking at the world, when these sorts of questions are raised they trouble the "two cultures" boundary, broadening the remit of "knowledge" as construed by the sciences and the arts.

It seemed to me that very rarely did the two approaches come together. Presenters were either theorising science and literature, or historicising, but not really making connections across the parallel approaches. This is particularly odd because the matriarch of science and literature (and President of the BSLS), Gillian Beer, stood in the shoes of both the historicist and the theorist in both of her seminal works. Darwin's Plots shows how Darwin's language and rhetoric was essential to the way his argument operates and convinces, and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter shows how science and literature interplayed in the late Victorian period in a way which makes the "two cultures" differences of the twentieth century seem quite arbitrary. For anyone working in science and literature, these works are founding manifestos of sorts, but in a sense the fact one of the most formidable (but charming) scholars of the present moment wrote them reminds how difficult it is to do this sort of interdisciplinary work in a way that makes best use of science's introduction to literary studies to create a new paradigm for the latter.

If it is to be conducted in the fullest way, I would argue that science and literature must avoid doing two things. On the one hand, it cannot simply seize on scientific texts as just other examples of influential historical documents through which to understand a poem. On the other, it must avoid turning to science in order to claim some positivist legitimacy for literary studies, as if to say that literary criticism is a science just like physics, when in fact if there is a scientific knowledge encoded within literature and literary studies, it is a science of a different sort to that encoded in molecular mechanics. The latter is precisely what the current hot topic of the moment, evolutionary literary criticism risks doing, when at its worst it appears to say that reading Jane Austen can somehow improve your evolutionary survival in society - which is simply to give a gloss of scientific kudos to what is essentially an old Arnoldian argument that reading literature is a moral activity (see Joseph Caroll's Evolution and Literary Criticism).

Labels: British Society for Literature and Science, Literature, Science and Culture

When I graduated from my first degree in 2003, to take a year out working and travelling before returning for a Master's, I realised that I needed to keep my reading and writing skills ticking over if I was to slip back easily into the literary life. To take care of the writing side of things, I set up this website (and how different it looked back then!), whilst for my reading, alongside my bedside stash of novels, I decided to take out a subscription to the London Review of Books.

Since then, I have resubscribed without hesitation every year - until now. My lasped subsription is no reflection on its content per se, for it has remained one of the few bastions of the art of the extended literary essay (Andrew O'Hagan perhaps being its star contributor in this line). I used to look forward to its arrival every other Thursday: tearing through the thin cellophane to reveal the latest Peter Campbell cover picture; then nosying the brief biographies of all the contributors; then turning from the final diary entry to browse the infamous personal ads - for a celebrity gossip monger in denial, these were a few of its little pleasures.

In between the picture and the personals was more serious content. The LRB essay is typically pitched a degree below the academic but a pitch above the popular. Encountering something controversial - such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby," or Terry Eagleton's lambasting of Richard Dawkins - was thrilling, because one knew oneself to be among the select group of subscribers who would read this first, in full and in original, before the controversy spread, distorted into sound-bites, across the web or the broadsheets. On that note, I always have to smile wryly when I see Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader promoted in bookshops - we LRB readers (for whom Bennett's New Year diaries are a special highlight) got there six months before hand, when this novella was published in full in the LRB.

But what I most valued it for was (or, I suppose, still is) its eclecticism. One could be reading Eamon Duffy on the Henretian Reformation one minute, then discovering the history of science with Simon Schaffer, or learning about legal issues with Philippe Sands the next. It was this diversity that I found most useful in relation to my research, as I continued to take the magazine in my postgraduate life. Time and again, looking for an unusual take on a well-worn subject, I would be sent in an unexpected direction by the LRB. My essay on Heart of Darkness and Victorian Anthropology is a case in point, because it began when I read a review of a biography of Malinowski. University research can be a narrow-minded exercise, but the LRB continually helped me to broaden my vision (much as, a few years back, I pondered whether my PhD reading was going to be determined less by considered reading and more by the random contents of my local Oxfam).

A couple of years ago, when still a keen fan of the LRB, I was having a drink with the novelist A.S. Byatt (as you do - my supervisor happened to know her) when Byatt complained that she did not have time for the LRB. "Surely one should make time for such an institution?" I thought back then. How naive I was in those halcyon days at the start of PhD life. In the final stages of my PhD last term, or when I am straining under a teaching load at the moment, such acts of temporal alchemy are purely wishful thinking.

At around 30 000 words per issue (nerd that I am, I pasted every article from the past few online issues into Word to reach this figure), the LRB equates to a small paperback book. This may not seem a lot, but when one also has novels and articles to read for work, other books to review, and wants a few pleasureable paperbacks on the go as well, this is quite a load. And, whereas at one time I would happily snuggle up with some of Jerry Fodor's analytical philosophy, after a hard day at the office I need a novel to keep me that little bit more alert - otherwise I'll be out within ten minutes. Having said that, I do miss Jenny Diski, whom I imagine to be cuddly and know to be cutely afraid of spiders, quite terribly. I am sure one day she, if not all the other writers on the paper, may one day be able to tempt me back within its sheets.

Labels: Literature, London Review of Books

My previous post about the problems of the historical novel has another dimension to it. In that post, I posed two questions, working with C.J. Sansom's popular Tudor detective novel, Dissolution: whether a good historical novel is harder to write in a period of poor general education, and whether the historical novel works less effectively when narrated in the first person. Both problems arise because the novel appears more didactic than fictional. Now whatever the answer to these questions, my point is that they were not raised out of my engagement with some great work of literature. Indeed, I suggested that the best historical literary fictions, such as John Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, actively bring such questions to the fore through devices such as metafiction, by which they reflect on the processes by which the story is being crafted. So, in a sense, my two simple questions hardly seem worth asking about this book, because the novel has pre-empted them and is interested in deeper, more complex issues, such as the degree to which we can ever transparently and accurately represent anything through language. It is perhaps only in less carefully constructed literature that basic questions come to the fore, at least for literary critics, because the problems with the fiction stand out so clearly.

And this brings to mind something I said to my students at the start of the academic year. We were looking at Robinson Crusoe, and in my initial questions I ascertained that the majority of them had not enjoyed it. Some of them were even bold enough to call it a "bad" novel. Ever the optimist, I tried to put a positive spin on things by saying that this was a pretty unique work on their course. Most of the novels, poems and plays they study over the three years are there because they have some intrinsic aesthetic merit, at least according to the lecturers who include them on syllabi. Robinson Crusoe, however, is there by virtue of its historical significance, as one of the earliest English novels. And so it is a unique book for them to study, because it is one of those rare works that has some quite obvious deficiencies in style and structure, even if it is contextually an important work of literature. In the tutorial, we were able quite easily to discuss issues of realism, because of how sharply this is breached when Crusoe swims naked to the shipwreck and returns with biscuits in his pockets. We also pinpointed that one primary objection to the novel is that its allegorical and didactic religious intentions bubble like froth on the surface of the plot, and so we almost automatically put up barriers against its moralising. The development of the novel over the three centuries since Crusoe can be read as the development of increasingly clever ways to conceal social and political issues beneath the text, in ways which are more effective because they sneak in by the back door of the book's potential readings. As with Dissolution, this problem of didacticism in Robinson Crusoecame out because of, rather than in spite of, the developmental weaknesses of Defoe's embryonic novel.

I wonder, therefore, whether literature courses are perhaps too much built around the canon of good literature. Should courses be bolder and also look at works of questionable literary quality? This of course feeds into broader debates about the role of literature departments: should literature departments exist to maintain taste and inculcate generations of students about what a good work of art looks like (a Harold Bloom kind of view), or should departments reflect the literary predilictions of culture as a whole, studying those books that happen to be popular even if not considered good fiction by trained literary critics? My own opinions would sway towards the latter, since my research looks at popular science fiction (arguably the most academically overlooked genre of significance), including film and computer games. Over the years, I have drifted away from being a pure literature student into a cultural studies researcher.

But regardless of my personal convictions and this broader debate, I am sure that even the conservative, Bloomian school ought to acknowledge that the teaching of literature loses something if it only ever focuses on the good, without providing a counter-image of the "bad" against which fine writing defines itself. Not only would such an "anti-canon" (as one might tentatively call it) help to guide questions of taste, it also might point to significant theoretical issues, such as those to which my attention was drawn in my previous post. The risk of only ever looking at "good" literature is that we focus intently on the intricate stylistic complexities that combine to make it excellent. We talk about Austen's free indirect discourse as a way of creating psychological intimacy, or George Eliot's omniscient narrator in Middlemarch, or John Fowles' historiographic argument in The French Lieutenant's Woman. And we overlook the very basic fact that a novel (and in a different way, a poem) tells a story, and that novels that have few stylistic innovations or have significant stylistic problems can nevertheless tell "good" stories. Just look at the longevity of the Crusoe myth in popular culture, or the fact that, in spite of my critical objections, I am absorbed in Dissolution's murder mystery, turning the pages as my light burns late into the night.

Labels: C.J. Sansom, canon, didacticism, Dissolution, Literature, teaching

Because I am now freed from the shackles of reading for research, I have just started an historical thriller that has been receiving rave reviews: C.J. Sansom's Dissolution. However, because the disease of literary criticism has by now infected me deep into my bones, I cannot approach this novel in the light-hearted, entertaining way I am supposed to, and cannot help but think about questions of technique.

Dissolution has sparked off a few thoughts about the problems of historical novels in particular, and also of first person narration in general.

Issues in the former begin on the first page, and can be summarised by a single word: didacticism. This novel is set in the Tudor period, in the wake of the Henretian Reformation. But lest we miss the connection, within the first few paragraphs we are informed that our hero is working for Lord Cromwell; that he had "once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men"; that he spots poles on London Bridge upon which stand the heads of those executed for treason; and that he is mourning the death of Queen Jane (Seymour). The historical details are packed in here, but the effect is like touring a museum recreation of a Tudor scene.

There is nothing natural in either the novel or such a museum, as every person has been placed there not for their own purposes, but to illustrate with waxy rigidity some dimension of the period. The blacksmith never simply happens to be working, but must present a "blacksmith working," hammering the anvil with the utmost concrentation; the shepherd is never simply shivering in a field wondering how long it will be before he gets home to his mutton stew, but is a "shepherd herding," crook in hand, posed as if looking too-strenuously for a lost sheep; a lady never empties a chamber pot whilst yelling at her kids, but is trapped forever in time as "woman emptying chamberpot." In an educational museum, of course, such caricatures serve a legitimate purpose. But in a novel seeking to recreate a thriving London scene, the mentions of the names of Cromwell, Erasmus, Seymour, Henry VIII all just seem to coincidental to be true to life. They have the quality of mannequins, lacking individual character and there simply for a purpose of the events which they illustrate. The historical novel must cling to the world's realism more than other genres, since history has actually happened, and the fiction inhabits that genuine - if now lost - world, rather than emerging from a timeless authorial imagination. Oddly, though, the more the historical novel strives for realistic detail the more it over-reaches its remit as a novel, a work of fiction.

If the opening of the novel is overloaded with pop-history, a different but related problem arises when the writer cannot assume his reader's general knowledge. Consider this exchange between the detective-hero, Shardlake, and his assistant, Mark, as they ride past a church:

All the windows of the church were filled with candles, a rich glow filtering through the stained glass. The bell tolled, on and on.
"The All Souls' service," Mark observed.
"Yes, the whole village will be in church praying for the relief of their dead in purgatory."

Now can we really imagine that the Mark who knows instinctively what date the bells are tolling on really needs to be told the significance of this particular service by Shardlake? Of course not. But then, the information is not really directed to him, even though conveyed in dialogue, but to the secular, modern reader. When even dialogue, the most vernacular of representative modes, is turned to the demands of history rather than simply inhabiting it, the whole artifice of the novel is exposed. The problem is that it is trying to perform two incompatible aims: to render a period realistically, whilst providing an entertaining and plausible work of fiction.

So this leads me to my first, general question: are good historical novels impossible to produce in a modern era when a reading public lacks a general grounding in social and religious history? As Andrew Motion observed recently, it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach English Literature because students do not know the Bible or classical mythology on which much of the canon is based. Even fifty years ago, one can imagine that the final sentence quoted above would not have needed to be written, because the author could expect a reader instinctively to know the meaning of All Soul's Day. The historical novel has been perhaps the most popular genre of recent times; one can bring immediately to mind Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels, Umberto Eco's The_Name_of_the_Rose, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, Bernard Cornwall's Sharp books, Allan Mallinson's Matthew Hervey series. Do these fictions suffer by being unable to stand as independent narratives in their own right, instead needing to convey history as information, rather than as the coincidental backdrop to the narrative, like the weather?

Not being an expert in this field, perhaps I am being unfair, which is why I present it as an open question. To look more specifically at this particular novel, though, another question springs to mind which is more specific, and can be illustrated by the following passage:

We made our way down Scarnsea's cobbled main street, where the top storeys of ancient houses overhung the road, keeping to one side to avoid the emptying of pisspots.

What is wrong here is the corollary to the didactic edge I have been complaining about. Again, we have the historical detailing. But that this is a problem may have something to do with this novel's narrative technique: first person narration. Keeping to one side of the street to avoid chamber pots is the sort of instinctive action that, in a character of its time, would have been entirely unconscious, and therefore not worth commenting upon. As with the dialogue quoted earlier, this moment exposes the didactic intention of historical fiction. But it is something we might object to less strongly if this information was relayed by an objective, omniscient, third-person narrator.

Such narrators act as discriminating eyes. They select what information we need to be told, and exclude other possibilities or unnecessary details. This is what John Fowles recognised in his postmodern reworking of the Victorian romance, The French Lieutenant's Woman. This historical novel is thick with metafiction, self-reflection on its own status and mechanisms as a novel (Linda Hutcheon would categorise this as a "historiographic metafiction.") In particular, Fowles presents himself as a character in the work, and likens himself to a puppeteer, pulling the strings of the love plot, presenting characters in certain beneficial or negative lights, and introducing modern paradigms of knowledge anachronistically into the Victorian period. Fowles seems to be saying that we cannot ever recapture history objectively, and any aspect or character of a period that is recollected is placed there, like props in a set, because the author requires it. History is made, not discovered, by the process of story.

Sansom's novel fails to realise this. By seeing events as if through the eyes of a character, it seems to be suggesting that such things could actually have happened, that these particular thoughts (avoiding chamberpots, acknowledging why the bells tolled) occured at the level of consciousness, and can therefore be written explicitly. Now I do not want to suggest the novel is not entertaining - I am certainly caught up by its tale of monastic murder. But it is compromised as a novel, a work of fiction, by clinging through the first person to the belief that a period can be seen now as it was seen then. I argue, however, that this is not the case, because between past and present the didactic intervenes, when to be successful any idea of a double-intention ought to be dissolved.

Labels: C.J. Sansom, didacticism, Dissolution, Literature

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is not a great formal work of literature. Its narrative line is repetitive, with little discernible development across the four books and separate road trips. Characters - including the narrator - are flat, popping up out of the background as we meet them, hitching a brief ride in its plot, before departing as specks in the rear view mirror of the book's incessant forward momentum.

But what it lacks in aesthetic sophistication, it makes up for with its wild-horse power, a fund of energy tapped from the collision between intense, young hearts - yearning, adventurous, sexually potent - and an American land and cityscape capable of satisfying their desires, but in a too-brief flare of passion.

Europeans are used to seeing America from a distance, down the telescopes of the space age, music, Disney, Sky News and, today, the internet. From this angle, America is perceived whole, with a glossy narrative of a unified republic of peoples. On the Road presents America from the other end, giving us unique individuals who seem full of character, but whose stories remain incoherent, hidden and untold behind the drive of the prose. It looks out onto America through a moving lens, which has the effect of distorting space and time, compressing and focusing America's landmass into a few miles of tarmac and a few pages of print which nevertheless contain multitudes:

"Whooee!" yelled Dean. "Here we go!" And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move And we moved!

The distortion of space and time is echoed in the print by the use of commas to splice together what should be separate sentences, as if even language cannot sit still on its own full stops. For all its aesthetic flaws and rough edges, then, there is undoubtedly a poetry of sorts here.In a passage like the following, it is easy to understand why the dust jacket of my edition (the 2000 Penguin Classics edited by Ann Charters) likens Kerouac to Walt Whitman:

There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the elevel teeming hills.

The movement here from local geography (the bay) into a spectra of the mind (the unknown young man), which then roams from the local (the place names) to the mythical (the eleven teeming hills) is not unlike the psychological transcendence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

With authorial connections like this, coupled with a style which is at once flawed and its great achievement, it is difficult to place On the Road in the Western or American canon. Perhaps Old Bull Lee is the character who might represent the uneasy status of the book as a whole. Lee experiments with boiling down bird seed to smoke as dope, sits with Shakespeare on his lap whilst reading Mayan codices, has tried narcoanalysis and discovered his seven different personalities, from an English Lord to a raving idiot who must be restrained by chains. Like the novel, Lee is a confused but bold experiment, trying to find which of many possible identities might be best placed to study America as it rushes past in a blur of history:

He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling down to his life's work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night.

Wallace Stevens meets Don DeLillo, the plain sense of things hidden deep beneath the belly of a glossy American life and letters.

Labels: Jack Kerouac, Literature, On the Road

My recent posts have had something of a common theme to them, as they have in part been musings about the way the online environment forces you either to assume different identities for different audiences, or to bare all in photographs, blogs and forums as you take the same username across different platforms.

In my previous post on Graduate Junction, I noted that it is particularly important to keep your professional life separate from private life, if your existence in the former depends upon the trustworthiness of your voice and character. In my case, I need to keep my academic self distinct from the "Ishmael" self who pseudonymously writes this blog, since the former writes in a considered and carefully research way, whilst the latter often splurges any old rubbish that springs to mind.

And today, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones exemplifies what happens when you forget to assume the right mask for the right circumstance. Last week, Cellan-Jones wrote a light-hearted post on the BBC Technology blog about Facebook's removal of Scrabulous. Soon after it was published, he received a message from a "friend" on Twitter, asking why he had not mentioned the existence of Wordscraper, the renamed, rebranded but still unlicenced version of Scrabulous. Cellan-Jones replied "cos I couldn't be bothered."

Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows anyone to become a "friend" without your authorisation. Cellan-Jones, in this off-the-cuff comment, let down his guard, forgetting that your online identity and real-life self may not be identical, presenting the same subject to the same circle of friends and readers. A real-life friend, knowing Cellan-Jones has a propensity for sarcasm (I speculate here), might be aware that this is just a throwaway remark, and the sort of brief message Twitter encourages with its 140 character limit. But on the Quaequam Blog (a blog with a name almost as impossible to remember as The Pequod), his interlocutor, James Graham, took Cellan-Jones more seriously, introducing a post about Scrabulous by saying:

When I twittered Rory Cellan-Jones to ask why he didn’t mention Wordscraper in his blog post about Scrabulous, he replied "cos i couldn’t be bothered!" Years from now, when British journalism has finally breathed its last, this phrase will be engraved on its tombstone.

Ignoring the what-rubbish-weather-and-weren't-things-better-before-the-war state of the nation hyperbole (which, so Graham says in his follow-up post, was simply satirical), this is a really interesting case. Although in his follow-up post Graham laments the fact that Cellan-Jones lacks any sense of humour in his "pompous" reply, Cellan-Jones has very acutely used the case to highlight the serious dangers of controlling identity online:

Now I write in a number of voices online - very straight and BBC in news pieces for the website, a rather more relaxed tone for this blog, and a downright shoddy, ungrammatical, and sometimes incoherent voice in places like Twitter. But perhaps I can no longer afford to be quite so careless. There is the option on Twitter to "protect" your updates - in other words to control who can see what you are saying. I haven't yet done that - it seems to go against the spirit of openness - but may need to consider it.

There have been numerous cases in the news recently about data loss, identity theft, phishing scams and the like. It will not, I hope, be too long before along with multiplication and learning how to spell "alcohol," children are also taught about IT security as a matter of course. But, though it is far harder to teach, the ability to control identity, presentation and voice online is also an important one, as this case indicates. Who will be able to teach this soft skill? I call forth the English Literature, Language and Drama teachers. For what is a book or a play, if not the expressions of different characters in a different medium, whose opinions may not be shared by their author, or whose opinions may be shared but presented in a different way? As I see it, the ability to control identity online is essentially a linguistic one; it is no coincidence that I find all the metaphors I invoke when I think about this topic concern fiction: costume, mask, voice and so on. If only we had T.S. Eliot around, showing us how to do the police in different voices!

Labels: identity, James Graham, Literature, Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology

Riting in the Times Higher Education, Ken Smith argues that we shud axept students' spelling mistakes as simply varient uses of the language, and relax our marking. [Enough of this comedic mispelling - it's quite hard, you know! I imagine spacemen feel similar to how I do now, when they have to train themselves to wee in their spacesuits.]

Smith notes how fed up university teachers are with marking and correcting the same mistakes year after year, compensating for an impoverished lower education system. His plan is to "put 20 or so of the most commonly misspelt words in the English language on the same footing as those other words that have a widely accepted variant spelling." So, for example, the Old English "twelth" is as acceptable as "twelfth"; "their" can be accepted in the form of "there" or "thier," since the former would make no difference to the meaning of a sentence and the latter is more logical under the "i before e" rule; "opertunity" is admissable, because it derives from the Latin "obportus," with only one "p."

Naturally, in the comments section, the hands went up faster than a Mexican wave at the Olympics, horrified at his acquiescence to linguistic arbitrariness. Most of them completely missed the fact that Ken Smith probably had his tongue so far in his cheek as he wrote this, that his jaw would have been aching by the end. This is Summer silly season in the press, after all. Come September, it will be back to the same old red pen routine. And jolly good too - the risk of confusing "Let's shoot there son" with "Let's shoot their son?" could be a more serious shade of red than a corrective mark on the page.

Labels: Literature

Last weekend, The Guardian hosted a debate on Ebooks, in which they discussed the merits and limitations of the novel (excuse the pun) medium. As is usual with this topic, most of the sceptics' arguments hinged around their belief that materiality matters. The feel, texture and dimensions of a physical book cannot be duplicated by a bundle of electronics and plastic which simulate words through flickering pixels.

Having just written a soon-to-be-published review essay on the subject, I'm not particularly taken by these sorts of arguments. When the likes of Margaret Atwood complain that Ebooks will never catch on because they cannot be read in the bath, you cannot help but feel sorry that the Luddites cannot come up with more reasoned arguments as to why the paperback novel is automatically inferior to its digital cousins, which have now become as legible as print (something not true of the earlier models, which quite understandably never caught on). However, I was today musing on one aspect of the material word that will not translate to the digital medium. This is the mere fact of the presence of printed paper in domestic life, and its relative indestructability compared to its digital cousin.

Oddly, my catalyst for these thoughts was the fact that my gift subscription to the Times Higher Education had expired a couple of months ago, but the copies kept on dropping weekly through my letterbox regardless. When I first started getting the Times Higher, I used to read every issue thoroughly: these were 52 small gratuities, with each therefore deserving my attention. However, once I started receiving issues even after the subscription period had ended, and my emails to the organisation failed to stem their generous flow, I suddenly realised just how little material was actually of interest to me. Sure, some of the book reviews were worthwhile; the petty intrigue and gossip provided the academic equivalent of celebrity cellulite; issues like the recent arrest of the Nottingham academic raised points that were of significance beyond the boundaries of higher education. But for the most part discussions about whether a metrics-based Research Excellence Framework is superior to a peer-reviewed Research Assessment Exercise are not of interest to this PhD student.

So you might have expected that, with this realisation, I would be happy just to skim through each fresh issue before throwing it in the recycling. I have more than enough relevant reading to be going on with, and I was finding that the addition of the Times Higher into my weekly schedule meant that I sometimes ended up with two or more London Review of Books on the go at a time (and these do merit my complete attention). Thus I decided to add the Times Higher subscription virtually, to my Google Reader. On a typical morning, I have around 100 feeds flood my inbox, covering topics from photography to Pepys diary, but it is remarkably easy to exercise the digital sieve (by clicking the "next" button), and I end up reading the full versions of perhaps one in ten of that total.

However, even after I had added the Times Higher news feed, those physical magazines kept landing on my doormat. And tellingly, even as I clicked through only a couple of pieces on the online subscription, I also found that magazine annoying me at the kitchen table. I could not just throw it straight in the recycling, even though I knew from its cyberspace incarnation that it would contain only a few points of interest. I could not just skim it, even though I knew that I also had other things to read through. Its physical presence - its thereness, in the room - taunted me. Throwing it away, all half-centimetre thick of it, did not seem quite right. It was not so simple as clicking the next button. And so I read it, thoroughly, from cover to cover, in spite of myself, in spite of more valuable calls on my reading time, and in spite of the fact that inevitably, mid-way through an article, I would realise that it was of little or no interest to me at all.

So this strange difference between my ephemeral reading habits online and my dogged reading habits in the physical world made me wonder whether in the ebook environment, we might lose the haunting possibility, the suspicion, that something of value might be found in the ostensibly bad book or unwanted magazine or newspaper. The book that you got half way through, but which now rests on your shelves, nagging to be finished. The weekend newspaper and its accompanying supplements that demand you check through them, to see if there might be something interesting amongst the full page adverts.

The four walls of my house contain numerous examples of magazines and books that demand to be read simply by being enclosed in my personal space, always being caught in the corner of the eye when I am going about doing something else. My to-read list is not so much dictated by the books I especially want to read in the near future, as by the books I bought in the past with that same desire and which now rest, forlorn but not forgotten, on my own shelves. By contrast, such potential words, experiences, information could be erased from the e-reader with a simple button press, and thus too erased from the library of your unconscious - or conscience - also. It is this habit of reading what is there, as opposed to what could be present, that we will lose in the future of immaterial words. The digital medium is full of possibilities because it makes works immediately accessible; the corollary to this is that it loses their materiality, the presence of books in the present of my life, a to-read list comprised of the physical space occupied by their printed pages.

Labels: books, e-book, Literature, Technology

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

The act of reading has to be one of the most uncomfortable activities devised in the name of leisure. Consider what is asked of the reader, when presented with a book. Here we have a device that dictates its own position with absolute authority. It is to be held not more than fifty centimetres from the face, else it will truculently dissolve its meanings to an inky smudge. The arms must therefore lock themselves at right angles to the body, neither moving forwards nor wavering, lest the print give up its contract with the eyes that are desperately trained on a sliver of word at a time.

Of course, one can rest the book at a table, or upon a desk, in which case all manner of props come into play, all with the sole purpose of keeping this object static. For it will insist on moving. Should you dare turn your back for an instant, pages will spontaneously leaf themselves backwards. Thus are pens, scraps of paper, food, tissues all recruited to mark the spot, such that the book over time becomes marked with an indelible debris of tomato ketchup, tea stains, snot. If you do keep attention for long enough, though, the book will become restless, transferring its weight from its right half to its left, necessitating subtle shifts in whatever tower - usually constructed from other books - you had devised to prop it at a forty-five degree angle.

Worst, though, is the trial of reading in bed. One's vision of the bedtime reader is the hairnetted housewife, herself propped by mounds of downy pillows, her dog-eared romantic novel supported by a mound of goose-feather duvet. Here she half-lies, half-sits, in perfect readerly comfort, until her husband's foot is heard on the bottom stair, from which point a scurry of activity ensures that, by the time he reaches the top, lights are off, she has been asleep for hours, and it is not only the novel's romance that has been tidily closed for this evening. But this warm vision of domestic ritual is impossible to enact in any house other than the snug double-glazed mansions of middle England. Dare to live (as does this reader) in a damp, stone cottage, for example, and night brings with it a tyranny of cold, that taunts the innocent reader with a Catch-22. For in this environment, one must choose whether to sacrifice the body to the mind, or vice versa. If one chooses to snuggle deep into the blankets and preserve the body's warmth, the arms alone can be allowed to protrude, but must do so vertically, holding the book directly above the peeking head; arms thus soon tire, and the book is cast in shadow from the anglepoise above. The alternative is to turn to the side, contorting the spine and using creased elbows as support for the rapidly leadening neck. Finally, one can satisfy the body's craving for warmth, and simply sleep, leaving the book dead on the bedside table. It is wrong to suppose that intellectuals are dedicated to the life of mind rather than body; witness the goose bumps, the back ache, the dry eye, all sustained in refusing dreams in favour of the imagination invested within this small cuboid.

Of course, all these exertions and stresses are worth it, for the worlds to which the good novel will remove the reader can dull the ache of limbs better than any pharmaceutical. The keen reader lives for those moments of total immersion, when he or she forgets that this physical world exists at all. But such moments are made more ideal by the sudden discovery - the sudden happening upon - a reading position of infinite comfort which, having been found, allows the activity to be sustained for hours. Such positions are not signposted; they are not marked in a library or known in the ergonomics of a favourite chair. They are hidden, like secrets, around the everyday house. They come upon one who, having stood to put the kettle on, finds himself standing at the kitchen window with the light cast just perfectly on the page. They are lurking on the bottom step of the stair, when one meant to go and fetch something but has suddenly thought to sit and reopen the book which distracted him from the job in the first place. There is one on that particularly mossy patch in the garden, which, when hit by the warming sun at the right moment of the day, accommodates your posterior like a King's silk cushion.

And there! There is one in Peter Vilhelm's masterful painting "Girl Reading in an Interior." She is leaning against the sharp edge of a hard-looking chair reading an open book, or perhaps a thick letter. It should be uncomfortable, but is instead the picture of comfort happened upon fortuitously. Diagonally from upper left to the floor in the centre, is cast a sunbeam. From right to left, her weight is pressed on a delicate outstretched leg, and she has found herself as featherweight as the cast of incorporeal light that her stance mirrors. She did not mean to be here. She had been en route from the imagined front of the picture - the position of the viewer - through that closed door on the left, through which surely awaited some vital task or arduous chore. But something diverted her, and she found herself suddenly in this unfurnished, anonymous corridor - far removed from her designated "reading" chair in the stately drawing room of this comfortable suburban house - totally exorcised from her body, living completely through those other consciousnesses nested deep in the words on the page.

Labels: Girl Reading in an Interior, Literature, Peter Vilhelm, Photography and Art

the relationship between Nora and Torvald Helmer could have been patterned on the "happy home-maker" image of women pushed by the media of the '50s. Nora as the "little squirrel" in 1879 is reflected in the "squirrels and bears" of Jimmy Porter and his wife in 1956.

Labels: A Doll's House, Erica Whyman, Henrik Ibsen, Literature, Northern Stage

Recently reading Aldous Huxley's little-known The Devils of Loudun, and wanting to know what others might have made of it, I stumbled across a website called Portico. Maintained by "R. J. Keefe, gent," its writer admirably keeps a daily blog of his reading of books and reviews, and other cultural activities.

As you will have realised by the sporadic nature of my postings on The Pequod, life as an academic reader and writer keeps me so busy that I do not have time to update the blog as often as I would like (some would say, given the babbling stream of my consciousness, that this is a good thing). However, the Portico example did get me thinking I could do a little more to track my reading habits.

I was aware that there are a number of online "reading list" websites - coming under the rubric of "social cataloguing" - through which you can chart your reading and share it with others of a like mind. Having trialled the best-known of these, LibraryThing, and discovering that its free version allows you to upload only 200 books, I finally opted for Goodreads. I am not sure quite what intellectual purpose cataloguing one's reading habits can serve, other than bloated self-satisfaction at the volume of books devoured. Nevertheless, I quite like being able to track all my past, present and future reads in one place, and am happy to be able to share it with you - the world! - through the gadget now in the left sidebar of all pages on The Pequod.

Labels: Goodreads, Literature

Having attained funding to attend the recent British Society for Literature and Science conference in Keele in 2008, I had to write a short report. In the interests of dissemination, I've copied this below:

On the evidence of this, the third annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, those of us lurking in the borderlands between the sciences and the written word have now got a centrepiece to our academic year to match (rival?) the conferences populated by members of the older-established British Society for Philosophy of Science and the British Society for the History of Science.

Having attended the BSLS in Birmingham in 2007, I can report that around half the participants from that previous event had seen fit to return to the BSLS in Keele in 2008. Picking up conversations from where you left off (whether about research or more ephemeral topics) is always easier than starting them afresh, avoiding the inevitable preludes about where you are studying and what your field is - never straightforward with a mouth full of flaky pastries. Incidentally, anyone attending a conference at Keele is in for a treat: the catering is excellent, and the venue, a former country house with huge gardens, is astonishing. It's not unlike being given privileged access to a National Trust property, though beware that holding forth about Thomas Pynchon's latest novel is liable to get you some funny looks when your unwitting interlocutor is a suit of armour.

If I am finding it hard to maintain a serious tone in this report, it is perhaps because I had - dare one say this about an academic conference? - such a good time, and can only reflect upon it with good humour. There is a really collegiate feel to the BSLS, with academics and postgraduates (who comprised about a third of the 100 or so participants) mingling easily. Perhaps it is because the field of literature and science is so broad - here covering everything from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Victorian poetry-generating machines to errant artificial intelligences in film - that no one felt a sense of superiority, whilst everyone was aware that they may have something to learn from another period interest or junior colleague with an innovative perspective. Likewise, panellists generally seemed aware that they needed to make their papers accessible to others not necessarily within their historical or literary field, even if all shared an interdisciplinary methodology.

Plenary papers by Helen Small, on interdisciplinarity, and Steven Connor, on X-ray vision, were exuberant and provocative, though it is a shame that both speakers left immediately after their papers, without a chance to engage with panel sessions.

If I have one criticism, it is that a conference on literature and science was dominated by literary intellectuals (C.P. Snow would have grumbled). The intrepid, lone physicist who had come to Birmingham in 2007 had decided not to follow-up by coming to Keele. Because the third plenary speaker, the physicist Frank Close, left immediately after presenting (appropriately enough, he gave a paper on "nothing"), this meant that the only representative from within the sciences was a gentlemen who works in the schoolchildren's section of the London Science Museum. Rather than a mutual flow between science and literature, the traffic was all one way.

There was perhaps an unwarranted belief that studying science as represented in literature matters most, when potentially greater benefits might be gained from studying the value of literature for scientists. Some energetic contest about the relative value of literary and scientific approaches to knowledge would have offered a welcome balance. Though for anyone engaging with literature and science this is absolutely the conference to attend, any scientist with a peripheral interest in literature is likely to find themselves listening in from the sidelines. Likewise, any presenter hoping for feedback on their paper from scientists will be disappointed. The annual general meeting of the BSLS, which took place over lunch on the second day, did acknowledge the stiltedness; let's hope their strategies for engaging more scientists pay off in Reading in March 2009.

Labels: British Society for Literature and Science, Literature

Any university teacher will grumble about the bad grammar and stylistic infelicities of first-year university students (see The Kids Aren't All Write from the Time's Higher). As I have noted before, since these are in many respects capable and intelligent students, and grammar as a technical procedure is not particularly demanding to learn, the blame for their mistakes must lie neither with them, nor with their previous teachers, but with an education system that does not reward the ability to write accurately. I gather that marks for spelling, grammar and presentation in language-based A-levels now comprise a maximum of just 3 percent of total marks, down from 5 percent when I was in their shoes a decade ago.

But if my students' linguistic errors reflect the bias of the amorphous system in which they have been raised, there is perhaps something altogether more sinister in the grammatical error I have noticed recurring in my most recent batch of marking essays on drama. This is the tendency to talk of "people that." People or characters that occupy the stage; people that suffer tragedy; dramatists that critique society. In the semantic shift from "who" to "that," people are deprived of agency, mutated from whole subjects into objects, from individuals who live, breathe and die into things that simply are. Whenever I correct a "that" which should read "who," I get a chill as there seems something cold, steely - even scientific - in the slip, as if the students presume characters to have been presented for the sole, didactic benefit of their analysis, rather than existing as rounded beings viewable in many dimensions and with many significances.

There is something of the surveillance society about this, as if we can view drama only through a grainy lens as a prurient snippet of Big Brother gossip that happens to pass the time. But we should experience drama not top-down, but live it through the characters, the fully-rounded embodiments of complex ideas that - if we sympathise correctly - we suddenly apprehend clearly, and in the instant of the drama's movements. It is to the idea that passes through the character, not to the character or person directly, that we should respond with the epiphany (as expressed by Fay Weldon), "yes, yes, that is exactly how it is. Life is like that." Only once we appreciate that characters are beings like ourselves, have lives of their own rather than existing solely for the purposes of polemic or entertainment, can we legitimately move from "characters who" to "characters that": characters that show in their realism that this is how life is.

Or, if not surveillance, in talking of "characters that," it is as if my students are playing a computer game, the first-person shooter, in which the actors are mere sprites (echoes of E.M. Forster's flat characters here), things presented to which we can do things - usually violent - to score points. But the drama is not like that. It does not demand we do anything other than gently hear the play; and if we listen hard enough, we will realise with a start that the thing being objectified is not the tragic hero or comic fool, but our own comfortable systems of beliefs.

Or, if not the computer game, the "character that" is a translation from contemporary media reporting of the War on Terror. The depersonalising effect by which the language of Western anti-terrorism turns subjects into objects was explored recently in an exemplary essay by Yonatan Mendel:

An Israeli journalist can say that IDF soldiers hit Palestinians, or killed them, or killed them by mistake, and that Palestinians were hit, or were killed or even found their death (as if they were looking for it), but murder is out of the question.

The Palestinians are passive objects, recipients that have things done to them; the Israeli IDF are the agents who are swift, purposive, judicial. Is it really a leap too far of my sinister imagination, if I suggest that the move in the drama from "characters who" do things to "characters that" exemplify the view of the dramatist is the reflection of the journalism of terror?

Of course, the consequences of reading literature with the wrong sort of perspective are not directly as great as those of reading the Muslim Other as an objective incarnation of an absolutely Evil ideology. But there is something of a parallel, for if we cannot know literature as being inhabited by other lives that are in their own way as purposive as our own - lives presented to us in the best possible, because artificial, framework in which our sympathy can be encouraged - what hope for the real world in all its interwoven web of moral meanings through which it is always difficult to cut, more so done with the bent knife of Western reportage?

George Eliot is perhaps the exemplary novelist, for she is not - at least not directly - a moralist, presenting characters as analogues for criticism. She instead allows her characters to inhabit the stage of the novel as fully and from as many different perspectives as possible. Most famous is the moment in Middlemarch when, having spent so long representing the world through the eyes of the young heroine Dorothea, she suddenly turns to the reader and demands:

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.

Eliot's contemporary, Arthur Sedgwick, observed that the consequence of the web of relationships between the rounded characters who Eliot presents in her novels, is that:

If George Eliot has real dramatic power, and has imagined real characters, there is no doubt that it is folly to say that she is primarily a critic. But we think she has not. What she has done has been to describe, with such wonderful minuteness and ironical force, the thoughts and feelings which, under given circumstances, a certain kind of person might have, that we are forced to admit the possibility of the picture, or, to speak more accurately, the reality of the report.

Or, as A.S. Byatt notes of Eliot, she "saw her work as making incarnate certain ideas that she apprehended in the flesh, i.e., sensuously, materially, through feeling." It is this view of ideas "apprehended in the flesh," emerging through characters and their emotions rather than layered upon them like a simple costume, that is shown as having been lost by the the thought of "characters that." But if we are to avoid becoming morally autistic in drama and in life, we must be capable of occupying the world as if through the eyes of another, even those who seem (as Casaubon, or as the terrorist) unlikeable, or who seem (as dramatic figures are) exemplars of some moral position we could get at through objective rather than subjective means (for example, through placing Chekhov in the context of Russian history, or through a misreading of what the Koran definitively says).

Labels: drama, grammar, Literature

In a two-part blog for the New York Times, the veteran literary critic Stanley Fish considers the uses of the humanities in contemporary society and education. Sadly - and like myself - he struggles to come up with a definitive answer. In his first post, "Will the Humanities Save Us," Fish takes on Antony Kronman's claim in his new book, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

Kronman considers that in the past “a college was above all a place for the training of character, for the nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together from the basis for living the best life one can” and that immersing oneself or even memorising the great texts of history would improve one's capacity to live the good life: “to acquire a text by memory is to fix in one’s mind the image and example of the author and his subject.” Only the humanities can address “the crisis of spirit we now confront” and “restore the wonder which those who have glimpsed the human condition have always felt, and which our scientific civilization, with its gadgets and discoveries, obscures.”

It's a nice idea, though as Fish observes it appeals not so much to the promotion of literary study as to the denigration of everything else, particularly science (and I would argue that some of the best scientific writing contains a powerful sense of wonder and awe at the complexity of the natural world, even if it does not offer a template for ethics and living).

Admirably refusing to buckle to this vision of secular humanism and literary criticism's didactic value, Fish argues:

If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge. The texts Kronman recommends are, as he says, concerned with the meaning of life; those who study them, however, come away not with a life made newly meaningful, but with a disciplinary knowledge newly enlarged.

And that, I believe, is how it should be. Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject.

In his second post on The Uses of the Humanities, Fish analyses a religious poem by George Herbert, riffing on the ambiguity of the homophone "sun beam" and "son beam." Such humanistic readings matter, Fish declares, because:

The satisfaction is partly self-satisfaction – it is like solving a puzzle – but the greater satisfaction is the opportunity to marvel at what a few people are able to do with the language we all use. “Isn’t that amazing?,” I often say to my students. “Don’t you wish you could write a line like that?”

Fish notes, rightly, that when we talk about the use of the humanities, we are invariably - if often implicitly - referring not to the creation of texts like George Herbert's, but to the analysis of such products within the disciplinary silos of academia:

The challenge of utility is not put (except by avowed Philistines ) to literary artists, but to the scholarly machinery that seems to take those operating it further and further away from the primary texts into the reaches of incomprehensible and often corrosive theory.

This is a somewhat different issue:

The funding of the humanities in colleges and universities cannot be justified by pointing to the fact that poems and philosophical arguments have changed lives and started movements. (I was surprised that no one mentioned “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book Lincoln is said to have credited with the starting of the Civil War.) The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?

Again, Fish reiterates his argument against secular humanism: the neoconservatives who declared war on Iraq in apparent ignorance of religious history were actually "as widely read in history, philosophy and the arts as anyone." Fish - excuse the pun - sticks to his guns:

I am saying that the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external to the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to them – measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination. If these or some other instrumental benchmarks – instrumental in the sense that they are tied to a secondary effect rather than to an internal economy – are what the humanities must meet, they will always fall short. But the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value.

This all sounds very bold in the face of some philistine comments: the point is, there is no point. Only it seems that for Fish, contrary to his own terms, sees that there is a pragmatic value, though it is methodological rather than ethical:

The first is that taking courses in literature, philosophy and history provides training in critical thinking.

Well, he's right, and the ability to analyse texts and motivations, the refusal to conform to received authority, and the willingness to assert alternative arguments all explain why English graduates are among the most highly sought-after by employers.

Of course, it would be wrong to claim that English literature students have any special ability to think critically. As Fish observes, sports commentators do this all the time. But I do think there may be a case that English studies does it more (economic jargon warning!) efficiently and with more transferable potential. If you are able to study a John Donne poem and a postmodern novel, you are probably going to be able to scrutinise the latest marketing material for Proctor and Gamble. The capacity to analyse Manchester United's skill at the offside trap probably does not.

The second reason for supporting the humanities that Fish offers is less forceful:

Let's support the humanities so that Stanley Fish and his friends have more people to talk to.

That is, being able to discuss literature, culture and politics in a sophisticated way enlivens dinner parties whereas discussions of football or the weather invariably dull them. Unfortunately, I think the champagne is probably still on ice when it comes to the issue of the true value of literature, as I have been discovering throughout my PhD in the subject. Still, at least I now have something to talk about over the cheese twists.

Labels: humanities, Literature, Stanley Fish

As regular readers will know, in my daily research I undergo something of a continual crisis of confidence, as I try to work out why literary studies is worth pursuing, in comparison to sciences which seem to produce so many technological and social benefits beyond the internal logic of their research. Several of my posts and essays have explored the "value" of literary criticism, and of doing a literature PhD, and one of my regular moans is that literary criticism is often intended to reach a limited spectrum of readers. So it was with a mixture of delight and deflation that I found one of my pieces receiving the following comment from a reader, Vincent, who blogs at A Wayfarer's Notes:

I was interested to see your piece on The Secret Agent, as I wrote one today on my blog, specifically not as literary criticism, for reasons which I summarise therein:

"Literary criticism, if I am not mistaken, analyses texts as objects with intrinsic qualities. I don’t take that view. Texts are nothing without the reader, who alone constructs the meaning. They are dishes served up to a person, preferably hungry, on a particular occasion. By this, my book-reviewing is a subcategory of memoir-writing. Here’s my bit of cooking for you, my reader. I have to guess your taste in spices for I don't know you that well."

I did literature at university but it was before the days of this new criticism, so I wasn't trained in it at all. I therefore have no idea as to what it's for, other than to keep academics busy.

The Secret Agent is subtitled "A Simple Tale" and while it is of course permissible for any individual to extract from it material to support any thesis which appeals to them, it would make more sense in my view if they took complete ownership of it, for example to start with a "claimer" (as opposed to a disclaimer) saying "I read this novel as one generally reads a novel, that is for fun and not work; and these are the thoughts which inspired in me personally. These are the things which I consider are most important to say about it."

I would also consider it perfectly valid to try and guess, from evidence available, why the author wrote what he did and so forth.

I have come across many essays in a similar style to yours on Conrad, when I used to contribute articles in a literary review on John Cowper Powys, but I have never had the chance to ask anyone "Why?"

Naturally, if I was a university student today, and asked to write such essays, I should, especially if young, just do it, as a rite of passage, the necessary if painful price of earning my degree.

But I am not young any more. I am not in thrall to the approval of academics, though I have children and grandchildren who will be embarking on their journey through the universities in due course.

I once was employed to edit some essays of students at the local college in the Crafts department, about ceramics, tapestry and the like. They used this same style, which I take to have emanated from some post-modernist general criticism. OK, it is academically fashionable. Perhaps if you train as a nurse nowadays you have to learn it too, for any essays you may have to write.

But still I don't know why.

If ever you feel inclined to respond I should be most grateful and enlightened. I'm pretty sure it is my ignorance which makes me so sceptical. I'm going to read some more of your work in case it throws any light.

With best wishes & thanks for your generous display of original web pages

Naturally, I could not let these comments pass without response, but happily I think my email - dashed off in the space of an hour - has provided my strongest and simplest articulation yet of the value of literary criticism. For this reason, I reproduce it below.

I am not sure if you read about V.S. Naipaul's comments the other week, but he argued - in his typically subtle way - that all literature departments should be shut down and its professors go and work on buses, whilst universities get on with teaching practical science. If you are questioning "what literary criticism is for, other than to keep academics busy," then you are not the only one. And I have asked similar questions myself in the context of my literature PhD (see links below).

Actually, though, Naipaul is being thoroughly naive of his literary history. Who was it who showed us how English literature was ignoring postcolonial writers like himself? Precisely the literature departments (e.g. Edward Said). Likewise, 1960s feminism was bound up with rediscovering a feminine style of writing (Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Susan Sontag), and again it was through and from literature departments that the politics of 1960s feminism originated. Likewise, if you agree that language is central to all the activities of all aspects of culture - from politics, to computer games, to film, to science - then literature departments have a key role to play in understanding and interpreting how we make ourselves understood by other people, and how groups of people (such as men, or scientists) write in a particular way to the exclusion or inclusion of other groups (such as women, or laypeople). In my own specific field, which involves analysing the way in which scientific ideas are understood by scientists and transmitted to culture, literature departments have been central and these things do matter: it's surely significant in judging, say, the ethics of current stem cell research that we understand through a reading of Frankenstein and the historical conditions in which it was produced that reactions to new life sciences tend to be similar across the ages; thus a knee jerk, tabloid reaction today that demonises stem cell scientists is only to be expected.

If you agree with Naipaul, it appears OK to turn million pound telescopes to the heavens as if we'll see a cure for cancer etched upon the cosmos, but not a valid activity to turn the tools of literary criticism to examine the words in novels, poetry, film etc, as if language has, after all the human effort that goes into its making, no point beyond its immediate meaning. I am not a romantic believing in ars gratia artis or knowledge for the sake of knowledge; as a left winger, I have to be also a pragmatist and admit that literary criticism in the university, paid for by the taxpayer, ought to justify its own existence and hence why it deserves funding rather than that new hospital. But that utilitarian principle - which Naipaul holds in extremis - does not mean I think literary criticism has no value at all.

Rather, the value of literary criticism lies in exploring the contexts around a text, the frameworks in which the novel or poem was originally produced: history, philosophy, politics, science etc. By doing this, such a form of criticism can help us to understand about ourselves, evaluate how "good" or "bad" our current society is - and you pointed out the obvious connection between Conrad's novel and the war on terror. My essay was admittedly more esoteric than this, in that it was about how the changing Victorian notions of time and relativity could affect Conrad's literary style. This may have been a prosaic piece, but if you agree in principle that it is worth being interested in novels because they show us connections across time (e.g. in notions of "terror"), then you ought to allow some room for studies such as my essay. If you agree that it is worth understanding history if nothing else but for the sake of it, because it is (was) there, then understanding literary sty
le can offer a route into this sort of knowledge.

Of course you may not agree. If you are a Naipaul, and think that universities (and the accumulation of human knowledge they represent) should just be producing applied sciences, then OK, lets do away with literature departments...and telescopes. And if we ever do live in that brave new world, I may just have to overdose on soma.

So I hope that this makes the case for my sort of essay, beyond it being (originally) the "painful rite of passage" of having to pass an exam (and, incidentally, English Lit students are among the most employable graduates around, so clearly literature departments are doing something right, given the quality of the students who emerge from the other side of its mill).

And now comes the twist. As I understand your email your problem, and the issue I do have with literary criticism myself, is not whether literary criticism is valid given the innate human desire to produce knowledge, and to understand the linguistic terms in which knowledge is produced and expressed, but the way in which that practice is carried out - its style.

You suggest that your piece on your blog - which I liked very much - was written "specifically not as literary criticism." But if not literary criticism, then what on earth was it? It certainly wasn't a mathematical appraisal of the number of words in The Secret Agent. It was, rather, an attempt to elucidate what to you seemed to be some of the key themes and interesting characters of the novel, comparing its urban themes to the maritime ones of Nostromo, and your placing the novel in an aesthetic rank along with his other works (e.g. his later writing is better than his earlier). It was critical in that you picked out some aspects and excluded others from your focus. It was literary, in that it studied literature, and was in its own way creative (a sort of memoir-writing). But your style of literary criticism (if you will allow me to varnish it as "literary criticism") is very much sympathetic, appreciative of the novel in question, self-reflexive in describing your own reactions to Conrad's work. In a word, your literary criticism embodies...passion.

It is passion which is lacking from contemporary literary criticism, including, I admit, my own. In an attempt to position itself alongside the sciences in the university - given the existence of views such as Naipaul's that the sciences alone have social value - literary criticism has systematically developed a more elevated, jargonistic manner; it has adopted some of the conventions of scientific writing, such as analysing the text from the perspective in the passive, third person. Thus, it writes "the text says this in such a way" rather than the (your) first person "I read this in such a way."

So here we find ourselves in a funny position. We hardcore literary critics admire novels for their historical transmutability, their ability to embody multiple themes simultaneously; the way they revealingly say different or similar things to different people. But we analyse them in a way that - as you observe - does away with the reader and constructs an artificially objective perspective which implies that "the text says this," definitively. Should we then produce a "claimer" which admits that we have complete ownership of the text, in spite of apparently arguing for the texts as objects with intrinsic qualities?

Well, herein lies the second problem to emerge from literary criticism's current style. If you were to read lots of contemporary literary criticism and theory, or if you were based at a university, you would not need a "claimer" to know full well that personal opinion still counts; that we all appreciate the aesthetic qualities of particular works and play authors off against each other; that in literary journals and monographs debates about the meanings of particular works bounce furiously around; that postmodern literary theorists dispute the possibility of there being a final meaning in any text, and propose that meaning is in a sense constructed by the reader, depending on their gender, race, age etc.

But if you haven't read lots of contemporary literary theory or criticism to allow you to realise this - I don't blame you!

Especially in the latter postmodern guises, it's hard, littered with jargon, full of dense and often turgid prose, clever references to other philosophers or theorists no one else has ever heard of. Sadly, then, what emerges is the impression you have got. That "texts are objects with intrinsic qualities"; that these intrinsic qualities rather than the passionate reader "construct the meaning." As a PhD student, I'm still very much trying to find my voice in this scenario. I am totally confident that I have (like all literary critics) something worth saying by placing novels and their language in a broader human context. The question is what tone I can adopt to say this message.

Have I got to succumb to the occlusive, difficult style of much current literary theory in order to get ahead in the university? Or can I find a way to be accessible, without "dumbing down" the intellectual content of what I've got to say?

At this point, I'm not sure it is possible to reconcile these competing needs within the academic context. What it is possible to do is to "do the police in different voices" (to cite T.S. Eliot, a great critic, great poet, who was accused in his own time of being irrelevant). Hence the blog is one of my most powerful outlets, because here I can write in a fluent way that expresses passion, but also points towards some of the more specialised elements of my discipline. Meanwhile, whilst some look down upon publications such as the Guardian Review or London Review of Books, most of our best critics write there (and, incidentally, many of the best critics happen to also be literary authors e.g. A.S. Byatt, John Lanchester, Tom Paulin). I would jump at the opportunity to contribute to any of these pages, alongside writing for academic journals (you don't happen to have their phone number, do you?!). I also engage heavily in interdisciplinary work, particularly explaining the language and history of science to scientists themselves, who have rarely reflected on the issue but who are always interested when described to them sympathetically.

It is sympathy for the reader, and a lack of passion in the writing, that leads to accusations that literary criticism lacks validity in the current culture. But - young and idealistic as I am - I do not see that this means we should give up on an activity which is as old as literature itself (think Aristotle's Poetics).

I hope this diatribe and polemic has not put you off reading more on The Pequod, or of letting me know how you feel about my arguments and about literary criticism now. If you do respond, I'd be grateful; and if you want some more existing material that I have written on this issue, then the following selection may be of interest:

• What Difference Does Difference Make? The Creative Deconstructions of Jean Rhys and Aimé Césaire - On the problems I have with literary criticism that imposes meaning on a text:
• The Political Art of Criticism and Quarks: An essay on the political value of literary criticism (my thinking on the subject has changed somewhat since I wrote this a couple of years ago)
• A Critical Highlight: Literary criticism at its passionate finest
• The Idea of a University: More on the "value" of literary studies

Labels: literary theory, Literature, the idea of a university

A fun article from the Guardian Education about "The Art of Reading," from their How to Be a Student series:

you don't just need to do it, you need to be seen to be doing it (and acting upon it). Sometimes you can be seen to be doing it even if you're not. This is called adding footnotes. Always read at least the title and name of the author, however, because it's never a good idea to pretend you've read some thing unless you're absolutely sure your tutor hasn't written it.

The secret Harriet Swain did not mention, however, was that this applies not only to new undergraduates, but to doctoral students and, yes, even professors.

Indeed, without wanting to sound too vain, I consider myself a Master of the Art of nodding sagely, when asked by my supervisor/conference delegate/peer etc. whether I have read Book X, and of then twisting the subject to my own self-inflating ends. "Yes, I found Book X most interesting. But I thought Book Y" - which I have read, or at least read the review of - "was the more accessible text." This game of intellectual ping-pong can go on for hours, as my initial interrogator must dissimulate equally: "Book Y was interesting, but I thought Book Z..."

Labels: Literature, Postgraduate Diary

Seen on a toilet door in the gents' toilets of my esteemed university - next year's literary theory exam question:



I'm actually rather proud that our institution produces such a high calibre of graffiti artist. Perhaps this could go forward as evidence of our Teaching Quality scores...?

Labels: graffiti, literary theory, Literature

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

My poetry writing has dropped off over the last couple of years. Partly, this is because I am no longer immersed in it, as I was as an undergraduate. Without the training in slow-paced appreciation poetry reading brings, and without the subconscious cues of rhythm working in the back of my mind through the day, I seem not to have the same impulse to spend a patient hour, two hours writing. I can't remember precisely when I wrote the last poem published on this site, "The Spaceman," but it must be over a year ago now.

So I am happy that today, suffering from a bout of endoftermitis, and not feeling inspired to do my conventional work, I decided to revisit a couple of poems I had half-written in the last twelve months. And after sitting down to them properly, I think I have them in a state where they can go online, for your comments and advice. As I have said, I don't necessarily like discussing the origins for my poems, except where this discussion forces me to interrogate and understand my motivations and execution of ideas, so I do not want to say anything more about the two here. Instead, in classic exam style, please read and discuss "Pass Over" and "Radio Ga Ga" now!

Labels: Literature, poetry

I must admit, I hadn't realised that Willa Cather's fiction had been ignored and not given the recognition it deserves, as A.S. Byatt asserts in today's Guardian Review. Cather was the first author to feature on my undergraduate American Fiction module, and I thoroughly enjoyed both set texts, My Antonia and O Pioneers!. Cather deposited her manuscripts at the University of Nebraska, and their Willa Cather Archive ranks, in my opinion, as one of the best examples of digital research tools, up there with the beautiful William Blake archive. Perhaps the ready availability of online material on Cather accounts for her popularity on university courses: writing in the early twentieth century, she is just distant enough for scholarship to be historical, whilst just modern enough to ensure that there remains a great deal of manuscript and audio-visual material on her. Further evidence of Cather's popularity comes from my own online resource: my essay on Cather and Faulkner is the ninth most popular page on the site.

Labels: Literature, Willa Cather

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

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

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

The debate about proposed changes to the English National Curriculum has been fierce. The tabloid press has had a field day with reports that canonical writers such as Dickens and Bronte may be removed from the list of prescribed texts, in a "dumbing down" of the subject. Now education minister Alan Johnson has reached a compromise, maintaining the requirement that students study writers "who are a crucial part of our national heritage," whilst allowing teachers more flexibility in choosing which writers in particular students must read. Half of the writers, chosen by teachers from a long list, can be from before World War One and half from after. The cut-off date needs some justification: is it really the case that the same number of "heritage" writers were born in the twentieth century as in the four centuries the novel has been around before it?

Regardless of reasoning, though, according to The Guardian Education, the following writers are staying in:

Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, John Bunyan, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope, HG Wells

Whilst these are under threat:

EM Forster, William Golding, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell, Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Evelyn Waugh, JG Ballard, RK Narayan, Berlie Doherty, Susan Hill, Laurie Lee, Joan Lingard, Alan Sillitoe, Bill Naughton, Mildred Taylor, Robert Westall, Chinua Achebe, Maya Angelou, Willa Cather, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Ernest Hemingway, HH Richardson, Doris Lessing, John Steinbeck, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Yesterday, I was reading A.S. Byatt describing in Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings her first introduction to George Eliot as being

unpropitious. At the age of eleven I underwent a class 'reading' of Silas Marner at Sheffield High School and remember finding it very tedious: no drama, or what there might have been subdued, too many comic country people who bore little relation to anyone I, a city child, had met, no Romance of the simple sort I was looking for.

Byatt today models herself on that great Victorian polymath, and so it evidences the dangers of teaching fine but subtle works too badly, to children too young, that even she was put off Eliot at school. Although I was taught very well in my secondary eduction, looking at the list I hated doing Defoe even at university, and I can't imagine 14 year-olds being particularly enthralled by the "book of lists" that characterises (in my opinion) Robinson Crusoe. And so whilst the "In List" maintains Eliot and her comparable peers in the historical ranks of Great English Literature(TM), I am concerned that heading out are writers who might be more immediately accessible and resonate with the children of the early twenty-first century, for whom the dominant literary genre, played over the varied geographies of Middle-Earth and space and cyberspace, is science fiction.

If teachers are confident that they can present Eliot or Conrad in a way that captivates and enlarges young minds, then good luck to them. But I would not be keen to reject out of hand the possibilities of popular literary fiction, such as William Gibson's Neuromancer, with its startling poetic invocations of cyberspace, or Aldous Huxley, with his unsettling prophetic visions of the Brave New World in which kids, drugged by cannabis and glued to the cinema, arguably grow up today.

Update: Thursday, August 10, 2006
John Sutherland is not happy with the list either: This Reading List Fails the Test

Labels: Literature, National Curriculum

With his sensitive finger monitoring the pulse of English Studies in the British university, John Sutherland wonders in Guardian Education whether what was "once the most venerated of disciplines," namely English Literature, is "headed for the dustbin of academia."

A glance at my old university prospectus and degree classifications shows how the times have been a changin' even whilst I have been at university. When I signed up to my undergraduate institution, I was inspired by a prospectus that showed pictures of (attractive) girls reclining beneath oak trees, reading The Mill on the Floss. When I was interviewed (a practice now stopped), I was asked some general questions about what poets I liked and why I liked them. I suspect that my answer was similar to that John Sutherland observes: "they will blandly inform you that they 'really like' Sylvia Plath as if that was all that needed to be said, critically." Despite this, some one must have taken to me as I managed to get a place to study for a BA in English Literature.

But when I emerged from the "production line" after three years, it was as a graduate not in English Literature but in "English Literary Studies." My department, and my degree, had been rebranded and, implicit in the name change, expanded to embrace all materials, not just textual, towards which "literary" approaches might be directed. Along with this change, leaflets and brochures dispensing careers advice and advertising graduate posts in corporate banking suddenly appeared in prominent positions by the photocopiers. Although I stayed on to study further, according to Prospects, some 58% of my contemporaries did not, preferring instead mostly to enter managerial roles in commerce and industry, to teach, or to occupy clerical positions. The buzzword now is the "transferrable skills" English graduates possess, their critical and writing faculties applicable equally to the writing of reports and policy documents as to the deconstruction of the proto-feminism of Jane Eyre.

One eye on their careers, A-Level students consistently choose to study English at university, and it remains one of the most popular courses. With vice-chancellors eyeing up the top-up fee income, it seems unlikely that English departments are going to close any time soon. But the question Sutherland asks is whether the intellectual nature of that discipline, which "was once the queen of the curriculum: the chemistry of the humanities," is going to survive intact. If English departments are now principally proving grounds for our future civil servants and industry moguls, it seems hard to justify studying Henrik Ibsen's minor plays, or Sapphic Modernism; rather, perhaps we should focus attention on the semantics of report writing, on the art of the press release.

For the time being, as a postgraduate, I have a stay of execution from such infections of the real world of economic sense. That some quality (and some would say, not without some foundation, irrelevance) of the Leavisite hey-day of English remains at the postgraduate level is indicated by the fact that my PhD is still classified as "English Literature." But even here, the fact that I am treating Dawkins and Maxwell in the same thesis as Byatt and Amis indicates the sea-change that has occurred in my field. With language at the centre of all human intellectual activity, English Studies - for that, I now feel, is the more appropriate title - is best placed to pursue the interdisciplinary approach. English Literature is not so much heading for the dustbin, as being recycled.

Labels: Literature

It is fairly uncontroversial to suggest that English literature begins with Gower, Whitcliffe, Chaucer and his contemporaries. Although infused - inevitably and permanently - with the mythical strains of Anglo-Saxon and Ancient epic, by the end of the fourteenth century English was beginning to make itself heard above French, as the language of verse romance, and Latin, as the language of philosophical debate and government.

The question of if and where English literature ends is harder to answer. India is the country with the largest English-speaking population in the world, and it would be naïve for Britain to cling to an image of itself as the principle island of creativity in the language, when in numerical terms alone it is the root, but not trunk and branch, of the English word.

A glance at recent Booker prize winners – Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yann Martel - confirms that literary writing in English is no longer necessarily done by holders of English passports. As another Booker winner, Salman Rushdie, wittily phrased it, "the Empire writes back." In contemporary English-language poetry, non-British or post-colonial writers have adapted traditional verse forms and content to register their own racial and social dialects and situations. Thus in an age of global communication, it is not inconceivable that a poet such as Tony Harrison, who invokes dialects from the North of England in formally constructed verse, may share more stylistic features with someone such as Robert Lowell in North America, than with his contemporaries (Benjamin Zephaniah or Grace Nichols, for example) living in a different area of his own country. And with the growing recognition of the potential of translation as a creative and adaptive aesthetic itself (see, for example, Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Beowulf or Christopher Logue’s War Music), the language in which something was originally written becomes increasingly incidental; it is what the word says which matters, not the originally foreign tongue - or variations on the root tongue of English - with which it was once spoken.

Is the answer, then, to make a distinction between "English-literature," of the early period, and "English-language" writing, from the modern period, which is characterised by its development by a variety of international writers? With its clumsy hyphenation and categorisation, this risks developing what linguists call "markedness," the implicit value judgement that lies behind our situating of a particular writer in relation to his linguistic heritage. Thus it is always the "Irish poet, Yeats," the "Afro-Carribean poet Langston Hughes," but never the "English poet Wordsworth."

Perhaps the only solution is to eradicate the proper noun of "English," and to use "english" instead as an adjectival marker of style and relation to tradition, in a similar way to "beat," or "postmodern," or "magic realism."

Labels: English language, Literature

I posted a few days ago in praise of Barbara Everett's delicate criticism of Philip Larkin. Now to the opposite end of the spectrum, with some gloriously self-contradictory postmodernist literary theory, that made me throw down the book when I read it. This is Steven Shaviro:

Language is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is not to indicate or communicate any particular content, but merely to perpetuate and replicate itself...language, like a virus or like capital, is in itself entirely vacuous: its supposed content is only a contingent means (the host cell or the particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates for the end of self-valorization and self-proliferation. Apart from the medium, there's no other message.

Perhaps I am misinterpreting or misrepresenting Shaviro here, in which case both of our arguments are actually winners. My inability to comprehend this passage endorses Shaviro's thesis that language is meaningless except as a self-perpetuating system. And my argument that his language is obfuscatory and, where it communicates at all, it undermines itself demonstrates its purposeless nature nowhere better than in the reflections of his literary theory.

But if language really does not communicate any particular content, what is the point of his writing and my reading him (or indeed, you reading this blog) at all? The answer is for the glimpses of those moments that capture in glorious and repellent detail the absurdities, inflected with psychoanalytic symbolism, that abound in readings of the body that are such a popular topic in English studies at the moment:

My "innards" are really a hole going straight through my body; their contents - shit and tapeworm - remain forever outside of and apart from me, even as they exist at my very centre. The tapeworm is more "me" than I am myself.

So far as I know, I don't have one of these egocentric parasites within me. Does this mean I have been thoroughly deconstructed...

Labels: literary theory, Literature, postmodernism, Steven Shaviro

Anyone believing all modern literary criticism to be as artless and occlusive as the texts it analyses are artful and popular could do worse than to look at Barbara Everett's essay on Philip Larkin in this month's London Review of Books.

Taking the trope of "high windows" from Larkin's last collection, which is named after that image in a poem of the same title, she uses the symbol as itself a window onto Larkin's work and its complex moral psychology. In her study, Everett does as E.M. Forster once requested, and only connects: biographical history with the poetry, late works with early poems, images embedded within poems. But that "only" underestimates the skill of the task she achieves, which is to do as all great criticism can and to convince in its arguments and to widen one's appreciation of the art it scrutinises, through a combination of careful research, empathic close readings, a keen eye for ambiguities and ironies others might miss. She also realises the other potential outcome of critical writing, which is to give voice to what one might not have missed and always sensed, but which even the alert reader is unable precisely to describe. She uses a key adjective that pinpoints perfectly how I have always felt, but never been able to articulate about Larkin, when she finds a characteristic Larkinian humour in the last lines of "Send No Money": "A splutter of laughter, rage, misery, expostulation, acceptance, 'truth.'" That word "splutter" is every bit as artfully chosen as the words of Larkin's original poetry.

As she draws together the web of inferences and influences Everett's essay takes on some of the same qualities of satisfying resolution that are more commonly found in the thriller or detective story. That I feel able, without stretching my point too far, to make that connection between the most populist of literature, and its most prosaic branch in the extended essay, is testament to the exemplary nature of this piece of writing that is more than "only" academic, and which instead assumes some of the qualities of the art it values so highly.

Labels: Barbara Everett, literary theory, Literature, Philip Larkin

I've spent the afternoon altering the way the Poetry section of The Pequod works, bringing it into a form similar to that of the Photography section. Each poem now has its own unique page, with comments - from both myself and readers - beneath them. I have also, at long last, added some new work. Please take a moment to look at it, and let me know what you think!

Labels: Literature

For various convoluted reasons I won't go into now, parallel to my thesis I have being doing some archival work on the correspondence of Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Thomas's poetry is quite unique, in that it was all written in a three year span after he was prompted at the age of 36, by Robert Frost, to turn away from the popular journalistic travelogues and biographies that were his stock-in-trade to a more creative literature. It is thus possible to correlate quite closely his biographical details (helped by the fact that he kept diaries) with the development of particular poems, such that it is possible to trace through his 144 poems the evolution of his mind on an almost weekly basis. This is something historians of more copious poets such as Wordsworth long for in their painstaking reconstructions of the multivarious influences in his works.

Because they develop over such a tight, and liminal, historical period, there is a haunting effect as one reads across his canon. Poems that start off describing natural scenes and rural life of his home Wales become infected, towards the second part of his Collected Works, with the tendril impacts of the war in France. Perhaps his most famous poem, "As the Team's Head Brass" demonstrates precisely and delicately the infections of the chaos of war on the steady pace of rural existence. Written in 1916, a year later Thomas himself would be plunged into the mud of the Western Front, and his poetry becomes dense with anxiety, darkness and loss.

However, in an optimistic mood, I thought I'd quote one of his very early pieces, which opens with a genius working in rhythm and rhyme, and closes with two brilliant examples of how effective line breaks can be in controlling the velocity of poetic "narrative." It is called "After Rain":


The rain of a night and a day and a night
Stops at the light
Of this pale choked day. The peering sun
Sees what has been done.
The road under the trees has a border new
Of purple hue
Inside the border of bright thin grass:
For all that has
Been left by November of leaves is torn
From hazel and thorn
And the greater trees. Throughout the copse
No dead leaf drops
On grey grass, green moss, burnt-orange fern,
At the wind's return:
The leaflets out of the ash-tree shed
Are thinly spread
In the road, like little black fish, inlaid,
As if they played.
What hangs from the myriad branches down there
So hard and bare
Is twelve yellow apples lovely to see
On one crab-tree,
And on each twig of every tree in the dell
Uncountable
Crystals both dark and bright of the rain
That begins again.

Labels: Edward Thomas, Literature

The editor of the Cambridge Grammar of English was on the radio today, defending the controversial stance of the new edition of the style guide, which says that rules of grammar are less important than clear communication. It argues that if the reader or listener's understanding is not compromised, then "good" grammar has been used, a stance I am inclined to agree with since, as I have argued in an essay on this site, we rarely realise just how much abuse our language can take and still allow our message to get across.

However, the editor also said, as I did in that essay, that we must recognise that language works not just by what we say, but also how we say it. Consequently, saying something with sloppy disregard to regular rules in a conversation with friends (probably scattering the word "like" liberally throughout as well) is fine. However, in a formal essay, no matter how well-researched it may be, if the writer cannot use language in a controlled and orthodox way, I am less likely to be persuaded by his arguments. Thus it was with some amusement that on the day I heard the radio programme, I received a letter from the Home Office, responding to a letter I had sent to them through Amnesty International, regarding the trials (or lack of) of terrorist suspects. In the page-long response, I counted five basic errors of grammar or style, including several Governments lacking apostrophes, and the obfuscatory sentence, "It is not our policy to discuss individual cases and that the majority of those who have been detained for national security reasons are the subject of court orders made by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission under the Contempt of Court Act." Needless to say, that the press office at the Home Office cannot write correctly is hardly the least of my worries about the way our government has acted in the "War on Terror," but this evidence certainly does little to modify my opinions.

Labels: grammar, Literature

Daisy Goodwin was on Radio 4 this morning, complaining that poetry would "soon be as popular as morris dancing". Based on the statistics of book sales, she may be right. But perhaps more so than novels and drama, poetry outlasts its moment, and whilst modern poetry may be at the margins of publishing today, one can't say the same about the poetry of the Romantics (Peter Ackroyd's documentary, though dreadfully over-special-effected, nevertheless still shows these poets still "alive" in the modern age), or the War poets (I lost count of how many times the broadsheets embedded some quote when the war on Iraq was beginning) or, of course, Shakespeare.

Anyway, to prove her point that modern poetry has an unprecedentedly narrow audience, Goodwin set a quiz. I'm ashamed to say that, though a couple of the quotations rang distant bells in the hazy mist of my skull, I could only answer one question, identifying the reader as Simon Armitage (with his Yorkshire accent, it was a 50-50 toss between him and Tony Harrison). I need to read more - perhaps next weekend, dressed oddly, I'll do so over a pint of cider in my nearest country pub.

Labels: Daisy Goodwin, Literature

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

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

The vibrant world of this novel is too big and too busy, bursting chaotically through the traditional seams of the rural Indian town of Ayemenem where it is set. Roy constructs, through a snowballing, growing structure of tiny details, a riotous environment of human life, of insects, of satellite television, business enterprises, weather, sexualities, educations, politicians and conflicting ethnicities.

Like that later Booker-prize winner, Life of Pi, the novel employs the perspectives of the fairy-tale, placing children - in the form of the twins Estha and Rahel and the newcomer to their world, the English-born Sophie Mol - as the characters about whom the asynchronous narrative is orientated, and through whose naive and roaming eyes the reader watches. Entering the minds of the young, this work implies, can help adults to establish order in a complex, apparently random and disconnected, postmodern world because children understand (though they often misinterpret) their various discoveries in acceptably imprecise terms, in relation to other, earlier, small moments of discovery. Every new object or lesson is described in terms of something different, by itself insignificant, which they already know or have learnt: a squashed frog leaves a frog-shaped stain on the road, and so a dead person leaves a human-shaped hole in the universe; a sexual deviant sells orange drink, and his semen is another form of juice. Children advance happily, though not always innocently, through metaphor, of which this novel is an adult's sustained, delightful and complex version.

Labels: Arundhati Roy, Literature

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was born in Boston on February 4, 1821. He was educated at Bishop Hopkin's school in Burlington, and then at Harvard, although trouble with his sight forced him to drop out. Although he later entered and graduated from law school, his career - supported by the inheritance of his businessman father - focused on his favourite studies: literature, botany and astronomy. In all three fields he achieved some minor success, publishing his observations of astronomical and meteorological phenomena, recognised as an authority on the Flora of Franklin county and publishing poems in the Living Age, Putam's and Atlantic magazines. These were collected and printed privately, and published in Boston and London.

Although publicly anonymous, Tuckerman was not unknown to his literary peers. In 1851 and 1854, Tuckerman met Alfred Tennyson, staying as his guest and cultivating a long-standing and sincere friendship. Unfortunately, Tennyson's views of Tuckerman's poetry are not known. However, those of Emerson, Hawthorn, Longfellow, Bryant - to whom he sent complementary copies of his verse - are available. All expressed their strong liking for the verse: Hawthorne thought it a "remarkable" volume whose "merit does not lie upon the surface, but must be looked for with faith and sympathy"; Emerson thought "Rhotundra" a "perfect success in its kind," and urged him to publish it in the Atlantic, which Tukerman subsequently did; Longfellow gave his opinion as "very favourable," although like Hawthorne he noted that the intrinsic merit of his work did not automatically mean that the challenging work would be publicly successful in the immediate term.

Oddly, having gained the respect of the foremost writers of his day, Tuckerman's publication of his Poems in 1860 was the point in his career at which he retired from public literary circles. Returning to seclusion, he continued to write (very well), but by the time he wrote his last sonnet in 1872, he was obsolete. He died the following year.

He was reclaimed from obscurity by the efforts of Walter Prichard Eaton, in an essay in the January issue of Forum, 1909. From this article, Witter Bynner corresponded with the poet's granddaughter, discovering the unpublished poems which were in her keeping. In 1931, he published his edition of Tuckerman's sonnets. The Complete Poems was edited by N. Scott Momaday in 1965.

With the growing interest in the relationship between science and literature, the peculiar interests and mathematical methods of this poet who kept a log of the rhyme schemes of his sonnets, ensuring no one followed the same pattern as another, may cause Tuckerman to come increasingly onto the critical radar.

Labels: Frederick Tuckerman, Literature

For someone now popularly revered as the first true poet in the American language, arguably as important to American letters as the founding fathers were to the political shape of the United States, Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) provoked ambiguous endorsements from critics of his time.

A contemporary reviewer, Peter Bayne, complained of his works:

They are neither in rhyme not in any measure known as blank verse; and they are emitted in spurts and gushes of unequal length, which can only by courtesy be called lines. Neither in form nor in substance are they poetry...

It is understandable why his style came as a shock to the system. With his long, rolling lines (which have the cadence of Biblical writing) which demand to be read and absorbed as much as comprehended, streams of personal thoughts, often erotic and sensual, merging with philosophical or political ideas, Whitman seems a remarkably modern writer. Not only this, but he also seems excessively egocentric, and it is only natural to want to react strongly against this man who reviewed his own poems anonymously in the Democratic Review, heralding them with the claim, "An American poet at last!".

However, Whitman's experimentation in verse centred around the self is precisely why he has become seen as the father of modern American poetry. For Whitman, "the topmost proof of a race is in its poetry", and the advanced and imaginative use of language was the key definition of the quality of the nation and society which produced the writer. Whitman's aim was to cast aside the residue of European styles which had up to this point been an intrinsic element of American poetry, breaking new formal ground to match the new political ground of the United States.

The artistic use of words in Whitman's eyes was more than mere verbal craftsmanship. For him, poetry should always be spontaneous and, rather than being an artisan in full control of his creation, the poet ought to be seen as an inspired genius, able to absorb, accumulate and translate the sensations of his environment into words: "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sounds contribute towards me" (Leaves of Grass, ll.584-585). Language was more than a practical communicative act, instead becoming the essence of what it means to be and to feel both a single, conscious human and part of a wider social, racial and religious structure; as he affirmed in his Primer, "All words are spiritual - nothing is more spiritual than words". For Whitman, there is a chain of influence, from race to the poetry which defines that race, from poetry to language and from language to spirituality, with the current link throughout being the poet himself. This ideology explains to some extent the egocentric I of Whitman's verse: by setting out his stall so explicitly in Leaves of Grass, Whitman was effectively inviting the reader to measure him as the coincidentally chosen equivalent for the achievement of the new, unified American national identity.

In spite of this, it would be wrong to view Whitman as a single, dominant, Adam-like figure, in whose mould all future American poets are invariably and inevitably cast. For example, America was, for Whitman, a "nation of nations" yet a century later Langston Hughes would be declaring that the coloured 'I' too needed to sing of itself, implying (rightly) that the black voice had been neglected, never thrown democratically and equally into the linguistic melting-pot. Likewise, patriotically to claim Whitman as the quintessential American poet is to, implicitly, isolate him from the international context in which he became something of a cult figure, particularly for the French poets of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Labels: Literature, Walt Whitman

Edmund Wilson heralded Edith Wharton (1862-1937) as "Not only one of the great pioneers, but also the poet, of interior decoration". In great detail, Wharton's fiction describes the habitats of that breed of middle-class, urban Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. Here is an extract from The House of Mirth (1905):

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.

Wharton's creation of the details of domesticity is more than simply an exercise in description and design. One of Wharton's consistent themes is the way in which physical space is a powerful metaphor for psychological freedom. In Ethan Frome, a remarkable novella, the tragic Ethan sees "in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body"; Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth is either shut-in or shut-out of the houses of aristocratic America, and is forced to become a chameleon-like figure, constantly adapting (most famously in the novel's tableau vivant scene) to her surroundings without ever feeling firmly located; for Lydia in the short story "Soul's Belated," marriage is a physical convention, designed "to keep people away from each other."

If Wharton was the poet of the interior, then her contemporary Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) must make a strong claim to be the literary artist of the outdoors. As Cather wrote, "When I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea - it's the grand passion of her life." Whereas Wharton's characters shuttle between the elaborately showy sets of classy America, Cather's fictions dramatise the experience of the pioneers on the frontier, in their struggle to lay down roots, secure ownership of a plot of land on which they may sustain themselves and their inheritors, build their own domestic space. Yet her immigrants never feel a sense of utter homelessness, even though many of them (Russian, German, Irish) are a thousand miles displaced. The current of the oral tradition, of stories of people in their homeland, of circling myths, rebinds them continually back to the land of their ancestors, even as in this new space they lo new space they look forward to their new future.

So, the comparison between Cather and Wharton serves very well to emphasise the truth of the old adage: that one may have a comfortable domestic environment, without ever feeling a sense of secure settlement, or be a nomad living a hesitant existence on the fringes of comfort, yet feel the indelible attachment to that invisible place miles away, which still anchors one to a sense of home.

Labels: Edith Wharton, Literature, Willa Cather

Just had an interesting discussion about Graham Swift's novel Waterland, the central character of which is a history teacher. As the talk went on, it struck me that there are quite a few works of the last twenty years which have featured characters in educational environments. Jotting down a list, I ended up with Miss Jean Brodie (of Muriel Spark's novel), the university lecturers in the arts who crop up in the fiction of David Lodge, and the science lecturers of Ian McEwan's works, the English lecturer of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, and Alan Bennett's new play The History Boys. Is this an unusually dominant trope of postwar fiction? Since many postmodern novels are marked by self-reflexivity on the role of narrative in the contemporary environment, does having a teacher as a central character provide a lens for this? Is it also part of the more general expression of scepticism about the reliability of the "professional," the doctor, the lawyer, the politician? Other answers on a large postcard, please.

Labels: Literature

The death of the playwright Arthur Miller, perhaps the most influential dramatist of the twentieth century, follows soon of the heels of the passing of Susan Sontag and Jacques Derrida. The passing of this trio of brilliant intellects marks the waning influence of the radicals who came to prominence in the Cold War atmosphere of the late 1950s and '60s; who will take over their mantle, as the voices of the next generation in this new war? David Hare's Stuff Happens, though provocative, would never claim to have been as bitingly political in such a tragically recognisable domestic environment as Death of a Salesman. And what critics around today can make as humane and natural a response to drama, without getting tied up in loops of theory, as Miller did in the winding prose of his non-fictional work?

Labels: Arthur Miller, Literature

This Christmas, Auntie put her foot in it again. Credit to the BBC: with its charter up for review, it would be easy to slip into a mode of comfortable, unchallenging family entertainment; but Pretty Woman - pretty unspectacular. That it has been prepared to screen Jerry Springer: The Opera now, in full consciousness of the hackles it would raise, is a bold avocation of its continuing independence and it refusal to be cowed by a politician's particular idea of moral or artistic norms. In spite of the fervour from Christian sub-groups - an anger which was not shared by all Christians - the BBC was justified in promoting an award-winning and popular show. Indeed, those same voices who claimed the BBC was undemocratic in its decision to go ahead anyway forgot that against the 45 000 complaints (of which half were about the level of swearing, rather than for offended religious sensibilities) were several million viewers. But at the same time as defending its right to broadcast, it seems a shame that the BBC has courted wrath for a venture which was artistically revolutionary only in a very limited sense.

Read the rest of this Review of Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Labels: Jerry Springer, Literature

The key dilemma faced by African-American writers is how to avoid adopting antagonistic and simple racial positions every bit as binary as those created by the white discourses they are reacting against, exchanging one negative stereotype of Africanist identity for another, positive, but equally stereotypical, construction. Perhaps even more of a risk, though, is that the expression of a unified Black Consciousness mounted wholly against the tradition of white suppression of it can lead to the occlusion of those social problems which exist on an even lower branch within black culture, most specifically the status of women in what are often sexually and physically abusive relationships. An example of the kind of text which raises this problem might be Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is in response to such texts that Barbara Smith cautions critics about the danger of ignoring "that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers" ("Toward a Black Feminist Criticism").

In the North American context, one possible way of avoiding the creation of too-simply, too-singularly, oppositional black identities is to return to, and re-awaken awareness of, the native cultural history which pre-existed settlement or slavery, and which consequently pre-existed black/white racial debates. For example, in Morrison's Song of Soloman the main (coloured) character stands and "read the road signs with interest now, wondering what lay beneath the names. The Algonquins had named the territory he lived in Great Water, michi gami. How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country". This raises the reader's awareness of a third-party, neither black nor white which suggests a middle-way (although African-American and American-Indian experiences will always be implicitly aligned) out of damaging binary racial politics which override the subtle issues faced within those generic groups (i.e. the rights of black women not to suffer physical abuse).

Since the end of Apartheid, similar dilemmas have been faced by female writers in the new South Africa: how to assert their new-found sense of identity as black South Africans, whilst preventing this from submerging both the existence of a still-legitimate white viewpoint, and the experience of black women. Sometimes, writers like Mandela, Kuzwayo, Mashini have expressed themselves and the wider cultural political context through autobiography. New publishing arenas such as Agenda are being built (though some would argue still with a distorting English-speaking bias) to empower the voiceless to speak about their experiences as women, as black women in a family unit, and as members of a wider black community.

I wonder, though, as well as this progressive creation of publishing spaces in which black women can express themselves, whether there is also a historical and retrospective movement - like that enacted by Hurston or Morrison - to take black politics back to a time before Apartheid and colonisation, and therefore to engage with the dilemmas of women and blacks on a level before the construction of racial différence. For example, to re-awaken the complex and diverse nature of individual tribes and examine positive ways in which female identity was constructed within them; to read back to find examples of female literature from before the nineteenth century; or even to encourage, endorse or offer support to those anthropologists and evolutionary scientists who argue that the 'missing link' will be found in Africa, in other words making Africa the site of a common human ancestry which pre-existed constructions of Otherness.

Are these ways in which black writers in South Africa, particularly black female writers, can find a happy middle-ground, neither oppositional to whites nor, in enforcing black identity, ignoring the problems of sexism which exist(ed) within the institutions of black society?

Labels: Literature

It seems paradoxical to suggest that any dictionary or account of national history, sport, literature, art, politics, biography can be securely objective; that it can escape the perils of patriotism, implicit in such a project, in wanting to claim for the country in which it was produced, and with which it is concerned, the continuing vitality of lives whose common link is their happy coincidence within national boundaries over an extended period of time. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is, therefore, an intrinsically risky venture, promising by the word 'dictionary' an authoritative account of British history which must, by the terms it has set for itself, largely suppress foreign-language voices, other nationalities, and which by definition cannot objectively and fairly represent the impact of other nations on the evolution of its particular national narrative. However, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, whilst it cannot avoid this issue, offers new, non-ideological ways of reading history...

Read the rest of this Review of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Labels: Literature, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Penguin Books have created a new series of slim titles featuring thinkers and revolutionaries, from Seneca to Orwell, Gibbon to Marx. This can only be a positive development, helping to broaden the cultural experience of those non-academics who would otherwise run shy - perhaps understandably, given the way philosophy, like literary criticism, is increasingly sealed in a complex and exclusive vocabulary - from anything hallmarked with philosophy. The danger, of course, as with the Big Read, is that bite-size chunks of text (one commentator likened the books to smarties) become perceived as the authoritative end, rather than the beginning, of exploration and reading. Also, their focus is unashamedly on Western and White authors, a shame given that here was an opportunity here to correct the dangerously popular and unbalanced perception, in the contemporary age, that the Muslim world has contributed little to the sum of global knowledge. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that, if the series takes off and proves popular (one million copies in the first year is the publisher's target), subsequent additions could expand and fill the gaps.

Labels: Literature

Hugo Hamilton's chillingly frank memoir tells the story of his childhood in Ireland. Hamilton, with his Irish father and German mother, finds himself torn between linguistic and moral codes. His father is defiantly nationalistic, against the trend of their home town, resorting to violence to enforce his demand that the children grow up as "Irish," not an Anglo-Irish corruption; his mother, in contrast and opposition, encourages the imagination and exploration (often leading to realms of humourous mischief) as the by-laws for growth to adulthood.

The family becomes a mirroring microcosm of the political events which preceded Hamilton's birth. The paradox, of which the young Hamilton becomes increasingly though never fully aware, is that his Irish father has the similar impulses of the "fist people" of Nazi nationalism, whilst his German mother seems more naturally aligned with the Irish dream of achieving independence through "invention and imagination".

Labels: Hugo Hamilton, Literature, Speckled People

There is an e-mail doing the rounds which contains examples of bizarre metaphors used by students in GCSE English Language exams. Some of them are simply funny; one can but imagine the motion of the person who "walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs". Others suggest the violently warped mind of an author who "hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall".

For me, however, poetic language defamiliarises. It uses conventional words, the words we use for all practical daily purposes ("walk into my office," "ow that hurt"), in different ways; it (re)draws attention to the nature of the objects or the emotions it describes. This is why I find a phrase such as "His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumble dryer" peculiarly moving, simultaneously witty and challenging. It suggests the mundane nature of our domestic and daily existence in a world of underwear and washing; simultaneously throughout such an existence, no matter how trivial, we are in a state of violent and perpetual fracture, attempting to recover from self-conscious disharmony and to reunite lost friendships.

It is very easy to react to the admittedly unusual image with patronising laughter, yet its obscurity demands deconstruction. It draws attention to its own use of language, its ambiguities and tonal contrasts between humour and seriousness. To provoke this reaction is far more preferable to that lazy automatism with which we respond to that most dangerous of phrases, with its easy and natural associations, the cliche. No doubt the examiner responds to 'powder soft snow' and 'sparkling eyes' with a red tick of curriculum satisfaction. I am more interested by tumbling underpants.

Labels: Literature

I have just finished reading the second extract from Richard Wollheim's memoirs, published in the London Review of Books (26:10, 20 May, 2004). I was surprised, after reading the first extract, to find that they had not found a publisher, and relieved to learn in the second that they will now be published by the Waywiser Press on October 28, 2004. For their writing is of a unique elegance, with a controlled confessional tone which moved me deeply. Here, for example, Wollheim has just been discussing his first hopelessly tentative steps with girls on a dance floor and, by extension, into the adult, World War Two, realm of sexuality:

And all the while I lived with this terrible premonition: that, were a girl in uniform, through what I recognised would have been an act of random kindness on her part, actually to have taken it upon herself to initiate me into the pleasures of upright sexuality, fully dressed, one eye kept open for the military police, the cries of soldiers revelling in the distance, the rough salt air blowing off the Irish Sea, I would have responded by falling so desperately in love with her that, as likely as not, my feeble sense of what being a soldier required of me would have crumbled, and the next night, and the next night, and the night after that, would have seen me standing under her window, a common deserter, shouting out her name through my tears.

It takes a unique writer to craft such a long, winding sentence, multi-faceted but never confusing, grammatically perfect but using only the barest of syntactical tools, the comma. It would have been criminal were this style not to have been published, admired, and learned from.

Labels: Literature, Richard Wollheim