Sporting Authors

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.

The Act of Reading

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.

A Doll's House at The Northern Stage

Has ever a dramatist better exploited the discrepancy between what an audience - seeing everything - knows and what a character does, than Henrik Ibsen? Has ever a director better understood the political effect of this double vision than Erica Whyman, with her setting of A Doll's House on a semi-transparent stage? On the evidence of last night's performance at the Northern Stage, I would be prepared to make a case for both Wyman and Ibsen.

The play's problem of vision, of failing to see through the eyes of another, is given an appropriate architecture in Soutra Gilmour's set, which locates the play in the 1950s. Framed by a proscenium arch decorated in large patterned wall paper which scales the centre stage as if it is a model, the main house is constructed with semi-transparent perspex walls and - crucially - a clear postbox, and is filled with formica tables, flimsy chairs and sofas. As is Nora, every artefact is liable to replacement, and at risk of seeming dated; this family home is decorated with bought objects rather than family heirlooms to be cherished for their uniqueness, however drab their appearance.

The semi-transparent walls work with brilliant effect. We see bustle in corridors; significant people and letters arrive in the background whilst others talk unknowingly on the main stage; Torvald locks himself in his study and chats with Dr. Rank, perhaps discussing their idealised Nora who is playing a radically different character in our direct gaze. Ibsen effectively exploits the ability of the audience to see everything in a family home, whereas each individual can only see the costume presented by the other; the transparent set provides a visual corollary to this experience, the experience of theatre where life is literally an act, the actor literally the doll, the mechanisms all on show.The house takes on its own dimension of consciousness (or unconsciousness) in Whyman's production.

For an audience, especially a modern one, who knows in advance about Nora's subterfuge and her self-will, it is hard to know whether to laugh or weep with infuriation at a Torvald Helmer who is so intellectually and empathetically impoverished that he simply cannot see his world through the eyes of his wife, even as we can see right through his world on this set.

At the interval, one of my friends commented that Torvald's acting seemed a little wooden. But that is precisely the point - he has to be intellectually immobile, talking in clichés ("my most precious possession"; "I want to be the strong man") to contrast with Nora's independence. But as well as just a dramatic foil, Torval's stasismakes perhaps the most potent political point. Any hope we have that he, too, can change is delayed until after Nora slams the door behind her. That he, not Nora, ask the final question laden with potential - "something glorious?" - leaves the ending ultimately ambiguous rather than hopeful: will Torvald have it in him to strive to find realisation, or will he will have to wait, vainly, for something glorious simply to drop through the letterbox? There are no hints in Torvald's earlier performance to answer either way, which is perhaps - on reflection after the drama of Nora's exit - the most damning statement of the play. At least Nora's gender allows her to know her status as being lesser in society, and thereby provokes her to look inward upon herself as an individual; Torvald's masculinity gives him neither a broad vision of the world outside, nor a focus through which to reflect upon himself. John Kirk as Torvald plays the role with precisely the lack of fluency needed for this social puppet, with a tunnel vision engineered by his times. (Though, it should be noted, it seemed as if Kirk missed his cue a couple of times in the final act, which probably was not intended as part of his representation of this lack of fluency.)

Exemplifying this is the central Tarantella dance scene. Here choreographed with energy on the brink of vehemence, Torvald is captivated, aroused and in control as he conducts Nora's movements, but when Nora stops abruptly as Mrs. Linde enters with news of her vital conversation with Krogstad, Torvald is left bewildered by the sudden change and as he is shooed into his study by Nora. The discrepancy between his singular vision of an erotic doll-wife, and our wider vision of the symbolism behind the movements - of Nora's expression of her inner demons through the "rather too realistic" urgency of her dancing; of Mrs. Linde's return - again makes movement through the house a politicised act.

The Tarantella is a visual premonition of the final scene, when what has been subconsciously known by the audience is made overt in polemic. But even now, explicitly stated rather than implicit in motion, Torvald misreads the situation with horrible ignorance. When Nora's illegal contract is returned, rescuing Torvald from his ruin, he believes he can restore the situation in a moment, dressing his doll back in the clothes of which he has just disrobed her: "I wouldn't be a proper man if I didn't find a woman doubly attractive for being so obviously helpless."

But if Torvald is cognitively inert until the very final, preminitory words, Nora starts a Victorian, and ends a modern, even a prototypical feminist. Which is why it makes perfect sense for Wyman to transplant the play to the 1950s; as Peter Lathan observes:

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.

Like the late nineteenth century, the 1950s were a liminal period when the boundaries of politics were becoming stretched, but it was hard to balance its elastic potential against leaving the family home, proscriptive but warm, masculine but safe. When Mrs. Linde comes in from the winter cold to sit beside the fire, she is moving from insecure independence to - temporarily - comfortable conformity. Inversely, Nora leaves this setting to enter a chilly society on the brink of change. Yet because the domestic setting does, in spite of it all, work as a compromised idyll - with happy children, confidente maids, wealth - it is vital that we believe in Nora's individuality, trust that she would still be prepared to relinquish it. In this case, Nora (Tilly Gaunt) is one upon whom realisation dawns in a totally convincing way.

Nora has moments when she herself appears not dissimilar to Torvald. Having discussed Mrs. Linde's loss of her mother and her financial plight, Nora comments that Mrs. Linde is looking unwell: you ought to go to a spa, she suggests, in an naively ugly sort of affection. But if Nora displays the same lack of empathy - the ability to see through others - as Torvald, it is offset by the other dimensions and perspectives she embodies within her own fragile, effeminate frame. Like Walt Whitman revelling in his song of myself, Tilly Gaunt's Nora contains multitudes: she can be of an instant flirtatious, proud, manipulative, helpless, naive, sympathetic, girlish, maternal or gossipy. She is a doll, can wear any clothes, perform any act; her pleading with Torvald when she wants money - elegant arms extended, wrists flicking to his shoulder, skirt flying tantalisingly high as she moves - is hard even for the objective observer to resist, even though we see these actions for what they are, facile manipulations.

The trouble is that with the exception of her business loan, she has not adopted clothes of her choosing, but has had them put upon her by her gender, financial need, and social nicety: "I have been your doll wife, just as at home I was Daddy's doll child." It is this sense that Nora has always had the capacity to play any part, but this time will choose her own, that makes us have faith in that her ultimate decision is natural to her, rather than imposed by the dramatist to score a didactic point.

As she drip-feeds Mrs. Linde (and, vicariously, the audience) with information about her loan, she tells her that she dreams of seducing an elderly gentleman who will provide her with lots of money. Though Gaunt adopts a superficially gossipy tone here - it is a clichéd girlhood dream, after all - there is a darker undercurrent here. We fully believe that she could do this if she so wanted, and so when she tells Mrs. Linde that it is not the decrepit Dr. Rank who is her benefactor there is a sense that the audience themselves are not quite understanding Nora emotionally, not reading her correctly, even though we already knew in plot terms that Rank was not Nora's donor. The inevitability of the plot is in tension with the fluidity with which Nora performs and manoeuvres within and against its expectations.

Gradually, at the start of Act One, Nora peels away the layers of her secret: she took out a loan to pay for Torvald's rest cure, something he must not know about for fear of remission; the loan was from a mystery donor; she is herself paying back the loan by working, showing a financial acumen not normally associated with this Macaroon-munching spendthrift; the loan is from Krogstad. Then, from Krogstad, at the close of Act One come the damning revelations that expose her as having not been in control as she has narrated it: Krogstad will tell Helmer (so what, she impetuously replies, "then my husband will see for himself what a bad man you are"); the contract was invalid, having been signed by her father after his death. Don't you understand, he pleads, cajoles and implores, admirably caring about her as he sees in Nora the mirror of his own social downfall, you have broken the law.

When she then comes out that "then they must be very bad laws," we want to sympathise - Nora is right that the ends justified the means - but find it hard, because her rash lack of honesty does justify the trap in which she now finds herself at this, a literal end. Since Krogstad - diminuitive, harrassed - has suffered under the law having defrauded others for similarly sound motives, Nora for all her beautiful, batted eyelashes must be punished too. Society may be rigid, but it is only in representing that rigidity without any double-standards that the play can promote change. As with Torvald's rigidity, but in a different way, Krogstad's performance as a desperate but sympathetic man pleading for Nora to understand the legal nature of her plight lends some weight to Ibsen's assertion that this play is not about women's rights in particular, but human rights in general.

It is certainly not only a problem of gender, which is anyway just another costume, one Mrs. Linde, plainly dressed and fiercely motivated, has been able to cast off. It is not a problem of the errors one makes or the desires one has. It is a problem of individuality. This makes the play so powerful - just as she could have seduced Rank to attain the money, Nora could easily wheedle her way out of this hole, also. Torvald's reaction to Krogstad's first letter plays to a stereotype of the misled husband, and his joyous response to the returned contract is so self-indulgently celebratory, that we understand that, ruined or saved, Nora could adjust to accommodate herself to a new stereotype Torvald could make for himself: the deceived but forgiving husband.

But it is her refusal to do this even as she is at her most seductively potent, dressed in the bright red Capri costume of the tarentalla, that is the real glory. For all that it would resolve a plot and enact change of sorts, conforming to a type again would be to don a costume already made for her. So with Nora, it is not so much that she changes specifically, as that she accumulates potential to change in ways of her choosing. Torvald wants answers: won't she let religion guide her, what morals will she have, how can she leave her children, her sacred duty as a mother? Nora, confidently, admits that she has no answers or explanations. The difference is that when she does have answers, it will be she who supplies them. She is no longer a daddy's plaything - "I thought what Daddy thought" - she is an individual.

There are innate structural problems with Ibsen's play that the striking performances Whyman draws from her actors cannot counter. The final act is too long, and loses much of its dramatic momentum by the time of the infamous door slam. There are chronological flaws, as when Mrs. Linde leaves shortly after Krogstad to encourage him to return his letter, only to arrive at his house and find he has left for the country. Ibsen cannot quite resist the template of the "well made play" tradition with which he is working, with switches in plot being brought about artificially, through the arrival of letters at (un)fortunate moments. Tied to the demands of a plot of revelation, we are still some way from the modern drama of family crisis that we find in Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller, where the mere tremor of Mary's hands and encroaching fog (Long Day's Journey Into Night) or the rise and dimming of lights (Death of a Salesman) bring about revelation through an almost purely symbolic drive.

Whilst updating the play to the 1950s makes sense in historical terms as the decade of emergent second-wave feminism and political ferment - both subtexts to O'Neill's and Miller's work around that period - other historically-specific aspects lose out in the translation. The idea that one is biologically infected with the moral sins of the fathers (or mothers) seems too vehemently adhered too for a decade which would see the discovery of DNA and when the effects of social Darwinism were all too familiar through the Holocaust. Rank is hysterical that his decaying spine is suffering for the Epicureanism of his father; Nora reacts with utter horror when Krogstad tells her she is a criminal and she shoos her bewildered children violently away as if they might catch her syndrome with a mere touch; Torvald is conviced that Nora must never be allowed to see her children. These beliefs make some sense - we still implicitly feel that bad parents make for ASBO offspring - but the vehemence of Dr. Rank's, Nora's, and Torvald's reaction requires the scientific endorsement of social Darwinism and degeneration, backgrounds which had been lost by the 1950s, though absolutely intense in the late nineteenth century.

Reading Lists

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.

Literature That Speaks, Characters Who Live

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).

Stanley Fish on the Use of the Humanities

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.

A Reader Writes on Writing on Reading

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

The Art of Reading

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..."

A Literary Theory of Toilets

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...?

Postgraduate Diary: The Schisms of -Isms

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.

Two New Poems

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!

Willa Cather

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.