Just lately, I seem to be writing about something I read or saw or listened to in the past and that I’ve returned to later. I blame the internet. I, like my contemporaries, have been able to revisit things we experienced in our past, our childhood, before the internet made information and resources easier to access. No I can learn more about those things that coloured our lives pre-internet but that won’t make it into encyclopaedias or even be the subject of talking-heads nostalgia shows.
There’s not a day goes past without some relic of the near-past being laughed about or the subject of gentle nostalgia. I imagine the impulse to understand our origins, our culture, our past is old: but the use of the internet to do so is new. In fact, much of what is happening, like so much in the revolution of the internet, is happening for the first time. Sometimes it is simply the recording of some document that we thought lost.
Take this, a scan of an Argos shopping catalogue from the 1976 (for those that do not recognise the name, Argos is one of the UK’s largest general-purpose stores). It’s seemingly innocuous but actually it’s highly charged with memories for many of us. We might find toys we played with or stuff that was in our homes as a kid. it reminds us of a different time, perhaps more innocent. (For me, there was a great deal of delight in finding ‘Super Flight Deck’ in the toys section. It never really worked at its one trick. But it could have been so great). The website in which it appears, Retronaut, is devoted to such nostalgia. Its banner reads: ‘The past is a foreign country. This is your passport.’
For most, the subject of such wistful reverie is the reappearance of toys or sweets or other childish pursuits. But people can return, too – namely, celebrities. Some are like a bad dinner; you get a chance to encounter them twice. If you thought that D-list celebrity you couldn’t abide was gone forever then there’s always reality tv to offer them a second bite of the cherry. Some are funny, like Ozzy Osbourne, who returned to our screens in one of the grandaddies of all reality tv, The Osbournes. Other are a little sadder, like Freddie Starr wheezing an exit on 2011′s I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!
The internet also gives us a chance to return to perhaps more highly valued culture, something a little more substantial than the ephemera of our childhood. I’ve listened to and loved Primal Scream’s Screamadelica album and especially the song ‘Come Together’. At the beginning it has a sample of what sounds like a speech, in which the speaker exclaims: ‘This is a beautiful day… it is a new day… We are together… we are unified and all for the cause…’
That cause, unknown to me in its precise context for so long in, was black empowerment and the speech is taken from Jesse Jackson’s opening address from the Wattstax music festival, held in Watts, California in 1972. I’ve have often idly sung that phrase ‘It is a beautiful day… it is a new day’ first thing in the morning when I’m feeling especially bright: now I know where it came from:
This lead me finding out a bit more about Wattstax and that period American history. For me, the vibrant era of civil rights and social justice in the United States is especially interesting and in the case of the Watts festival, was captured wonderfully in a full length documentary.
Revisiting our past life in this way, through reviewing new information on ephemera or other culture that’s personal to us, becomes like a step into a future of new possibilities rather than a retreat to the cul de sac of inward-looking nostalgia. We are going back to the future, hoverboards or not.
Here, we find what I call a ‘resonant’ form of allusion because it invites consideration between the novel and another work entire. Despite this, apart from the highly significant and deliberate identical titling of the novel, shares little or no direct reference. Rather, we’re asked to look for perhaps more elliptical but no less telling themes, patterns and interest in both novel and critical text. Indeed, I find – in my cursory reading – such connections between texts that it could easily justify a more sophisticated analysis that I give in this intentionally short(ish) blog post.
In the broadest sense, Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending attempts to make sense of time in fiction. Unlike those who start such an enterprise by considering origins or beginnings, Kermode’s work is eschatological: that is, it is concerned with end times. Kermode seeks to understand the passing of time in fiction by suggesting that the ‘apocalyptic’ stories present in religious texts, for example, provide a framework – a patterning of time in the long perspectives of history – which makes possible the imagining of a beginning and a middle in fiction.
Time as lived is messy; we never know the world’s end, we only know our own in death (that is, arguably, without experiencing it). Those who imagined the apocalypse, the end of times (and we are thinking of writers of early religious texts especially) needed to impose a sense of ending to fulfil their narrative obligations as a morality tale. Only the ending of a morality tale gives the writer the opportunity to resolve and close meaning and effect, to teach a lesson. But, as we are aware even now, mankind’s prediction of an apocalypse is always false. Like those with vision of the apocalypse, fiction writers, too, are forced to impose a limit on time. As Richard Webster writes in his excellent account of Kermode’s work:
[…] no sophisticated fiction fails to make use of ‘peripeteia’ (a sudden change in the movement of the plot). Since ‘peripeteia’ is, by definition, something we do not expect, in assimilating it we are ‘enacting that readjustment of expectations which is so notable a feature of naive apocalyptic’ (p. 18).
Barnes, following Kermode, is therefore exploring formal, stylistic ways of encouraging us to adjust our expectations as to the influences and path of time. Our expectations are thwarted and as such, more closely reflect both the lives lived in the novel and our own lives. This is not to say that our lives will have an plot twist, a precise moment around which its meaning is resolved or suggested. Rather, that our lives are not lived as simply as a series of discrete episodes within a normative structure of beginning, middle and end. It is not jus the themes and plot which explores that; but the plot twist, the unexpected moment when we learn that things are not as they seem; the story’s ‘peripeteia’.
What’s more, the notion that a story makes sense in relation to how a life is ended has a resonance with the both the effect Adrian’s death had on Antony, and the ways in which Antony considers the success of his life and that of others as he learns more about Adrian’s circumstances.
Looking from a broader perspective, the idea of time as being part of the subject of a novel is certainly one that chimes with Barnes’ work. But it’s a sophisticated argument, as suggested in Kermode’s assertion that time – that moment between the tick and tock of the clock – is disorganised and chaotic:
The clock’s ‘tick-tock’ I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form; and the interval between ‘tock’ and ‘tick’ represents purely successive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise. (p. 45).
The role of fiction in general is to impose order on the chaos, to suggest a patterning of cause and effect between one moment and the next that doesn’t actually exist in time’s ‘purest’ sense. This works, according to Kermode, in all of fiction: but I think we can take Kermode’s interest in time, and the significance of the end-times as (at least in my cursory reading) as having some sense of connection with the notion that lives are made meaningful in that they will in personal death; and, more specifically, the lives of Antony and Veronica are coloured by the suicide of Adrian.
Returning to Philip Larkin, the subject of the reference to the poet in part 2 of my study, we find the discord between the long perspectives of our lives – the distant past, even the distant future, and beyond that future, incredibly difficult to understand and cope with:
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.
Like the ‘naive apocalyptics’ who sought to impose order through the endtimes, our difficulty with time lies partly in that we cannot know its end. Except that Adrian did by taking his own life when so young, obliterating the promise of a future and in doing so hoping to make sense of time and his life, just as the apocalyptics would have it.
In the first part of this three-part series, I wrote about the use of what I call ‘simple’ allusion in Julian Barnes’ novel, The Sense of an Ending. In this second part, I turn to a ‘complex’ allusion, where the novelist discusses ideas of accumulation, growth and loss by referring – indirectly – to the poetry of Philip Larkin.
Unlike our ‘simple’ example of allusion, where the author’s name – Stefan Zweig in this case – is referred to directly, the reference to Larkin is not direct and he is not alluded to by name. Despite this, I think we can learn a great deal about the themes of loss, accumulation and growth by thinking about Larkin’s work when reading The Sense of an Ending.
A key theme of the novel is that addition – of a lover, a job, a car and house, etc – needn’t mean a positive improvement. This is also a central preoccupation of some Larkin’s poetry, who I claim is indirectly referred to as ‘the poet’ in the novel, as we find in this extract (my emphasis):
‘He took his own life’ is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it… How few of us – we that remain – can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. As the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.
Here, I take ‘the poet’ to refer to Larkin and the poem in which he ‘pointed out’ this idea to be ‘Dockery and Son’. Here is the key section from the poem (the poem needs to be read in full to make complete sense):
[…] Dockery, now:
Only nineteen, he must have taken stock
Of what he wanted, and been capable
Of […] how
Convinced he was he should be added to!
Why did he think adding meant increase?
To me it was dilution.
The narrator of the poem, like Antony in the novel, compares himself to a peer and what he finds is that addition, rather than ‘increase’, means dilution. It is a compelling, counter-intuitive idea that is captured in Larkin’s brief lines and which is explored more fully in Barnes’ novel. Barnes, like Larkin, not only challenges the very things that we ‘accumulate’ – people, things, memories –but like Larkin, disputes the very idea of accumulation as a profitable gain.
The path that Antony follows is one that many of us take: we approach life without guidance from a series of carefully-considered plans, and go on to make decisions as the opportunity arises; rather than seek out new horizons, we continue on our path of least resistance. This is why Adrian is significant a character in the novel and for Antony – he takes ‘his own life’, which literally means suicide but also suggests he takes control, makes conscious decisions rather than fulfil our obligation in the status quo. Larkin again, from ‘Dockery and Son’:
Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got.
The notion of ‘hardening’, that almost physiological image, reminds us that accumulation may as equally lead to a stopping heaviness as well as a comfortable ballast. Larkin used a similar image in ‘Afternoons’, a poem that laments the loss of innocence and energy of whose lives have become unravelled by time:
Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.
The imagery of a person ‘thickening’ brings with it a sense of solidity; it is a comfortable state but a stagnant one and the weight of accumulations ties us to that very lethargy that removes from us the ability to shake off the weight of our encumbrances and start afresh. We’re tethered by our accumulations, like a balloon; they clip our wings.
I call these examples ‘complex’ because they do not directly refer to a specific poet or poem in name but they do share a more than coincidental connection to some of the themes. That is – it is complex because it is a significant theme, or motif, that runs throughout the novel. Referring to another treatment of this theme – by, in this case, the ‘poet’ – helps develop the meaning and effect of the allusion. It is true that the reference is short and does not reappear in quite this manner again. But it is a theme that lingers throughout the novel grows in complexity as we read on.
In the final part, I will discuss the ‘resonant’ allusive relationship between The Sense of an Ending and the work of literary criticism which shares its name.
Coda – accumulation and responsibility, from Sex Lies and Videotape
The notion that addition meaning dilution is not uncommon. In Steven Soderbergh’s film Sex Lies and Videotape (a deeply ‘intertextual’ film, in that it depends upon other films for effect), James Spader’s character Graham Dalton explains why he is reluctant to look for an apartment in this clip. Dalton finds the addition of keys – symbols of responsibility and security – an undesirable dilution to his freedom.
Over the course of the next three blog posts, I discuss the role of allusion – the reference to one text from within another – in Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending.
The Sense of an Ending is a novel that depends upon documents, or texts – its own and others – to create meaning and effect. Its ‘own’ documents are letters, diaries and emails that appear within the text to help create the plot, chart the unfolding of a life, and bring together two disparate characters through whom we come to understand more about how another lived and died. The ‘other’ documents are those texts to which it refers, its allusions – other literary works, including criticism – to create a resonance beyond its pages. The analysis contains spoilers.
My three areas of focus show different levels of sophistication in the use of allusion in the novel. In order, I discuss:
the simple allusion, as a brief reference to another author, which is not discussed in detail in the novel
the complex allusion, where I focus on novel’s interaction with the work of poet Philip Larkin, and particular the motifs of loss, accumulation, and age
the resonant allusion, where no detailed specific reference is made to another text but which occurs when the ideas of another text illuminate, reflect or chime with such resonance that we are compelled to read them alongside one another. In this case, that text is one that shares its name, Frank Kermode’s seminal critical work, The Sense of an Ending.
The novel is not highly allusive in the way that T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is; but it does use a few, carefully positioned texts that we can interpret as important and which tell us something about the novel. It is those allusions that are my interest here.
Some allusions are more easily discovered than others and when found, there is a range of complexity in terms of their meaning and effect. But here it’s worth remembering that it would be equally natural to miss or ignore such an allusion, too: the novel is self-standing, self-contained: and what I might find allusive because of my reading and experience might not be the same as what you think is important.
I start here with a ‘simple’ example of literary allusion, one where the name of an author appears in the text and we are invited to interpret what it means.
Part One: Simple allusion – judging a reader by the book they’re reading
The appearance of a book title or author’s name in a novel functions in an obvious sense to reveal something about their reader: as we judge people by the clothes they wear, the food they eat and the cars they drive, the book one reads seems to provide an equally penetrating insight, perhaps even more so. When Antony meets Veronica in the café, he asks:
What are you reading?
She turned the cover of her paperback towards me. Something by Stefan Zweig.
How we interpret the significance of this inclusion, in short, what we take the ‘cultural value’ of Zweig to be in this specific context, depends on how much we know about Zweig. So, who is Stefan Zweig and what does including a non-specific title mean? This is what Wikipedia says about him:
Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 23, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.
I think from this phrase we might think ‘he was one of the most famous writers in the world’ is most telling. I wonder how many people would have heard of Zweig, let alone read him. There is more on his reputation here:
Zweig was a very prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s, and befriended Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. He was extremely popular in the USA, South America and Europe, and remains so in continental Europe; however, he was largely ignored by the British public, and his fame in America has since dwindled. Since the 1990s there has been an effort on the part of several publishers (notably Pushkin Press and New York Review of Books) to get Zweig back into print in English. Zweig is best known for his novellas […], novels […] and biographies
As I’ve said, if we know nothing, then the allusion will mean little to us. If we know that he was once a well-known writer but that his reputation had suffered over the years we might reflect on how this relates to Veronica, who is reading him, and reinforce the book’s themes in general, such as the effects of time passing and the waning of reputation.
However, looking more closely, we find that he wrote a novel called Letter from an Unknown Woman. Wikipedia says of it: “it tells the story of an author who, while reading a letter written by a woman he does not remember, gets glimpses into her life story.”
Clearly, this has some resonance for The Sense of an Ending: Veronica, up until now, is more or less unknown to Antony, and how much he knows about her is a point upon which the plot hinges. Veronica may be reading a book that knowingly (for Barnes and his readers) echo her and Antony’s relationship. We can’t be sure, because all we know is that it is ‘something’ by Zweig, as far as Antony reveals. Such a paucity of information may reveal either an indifference, ignorance or rejection of Zweig by Antony – we cannot be sure. But it does introduce the idea that the value of the author’s name is seen through Antony’s perspective: therefore we need to make an imaginative leap if we are to interpret it through his eyes. Overall, the allusion is inconclusive in this respect, since we are uncertain as to what it means for Antony. It is equally significant that Veronica does not tell Antony what the novel is called or who it’s by, or offer comment or evaluation – he is left, like us, to interpret it without further information. Overall, it is a stark, brief and limited allusion which refuses to reveal a great deal whilst tantalising suggesting some interesting connections outside of the novel.
Despite the potential complexity of how we interpret what referring to Zweig means, I call it a simple example of literary allusion because Barnes does not discuss the reference in detail, nor does it illuminate the novel with any sophistication. It does not add a layer of complexity in terms of how it is expressed; rather, it is a single point of reference to another work amongst many others, implicit or explicit.
That is not to say it doesn’t have resonance for the reader, depending on how much they know about Zweig, his life and work. Rather, when we compare it to the other kinds of literary allusion in The Sense of an Ending, we can see that it lacks the depth and complexity by comparison. In a sense, reading Zweig is rather like an adjective, albeit a loaded one: it has a similar density to writing that Veronica was wearing (say) a ‘shabby’ coat, or curled her lip when she spoke (neither of which are true but are used for illustration).
It is to such another, more sophisticated example of allusion that I turn in the next part. Here, I will be looking at focussing on how the novel alludes to the work of the poet Philip Larkin, and especially the notion that accumulation – of a lover, a job, a car and a house – need not mean a positive addition to one’s life.
Trying to live and think as a rational human being is my goal. But perhaps the project is doomed. I’ve been reading David McRaney’s book You Are Not So Smart, which playfully (but no less convincingly) undermines the cherished belief that we are rational human beings.
For example, he writes about priming – “When a stimulus in the past affects the way you behave and think or the way you perceive another stimulus later on” – which leads us to an idea about how our thoughts maintain mental equilibrium without necessarily being grounded in reason, called the adaptive unconscious; and eventually, with a little research from Wikipedia, we find ourselves at the introspective illusion:
The introspection illusion is a cognitive illusion in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (called “Causal theories”) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
In short, we cannot be sure of where some of our mental states – and the beliefs, ideas, thoughts and feelings that accompany them – originate. The following experiment illustrates the potential for people to lack insight into their preferences and the ability, in the absence of a rational explanation, to ‘confabulate’, or invent, the reasons for doing so:
Subjects saw two photographs of people and were asked which they found more attractive. They were given a closer look at their “chosen” photograph and asked to verbally explain their choice. However, using sleight of hand the experimenter had slipped them the other photograph rather than the one they had chosen. A majority of subjects failed to notice that the picture they were looking at did not match the one they had chosen just seconds before. Many subjects confabulated explanations of their preference. For example, a man might say “I preferred this one because I prefer blondes” when he had in fact pointed to the dark-haired woman, but had been handed a blonde. These must have been confabulated because they explain a choice that was never made.
The large proportion of subjects who were taken in by the deception contrasts with the 84% who, in post-test interviews, said that hypothetically they would have detected a switch if it had been made in front of them. The researchers coined the term “choice blindness” for this failure to detect a mismatch.
In this case, any perceived (by the subject) rational explanation for making their choices was undermined by the sleight of hand. Despite this, most subjects didn’t notice; and of those, they offered what was to them a rational justification for their choice. One explanation for our difficulties with understanding our preferences, for example, is the sometimes unknown significance that objects possess for us. As McRaney suggests:
Just about every physical object you encounter triggers a blitz of associations throughout your mind. You aren’t a computer connected to two cameras. Reality isn’t a vacuum where you objectively survey your surroundings. You construct reality from minute to minute with memories and emotions orbiting your sensations and cognition; together they form a collage of consciousness that exists only in your skull. Some objects have personal meaning, like the blow-pop ring your best friend gave you in middle school or the handcrafted mittens your sister made you. Other items have cultural or universal meanings, like the moon or a knife or a handful of posies. They affect you whether or not you are aware of their power, sometimes so far in the depths of your brain you never notice.
When we interrogate the extent to which we are rational beings, the perceived dichotomy between religious belief and reason needs to be renegotiated. Julian Baggini, in his ‘Heathen’s Progress’ blog, argues that those who believe themselves to be rationalist need to recognise the ways in which their reason might be compromised:
Humanism [secular rationalism] is faced with the bind that its existence depends on maintaining a tension between finding what is good and worth celebrating in the human and having the intellectual integrity to see our species warts and all, which means being open to the possibility that we are not as great as we’d like to think we are.
‘Not as great as we like to think we are’ chimes with the notion of the illusion of introspection and our ability to make rational decisions, as we’ve seen in the ‘choice blindness’ example above. He goes on:
No self-respecting humanist can fail to have “doubt over humanity”, and although that need not occlude all the light, it is a dark cloud we have to live under.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The doubt over humanity that is an inevitable corollary of secular humanism cannot be neatly contained and eventually it spills over into doubt abut the capabilities of human reason. Indeed, the more you know about how the human mind works, the less reason we have to trust our rational capacities. For instance, Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism claims that secular reason leads to evolution, but evolution removes any reason we might have to trust secular reason. There is no reason to believe that a brain that evolved to help us survive in the pleistocene is a reliable tracker of truth. Darwin himself had this concern, writing that “the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy”.
Baggini summarises:
What all this suggests is that in practice there is no neat distinction between the logical and the psychological. Those who attempt to use pure reason cannot expect to succeed, while those who willingly allow psychological factors to affect their reasoning may be being more self-aware about their rational capacities than those who do not.
Despite this, we need not throw out the rational baby in the bath water of reason. Even if we are not completely rational beings and do not possess the kinds of intellects and cognitive apparatus to make us what we might sometimes aspire to be – rational human beings – we must continue using reason, whilst noting its limitations:
Kierkegaard saw the limits of reason as themselves a reason to make irrational leaps of faith. In a more modest form, his insight could help explain the rational non-rationality of much religious belief. [...] We choose faith so as not to be lost, because the alternative, reason, cannot enable us to find ourselves.
As an atheist, I’m not convinced by this. People who have a point are often nonetheless wrong, and often it’s precisely because of that point that they go wrong. Reason has its limits but we need to go right up against them, and for my money faith sees these limits and gives up on reason too soon.
Nonetheless, the mere fact that a serious argument can be made against the coherence of relying on human reason alone not only gives us atheists a way of understanding religion more sympathetically, it also suggests that the limits and role of reason has been a relatively neglected area of debate between believers and non-believers.
In rational discourse, it is not enough to simply immerse yourself in the ideas and arguments of others, but to understand – where possible – the extent to which your ideas are influenced by unconscious processes. You must know thyself as well as know thy enemy.
I won’t do anymore throat-clearing before starting the list other than to say that this list might equally (and more accurately) be called ‘stuff which I listened to / read / watched, etc but that didn’t come out in 2011′. Although many of them did appear for the first time in 2011, many didn’t – this list just means I encountered them in 2011. Since I have an almost preternatural way of seeking out and sharing what you’ve already seen / done /read, this comes as hardly a surprise.
So, that said, here they are, in no particular order…
Favourite song - ’Video Games’ by Lana Del Rey
I read on Twitter from Caitlin Moran that she had more or less repeatedly listening to Lana Del Rey’s song, ‘Video Games’, all summer long. Clicking the link, I could hear why. It’s amazing. Best seen as well as heard – the video and song work seamlessly together – it has topped the polls for many others, so I’m hardly being original – a theme that perhaps is true of all my list. This piece nicely sums up why we like it. I like it because it will forever remind me of my little bike tour, where I sang it, if not word perfect then with gusto (and aloud), for most of the way.
Favourite album – The Courage of Others by Midlake
I started listening to The Courage of Others in 2010 and I haven’t stopped playing this regularly since. It was the same with Vanoccupanther in 2009. The Courage of Others might 2012′s favourite album, too – I wouldn’t bet against it. I know it will always remind of being here in France and the mountains in particular. It’s so tied up with memories it’s hard to think of anything else which has touched me like it.
Favourite book(s), article
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
‘Two Paths for the Novel’ by Zadie Smith
I’m opening up the idea of a ‘favourite’ book by including two books, both published outside of 2011 and one of which I read in 2009; and by including an article. It’s a bit sneaky, I know. Bear with me and I’ll explain.
Remainder is one of those books that helps you rethink the boundaries of fiction and offer a glimpse of where it might be heading. There are problems with it: the forensics of assembling some of the scenes can drag and some of the red herrings seems a little contrived, by even both of those approaches illustrate how this book is different. That said, it is brilliantly conceived and is packed full of ideas – what time means; how we construct reality; the difficult of being authentic; public and private lives. There’s so much there to think about. Its style is deceptively light: it’s a complicated book with an unforgettable ending that seems to capture what it means to be living now.
I wouldn’t say that either book is ‘about’ cricket but both contain an element of the fine game, so that’s my ill-conceived ‘hook’ to bring them together. Netherland is a novel about being lost in a new country; about expatriation and changing identities; about new worlds and the old. As such, it spoke to me a little following my move to Switzerland, then France. The character of Ramkissoon is brilliantly drawn, the narrator convincing. Alas, it dies a little by the end; but what comes before is enough.
As good as these books are, I would suggest they are best read in conjunction with Zadie Smith’s perceptive work of comparative analysis which considers both books and their contribution to the identity of the contemporary novel. I think Smith (who also wrote a brilliant analysis of the effect that computers have on us, ostensibly as a discussion of Jaron Lanier’s book You are not a Gadget and David Fincher’s film, Social Network) offers two paths that fiction might take, illustrated by these two novels. Remainder and Netherland diverge in many ways, not least in realism and technique – one more conventional, the other ‘experimental’ (that dread word). It’s ok, though – we can read both.
Favourite internet meme - Ultimate dog tease (hungry dog)
In our house, something that is especially good is now referred to as ‘the maple kind’. If a video is good enough to get you starting you own, minor meme then it has my vote. Honourable mention goes to Fenton. Unusually, it’s dogs, not cats, that rule the roost.
Favourite restaurant - Bistrot des Halles de Rives
This unprepossessing place appears to offer very little if judging by appearances. Sandwiched between the stalls in the indoor (admittedly, gourmet) food market in Geneva, there really is (for me) only one dish – the steak frites equivalent, served with buerre Parisien and garnish (a rather lonely half tomato). It is uniformly superb. I have to keep returning to make sure they retain their standards.
Favourite computer game - Dead Space 2 (Playstation 3)
I played Dead Space 2 before the first version and nearly didn’t play either. I played the first Dead Space in demo and thought to difficult and unexciting. I was wrong – the difficulty is just right in both games and it could hardly be said to be boring. Rather, the often samey scenes – both games are set onboard spaceships – are deliberately crafted to appear claustrophobic; their uniform design appears authentic and contrasts well with the horrors you find within. A superb game, superior in all departments to any other I’ve played this year.
Favourite Tweet / Status Update
This tweet made me laugh when I first read it – always a good sign:
tashapotamus
#midnight #snack
It introduced a whole new way of thinking about Twitter for me – no content, only metadata. Wow. Perhaps this is how we will communicate in the future – perhaps the modern aside (or soliloquy) will make the hashtag its vehicle? Who knows. This just made me laugh.
Favourite gadget - Apple iPad
I’ve used this more than any other single gadget, mostly for ebook reading, but also for travel – it’s 3G is useful for maps and for learning more about the place your in. I can’t imagine life without it now – and the new iBooks night reader has made it even more useful.
Favourite blog - ’Heathen’s Progress’, Julian Baggini, The Guardian (Comment is Free)
The latter half of the year saw the start of philosopher Julian Baggini’s excellent blog on philosophy and belief, Heathen’s Progress. This series has sought to further understand the nature of belief as it is experienced. It suggests that rather than a single set fixed dogma, believers often have individual ideas about how to characterise their faith. It has sought to understand, if not to reconcile, without fundamental compromise. The comments are also unexpectedly good; like so many blogs, the author’s by line should be supplemented with a thanks to those who comment.
Favourite photo that I took - Tate Modern (version 5)
Tate modern (Version 5)
I had some trouble with this photo. I asked my Twitter contacts if they could help and they made some good suggestions. But still I couldn’t get the crop right. Even now, when I look carefully, it doesn’t fully work. Still, it’s an interesting image and one that I like because it happened completely spontaneously. They are sitting where I had just sat, to have a beer and a sandwich and watch people flow over the bridge across the Thames.
Favourite photo that someone else took – Black Macaque Self Portrait (David Slater)
You may have heard the story of a photographer – David Slater – who had his camera stolen by a black macaque, who then went on to take photographs of itself, like the one below. A great story – and some accomplished photos. Honourable mention to all those excellent photos I’ve seen on Flickr, too
Copyright David J Slater / Caters
Favourite television programme - The Hour
I think Mad Men was excellent again, now at Season 4. But the show that sticks in my mind was The Hour. It approached Mad Men’s mix of private and public politics – the grand and the great, the intimate and the secret – and I loved (again, like Mad Men) the period feel, only this time it British. Well worth seeing, I hope they make another series.
Favourite film - Rabbit Hole
I was completely surprised by Rabbit Hole (2010). I think Nicole Kidman plays some interesting parts and acts well but I was suspicious it might have suffered from the Hollywood gloss. It hasn’t. It’s very moving, horribly so around half way in – but it captures the horror that few of us will hopefully never know so beautiful and with such dignity. It was also superb at the dynamics of relationships and the sudden escalation of marital arguments.
Favourite artwork - Isenheim altarpiece
I saw the Isenheim altarpiece for the first time this year. I’ve written about it elsewhere (with photos) so I won’t repeat that, suffice to say it was incredible to see in the flesh.
Favourite memory – pitching a tent by the lakeside on my bike tour
Camping by the lake, Provence
Aside from all those wonderful times I have shared with Jennie (and which remain private), my bike tour provided me with the most pungent memories. But which one? Starting off, thinking I had forgotten to pack something – then relaxing and starting to enjoy it the ride? Arriving on a sweltering hot day in The Camargue, the journey over, and sitting in a bar to order a beer – when the waiter took my dry bidons and filled them with ice and water? All of these – but this one, moreso – making camp on the banks of a lake in Provence; cooking dinner on my portable stove; and looking over the lake, listening to the cricket on BBC TestMatch Special. Oh happy day.
There is a corollary between key texts on a given subject – known as ‘canonical texts’ – and the most prominent contacts in online social networks on a given subject.
That social networking contact might be an individual on Twitter; an institution on Facebook; a photostream on Flickr; or a business web presence and so on. The important point is that the contact is ‘canonical’: it is one to whom we are recommended to turn through a consensus of opinion, either through word of mouth online, or through ‘recommendation services’ such as that found through Twitter’s ‘Discover – Who to follow’ function, for example.
I call these ‘canonical contacts’. These contacts are to social networking what Shakespeare, Chaucer and Jane Austen are to the literary canon.
As such, I would argue that canonical contacts have similar problems and benefits to the textual canons which preceded them and which have been discussed at length. The following are a cursory considerations of the kinds of objections made regarding the textual and canonical contacts.
1. Canonical contacts are not chosen by us (or by anybody). The mechanism for establishing a network has many paths that lead in the same direction – to a set of established (not by us) canonical contacts. This canon is handed to us, conveniently readymade and therefore narrows the perspectives otherwise open to us.
2. Undermining the potential of chance encounters. This is one of the ways in which ‘recommendations’ – the removal of chance encounters and serendipity – is damaging to our to the development of knowledge and understanding. Establishing a ‘canon’ is one way of reducing the number of available options for learning and removing the notion of ‘chance’ encounters. How do we learn if we do not make the mistakes – and how far is not following a canonical contact a mistake?
3. Who has the authority to determine a canon? In conventional terms, a canon reflected the choices of scholars, course designers, the academy, Government advisors, schools and many other individuals and institutions of power. An objection is that it reinforced the liberal, white, male culture of the time. In addition to these similarities, there are differences worth exploring: in terms of social networking contacts, it is Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, who recommend contacts based upon their algorithms. Importantly, it is also the sharing online of useful contacts by users themselves.
4. Homogenisation of culture. Where we all choose the same sources of information, we are likely to not just arrive at similar conclusions, but only ask those questions that are within the intellectual framework of the contacts in which we are immersed.
5. We are not beautiful unique snowflakes. Online, we are free to choose our information from many sources. But we already know that using search engines such as Google’s influences, necessarily, the availability of information online. We are free to choose any contact and we might consider our choices as unique. Yet, I imagine a high degree of consensus between users when considering the same subject. I speculate we do not (often) have a high degree of individuality in our choices: we are not beautiful unique snowflakes. We choose the same people when wanting to know about the same subjects.
There are many ways to defend either the textual canon or the canon of contacts. Certainly, in a potentially bewildering array of users, websites, services and so on, it is often wise and natural to gravitate to the most popular and/or the ones recommend by people we trust. I wonder if we are currently in a similar position to the one John Searle outlines below, when he considers the historical placing of the western literary canon:
There is a certain irony in this [i.e., politicized objections to the canon] in that earlier student generations, my own for example, found the critical tradition that runs from Socrates through the Federalist Papers, through the writings of Mill and Marx, down to the twentieth century, to be liberating from the stuffy conventions of traditional American politics and pieties. Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude, the “canon” served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. Ironically, the same tradition is now regarded as oppressive. The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.
Searle, John. (1990) “The Storm Over the University”, The New York Review of Books, December 6, 1990.
There is much more to think about on this subject. I’m not the first, of course, to recognise some of the negative effects of reducing chance encounters, say; or the ways in which search engines effectively narrow our scope. But thinking about canonical contacts – and I had in mind individuals on Twitter especially – leads me to think that we can use our understanding of the decades of debate on the textual (and specifically literary canon) to think about the ways in which we might choose the contacts we follow and what this means for us and education.
There is a pithy old joke, told again and again, perhaps most famously by Woody Allen at the beginning of his film Manhattan, that summarises my view of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It goes something like this: two women walk into a restaurant. One says – the food was terrible; to which the other replies – yeah, and such small portions, too.
Well, following Allen’s gag: Ulyssses is both difficult and, at over 900 pages in my edition, there’s a lot of it.
So, how do you approach reading it for the first time? That phrase ‘first time’ is deliberate because I think it’s likely that it will need more than one reading. I hope, because I think it merits it, that you’ll want to do that – I do, having just finished it. Here was my approach, along with one or two ideas, on how you might undertake a reading of Ulysses. I chose 11 points of guidance because it seemed to follow Ulysses’ perverse and contrary spirit. I hope you find them all useful.
1. Ulysses is a work of art to be enjoyed, not an obstacle to be overcome. I say this because it’s not always how I felt. I had to remind myself that in the most difficult and obtuse passages, I was reading this to be enlightened, moved, amazed, awed. If you can keep this in mind, it will help motivate you and keep your mind open its delights.
2. You’ll need other books to help you. Ideally, you should have read Homer’s Odyssey (and remember it). In my view – and this is not shared by others – you’ll also need a commentary. I used Harry Blamires book, which is a line-by-line discussion, written in continuous, clear and concise prose.
I would also strongly recommend reading T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Waste Land’, along with notes that explain it. This gives an idea of the flavour of the much grander enterprise of reading Ulysses: both are Modernist masterpieces, so you’ll learn something about context; both are difficult and display a variety of style and allusions; both will introduce you to the idea of reading a primary text (the poem and novel), alongside notes on it.
3. You’ll need lots of structured time. As I’ve said, the novel runs in at over 900 pages in my Penguin edition. I read much of the novel in very small chunks, around 20-30 pages at a time. If I had more time, or the inclination, I would read more. For every sitting I would read the Blamires’ commentary, too, so it’s quite an undertaking. Moreover, I would recommend structuring your time a little: say, devote the next month to reading 20 or so pages per day.
4. Embrace the idea of a second reading. In a sense, this is a cop-out. It means those thorny issues can be postponed until the next time. But it also means that you won’t get so demotivated by the difficulty because you know you can return to it later.
5. Write with a pencil in your hand. This is another way of saying ‘be an active reader’. Make notes on things you need to look up. But – importantly – not too many. You might need to leave some things alone for now. Since Ulysses condenses deep reflection on the most mysterious and sophisticated questions of life, you can’t expect to cover it all. Just note those things that will aide your reading or take your interest.
6. If you’re not confused, you haven’t ‘got’ it. Get used to the idea that not all of Ulysses’ ‘problems’ will be solved in either one or several readings. The reading is extremely difficult in some sections and sometimes you’ll wonder why you’re reading it all. Some of the problems of the novel will remain mysteries. That’s ok.
7. Absorb and believe that reading Ulysses is unlike anything you’ve read before. When reading, as with many things, we often use our past experiences to get to grips with a new idea or format. This is unlikely to be the case with Ulysses. It’s not quite like anything else, which is one of the reasons it’s so highly praised. Reading ‘The Waste Land’ (see Point 2, above) will help in at least introducing the process of reading.
8. If you can’t get past a difficult part, skim read it and read the commentary… But don’t read the commentary instead of reading the novel. Although everything in me says this is bad advice, if it’s the difference between giving up and going on, then read what you can, how you can and the commentary be your guiding light. For example, Part 1, Episode Three (‘Proteus’) appears early in the novel [note that your version may not be divided into these named sections - Blamires and others do so, however]. It’s a notoriously difficult read and had me completely puzzled and demotivated. So, I read it, absorbed what I could without becoming anxious about the finer points of interpretation, I read the commentary – then moved on. I think many people stop here, when the novel really becomes difficult. Don’t be one of them.
9. Preview your reading by learning more before you start. I knew quite a bit about Ulysses already and it had coloured my reading. I have done this for other books and it has worked well. Since Ulysses is not plotted in the conventional sense – that is, you’re unlikely to find most satisfaction in how it resolves itself at the end – then I think it’s fine to learn more about it. It’s the telling, not the tale (on the whole), so previewing the structure and learning more about it online might help ‘position’ it as you read. The wikipedia entry is useful in this respect, offering short summaries of the sections.
10. Augment your reading with an unabridged audiobook. There are unabridged versions and so you’ll get the full text. Perhaps these are most useful when supplementing your own reading of the text, for which there is no replacement in my view. Perhaps listening to a difficult section again, in the car on the way to work, might help.
11. Don’t give up! Reading Ulysses is probably one of the most difficult enterprises we can start when reading. But the rewards are immense. Other books will seem easy, you’ll be more popular with your friends and you’ll find life’s slings and arrows bounce off you harmlessly. Well, not quite. But you will have achieved something that many claim and far fewer actually have and what’s more – you will have engaged with a work every bit as good as people say it is.
Good luck with your reading and do share your thoughts and experiences here below.
When someone close dies it’s not uncommon to imagine them still alive, still there. It can happen in the most banal of circumstances. For example, when the phone rings, one imagines it might be them on the line, ready to talk, as before. The realisation that it isn’t them – can’t be, won’t ever be – follows quickly after. In this way, we may feel their death many times over.
The same is true of Christopher Hitchens, who has died from cancer. It is hard for me to accept anything other than he is still there. But unlike the example above, I didn’t know him at all in person. Like many, I ‘knew’ him, whatever that might mean, from reading his books and articles, and from listening to him in argument and debate. As I’ve said before, feeling that you know someone you have never met is often most acutely expressed by how we refer to them. For especial intimacy, we might use the first name, or a nickname, of someone who is otherwise a stranger to us. For many, he became simply ‘Hitch’ – or perhaps ‘The Hitch’, the definite article reflecting our unspoken understanding that the likes of him cannot be found elsewhere, or again.
Like the bereaved waiting by the phone, suffice to say that I keep thinking that, when the next edition of Vanity Fair is published, there will a new article written by him. Perhaps, for a short while, there will be: we know that a posthumous publication, provisionally entitled Mortality, will collect Hitchens’ thoughts on death and dying, drawn from his final articles for Vanity Fair. Eventually, however, publication of new writings will stop and those times we listen to him will be from the archive.
How should I remember him? Certainly not to say ‘rest in peace’ since, like Hitchens, I don’t believe he is ‘resting’ anywhere. Annihilation doesn’t offer such a cosy future. Nor in hagiography. Like many, again, I disagreed with some of what he wrote. I think he made mistakes, inevitable perhaps if you consider his scope and engagement. Besides, thinking of him in godlike terms would have a perverse irony given his infamous dismantling of deities in god is not great. I don’t think it would have been the kind of irony he would have enjoyed. Once again, and as I have said before, it is his passing – the irreversible loss of the potential to live more, enjoy more of his only life – that I regret, as much as I regret the pain to his friends and family and all who benefitted from his work.
So, instead, I bought a bottle of his beloved Johnnie Walker Black Label, poured myself a glass, and listened to him read his autobiography, Hitch-22. He spoke of his mother, Yvonne, in ways beautiful and touching. When I had drained the glass, I went downstairs and stacked his books into a pile alongside those that I will read next, to read again.
Reading Hitchens has been in education in learning how to live. In the final months of his life, reading him has been an education in learning how to die. No writer, no one, can hope for anything more.
Planning a visit to Colmar, a small town in France’s Alsace region a few miles outside the border with Germany, I came across a guide to the Unterlinden Museum where the altarpiece is on show. It jogged a memory: I remembered reading somewhere that the Isenheim altarpiece is widely regarded as one of the most important works of Western art.
The Isenheim altarpiece, in the Unterlinden Museum
Despite this, few appear to have heard of it and fewer have seen it. Colmar is not central to the conventional tourist trail, except perhaps during December, where it gives itself entirely to Christmas celebration. In a quiet corner away from the colourful markets, the processions and performances, is a beautiful museum, of which the altarpiece is the jewel in the crown.
The resurrection panel, perhaps the strangest of all
The altarpiece, thought to be the work of Matthias Grünewald and painted between 1506 and 1515. It is tied to the history of the Antonite Monks and particularly to Saint Anthony’s Fire, now known as ergotism, an often fatal disease caused by poisoning. There are several accounts of the altarpiece, including elaborate praise from J.K. Huysman. The altarpiece was once a series of panels that were configured according to the Christian calendar. The following model shows how those panels were once assembled.
The altarpiece was a series of panels, now separated. This model shows how they were originally assembled
The paintings are some of the most striking I have ever seen. Upon entering the long room where the altarpiece is kept, one meets the remarkable ‘crucifixion’ first panel.
The crucifixion panel. This had special resonance for Antonite Monks and their followers
I was left with the feeling that the paintings were ‘strange’ and that I was witnessing something outside of my experience of art (such as it is). I meant this both as a way of describing the effect they had on me – the are awe-inspiring, as well as quite unsettling. But it also captures their provenance and their reputation: they appear to have been created outside of the normal limits of the human imagination, outside of arts history almost, especially the resurrection panel.
I thought, too, how right Harold Bloom was when he said that the defining principle of the greatest works of art is that they could be considered ‘strange’. Bloom, writing about literature in his notorious Western Canon, had Dante and Shakespare in mind, but I think it equally appropriate for the Isenheim altarpiece:
One mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.
I will ‘never altogether assimilate’ the strangeness of effect, form and history that I found in the altarpiece.
