Alberto Manguel, With Borges

His library (which like that of every other reader was also his autobiography) reflected his belief in chance and the rules of anarchy. ‘I am a pleasure-seeking reader: I’ve never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.’

Alberto Manguel, With Borges

If he had a favourite literary genre (he disbelieved in literary genres) it was the epic. In the Anglo-Saxon sagas, in Homer, in the gangster sagas and westerns of Hollywood, in Melville and in the mythology of the Buenos Aires underworld, he recognised the same themes of courage and battle. For Borges, the epic themes is an essential human hunger, like that for love or happiness, or misfortune.

…He loved detective novels. He found in their formulae the ideal narrative structures which allow the fiction writer to set up his own borders and to concentrate on the efficiency of words and images made of words. He enjoyed significant details. He once observed, as we were reading the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Red-Haired League’, that detective fiction was closer to the Aristotelian  notion of a literary work than any other genre. 

Alberto Manguel, ibid.

Isobel Colegate, The Summer of the Royal Visit

Allow me to begin with a digression about Gosford Park. Whilst it’s certainly a great film, it has one major flaw. No, I’m not referring to Stephen Fry’s inspector, although his performance does feel feel like a major tonal misjudgement with the rest of the narrative. An intrusion into this naturalistic and closely observed world of a character who surely properly belongs in a parody of Agatha Christie. In fact, I’d argue that it almost manages to unbalance the rest of the film. No, the film’s real major flaw is retrospective: the boost that it appears it gave to the career of Julian Fellowes. I’ve read somewhere that little of his actual script survives, that it was used primarily as a basis for the improvisations of the cast. If that is the case, then we should be grateful that the producers engaged the services of Robert Altman, giving the ageing American filmmaker the opportunity to produce a final late (almost) masterpiece.

Nevertheless, Fellows’s script shared in the adulation - didn’t it win awards? - and now we have Downton Abbey. Personally I’d thought that Downton Abbey was nothing more than recycled story lines stolen from Upstairs, Downstairs, only this time from the point of view of the masters. A waste of my time, so I’ve not bothered to watch it. Only a lot of people appear to have latched onto Isobel Colegate’s 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, as a source, taking it as a guide to work out what might happen in future episodes (although surely the end is easy to predict; the aristocracy declines and the house is now administered by the National Trust, assuming it wasn’t demolished after the Second World War. In other words, History happens, despite whatever the nostalgic longings of the creators and audience might wish for). The Shooting Party has recently been republished as a Penguin Classics, with an admiring introduction from Fellowes (Fellowes seems to have a sideline in providing introductions to books which can be made to fit into his idealised reactionary view of an idealised British past), although I think I’m correct in saying that he hadn't actually had read the book when he created Downton Abbey.

*

The Shooting Party was itself made into a film in 1985 - in outline it sounds very like that ur-text of the country house narrative, Le Regle de Jue - and won awards. It’s clearly the work of hers which is going to be remembered before the rest of her work. My paperback of her later 1991 novel already advertises itself on the cover as being by the ‘Author of…’. No doubt because of the film.

*

“I can do all sorts of voices. I’m virtually a ventriloquist.”

What I wasn’t expecting to find when I started reading The Summer of the Royal Visit was such a visionary novel. A novel which is much closer in feel to the writing of Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt than the kind of historical fiction with which I was mentally associating her work. It makes me eager to actually read The Shooting Party, and wonder what kind of novel I’m going to find.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t provide plenty of the pleasures of historical fiction. There’s plenty of finely judged detail of the past. We’re in a period which is towards the end of Victoria’s reign, in a provincial city which is now a faded reflection of its former glory. I take it to be Bath, with the references to the healing waters, but it’s only ever referred to as ‘the City’, or else more intimately as ‘our City’. Two larger entwined public events overshadow the narrative: the royal visit of the title in which Victoria blesses the opening of a new library and presides over a royal procession through the City, and an architectural competition over the design for a new hotel which is at least partly intended to revive the fortunes and reverse the decline of the City.

In the foreground we have a varied cast which includes the dignitaries and provincial nobility of the City, retired soldiery, a deceitful scholar engaged in a study of the Druids, a theosophist, a priest struggling with his faith, and a youthful poet who is suffering from consumption.

Described like that, it might easily sound as though many of the characters are all late Victorian cliches. There’s something in that I suppose, although Colegate is careful not to simply give in to cliche. Her consumptive poet, Peter Tilsley, dies before producing any work of significance. Yet far from being an undiscovered genius, a Keats at the other end of the century, we're explicitly told that his work is mostly sentimental and without a great deal of merit. He’s actually the type who longs to produce work of real visionary quality, but who simply lacks the talent. We can say that all great writers start with the longing to be a writer, but there must be as many (if not more) who have the same longing but are never able to achieve their ambitions. Sometimes this will be because they are unable or unwilling to put in the work required, but as often it must be because they simply lacked the necessary talent.

But in many ways, these are as much our ‘cliches’ of the Victorian past, an attempt to rediscover the doubt and sexuality that we imagine must have lurked behind the stiff facade of Victorian culture as it's come down to us. The pieces that novelists of the time were unable (or unwilling) to include. The central character in the novel (if it can be said to have one) is one Stephen Collingwood, a priest who has buried himself in his vocation following the death of his wife in childbirth, but finds himself unable to properly connect with the impoverished parishioners among whom he lives, and finds himself doubting his faith.

There’s also a modern narrator providing us with the story the story. A retired historian, he’s a familiar figure from works such as Graham Swift’s Waterland and Maureen Duffy’s Capital, equally visionary novels with ambiguous claims on history. Remaining nameless throughout, he intrudes at various points to discourse on both the past and his late twentieth-century present. His motives for researching this tale of his city stem from his reaction against the contemporary political situation of the world; he is “…simply looking for someone who went this way before me and left a sign on the wall beside the road.”

Ever so quietly then, this is a profoundly anti-Thatcher novel (it was published in 1991, after all). It speaks for the value of community, a value which is extended to all. It's not at all the kind of reactionary nostalgia which produces a work like Downton Abbey, but a novel that digs into the late Victorian past, exposing its nerve endings and moral failings. In fact, much of the material feels like it could  easily belong in an up to date novel about the contemporary early nineties, only displaced back a century or more. One of the secrets lurking behind the Victorian facade is the abuse of children, an issue that became incredibly prevalent in various parts of 90s culture. Arguably we still have a culture which is obsessed with childhood, for better or worse.

The other aspect of 90s culture, which we seem to have moved past in some ways as it's simultaneously become a part of the cultural air, is the popular desemination of post modernism. The winning hotel design for instance, first seen in a vision from the novel’s fake psychic, Madame Sofia, consists of, "Portals and porticos, arches, window on window, an immense thing, and then we have turrets and lookout posts and what can seem to be an little houses from Simla on the roof.” No doubt this is a parody of late Victorian eclecticism, but in it’s profusion of details and borrowed influences, it also feels inescapably postmodern. Elsewhere the city is repeatedly likened to a stage set.

The are no grand narratives. Nothing is certain here. We might even define it as a kind of ‘radical’ nostalgia.

*

In theory (and goodness, hasn't post modernism generated a lot of theory!), post modernism elides any stable difference between the present and the past. I don't feel that that has ever been my experience though. The proliferation of pastiches and knowingly fake histories that postmodernism has produced seems rather to serve to reinforce a huge distance between the present and the past. It's a very discomforting sensibility.

*

I’ll leave you with our narrator’s lovely, melancholy consideration of history's losses:

You can’t teach history for thirty years and be against change; equally you can’t help noticing that it nearly always brings loss as well as gain. The ratio is hard to determine afterwards and almost impossible at the time. 

*

Actually, no, one more thing which I haven’t managed to fit into the main body of my review. Partly because I find it so confusing.

This is also a novel which is concerned to reclaim and acknowledge the visionary aspects of Victorian culture (hence the theosophist, Madame Sofia, and the research into Druids).

But this also creates a problem, in the character of Petchumah, the South Indian wife of Wilf, the retired soldier with whom Stephen Colegate lodges. The novel is clearly acknowledging the reality of Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that I think is often overlooked: the relationships which occurred between soldiers and women from the cultures they were ostensibly oppressing. It's not a meeting of equals between the two cultures, rather it's an acknowledgement of the messiness of humans, the fact that people can't be fitted straightforwardly into a convenient cliche. Consequently, Petchumah has been brought back to our cold island. We hear little of her own voice; mostly, she's talked about by other characters, including her husband. Neither of them are principal characters in the text. But I still feel that her presence in the text is one of its strengths, because it jars nicely with our  typical stereotype of what late Victorian reality and culture was like.

Like everyone else in the town she is viewing the royal procession, accompanied by her husband, Peter Tilsley and Stephen Colgate. As the monarch passes, Peter’s enthusiasm gets the better of him, and the writing rises to a genuinely visionary pitch:

Petchumah, so pushed forward, put her hands together in her traditional greeting and bowed her head in homage. The black-clad figure turned, leant forward, seemed to speak; the royal hands - both royal hands - were half outstretched. In this small northern city the might and mystery of India, the gardens, the temples, palaces, the tiger-haunted forests, the snow-covered hills, the stone-carved elephants four thousand years old, the sacred rivers, the merciless deserts, the ancient cruel gods, bowed in homage in the person of Petchumah in her cerise and blue and silver sari before the plump elderly widow of German extraction into whose slightly protuberant eyes an extraordinary tenderness had come. Again and again Petchumah made her obeisance. Again and again the palms, the plains, the crowded bazaars, the ancient suffering, the distant wisdom based themselves, and the outstretched hands seemed to wish to bless, and the royal lips when they moved to say - or at least Peter said that was what they had said - ‘Beloved India.’

It’s really hard to know quite how to take this passage, to understand what’s going on here. India is reduced to a series of familiar cliches (and it all sounds like rather a lot to place on the shoulders a poor single individual too). At the same time, Victoria’s mystique is punctured. Throughout her appearance in the novel the Queen's magnificence simply dazzles all of the residents of the City with whom she comes into contact. Here, we see her as she was, the elderly woman who would have much preferred to stay hidden away in mourning and had to be forced to engage with her subjects. At the same time, any safe notion of Englishness is complicated by the noting of the Queen’s ethnicity. So, seriously, what the hell is going on here? There’s undoubtedly something deeply offensive about it. But it also feels like an extraordinary balancing act? The writing is genuinely stirring, if also somewhat mystifying.

If anything, it feels as though the writing has got out of control of the author here. The novel contains several other genuinely visionary moments which are much more successfully achieved.

But it also alerts us to a potential pitfall of the visionary mode: it all depends on just whose vision you’re in.

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (5)

Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

This is one children's book that I know I did try to read when I actually was a child. I forget how old I was exactly, but I know that I was already aware that this was a 'classic', and that therefore it was something I ought to read. Alas, I gave up after only a few chapters, finding it rather boring.

As a consequence, I didn't watch what is apparently a much loved and fondly remembered adaptation for the BBC in 1989. I think one of my brothers must have done, because I do have several memories of scenes from it: a sunlit garden verging on something paradisal, and a young friend to enjoy it with.

In fairness to my younger self, I can understand why I might have found it rather boring. There's very little in the way of plot. Sent away to stay with his aunt and uncle because his brother has measles, young Tom finds himself able to slip back in time when he crosses the threshold of the backdoor at midnight when the unreliable grandfather clock strikes thirteen. Their flat is part of what was formerly a country house in the late 19th century, and it is the lost garden to which he returns each night. What follows is more a series of episodes strung together, as Tom explores the garden and in the process befriends a lonely young girl, Hatty, one of only two people who are able to see him. In the 19th century past, Tom appears as a ghost, unable to leave any mark on the world in which he finds himself. With effort, he's even able to push his way through doors.

The transition back to the past is evoked manner a marvellously eerie manner. We do eventually find a sort of explanation for it, but it's one which is satisfactory only in purely emotional terms. It's simply the narrative means by which two lonely individuals are able to meet and play together, alleviating some of their unhappiness. And that play is threatened not only by the end of summer, but by the fact that Hatty grows older throughout their meetings. Tom never returns to the same time, but drops in on Hatty as grows into adolescence. The later times to which he returns are not the paradise of summer, but an icy winter wonderland of the great frost. Hetty is not only older, but Tom is gradually growing less distinct for her. Several images of the 'thinning' of fantasy to evoke her transition into adolescence. Ultimately we're left with a sense of loss, but it's a very appropriate sense of loss for a children's fantasy since it's only the loss of childhood play which we all experience.

Since that narrative of loss is tied to the transition between an 'aristocratic' 19th century garden and post war reality in which Tom lives, in which the garden has been built over, it's not surprising that some critics have complained that the book idealises that world as a 'lost paradise', obscuring the reality of poverty found elsewhere in Victorian society. It's a view which I have some sympathy with, especially nowadays when we have a popular culture which contains more than it's fair share of representations and pastiches of the Victorian past. Neo-Victorianism is an actual thing, an object of academic study.

On the other hand, I'm a little suspicious of critics who criticise fictions for what they don't contain.  Nor am I convinced that a fictional representation of the Victorian period which does acknowledge the horrors of poverty can't also be idealising. And I'm not sure that the 19th century world to which Tom travels is quite as idealised as some appear to think.

Hatty is an orphan, having been taken in by a considerably unsympathetic aunt who clearly resents the presence of a poor relation in her home. She's left out of the games of her three older cousins, only one of whom appears to have any real sympathy for her. Hatty is eventually lucky; she meets a farmer who is successful and prosperous, and who provides her with everything she could want during their married life together. But it's easy to imagine that life might gone very differently for her if she hadn't been fortunate enough to meet her farmer. And the loss of the garden is explained not simply as the fault of modernity, but as a result of the failure in business of Hatty's cousins who gradually have to sell off their land, eventually losing everything. It's not simply an idealised world that we're presented with here, but rather its a world which is contingent, lodged in time.

*

Time slip fantasies appear to have been a popular mode in post war children's literature. Perhaps some of the impulse was a desire to escape from what was perceived as a drab post war world. The feeling of just stepping through a door to enter a vanished past literalises the nostalgic motive in a way which is also very moving. I do wonder too if the engagement with the Victorian past is not also down to the fact that in 1958 the Victorian world must have still felt very close. One consequence of two world wars and an intervening economic slump is that the pace of building would have slowed. There would was less desire or ability to replace older buildings. It was the modernist planners of the 60s and their successors who really began that process. So in 1958, many more people than nowadays would have lived in places which were surrounded by fragments of the Victorian past. Not that that has entirely vanished, even now.

It's something which I recognise and feel quite strongly myself, because I grew up in old houses. Ironically, this was because of a grandfather clock which my parents owned, and consequently all the houses we lived in required ceilings which where tall enough to accommodate the clock. Hence they were all houses built in the later 19th / early 20th century. I suppose now I would see that as a privilege, although at the time of course it seemed perfectly normal. And perhaps it was only because I was a child, but the past could feel very close.

Time Will Darken It

"Most maxims are lies, or at any rate misleading. A rolling stone gathers moss. A stitch in time doesn't save nine. The knowledge that you have been a fool hurts just as much, is just as hard to admit to yourself if you are young as when you are old. Every error that people make is repeated over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, if they know what they are doing and cannot help themselves. The curtain goes up night after night on the same play, and if the audience weeps, it is because the hero always arrives at the abandoned sawmill in the nick of time, the heroine never gives in to the dictates of her heart and marries the man with the black moustache. There is not only a second chance, there are a thousand second chances to speak up, to act bravely for once, to face the fact that must sooner or later be faced. If there is really no more time, it can be faced hurriedly. Otherwise, it can be examined at leisure. The result is in either case the same. Windows that have been nailed shut for years are suddenly pried open, letting air in, letting love in, and hope. Cause is revealed to be, after all, nothing but effect. And the long, slow, dreadful working out of the consequences of any given mistake is arrested the very moment you accept the idea that for you (and for your most beautiful bride, who with garlands is crowned, whose lightness and brightness doth shine to such splendour) there is an end." 

William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

Time Will Darken It

"The beautiful blind passion of running away is permitted only to children, convicts, and slaves. If you are subject to the truant officer and the Law of Bedtime there will be doorways that will shelter you and freight cars that will take you a long way from home. If you are a safecracker and cannot walk in a straight line for more than a hundred yards without coming face to face with a high stone wall, there are ways of tunnelling under the wall, under the five-year sentence, and confederates waiting outside. If you cannot own property but are owned yourself, you may, hiding in the daytime and travelling across country back roads at night, eventually reach the border. But if you any free person tries to run away he will discover sooner or later that he has been running all the while in a circle and that this circle is taking him inexorably back to the person or place he ran away from. The free person who runs away is no better off than a fish with a hook in his mouth, given plenty of line so that he can tire himself out and be reeled in calmly and easily by his own destiny." 

William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

"It is not easy for the historian..."

"It is not easy for the historian, ten, fifty or five hundred years away from an event, to put aside for a moment the large concepts of currents and forces, or the mechanical aids of statistics, charts, maps, neat plans and diagrams in which the migration of men, women and children is indicated by an arrow, or a brigade of half-terrified, half-heroic men becomes a neat little rectangle. It is not easy to see behind source material, to visualise state papers, reports, letters, diaries as written by men who spent most of their lives sleeping, eating, yawning, eliminating, squeezing blackheads, lusting, looking out of windows, or talking about nothing in general with no one in particular. We are too impressed by the pattern revealed to us - or which we think has been revealed to us - to remember that for the participants history is a haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by human beings whose concern is essentially with the trivial and irrelevant. The historian is always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely - or mistakenly." 

Ward Moore, Bring the Jubliee

The Tower of London Remembers

We're currently drowning in cultural representations of the First World War.

Actually, no, a complaint probably isn't the best way to frame this.

(And I certainly wouldn't wish to align myself with the Michael Goves of this world!)

But it's the image which my mind immediately jumps for when I think about it. With the anniversary of the start of hostilities this year, it was inevitable that many people would wish to commemorate it in some way. And I don't wish to suggest that such work isn't worthwhile.

Quite apart from anything else, a friend has got his first television role as an actor in a BBC production which will be showing later this year.

Still, thinking specifically about the BBC project of which that drama is a part, a season of programming which is running over the next four years, the largest project the BBC has ever engaged in: there's something a little bit off about it isn't there? The huge resources, the attention paid to all aspects of the conflict (or the attempt to do so at any rate). Something about it puts me off.

It's partly to do with the way in which the First World War has been remembered. It's the suffering of the ordinary soldier in the trenches which has been made the central image of how the conflict has been memorialised. Too much attention on this central fact feels like it runs the risk of becoming prurient, of taking that experience for granted. There's a crucial aspect of respect which is found in any worthwhile representation of the First World War.

And the War is a major part of the culture of the last century anyway, as both subject and backdrop, that the extra, excessive attention being given to it now almost seems unnecessary. Poetry of the First World War was some of the first, grown up, poetry I ever encountered, at primary school. The conflict is now, incontrovertibly history - no one who fought in the trenches is still alive - and yet still it seems like a central event in the culture of the century which followed. It's why it still feels why the fight over how the conflict should be remembered still feels important. In comparison, the way in which the Second World War is memorialised feels as if it is far more settled. Not that there aren't arguments to be had over it, but they seem less central to it's representations. Where the first War has been defined and memorialised in terms of the suffering of ordinary soldiers in the trenches, the second has been defined as the defeat of an enemy, Nazi Germany, a victory of which few would challenge the justice. It's easier to see Second World War as a good or just war (however you wish to define, or question, such a term) than it is the First. Britain did eventually win the First World War, but the victorious battles haven't lasted in our cultural consciousness alongside the battles of which nobody 'won', achieving little more than a senseless loss of life.

I might well be wrong here of course, but assuming we can even imagine what the television culture of 2039 is going to look like, do we really imagine that the BBC will lavish such attention on the  anniversary of the conflict we'll be remembering then? It will surely be remembered differently.

So something about it bothers me, even if I can't quite put my finger on what it is here. And even though I appreciate much of the work which is concerned with representing the War. So when my wife told me that she wanted to see the Tower of London ceramic poppy field when we were down in London a few weeks ago, my initial reaction  was rather dismissive. It felt gimmicky, precisely the kind of memorialising I would prefer to avoid.

Anyway, I was wrong. It's utterly magnificent. It shouldn't work, yet somehow, faced with the reality, these massed ranks of delicate, beautiful works of art, it achieves something extraordinary. The meaning is obvious: the tension between the delicacy of the ceramic poppies - so much more delicate than a real flower - and the heavy destructiveness of the machinery that destroyed the bodies of so many millions. That it's obvious does nothing to diminish it's power.

Photographs can't really do it justice. It has to be seen.

All the books that stayed with me...

It's the meme (although I hate that term) which has been going around on Facebook:

"List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way, not to over-think the process, not to worry over whether they are the 'right' books... just books that had an effect on you, for better or worse."

Any arbitrary limit will inevitably force you to leave out choices you would have included on a different day if your mind had landed on them first. I tried to approach it as a list of the books which I feel had the largest role in forming who I now am, the books which, for better or worse have had the biggest influence on my taste and the values/things which are most important to me.

Anyway, this is my blog, so I can include as many choice as I want.

C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia

Alan Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
Rosemary Sutcliff, Blood Feud

Michael Moorcock, the Elric of Melnibone series
Michael Moorcock, Casablanca

Jeff Noon, Vurt
Michael Moorcock, The Cornelius Quartet
William Blake, 'London'
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

Oscar Wilde, 'The Decay of Lying'

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems
Alan Garner, The Stone Book Quartet

Alan Garner, Strandloper

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Richard Calder, Dead trilogy

Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writing

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

Elizabeth Young, Pandora's Handbag
Alan Bennett, Writing Home

A.S. Byatt, Possession

George Orwell, Essays

Geoff Dyer, Anglo-English Attitudes

John Berger, To the Wedding

R.K. Narayan, The Man-Eater of Malgudi

William Dalrymple, City of Djinns

A total of 23 authors. Several appear more than once because their work is that important. Also, they're mostly men, which is a little annoying. Some other observations: it's mostly work from the last century. More significant: The Tempest aside, there's no poetry. Something about my imagination seems to respond more to prose for some reason.

What I do like is the sense of a hidden autobiography below the surface of the list. Of course, it leaves out as much as it includes.

Edited on 1st October, 2014

Oh, for goodness' sake, this is getting ridiculous! No wonder the original challenge specified that you shouldn't spend too long thinking about it. Otherwise you could drive yourself to distraction, attempting to list everything. Before I know it, I'll have listed half the contents of my library.

The whole point of such an exercise is that it's governed by whim. You can't include everything, no matter how many choices you allow yourself. Anyway, now there's another woman on the list and a little bit of poetry. Choices that should have come to mind the other day when I put this up. There will be others, but they will not be posted here, or the exercise will become completely ridiculous.

And honestly, outside the realms of Facebook, why should anyone else care?

George Mackay Brown, Vinland

Earlier this year my life was rather dominated by the Vikings. Hah!

My wife is an early medievalist, a specialist on the Viking diaspora. Consequently, at the end of April, I was driving her and a colleague around parts of North Yorkshire as part of a research trip. They needed a second driver and none of the rest of the team could drive. We made what I can only describe as a fantastic discovery, as we still need to keep it a bit secret, and as a result the team very kindly invited me to the end of project conference at which the find was unveiled to an academic audience. As a result of being around half a dozen experts on the subject, I got something of a crash course on Viking culture, immigration and assimilation. Obviously I've also picked up plenty here and there from my wife over the last 4 years or so, but this was much more concentrated. And being out in the places where they arrived and settled, listening to the bunch of them discussing the material, you could almost see the past coming to life before you.

*

Orkney poet and novelist George Mackay Brown appears to have drawn on the history of the islands for much of his work. Here, in a novel written towards the end of his life, he tells the story of the life of a fictional Orcadian man, Ranald Sigmundson, set in the 11th century. The writing owes much to the example of Norse sagas. There's a swiftness to the telling, and little concern for the interiority of any of the characters. We learn about their thoughts and feelings almost exclusively through what they choose to divulge. The stripped down language took a little getting used to at first - it's not simple by any means - but the result is a pure, elemental language entirely in tune with the harsh lives of its characters and their world, balanced between the 'pagan' Viking past and their Christianising present.

The title comes from the voyage which occurs in the earliest section in which Ranald, having abandoned his rather abusive father midway through his first voyage - and just before his father and his crew are drowned in a violent storm - joins another crew led by the famous Leif Ericson, the first European to reach what is now North America. The stay only a short while after, repelled by the native people of the land. After their return to Europe, Ranald joins another crew lead by one Hakon Treeman, and his travels eventually take him to the Norwegian court before he returns to Orkney to settle down. Thereafter the story focuses on his attempts to raise a family and increase the prosperity of his farm, whilst being occasionally drawn into the political machinations of the sons of Sigurd Hlodvirsson, Earl of Orkney. After one such encounter Ranald becomes thoroughly disillusioned with politics, drawing more and more into himself, until he eventually isolates himself in a remote cottage on his property, obsessing over religion and an escape from the difficulties of the world around him. The novel encompasses a single life, with all it's hardships and disappointments.

*

Two things stood out for me in particular, especially given the nature of our conversations the other month. Firstly, 'Viking' is clearly not presented as an ethnic or cultural identity, in line with the stereotypical view of the Vikings our culture still appear to possess. It's a role that Scandinavians may choose to take on, and by the time of the story, 'Viking' raids are a practice which has largely been outlawed. It's equivalent to being a pirate. At one point, after Hakon Treeman is murdered, the remaining crew members debate among themselves whether they should become Viking, and eventually decide not to because of the risks which the role involves. It feels in line with the findings of the 'revisionists'.

Secondly, I was really struck by the way in which the world is connected up. Certainly, it's hardly as connected as our world now, is but people seem to think nothing about getting on a boat and travelling sometimes vast distances. As the story develops it becomes more and more confined to the family farm on Orkney, but it never feels isolated from the outside world. There are strong and functioning cultural, trading and political links between the islands and Norway, Iceland, Scotland and Ireland. The Viking world is, as my wife would put it, a functioning diaspora.

*

Digging around online, I found several reviewers suggesting that the encounter with the native American tribe is unrealistic, and that the novel treats them in rather 'new age' fashion as noble savages, living in harmony with nature. I'm not sure that I agree. Leif and Ranald both conceive of the native Americans as such terms, but that is clearly presented as their belief. The tribes people we see in 20 pages or so of the novel in which they appear are completely unknown to the Scandinavian voyagers. There is the beginning of communication between the two groups before the possibility of harmony is destroyed by the actions of the Scandinavian man, Wolf, who loses his nerve and kills one of the tribesmen. Thereafter the native Americans are just as violent as their Scandinavian opponents in their attempts to repulse the people who have revealed themselves to be aggressors. The tragedy of this sequence, and what seems to stay with Ranald throughout his life, is the loss of the chance of understanding these people who were so very different from the Scandinavian and Christian culture Ranald has grown up within.

It links with his disdain for the political leaders whose actions seem to do little more than sow division. In contrast, Ranald is a decent man who does all he can to help the community of small cottagers who are his dependants. His success and prosperity as a farmer never encompasses a compassion for those for whom he is responsible. It may be a mistake to criticise the depiction of the native Americans as idealised, when from our own point of view the life of the Orcadian farmers is similarly pre-lapsarian. Based on small communities of farmers, their lives are just as 'close to nature'.

By the end of his life, for Ranald, Vinland is no longer the place he visited, but has become a metaphor, a land which is more akin to heaven. He dies dreaming of a ship. A ship of death, as D.H. Lawrence similarly puts it in one his final poems.

English literary surrealism

Since I've come back to the term in my last post, I should probably put this quote here as it's what got me thinking about the concept in the first place.

"Most definitely I say 'English' instead of 'British'. The British include the Scottish and Welsh, who have their own brand of surrealism. At least the Scottish do; the Welsh make do with simply being surreal. There's nothing remotely English about a Scottish surrealist writer such as Alasdair Gray, whose prose crackles, dances, does other tricks, in a member vehemently non-English. English surrealism is a distinctive brand. Rex Warner, J.B. Morton, W.E. Bowman, Vivian Stanshall, Kyril Bonfiglioli, a few others, adopt a mocking stance from the beginning. They just can't seem to take surrealism seriously: by which I mean that they tend to exploit the surreal for its comic inventiveness rather than for the light it sheds on the secret workings of the grim subconscious mind. 

"...The English surrealists were consequently far more theatrical than their continental counterparts - they had a liking for large casts and elaborate props, the complex and ineffable interconnections of clubs, galas, events, expeditions. Its all about the Show; and the Show must go on, far beyond the ridiculousness that once was the sublime. Rex Warner's bicycle race in pursuit of the proverbial and real Wild Goose; J.B. Morton's boomerang-shaped aeroplanes that save on the fuel for a return flight; W.E. Bowman's cruise in search of talking fish: these form a different order of surrealism from the one Breton originally envisaged, and conceivably he wouldn't even recognise the representative works of these authors as being 'surreal'." 

Rhys Hughes, Englebrecht Again!

'[A] few others' for Rhys would at the very least include Maurice Richardson (whose work Englebrecht Again! tributes), Michael Moorcock (Dancers at the End of Time), and the 'semi-surrealist' William Sansom. There must be others?

I confess, Moorcock, Richardson and Stanshall aside, to date I've read none of these gentlemen. This needs investigating further I feel.

Drumming badgers

Goodness, has it really been ten years? Longer in fact, if I consider that Sweet England, the album on which this arrangement originally appeared actually came out the previous year. I remember the praise and the excitement it received. This was the 'future of folk', or some such similar nonsense. And consequently hated by those who feel affronted by a difference to their fixed ideas of how folk music should be performed. It was certainly innovative, in his melding of traditional songs and tunes with ambient electronic soundscapes. Only it falls apart at the end for me with the one rather plaintive original, backed only with the piano.

I actually prefer the live performance here to the original that's on the record. It preserves most of the icy chill of the arrangement (that opening solo violin) with an added forcefulness when the drums come in, provided here by two static drummers, both rooted to the spot behind the main performer. What really lived in my memory though, was the eccentric backdrop playing behind the musicians.

Here, memory has clearly betrayed me somewhat, as the camera focuses on it for relatively little of the performance. Instead, we get rather more of Jim Moray's rockstar posturing than I remembered. Which is understandable: the performer is what we want to see after all. Still, we see enough to get a clear sense of what was shown, and it's not as though it's anything particularly complex.

The backdrop is, as I said, the element that's really stayed in my mind from when I first saw it:

An autumnal forest, much like that which appeared on the album cover and inside sleeve. In fact, I imagine it's the same image. On the cover, Jim Moray appears asleep, lying next to an electric guitar and several books. One of them looks like an old fashioned kind of exercise book, while the other is a cloth bound hardback, missing a dust jacket. In the background, gazing at him, there's a black dog. The dog reappears on the inside sleeve, as part of a digitally manipulated series of images of the musician. Behind his pensive looking self he appears holding a crow on his left hand; two versions of him are investigating his - sleeping? - self; he gazes at an open book whilst the back of his head bursts into flame; he holds a rose, while his head spins so fast that it's become a blur; he stands proudly next to himself, bound to a tree, whilst another self takes a photograph of the two of them; finally, a tear falls slowly down his cheek.

We don't need to read anything specific into the symbolism here - I imagine that nothing specific is meant - but images of crows, roses, black dogs, of repetitive doubling of the self, have their own resonant meanings, if only ones taken from popular culture. It conjures up a vague sense of the occult: occultness if you like. The combination of a very modern looking guitar and camera means that the images enact a melding of the past and the present which the music also works to self-consciously create: very old songs treated in a most up to date manner.

The performance backdrop achieves something else. Whilst the musicians play, the initially empty forest scene is slowly populated by their doubles, only in the backdrop they are wearing costumed animal heads. This is achieved by what looks like a very cheap effect, akin to the blue screen of an earlier era, as though their human figures have been pasted onto the image. The final figure to appear, and here I'm grateful that my memory hasn't completely betrayed me, is of a drummer wearing a badger's head. Or so it looks to me.

How to define, how to place this image? The album cover and sleeve are trading very obviously in a form of romanticism, laying it on a bit thick almost. The intense seriousness carries over into the musical performances on the album. Live, that seriousness is preserved. It's only in the backdrop, in the simulated or actual cheapness of the backdrop, that any humour creeps in. It's very oddness lends it that somewhat comic air. The reason that it's the badger which has lodged in my mind all these years is probably an unconscious echo of The Wind in the Willows. Taken as a whole, matched with the seriousness of the performance, what I think I saw all those years ago was an image of what I would now wish to define as English surrealism. No wonder it lodged itself in my mind in the way that it did.

"Old cities..."

"Old cities are piled on layer after layer of unrecorded human lives and things." 

V.S. Pritchett, 'The Fig Tree'

...Boneland

"Once place is lost, you fall into history." 

Alan Ganer, Boneland

Oh, Those Magnificent Ambersons!

Two quotes from V.J. Perkin's book on The Magnificent Ambersons for the BFI Classics series. If I had to pick a favourite of Welles' films, I might well pick this, despite it's undoubted ruined state. I certainly love it more than Citizen Kane, great as the earlier film might be.

*

"On paper Welles' ending looks inspired. But everything would turn on the question of tone, the balance between pain and compassion, humour and harshness, bleakness and generosity. It might - though none of the witnesses suggests this - have embraced the complacent despair that so often wins acceptance as the authentication of seriousness and Art."

[We'll never know of course, since Welle's ending was poorly substituted by RKO. It's the wider point that struck me though, since it seems to be a much more elegant formulation of what I was struggling to say in my last post about George R.R. Martin's work. On reflection, what I was really responding to was not the work itself, which as I said, I've neither read nor seen, and nor do I wish to. That part at least, is not really the best thing I've written on this blog. I was trying to respond to an element of the discourse which appears to surround the tv show. And the reason I find it so irritating is probably quite personal. I mentioned in passing the way in which the use of the term 'realism' seems to be replicating the sorts of claims which were made on behalf of the mainstream American comics which came out in the wake of the success of Watchmen and The Dark Night Returns. A typical defence of violence and 'complacent despair' was that it was more 'realistic' than the standard kind of superhero stories they were contrasted with. I worry that I've made that kind of argument myself, when I was younger, since it was in the wake of those works that I became interested in American comics (in the early 90s, around the time DC's Vertigo imprint was established). I worry that I've read work which has exactly the same failings as I imagine that a show like Game of Thrones does. The problem isn't that fictional works should depict violence or despair, or anything bleak or unpleasant, but there's a difference between a visceral presentation of violence or suffering as opposed to a relishing in it's depiction. It's precisely as Perkins says, that such representations are often used as a facile way of claiming seriousness for a work. It isn't an easy line to judge. Indeed, I'm not sure that it can always be so easily separated into the two contrasting approaches. And it's a mistake that seems particularly easy to make when you're a teenager, a mistake which I'm sure I've made on plenty of occasions. I was a very serious teenager. So there's an element of guilt now in my responses to any work which represents violence. An element that wasn't there before.

[This is also of course, related to the way in which genres such as comedy or romance get slighted, seen as something lesser. They aren't serious enough. But that's a separate argument.]

*

"Accumulation has it's inconveniences but they are more tolerable than loss."

[Surely every hoarder lives with that contradictory feeling of wishing they could get rid of everything? Or is it just me?]

'Realism' in a couple of secondary world fantasies

Actually, this post was really meant to be a couple of notes I wanted to make about Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, but it's grown, and taken considerably longer to finish writing than I  had anticipated. It was reading a post about the Game of Thrones tv series a few weeks ago that catalysed these thoughts. 

*

I'll admit, I've neither read any of the books, nor seen a single episode of the tv series into which it's been adapted. I read plenty of fantasy fiction as a child and teenager. I still do read fantasy, obviously, but my tastes in the genre have changed and I no longer have much interest in the kind of epic or high fantasy into which A Song of Ice and Fire fits. To be honest, Tolkien aside, I'm not sure I even read very much of it when I was younger. It's not just lack of interest on my part though. Honestly, the more I hear about the series (whether it's the books or the tv series), the more both incarnations of the story sound utterly vile.

Yes, obviously, I can be accused of not properly engaging with the thing which I'm dismissing here. So be it, but I'm not prepared to find out if I might be wrong. I simply don't have the patience or inclination to read a series of lengthy novels that I already suspect I'm not going to like. I'd happily waste 45 minutes or so on an episode of the television series, but I'm still not inclined to seek it out. In any case, it sounds as though the tv series actually magnifies the faults the series appears to possess in both incarnations.

Going on the descriptions I've come across from both enthusiasts and detractors of the series in the last few years, my strong impression is that it's a typically medievalist secondary fantasy world consumed with violence, populated with characters who all appear to be utter sociopaths, and with a really unpleasant obsession with rape.

To repeat, yes, I might be mistaken in my soundbite description there. My point though is that it isn't just an impression given by critics of the series, it's an impression I equally get from it's fans. The central term that seems to get used a lot in it's defence is the one I've put in my title: 'realism'. The horrific behaviour Martin includes in his stories is usually justified on the grounds that it is more 'realistic' than other fantasies of this type.

Yet I wonder if this praise of the narrative's 'realism' isn't something of a chimera. That in fact, whether it's on tv or in the books, Martin's series isn't actually just revelling in sordid and unpleasant behaviour under the pretence that this is 'realistic' in a medieval fantasy setting.

The post I read the other morning was specifically about the tv series and it's adaptation. It received a number of responses in the comments threads which felt like fairly well reasoned attempts at defending the series. Since I've not seen any of it I can't respond to them exactly, but there was one thing that jumped out at me, which also seems to align with this claim for 'realism'. One commentator argued that most people in medieval societies, including all women, would have had very little agency. Now, I'm not a medieval historian, but then I don't imagine the poster was either.

It's true up to a point I'm, but we shouldn't generalise like that. Individual agency is a very modern concept with which to judge the past. My academic field is early modern literature, so I know something about women and gender in that period. There's a very famous essay, which I wish I could remember the author of, which argues that many women actually had less agency in during the Renaissance than they previously had in a high medieval context. It's hard to generalise of course, and the evidence is rarely wholly conclusive, but just because the dominant ideology of a society says one thing doesn't mean that everyone is going to follow it's rules to the letter. Agency surely is something which exists within a social context, then as now, and if for example there is a prevalence of conduct literature attempting to enforce norms of female behaviour, as there was in early modern England, then that might have been in part a response to the fact that women were failing to behave in accord with such social norms.

It strikes me that these arguments about George R.R. Martin's supposed 'realism' are actually profoundly ignorant about medieval society. It's constructing what is actually a very simplistic image of medievalism against which an equally simplistic vision of modernity in which supposedly we all have far greater agency and freedom is then implicitly contrasted. Now, I know that George R.R. Martin has used the Wars of the Roses as part of his inspiration, and that was hardly a very civilised period of English history. No doubt medieval societies could be incredibly violent at times, with some truly vile individuals occupying prominent positions in all medieval societies. But surely we could make a similar argument about any modern society? It's that implicit assumption that we're so much more civilised than they were in the past which seems to underlie this kind of argument. Certainly we're better in some ways, but I wouldn't feel so smug about it.

I'm certainly not suggesting that fantasy shouldn't address issues of violence or power. It isn't the presence of violence in a work which bothers me, but the way in which it's dealt with. Perhaps A Song of Ice and Fire does a better job of addressing these issues than I imagine. I'm just very suspicious when violence is justified on the basis of it's supposed 'realism'. Nor should we forget that in Medieval societies there were very strong forces opposed against such behaviour, cultural forces which attempted to moderate and control violent behaviour. Most obviously in a European context, there was the Church. Much secondary world fantasy seems to not so much neglect as fail to understand the role of religion in ordinary daily life in medieval societies. Despite his Catholic beliefs, Tolkien excluded any explicit reference to religion in his famous secondary world.

Dragons are more fun, I suppose.

*

But there's more than one version of 'realism' available in fantasy of course.

As I said above, this post was only meant to be about Unseen Academicals. I'll get to it eventually. Like most people, I'm aware of the competition currently taking place in Brazil. I've plenty of friends who follow and play the game. My wife has been watching many of the matches. This isn't really based on particular dislike. I've just never been able to sustain much interest in the game, either as a participant or spectator. So reading a novel which is basically Discworld does football is my somewhat eccentric way of joining in with their enthusiasm.

It might be imagined that the comic fantasy of Terry Pratchett is profoundly opposed to any notion of 'realism' in secondary world fantasy. Certainly there's been a cartoonish feel to the Discworld since the very beginning. It's often knowingly silly, from the very notion of a world that is flat and balanced on top of four elephants and a giant turtle onwards.

Arguably 'realism' as a fictional mode originally develops out of comedy. Certainly it's an argument that can be made, and I think that's why I'm innately suspicious of a work like A Song of Ice and Fire in which the argument about the work's 'realism' is tied to it's worth. The unspoken argument is, "this isn't silly like all those other fantasies". It's an argument that is tied to anxieties about the cultural worth that is attached to modern commercial fantasy. I saw exactly the same argument occurring when I got into American comics in the early 90s. Works like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns and all the work which came in their wake were important because they were serious. Which I now realise is a very limited sense of what constitutes 'serious'.

In the case of the Discworld, since the very beginning of the series much of the humour has come from the knowing deflation of the tropes of fantasy. The jokes work in part because the characters and situations don't fit our expectations based on our prior knowledge of the genre. This implicitly contrasts the fantasy with a notion of 'realism' by showing how artificial the tropes of commercial fantasy are in contrast to how things really happen in the real world.

As the series develops and the satire shifts from tropes of fantasy to satirically target the real world, elements from the world we recognise are placed within the fantastic setting, and we get a similar kind of juxtaposition between fantasy and the 'real'. It's a fantasy which is some respects highly suspicious of fantasy.

Some of those elements of fantasy that Pratchett is highly suspicious of are also those which A Song of Ice and Fire appears to take very seriously. As he pointed out in the introduction to the revised edition of The Carpet People, at the age of 17 he 'thought fantasy was all battles and kings. Now I'm inclined to think that the real concerns of fantasy ought to be about not having battles, and doing without kings.' This notion appears to be behind what is possibly one of the most interesting changes Pratchett has wrought on the series. At least since The Truth, where 'modern' news culture was introduced to the city of Ankh-Morpork, the representation of the city has developed through a number of novels as the city has changed from an essentially medieval city state to one which is much more recognisably early modern.

Arguably the ground work for this was first laid down in the city watch books which initially charted the rise of Sam Vimes, but I doubt there was any particular intention to the way in which the city has developed. The somewhat haphazard way in which it has taken place, across a number of books actually contributes to it's sense of realism. This is how societies develop I think, mostly through trial and error. Now, in Unseen Academicals it's become something that the characters notice. The city is booming, immigrants are moving in and the city is awash with money. We're at the beginning of modernity. There's even a tyrant of the city who's partly inspired by the Medici.

Which is one of the things I find problematic about it, as I've mentioned before. Modernity is always something of a double edged sword. I think Pratchett recognises that. On the other hand, while he might use his fantasy to critique modernity, there's also a sense of acceptance: this is the world we live in now and Pratchett can't imagine an alternative. And because it stands in opposition to the medievalist cliches of traditional secondary world fantasy, he ends up tacitly endorsing many of the claims of modernity.

*

'She is a cook Drumknott, not a maid. Show her in, by all means.'

The secretary looked a little resentful. Are you sure this wise, sir? I have already told the guards to throw the foodstuffs away.'

'Food cooked by a Sugarbean? You may have committed a crime against high art, Drumknott.'

So yes, Vetinari troubles me, because he's explicitly described as a tyrant who is forever seen  threatening and manipulating people in order to bend them to his will. He's a trained assassin who, we can only assume, has killed people, and presumably has no compunction about committing murder to ensure his power. He's the stereotype of a Machiavellian Prince dropped into a fantasy world. Which is problematic, because Machiavelli's The Prince, in one interpretation at least, was a satire. It's no longer very funny to me when such methods are shown to actually work.

As the series has gone on, Vetinari has also evolved into a hyper-efficient individual. Actually, he was pretty efficient to begin with, if memory serves. He appeared in the very first Discworld novel, threatening Rincewind. The cowardly, incompetent wizard hasn't headlined a novel in the series for years now. He does appear in Unseen Academicals, as part of the Unseen University staff, but gets all of half a dozen lines. The point of Rincewind's character, the obvious reason why he's so funny, is that he's an inversion of the stereotype of the all powerful wizard. Although he does eventually get to save the world in The Light Fantastic, he remains pretty much the same throughout all his appearances. He's the prototype for the typical male character who appears throughout many of the early Discworld novels, from Mort to Teppic (Pyramids) and Brutha (Small Gods). They're all character in flight from anything resembling the stereotype of traditional masculinity that you find in so much fantasy, whatever it's quality. They're physically unprepossessing, often cowardly, and somewhat inept. They probably functioned as stand-ins for many boys and young men in the audience. They fit the stereotype of the typical science fiction/fantasy fan, however unfair that stereotype might be.

In his initial appearances Ponder Stibbons appears to be a character of a similar type. A wizard who's a parody of a stereotypical geeky science student. In Unseen Academicals it's revealed that he's now effectively running Unseen University on the basis of all the positions he holds. Like Vetineri, like many of his characters, he's evolved in a hyper-efficient individual, responsible for keeping everything running. You see the same thing in characters like Granny Weatherwax (who, in fairness, never lacked for confidence) and Sam Vimes. In his first appearance, Vimes was a washed up alcoholic. The point of Guards! Guards! was to celebrate the nameless soldiers who normally get cut down indiscriminately by the hero of a typical fantasy adventure narrative. Carrot, the actual hero who in another narrative would have been the one killing the men who in the parody become his friends and colleagues, the lost King of the city, ends up as just another working stiff. Since then, Vimes has kicked the bottle and married into the aristocracy. In the process he's been revealed as a genius for managing the police of Ankh-Morpork.

Whilst its certainly admirable to want to move the concerns of fantasy away from the concerns of 'battles and kings', what actually seems to have happened is that the Discworld novels are still full of exceptional individuals who get to save the day, even if they aren't kings. You see this in the exchange between Vetinari and Drumkott about Glenda Sugarbean, Unseen Academicals' beating heart. She's not only a cook, but a Queen of cooks, one who has inherited her culinary prowess from her Grandmother. It's an 'aristocratic' dynasty relocated to a lower class. And yet again, she's a hyper-efficient individual who's running the lives of everyone around her.

Inevitably perhaps, Glenda eventually learns that you can't always run other people's lives for them, learning that she can't control the life of her beautiful friend Juliet Stollop. This growth of her character is also tied to her seeing through the illusions supposedly perpetuated by the reams of cheap romance fiction she consumes. If this plot doesn't quite work, it's because she seems so grounded from the beginning, that it's hard to believe that she'd be so taken in by such illusions. In general, Pratchett's female characters have always been strong personalities, the ones who are actually running everything. It's yet another of his inversions of the gender stereotypes found in plenty of commercial fantasy.

But to try and conclude a piece that has already become far too long, I want to come back to this term 'hyper-efficiency' I've been using to describe his characters. It's also a quality that the cultured savant (and Orc) Mr. Nutt possesses, tied to his desperate desire to acquire what he describes as 'worth'. Whilst there is something comic about the way his desire becomes a desperate need to please the people around him, his hyper-efficiency is never really challenged as ineffective. He's respected, aquires 'worth', in part because he is competent.

Why does this focus on his characters' efficiency bother me? Because I don't believe in it. For me, it's a far more pernicious fantasy than many of the tropes Pratchett has mocked elsewhere. Here in the real world it seems that every indignity, every tyranny, can be justified in the name of the desire for efficiency. It's a small part, perhaps, of the set of discourses which has served to justify the still ongoing program of the privatisation of the state's activities in Britain and the associated praise of the private sector in contrast to a beleaguered public sector. The problem really is that, somewhat counter intuitively perhaps, efficiency is such an abstract quality. It becomes an unattainable myth, because it's impossible for anyone to be as efficient as the modern world so frequently demands. I'm not trying to argue here that I want to live in a world in which everything is falling apart and inefficient. Only of course, since inefficiency so often appears to the - hopefully unintended - consequence of so much of that which is justified under the name of 'efficiency', that I can't help wondering whether it's really a quality which is actually worth chasing after.

It's also a link with the work of Charles Dickens, a writer Pratchett has been compared to by at least one of the quotes which has regularly appeared on his dust jackets. Despite the social criticism contained in his work, Dickens never seems to have wanted to challenge the underlying principals of Victorian society. He just wanted to the system to be run better, more efficiently, as though that was all that was needed to solve the problems his work highlighted. That this blind spot is shared by two writers who were and still is in the case of Pratchett, despite his illness, incredibly productive, incredibly efficient in their chosen field, is perhaps not surprising.

*

To try and drag this back to the point from where I started out: probably all fictional secondary worlds are engaged with 'realism' in some way. It's not that their writers are trying to delude their audience into believing in the existence of a world which is transparently fictional, but they do seem to require some justification for their existence. Hence the focus on maps and fictional histories, even made up languages. I suppose that what I find particularly interesting with Terry Pratchett's Discworld is the way in which it's 'realism' gestures outside the text, even if I find some of the ways in which it seems to intersect with real world concerns occasionally troubling. It may even be that I'm mistaken to label this as 'realism'.

The barbarians have always been with us, it seems...

Published in 1925, and yet it could be describing the present, as we're still assailed by exactly the same forces, making the same, tired, appallingly trite excuses:

"Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common cause. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to 'show results' that was undermining and vulgarising education. The State Legislature and the board of regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the university. Candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts were allowed credits for commercial studies; courses in book-keeping, experimental farming, domestic science, dress-making, and what not. Every year the regents tried to diminish the number of credits required in science and the humanities. The liberal appropriations, the promotions and increases in salary, all went to the professors who worked with the regents to abolish the purely cultural studies. Out of a faculty of sixty, there were perhaps twenty men who made any serious stand for scholarship, and Robert Crane was one of the staunchest. He had lost the Deanship of the College of Science because of his uncompromising opposition to the degrading influence of politicians in university affairs. The honour went, instead, to a much younger man, head of the department of chemistry, who was willing 'to give the taxpayers what they wanted'." 

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

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[It's years since I last read something by Willa Cather, and the novels I read then were the early ones of American midwestern rural life. Oh, Pioneers!. My Antonia. A.S. Byatt's introduction to the Virago edition of the latter is possibly the first piece of writing I read by her as well. Which is interesting to me, because one of the things I felt about the writing of The Professor's House was that it's style seemed to have much in common with Ms. Byatt's style. There was nothing I could put my finger on exactly, but since she has clearly thought long and deeply about Willa Cather's art in her introductions to most of Virago's reissues of the novels, it's perhaps not too surprising to feel something of the influence. It's a matter of sensibility, perhaps? They both seem to combine a sensuality and asceticism in their depiction of the world and their respect for all of their characters, an awareness of the ways in which dailyness fills up our lives, and an effort to look at the world as it is exactly.]

In Ankh-Morpork...

'A third proposition, that the city be governed by a choice of respectable members of the community who would promise not to give themselves airs or betray the public trust at every turn, was instantly the subject of music-hall jokes all over the city.' 

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

'Narrative plenitude'?

For a second there, I had wondered, naively no doubt, if I hadn't inadvertently stumbled over a new critical term. One that might even have some use. Alas, it seems not.

Oh, well.

'Narrative plenitude'?

A simple google search will find plenty uses of the term, going at least as far back as Laura Mulvey's seminal 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975) and Frederick Jameson's The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), both works that I know only by reputation. From the brief scan which is all I have time to give them at present, it would seem that I meant something different by the term. It appears that a sense of narrative plenitude is used in a Freudian context, set against a narrative 'lack'. Plenitude here appears to be in line with the first definition of the word as it is defined by the OED:

"Fullness, completeness, or perfection; the condition of being absolutely full in quantity, measure, or degree."

'Narrative plenitude' is referring to a narrative which conveys a sense of satisfaction, of completeness. It's a narrative which satisfies all the conflicts and issues which have been brought up throughout it's duration. It's a sense of narrative 'rightness' which can of course be construed as a form of mystification if one is so minded.

I apologise if I'm repeating myself a bit there, but I'm trying to get a hold of this. 'Plenitude' of course has another sense, of abundance and excess, and that also seems to a be a way in which it can be used. It can be used in terms of analysing melodrama, where part of the satisfaction of the narrative is  surely precisely in that excess of emotion or style which the form provides. In other contexts, 'plenitude' refers to the excess of multiple narratives that postmodern or consumerist culture confronts us with.

It's this last which is closest to what I was trying to get at, and it might be argued that there isn't really any need for a new term. But then, what am I trying to get at?

It's a form of intertextuality. Professor Challenger isn't just referred to in All-Consuming Fire. Although he doesn't actually appear in the narrative, what is clearly being posited is a fictional world in which he and his published adventures are all as much a part of the fictional reality as are the adventures of Holmes or the Doctor. It's part of the 'reality effect' of the novel, even though what's being referred to is fictional. This effect becomes clearer in works like Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics or much of Kim Newman's fiction (Anno Dracula obviously, but also the Diogenes Club stories), where characters from multiple fictions are actually interacting with each other. I've not read any of Philip Jose Farmer's 'Wold Newton' work, but that might be earliest example of what I'm talking about (there's also a little known short story by Maurice Richardson, 'Unquiet Wedding' from 1948, and other examples too no doubt, but that's more of a burlesque, which is not quite what I'm trying to describe here). It's a sense of multiple narratives interacting, that behind the scenes of the novel which we're currently reading, there is a wealth of narratives currently invisible to us. But there they are, happening out in the same fictional landscape.

It could be argued that we already have the perfectly serviceable term 'crossover'. I wouldn't wholly disagree, but that feels rather too mechanistic to me, a simple description of what it is. In a more academic context, Umberto Eco has proposed the term 'transworld migration' which can be taken as the technique of borrowing a literary character from another work. Again, this feels to me like a structural term to label a technique. Whereas what I'm trying to describe here is something that is more affective (assuming I've got the right term there), a sense of how it works, of what it actually achieves. Which will inevitably be somewhat subjective. It's a quality rather than a description.

Consequently, whilst I think that these narratives which bring fictional characters together from multiple disparate works are at the heart of what I'm thinking about here, I would also broaden it to include other works. Michael Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' stories, especially the 'Second Ether' trilogy, also seem to have something of this quality. Then there's the storied landscapes of the superhero universes owned by Marvel and DC. The worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars and Doctor Who and all their many spin offs. The many spin-offs of Sherlock Holmes. Again, no doubt there are plenty of other things I'm currently unaware of at present.

What all of these fictional narratives have in common is that they have multiple authors. This is most obviously the case with Marvel/DC and commercial spin-offs, but it's also the case in a work which combines characters from the work of other authors.* It's also, unless one is a complete obsessive, practically impossible to read or see or hear everything that makes up most of these narrative worlds. I'm never going to read every DC comic, or every Doctor Who spin-off, or the original appearance of every character that Kim Newman includes in Anno Dracula. Life's too short.

So the sense of narrative plenitude or excess which I'm trying to define here also encompasses narratives that I'm never going to experience. I'm sure this is the case for most readers. So that sense of narrative excess actually entails a lack, which might in turn account for the obsession with continuity which so many fans of this kind of fiction exhibit. It's the hope that somehow this excess of narrative can be contained and made to make sense. Since the very reality of multiple authorship also means that there will inevitably be contradictions in these texts, there is obviously something rather quixotic about such a desire, but it's a desire which is clearly a response to that initial sense of narrative excess and plenitude.

Once you get away from that anxiety though, what we have is a sense of seemingly boundless possibilities, of narratives bumping up against each other, braiding together: a plenitude, an excess. A joy.

*

So that's an initial rough sketch of what I think I'm trying to get at here. Now I just have to decide on what to call it.


* It might be argued therefore that Moorcock's 'Eternal Champion' stories don't fit here, since there there is only one author. And most of the characters Kim Newman crosses over in his Diogenes Club stories are of course his own creations. It does seem that where an author's work falls into discrete series there is then the opportunity for combining characters so as to produce an effect which is otherwise more commonly found in works which have multiple authors, or which borrow characters originally created by others.