Modern tourism

So, what's The Sun Also Rises about? Masculinity and it's various crises (it is Hemingway, after all)? Life in the aftermath of the First World War? All that and, no doubt, plenty more. Still, what's struck me is how it's also a novel of tourism. Specifically, modern tourism:

After the coffee and a fine we got the bill, chalked up the same as ever on a slate, that was doubtless one of the 'quaint' features, paid it, shook hands, and went out.

'You never come here any more, Monsieur Barnes,' Madame Lecomte said.

'Too many compatriots.'

'Come at lunch-time. It's not crowded then.'

'Good. I'll be down soon.'

We walked along under the trees that grew out over the river on the Quai d'Orleans side of the island. Across the river were the broken walls of old houses were being torn down.

'They're going to cut a street through.'

'They would,' Bill said.

Taken from about a third of a way through the novel, when they're still in Paris. So many details, which seem to sum up a certain kind of modern holiday experience. The concern about the authenticity of the places being visited, with the wry acknowledgement that perhaps that very authenticity is actually mocked up. The desire to avoid one's compatriots in going off the beaten path. The dislike of any attempts by locals to change or modernise their own city or country, because that will destroy what has attracted you to that place in the first instance (that resentful 'They would').

It's perhaps a bit of a stretch. The narrator, Jake Barnes, does actually live and work in Paris. Yet his experience as detailed here identifies him not simply as an outsider, but specifically a tourist. And his journey to Spain is explicitly described as a holiday. The detailed descriptions of what was done and where they stayed, and what they ate - modernist in style as they might be - also have the feel of a tourist recounting his experience of  where he visited for a holiday.

The other characters, American and British expatriates, are certainly richer and more privileged than either your average backpacker or package holidayer of today, and yet they don't seem so different. Certainly, their experience feels closer to that of a modern tourist than it does to the earlier model of the Grand Tour, so aristocratic, and belonging to the 18th and 19th centuries. I've tried to think if this was the earliest example of this modern experience of being a tourist, and the only earlier examples I can think of, that I've read, is E.M. Forster's early Italian novels, A Room with a View, or Where Angels Fear to Tread. They even have holiday romance!

Of books I haven't read, Three Men in a Boat and it's sequel would appear to fit the bill. Can we go back earlier still? Henry James perhaps, or are we now coming closer to the notion of the Grand Tour? I'm sure people have done research on the subject. What was the point where the Grand Tour became modern tourism? Is it even possible to clearly unentangle the two notions, or is it only our retrospective view that wants to locate the beginnings of modern tourism in the aristocratic Grand Tour?

So, obviously, The Sun Also Rises is about much more than this, but still, it's interesting to place it in this context of modern tourism. Along with his history of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway was hugely influential in popularising the bull running in Pamplona and accompanying festival. Who with? Tourists obviously:

The town was crowded. Every street was full. Big motor-cars from Biarritz and San Sebastian kept driving up and parking around the square. They brought people for the bullfight. Sightseeing cars came up, too. There was one with twenty-five Englishwomen in it. They sat in the big, what car and looked through their glasses at the fiesta.

Before reading this, the last time I saw the running of the bulls in Pamplona appear in a fictional narrative was in Zoya Aktar's film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, another story about tourists!

Nobel

Praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody's shouting, "Which side are you on?!"
And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row 

Bob Dylan

An addendum to my last post

Honestly, the book is sitting there on the shelf, I ought to have thought to check it out before writing my previous post. Talk about reinventing the wheel...

SECRET GARDEN Derived from The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson BURNETT, the term refers to a private world which becomes something of a personal Paradise surrounded by an impressive reality. In Burnett's novel the place is a walled garden amid the bleak Yorkshire moors; the garden, imbued with the youthful zeal of the children, becomes a place of recovery and regeneration. An SG is thus any place of escape or retreat that provides a personal haven for the protagonist. The SG may be a WAINSCOT or POLDER in our own world, or in an OTHERWORLD or even elsewhere in TIME. It became a standard MOTIF in CHILDREN'S FANTASY, where most SGs are literally gardens... It was in recognition of the SG as a key motif in children's fiction that humphrey Carpenter (1946- ) titled his study of the golden age of children's literature Secret Gardens (1985). 

In ADULT FANTASY SGs are a similar retreat from everyday life, though may not necessarily prove to be such a haven.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant 

On the other hand, I was pushing a little at the edges of their definition. On reflection, I was conscious of pushing a bit hard to make Charlotte Sometimes fit my pattern. If it doesn't quite fit, then it still has affinities with the trope. Perhaps all timeslip texts do? Certainly it is more complicated than the simple 'eden' which we find in the Secret Garden. After all, what is the attraction at the heart of the notion of slipping back in time? Whether for the character, for the writer, or for the reader? It doesn't have to be anything as straight forward as a simple idealising of the past, but desire and pleasure are certainly mixed up in the notion.

Marianne Dreams though, is much closer to their use of the term in the context of adult fantasy. None of the examples given in the encyclopedia for it's use in 'adult' fantasies really convince me, which is why I think I actually prefer it that we can see this more complex version of the trope appearing in the context of fantasy written for children. It's years since I read it, but I suspect that Alan Garner's Elidor might fit the pattern. There are probably other examples out there.

Secret Gardens (The Gold Age of Children's Literature 8)

Catherine Storr, Marianne Dreams

Confined to bed, as a consequence of a long-term illness, a young girl entertains herself by drawing a picture of a house, which she then finds she can enter in her dreams. When she then draws a picture of a boy in the house she creates a companion for herself, Mark, a boy who, like Marianne, is also unwell. Unlike with Marianne, whose illness is never named - it seems more a storybook illness, allowing a long convalescence during the which the story can unfold - we eventually learn that he is recovering from Polio. Not just a creation of Marianne's imagination, he also corresponds to a boy in the real world who is, like Marianne, being tutored by a Miss Chesterfield who passes on news of her companion, whom Marianne otherwise only encounters in dreams.

The narrative follows the interaction between the two children in this peculiar landscape, created out of a child's act of drawing. Marianne gradually fills in the details of the house, and supplies food and games for her new friend. Unfortunately, early on, after an argument with Mark, she also draws a number of rocks with single eyes to keep Mark entrapped. The narrative eventually resolves itself into their attempt to escape these frightening, haunting figures which now people this barren landscape.

Mariano's attempts to help Mark build up his strength and escape, parallels his real world recovery from the effects of polio. It reminds me a little of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, specifically Colin's recovery from his unspecified illness (another storybook malady, more symbolic than real). Thankfully, Catherine Storr never descends to Hodgson Burnett's levels of sanctimoniousness about her character's illness. In place of a narrative informed by Christian science, we have something which feels - what - Jungian? Therapeutic, at the very least. The destination of their escape, a lighthouse - as with everything else, drawn by Marianne for Mark - seems symbolic of recovery, it's light piercing the eternal gloom of the dream landscape and temporarily blinding the nightmarish jailers. And the form those jailers take - rocks with single cyclops eyes - is something literally out of a child's nightmare - Marianne's.

I know almost nothing about Jung's theories, beyond a vague outline, so perhaps I'm stretching my argument here. Although, at the time she wrote her novel, Catherine Storr was married to the psychoanalyst Anthony Storr (her fiction published under her married name), who clearly had an interest in and knowledge of Jung's, as can be seen just from a glance at his bibliography, so there's no reason to suppose that she wasn't familiar with such ideas.

Perhaps it's just that any narrative of recovery, especially one which is couched in such fantastical, symbolic forms, is going to have a therapeutic note to it. It's certainly a powerful tale.

*

There's an idea, though I can no longer remember exactly where I first encountered it, that a common trope of English children’s fiction is that of the ‘secret garden’. It derives from the title of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s famous novel of course, but refers to all the many hidden spaces and worlds which can be found in so much children’s fantasy. It’s close in some ways to Philip Sandifer’s trope of the ‘portal to fairy’ which he deployed in his epic examination of Doctor Who: the notion of a door or portal through which the protagonists pass, exiting the mundane world for one of fantasy and adventure. C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe leading into Narnia, basically, which easily maps onto the Doctor’s Tardis, and no doubt other children’s fantasy. But it’s there in The Secret Garden too, I think. Gardens by their very nature have natural boundaries, the passage through which can easily be freighted with literary, or even religious significance, if we think of the passage from the Garden of Eden in Genesis. Hodgson Burnett’s characters must first discover the means to enter the garden of the novel’s title, passing through an initially locked door into the space where they will achieve their own personal growth and restoration of health.

It appears to be quite a flexible trope. If I remember this correctly, I encountered it in the context of a piece about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, which definitely works: as we all know Hogwarts is a secret world reached through a hidden doorway in King's Cross station. I’ve also found myself wondering if this isn't a trope that I’m finding within many of the children’s fantasies from the 50s and 60s which I’ve been reading over the last few years. I’m thinking specifically here of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, The House of Green Knowe (which I didn’t get around to writing about, despite my good intentions). It’s most obvious in Philipa Pearce’s book: Tom literally steps over the threshold of his backdoor at night into a wonderful garden of the past. This actually underlines a significant difference though. What for Hodgson Burnet was a symbol of growth and unification with the world - both social and natural - which exists beyond the child characters’ sense of self has here become much more private, even solipsistic. Although he is sharing it with someone else, the experience of entering this hidden space remains Tom’s private engagement with the past.

In The House of Green Knowe it’s the eponymous house which serves as the magical space, hidden away from a threatening modernity. In order to reach it, the oddly named Toseland initially has to cross the barrier of floodwaters, which for the remainder of his Christmas holidays are the comforting barrier which help keep the rest of the world out, while he explores both the history of the house and his own family history through a series of ghostly encounters. Toseland's relationship with the past, both national and mythic is a sanctuary, keeping not only modernity at bay, but also an evil, storybook gypsy, the narrative's one source of conflict. I call her a 'storybook' gypsy, because that's exactly how she appears to me: a trope which bears little relationship to the real people we call gypsy's, although I am fully aware of the troublesome nature of that. As a gypsy, she is both the cultural and ethnic 'other' which is rejected by the national English past, the past which Toseland and his grandmother have continuity with through their ancestry.

Put like that, it feels like overly harsh with what is after all, a lovely children's fantasy. Yet, that reading is there. Much as I love it, and fully intend to read the other books in the series, I can still recognise that The House of Green Knowe is a deeply consolatory fantasy.

In comparison, both Charlotte Sometimes and Marianne Dreams feel far less consolatory. If anything, they're far more solipsistic, the secret worlds entered through sleep and dreaming. Charlotte Sometimes gestures at an alienating slippage of identity, and the world Charlotte travels back to and becomes trapped in is hardly a consolatory one, mostly dreary and unpleasant, overshadowed by the final stages of the First World War. If this is a secret garden, it is one which is despoilt, and to be escaped from.

Marianne Dreams is harsher still, since it isn't just Mark who needs to discover the resources within himself in order to fully recover from his illness. It's also Marianne who needs to learn to be a better person. It's her initial fit of pique and irritation with Mark which causes her to create the jailers in her dream in the first place. It's very nicely judged. She's never portrayed as a particularly unpleasant child - a bit self-centered, perhaps, but no more than most children can be - instead, her actions are the result of thoughtless anger, the sort of thing which we can all be guilty of at times. Marianne's desire to aid Mark in his struggle then is partly the result of her need to apologise and to atone for her earlier actions.

The magical space in which Marianne and Mark find themselves then, is intimately intertwined with the real, material world. It's a space in which they are both tested and ultimately learn to become better versions of themselves. Here, the 'secret garden' is located firmly within the self. Which is perhaps only to restate how the trope of the secret garden works. In contrast to the 'portal to faerie' as theorised by Philip Sandifer - where the portal is a doorway to a more magical, adventurous world - the 'secret garden' is ultimately always bringing the child characters face to face with themselves.

Anita Brookner quote

These are the facts, I wanted to say: death comes swiftly. And it usually comes too soon, while mourning is endless. Very few can negotiate a stay of execution. The gathering of rosebuds may be recommended. but this is largely a peacetime operation: for those who have received the warning graver considerations must obtain. I felt like that watchman in the Bible, who is supposed to blow a trumpet when danger approaches, knowing all the time that it is easy to ignore the sound, particularly when it is inconvenient, or when pleasurable expectations are aroused. It is the fate of the watchman not to be heard, but unless he does his job he has no other justification. 

Anita Brookner, A Friend from England

...on discovering English folk music

...I chanced upon an intriguing looking L.P. with a deep blue border haloing an antique looking sailor and his young son and the words 'Sea Songs and Sea Shanties' printed on the top. 

...From the first time I heard The Watersons sing 'Plains of Mexico' or A.L. Lloyd sing 'Coast of Peru', I was utterly enthralled. I had no precedent for this music whatsoever, but it seemed to be a direct mainline to certain psychic atmospheres I liked to inhabit that were both romantic and barbaric. ...There was something that smacked of the salt water about these songs. I responded profoundly to the desperate vitality and intuitive salutary gruff of the performances, but had never heard anything like the sandpapery bray of Burt Lloyd singing 'Blood Red Roses' ...or the really fucking peculiar nasal cadences of Mike Waterson's lead vocal on 'Boston Harbour' 

...Imbedded in the fabric of the music, themes, melodies, delivery and language, seemed to be everything I held precious; the eternal call of the lonesome vocalist. The universality of the characters and the death defying situations they are condemned to play out eternally. The songs seemed to act as alchemical agents where you start with the base matter of the language and the very basic scenarios that reflect very basic human concerns (fidelity, obsessive love, death fantasy, incest, infanticide, submitting yourself to something other, abandoning your True Love to go and fight some remote foe across the barbarous blue) and the realisation that transcendence can be achieved by inhabiting the characters and internalising and playing out the predicaments with sincerity with acceptance of the possible fatal consequences. Eternity awaits. The glory chord can be struck and sustained. 

Alex Neilson, sleeve notes to Stepanie Hladowski's The High High Nest 10"

As overly romantic as the effusions he expresses here are, I definitely recognise something of my own deep rooted love of this music in what Alex Neilson is saying here. I might want to add a few categories to the list he gives, which seems to miss something of the social, communal character of much folk music. I'd also add a pragmatic, no-nonsense, popular Christianity to that list. Still, at least he didn't try and claim it for Paganism. Seriously, every time I see a music reviewer trying to assert a clear binary opposition between Christianity (which is clearly present in a number of songs) and a hazily defined 'paganism', I want to shout 'Syncretism!' at them. 'Pagan' elements are - sometimes - maybe - present in some folk songs, but if so, I don't think they can be so clearly separated from the Christian underpinnings which are clearly present in many more songs, including some of the most beautiful and moving. I doubt very much that anyone singing folk songs in the last few centuries would have ever thought of themselves as somehow unChristian. Any elements of paganism would be absorbed into and understood within an overtly Christian understanding of the world, even if that 'popular' Christianity might be somewhat distant from what the Church taught.

Anyway, my own discovery was rather more prosaic. The third folk CD I bought was A Collection, a dozen songs taken from Martin Carthy's first half dozen albums, two apiece. Eliza's Red Rice was the second folk album I bought, so I assumed I'd also like her Dad's stuff too. Sitting in my parent's kitchen, as the first track, 'The Trees They Do Grow High' started to play, my initial reaction was bafflement, worry that I'd spent good money on music that wasn't actually much to my taste. Too astringent, too spare in it's approach.

But then, by the time 'Cold Haily Windy Night' reached it's brutal finish, I'd already warmed to it. And after listening to the whole album a couple more times, I was converted - completely infatuated with Martin Carthy's powerful singing and pared down guitar playing. It was at that point that I think I realised I'd found what I've ever after thought of as my music. This was my musical home, so to speak. While I might continue to listen to other styles, other genres, this music - specifically English folk music, although I know you can't ever keep things so separate as that, and nor would I wish to police borders, musical or otherwise, in any such way - was the music which spoke to me above all others. In fact, I could go further, and reduce it just to Yorkshire, the English county in which I've lived most of my life (if not just at present), also home to the Watersons. Ask me which is my favourite folk music, and it will always come down to that mighty river of song that the Waterson/Carthy families have so generously given us over all these years. That's where I belong. It's my home.

So, thinking again, perhaps my discovery of this music - and what it has come to mean to me - was just as romantic...!

July's despair, or, blogging about recent blogging

As I walked out on a bright May morning,
Like a hero in a song,
Looking for a place called England,
Trying to find where I belong.

*

Looking back at the posts I produced over the last month - the first things I've published after yet another inadvertent break from blogging - I'm wondering if there isn't something underlying them all. I've decided that it's probably best described as 'despair'.

Globally, it feels like the world has been undergoing more than it's fair share of outrage and horror over the last few years. Of course, it's not like we've ever lived in a world free from war and terrorism and their consequences, and there's also a very sensible argument that both the internet and a digitally interconnected world have made many of us so much more aware of what's going on around the world in a manner which magnifies a sense of a world going to hell in a handcart, producing a false sense of how awful things actually are. When in actual fact globally, worldwide levels of violence have fallen over the last fifty years.

Still, that's small comfort if it's you that's living in the middle of a war zone, but - rightly or wrongly - from a relatively privileged position lived here in Britain, it still feels as though things are becoming worse. We're living through a moment of history which will have lasting, and unknowable consequences, which includes more than terrorism and war. I'm also thinking of a culmination of the growth in economic equality over the last few decades, the increase in power of a global oligarchic financial elite, an increasingly polarised public discourse around economics and immigration and other things besides. And behind it all, the unfolding ecological catastrophe the human species is now enduring along with all of the natural world. Again, perhaps we're always living though difficult times, but it feels as though it's more obvious now. And of course, here in Britain, we've just gone through an intensification of our own particular local politics, the consequences of which are still unfolding.

I have my own opinions, of course - like many others - but I make no predictions. Frankly, I hardly feel that I'm qualified to do such, although I know that's hardly something which stops many from making their own impassioned pronouncements. Or something which has stopped me in the past! Instead I choose to despair. A luxury no doubt, and perhaps it's the wrong word anyway. As often as I find myself reading something about the current political situation either here or somewhere abroad, I feel the equally strong impulse to look away, to absent myself, to refuse to engage with political events in even the limited, voyeuristic manner of an onlooker that I have ever engaged with them.

*

Perhaps I confuse my categories here, when I refer to this as underlying the arguments I was trying to make in those earlier posts. Aesthetics are not, after all, the same thing as politics, and it can be dangerous to mix the two (to put it mildly!). But on the other hand, politics are a part of our aesthetics, and that is the 'tradition' in which I feel I was trained when I was an undergraduate, and the approach that I feel I instinctively reach for when I choose to write about something on this blog.

How much political argument has made it into this blog? Probably more than I realise, creeping in around the edges of all my assumptions - you don't get outside of politics that easily, after all - but maybe not quite so much as I might currently fear. Perhaps it's different for others, who are surely far more disciplined about their own blogging, but personally I've found it to be a writing process which takes on an instinctively personal cast, whatever my actual intentions, which are generally opposed to making any overly personal revelations in a space like this. I do hope that little I say here has been especially strident.

So I don't seriously think that I'm going to alter much of my approach to what I choose to write about here. It's just that at present, I'm feeling such despair, such disgust and fear about our politics in general, that it's influencing my thoughts about the value of aesthetically political readings in general.

I'm looking for a space which feels uncontaminated with politics. It's inevitable perhaps, given the sort of person I am, that I should want to look for that in books and art.

No doubt these feelings will pass, if they haven't already. I'm well aware that my hoped for refuge doesn't actually exist.

"The old stones were quiet here..."

The old stones were quiet here, polished by the footfalls of the years. Gandhi and Jinnah must have walked up this stretch, founding fathers of two nations; the same basalt flagstones offered a place to rest to beggars and itinerant vendors of fresh lemonade, second-hand textbooks, and handled-looking postcards that showed ten famous views of the city. Walking here, he felt that he walked among the great and insignificant of the past; all, alike, hurried as he did, for in this city even idlers liked to look as though they had somewhere to go smartly. All the clerks and petty officers; in their stream, he imagined his father, hurrying along with a set of proofs in a large envelope; he'd been proud, at one time, to do some printing for the university. It hadn't been a lucrative job, but had seemed to confer a diffuse glow of learning over all his work. A hundred and fifty years earlier this had been the beach, before the land reclamations; perhaps it was the murmur of waves one heard on the busiest days, through the endless talking of peons and passers-by, and the tumble of the red busses, the taxi-horns, the metallic steps of each person hurrying through the Fort.

Anjali Joseph, Saraswati Park 

A long quote, from a novel I read some time early last year. One of many I wanted to write something about, but never got around to. It's far to late now.

If I remember correctly, what I wanted to write about this quote specifically, was how it seems to work as an allusion not to any specific novel or writer, but to that tendency in much Indian fiction in English to focus on the history and politics of post-colonial India in big, maximalist novels. Rushdie, Seth, Mistry, etc. Writing a novel of modern middle-class Mumbai, this is the only time Joseph alludes to India's history, and she is as concerned with noting the presence of 'insignificant' ordinary folk of Mumbai, going about their everyday business, which is explicitly contrasted with the great men of history, who appear only against the mass of present day reality. Where politics enters the narrative elsewhere, it's only as the irritating right wing opinions of an older relative, or else the idealistic environmentalism of a young neighbour. It appears early on in the novel, almost seeming to stand as a sign of what she's not going to do. Instead, her work is concerned with the interpersonal relationships of several characters connected by family and friendship, and with their individual experiences of living in modern Mumbai.

*

Now, admittedly, my earlier post on Satyajit Ray was already long enough. Still, it's interesting to me to see that, in arguing against David Thomson's condescension to Ray, and having noted that an artist should not be expected to focus on the history and politics of their country, I then go on to argue for some of the ways in which Ray's films do actually open up to history, both colonial and post-colonial. I don't think that anything I wrote is wrong exactly - all art has a political dimension of course (the consequences of which is something which I was recently trying to grapple with in my most recent post) - but there is surely much which is easily left out of what the experience of an art work can actually mean when one is producing an explicitly political reading of a work. But if I'd wanted to try and address that there, it would have made an already very long piece even longer!

Now, I have no particular issue with reading art works for their latent political meaning - it can be a very productive way of examining a work and can produce valuable insights, and I find thinking about the social and historical contexts of a novel can be very invigorating, and certainly does;t have to exclude pleasure or enthusiasm - but I'm questioning here my own ingrained leap here to such a way of reading an art work. Is that really the reason why I fell in love with literature in the first place? Is it anyone's?

(In another context, it's also one of the ways in which, in Britain and America, and presumably elsewhere too, writers and filmmakers who come from elsewhere - specifically Asia or Africa - or else emerge from immigrant communities, can be condescended to. The unspoken expectation is that they must comment in some way on the historical and political experience of the countries or communities from which they come - they're expected to explore this for an audience which is implicitly white and British. Certainly I've seen writers expressing dismay at this 'othering' and pursuit of bogus authenticity. Aminatta Forma, in The Guardian, just last year, complaining about the labelling that both fuels and results from this unspoken assumption. Inevitably, the only book of hers I've read is her first book, her memoir of her father and Sierra Leone.)

Anjali Joseph doesn't venture far outside of her own experience in Saraswati Park, writing about the middle class Bombay in which she grew up and presumably knows as an adult from trips back. But her main characters are both men. Actually, the stories of both are hardly particularly novel - a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality, an older man coming to the realisation that he's been taking his wife for granted for years - but it's beautifully written. And as I've tried to articulate above, what's most refreshing is her refusal to overtly tie her story to explicitly political or national concerns. Nothing wrong with that, surely. Equally, it can be just as enthralling to observe the lives and intimate characters of several middle class individuals and their movement through both public and private spaces and the city. It's a novel which contains a lot of travel, of people getting about by foot or by train. Inevitable in a modern city like Mumbai, perhaps, but it's lovely to see it depicted so lovingly here.

Three quotes about childhood and our relationship to art

I'm not entirely sure why these three quotes are so easily relating to each other in my mind, so lets see if I can work it out, if only for my own satisfaction.

But it’s not something, really, that anyone needs to watch today. In ten-minute chunks it can be fun enough if you can get over your natural repulsion at the racism, but should certainly not be shown to the children who were its intended audience... 

Andrew Hickey, Batman on Screen: Batman (1943) blogpost, 2014

BRIGER: OK, let's - let's talk about the part that you can't relate to. It seems that H.P. Lovecraft - you know, from his fiction, his poetry, his letters - that he was racist. When did you realize that first? 

LAVALLE: Well, here's the funny thing - so I didn't realize it when I was 10 or 11 reading these stories. And I read pretty much all of them. And in some of them, he's pretty blatant about his particular hatred - particularly of black people. When I was 10 or 11 and I read these stories, I read them only for the wild and outlandish plots and the large cosmic dread sort of thing. And in a way, I was naive and I could overlook what should have been blatant clues about the uglier sides of H.P. Lovecraft's personality and his ideas. ...when I was, like, 10 or 11, I just didn't even see it. I think I just couldn't have processed it. And then when I was about 15 or 16, I started being like what is this dude - what did he just say? And it was the kind of thing that you would say, like - if you were walking down the street and somebody said that, you'd smack them in the mouth. So why did I say that it was OK on the page? And yet by this point, I already loved the stories, so it made for these very conflicted feelings. 

Victor Lavelle, author interview, 2015

Certainly the juxtaposition of the first two makes some kind of obvious sense, I think, since both are clearly concerned with making political reading of particular texts, whether that is the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, or one of the early 1940s Batman film serials. Andrew Hickey's Batman review stuck in my mind from when I first read it a couple of years ago. While I don't doubt that he is quite correct in his judgement that the serial now looks deeply racist with it's yellow face depiction of it's Japanese villains, I also remember watching it as a child during some school holiday, and didn't grow up to be a particularly racist person. Not that I would dream of suggesting that I am somehow incapable of saying or writing something racist, if only inadvertently, but it does make me wonder whether a serial of this sort is really 'dangerous' to a child audience as his remark seems to suggest?

While I would probably easily see it if I were to re-watch it now, as a child I was completely unaware of any of the racism which Hickey points out in his blogpost. Some of this may be down to just how old the serial is. It's style is far removed from anything a child of the eighties was going to be especially familiar with. A more likely explanation is simply the context in which I lived: brought up by Guardian-reading liberal-left parents, with school friends whose families came from India and Pakistan. Some old film serial from the 1940s was unlikely to make much of an impression on whatever I might come to believe about the Japanese or any other national or ethnic group.

But for me this still gets at one of the difficulties with any politicised reading of art or popular culture. While, obviously, the art we encounter as children (and as adults) has some effect on what we then come to believe about both the world and, especially, people from different backgrounds and cultures, it's clearly not the only thing which shapes our beliefs. How 'dangerous' a film serial or book is is surely going to depend very much on the context in which it is encountered.

In my second quote Victor Lavelle describes not just the experience of a child being unaware of the racist subtext to works that child enjoys, but also the conflicted feelings this can generate for the adult -  or, as here, just the slightly older teenager - who has learned to see how the things he or she used to enjoy can also embody some very ugly attitudes and prejudices. It's one of the reasons why going back to beloved childhood favourites can sometimes turn out to be a real disappointment. And I also don't doubt that such feelings are going to be much harder to deal with for someone who belongs to the group which is being stereotyped or subjected to such prejudices in this case. I'm very fortunate really; it's easier for me to overlook racism or sexism or homophobia in a book or a film, to read around such attitudes as it were, because I belong to the groups which are rarely if ever subjected to that kind of prejudice, at least here in Britain.

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Parenthood changed the way I view characters. And the way I view humanity. I would’ve thought that you have a lot more input into raising a child, into how they turn out, than you actually do. The best you can do is sort of help them realize who they are, and not dissuade them. It’s not as interesting in a way to be a writer when you come to grips with that. You want to believe characters are controlled by the events in their lives, but that happens so much less than you’d think.

Dan Clowes, author interview, 2016

Aside from Ghost World, I've not read much of Dan Clowes' work. The description of Patience, however, makes it sound like something I'd really like to check out.

Anyway, that aside, it's less obvious just how much this quote has in common with the other two. It comes back to that issue of childhood, and the extent to which we are influenced by the culture around us. One shouldn't overstate this of course. I rather imagine that, as a successful cartoonist with several films made out of his work, Dan Clowes has been able to provide his son with a relative level of comfort and security which has ensured his child has avoided some of the more obvious traumas which can easily result from a less privileged childhood. But I suspect that's not quite what he's addressing here in any case. He's not, after all, denying that the 'events of our lives' leave their marks upon us, but merely suggesting that their impact is rather more complicated than might easily be supposed. In any case, how any of us respond to a traumatic event or experience is to some extent going to be dictated by the person we already are.

And from the point of view of a writer of fiction, I would imagine that a relatively clear sense of cause and effect (however nuanced this may be in practice) is, to some extent at least, necessary if your fiction is to be coherent. Real people are always much more complicated than fictional characters, after all, hence part of the reason why modernism became so complex with its attempt to represent human character in all of it's complexity.

Unlike the first two quotes, Clowes isn't concerned here directly with a child's relationship with and understanding of art, but it surely chimes with what I've been trying to explore in this short blogpost? If even the 'events of our lives' - and surely, we might think, this refers to something of far greater import than the art we encounter? - can leave less of a mark than we might suppose, what hope for the books we read, or the films we see?

*

None of the above is intended as in any way to constitute a definitive judgement. There are a number of conclusions which I could draw from what I've written here which I don't agree with. I don't, for example, believe that we shouldn't be concerned about the books which children are reading, or the films and television they are watching. Nor do I think that the ideological content of a work somehow doesn't matter, and that we shouldn't criticise works which we find to be sexist or racist or homophobic. The whole point of didactic works of art, after all, of whatever political stripe, is that they are an attempt to change the hearts and minds of the people who encounter them. And they do, surely, in some way. But how? It seems to me that it's very hard to define precisely how any of us are effected by the things we read or watch, beyond whatever personal, visceral reactions we may each experience.

...for Brexit

Song on the End of the World

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

Czeslaw Milosz

Gene Wolfe quote

Inspired by the sense of theatre I have often been forced to cultivate, I raised my arms, spread my hands, and gave them my blessing, telling them to be kind to one another and as happy as they could. That is really all the blessing we godlings can ever give, though no doubt the Increate can do much more. 

Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun

The Golden Age of Children's Literature (7)

So, first of all, lets take a quick look at the cover, illustrated by one Janina Ede, an artist with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar:

I really don't have very much to say, other than, isn't it just gorgeous? The sort of neo-romantic illustration that feels very tied to its period. Or so it seems to me, at least. Also the sort of illustrative tradition which has been largely replaced by computer generated imagery. It's gorgeousness is added to for me by the fact of my copy being such a beaten up second hand volume. It's very materiality redolent of an older period of publishing children's literature.

*

Unlike some of Penelope Farmer's other books, Charlotte Sometimes is still in print, if only because of the song it inspired by Robert Smith. It's actually the second of two sequels to the earlier The Summer Birds, although chronologically the second of the sequence. I'm fairly sure I may have encountered her work in my first year of secondary school; a later novel, Thicker Than Water, sounds familiar from it's description. Unlike Tom's Midnight Garden, with which it has features in common, this is not a book I even tried to read as a child, but certainly it's one that I wish I'd read.

*

It's another timeslip tale from post-war England. It gives me the sense I might be on to something in my earlier post when I tried to suggest that the past - or in the case of Tom's Midnight Garden, specifically the Victorian past - must still have felt 'close' to many people in the period in which this type of story appears to have been so popular. In the sense at least that so much more of the material fabric of the Victorian period must have remained visible than it does now after so much redevelopment of British cities. It was in the post-war period that saw the large scale destruction of much of this materiality through redevelopment, in addition to the scar that bombing during the war had already left on many of our cities.

Penelope Farmer's beautiful, subtle novel doesn't go back quite as far as that, but the transportation of it's heroine to the end of the First World War literalises this sense of the nearness of the past through it's means of timeslip. Charlotte only needs to sleep in a particular bed in her boarding school dormitory in order to switch places with Clare, another young girl at school in 1918, towards the end of the War, and whom she physically resembles. Each night the two girls find they switch places. Consequently each of them has to navigate a social environment which is subtly unfamiliar, highlighting the changes between the past of 1918, and the present of the late 60s that Charlotte longs to return to once she finds herself trapped in the past. Since the novel is told entirely from Charlotte's perspective, we only hear Claire's voice through the entries in her diary which she leaves for her replacement, but while the social world and rituals of a school enables them to survive, both girls clearly struggle to adapt to the unfamiliar time in which they find themselves.

Looked at over literally it feels just a little unlikely that a bed would really survive four decades of use and still be residing in the same room, but that enables the book to achieve the little narrative suspense it has. Whilst the room in which the bed resides is a dormitory in Charlotte's time, in 1918, Claire and her younger sister Emily are sleeping in a sick room, before they move to the stern foster home they were supposed to be have been billeted with initially. It's this move which traps Charlotte and Clare in the wrong time periods, necessitating Charlotte breaking into the school, which she still attends as a day girl, in order to sleep in the bed and be returned to her own time.

The sister of one of the girls, Emily quickly realises that her sister is being replaced every other day. One of the things which is most fascinating about the novel is the sense in which much of our identity is socially created through the pressures and expectations of the people surrounding us. The author has apparently related this uncertainty of identity to her own experience of being a twin, but it doesn't feel nearly so specific as that. Surely most of us run up against this at some point in childhood, the realisation that you are expected by family and friends to behave in certain ways, and hold particular interests, because that's what they've always expected from you. It's an almost existential moment, the realisation of just how hard it can be to change oneself in the face of others' expectations.

The choice of 1918, towards the end of the war (victory is announced late on in the narrative), that Charlotte travels to, also feels unusual. When depicted in fiction, or at least this is my sense, the home front of the First World War is usually seen from the point of view of the returning soldier on leave, unable to make those he's returning to understand precisely what he is experiencing in the horror of the war. Inevitably perhaps, if the focus of most fiction of the war is concerned with the experience of the soldiers. Here, we see something very different, the experience of all those ordinary civilians left behind, making do in a depleted world, ground down by years of a conflict which is taking place elsewhere. The closest the narrative comes to the experience of the soldiers is a long line of returned injured men derailing from a hospital train, beautifully illustrated by one Chris Connor.

In this, the illustrations are a fair match to a narrative which is concerned with small moments of individual perception and ordinary life, and with a sense of a lived past, which is still, just, even without the magic of a time-slip, able to be glimpsed in the world of the late 60s. Right at the end, a passage illuminates this feeling beautifully:

The bus went by modern, noisy roads. But when it came to the river and crossed over the bridge into the town, just for a moment, looking down the river, Charlotte could almost have believed it was the past, 1918, again. The pigeons and ducks and gulls there looked no different, nor did the faded, once elegant buildings with their elaborate cornices. The stucco was cracked, the gardens full of weeds, just as they had been then, after four years of war.

It's hard to imagine that you could make such a comparison these days. The houses would all have been restored, the gardens no doubt better maintained in preparation for some national gardening competition, the village likely a dormitory town for the city of London. The school might not even be a school any more, but perhaps converted in to some other use. The village would look 'old', but remain only a simulacrum of a past that we might imagine could once still be fully experienced.

An unfinished 'review'

My first post of the year, in February no less, and it's a fragment of something which I never finished. And now I never will, because it's opening section refers to contemporary events which are now no longer current.

I've put 'review' in scare quotes in the post title, because I'm not sure how many of the posts on this blog could really be described very accurately as 'reviews'. Or even if that's what I'm intending to write. I do worry that some of what I write is little more than a conversation with myself, and will hold little interest to anyone reading. But then I don't have much sense of an audience for this blog ('Hi!' if you are actually reading), and I don't think I post frequently enough to actually attract much of an audience.

Part of the reason why I don't post as much as I'd like is because I've increasingly found that should be relatively short appreciations become much longer pieces in the writing, taking up more time than I can really devote to them. That's certainly part of what happened here; I barely even start to talk about the book.

Still, I think I am trying to engage with an important point here, however ineptly. It's an idea which I've often come across, that the person of an author - whatever unpleasant opinions they may hold, or whatever unsavoury things they've done - should make no difference to one's appreciation of a work. In principle I agree, and it's surely necessary up to a point. But the experience of encountering a work where we know something about the person who created it will surely always colour our responses. And as a consequence, we might refuse to read something, or listen to a particular band, or watch a tv show or film. It's not that I think that's somehow wrong or even right, it's just inevitable, part of the filter we use to navigate the culture which is available to us.

So, anyway, for what little it might be worth:

William Mayne – A Game of Dark 

The decision to read some writers, whether we like it or not, make moral demands upon us. Of course, in principal, I agree with the proposition that creative works should exist independently of the people who create them. The fact that you disapprove of the behaviour of any particular writer shouldn’t automatically disbar them from writing a novel you consider to be a masterpiece. It should never be a reason not to read an author.

In practise, however, I don’t think it’s nearly so simple. We all make such decisions, and provided we don’t attempt to make this into a grand principal, disapproving of others for enjoying a work we have forbidden ourselves for whatever reason, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. These are personal decisions we make for ourselves, one of the many ways in which we decide what we’re going to read, or listen to, or watch. 

Until a friend posted a link to a news story about the singer, I’m not sure I’d even heard of the band lostprophets, but I can well imagine that many fans are revaluating their relationship with the band’s music. For all that that seems unfair on the other musicians involved who have committed no crime. I’ve made a couple of similar decisions just recently. When I heard of how Noel Fielding had inspired an incident of cyber bullying on twitter which led to a young woman attempting to take her own life. And recently the comics blogosphere has been made aware of writer/artist Brian Wood’s repeated sexual harassment of women at comics conventions. In both cases, the individuals only compounded things through their responses. Noel Fielding deleted his incriminating tweets, whilst Brian Wood issued a poor apology which failed to even address all of the complaints against him. 

So I’ve gotten rid of my Mighty Boosh DVDs, but on the other hand I’m still reading the Conan the Barbarian comic which Brian Wood is writing. I’ve actually given some thought to this, justifying it to myself that I’ve liked much of the art on the series, as well as his writing, and besides, there’s only a few issues to go. Yes, it’s a pretty mealy mouthed justification, but then who, apart from myself, am I trying to justify these decisions to? I don’t pretend to be morally spotless, and if I wanted to find a reason for not reading something, I’d be much better off looking at the text. 

I’m not comparing the behaviour of any of these individuals, or explicitly judging one worse than the other. In practise any such decision is going to be taken in isolation, partly effected by other considerations. Perhaps I just don’t like The Mighty Boosh as much as I thought I did when I first saw it? Perhaps as a man I just don’t believe or value the complaints of a woman making claims of sexual harassment? Well, actually I do, and if I am going to read the last few issues of his Conan series, then I’m still not going to seek out any of Brian Wood’s work in the future without feeling rather ashamed of myself. It’s probably fortunate that I’m not interested in many of his other comics anyway.

These are individual decisions I’m making. In both cases, it’s really only my own choice that they call for an ethical decision in the first place. I could just ignore these issues if I wanted, and I don’t think that would make me a bad person. So my opening sentence is incorrect. Books only make demands upon us through their contents. The specific acts of any writer only affect us if we come to know about them, if we allow them to do so. In practise, it’s messy, because while we most likely read plenty of books written by people we disapprove of, it’s only when we come to know about specific things, or specific statements, which cross what for us is a line on acceptable behaviour, that we’re going to want to make such a choice.

* 

William Mayne is another writer I never encountered as a child, but The Game of Dark certainly fits fairly comfortably alongside the kind of children’s fantasy I did enjoy. As far as I can tell from a brief survey of amazon, all his work is now out of print, so anyone reading him now, as an adult, is going to have to go looking for his work, and is almost certainly going to know about the nature of his crimes before they read, or even re-read anything he’s written. Clearly a collective decision has been taken between publishers, librarians and parents, and given the nature of his crimes, that’s not at all surprising. 

I picked this up in a charity shop for 50 pence, but of course I knew who he was when I did so. Obviously, nobody with any conscience could approve of the crimes for which was convicted, so if we read a book by him, then we’re choosing to not make an ethical decision. Assuming there’s an ethical decision to be made. It’s not as though a book can have this effect. The fact that he’s now dead somehow makes this easier. 

If I had tried to read The Game of Dark when I was a child, I do wonder if I would have finished it.

And there I broke off.