Friday, 21 October 2016

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!

Friday, 14 October 2016

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

Saturday, 8 October 2016

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.

Friday, 7 October 2016

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.