Sunday morning: more on McEwan's Saturday

ReadySteadyBlog provides a mouseful of links around McEwan's new novel. In particular, the lengthy (i.e. I scanned it) article on The Sharp Side, a blog new to me (though I'm delighted to see it links to The Gaping Void!). It more than justifies my intolerant reaction to the recent extract from the novel.

Some might condemn my reaction as politically motivated rather than a discerning literary judgement. Indeed, The Sharp Side's author concedes that "[i]t would be unfair to condemn a novel which hasn’t yet been published and which I haven’t yet read". Yet I need only read one sentence from the novel, quoted in The Complete Review's review, to feel political and literary disgust:

This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination ...

Whenever I read a sentence like this from a fictional work, I feel the stuffy breath of the Master Novelist. No doubt it is beautifully written. This is not the problem. The problem is that it has the same solipsistic tendency of the beginner who takes up residence in the snug of fiction, suddenly freed from the cold wind and rain of uncertainty.

I once described this kind of sentence to a friend by making up the opening line of to ficticious novel: Laetitia was glad she had lighted a fire in the parlour as the day had turned dark and cold. It evokes, to me, the same sense of suffocation as one feels in the company of a bully.

There's a phrase that comes to my mind now, the source of which I cannot recall, that sums up my own approach to fiction: the creative letting-go of the desire for possession. This is not an intellectual approach - or at least not solely - but felt in the urge to write itself. When I read a sentence like McEwan's, I feel that I am not reading fiction at all. What can it be called instead?

John McCririck: lest we forget

From 9pm to 950pm I used the Recall button on my remote to switch between BBC2's Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution' and C4's Celebrity Big Brother.

Bernhard in the Cabinet

Gregory Williams on a postcard from the Austrian Cultural Forum.

The Kafka Project

Mauro Nervi's impressive resource The Kafka Project has been redesigned and relaunched. The site went down after I had accessed a good appreciation of Kafka's short story The Cares of a Family Man by EV Meksin from the front page. Now it's gone and I can't find the link.

Extracted from involvement: Ian McEwan's Saturday

I began reading this Guardian piece thinking it was a review of Ian McEwan's new novel Saturday about a man caught up in the February 15th 2003 march against the coming invasion and occupation of Iraq. The opening lines didn't disabuse me. I thought it was summary of a scene in the novel. But by the second sentence of the third paragraph, I had realised something was wrong. Up to this point, there had not been a comment from the reviewer.

The first sentence of the third paragraph is: Ever since he treated an Iraqi Professor of Ancient History for a cerebral aneurysm, saw his torture scars and listened to his stories, Perowne has had ambivalent or confused and shifting ideas about this coming invasion.

At this point, I still thought it was a review. After all, it does read like a précis. From the second sentence of the third paragraph, however, it begins the story of the Iraqi professor. It was here that I stopped.

It was so unconvincing and yet there was no comment from the reviewer about 'caricature' and the like. Hasn't "Henry Perowne" (and what an unconvincing name that is!) ever treated another torture victim from somewhere less newsworthy? This is a prime example of journalism by other means. The narrative does not include itself in its meticulous study.

My mistake in reading it as review was an unwittingly perceptive one. There is no involvement but a supercilious schematic based on a very limited perspective that is also unaware of its limits. However, this is the understanding of what fiction is if one reads reviews in newspapers like The Guardian. Here we have a narrative of complete control where the only doubt is the contemptible liberal umming-and-arring of a character designed to justify the inexcusable open-mindedness to Blair's criminal war by writers like Ian McEwan and other journalists.

Time of the Superwolf

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy’s new record is a collaboration with Matt Sweeney. Together they form Superwolf. After several listens, I'm still not won over.

Four songs stand out: A Beast for Thee, Lift Me Up, Bed is for Sleeping and Death in the Sea. Generally, these are the cooler, quieter songs. Some were written by Sweeney. Yet all lack the essential Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. I felt more or less the same about Master & Everyone, Ease Down the Road and, going back much further, Joya. While there are great songs in each, there is a sense of an inauthentic assertion (which might explain why they were popular with journalists). However, with these LPs, one at least felt there was something going on, a search for a way forward.

Some might now look back and see Greatest Palace Music - the lush, Nashville reworkings of the Palace Brothers' low-fi alt-Country classics - as an indication of BPB’s stagnation, or worse, his betrayal. I don't. I see it as a triumphant reassertion of his essence: serious joy. All the darkness of the originals is unified with the brightest, most gorgeous music. It’s not a matter of being better or worse but of reinvention.

Superwolf is, by comparison, fairly complacent arcane musings in familiar (familiarly arcane) BPB territory. There is no real sense of reinvention.

Only with the opening lines of Death in the Sea do I sense what makes Will Oldham songs special.

Someday I must die.
It ain’t for me to know why.
And I want to die in the sea.

Here is the familiar and endearing preoccupation with death; a morbidity that is immediately mixed with an odd sense of joy – due partly to the cool tenderness with which Will Oldham sings the lines, and partly to the writing: the adamant statement of the final line, in all its cheerful peculiarity, raises the spirits. The dual movement towards death and life is all important. It makes me want to hear it again and again. Unfortunately, the rest of the song dissipates this joy too easily.

Perhaps the collaboration with Sweeney has diluted the essence. But all music is a collaboration. Individuals collaborate with music. This is why Will Oldham appears as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. He recognises (seems to feel it viscerally) that the music removes Will Oldham from himself. He is reinvented, or goes as far as to become someone else. When this dynamic is the subject of his songwriting (with death at its heart), Bonnie 'Prince' Billy comes into his own. With Superwolf, reinvention is indulged in rather than explored.

On the feast of Shakespeare

A lot of fuss attends the shortlist for the Richard & Judy Best Read award. Little of it is to do with the books themselves. The choice is invariably governed by fashion, PR budgets or the immediacy of political relevance.

In my contempt, I am demonstrating what is referred to as "book snobbery". This is what I assume, at least. For whenever this couple's promotion of reading is mentioned, the wrath of "book snobs" is almost invariably invoked. Yet not once has a book snob been identified by picture, name or quotation. Perhaps they have appeared on R&J's daytime show and, being too much of a snob to watch daytime TV, I have missed it. (Actually, I'm at work at the time). Perhaps this mythical creature is out there for real, somewhere. Perhaps it is me.

But no. I tend to suspect that the real book snobs are those so terrified of books and the silence they command, that they give awards instead. Or set up movements.

Take those busy radicals at the Underground Literary Alliance. Its spokesman was kind enough to send me – unbidden – its near reading of Shakespeare. King Wenclas claims that "Today [Titus Andronicus] would be considered the lowest of low pointless semi-literate unredeemable hack underground trash theater." This might be true – though I haven't seen this play, or any trash theatre, to be able to judge – but it does make me wonder why dozens of other such 'hacks' haven't survived from Shakespeare's time nor had such a major influence on our language and culture. Perhaps Richard & Judy discuss them. I wouldn't know.

King Wenclas expresses the common opinion that were Shakespeare alive today he would be vigorously populist. This is barely opinion at all. People say these things all the time, thoughtlessly, in order to stop thinking. King Wenclas links a chain of clichés and seems barely to exist himself. Actually, this is very much like Shakespeare himself, except for the clichés.

However, Mr Wenclas does make some significant observations:

We see Elizabethan England through an unrealistic glaze. In comparison to us, here in this advanced society near the beginning of 2005, England was a primitive, backward country.

But the observation only overlooks its significance. Shakespeare wrote at a time between these times, on the rickety bridge between times: between the trust of the medieval world and the rational suspicion of the modern. He brought the inevitable tension to life in drama and poetry. This is particularly clear in Richard II and Othello.

By contrast we live in a robotic, antiseptic, technocratic time; suburbanized; homogenized. [...] To get the feel and atmosphere of the Elizabethans you'd better go deep into rougher neighborhoods, punk theater maybe in a setting of scrap yards and industry, in nondescript buildings surrounded by packs of roving wild dogs.

Again, this is true only insofar as the reverse is also true. It reveals the ULA’s essential Romantic sentimentality. It is no more real in rougher areas, just as Irvine Welsh is no more real than Wallace Stevens. But at least the latter makes us aware of the distance between language and world.

It is odd that the very first line of this blog about Shakespeare is "We're creatures of language". It is clearly not the case. If it was, then it wouldn’t need to be written. The word 'creature' in this sentence evokes the knot fastening the self to a dying animal. It also evokes the imposing longevity of language. One wonders why this needs to be pointed out to those who are quite clearly uncomfortable with the latter.

King Wenclas announces, as if he knew it were true, that Shakespeare "wrote not for scholars or posterity" and that "His sole goal was to entertain." Which only begs the question: what is entertainment? Clearly, it is not what the ULA want it to be (trash theatre), otherwise we’d be overwhelmed by works like King Lear from every mediocrity with two thumbs and a keyboard.

To say again: Shakespeare's genius (which was his craft) was to make a spectacle of the breakdown of religious tradition and the rise of rational authority. His most famous plays animate the ordeal. It goes on today. This is why they resonate. This is why they entertain. To make entertaining art out of such comedy and such distress demands more than noise and hack work.

Kitsch and silence: on photographs

The Guardian proudly presents Sebastião Salgado's photographs of mountain gorillas and volcanoes.

Usually, photographs (and paintings) develop an incandescence when viewed online. Salgado's, however, seem flat, laboured and dull. Perhaps the use of black & white introduces a leaching sentimentality to what should be awesome. And one wonders why the paper felt it necessary to add a commentary. The decision says: A picture speaks a thousand words, but here are some more just in case.

Alternatively, browse the found photos at Found Photos (even if they've spoilt the effect that its original design had, which allowed one to scroll fullsize images). And look at Fallujah in Pictures. It does not matter that photography is not an art form. On each site, a terrible, exhilerating silence persists.