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.

Gardening: on intensely pleasurable private experiences

Trawling through piles of books tucked away behind the TV, I found Damned to Fame, James Knowlson's biography of Beckett. Opening it random, I read Dennis Potter's "review" of Not I when it appeared on BBC TV in 1977

Would Solzhenitsyn have understood? Would the Jews on the way to the gas chamber? Question: Is this the art which is the response to the despair and pity of our age, or is it made of the kind of futility which helped such desecrations of the spirit, such filfh of ideologies come into being?

It's hard to comprehend the arrogance, insensitivity and sheer wrongness of these questions. As Knowlson comments, Beckett would have read this "as someone who had joined the battle against Fascism as a Resistance agent precisely because of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews".

But such philistinism is endemic in British culture, even among those considered avant-garde. Beckett has never been accepted with the same enthusiasm as his mentor Joyce. And yet, even then, Ulysses is often mitigated as a Dublin compendium, as if it were like any other 'ambitious' 800 page time travelogue. Even a Joycean like Anthony Burgess thought that Beckett's reputation would take a deserved downturn after his death. (Of course, it has soared while Burgess's has plummeted).

Knowlson quotes a letter written by Beckett during a period of "inertia and void" toward the end of his life: "I remember an entry in Kafka's diary. 'Gardening. No hope for the future'. At least he could garden."

I tend to think: at least I can read. Forget the culture and desecrations of the spirit by journalists.

Today, I read Franzen's odd, enjoyable review of a book by Alice Munro. He puts it well: Beckett is also "the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences". It doesn't matter that the author is under-appreciated; it doesn't matter that a book is not "a major cultural event"; it doesn't matter that the reviewers get it wrong all the time; it doesn't matter that not one of your friends has heard of him or her. It doesn't matter at all.

Instead, what matters (to me, at least, as I watch Ohio Impromptu) is: how does one discuss these experiences?

Reviewing: "The saying of inapposite things in uninteresting ways"?

In 2002, the novel Luck was published, Michael Hofmann's translation of his father's Das Glück. It is a wonderful novel. The TLS ran one of the few reviews it received. Michael Butler, a professor of German, was polite, welcoming and condescending ("an idiosyncratic author"). And in the final paragraph picked holes in the transation. Michael Hofmann responded with a letter, which I think merits repetition:

Translators live in the doghouse, and whenever they come forward ("sich zu Wort melden"), it's invariably dismissed as self-interested barking. I have, accordingly, tried and tried not to write about Michael Butler's really hurtfully inadequate account of my translation of my father's penultimate novel ... but it's no good.

There is a kind of niggardliness that mistakes itself for measure, for judgment. Butler's piece - he perhaps didn't even know it - was niggardly. It was an even 1 on the Richter scale. It was one bland, tepid routine phrase ("they last for ever if you look after them properly") after another. This wouldn't matter - or it would matter a lot less - if the book he was - or, on the whole, was not talking about hadn't been wildly, vocally, desperately, blackly original. It made me wonder what criticism was, or reviewing: perhaps the saying of inapposite things in uninteresting ways.

As for the few strictures on the translation (along with the usual, and usually worded cereal pack goodies, "considerable gifts", "fluent", "prose rhythms", la-di-da), I reject those too. The idea that by commission or omission I could do anything to diminish the effectiveness, the vivacity of my father's book is to me traumatic. The things that "grated" with Michael Butler - but, please, the whole book is meant to "grate" - I am perfectly happy with. "Gone on" ends a sentence and carries a metaphor (it was about a marriage, if I remember) better than "passed away"; "whippersnapper" is unendurable; if "bite down hard" isn't English yet, there's no reason why it shouldn't be soon; and the shoes did go downstream. I was four. They were my shoes.

I don't want to antagonize a profession, but it upsets me to think that busy people like professors of German can still find the time to impair the pathetic prospects for German literature in English. It took me eight years to find a publisher for Luck. There is nothing like it in English. Take that any way you like.

The good news is that Hofmann's ultimate novel, received a lot more attention; all favourable.

Death to Everyone: in memory of John Peel

For one month and twenty years, Peel kept me company. In the autumn of 1984, I first listened to his programme. I was fortunate enough to catch Microdisney. And I remember being impressed by a Moroccan band called Dissidenten. From then, I rarely missed a show.

In March 1985, there was a session by The Nightingales, it included a song called How to Age. I can't recall much of the song now except that it meant a lot to me; for the atmosphere and emotion expressed. It was the middle of the Thatcher years and I was unemployed, without much of a life to come.

At the same time, I heard Hüsker Dü, the early Crime & the City Solution and Yeah Yeah Noh. But he didn't just play dark European music. He introduced me to the Bhundu Boys and the Four Brothers, both from Zimbabwe. It seems like a long time ago and, now, listening to the old favourites, my skin bristles and I am uncomfortably warm. It is not nostalgia. I am more interested, like Peel, in hearing new music – new music that will have a similar impact on me. Yet listening to the old music, such as Hupenyu Wangu (from the Bhundu Boy's LP Shabini), I realise such joy is not far from this sense of incommensurable loss. Mere repetition doesn't bring joy – it is the implicit knowledge of it being finite that makes it so good. This is why Peel was always looking for new music; it enabled the old to become new again.

I had imagined he would die when I'd long given up listening to his show, and perhaps long after he'd stopped broadcasting. I knew it was not a world I particularly want to live in. A week after he died, that feeling was sharpened.

I have always remembered the times when he tried to say something about a death or a tragedy. Of the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, he said very little. He was in the stadium that night supporting Liverpool. At the start of the first show on his return, he said that, as a child, he could never understand why his father never spoke about his experiences in North Africa during the war. Now, he said, he understood. He then played Tupelo by John Lee Hooker. The song was breathtaking. I'd not heard it before. He didn't have to say any more.

Four years later, after the Hillsborough disaster, he opened the microphone and began to speak. He said he didn't know it was possible to feel such grief for people one didn't know. He then broke down and cried until music faded in.

The music always seemed to resonate with Peel's voice either side of it. I am glad I didn't try to erase it from my recordings of the show. One night in 1988, he said he had a new LP by Everything But the Girl, a band whose members he had championed years before. He said he hadn't heard the record but was attracted to the title of one song – The Night I Heard Caruso Sing - and decided to play it there and then. It turned out to be a dark affair about the threat of nuclear war and the decision about whether to have children or not:

Then someone sat me down last night and I heard Caruso sing!
He's almost as good as Presley, and if I only do one thing
I'll sing songs to my father, I'll sing songs to my child.
It's time to hold your loved ones while the chains are loosed
And the world runs wild.

As the last note faded, Peel said:

I do know exactly how they feel. There are times when you're feeling good, even cheerful, when you go as far as that [meaning the song's epiphany]. But you think to yourself, which I do, at this very moment, someone somewhere on the planet is being tortured to death; and it's happening right now. And that tends to blunt my enjoyment of almost everything.

His voice wavered with awkward sincerity over the hyperlinked words. He clearly meant it. But, I wonder, how much of that enjoyment depended on this sensibility? When I listen to music, my enjoyment, such as it is, includes the terrible knowledge that it is over. This is Peel's gift.

every terrible thing
is a relief
even months on end
buried in grief
are easy light times
which have to end
with the coming
of your death friend.

death to everyone
is gonna come
and it makes hosing
much more fun.

All Souls' Day

There is one reason that keeps me writing: hope. The hope that I might be able to write what I need to say because it could not be said in any other way.

That said, I am not writing.

There is also the hope of reading, which is much the same: to find, at last, the narrative that allows me to breathe and to step forward actually; not vicariously through a character or the author’s experience, but actually to step forward. The metaphor is the only means.

That said, I am not reading.

A couple of years ago I reviewed Cees Nooteboom's All Souls' Day, long after it had been released in paperback. I had been impressed by the way it dealt with the subject matter: a man reflecting on post-traumatic life in the way one might reflect on a hurricane in the utter stillness of its aftermath. I was writing in the aftermath of mixed reviews. The worst of them – by Julie Myerson in The Guardian – had upset me with its lazy assumptions and condescension. Yet two people who I do respect had dismissed it also. One called it "trauma tourism" for its preoccupation with disaster. Looking back, I now understand that view.

Arthur Daane, the main character, merely reflects on other people's suffering: there's a scene where the Daane looks out of a boat's window and thinks of the MV Estonia disaster of 1995. This could easily confirm the criticism of the book that it is too discursive, more concerned with ideas than with anything else like emotion, empathy or narrative. Flick through the novel and you can see the names of Caspar David Friedrich, Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger and innumberable others. The book teems with reflection on ideas and meaning. And at 340 dense pages, it might be too long, or at least its moments of lightness not enough. By contrast with the speculations, the death of Daane's family is barely mentioned: "no more than juicy, gratuitous sidebars" according the bad review. It also compares it to American novels that deal with stories of grief but "do not trade in art or history or big ideas precisely because intellectual posturings have no value, no purpose in such stories".

One wonders, then, what value and purpose they have in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust wrote that ideas were substitutes for griefs and perhaps the beginning of release. His entire novel demonstrates that life demands understanding if happiness of any kind is to be possible. Marcel's happiness is that of a paradise lost, the only possible paradise, he realises. Is that "a big idea" or the result of a long search?

Myerson has found instead that minimal, received ideas and philistine posturings do have greater value, at least in promising careers in popular criticism. It is perhaps too much to ask her to consider the book in its European tradition, marked by history like the Berlin walls – as remarked on in the book – potted by bullet holes. Daane reads the city like a history book. His photographic eye for detail reveals the horror of living on physically untouched by disaster but surrounded by its legacy. His speculations, like Proust's, do have a compulsive edge, as if to stop thinking would return him to blank, unrelenting hunger for his wife and child. But he is aware of it. He recognises it as a symptom in the culture at large. His job is making documentaries for Eurpoean TV channels. But they demand action, violence and politically hot subjects, which appall him. When he suggests a film on Walter Benjamin, they dismiss it out of hand. The philistine's review is an example of this behaviour. Daane prefers instead to wander, seeking bleak epiphanies.

Mainstream British culture is also glib and anti-intellectual, demanding the "B grade sludge" of which Daane speaks. It always has been. But now it is also aggressively resistant to any alternative. Even the one TV channel dedicated to more than bland entertainment is attacked by government accountants. And for all the admiring talk from those in charge following the untimely death of John Peel, there will be no attempt to learn from his example. Everything will be forgotten.

What I admire in All Souls' Day is the willingness to remember, to make one last effort to understand, and to take the long way round, deliberately; through the trial of Purgatory.

Literary immunity: on pretentiousness

Fifteen years ago, John Bayley opened his short essay marking Seamus Heaney's 50th birthday (1) like this:

Maurice Blanchot, the most pretentious if also at time the most suggestive of poet-type critics, has observed that la negation est liée au langage. A word is the memorial to what it signifies. Death is implicit in the distinction between sign and self. Clever, eh? Well, striking at least.

It is out-of-keeping with the rest of the essay which is a perceptive overview of Heaney's achievement, which is, according to Bayley, that Heaney's poetry in itself is able to "take cognizance"” of the distinction "between Romanticism – the spontaneous overflowing of powerful feelings – and the much wider, more perennial notion of poetry as the Sprachgefühl of civilisation, the repository of intelligence, perception, personality, in its highest linguistic form."

Pretentious, lui?

Whatever, I tend to agree with the assessment. Bayley talks about Heaney’s strength in dealing with issues even after Blanchot’s "observation" has been accepted. So I wonder why Bayley distances himself from Blanchot with such haste? I know Anglo-American critics have always been afraid of appearing pretentious, even if they make use of the ideas of those who are not so afraid. Yet what is pretentious in Blanchot that is not in Bayley's impression that "[Heaney’s] poetry is continually aware that it does not live in its own area of discourse, but only visits it. His poetry is a pilgrimage to its own subject."?

Bayley contrasts Heaney’s "sophisticated, referential, and highly group-conscious verse" with poets who did not embrace the pretentions of Modernism, such as Philip Larkin, who, Bayley says, lived inside poetry "with the confidence born of total solitariness". This distinction seems to come from Bayley's assumption that Modernism's first lesson is "think before you write; study before you do so". It suggests that Larkin's poetry is more Romantic; more spontaneous than the more illustrious Irishman. Whereas for Heaney, death’s presence in language is a subject for "historic reverie in verse", for Larkin "death was a holy terror"” and affected the very possibility of writing poetry at all. This would mean that spontaneity would be the first freedom denied, which perhaps explains why Larkin published very little toward the end; there was no expression in poetry that had not also negotiated its way past the violence of language.

So while it is surely correct to say, as Bayley does, that Heaney lacks a "central emotional obsession that wells up in the verse of a Larkin", it would also be true to say that this welling up actually reaches its peak when Larkin faces language:

… but why put it into words?
Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity.

Love Again ends with subtle disgust with poetry's implication in the suffering it had expressed in the first part of the poem. The welling up here is detachment internalised to the degree that it becomes part of the "central emotional obsession"; the poet's inability to live fully is because he has lived only in literary negation; the violence done by words to life. In this way, Larkin wrote poems true to his experience, which is, I would say, the first lesson of Modernism: write true to your experience. Yet by 'experience' I mean the confrontation with that which takes you beyond your nature. Writing would then become a genuine challenge.

For a critic like Bayley, the implications of Larkin's poem and Blanchot's criticism, remains a tool of commentary, and thereby also a tool of marginalisation. But criticism should not be immune to what it discovers, just as Larkin's poem isn't (which is perhaps why he never published Love Again). Pretentious or not, Blanchot's criticism is not immune; this is why he is "a poet-critic type".


Note
1: In Agenda magazine Spring 1989

Pornography: on insensitivity toward Derrida

First of all, I am not familiar with the work of Jacques Derrida. Whenever I have tried to read him, when I wanted to read him - for instance the essays on Blanchot in The Law of Genre, on Kafka in Before the Law or on Celan in Shibboleth (all collected in Acts of Literature), I soon became lost and demoralised. But the response in English-speaking nations to his death has roused me to defend him from the reserves of what I think I have understood.

However, I understand where the critics are coming from. Leonard Bast’s recollection of Derrida's influence on his time as a student reminds me of sitting in a common room in my first year at university listening to fellow students announce that their next set text was "Duh-reeder". Who's that? I asked. But I knew of Derrida. If this was their tutor's pronounciation, one could only imagine the nature of their reading.

Bast demonstrates how Deconstruction became a mechanical device for reading texts, particularly among those with a political agenda and/or a need to formalise the study of literature. It explains why English departments have become staffed by people who seem to have no affinity for literature. I suppose studying the "merely literary" cannot really justify a career.

I had a taste of it attending a course in preparation for university. The English teacher got everyone to buy one book, and one book only: something called Issues. It was a book of sociology. This was meant to help us to read the set texts. One of these was Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole, a novel that, we were told, "gives an insight to Working Class life in the 1930s". That it was sentimental tripe was irrelevant; apparently literary discernment stopped one discovering the noble suffering of ordinary people (i.e. those who didn't appear in novels).

This is why I chose to study philosophy at university.

My only encounter with Derrida in those three years was a reading of the essay Signature Event Context (SEC). It was given by a philosopher familiar with Derrida's background in phemenonology. He explained this essay was slightly out of character with Derrida's usual work; it was perhaps more programmatic than others. In very crude summary from dim memory (I'm not going to re-read it!), SEC argues that as language depends on repetition of the same words through almost infinite and infinitely varying contexts, then absence of writer and context is also necessary. Our presence in writing is erased by writing. It is, I suppose, another expression of The Death of the Author, this time adding The Death of Context. It is a simple idea to grasp. Perhaps too simple. In the Guardian's revealing survey of the extent of British philistinism, the British philospher Roger Scruton says that "For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning - it always eludes us and therefore anything goes."

Anything goes. That awful catchphrase of a caricatured postmodernism! One can certainly construe from my summary of SEC – as well as from the literary criticism of those who influenced Derrida (such as Maurice Blanchot's essay The Essential Solitude) – that if language works this way then there is no definitive meaning and we might as well give up. But this would do a violence to what should be the patient response of our helplessness.

I would like to compare the implications of Derrida's literary philosophy with Scruton's own arguments in regard of something apparently very different: pornography. He made these in a TV programme a couple of years ago. From what I can recall, Scruton said that porn could be damaging to the individual. It distances the self from the consequences of human interaction; it offers a form of solipsism in place of real life. (All banally true, but in the context of the programme, it was a sudden outbreak of sensitivity). As a Right-wing libertarian, Scruton might well have said: anything goes. But in this case, his arguments were sane and thought-provoking. I don't believe he was condemning porn but saying only that there are dangers. One could only concur that one has to keep in mind the importance in human relations of community and reciprocity - not isolation and selfishness, if not also self-abuse.

If we apply Scruton's concerns to writing, then we would have to regard a piece of writing as a person - an individual that you meet face-to-face – rather than communicating a concrete truth at our disposal. In this way, meaning becomes less stable, although it is not destroyed. Indeed, this is part and parcel of what we call literature. Take James Wood in a recent review: he says Muriel Spark's most famous fictional creation remains so because the novel "so beautifully creates a vital and intriguing character - Jean Brodie - while simultaneously asking us to reflect on how well we can ever know people at all, whether real or invented by novelists."

Would Scruton condemn Muriel Spark for writing nonsense because we do not fully know Miss Brodie? Of course not. If literature can make us feel this movement between closeness and distance, between clarity and obscurity, and between certainty and unknowing, then it does not require a huge leap to recognise that language also partakes of these oscillations. Our task, from what I understand from Derrida, is to remain sensitive to these movements.

Scruton's anger and disdain for Derrida is perhaps significant as it indicates a fear that certainty is most threatened where it is most deeply promised. He is like the masturbator confronted with a real woman who resists his desires.